The Barker Street Regulars

olfaction, the Chevaliers du Tastevin had nothing on Rowdy and Kimi. In case you’ve never walked a dog, I should perhaps say explicitly that the bouquet Kimi relished was not that of wine.
    I translated for Hugh and Robert. “There’s been a dog here.” To prevent Kimi from overmarking, as it’s called, I took hold of her collar and gently moved her away from the sundial. In the beam of my flashlight, the granite pedestal showed not the slightest stain. “A big dog,” I went on. “Tall enough to leave a mark as high as Kimi sniffed. Probably but not necessarily a male. Probably high-ranking in the social world of dogs.”
    “Recently?” Robert asked.
    “It’s hard to say. How long scent lasts depends on humidity, temperature, and some other factors.” I imagined myself the author of a work comparable to Holmes’s monograph on however many distinct varieties of tobacco it was. A contribution to the scientific literature on dog urine, however, felt rather undignified and not really comparable at all, even though my subject had the obvious merit of not causing lung cancer.
    “Let’s say,” I ventured, “that the dog was here within the past week. Probably more recently. Kimi is pretty interested in it, so it’s probably fresh.”
    “Consistent with the white hairs,” Robert remarked. Hugh nodded.
    “The yard is fully fenced.” I pointed toward the gate. “Is the fence this high all around?”
    The men agreed that it was.
    “Six feet or so,” I said. “An escape artist dog might jump it or climb it to get out, but it’s unlikely that a loose dog would’ve gone to the trouble of scaling the fence to get in, not without some strong motivation.” I refrained from citing the obvious example of a bitch in season. “One of the gates could’ve been left open,” I continued. “For Simon? But Newton enforces the leash law, so the chances are slim that there would’ve been a stray dog around here. What I really think is that someone deliberately brought in a big dog. I think it was part of an effort to convince Ceci that Simon is returning in material form.
    At Hugh and Robert’s suggestion, I led Kimi through the gate to Lower Norwood Road. Still holding her tracking lead, I released my grip on her collar and let her explore. The pruned evergreens inside the fence formed a tidy hedge. Here, masses of shrubs were tall and wild. Kimi snuffled around without paying special attention to anything. To satisfy Hugh and Robert as well as to sate my own curiosity, I directed Kimi’s attention to the gigantic paw prints preserved in the frozen mud and ordered her to track. Kimi, of course, could virtually see the big dog who’d left those prints. But did she understand what I wanted? For the thousandth time, I resolved to get serious about the sport of tracking.
    Kimi dutifully put her nose down. She kept it down as she took a few steps, hesitated, took another step or two, and came to a puzzled halt near the blacktop. Numerous tire tracks were visible on the wide verge of dirt and weedy grass that stretched from the asphalt to the ragged hedge. The road was narrow. Anyone driving here for any reason could have run a tire off the paved surface. Hugh and Robert, however, were thrilled. Toby, they decided, had successfully followed the big white dog to the spot where he had entered a parked car and been spirited away.
    No pun intended.
     

Chapter Fifteen
     
    A CCORDING TO ECCLESIASTES , a living dog is better than a dead lion. As I said goodbye to Ceci, I couldn’t help wishing that Ecclesiastes had gone on to assert that a living cat is better than a dead dog. Lacking a biblical pronouncement on the topic, I failed to convince Ceci that a darling little kitty would make the perfect addition to her household.
    The next morning, while running errands, I tried to foist off the cat on the employees and customers at the dry cleaner’s, the local used-book shop, the hardware store, and—drat!—the proprietor of the fish market, who obviously would have offered a delectable home. In the afternoon, the cat had to endure my presence in my study for the three hours it took me to keyboard and revise a book review for Dog’s Life that I’d drafted by hand. Before I dared to step into my office, I had to put the dogs in the yard in case they squeezed past me and nailed the cat. When I entered, the cat was curled up on my mouse pad. At the sight of me, it hissed. I’d discovered by now that the easiest way