Paws before dying Read online

  ON THE TRAIL OF A KILLER?

  “Which way, boy?” I asked confidently, but felt as though I might as well have flipped a coin. He hadn’t been taught to track. I’d meant to do it someday. I’d been busy. I’d been lazy. Rowdy would choose a path for us, of course, but he might head us directly toward the backyard hutch of some family’s pet rabbits or take us to the nearest bitch in season...

  Praise for Susan Conant’s Dog Lover’s Mysteries...

  PAWS BEFORE DYING: “Superb... Beautifully written and plotted!” —Carolyn G. Hart, author of the prize-winning Death on Demand series

  DEAD AND DOGGONE: “Dead and Doggone reminds me of my first dog... Sasha was a little dog, but she had a big, brave soul. She made me laugh, she taught me a lot, and she broke my heart. This book is like that. I’d award it Top Dog Honors!” —Nancy Pickard

  A NEW LEASH ON DEATH: “Susan Conant deserves high praise... delightful characters... [an] enjoyable mystery!”

  —Kate's Mystery Books Newsletter

  MORE MYSTERIES FROM THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP…

  DOG LOVERS' MYSTERIES STARRING HOLLY WINTER: With her Alaskan malamute Rowdy, Holly dogs the trails of dangerous criminals. “A gifted and original writer.” —Carolyn G. Hart

  by Susan Conant

  A NEW LEASH ON DEATH A BITE OF DEATH DEAD AND DOGGONE PAWS BEFORE DYING

  DOG LOVERS’MYSTERIES STARRING JACKIE WALSH: She’s starting a new life with her son and an ex-police dog named Jake... teaching film classes and solving crimes!

  by Melissa Cleary

  A TAIL OF TWO MURDERS FIRST PEDIGREE MURDER THE MALTESE PUPPY

  DOG COLLAR CRIME SKULL AND DOG BONES MURDER MOST BEASTLY

  HOUNDED TO DEATH DEAD AND BURIED OLD DOGS

  SAMANTHA HOLT MYSTERIES: Dogs, cats, and crooks are all part of a day’s work for this veterinary technician... “Delightful!” -Melissa Cleary

  by Karen Ann Wilson

  EIGHT DOG FLYING COPY CAT CRIMES

  BEWARE SLEEPING DOGS CIRCLE OF WOLVES

  CHARLOTTE GRAHAM MYSTERIES: She’s an actress with a flair for dramatics—and an eye for detection. “You’ll get hooked on Charlotte Graham!”

  —Rave Reviews

  by Stefanie Matteson

  MURDER AT THE SPA MURDER AT THE FALLS

  MURDER AT TEATIME MURDER ON HIGH

  MURDER ON THE CLIFF MURDER AMONG THE ANGELS

  MURDER ON THE SILK ROAD MURDER UNDER THE PALMS

  PEACHES DANN MYSTERIES: Peaches has never had a very good memory. But she’s learned to cope with it over the years... Fortunately, though, when it comes to murder, this absentminded amateur sleuth doesn’t forgive and forget!

  by Elizabeth Daniels Squire

  WHO KILLED WHAT’S-HER-NAME? REMEMBER THE ALIBI

  MEMORY CAN BE MURDER WHOSE DEATH IS IT, ANYWAY?

  HEMLOCK FALLS MYSTERIES: The Quilliam sisters combine their culinary and business skills to run an inn in upstate New York. But when it comes to murder, their talent for detection takes over...

  by Claudia Bishop

  A TASTE FOR MURDER A DASH OF DEATH

  A PINCH OF POISON MURDER WELL-DONE

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  This Berkley Prime Crime Book contains the complete text of the original edition.

  PAWS BEFORE DYING

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Diamond edition / August 1991

  Berkley Prime Crime edition / December 1993

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1991 by Susan Conant.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

  ISBN: 0-425-14430-5

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks of Berkley Publishing Corporation.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4

  To Vivian Carter Umbarger

  In memory of

  Her coyte-dog hybrid

  Rowdy.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Joel Woolfson, D.V.M., and William Walker, D.V.M., for advice about this book as well as for their care of my beloved Alaskan malamutes, Frostfield Arctic Natasha, C.D., and Frostfield Firestar’s Kobuk.

