The Wicked Flea

that I have been taking her side. All along, Noah has been perfectly right about Sylvia. Zsa Zsa is ruining the park for everyone, and it’s all Sylvia’s fault.”
    “Ceci,” I said forcefully, “Zsa Zsa is not ruining the park for us because I’m not going to let her. Sylvia lives right near here, doesn’t she? Do you know which house? And how to get there?”
    “It’s a brick Tudor, or what’s called Tudor, although I doubt that... well, it’s a suburban Tudor, let’s say, with cream stucco and a brown door and trim, and a slate roof. It’s no distance at all, in fact, you can see the chimney and a bit of the roof from here. Wilson showed me one day.” With that, she pointed out a brick chimney and a slate roof easily visible beyond a stretch of leafless trees. “That’s Sylvia’s house. If you go down the trail where we just were, you cut through the woods a little, and there you are.”
    After settling Ceci in the passenger seat, I armed myself with a leash, a training collar, and fresh supply of dog treats (liver, what else?), and set off to capture the wild beast, Zsa Zsa. I did not, of course, intend to carry out my threat of strangling her; I just meant to catch her and walk her home. If I sound confident or even arrogant about the prospect of dealing with an aggressive dog, it’s because Zsa Zsa was a golden retriever, a horrible, atypical one in almost every way, but a golden nonetheless. The goldens I’d grown up with and the ones I’d owned myself had been sound of body and mind, strong, healthy, biddable, and angelically gentle, just as goldens should be and Zsa Zsa wasn’t. Still, I felt a sense of control over any golden.
    Soon after recrossing the footbridge, I began to call and whistle for Zsa Zsa. She didn’t appear. I kept walking and, within a few minutes, ran into one of the women I’d met on my first day at the park, the owner of Princess, the lean black Lab, who was happily trotting along on a retractable leash. The woman and I exchanged nods and smiles, and I asked whether she’d seen Zsa Zsa.
    Instead of answering, the woman said, “Is she loose again? I thought Sylvia had shaped up, but Zsa Zsa was running around yesterday. And Sylvia was nowhere in sight.”
    The woman hadn’t seen Sylvia today, either. I continued my search for another minute or two and then caught sight of my quarry a few hundred feet ahead on the trail. Zsa Zsa proved suiprisingly easy to lure. I held out a handful of liver treats and called sweetly. But when she got within a yard of me, she stopped. I’m an old fox with dogs. Instead of moving toward her, I inched backward. Happy sounds and liver did the rest. In no time, I had her on leash and was taking her home. A narrow footpath off the main trail seemed likely to lead to the house Ceci had pointed out and, in fact, did. Sylvia’s irresponsibility about her dog and the scrappy nature of her family had somehow made me expect a house with vines running wild and architectural elements at war with one another. The little path ended at the rear of a neatly lawn-serviced yard with short grass, tons of mulch, and the inevitable suburban rhododendrons. The conventional brick Tudor matched Ceci’s description. The only object in sight that showed any sign of neglect was a large, treelike wrought iron structure with a variety of empty bird feeders and empty suet baskets hanging like weird pieces of fruit from its numerous branches. But the house was Sylvia’s. When I rang the bell at the back door, the young man who answered took one look at Zsa Zsa and, addressing me, asked, “Did my mother get arrested again?”
    “Not that I know of,” I said.
    Although it was midafternoon, he’d apparently just awakened. His eyelids were puffy, and the inner corners were thick with the crud that is euphemistically known as “sleep.” He wore two diamond-chip studs in one ear. On one side of his scalp, his hair was in rather rumpled spikes, but his pillow had flattened the hair on the other side.
    “I’m Holly Winter,” I said. “I’m returning Zsa Zsa. She really shouldn’t be loose.”
    “Eric Metzner.” He yawned. “Uh, sorry about the dog. I’ll keep her in. Where’s my mother?”
    “I have no idea.”
    “There’s no food in the house,” Eric complained. “There was nothing when I got in last night, and now there’s nothing for breakfast. If you see her, could you tell her?” He yawned again. “Is her car here?”
    “I don’t