Ruff Way to Go Read online

  Just as she picked up the handset, someone started pounding on the door.

  We exchanged glances, utterly confused. “Hold off on your call. I’ll see who it is.” I wondered if the trespasser could have run from the yard, only to knock on the front door. That was beyond bizarre, but the timing left few other possibilities.

  Shogun was still agitated and struggling to get free. I didn’t want to risk his darting out the door, and kept a tight grip on him as I looked out the peephole. Betsy Haywood was knocking on the door. She wore her standard housecoat and the scowl that made the deep lines on her face look all the harsher.

  “It’s Mrs. Haywood,” I told my mom, who was waiting in the kitchen entranceway, receiver in her hand, for word regarding who’d been knocking. “Maybe she knows what’s going on.” Mom dropped the phone back into its cradle. I released Shogun and swung open the door, with Shogun keeping up a rat-a-tat bark at Betsy Haywood, who ignored him completely.

  Betsy pointed a bony finger in my face. “What the hell did you think you were doing? You had no right!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Siccing your dogs on my poor Harvey, that’s what! He just got confused. I was on my way over here to fetch him and saw him running for his very life! If you’d given me just one more lousy minute, I’d have had him back home with me.”

  “You’re yelling at me because I sent the dogs into my own fenced backyard? Give me a break! Someone was trying to pry open our kitchen window. I let the dogs out into the yard to protect us. If that was your husband, he’s the one who should be explaining himself to us.”

  “Why, you little ingrate! You young people have got no respect for your elders!”

  “Not when they’re committing criminal offenses, I sure don’t!”

  Putting a hand on my shoulder to calm me, Mom said in placating tones, “Betsy, there’s no need to get upset at my daughter. It sounded as though someone were trying to break into our house.”

  “It was just Harvey. He...sleepwalks.”

  “He pries people’s windows open in his sleep?” I asked incredulously.

  She continued as if she hadn’t heard, “But you didn’t have to go and have those monster dogs of yours try n’ eat him alive!”

  “Betsy?” came a raspy voice from behind her. Harvey appeared on the porch next to his wife, which caused Shogun to turn up his relentless high-pitched bark by another notch or two. Harvey’s face was damp with perspiration and his cheeks were flushed. I noticed immediately that he was fully dressed, including shoes. If he was sleepwalking, he had to have been a sleep “dresser” as well, or have fallen asleep fully clothed. “What are you doing over here at this hour?”

  Betsy didn’t answer. Harvey turned his gaze on me and shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Marilyn, but you’ve simply got to control those kids of yours!”

  “Harvey! This is Allida.” Betsy’s voice was rife with exasperation and her cheeks colored. “Marilyn is standing right behind her.”

  Though Betsy pointed at my mother, Harvey continued speaking to me. “If you can’t control that son of yours, we’re going to have to call the police. He put Super Glue all over my daughter’s shoes. Did he tell you that? Did he?”

  My mother looked at me in confusion, which I could only mirror. “I’m sorry about my son’s behavior,” my mother said kindly to Mrs. Haywood. “I’ll make sure he never does it again.”

  “See? That’s all we needed to do, Betsy! I told you. Even the Babcocks can be reasonable if you try to communicate with them.”

  Betsy turned in a huff and said under her breath, “Keep your mouth shut, Harvey! They’ll have you thrown in the loony bin, if you don’t watch it. Which is where you deserve to be.”

  We shut the door behind them, the Haywoods hissing at each other, but walking arm in arm back to their home. I turned and looked at Mom, who was staring after our neighbors with a grim expression.

  His all-around bizarre behavior and his having mistaken me for my mother left me feeling slightly sick to my stomach. I retrieved the dogs and let Suds come upstairs. She’d been barking periodically throughout our dealings with the Haywoods. Once the dogs had quieted, I asked my mother, still standing in the living room, “Do you think Harvey could have Alzheimer’s?”

  “Maybe so, though that would have to be in addition to the alcohol. Harvey drank himself out of that store of his.”

