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Chapter One
Joel talked her into throwing a birthday party for the dog. A big one. He wanted every pet from the neighborhood to come, with owners in tow. The invitations would be delivered by Hermann himself, each one clipped to a red bandanna around his neck. BYOB, they would read: Bring Your Own Bone.
"Oh great," Kate said when Joel first told her about the idea, showing her the design for the invitations on his computer. "People might think we really think this is funny."
"True, they might," Joel answered. He smiled as he played with the fonts on the screen. "And that would be the funniest part of all, wouldn't it?"
Kate shook her head and leaned over to whisper in his ear. "You're bad, you know that, Joel?"
"I know that," he said, clicking away on his mouse.
On the afternoon of the party--a damp, cold Saturday in November--two dozen people crowded around the edges of the downstairs family room in Joel and Kate's four-bedroom colonial, trying to make their animals sit quietly at the picnic blanket. Joel stood at one end, ready to take what he called the official party picture. He was using a digital camera, some new toy he'd found that could be hooked up to his Macintosh. His plan, he told Kate, was to take a few shots, call up the images on the computer monitor, and print a copy for each guest.
But the animals weren't cooperating. Joel got off just one frame before a couple of the rowdier dogs, excited by the sight of all that food--or by the birthday hats clinging rakishly to the sides of their heads--broke free and ran around the blanket, trying to get at the cake. Things fell apart after that. Dogs howled, birds squawked, somebody cursed a broken video camera. Then the Websters' dachshund had an accident under the billiard table.
A dog party. It was a classic Joel idea, Kate thought. Although she had joked about it earlier, she really did wonder what kind of impression this party was making on their guests. Kate Baker--born Theodorus, from solid working-class Greek stock--had never felt totally sure of herself in her husband's choice of neighborhood, a rich D.C. exurb with winding roads, flowering cherries, and mailboxes labeled with names that could have come from the passenger list of the Mayflower. She always had the feeling there were unwritten rules in force, rules that had never made it to the old row house district of Chicago where she grew up. Would the idea of a dog party seem funny to these people instead of just corny? Kate had no idea.
Joel, on the other hand, never seemed to waste much time on questions like that. He was the only real nonconformist she'd ever met--a sixties student radical turned eighties entrepreneur turned nineties ... what? Socially conscious businessman? Neocapitalist rebel? Kate didn't know what to call him. A lot of the virtues that her family had tried to drill into her from the day she was born--duty, eagerness to please, concern for appearances--didn't seem to interest Joel, and this fact about him, probably more than any other, intrigued Kate. She wished she could be so confident.
It was her own stubborn sense of duty--as well as a need to get away from a mind-numbing conversation about Laura Ashley window treatments--that kept Kate downstairs with the pets when Joel and the guests began to wander up toward the drinks table. Even though Joel had promised to do the cleaning up, Kate decided to stay behind and deal with the three-legged Chihuahua, the macaw who bit, the mess. Not that she minded much. Kate generally liked animals better than humans anyway, and she felt that Joel deserved some indulgence right now. He'd been putting in brutal hours at work for the past month. There'd been a couple of freak currency fluctuations in South America, and now a huge order of Malaysian vanilla beans was missing somewhere in the South Pacific. Joel had been at the office until dawn three times in the last week alone. In Kate's opinion, getting tanked at a dog party was probably just what he needed.
After a few minutes, Kate managed to get the last of the canine guests out the back door and into the fenced yard. The macaw settled down, and the only cat invited to the party came out from under the sofa to lap up the crumbs left on the picnic blanket. Hermann--Kate end Joel's own twelve-year-old German shepherd, the birthday dog--sat in a corner, giving Kate a dark stare.
"Well, don't look at me. They're your friends," she said to him in her hoarse, raspy voice.
Hermann cocked his head to one side, his ears flattening back against the thick black fur. He had such expressive ears, Kate thought. She could read his ears the way other people read human faces.
