Stud Rites

under her van, she asked, ”What time is it?” Answering her own question, she said, ”Seven-thirty. Judging’s at nine, isn’t it? Hunnewell’s probably still asleep.”
    Freida sourly replied that she’d rung James Hunnewell’s room twice, banged on his door three times, and failed to get what she described, and I quote, as ”any sign of life.”
    ”Well, Freida, delegate someone to go and roust him out!” advised Betty, who had moved the auction items all by herself. ”Maybe he’s not in his room. Maybe he’s wandering around somewhere.”
    Freida bristled. The pewter pups on her earlobes trembled. ”Naturally, I have people looking, but after all these years, there aren’t all that many of us who know what he looks like.”
    A gigantic horny toad, I longed to say. Instead, I picked up my check, excused myself, paid, and dashed to the nearby ladies’ room, where investigation confirmed that Mother Nature had once again adjusted my menstrual cycle to make my period coincide with a big dog show. I will swear that She consults the AKC Events Calendar. I could practically hear her: Hm, Alaskan Malamute National Specialty, October thirtieth, so let’s see, obedience on the thirty-first, we’ll hit her with PMS for that, and on Friday morning...
    As I sat in the cubicle digging around in the little cosmetics bag in my purse, the metal door of the next stall slammed shut, and a lock slid in place. Someone got violently sick. The toilet flushed. Dogs, fine. I stroke their heaving ribs and whisper sweet moral lessons about eating steel-wool pads and paying the consequences. But people are hard to help. Morning sickness? Crystal, I thought.
    Again, I was wrong. A few minutes later, while I was washing my hands at one of the dozen sinks, out of the cubicle emerged a green-faced Mikki Muldoon, who had finished second in the judging poll, second to James Hunnewell. Ignoring me—I was a stranger to her, anyway—Mrs. Muldoon made her way to one of the basins, turned on both faucets, and, without using soap, rubbed her hands together as if trying to warm her fingers. As I combed my hair and daubed on lip gloss, she produced a makeup kit from her pocketbook. Just as Crystal had done, she brushed her teeth. Then she began to restore color to her face.
    Five minutes later, when I was crossing the lobby and heading toward Betty’s van, Duke Sylvia told me that James Hunnewell was dead. My thought was of Mikki Muldoon, who was a decade beyond Crystal’s kind of morning sickness. Nerves? After all, with Hunnewell permanently out of the picture, she was now about to judge a national specialty.
    Had she known? And if so, how?
     

 
     
    AS DUKE SYLVIA told me about the demise of James Hunnewell, he could have been remarking about how many autumn leaves had fallen overnight. ”Fellow from R.T.I. found him,” Duke informed me. Arms folded across his chest, Duke leaned comfortably against a wall of the hotel lobby.
    Infected by Duke’s placidity, I said, ”Oh, I was looking for the R.T.I. guy yesterday. I wanted to ask him about...” I stopped myself. If we’d been attending a service at an open grave, Duke wouldn’t have considered a discussion of Rowdy’s sperm in the least out of line. I cleared my throat. ”He was looking for him?”
    ”Who?”
    ”The guy from R.T.I. He was trying to find Mr. Hunnewell?”
    Duke shook his head. ”Just happened on him. Right out in back here, in back of the hotel. At the end of the parking lot, there’s a baseball field, recreation area, and there’s a little storage shed.”
    ”What on earth was James Hunnewell doing out there?”
    Duke shrugged. And when I asked what should have been my first question—what Hunnewell had died of—Duke said he didn’t know. He made the obvious guess. ”His lungs must’ve finally quit. Freida’s shaken up.” Duke made Freida Reilly’s distress sound as distant and foreign as a volcanic eruption on some South Sea island he’d never visited and never would. ”Once Freida calms down, she’ll be relieved. James would’ve botched the judging. He’d’ve done an awful job.”
    Over the next hour, in the lobby, the parking lot, the corridors, the grooming tent, and the exhibition area, everyone seemed to agree: We were better off without James Hunnewell passing judgment on our dogs. But relief turned to astonishment when the word spread that instead of passing peacefully to the ultimate Judgment, Judge James Hunnewell had