The Wicked Flea

she was on her feet, and the next, she lay on the brick pavement. She immediately drew a crowd that included my sympathetic dogs, who did their best to revive her by licking her alarmingly pale face. Someone who announced herself as a doctor gently nudged the dogs aside, kneeled, and hovered over the ailing Dr. Foote. As I watched, Dr. Foote whispered something to the doctor, who rose and spoke to me.
    “This woman is having a severe panic attack,” the doctor said. “If you’ll take the dogs away, she’ll be fine.”
    “What?” I said.
    “She’s phobic,” the doctor said. “She’s deathly afraid of dogs. Yours are beautiful, by the way. I have a malamute myself.”
    As it turned out, by what the non-dog world foolishly calls coincidence, she’d bought her dog from Kimi’s breeder and was thus a long-lost cousin of my own. Naturally, we simply had to spend the briefest possible moment or two comparing notes about pedigrees, and then I simply had to tell her about breeding Rowdy, and after that we devoted practically no time at all to figuring out exactly how her dog was related to Emma. Anyway, although we devoted only a second to two to exchanging these snippets of family history, when we looked for Dr. Foote, she’d mysteriously vanished. If she’d risen to her feet, we’d have noticed. I assume that she crawled ignominiously away. Poor woman! I hate to think of the psychotherapy hours we wasted together. If only she’d been open and honest with me about her fears, I’m sure I’d have been able to help her.
    Rita was entirely and uncharacteristically unsympathetic to Dr. Foote’s plight. She apologized profusely for having referred me to Dr. Foote and explained that she’d done so only because of Dr. Foote’s supposed knowledge of neurology. If I’d told Rita the truth about Douglas, she’d probably have filed an official complaint against Dr. Foote. As it was, Rita settled for making Dr. Foote hand over every note she’d written about me. Rita presented me with the lot in a sealed envelope. Also, she made Dr. Foote promise to go into treatment herself with a therapist of Rita’s choosing. Never supposing that I’d recognize the name, Rita told me that she’d sent Dr. Foote to Dr. Harvey Bremmer, whom Rita described as a skilled clinician whose specialty was ethics. As I didn’t tell Rita, I’d known Harvey for ages. He breeds and shows Gordon setters. Very nice dogs. Sound. Typey.
    But to return to the matter of Sylvia Metzner’s murder, it was Althea Battlefield, Adventuress of Sherlock Holmes, member of the Baker Street Irregulars, and Ceci’s sister, of course, who pointed out the inadequacies of my dog-attack analysis and of Pia’s explanation of her husband’s motives. Instead of enumerating my stupidities and telling me that the truth was elementary-my-dear-Holly, Althea straightened me out in the kindest possible way. She invited me to tea. As Ceci dished out cream and fresh raspberries, Althea told me that it wasn’t necessarily a mistake to view murder through dog-colored glasses. According to Althea, if I’d looked through my lenses at my own egregiously opportunistic dogs, I’d have seen that a concatenation of motives triggered the murder by constituting an opportunity that Wilson couldn’t resist.
    When Sherlock Holmes summed up a case, Watson was always staggered by the Great Detective’s brilliance. From Watson’s astonished admiration, it’s clear he understood what Holmes was talking about. Forgetting my manners, I said, “What?”
    “The concatenation of other people’s motives.” Althea’s eyes sparkled. “There being no such thing as a condogenation.”
    “Yet,” I said.
    Althea smiled. “Motives. The victim, Sylvia Metz-ner, had just had a dramatic public confrontation with Officer Jennifer Pasquarelli, who had every reason to be angry. The Trasks were justifiably furious at the victim because of the suffering of their beloved pet. My sister’s dog-walker companions at the park, especially our mayoral candidate, Noah, had been repeatedly harassed by the victim’s dog and, indeed, saw the victim’s failure to control her dog as a threat to their own dogs’ freedom to enjoy the park.”
    “Enjoy? Really, Althea—”
    “Let me finish! And before I do, let’s add as a little aside that in a misguided effort to assist in the control of the victim’s dog, you offered the murderer a handy means of covering, or diverting attention from, the