"Okay," she said, "so maybe this wasn't a great idea."
Hermann whimpered. He let Kate scratch him behind those expressive ears, then gave her a quick, forgiving nuzzle and stalked off to the garage for a nap.
Kate stopped in the bathroom to see if she still looked all right after her struggle with the dogs. Her thick, raisin-black hair was pulled back into something like a French braid, though now stray hairs sprang from her head at every angle, giving her a wild, frazzled look. That hair, along with her intense green eyes and long, slightly crooked nose--inherited from a legendary Macedonian grandmother she'd never met--made her look a little like a crazy fortune-teller, she thought. And the effect was only strengthened by the small comma-shaped scar on the outside end of her right eyebrow, a childhood gift from her toy-throwing youngest brother. It made one eyebrow seem shorter than the other, and gave her whole face an off-center tilt. Kate frowned. At least her dress still looked good. It was tight, gray wool, belted at the waist--the kind of clingy thing she never wore before coming east. She liked the way it helped to fill out her too-narrow hips.
Deciding to leave the clutter on the picnic blanket for later, Kate went back upstairs and dove again into the noise of the party. Elena Drummond, her best friend, sidled up to her with a drink in her hand. "Keep it under your hat, Kate, but I think there's something going on between Matilda Barnes and the Landons' weimaraner."
Kate grabbed Elena's drink and took a taste, letting a drop of gin fall to the floor like a tiny glass bead. "I always told you that woman was a bitch," she said.
Elena laughed. She seemed to love hearing Kate curse, though she would never say an off-color word herself. Elena was the only neighbor that Kate felt totally at ease with, and the two were inseparable, despite the fifteen-year difference in their ages and the even more extreme difference in their situations: Elena, fifty-one years old and living alone in the house next door to the Bakers, had two girls in college and an ex-husband whose monthly alimony check would occasionally show up with smiling holiday pictures of him and his new blond wife. To hear Elena tell it, she deposited the checks in the bank and gave the pictures to her macaw to shred.
"So how's my husband acting?" Kate asked her, giving back the drink.
"Joel? As bizarre and charming as usual." Elena took a quick sip. "Why?"
"Just checking." Kate looked across the room at her husband. Joel was standing near the CD player in the den, talking to Wayne and Allie Webster. He looked young for his forty-five years--sun-streaked brown hair, a square chin, mud-brown eyes, and a definite hint of adventurousness in his grin. Still a decently sexy man, Kate thought, better than I deserve. "It's just that things have been lousy at work," she continued. "He seems ... I don't know, distracted lately."
"You worry too much," Elena said.
"Yeah, so you always tell me."
"And I'm always right."
Kate grabbed Elena's drink again. It was true that she was a worrier. There was no way she could be anything else, having been trained in worry from a young age. As the only daughter in a Greek family of seven, she'd had to look after four brothers and her father before she was even in her teens. Her mother, a tall, red-faced woman with ever-aching feet, would retreat into her bedroom most afternoons with a crossword puzzle and a magnum of cheap white wine. When her father came home from his job as a desk sergeant in the Chicago Police Department, it was Kate who had to have the meal on the table, the younger children bathed and in pajamas, the dog fed. Even years later, when she was a cop herself, she worried--about her widowed father's heart condition; about Vic, her partner, and his marital problems; about her brothers. She sometimes wondered if she hadn't left Chicago and come east just to escape this constant worry, to start over in a place where she could worry about herself for once.
