Ruffly Speaking

question of what Stephanie was paying for Morris’s house. Better yet I wished that Doug and Stephanie were vulgar enough to answer it before it was asked. Steve and Rita didn’t even know she was buying the house. Matthew, I decided, either knew the purchase price, could find out, or didn’t care. I tried to work it out. The small size and passé-modern style of Morris’s house made it worth less than the colonials, Victorians, and gigantic twentieth-century hodgepodges that surrounded it. For Off Brattle, the house must have been a bargain. Even so, a vacant lot in that location would have sold for enough to ease Doug’s worries about the competition from the mammoth new bookstores. My thoughts wandered. The raised bed had been Doug’s gift; Doug had built it. Having inherited Morris’s estate, Doug had mourned his partner by immediately redecorating the café, instituting the Sunday teas, and expanding the mail-order business.
    Doug’s voice broke in. “Stephanie, I positively forbid you to lay a finger on that grill! I absolutely insist on charcoal.”
    Doug had brought a small portable Weber grill with him to supplement a giant Weber from Morris’s cellar. He’d also contributed a bag of some kind of special charcoal, and he’d volunteered himself as chef. After delivering the rest of a lengthy scolding, Doug went down the steps to the yard. When Steve and Matthew joined him there, I got up and took Steve’s seat next to Rita.
    “Where on earth is Leah?” Rita murmured.
    I aimed my whisper at her ear. “French-braiding her hair. Ironing something black. I’ll make some excuse and go in and call her.” I turned so that Stephanie could see my face. “Is there something I can help you with?”
    Rita seconded the offer, and Stephanie accepted. Before long, she had Rita and Matthew moving the chairs aside to make room for the glass-topped table that occupied a comer of the deck, and I was dispatched to the dining room to pick up a pile of table linen. Returning to the deck, I passed through the kitchen, where Stephanie was transferring romaine from a salad spinner to a big wooden bowl, next to which sat a package of croutons and a bottle of Caesar dressing. If Morris had been preparing a Caesar salad, he’d have tossed those croutons on the deck for the birds and poured the bottled dressing down the sink, and every surface in the kitchen would’ve ended up thick with the skins of garlic cloves, the crumbs of real French bread, the rinds of squeezed lemons, and the discarded bits of ten or twenty other ingredients that he’d have impulsively decided to add to make the salad his own instead of Caesar’s. I reminded myself that no one had any reason to poison all of us. Still, I was glad we weren’t having mesclun. No one had any reason to blow us up or set the house on fire, either. Just the same, I was grateful to Doug for making sure that we’d barbecue over charcoal and not gas.
    That’s when my reverse paranoia started to double back on itself. The house had smoke detectors and a hearing dog who would sound an alert the second one of them went off. Any sensible arsonist would start a fire outside, probably by taking advantage of the gas grill on the wooden deck. And Doug Winer, of course, would collect the insurance money.
    I’d finished spreading the white tablecloth over the glass table when Leah finally showed up, a half-hour late, w ith marigold-red curls blossoming from the Obsession-scented crown of her head. She wore a black blouse, a short black pleated skirt, and black stockings and shoes, too. Having ignored my injunction to arrive on time, she’d also disobeyed the spirit of my command to leave Kimi at home. At the end of Leah’s leash, his gorgeous white tail flapping over his back as if to flag that perfect topline, his big pink tongue protruding from his show-ring smile, was, of course, Rowdy. He bore the delighted expression of a dog who knows that someone is getting away with something and suspects that he just might be the one. I scowled at Leah and Rowdy, and tried to predict the damage. As a food thief, Rowdy was almost Kimi’s equal, but as a pouncer on small dogs, especially male terriers, he had an edge on her. Ruffly, however, would never have made it through the initial screening of hearing-dog candidates if he’d picked fights with other dogs. And Ruffly was neutered, too; Rowdy’s sensitive nose wouldn’t detect a belligerent hint of testosterone. Even so,