The Barker Street Regulars

was experiencing a conflict in my love life. As I’ve said, I was wearing a blue denim skirt and, as I haven’t said, a navy sweater embellished, I might add, with undercoat Kimi had just started to shed. My parka was also navy blue. Anyone with two malamutes is by definition someone who likes a challenge. As to my love life, whose is without conflict?
    So, I was ready to dismiss Irene’s powers entirely when she startled me by tapping on one of the photographs of the dogs. I stood and peered. One of her thin fingers was rapping on the picture taken by the ocean and, specifically, on Rowdy’s face. Closing her eyes, Irene murmured that this one was of special interest to her. Since her eyes were shut, it didn’t seem to matter where I stood or what I did. I loomed over her and stared. This one had great force, she asserted. He was deeply connected. “Yes!” she cried out.
    I sat abruptly.
    “Yes!” Her voice vibrated. “This one is a special gift. He is a gift from one who had departed. Here is a connection! Here is a guide!”
    Rowdy, in fact, entered my life soon after Vinnie left. I had never told any human being, not even Steve or Rita, that Rowdy had always felt like a gift from Vinnie. The idea had always seemed too crazy to speak aloud to anyone but a dog. I’d never told Kimi. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her feelings. I had told no one on earth but Rowdy. I caught my breath.
    Opening her eyes, Irene Wheeler gazed at me and then again at the photographs. Tapping Rowdy’s picture, she murmured, “Both are ancient beings. This one, however, has the purer soul.”
    I felt enraged. Purer, indeed! Kimi is my dog, too. Furthermore, Kimi is short for Qimissung, which means snowdrift, as in “pure as the driven,” damn it, and I do not like to hear her disparaged. Purer soul! Irene Wheeler was, I decided, a complete fraud.
     

Chapter Eleven
     
    H UGH SEARLES HERE.” The Holmesian’s voice on the phone was brisk. As if taking me up on an any-old-time offer to borrow my car, Hugh added pleasantly, “We want Rowdy at once. Let’s say we’ll pick him up in half an hour. Would that be convenient?”
    It was five-thirty on that same Monday. Rowdy and Kimi had eaten dinner, and I had no plans. Even so! “Pick him up?”
    “In the manner of Pompey,” Hugh said hurriedly.
    “Toby.”
    I felt myself inducted into what’s known as the Great Game: the playful pretense that Sherlock Holmes had been a real-live person and that Watson’s tales were accounts of actual events. By now, I’d read or reread maybe three quarters of the stories—whoops!—three quarters of the factual reports. Missing from my personal version of the Canon were the tales I’d never read at all or had unforgivably, even sacrilegiously, forgotten. Deliberately deleted from my version were a few tales I just didn’t like. I knew, however, that Toby and Pompey were tracking dogs rather blithely borrowed by Sherlock Holmes. In the Great Game, those dogs were as real as Holmes and Watson. Ah, but in which adventures? For once, my near-total recall for dogs had deserted me, and I was unable to dredge up the sort of subtle acknowledgment of comprehension that would have pleased Hugh. Although I had no intention of trying to pass myself off to Hugh as any sort of Sherlock-ian, I felt oddly ashamed of my inability to return what would be, in effect, the correct password or secret handshake, some countersign of forceful commitment to the Canon.
    Without spoiling the game by announcing that even the Master Detective himself wouldn’t be allowed to help himself to one of my precious dogs, I explained that Rowdy was, as I tactfully phrased it, something of a handful. “He doesn’t necessarily listen to anyone but me,” I said, without adding that he doesn’t necessarily do more than take my opinions under advisement. “What do you need a dog for?” I asked.
    Robert and Hugh, it emerged, had seized on the murder of Jonathan Hubbell to play the Great Game in real life or—and here’s what troubled me—in real death. The police, Hugh informed me, had finally finished their so-called examination of the crime scene, doubtless after destroying vast amounts of valuable evidence. Despite “the depredations of the Gregsons and the Les-trades,” as Hugh phrased it, Ceci’s property might contain important clues about Jonathan’s murder. Ceci was being most obliging in the matter. Although Ceci was, according to Hugh, a functional