  Author's Note

  Several canine characters in the book are based on real dogs, including my own, but all actual institutions and locales are used fictionally.

  Chapter 1

  ACCORDING to family legend, allergies were the excuse my Aunt Cassie and her husband, Arthur, gave for failing to attend my parents’ wedding. My mother, though, believed that the real reason they skipped it was fear: Arthur harbored an inborn terror of life itself, Marissa always argued. You might suppose that she referred to some aversion to the symbolic significance of nuptials, but she didn’t. She meant that Arthur was afraid of dogs.

  Arthur and Cassie’s absence from my parents’ wedding pictures, though, is somewhat less striking than is the presence in portrait after portrait of six or eight members of the bridal party, which, with the exception of my parents themselves, consisted entirely of golden retrievers. The highlight of the ceremony occurred as my mother marched down the aisle preceded by a flower girl who bore a basket of orange blossoms in her mouth and an usher whose task it was to thrust his muzzle into the basket and strew jawfuls of petals on his trainer’s route to holy matrimony. Marissa, I believe, forgave her sister for forgoing the exchange of vows but not for missing the sight of that perfect brace in action.

  The dogs’ performance did not, however, pass unnoticed or unrewarded. After joining my parents in wedlock, the minister presented large white ribbons to the attendants. He had the authority to make the awards, of course; he was—and still is—ordained by the American Kennel Club as well as by the Episcopal church. My father, in fact, insists that Dr. Hooper performed the wedding itself in his capacity as an AKC obedience judge and that his affiliation with a secondary religious organization was incidental.

  Cassie and Arthur sent nothing at all when I was born, probably because the birth announcement, designed by my sire and dam, took the form of a pink premium list for a golden retriever specialty show. Cassie probably thought that Marissa’s mail had reached her by mistake, or else Arthur opened the envelope, succumbed to a dander-driven sneezing fit, and discarded the announcement unread. More likely, Cassie and Arthur simply failed to realize that the new puppy bitch was human. It’s not their fault. My name is Holly Winter.

  My aunt and her husband, then, can’t be blamed for missing the point of my birth announcement, nor can my parents really be held responsible for their difficulty in deciphering my cousin Leah’s, which we received when I was about sixteen. Unlike all previous birth announcements sent by Buck and Marissa’s friends and family, this one was not headed: “Litterbox News” or “Something to Howl About.” They were also puzzled about why the new owners had failed to specify Leah’s breed. Marissa, though, rationalized her sister’s slip: If the breed went without saying, Cassie’s pup was assuredly a golden retriever.

  Because of subsequent bad feeling between our families, as well as Arthur’s allergies, I saw almost nothing of Leah during her puppyhood and do not know whether s
he enjoyed retrieving the special imported English hard-rubber, chew-proof balls sent by my mother together with a typewritten list of tips on house training. Even when Marissa died and Cassie was obviously grieved—and probably sorry she’d missed the wedding—Buck didn’t forgive her or Arthur, because he still considered them poor sports and moral weaklings for having violated Section 24 of the AKC obedience regulations: “Dogs must compete.”

  In fact, before Leah moved in with me, I hadn’t seen her for about ten years, not only because Buck stopped sending whelping announcements to her parents after my mother died but also because Leah’s family had left Boston for a small college town in central Maine, and I’d meanwhile left Maine, gone to college, and moved to Cambridge. It must have been my grandmother who first told them that I live here. Although my editor includes a little biographical information with my column, something tells me that Arthur and Cassie don’t subscribe to Dog's Life magazine and seldom even pick it up at the newsstand.

  Partly because Cassie’s voice sounds remarkably like Marissa’s, especially over the phone, her rare calls always startle me.