Seeing an empty ice bucket on the drinks table, Kate excused herself, grabbed it, and pushed her way through the crowd. Her mind was racing now. It was at times like this--at a party, surrounded by the clever talk and laughter of her well-heeled Maryland neighbors--that she felt most self-conscious about her East Coast life. She remembered the parties her family used to give in Chicago. Their cramped row house with the sky-blue awnings would be overrun with screaming kids, gin-playing aunts, and dozens of off-duty cops drinking beer and eating homemade spanakopita off paper plates. Nowadays she gave parties like this--fancy affairs where people drank scotch and bottled mineral water and nobody would even think of bringing along a visiting cousin or a kid under sixteen. It still amazed her that she'd ended up in a place like Lewisburg. She'd come east to go to graduate school, to get away from cop work and do something better, worthier, something she could actually feel proud of. And Kate was proud of what she'd accomplished so far. She had her master's in social work and was counseling teenagers in the District as part of her early work toward a doctorate. Meeting and marrying a rich businessman wasn't part of her original plan, but it had happened. She couldn't help it if the people back home, especially her brothers, saw this part of her self-improvement as a little too convenient.
Kate went into the kitchen and put the bucket into the automatic ice maker. Her brothers. Even now, four years after leaving Chicago, she still found herself thinking about them, imagining their reactions to everything she said or did. She could just guess how they would roll their eyes at the thought of an automatic ice maker. "What's the deal, Katie," her oldest brother, Phil, would say. "Can't you be bothered to fill a few ice-cube trays?" The Theodorus boys--three of them still cops, the youngest a contractor just starting his own business--were always skeptical about Joel and his fancy lifestyle. They tended to see anyone with money, especially ex-hippies with money, as automatically suspect. So they gave her a hard time about him, and about her new life in general. They kept telling her that she was getting soft out here, making nice with JDs in her spare time, living in her big suburban house. They warned her that she was--God forbid--turning feminine on them.
"Right, feminine," she'd answered back one year over Easter dinner. "Is that what you call it when you stop shooting at fifteen-year-old kids stealing televisions?"
"Oh, excuse me," Phil had answered. "Now she's got enough money to buy TVs for all those ghetto kids. And give them jobs in communes." He'd turned to Joel then and said, in all seriousness, "Hey, no offense."
Kate took the full ice bucket from the machine. Outside, the dogs were barking raucously. Kate wondered how smart it was to let half a dozen dogs run free in a fenced yard. She went over to the kitchen window to check on them. A few dime-sized flakes of snow were starting to fall out of the twilit sky, sticking to the coats of the longer-haired dogs. The animals seemed agitated--overtired and cranky, like children who had missed their naps. She was glad Hermann had stayed inside.
Then, just as she was turning away from the window, Kate saw something moving behind the row of cedars on the other side of the fence. At first she thought it was a man in a brown overcoat, but the figure had disappeared too fast for her to be sure. Maybe it was a neighbor attracted by all the barking. Or a deer, though it didn't seem likely that a deer would come within a mile of those baying hounds. She watched the spot for a few seconds, trying to see into the shadows behind the cedars, but it--he, whatever it was--had already gone.
Kate turned from the window and carried the ice bucket into the living room. The guests, who were making almost as much noise as their pets outside, were clustered at one end of the house, near the drinks and the music. Kate again looked over at Joel, who now seemed to be arguing with Don Fordham, the old college friend he'd taken on as a partner when he started his business--From the Rainforest Imports, Inc.--in the mid-seventies. The two stood off in a corner of the den, near the collection of Japanese prints. Joel had his hand on Don's shoulder and was saying something close to his ear. Don shook his head and looked uncomfortable, almost afraid. Kate was about to go over to them when Matilda Barnes plucked at her arm.
"A wonderful idea for a party!" she oozed, waving her drink. "And so nice for the dogs, too. They so rarely get together."
"Thank Joel for the idea," Kate shouted over the noise.
"I just love seeing them all together," Matilda went on. "And that weimaraner, who does he belong to?"
"The Landons."
"Such a handsome, handsome animal.
Kate bit her lower lip hard. "Excuse me a minute?" she said. She took the ice bucket over to the drinks table and then made her way across the busy room to Joel and Don. Whatever it was the two men were talking about, their argument was over by the time she reached them. They stood gloomily side by side, looking in opposite directions. Kate thought of bookends. "Everything okay here?" she said as she took her husband's arm.
