The dog lady couldn’t get her terrier to shut up.
The dog barked. His owner yelled at him. The dog barked again because the owner yelled. The owner yelled again because the dog barked. And around and around they went, barking and yelling, all because of a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” she screamed at her apartment door.
“Police!” a male voice called back.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Buddy, be quiet!”
As she unlocked and opened the door with one hand, she held onto the dog with her other arm. “Hang on. Let me get his magic collar and he’ll shut up. I guess I’m going to have to keep it on him all the time.”
The thick-set man in a blue suit stood in the doorway as she picked up the little dog and scurried to her tiny dining room, where she picked up a collar and struggled to get it onto the pooch.
“It’s eucalyptus!” she said to the cop at the door. “Just watch!”
Somehow she got it fastened onto the dog.
Buddy started to make a ferocious charge toward the door, opening his mouth to bark, but a second in he stopped barking.
“See?” his owner crowed. “Magic, I’m telling you.”
“What the heck?” the blue-suited cop asked as he stepped inside. “Why’d he stop barking?”
“The collar lets out a spray of eucalyptus scent! He hates it.”
“I never heard of that. That’s amazing. Where’d you get it?”
“My neighbor, that poor sweet girl, gave it to me the day before she got murdered. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To ask me about Priscilla? She was lovely. I know Buddy’s barking drove her mad. It drove me crazy, too. But she found out about these magic collars and gave one to me.”
“I’ve got to get one for my dog.”
“They’re expensive, and it doesn’t work on all dogs, I hear.”
“It sure works on this one.”
“Oh, yes. And Buddy’s a barking demon.”
The cop, who had crouched to take a look, stood back up. “Yeah, I heard him.”
“I don’t know anything about her getting killed except that it was horrible, and I’m just broken up about it.”
“Did she say anything about being stalked or followed?”
“Oh, my word, no. I never heard anything like that. Was that what happened?” She didn’t give him time to answer. “I’ll tell you what I did hear, though. When she came down to give me the collar, she was jittery, and she told me she was going to do something she wasn’t sure she should do.”
“What?”
“She told me she’d had a baby when she was only sixteen, and her parents had kicked her out of the house, and by that time it was too late for an abortion, and she’d put it up for adoption, and she was going to try to find the baby and just get a look at him. That’s all she wanted, she said, just to see him one time before she died to make sure he was taken care of. She told me she had cancer. Isn’t that ironic? That she had only a short time to live anyway, and then some monster kills her and takes away her only chance to see her only child. It’s just so sad and awful. She had the worst luck. Seems so unfair for such a nice person. I’ll think of her every time Buddy doesn’t bark.”
With a shaking hand, Sam laid his keys on the little curved table in the foyer of his home.
“Cassity?” he called out to his wife. “I’m going to change clothes. Then let’s go for a run.”
“Okay!” she called back from her office.
Minutes later, they met in the foyer, and she smiled a welcome home for him. It looked forced; there’d been a brittle, frantic quality to her since Priscilla’s murder. It hurt his heart to see it in her face and hear it when she spoke to him. Only with Eric did she still seem like herself.
She was tall and athletic, with college-shot-putting shoulders and legs that could pound down tracks as if Olympic medals were at stake.
“I’m rarin’ to go,” she said, though she sounded weary.
She had on running shoes, pants, and a top; her long dark hair was pulled into a ponytail at the top of her head. She’s so beautiful, Sam thought, and such a wonderful mother. They’d both married late and then waited for many fruitless, disappointing years for the child they both wanted. Nothing had worked, but somehow their marriage grew deeper in a situation that would have weakened many others. He loved her fiercely, thought her brave and tender, brilliant and wonderful. He had felt guilty through all the years of trying to have a baby because it was his biology that failed them. When they finally agreed on adoption, enough years had passed that their ages became a problem on applications.