  My mother is often with me, but when she speaks in my ear, I usually recognize the source as internal. Besides, I’m always stunned to hear my mother’s voice discussing any topic except dogs, and Cassie usually drones on about people, including Arthur and Leah. One of the joys of dog ownership is liberation from the boring self-centeredness to which Cassie’s loveless marriage has doomed her, or so said Marissa, to whom a loveless marriage was any union not blessed with canine progeny.

  As my mother would wish, then, I pity Cassie and listen to her blather on. I even phone her once in a while, and we exchange Christmas cards. Last year, for instance, my card showed a breathtaking color photograph of Rowdy, one of my two Alaskan malamutes, in his new red harness, pulling a sled across the snow-covered lawn at Owls Head, where my father still lives. Rowdy’s big color-coordinated red tongue is hanging out, he’s smiling, and especially in harness, he doesn’t really look much like a wolf. Because of the snow, you can’t see that the lawn isn’t a proper lawn anymore, and neither Buck nor his wolf hybrids appear in the picture. In other words, I do my best to introduce life and love into what my mother called Cassie’s blighted existence, which is probably why she felt free to phone me one May evening to ask whether I would keep Leah for the summer.

  Arthur, it seemed, had obtained some frivolous grant that would pay him to gallivant around Europe under the pretense of conducting scholarly research, and although he had managed to include Cassie as a boondoggling research assistant, Leah couldn’t go unless he paid her way. Cassie didn’t phrase it quite like that. She didn’t have to.

  “In any event,” Cassie added in my mother’s voice, “she needs to study for her SATs.” She paused. “Scholastic Aptitude Tests.”

  “I know what SATs are,” I said. “Believe it or not, I even took them.”

  “And then there’s Cambridge,” Cassie said. “Of course, we always hoped that Arthur would get the call, but...”

  Don’t be misled. Although Arthur went to graduate school down the street from my house—at Harvard, in other words— he didn’t go to theological school. He and Cassie both think that the entire institution is divine.

  “But the trumpets never sounded,” I said gracelessly, mostly because I realized that Cambridge was simply Arthur’s idea of a classy-sounding boarding kennel. I wouldn’t trust my dogs to someone I knew as slightly as Arthur and Cassie knew me. “How old is she?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “And she didn’t, uh, inherit...?”

  “She is in robust health,” Cassie said. I took that to mean that she was fat. “And she is your niece.”

  “Cousin.”

  “But she does call you Aunt Holly. Because of the age difference?

  “I’m not that much older than she is, you know. I’m only a little over thirty.” And why would Leah have an occasion to call me anything? She hadn’t seen me for ten years. My promotion to aunt was probably one of Arthur’s transparent ploys to finagle two months of room and board. If Leah’s species and breed had been what my mother originally supposed, I wouldn’t have given in. Much as I adore golden retrievers, I’d have had to explain to Cassie that the first time her bitch tried to drink out of Kimi’s or Rowdy’s water bowl, one of my malamutes, probably my own bitch, Kimi, would crush her muzzle. But Leah wasn’t, after all, a golden retriever, and I’m not Kimi. I said yes.

  “So if you feel that way about these people, why didn’t you tell her no?” Steve Delaney, Rowdy and Kimi’s vet, has a quiet, reasonable voice. He is tall and lean, with curly brown hair and blue eyes that change to green. He’d arrived soon after I talked to Cassie and was sitting at my kitchen table fooling around with the dogs while I scrambled some eggs and toasted an English muffin for him. He doesn’t really like breakfast for dinner, but I can’t cook much else and hadn’t been to the store recently, anyway. The alternative that night was IAMS Mini Chunks, which is more nutritious than my cooking and, in fact, may well taste better, too.

  “Why? Probably because she sounds like my mother.” By the time I was born, my mother had spent years obedience-training spirited dogs. A mere small person was no challenge. Don’t think that she was harsh, though. She never raised her voice, but her tone made you want to do whatever she wanted. I lost her more than ten years ago, and, in case it isn’t obvious already,

  I’ll tell you that I miss her all the time. “Also, I guess I felt sorry for this poor ugly, fat kid, with her parents taking off for Europe and obviously just wanting to get rid of her for the summer.” I buttered the muffin, scraped the eggs out of the two skillets onto the plate, plunked Steve’s food in front of him, and let the pans cool so the dogs wouldn’t burn their tongues. When Kimi first entered our household, I tried to keep track of whose turn it was to lick pans, but the concept of taking turns is somewhat abstract even for Alaskan malamutes, dogdom’s geniuses— hence two pans. The concession stands at dog shows sell sweatshirts embellished with stylized paw prints and the words “My dogs walk all over me.” I own one.

