Black Ribbon by Susan Conant Read Free Book Online

startled.
    “He needs to finish his walk,” I said, “and I have to call home before this meeting. I need to check on my bitch.” Real dog people like Ginny and Cam required no explanation, but I couldn’t think of a good reason to withhold the real one. “Ginny, the card you got? About Merlin. There was a sympathy card in my cabin, too.”
    Their faces fell. “Holly, you should’ve—” Ginny started to say.
    “Nothing’s happened. That’s what’s so weird. The last dog I lost was Vinnie, and that was a month before I got Rowdy. Ginny, could I ask you, the card you got, did it have a sort of watercolor scene? With a couple of trees? And something like, ‘With Sympathy on the Loss of Your Pet.’ In a kind of pale tan envelope.”
    Ginny nodded.
    I said, “I got the same card. I assumed it was some kind of mistake. It probably is. It has to be. Mine wasn’t signed, either.”
    Cam and Ginny both understood: I still had to call home.
     

 
    THE WOMAN in front of me in line for the pay phone wore a blue T-shirt with a picture of a beret-wearing poodle and the proclamation: J’embrassemon chien sur la bouche. But the dog at her feet was a feisty-looking basenji, and she wasn’t kissing him on the mouth, either. She was complaining. “One phone for the whole place isn’t my idea of luxury. Wouldn’t you think they’d have them in the rooms? All these dog people? Everyone’s going to need to call home all the time.” The big lobby of the lodge had had its log walls scrubbed and its floor refinished. The furniture had been arranged with such professional skill that the red-upholstered couches and chairs appeared engaged in happy conversation with the consciously rustic end tables, coffee tables, and magazine racks. The sepia-tinted, blown-up photographs on the walls showed grubby, grinning fishermen holding impressive strings of trout. It seemed just as well that the anglers and their catch were now confined behind glass. Sweat, bug dope, and dead fish would have fought the saccharine reek of floral incense, scented candles, and gift-shop potpourri. A mammoth brown trout mounted on a wooden plaque above the stone fireplace paid odorless tribute to varnish and taxidermy. There wasn’t a fly rod in sight.
    But the renovators had left the original phone booth, a wooden cabinet tucked under the staircase to the second floor. Superman lives. At the moment, though, the hinged door was folded open.
    “Just shove it down his throat and clamp his jaws shut,” a woman was saying, “and then blow on his nose until he sticks his tongue out, and give him a cookie and tell him what a good boy he is.” After she finished, a man in a Big Dog T-shirt interrogated some unfortunate veterinarian about a puddle of perfectly ordinary-sounding vomitus. “Bright yellow and slimy,” the man insisted. “You practically wanted to scramble it.” Then the mouth-kissing basenji woman reminded someone that under no circumstances was Arax ever to be allowed off leash. My turn finally arrived. Rowdy, of course, did not fit in the phone booth. He had to sit just outside. It didn’t matter. I’m not the kind of person who makes the dog say hello.
    In the half day since I’d left Cambridge, my cousin Leah had replaced the message on my answering machine with the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth followed by a cacophony in which Kimi’s woo-wooing vied with the loud barks of her friend Jeffs Border collie. The noise abruptly quit, and Leah’s recorded voice informed me that I had three minutes in which to record my innermost thoughts. As I was about to do so in rather violent language, Leah came on live.
    “Leah, is Kimi all right?” I demanded.
    “You don’t trust me!”
    “I leave you with my bitch in season, and—? Leah, let me tell you, greater trust hath no woman. She is all right?”
    Although I’m the one who initiated Leah into dogs, she is nonetheless the kind of person who...
    Although growling and roaring carry