Ruffly Speaking

floodlights, but Stephanie’s voice came from the darkness. “Damn! Where is he? Ruffly? Ruffly, I know you mean it, and I’m trying. Where are you?”
    Ruffly’s answering bark carried a note of exasperation. As I headed toward the back of the lot, the white of Stephanie’s dress appeared ahead of me, and as my eyes adapted to the dark, I saw that she was next to the shrub border that separated Morris’s yard from Alice Savery’s. Leaves rustled.
    “Maybe he’s after an animal,” I said to Steve. “There’s an old carriage house back there, and there are supposed to be raccoons living in it.”
    “There are,” Doug said. “Morris used to insist on feeding them.”
    “Christ,” Steve muttered.
    “That’s what I told him,” Doug said. “After all, they are wild animals.”
    “Oh, God, it’s not a skunk, is it?” Rita cannot be talked out of the belief that skunks not only can direct their spray, but will aim it straight at her.
    “Oh, all right, Ruffly. If we really have to. But wait for me.” Stephanie pushed her way through the shrubbery.
    Doug followed her. “If someone finds us in her yard, we’re going to get a good scolding, and if someone sees a dog violating the leash law, God forbid, are we ever going to catch it. Do you know that you-know-who once tried to file an official complaint against Nelson and Jennie for playing in their own yard? Can you believe it? That woman has rabies on the brain. Her carriage house is positively crawling with raccoons, and she’s utterly phobic about fully immunized dogs being off leash.”
    Rowdy and I had cleared the shrubs. I held a branch for Steve, who was in back of Rowdy and me, and we waited for Rita, whose high heels were slowing her down. “What is this stuff?” she complained.
    “Laurel, I think, or maybe azaleas,” I said. “Whatever it is, it doesn’t have thorns. Rita, why don’t you take off your shoes?”
    She crashed out of the bushes. “This is horrible! If God had intended plants to grow wild, He’d never have invented pots.” She sniffed. “I smell smoke.”
    “Rita, calm down,” I told her. “It’s probably just someone else’s charcoal. I mean, it is the Fourth—” But it didn’t smell like briquettes. I wished that Alice Savery’s house had motion-sensitive lights like the ones on the path beside Morris’s. I could see Rita, who was right next to me, but the others were ahead of us somewhere in the shadows. The white of Rowdy’s face stood out, and the white of his tail was waving over his back. Ahead of us, Ruffly was hard at work. His barks were increasingly urgent. I felt a surge of irrational dissatisfaction with Rowdy. His hearing probably wasn’t quite as sharp as Ruffly’s, and he lacked Ruffly’s passionate attention to sound, but he could at least make some effort to help. Rita was sputtering. “These things are set wrong!
    Everything is so damn loud that I can’t hear anything. Holly—”
    Doug collided with me. “It’s the carriage house,” he exclaimed. He dashed off.
    “He must be going to call—” Rita began.
    “Of course he is. Rita—” I was going to tell her to hurry up, but at that moment Rowdy ran out of patience.
    I found myself hauled like a racing sled toward the carriage house at the rear of Alice Savery’s property. There were no lights on in the building itself, but spots mounted high in the trees of an adjoining yard revealed a distraught Stephanie. She paced in front of the tall doors of what looked like a small bam. “Ruffly, your work is all done. I’ll take over. My turn now,” she was saying. “Good boy. Thank you. It’s okay now. I’ll take over.” Ruffly, however, kept frantically barking, jumping in the air, and racing back and forth between Stephanie and the building. Catching sight of me, Stephanie asked anxiously, “Can you hear anything? He will not calm down. Is there a smoke alarm going off in there?”
    If there’d been an alarm in the building, it would certainly have been sounding. No flames were visible, but the air stank of smoke. I tried to get my face in the light so that Stephanie could see my lips, and I spoke as clearly as I could, but my Caruso reincarnate had added his arctic canine voice to Ruffly’s, and he almost certainly drowned me out. “No, not that I can hear, but the dogs are making so much noise!” I shook my head, pointed at the dogs, told Rowdy to hush, and finally clamped my hands around his muzzle.
    Stephanie