Play Dead (20 page)

Why, then, was she nearly an hour late?

By the time another half hour had passed,
I was all but frantic. I’d called her four times. I’d also called every friend
I could think of whom she might have dropped in to visit, all to no avail. What
was this? Get-Even-with-My-Daughter-For-Scaring-Me-Last-Night Time?

Leaving the office unlocked and my
answering machine on, I took Doppler on a walk to check for any signs of Mom
wandering around lost. No luck. I was sitting on the top concrete step of my
entranceway when she finally drove up in her covered pickup and parked next to
my car in Russell’s space. She didn’t seem to see me sitting there, but both
Sage and Pavlov greeted me with great enthusiasm the moment she opened the door
to the truck bed.

Her jaw was clenched and her lips pursed.
She marched with such evident anger that even her braid seemed to be taut.

I rose, still petting both of my big dogs.
Doppler, too, was so excited at the sight of his canine friends he tried to
engage them in a game of tag, despite the leash I still had a hold of.
Surmising that this was not the time to go on the offensive with my mother, I
merely greeted her and asked what had happened.

“Some dog hater who thinks he’s a big deal
police officer gave me a ticket for having the dogs in the mall.”

“Well, Mom, dogs aren’t allowed in the
mall.”

“It’s a stupid rule!”

“Not really. It’s a pedestrian mall,
period. They’ve got all this expensive brick, and they have to have certain
rules to protect that and the pedestrians, such as ‘No animals, no bicycles, no
vehicles.’”

“I was just walking the dogs. It’s not as
though I were riding through on a horse-drawn cart constructed out of bicycle
wheels! The ticket was for fifty dollars. Fifty bucks! The city of Boulder has
it in for dogs.”

She put her hands on her hips and glared
at me.

“There was somebody walking a black lab
right in front of us and
she
didn’t get a ticket. The officer singled us
out because Sage started barking at him.”

“Was he wearing an officer’s cap?”

“Of course, but that hardly makes his
ticketing me, and not the labrador owner, any more acceptable! It wasn’t fair,
Allida! I went down to the courthouse to make a formal protest.”

I was so tempted to repeat her oft-heard
refrain, “Who says life is fair?” that I had to bite the inside of my lip.

“You can’t just ticket one dog owner and
let the next one stroll on past without a word! And did I happen to mention
that the unticketed dog owner was a pretty young girl? I’ll tell you, Allie, I
am not going to pay this. I’ll fight them with my dying breath, but I refuse to
sacrifice my ideals for an arbitrarily enforced law.”

I couldn’t resist leaping on that last
remark as I ushered her into my office. “Just because the enforcement of the
law is arbitrary doesn’t give you the right to ignore it. Couldn’t you just
have left the dogs in the car till you were done shopping?”

She gave me an angry visual once-over. “I
don’t know how I managed to raise such a conformist for a daughter, but it’s
damned annoying.”

“On that note, this is my office.” I held
my arms out to demonstrate—Mom’s mood too sour to let me give in to the
temptation to say, “Ta Dah!”

“Oh, yes.” She turned in a slow circle. “It’s
Very nice, dear.”

It’s pretty hard to take someone on a tour
of a one-room office, so I wound up including the bathroom, forgetting that I’d
neglected to replace the cup under the leaking pipe last night, so the floor
was wet. Mom slipped and nearly fell, but I managed to catch her. Despite our
acrobatics, she noticed the flowers and asked, “Who gave you those?”

“They’re from Russell Greene, my
officemate.”

“Is there any reason they’re floating in
the sink?”

“It’s been a hectic two days since he gave
them to me.” In a flurry of motion, I swept the flowers out of the sink, shook
them off, and returned them to their jar. “I had to use the vase for Doppler’s
water dish, and I forgot to replace it. There.”

Mom crinkled her nose at the mayonnaise
jar. “I’ve got a lovely applesauce jar back home if you want to upgrade the
vase.”

I snapped to attention at the sound of my
outer door opening. All three dogs barked and galloped toward the sound. If
this was merely Russell trying to get to his office, the poor man would need
therapy for post traumatic stress disorder.

