The Wicked Flea

“Yes, I do!”
    “You didn’t decide to breed Zsa Zsa.”
    “Neither did Mrs. Waggenhoffer,” Wilson pointed out. “But you can see why those people decided to go after her. She’s very eminent in goldens. And in the entire fancy. They probably imagine that people like her can get rid of irresponsible people like Sylvia.”
    I must have looked startled. Someone had gotten rid of Sylvia.
    Having evidently absorbed what he’d just said, Wilson looked embarrassed and added, “You know, stop them from breeding.”
    “If only,” I said.
    “Those people called Sylvia, you know,” Wilson confided. “And Sylvia treated them like dirt. Her attitude was that it was their dog, so it was their problem. She thought the whole thing was a big fuss over nothing. Sylvia would think that. You touch Zsa Zsa’s rear, and she hollers, and Sylvia never even took her to a vet—no shots, no heartworm test, nothing. And there she is, running around loose. She probably has heartworm, for God’s sake.”
    With Sylvia dead, whose dog was Zsa Zsa? The sad, nasty golden was an inheritance no one would want. But who was inheriting the house? And anything else Sylvia might’ve owned? At a guess, Pia, Oona, and Eric, her three children, would inherit equally. But maybe not. If I’d been in the heirs’ situation, I’d’ve felt a moral responsibility to make things right with the Trasks; the cost of Charlie’s surgery would’ve felt like a debt that had to be paid. When it comes to dogs, though, and especially when it comes to responsibility for puppies, I get carried away. I struggled not to impose my exacting standards on Sylvia’s children. If they’d felt like helping the Trasks, I’d have admired them. But if Wilson, the only dog person in the family, sensed no obligation, it seemed highly unlikely that any of the others would assume responsibility.
    “What’s going to happen to her now?” I asked. “To Zsa Zsa?”
    “Eric wants to keep her. I told him he had to take her to the vet. Her hips are bad. You can tell by looking at her. Her elbows are probably bad, too. She’s obese. Her teeth are a mess. God knows what else. But I’m not having her around Llio unless Eric gets her shots and gets her wormed. At a minimum.”
    The weird thing about Wilson’s take on Zsa Zsa was its strong resemblance to my take on him. Not that his hips or elbows were bad, but his teeth did need cleaning, and whenever I’d seen him, he’d looked as if he could use a good bath. At a guess, he wasn’t up to date on his tetanus shots, either.
    “You know,” he went on, “you can’t blame those people, those Trasks.”
    “I don’t. I feel sorry for them. How do they tell those little girls that their dog has to die because there’s no money for surgery? Or are they supposed to keep the dog the way he is? That dog is in pain. You can tell. And the pain is only going to get worse. It’s a degenerative disease. What are they supposed to do?”
    “Sylvia bought our house twenty-five years ago,” Wilson said in a near whisper. “She bred that litter before I even met Pia, but Sylvia was living there when those puppies were whelped. So the people who bought the puppies must’ve come to the house.”
    “And?”
    “And so these Trasks knew where to find Sylvia.”
    “Are you suggesting...?”
    “They could’ve. And it’s not just that Sylvia sold them that puppy. It’s how she treated them when they called.”
    “Did you actually hear the conversation?”
    “Sylvia’s end of it. And what she said about it after. She thought it was a joke. She was nasty. Condescending. The truth is that Sylvia was a condescending person. She had no sympathy for people who were less fortunate than she was. You couldn’t blame these Trasks if they wanted to get back at her. Well, if they just hated her, you couldn’t blame them. But you know, they could’ve hung around the house and watched until they saw her go out. Alone. They could’ve .”
    “Not all of them,” I said lightly.
    “That old man looks like the brightest of them.” With some misgivings, I said, “George, that’s his name. George Trask. I know what you mean. He has some spark.”
    The matching black-and-white Border collie team bowed and drew loud applause. Wishing I’d been free to give their performance my full attention, I joined in. Picking up on the break as a cue to move along, Llio trained her intelligent eyes on Wilson’s face and shifted on her short