The Barker Street Regulars

updated since the last time I looked. I would dearly love to know her present address. Like most other rooms in Cambridge, however, my study serves principally as a repository for books, periodicals, and reams of photocopies and clippings, some in three-ring binders, some in folders, some in plastic file boxes, many, the unjudged, teetering in semipermanent purgatory in a precarious stack on top of a filing cabinet next to the wastebasket, their fate in the hands of God. Surveying Irene’s uncluttered office, I envied what was obviously her gift of prophecy. I wished I could forsee what I’d want someday and what I could safely throw away. Sherlock Holmes, I recalled, docketed everything. He was confident that he’d always want to be omniscient.
    By city ordinance, Cambridge requires each household to maintain a minimum of one wall of books per person, including babies. Dogs and cats are exempt. The floor-to-ceiling shelves behind Irene Wheeler’s desk thus contained what was for Cambridge an ordinary number of books, with a run-of-the-literary-mill ratio of paperbacks to hardcovers, say fifty-fifty, but incredible though it may seem, and astonishing though it was to me, I swear that she owned more books about the occult than I do about dogs, and that’s saying something. The titles of my books follow a somewhat repetitious pattern: The Complete Alaskan Malamute, The New Complete Alaskan Malamute, This Is the Alaskan Malamute, Your Alaskan Malamute, Successful Obedience Handling, Expert Obedience Training for Dogs, Schutzhund Obedience, The No-Force Method of Dog Training, Improving the Obedient Dog. A few of Irene Wheeler’s titles followed a similar pattern. She had Animal Talk, What the Animals Tell Me, and Stories the Animals Tell Me. Although she also had Strange Powers of Pets, most of her books seemed to be more about the former than the latter: telepathy, channeling, past life regression, etheric bodies, ancient healing arts, eternal spirals, cosmic pyramids, flower remedies, the energies of gems. The names of the books gave the only visible clue to Irene Wheeler’s profession; in other respects, these might have been the premises of a freelance computer consultant or a psychotherapist in private practice.
    Unless the polished stones on Irene Wheeler’s chunky necklace exuded some mystical force invisible to me but visible, perhaps, to the psychically gifted, the only mystery about her appearance was how anyone managed to stay so thin. Mindful of her fees, though, I was reminded of the Duchess of Windsor’s famous remark that you can’t be too rich, either. Like the late Duchess, Irene Wheeler had the build of a sight hound, and her shoulder-length fawn-colored hair would have looked at home on a saluki’s ears. Her eyebrows, however, were overplucked, and I noted a nervous awkwardness about her gait; in the ring, she’d have been faulted for a subtle lack of refinement. When we shook hands, hers felt like a bony paw. Probably because of self-starvation, she was very pale. She couldn’t have been more than thirty.
    She took a seat behind the big desk, which was the kind you see in warehouses that sell discount office furnishings: yards of wood veneer designed to impress at first glance and to be ignored thereafter. “You’re here for a reading.”
    “For two dogs.” Heaven forbid that one of the two be rivalrously marooned in whatever state of psychic frustration might result from an unread mind.
    Luckily, Irene Wheeler assured me that she charged a flat fee for an initial reading. I fished in my bag, counted out a painful number of twenty-dollar bills, and said, “Ceci Love recommended you. She gave me your card.”
    Rita and the other Cambridge therapists I knew through Rita were obsessed with client confidentiality. Steve, for that matter, didn’t blab about his intimate knowledge of the innards of particular dogs, cats, and ferrets. Irene, however, said, “Oh, Ceci! And Simon, of course. He has had a great deal to share with her. It’s been tremendously satisfying to channel his messages. She was really a mess, you know.”
    I nodded in what I hoped was a meaningful and even conspiratorial fashion.
    “Ceci was bereft without the ties they shared. She had lost all sense of perspective and purpose.”
    “She must be terribly upset again now,” I said. “You do know that her grandnephew was just murdered?”
    As if giving a factful report on a recent conference call, Irene Wheeler