Mom and I no doubt shared the same concern
for my unsuspecting visitor and raced into my office. Pavlov and Doppler
stopped barking almost immediately, as Joel Meyer, sans his good buddy Tracy
Truett, greeted them. Sage, however, continued to bark.

Admittedly, I’m somewhat warped, but there’s
nothing sexier in my estimation than a man petting a dog. No sooner had this
thought formed in my brain than I disagreed with myself—but still, Joel
looked a zillion times more handsome now with one hand out to Doppler and
another scratching Pavlov’s ear than he had yesterday with a tire iron in his
hand. Also, his dark hair and beard had been neatly trimmed since yesterday,
and he was wearing a cotton plaid shirt instead of the torn flannel one.

Though Joel had seemed to win over both
Pavlov and Doppler, Sage was keeping his distance and barking. The collie
looked back at me and then returned his attention to Joel in what was dog
language for, “Take a look! This could be trouble!”

“Sage, no,” my mother said firmly. Sage
let out a couple of more sharp woofs, then quieted. But he stayed at attention,
staring at Joel. As I appraised the situation, I had to say that Sage wasn’t
acting nearly as threatened by Joel’s presence as he had the other day when
Russell entered wearing a hat.

“Hi, there. Who’s this?” Joel said,
offering his palm to Sage to sniff.

Sage barked and then growled. Joel put his
hand down and stayed put. Few people realize that the best way to approach a
strange dog is to come around to the dog’s side. If you simply hold your hand
to its nose, for all the dog knows, he’s about to get slapped. At least Joel
had offered his hand palm up.

“I’ll just put him in this other room, all
right?” Mom asked, already tugging Sage toward Russell’s office.

Now I really was uneasy. Sage hadn’t acted
this defensive, even when he was next to his dead owner. It could be a very
understandably anxious state for him to be in, but it made me nervous.

“I see your tires are all nice and round.
The spare must have been good.”

“Yes, thanks. Nicely done.”

“Everything going all right?” he asked.

“Just fine, thanks.” I could pad my answer
a little to be more friendly to him, but what could I say? No dead bodies? No
rabid canines? “You?”

“Doing fine, thanks. I see you have a
client, so I won’t keep you.”

“I’m not a client,” Mom said as she
returned to my side. “I’m her mother. What kind of dog do you own?”

Joel gave her a charming smile, and I
remembered what a sucker Mom was for men in beards. “A little mutt. Her name’s
Suzanne.”

“You should bring her to Allida. She’s the
best. And all dogs have some behavioral things that could stand improvement.
Allida’s services are worth every penny she charges, and then some.”

His attractive dark eyes sparkled as he
shifted his vision to me. “Hey, that is a good idea. What do you say, Allida?
Can you fit Suzanne into your schedule this week?”

“What would she be seeing me for?”

This question gave Joel pause, but only
momentarily. “For one thing, she’s terrible around other dogs—never stops
barking, tries to bite them. I’ve never worried about it too much, to be honest
with you, but Tracy pointed out to me the other day that she’s going to start a
fight with a bigger dog one of these days, and she won’t stand a chance.”

“I can help train her out of that,” I
said, perhaps overly confident in Mom’s presence. Having been a trainer of what
was often large groups of dogs of all shapes and sizes, this was among the
first behavior problems I’d helped dogs to overcome.

“Great!” Joel gave me a downright eager
glance. Next thing I knew, we had set an appointment for him to bring Suzanne
here the next morning, since we would need to start by working in a neutral
territory. Unless trained otherwise, all dogs bark at other dogs when on their
own property. He left in great spirits.

Mom immediately turned to me and said, “I
got you a new client. You need to be more aggressive in your marketing. Act
like a pit bull, not an elderly basset hound.”

I searched my mind for a dog motif
comeback line, but I was too sleep-deprived. Anxious to put at least a
temporary halt to my nomadic existence, we drove our separate cars to her
house—the three dogs in her truck bed, most of my possessions in my
backseat. It took me little time to clear my things out of the backseat and
into the closet of her guest room. Afterwards, I found her seated at the
kitchen table enjoying a cup of tea, mine already poured and occupying the
place mat across from hers.