  “He did?” Now that I thought about it, the concept of his having been a heavy drinker didn’t surprise me in the least. “I always found it odd that he, of all people, ran a hobby shop. He didn’t seem to have any hobbies of his own, plus he hates people, especially children.”

  “It is ironic.”

  “So you think he might just have been drinking too much tonight?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Has he ever done anything like this before?”

  “Not for years.” Mom sank into the couch, and I leaned back against the arm of the upholstered chair near her. “When you and your brother were just young kids, you slept through a couple of incidents ...times when he’d wander over here. I’d see him pacing around in the backyard. Stumbling around was more like it, really. It would upset the dogs, of course, and scare the dickens out of me. That was before the days of nine-one-one, but I told Andy Millay about it. He talked to Harvey on my behalf, and Harvey’s nocturnal wanderings stopped.”

  “When was this?” I asked, slightly offended that she’d never mentioned this to me in all these years.

  “A couple of months after your father had died. I got the impression that, once he got too full of liquor, Harvey was taking it on himself to act like he was running the entire neighborhood.”

  “But he hasn’t done that in some twenty-five years? And now he’s taking to trying to pry our windows open as well?”

  Mom frowned. “It does sound more than a little odd. Maybe he’s just acting drunk or incoherent to cover up his actions, once he’s already been caught in the act. All I know is that his DUI charges led to his getting his driver’s license revoked last year. Then the bank foreclosed on his store. That’s when he and Betsy decided to close up shop.”

  “Huh. I guess that was pretty lucky for Edith. She got to rent his store, which was in a prime location.”

  “Yes. The retail space she’d been renting earlier had been half the size at twice the cost.”

  “I’m surprised that Harvey didn’t resent Edith for that.”

  “Oh, he did. Still does, in fact. You know the way that man holds on to a grudge.”

  I silently wondered if he had any grudges against Cassandra Randon. And what possible motive he might have had for trying to break into our house.

  The next day I got my first opportunity to work with Boris, the schipperke that belonged to Susan Nelson. My plan was that as soon as the opportunity presented itself, I would ask her about her father’s behavior the night before.

  Susan and I stood in her messy living room, watching the dog whip through the house like a Tasmanian devil. Although he would stop by Susan’s feet, he seemed to think that “sit” meant simply touching his haunches down, then off he’d go again.

  “First and foremost, Boris is in need of some basic training. I highly recommend that you buy a clicker and a Gentle Leader. I’ve got extras in my glove box, which I’ll sell you at cost, if you’re interested.”

  “At cost? Meaning what you paid for them?”

  “Right. They aren’t expensive, and they are absolutely invaluable.”

  She came outside with me to look at the training items. Then we rounded her dilapidated house to work with Boris in the backyard. It was going to be a scorcher today; not even ten a.m. and the temperature was over eighty degrees.

  I showed Susan the clicker, a rectangle an inch thick and wide and two inches or so long, with a circle cut out for the thumb to access the metal noisemaker inside. I rarely use the clicker for my own dogs now that they’re well trained, though I don�
�t admit that to clients.

  “This method was initially developed by a trainer of dolphins at Sea World. It gives the animal immediate feedback, indicating precisely what you want. For example, the trainer can click the moment the dolphin reaches the highest point of its jump, so that the dolphin realizes the trainer wants it to go high.”

  “Huh,” Susan said, snapping her chewing gum. “If only Boris were as smart as a dolphin, I’d be more optimistic. Unfortunately, he’s dumb as a doornail.” She knelt and stroked his black fur good-naturedly as she spoke. “You saw him trying to catch the rainbow from the crystal.”

  I had also seen that Susan hadn’t even figured out that the rainbow was what Boris was trying to catch, though that had struck me as obvious. It was something of a matter of opinion regarding which party was the less intelligent. But no sense in alienating a client, even though this one wasn’t paying. “I’ve heard the clicker method works on almost all species, except snakes and other deaf animals.”

  “Snakes are deaf? That can’t be true. What about snake charmers that get ‘em to dance?”