  “I thought you hadn’t seen her for ten years,” Steve said. “I haven’t, but Cassie says she’s robust, and that’s got to be a euphemism, right? And the last time I saw her, she looked like Arthur, I think. Okay, guys. Here you go.”

  They didn’t need to be told. Malamutes always know what’s meant for them, and if it isn’t, they try to convince you that it should be. Before the pans reached the floor, the dogs’ red tongues were scouring them, and each dog’s big dark brown eyes were scanning the other dog’s booty to calculate the chance of finishing first and stealing what the other had left. All malamutes have brown eyes, of course, and the darker, the better. In case you didn’t know, the blue-eyed sled dogs are Siberian huskies, although some Siberians have brown eyes. Malamutes, of course, are much bigger than Siberians, with strong bulky muzzles and rounded triangular ears set wide apart. At that time, Kimi, the bitch, weighed an ideal seventy-five pounds, and Rowdy was somewhere between eighty-five and ninety pounds, but don’t go by weight. Malamutes have a thick undercoat of soft, short fur covered by a long outer coat of coarse guard hair, so they look bigger than they are, and they’re even stronger than they look, bitches included.

  “And,” I added, “can you imagine? Here is a member of my own family—my mother’s niece—who grew up without dogs. I mean, it’s practically inconceivable. So obviously, she’s kind of pathetic. She must sense this void in her life and not know what’s supposed to fill it. So this idea crossed my mind that she could handle Kimi for me—you know, as a kind of therapy.”

  “For you?”

  “She isn’t driving me that crazy, and you have to admit, she’s improved a lot. Haven’t you, Kimi?”

  Both dogs were sprawled on the floor with the pans clutched between their big snowshoe front paws. I’d painted the kitchen cream with terra-cotta trim when I had golden retrievers, but if I ever had the money,
I intended to do it in silvery gray and white with a real slate floor, not more fake-tile linoleum. In the meantime, though, Rowdy and Kimi’s wolf gray and white didn’t clash, and, in any case, they’d have graced a hovel. Bonnie, who edits my column, won’t let me say it in print, but Alaskan malamutes are the most beautiful dogs on earth.

  When Kimi heard her name, she raised her eyes, but didn’t release her grip on the pan. She growled softly.

  “Her attention is much better,” I added. “And, of course, I’ll find a class for Leah to take her to. There’s one in Newton, in some park. Rose Engleman called me about it the other day. I’ll take Rowdy. She can take Kimi. It’ll be a sort of emotional reeducation. As it is, she’s probably terrified of dogs, and I’m sure she has no idea what to do with them. And mais aren’t one-person dogs.”

  “It’s generous of you,” Steve said, as if generosity to my fellow human beings were as foreign to me as dogs were to Leah. “So? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “So it’s nice of you. That’s all.”

  Then we washed the dishes and went to bed. Doesn’t your vet make house calls?

  Chapter 2

  ON the day Leah arrived, the thermometer outside my kitchen window hit ninety, and the air was so saturated with moisture that the scribbled draft pages of my new column stuck together, the windows and mirrors clouded up, and my clean, odorless malamutes smelled like dogs. In the late afternoon, the pale gray cloud cover turned deep charcoal, and thunder began to roll. The downpour let loose just as Arthur’s academically correct medium-blue Volvo station wagon pulled into the driveway at the back of my house, which is the barn-red wood-frame tripledecker on the corner of Appleton Street and Concord Avenue. The wagon was obviously a professor’s car, five or six years old and dented, with a multihued collection of campus parking permits stuck on one of the rear windows. If Harvard had seen Arthur’s car, he’d have heard the celestial brass, after all.