Ruffly Speaking

Description

Holly Winter’s a Dog’s Life columnist on the wrong side of thirty, a canine-loving detective sniffing out crime on the streets of Cambridge. Holly is a dog’s best friend—and a murderer’s worst enemy . . . 

They might be less famous than guide dogs for the blind, but hearing dogs are no less invaluable to their owners. Holly Winter discovers this well-kept secret when she interviews Stephanie Benson, a hearing-impaired priest, and her canine companion, Ruffly. A hardworking, reliable mixed-breed, Ruffly lends an ear with ringing telephones, doorbells, smoke alarms, and the other everyday sounds on which Stephanie’s livelihood—and life—depend.

Ruffly and the rector have just moved into the house of Holly’s recently deceased friend, Morris Lamb, whose life-loving and dog-adoring ways left no clue to his sudden and untimely death. Then Ruffly begins tuning in to something more than mere mortals can hear. And when Holly follows the dog’s lead, she picks up the unmistakable sound . . . of murder.

“[Susan] Conant’s readers—with ears up and alert eye—eagerly await her next.”—Kirkus Reviews“[Susan] Conant’s readers—with ears up and alert eye—eagerly await her next.”—Kirkus ReviewsSusan Conant, a three-time recipient of the Maxwell Award for Fiction Writing given by the Dog Writers Association of America, lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband. She is the author of nineteen Dog Lover’s Mysteries.1
 
If I come right out and ask whether you’ve been grabbed by evil-eyed aliens, whisked aboard their spacecraft, and subjected to grueling medical tests, you’re going to say no, aren’t you? Even if you remember every terrifying detail of the whole nasty business, you’re probably too embarrassed to say so because you’re afraid that people will think you’re crazy. Besides, UFO experts agree that practically all abductees are left with only fragmentary memories of the horrid little gray-skinned medics who prodded and poked them and stabbed them with needles. No wonder people forget. Earthling doctors are bad enough; a gynecologist from outer space doesn’t bear remembering.
 
It can’t be easy to do research on UFO abductions, can it? The subjects who remember won’t tell, and the ones who might spill all the fascinating details about the design of extraterrestrial hypodermics and speculums and stuff can’t because they’ve forgotten. So instead of asking about the experience per se, the experts pose trick questions about epiphenomena—buzzing and whirring sounds that orchestrate the dance of weird lights, the sense that you’ve lost time and don’t know where it’s gone. Ah, but that happens to everyone, doesn’t it? Certainly. But is it common to wake up paralyzed and sense a living presence lurking around in the room, looming over you, breathing close by your bed, watching you? Does everyone have the feeling of flying through the air without knowing how or why? Do we all feel as if we’ve left our bodies? And on returning, do we discover puzzling marks and scars on our torsos and limbs? Key indicator experiences, they’re called, signs that maybe even unbeknownst to you, you’ve been the victim of an alien abduction.
 
Alternatively, of course, you spend your life with big dogs. The loudly respirating being in the bedroom? That sense of being watched? And just try walking two Alaskan malamutes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an icy winter day. Yes, flying through the air without knowing how or why, an out-of-body experience like none other, invariably culminating in abrupt reincorporation and the subsequent appearance of genuinely mystifying lumps and bumps, scoop-shaped, line-shaped, and otherwise, where none were before.
 
Amnesia, too. The last time it happened to me, I didn’t remember a damned thing. One second, Rowdy and Kimi were leading the way down Appleton Street, and there was I, Sergeant Holly Winter of the Canadian Mounted Police, fearlessly daydreaming her way across the frozen Yukon wilderness; and the very next second, I found myself sprawled on a Cambridge sidewalk, watching a heavenly light show, but clinging nonetheless to the leather leashes of the Wonder Dogs, who were still after the same cat that had just precipitated my own precipitation, if you will. Thus, according to every key indicator, I am a bona fide abductee, and, in a way, the experts are right. What they miss, though, is a crucial difference: UFO abductees loathe and fear their alien captors, but, scars or no scars, I am wholeheartedly crazy about dogs.
 
So was Morris Lamb. For that matter, if experience continues beyond the great abduction, he’s still wacky about dogs, and if Morris’s heaven is truly his, he sits in perpetuity at the great eternal dog show in the sky. I see him there as clearly as I see the cream and terra-cotta of my own kitchen and the dark wolf gray of my own dogs, and I hear the raucous glee in Morris’s laugh as Bedlington terrier after Bedlington terrier goes Best in Show, as is perpetually the case in any paradise inhabited by Morris Lamb, who was an avid fancier of the breed and such a show fanatic that, regardless of even the most radical postmortem transformations of his soul, he undoubtedly continues to remember to bring his own thermos of coffee and his own folding chair.
 