“I take it you shared my appreciation for
my favorite flight student last night?” she asked as I sat down.

“Keith Terrington?” I took a sip of the
tea. It had a pleasant, tangy flavor that I recognized. Cranberry Cove, from
the local Celestial Seasonings factory.

“Yes. He really is my favorite student,
you know.”

“From what little I saw, he seems
terrific. Thanks for introducing us. I just wish things had been a lot less
harried yesterday, so that I could have made a better impression.”

“Oh, don’t underestimate yourself, my
dear. I just hope he’s good enough for you. I was worried you wouldn’t find him
attractive.”

I chuckled at the thought of my not
finding Keith attractive, who was one of the most handsome men I’d seen on this
side of a movie screen. “See, you’re supposed to think that way. You’re
hopelessly biased because you’re my mother.”

“I am not!”

I raised my eyebrows and she added, “Biased,
that is.
Well, okay, I
am
biased, but I’m also a good judge
of people.”

“What did you think of Joel Meyer?”

“He seems nice enough. Are you thinking of
dating him, too?”

I shrugged. “It made me a little nervous
the way Sage wouldn’t stop barking at him.”

“Joel was only there for two minutes or
so. Sage probably would have stopped on his own momentarily.”

“I meant to tell you, Mom, I haven’t had
the chance to condition Sage out of barking at men in hats.”

“He barks at men wearing—” She
paused, then said, “Oh, that’s right. The men in raincoats thing. That was
actually directed at hats?”

“Oddly, yes.” I sipped my tea and
considered the matter. In point of fact, barking at raincoats would have been
much more common. A long raincoat would likely make a swooshing noise, and its
wearer would be considerably bulkier looking to a dog. Either sensation could
have easily upset Sage. The hat, however, was admittedly odd.

“Which is something I wanted to talk to
you about,” my mom began in a non sequitur. “There’s something special about
Sage. Don’t take this the wrong way; I’m very fond of Pavlov, too. It’s just
that...maybe it’s because Sage is so homely.”

“Homely?”

“In a classical sense. He’s got this one
ear up, the other down, the bumpy, Roman nose. But really, it’s the fact that
he’s ...so noble, despite being an orphan. Anyway, what I’m trying to get at
is, I want to keep Sage.”

I sat up in surprise. “Really?” I mentally
readjusted. I’d been thinking of finding a place for all three dogs and me, not
wanting to see Sage go, either. But this was a better solution—and one
that allowed me to go on seeing Sage in the future. “The offer’s come up many
times, of late. It’s as though Sage is the most adoptable pet in the city of
Boulder. That’s what concerns me. I’m not sure it’s safe to own him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Both of his former owners were killed.
What if that’s because some creep forced Sage to swallow a diamond or a packet
of cocaine or something? You hear about things like that on the news sometimes.”
I snapped my fingers and hopped to my feet. “Wait a minute. That’s it! Some
smuggler wanted to get something in or out of the country in Sage’s stomach. So
he or she destroyed Sage’s dog food, so that he’d be hungry enough to swallow
the contraband!”

Mom furrowed her brow. “You think that over
a month ago, somebody forcefed Sage contraband? The dog would poop it out the
next day.”

That was a good point. Although gross. “But
maybe it was a regular thing. Every month or so they’d force-feed Sage the
contraband, and it was working so well, they didn’t want to have to start all
over again with a new dog.”

“Why would anyone take the risk of doing
that to another person’s dog?”

“If it was Hannah’s business partner, who
got greedy...” My thoughts raced ahead of me. What if Hannah was not as sweet
and scrupulous as everyone thinks? She and a partner use Sage to smuggle. That
could explain Hannah’s flying lessons at her late age. She intended to pilot
the plane for their illegal operation. The partner kills Hannah, but doesn’t
want to draw attention to himself by taking the dog immediately.