Enter Hal Liston, a man who seemed nice enough but didn’t understand that grunge had gone out with the nineties. In a way, he looked like we did—plaid shirt, Timberland work boots, wrinkled and muddy jeans. But he had this long brown stringy hair draped over his right eye, and a bulbous nose that made him look like some creature out of a fairy tale—and not a nice one, either. Someone who would eat you up like a billy goat if you didn’t answer his riddle correctly.
He whisked Patience off to his compound in Deception Pass before we had a chance to say goodbye. My brothers and I had a family conference about it later in their bunk room, and we realized none of us liked the guy—least of all Sammy—who’d endured the storm of the century from Mom to keep that dog.
We couldn’t explain why we didn’t like Hal Liston. He had a smoker’s voice, but so what? So did everybody in the Rod and Gun Club down the road.
“It was the hair,” I told my brothers. “It made him look like a troll.”
When the murdered man (still not yet murdered, of course) brought Patience back a month later, she had a medieval-looking pinch collar around her neck. Liston trained us all how to make “corrections.” His gravelly voice freaked me out. “As long as Patience is on this leash, she should be okay. Sit, Patience.” Quick yank on the leash, followed by a high-pitched yelp. Patience sat.
“What about when she’s off-leash?” Sammy asked.
Liston squinted at him. “Off-leash? You want to control her off-leash? That’s another solid month of boot camp. Two thousand bucks, kid.” And he looked at our roof, with the rotting cedar shingles and weeds growing from the gutters, and he smiled a gruesome smile. Without waiting for a response, he got back into his truck, which was loaded with other people’s overbred dogs that couldn’t be controlled.
At that moment, I was overcome by an urge to open the back of the truck and let them all out. All of them. No matter whose Lhasa apsos they took on. The urge was so strong, I couldn’t stand still.
I hated the guy. Not just because of his looks, but because he was perfectly comfortable half-assing an important job. My four brothers and I had our faults, but not finishing a job you’d started? That was a sin. This Liston guy had to go down.
I charged toward the truck, determined to wrench it open. I knew there’d be a canine scrum, but if Sammy could deal with it, so could I. I even had my hand on the door handle when, with some kind of animal supersense, Liston turned around in the driver’s seat and looked right at me. The windows were up, and the aggressive dogs were all barking and howling to be let out, so I couldn’t hear what he said. But I could see his lips as he pointed at me and mouthed the words Stay . . . Good girl.
I froze. It was as if Liston’s greasy hands had snapped a leash around my neck. I didn’t want to obey him, but I did. With his greasy hair and his piercing eyes, he scared me into submission.
Then he drove off, kicking up a rooster tail of pollen in our circular drive.
I stood there staring at nothing for a while before I realized that Patience was leaning against me. Without knowing I was doing it, I was stroking her long velvety ears. Her eyes were half closed, as if she were on vacation right there in our front yard.
I made two vows that day. The first was that since I hadn’t been able to rescue those other dogs, I would finish rescuing Patience.
The second was that I was not going to back down from any more bullies. The next time some alpha wanted to pick a fight with me, I would fight back.
? ? ?
A month later, Sammy came running into my room and said, “Hey, Pixie, whaddaya think this means?”
I didn’t know what he meant, since he wasn’t carrying anything and since, as we’ve seen, Sammy isn’t long on planning. Or explaining. All I knew was that something had his dander up. His eyes were narrowed the way they were in math class.
I followed him to Mom’s home office. Mom herself was nowhere to be seen. Sammy kept checking over his shoulder, like we were government spies about to hack international DEFCON codes—even though she was just a telecommuting code monkey for some gaming company.
Her e-mail was up on her monitor, with the message that had Sammy so perplexed. At first, it looked like spam—the message began, “Dear Customer.” It was from Liston Kennels. The body of the message read, “We’re all praying for Hal’s safe return. In the meantime, we’ll continue to serve you and the furry members of your family as best we can.”
I read it four times. I could see why Sammy needed someone to help interpret it.
“‘Safe return.’ Do you think that means he’s been in a hiking accident?” he said.
I wondered the same thing. So I pulled up the Seattle Times website, thinking I would have to dig for information, but I didn’t. There was Liston’s troll face right on the front page. He did not look like a happy man. The way he looked, if he could’ve thrown a pinch collar over all of us and given us a good yank, he would’ve. The headline read: Dog Trainer to the Stars Missing, Presumed Dead.