In my own heaven, I won’t be marooned outside the baby gates, and I won’t be showing in conformation, either. Nerves or no nerves, I’ll be striding briskly along over the mats of the Utility B obedience ring with a celestial Obedience Trial Champion at my side, an Alaskan malamute who eternally goes High in Trial or, on alternate days, the best obedience dog who ever cleared the high jump and never ticked it once. My last golden retriever, Vinnie, won’t just meet me at the pearly gates, but will soar over them, Velcro herself to my left thigh, and precision-heel me through the portals and onto the streets of heaven, which are, of course, paved in … Well, let’s just say that they are not paved in honor of the terrestrial obedience of the Alaskan malamute.
 
So there’s Morris, content in the knowledge that his breed always wins. Also, if Morris’s heaven is anything like Morris’s earthly vision of paradise, you can bet that half the other men there are gay, too, or at least were when it still counted. Or, on second thought … I can’t speak for Morris. Or God, either, for that matter. In fact, I know only two things about Morris Lamb’s spiritual life. First, he was an Episcopalian. Second, as I’ve mentioned, he believed in Bedlington terriers. Otherwise? I have no idea. And my knowledge of God? Well, God and I have never actually discussed Morris Lamb—or sex either. Come to think of it, my conversations with God bear a striking resemblance to my conversations with everyone else, which is to say that we talk almost exclusively about dogs.
 
So if I’d gone to Morris’s funeral, the Deity and I would probably have had an informative exchange about Rowdy and Kimi, but, as it was, I had the perfect excuse for missing Morris’s funeral: I didn’t know he was dead. I’d spent the weekend in Bethel, Maine, at the eightieth-birthday party of my grandmother, Lydia. She’d celebrated the occasion by getting an Irish wolfhound puppy and summoning the rest of us to come and admire him. We had. Early in the afternoon of Monday, May 11, I’d just arrived back in Cambridge and was puttering in the kitchen when Rita, my second-floor tenant, rapped sharply on the door.
 
Instead of applying the knuckles of her manicured right hand to the alligatored paint, Rita taps out a rhythmic beat with whatever collection of rings she happens to be wearing. Manicured? Yes, polish and all. Here in Cambridge, the typical educated woman gets her nails professionally painted only if she happens to be an anthropologist researching a book on female self-mutilation. But if you think about what Rita does for a living, it’s easy to overlook almost any oddity she exhibits. Day after day, hour after fifty-minute hour, this poor woman has to sit in her office getting paid to hear stuff that’s so awful that no sane person would listen to it free: trauma, misery, despair, terror, grotesque twists of fate—the whole catalog of human suffering, and all of it inflicted on Rita. So in addition to having her fingernails filed and polished by a presumably unconfiding and uncomplaining manicurist, Rita wears clothes that not only match but coordinate with her shoes, which often have high heels. Even so, with the exception of Rowdy, Kimi, and their vet, Steve Delaney, Rita is the best friend I have. So if I’m defending her, what else are friends for?
 
When Rita’s rings played her signature tune, her Scottie, Willie, must have recognized it from upstairs; one of his fits of owner-absent barking finally ended. Simultaneously, Rowdy and Kimi, who’d been sprawled on the fake-tile linoleum, quit gnawing their new Nylabones, leaped to their feet, and dashed to offer her the same joyous welcome they’d have extended to the Boston Strangler or a repo man come to claim all my possessions. The Alaskan malamute is the heavy-freighting dog of the Inuit people on the shores of the Kotzebue Sound, peaceful wanderers with no need for a watchdog or guard dog. My practiced eye, though, can spot the difference between Rowdy and Kimi’s delight at the arrival of any visitor and the transported rapture they reserve for anyone who has ever treated them to so much as a miniature dog biscuit. After what happened the last time Rita did me the favor of feeding them when I had to be away—chaos but no bites—she’s sworn never to do it again, but Rowdy and Kimi, oblivious to her vow, continue to offer Rita the ecstatic greeting owed to all incarnations of the supreme god in the Malamute pantheon, the many-named deity best known as Harbinger of Eukanuba.
 
So I shoved past the dogs, and before I even had the door all the way open, Rita was saying, “Holly, for God’s sake, give me a drink, would you? I can’t believe it. Christ, I’ve just been to the funeral of a total stranger.
 US

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