"Have you seen Jeannette?" Don asked, before walking away to look for his wife.
Kate pinched Joel's arm. "Hey, take it easy," she said. "This is a party. You're not supposed to beat up on the guests. What was that all about?"
She could feel the anger knotting Joel's arm muscles. "Our usual philosophical differences," he said. "Don's acting like an old lady again." Then he turned to her with a strange smile on his face. He slipped his free hand around her, grazing her left breast, and pulled her face toward his. "I want to fuck you later," he whispered into her ear, then bit the lobe, her earring clicking against his teeth.
Kate felt suddenly breathless, ambushed. Joel quickly let her go and turned away, as if nothing had happened. Kate steadied herself. Normally, she would have been thrilled by her husband's little outburst--this kind of unexpected lewdness always aroused her more than she liked to admit--but she had a feeling that Joel was just trying to distract her, to end any discussion about the argument with Don. Feeling annoyed, Kate looked up at the man she had married just three years ago. There were lots of things--his evasiveness, for one--that she would change about him if she could. But what wife wouldn't say the same about her husband, or vice versa? I love this man, she told herself. That should be enough.
It was then that the dogs started howling.
The sound--an eerie, high-pitched wail--was almost like a chant. One by one, the guests became aware of it. The noise of the party shrank back, as if to make way for a more urgent sound.
"What on earth?" Elena said.
Kate was already moving. She elbowed past a few guests to get through the living room. Before anyone else had reacted, she was out the back door and down the steps to the fenced yard.
The dogs were circling the lawn in the twilight, sending nervous howls toward the sky. Kate saw the cause of the commotion immediately. It was impossible not to. In the middle of the yard, blazing like a comet, was an animal on fire.
Her jaw tightening, Kate watched the figure run from side to side, blue and yellow flames lapping silently around its head and body. It was one of the dogs. She recognized it as Pearlie, Don and Jeannette's Labrador.
"Quick, get me a blanket!" Kate shouted back at the stunned guests who'd reached the back porch. "Or a coat--who has a heavy coat?"
Kate remembered the picnic blanket in the family room. She ran to the basement door and pulled it open. The blanket--a thick wool comforter--lay there on the floor, still covered with plates of half-eaten cake and dog biscuits. Kate grabbed the nearest corner and pulled, sending the plates flying. By the time she got back to the yard, a few people had reached the bottom of the stairs, but they stopped there, as if hypnotized by the sight of the writhing animal on the lawn.
"Keep the other dogs away!" Kate shouted hoarsely. Then, holding the blanket in front of her, she stepped toward the burning dog. The Lab was moving fast, rolling and jumping. She waited, then lunged with the blanket, but the dog shot away and Kate skidded across the cold, wet grass.
She got to her feet. People were shouting at her, but she wouldn't let their words distract her. Turning, she dove again at the dog. This time, she felt the quick heat of the thing in her arms, the bone and tight muscle. Yellow flame seared her cheek as she locked her arms together, and her hair sizzled near her ears. She pulled the dog's body under her and began rolling over on the slippery lawn, until finally her back hit the metal fence at the edge of the yard. The dog, still panicky, broke free and ran away, the blanket trailing from her collar. But Kate could see that the flames were out.
Joel was kneeling at her side now. He took her head in his hands. "Kate, damn it, are you all right? Talk to me."
Her cheeks and hands stung so sharply they seemed to buzz. It was only then that she noticed the smell of kerosene.
"Somebody's calling an ambulance," Joel went on, checking her over. He was shaking. "You're out of your mind!"
"I'm okay," she said, her tongue thick in her mouth. She let him help her to her skinned knees, then to her feet. The howling had died down, but the dogs were still circling, their frantic silence as eerie as their noise had been. Kate could see Don on the other side of the yard, huddled over the burned dog, trying to keep her calm.
John Peters walked over to Kate and Joel with an open fuel can in his hands. "I found this in the grass over there. Yours?"