  By now Boris was trying to get into the shade for a nap, and I couldn’t say that I blamed him. When would I learn not to delve into mini-lectures about my techniques? “Snake charmers use vibrations, I think. Anyway, let’s do a few minutes of basic training here.”

  I took a couple of steps, then said, “Boris, come.” He took a step toward me, mostly out of curiosity, but I clicked, then gave him a treat. I did the same with the sit command. “Notice how I made the noise the very instant that the dog rose, then again when he sat down. Dogs need immediate feedback.”

  I ran through a quick come-sit, come-sit routine a few times, using the clicker and tidbits. “Pretty soon, Boris will catch on that good things happen every time he hears that click. Then he’ll put it together that he hears the click each time he does what his trainer tells him to.”

  “That’s pretty simple. I think I can handle it.”

  “Next I’ll show you how to get the Gentle Leader on him. That’s really important when you’re training, because it fastens around the muzzle and controls the dog’s head position. Where the head goes, the dog necessarily follows. It’s an outstanding way to teach leash training, as well as to teach the dog not to jump up on you, and so forth. Some dogs are so easily distracted that this is about the only way to keep them focused. A gentle tug on the leash forces them to look straight at you.”

  I went through the procedure of putting on the collar using tidbits to get him to put his muzzle through the leash, and we waited through the typical period of the dog struggling to pull his collar off. Some dogs are so persistent with this that they flop around like a hooked fish, but the Leader doesn’t hurt and is in no way a muzzle.

  Once he’d calmed down enough, we resumed the training. At the same time, I explained, “The keys to successful training of a dog are consistency and putting the time in each day. I wouldn’t overdo it with him, though. Just a couple of fifteen-minute-a-day periods should work wonders with his behavior. But don’t allow anyone else to get hold of the clicker and play with it or use it for anything other than training Boris. Dogs can’t extrapolate the way we humans can and conclude that the click means nothing unless x and y are also happening.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I get it.” She watched me as we expanded into a lie-down-and-stay. I was really pleased with how quickly Boris was catching on, but just as I handed the clicker to Susan, she gave me a haughty sneer. “So, this is what you do for a living? You click a little plastic thing at a dog and you charge people a pile of dough?”

  “Yes,” I shot back, “and the benefit of working with dogs instead of people is that my canine clients never insult me.”

  She shrugged. “I’m in a foul mood, I guess.”

  “Which shouldn’t qualify me as a target. If you would rather not continue with our agreement, we can end this right now.”

  “Nah. Sorry. Like I said, it’s just that I’m in a bad mood. The parents of that little girl who was over here yesterday canned me. They found a day care center that could save them a few bucks.”

  At the mention of a “little girl,” I thought of Melanie and worried about her, but replied only, “That’s too bad. I know you needed the money.”

  She shrugged and pushed at her curly head of hair. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world.”

  An expression I’ve never cared for, but I said nothing. Drat. I wouldn’t have minded if she’d said to forget our agreement. Sure, I’d been anxious to work with a new-to-me breed, but Susan herself was every bit as uncooperative and demanding as she’d been more than twenty years ago. On the other hand, she and her parents were perhaps the likeliest suspects in Cassandra’s murder, and my continuing work with her and Boris might just lead me to uncover some clue that I could pass along to the police.

  Boris was an interesting character, I thought as I removed the Gentle Leader. He had a real stubborn streak when it came to taking direction and yet was also playful. As was so often the case, I liked the canine much more than the owner.

  Partway through my supervision of Susan’s use of the clicker, a squirrel ventured into the yard behind Susan, and Boris tried to go straight through his owner in his anxiousness to get at it.

  “Your dog shows strong aggressive tendencies.”

  “Do tell,” Susan said with a sigh. “That’s probably the main reason the girl’s parents canceled. After you left yesterday, Boris grabbed hold of the skirt on her dress and wouldn’t let go. I had to pry his jaws apart, and the fabric got torn. I wound up having to offer to sew her a whole new one for free, but they wouldn’t hear of it. Their loss. I’m one hell of a seamstress.”

