Black Ribbon by Susan Conant Read Free Book Online Page A

poorly over telephone lines, I hung up reassured about Kimi’s vigor, yet in some peculiar way, newly angry about the unsigned sympathy card.
    The welcome-to-camp meeting was due to begin in fifteen minutes, and the area between the lodge and the lake, half grass and half pine needles, was already crowded with people and dogs. As Rowdy and I made our way down the stairs to join the group, Maxine McGuire appeared around the side of the building, and I hailed her. Ambling peacefully at her side was the young mastiff I’d noticed earlier, a fawn-colored male the size of a three-car garage and still growing. Max’s yellow-gray curls had turned to corkscrews, and her pale face was flushed.
    “Maxine, could I have a word with you?” I asked. “Do you have a second?”
    “One.” She glanced at her watch. “No, two.” She raised the hem of her camp T-shirt, pulled out a ragged hand towel caught in the waistband of her shorts, and mopped off the dog’s mouth. “If you can’t stand drool, don’t get a mastiff. Good boy, Cash.” She moored the towel back in place. With the giant puppy at her side, Max seemed to have shed some of her earlier nervousness. “What can I do for you?”
    “Beautiful dog.Cash?”
    “Stud fee,” Max explained. “I didn’t name him; the breeder did. The deal was that if she kept the pick puppy, she owed the stud fee in cash, and her husband kept telling her, ‘Never mind the dog! Keep the cash!’ ” Maxine let the point sink in. “But she ended up selling him to me. I just got him a month ago. He’s only a year. Forty or fifty pounds to go.”
    Cash stood patiently at Max’s side. His ears and tail were motionless, his eyes gentle. By comparison with Cash, Rowdy looked the size of a Pomeranian. He must have thought so,. too. The hair on his back began to rise. “Puppy,” I told him-Rowdy knew the word, but, for obvious reasons, didn’t believe me. Cash stared placidly into space.
    “Don’t worry about it,” Maxine said cheerfully. “Cash doesn’t mind.”
    Confronted with the overwhelming evidence of Cash’s total lack of interest—Cash completely ignored him—Rowdy! slowly began to lower his hackles. Rowdy is more hierarchical; than he is aggressive; if Cash didn’t want to play King of the Mountain, neither did Rowdy. Even so, especially because of; the subject I wanted to raise with Max, I felt embarrassed. I cleared my throat. “I wondered if there might be some rule or j whatever about dogs on long flex leads. People do it at shows,  and it can be a problem there—they let the dog out the full twenty-six feet. A while ago, a dog shot out of nowhere and went for Rowdy. Nothing happened. But it made me a little uncomfortable. And I wondered.”
    Max scowled. “Whose dog?”
    “It doesn’t matter. It’s the general—”
    “Eva Spitteler. You ever run into her before?”
    “No. Just today.”
    Maxine drew close. Her breath smelled like candy. “Did Eva bite your head off?”
    I live with two Alaskan malamutes, and I'm still here, I wanted to say. I contented myself with a simple no.
    “There’s a little problem there,” Max confided.
    “If that big Lab of hers takes on the wrong dog, the problem won’t be so little.” My eyes darted to the peaceful mastiff. “Even Cash would defend himself.”
    Max dismissed the possibility. “A Lab’d just bounce right off him. If Eva bothers you, just ignore her. The truth is, I didn’t find out about her until she’d already signed up, and by the time I got warned about what a pill she was, it was too late. I put her by herself in one of the cabin units, and all she Paid for was a shared double in the bunkhouse, so that ought to put her in a good mood, and no one’s stuck rooming with her. That’s the best I can do. Sorry, but there’s a rotten apple in every barrel.”
    Without having really addressed the question of keeping dogs under control, Max hastily excused herself to get the meeting started. Rowdy and I