Joel nodded, looking grim. It was one of the kerosene cans they kept in the crawl space under the house--for the heater in his basement office.
"Who ...?" Kate started to ask, but her voice gave out before she could finish.
Joel shook his head. "Some kid, probably," he said.
Kate pushed away from Joel and went over to Don. He was trying to wrap the blanket around the Labrador, but Pearlie was jumpy--going into shock, probably. She snapped feebly at Don's wrists, her eyes still foggy with panic. "How does she look?" Kate asked.
Don's face was drained of color. "It's mostly around her shoulders and back," he said. "I don't know."
Suddenly, Jeannette was on top of them. "I can't believe this," she wailed. "Why would someone do this?" She shivered and held on to Kate as Don lifted the dog.
"I'll take her around to the driveway," Don said. "When the ambulance gets here, I'll see if they can do anything for her." Pearlie had settled down by now, and just lay wrapped in his arms, trembling. "Are you hurt?" he asked Kate.
"No, I'm okay. Really."
He stared at her for a second in the dim light. "I appreciate it," he said.
The ambulance arrived a few minutes later. At first, the two paramedics wouldn't do anything for Pearlie, but after seeing that Kate was all right, one of them agreed to treat the dog's burns and then take her to the animal hospital in town. The other paramedic sat Kate on a collapsed gurney in the back of the ambulance. He began dabbing her minor burns with antibiotic ointment, bandaging the two or three that were more serious. Neighbors and friends thronged outside the van. The spinning lights of the ambulance raked them ail with a kind of disco strobe as they stood on the asphalt, looking nervous and awkward.
While Kate was being treated, a county police cruiser pulled up behind the ambulance in the driveway. The borough of Lewisburg had its own police department, but it was understaffed; it was the county police that usually responded to calls this far out of town. Kate saw the patrol officer, blond and built like a porn-magazine cliche, pull himself out of the car. He talked to one of the paramedics for a minute, then, notebook in hand, walked over to question Joel, Don, and the other guests.
Kate watched him with an uneasy fascination. She remembered exactly what this was like--arriving at a disturbance with nothing to go on, no way of knowing what had really happened. She could see the familiar look of skepticism in the patrolman's face. The ugliness of any crime had a way of tainting everyone it touched. Even victims were suspect. That feeling of constant distrust was one of the things she'd hated about being a cop.
The patrolman disappeared into the backyard and then, after a few minutes, came back to check on her. "How we doing in here?"
"I've been better," Kate said, giving him a weak smile as she read his name tag: Randall Briggs. One of the paramedics--a balding young black man with huge biceps--was kneeling beside her, winding gauze around her right wrist. "So, did you catch the perp yet?" she asked, trying for a lightness she couldn't really pull off.
"No, ma'am, not yet." He smiled, looking around the bright interior of the ambulance before continuing. "Tell you the truth, I'm not even sure what's been perpetrated here. Dog catches fire in somebody's backyard. What do you call that? Canine assault? Dog arson?"
"Criminal damage, number one," she said, feeling a quick jolt of anger. "Or cruelty to animals. It's a Class C misdemeanor."
Briggs looked straight at her then. The neutrality of his expression seemed forced, as if he'd practiced it in front of a mirror. "You want to tell me what happened?"
"It seems pretty clear, Officer Briggs. Some sicko pulled the kerosene out from the crawl space, threw some on the dog, and lit it."
"Okay, okay," he said. "But why would anybody do something like that, is what I want to know."
"It's what I want to know, too."
"Me, too," said the paramedic.
The patrolman paused for a second, pressing the eraser end of his pencil against his cheek. Another self-conscious gesture, to find out if Joel had stopped off to see any of them, maybe to talk over what had happened.
At eleven o'clock, she and Hermann were circling the parking lot of the all-night Safeway, looking for Joel's Saab wagon.
At midnight, for the second time that day, Kate was talking to the Hampton County Police.
Copyright © 1997 Gary Krist. All rights reserved.
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