  A dog grabbing on to a little girl’s dress was a much more serious problem than anything I’d witnessed so far and my mood immediately switched accordingly. Nothing bore the potential for disaster like a small child versus a badly trained or aggressive dog. “Boris’s behavior has to be curtailed immediately, especially if you intend to babysit at your home. That means you’ve got to train him not to give chase, such as to squirrels or to cars.”

  “How?”

  “The instant you spot something he’s going to chase, you distract him with something he enjoys more. Next time you see him spot a squirrel, before he can chase it, call him to you, use the clicker, give him a treat. Or you engage him in a favorite game, so long as it’s not tug-of-war. That’s only encouraging him to grab and pull, like he did with that girl’s dress.”

  “But I always win when we play tug-of-war. He’s just a little dog, and I’m stronger.”

  “And once you get the item from him, what do you do with it?”

  “I toss it and won’t grab it again.”

  “Then, by Boris’s way of looking at the world, he’s won. He who winds up with the toy wins.”

  “Huh.”

  “Furthermore, even if you consistently ‘win’ at tug-of-war, Boris might seek to challenge a smaller, inferior opponent, such as a child. And you’ve got to be consistent with the rules. Dogs are eager to please their owners; they just need to know exactly what they’re supposed to do.”

  I needed to make sure both Susan and her husband understood the importance of curbing Boris’s aggression. “Is there a good time for me to come back to speak to your husband?”

  “No, he’s...out of town for the day.”

  She spoke so hesitantly that I began to wonder if she was telling the truth. “It would be best if I could work with him and Boris at least once. Is there a good time for me to come back and find him?”

  She shrugged. “You could try tomorrow afternoon. It’s possible he’ll be back by then.”

  Boris finally gave up on his pursuit of the squirrel and returned to us. I worked with him with renewed interest. When Susan’s eyes seemed to be glazing over from my dog behavior talk, I said, “By the way, your father scared me half to death last night.”

  Her eyes widened but she made no comment.

  �
�He was over peering into our kitchen window and had removed the screen. Your mother said he was sleepwalking, but—”

  Susan furrowed her brow. “Dad’s having a hard time accepting his retirement.”

  “I hear that’s quite common with retirees. But what would his adjustment problems have to do with his poking around our property?”

  “Mom says he goes on a lot of walks at night these days. He fancies himself as something of a vigilante. He’s harmless.”

  “But Susan, our neighbor was murdered a couple of days ago. It isn’t safe for him to be wandering around like that.” Nor was it safe for anyone else, when no one knew for sure that Harvey wasn’t the killer.

  “I’ll talk to Mom.” She glanced at her watch. “Listen, Allie, I gotta get going. I promised a girlfriend in Boulder I’d come over ten minutes ago. I’ll call your mom before the end of the day to schedule when she wants me to mow your lawn.”

  “No rush. The grass isn’t that long yet.”

  “I want to keep even. But this had better be the last time. I think I have changed my mind, after all.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I think we’d better cancel our arrangement. I don’t know if I want to keep the clicker and the special dog collar yet. I’ll either pay you for them or give ‘em back in a couple days.”

  “Is this sudden change of heart because of what I told you about your father’s actions last night?”

  “No. Jeez, what gave you that idea? Listen, I really have to get out of here.”

  “Okay. Sorry things didn’t work out.”

  Susan locked her front door while I got into my car, surprised and confused by her rapid change of heart. Her mood swing seemed to occur directly after I’d mentioned her father’s behavior last night.

  Feeling suspicious, I drove to the nearest intersection and parked to watch for Susan’s car. My discomfiture only increased moments later when I spotted her. She turned not toward Boulder, but toward Berthoud.

  Chapter 10

  Susan had given me the impression that she knew more than she was telling. I replayed our conversation in my head as I drove to my office. Could she know what her father was up to last night? Could he have been trying to steal something out of the house, such as some piece of evidence that he thought I had? Or was he after the puppies? None of the possibilities made any sense to me.