The Barker Street Regulars

Chapter One
     
    W HEN ALTHEA BATTLEFIELD FIRST referred to the Sacred Writings, I naturally assumed that she meant the American Kennel Club Obedience Regulations. She didn’t. What Althea had in mind—what Althea held perpetually in the forefront of her considerable intellect—was The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Neither had nor held is quite right, however, except perhaps in the nuptial sense of to have and to hold. Althea loved and cherished Holmes’s adventures with a passion that admitted only the richer and the better, and entirely discounted the possibility of the poorer or the worse. As to the bit about from this day forward, if you count Althea’s six preliterate years of dependence on parental voices, she’d been reading Sherlock Holmes for ninety years.
    This is to say that soon after Rowdy and I first entered Althea’s room at the Gateway Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, she and I recognized each other as kindred spirits, women with passions: in her case, Sherlock Holmes; in mine, dogs. Not that I disliked Holmes. On the contrary, the ill-used hound of the Baskervilles was one of my favorite literary characters, as I was quick to tell Althea, who pretended to bristle at the suggestion that the beast had been other than real. And not that Althea disliked dogs. Indeed, Althea’s mild fondness for dogs was the reason Rowdy and I began to visit her in the first place. When she referred to my gorgeous Alaskan malamute as a “big husky,” however, I pretended to take umbrage. In other words, Althea knew about as much about dogs as I did about Sherlock Holmes.
    Before I say anything else about Althea or about the subsequent murder of her grandnephew, Jonathan Hub-bell, I want to state outright that in taking Rowdy on pet therapy visits to the Gateway, I wasn’t engaged in a mission of noble altruism. I’m ordinarily thrilled to have my self-serving motives mistaken for saintly wishes to help others, but this is a story about trickery—fakery, fraud, artifice, subterfuge, call it what you will—and I feel impelled to dissociate myself from the deliberate effort to deceive. In fact, Rowdy became a therapy dog only because I’d taken him to an obedience fun match that also offered therapy dog testing, and I’d had him tested because I knew he’d breeze through and because I thought I’d found an effortless way to get him a new title. Hah! Well, Rowdy aced the test, but as I discovered only when I registered him with Therapy Dogs International, that organization takes ferocious objection to having its initials, T.D.I., used as a title. Why? Because of an utterly irrational suspicion that certain despicably title-hungry dog owners might see T.D.I. only as an easy new title and, once having obtained it, might selfishly refuse to take their dogs on therapy visits. So there I was with a certified therapy dog and no new title when I heard about a local Boston-area group called Paws for Love, which did a thorough job of screening dogs and training handlers for therapy work, and—not that I cared, of course—would bestow on Rowdy the title Rx.D. when he had visited his assigned facility fifteen times.
    Continuing in the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention my realization if I were ever to end up in a nursing home, the only thing that would cheer me up would be a visit from a big, friendly dog. I nonetheless entered the Gateway with the prejudices characteristic of most human beings and entirely foreign to dogs. First fear: The place would smell of urine. It didn’t, but if it had, Rowdy would have considered the stench a fabulous bonus. Second fear: Everyone would have Alzheimer’s, and ten seconds after we’d left, no one would remember we’d been there. Some people did have Alzheimer’s. One was a woman named Nancy, whose body had reached a state of advanced shrinkage in which her weight in pounds equaled her age in years: ninety-three. As I learned only after our first visit to her, the Gateway staff had never before heard her utter more than a word or two. I had to be told that Nancy didn’t usually speak. The first time I led Rowdy toward her wheelchair and asked whether she liked dogs, she ignored me, but croaked to him, “Beautiful! Beautiful dog! Come! Come here, beautiful dog!” Her hands were like a bird’s feet. She perched one on top of Rowdy’s head. He licked her face. She giggled like a child. “I love him,” she said to me. “I love him.” Nancy’s hearing was poor.