The Wicked Flea

running out of the woods? She looked like a crime victim to me. She was very frightened. The violence was emotional, or psychological maybe, but it was still violence. And this is a crime against women, meaning that it tends not to be taken seriously.”
    As if to prove my contention, Douglas said jocularly, “We’ll have to start a campaign, persuade the guy, hey, he’s being politically incorrect.”
    My hackles rose. “You see! It’s a crime against women, so it gets joked about and dismissed. Pia didn’t exactly have a hilarious experience. There was nothing funny about how she felt. It’s possible that this guy exposed himself to Sylvia, too, and that he’s the one who shot her. I don’t tend to think of exhibitionists as physically violent types, either, but what do we really know about them? And we don’t know anything about this particular man. He could be an exhibitionist and a murderer, too. The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
    Rowdy had turned his attention to my face. His beautiful almond-shaped eyes glowed with approval. He approves of Kimi even more than he does of me. Anatomy has made her the feminist extremist in our family: she is blessed with malamute jaws, whereas I make do with a sharp tongue. Douglas looked abashed. Well, to be accurate, he looked like a men’s suit ad model trying to look abashed.
    From behind us, the sound of pounding feet and strained breathing presaged the appearance of Wilson and Llio. Llio was trotting along happily, maybe because it was the first time in her life that she’d ever been taken for a run. Wilson was sucking in air. He’d changed into gray sweatpants and a faded maroon sweatshirt. To fortify himself for exercise, he’d apparently eaten a doughnut; his sweatshirt was dusted with powdered sugar. As he approached us, he said, “Getting in a little conditioning before the show tomorrow!”
    The sensible time to begin conditioning a dog for a show is about six months before the dog is going to enter the ring. Llio, however, was muscular and fit from walking or playing; no judge was going to fault her for flabbiness. I suspected that Wilson had suddenly taken up jogging in response to his own preshow nerves. In any case, he slowed down and joined our little group. “Sorry about the fiasco back there,” he told Ceci.
    “No apologies are necessary,” she said graciously.
    “Without Sylvia, we’re in chaos,” he explained. “But that’s all too obvious. We don’t know what to do. We’re barbarians. Here I am showing Llio tomorrow when Sylvia—but what else am I going to do?”
    Stay home, I thought. In my own show-fanatic family, the opposite would’ve been true. We’d expect a family member to go right ahead and get into the ring and win even if the entire rest of family had just perished in a catastrophe. But that’s because we’re exceptionally religious. If an Orthodox Jew dies, the family doesn’t stay home from temple; on the contrary, everyone attends services. My family’s just like that: Orthodox. But Wilson was a new convert, and the other members of the family weren’t show types at all. Still, I had the feeling that none of them would give a damn whether Wilson went to a dog show or to hell. They probably wouldn’t even notice he was gone.
    “Sylvia wouldn’t have cared,” Wilson added.
    “The police have any news?” Noah asked. “Have they got any idea what happened?”
    “They’re asking questions,” Wilson replied, “not answering them. The one thing that hasn’t been in the papers is what Sylvia was doing in the park, which was scattering Ian’s ashes. That was her husband. Not that she shouldn’t have been doing it. It’s morbid to keep human remains in a vase in the house. You can call it an urn, but you could’ve put a bunch of flowers in this one, and no one would’ve known the difference.”
    I confessed. “Sylvia got the idea from me. Not the idea of the urn, but about scattering the ashes. Or a story I told her must’ve made her think about it. My stepmother inveigled me into helping her scatter her first husband’s ashes in Harvard Yard. Only we got caught by the University Police. I remember that after I told the story, Sylvia said something about her husband’s ashes.”
    “Ian was a bird-watcher,” Wilson said. “Used to wander around here with binoculars. That’s why she picked the park. Or that’s what we think, although it’s not my idea of a dignified resting place.