All Shots (4 page)

Unbeknownst to me, the other Holly Winter, she who
once had a bladder infection, far from having been shot to death while fish-sitting for Dr. Ho, still lives—and still lives where I thought she did, off Kirkland Street. The address had made me imagine her in grand surroundings. Julia Child’s kitchen, now in the Smithsonian, was dismantled and removed from a house in that neighborhood. The late John Kenneth Galbraith, author of
The Affluent Society
, lived there. How convenient for him! To study personal wealth in American society, he merely had to stroll around the block.

But Holly Winter, this other Holly Winter, does not occupy one of the grand old places. Elsewhere she might be said to rent a garage apartment, but since her abode is a short walk from the academic center of the American universe, which is to say, anywhere but
elsewhere
, she lives on the second floor of a renovated carriage house. Or does she? After a summer in England, she refers to the second story of the not-a-garage as the first floor and takes care never to say
apartment
when
flat
can be put to use.

Her taste is minimalist: simple blinds, no curtains, sleek black couch and chairs, no throw pillows, black filing cabinets, no piles of paper, hardwood floors, no rugs, hundreds of books neatly aligned on bookshelves, no paintings, no prints, no pieces of sculpture, no photographs, certainly no snapshots, and nothing even remotely like geegaws or tchotchkes. She now sits at her teak desk, its surface clear except for her notebook computer, the screen of which displays a document she is drafting for the CAMP, the Cambridge Alliance for Media-free Preschools, an organization that she has recently begun to support by serving on the group’s advisory board. To her annoyance, instead of merely being asked to advise, she has been asked to contribute by analyzing data from a study intended to evaluate the impact of a media-free policy on children in participating preschools and day-care centers. As is invariably the case with projects inspired and implemented by idealistic reformer-educators, the design of the so-called study is a mess, principally because the statistician, Holly Winter, this Holly Winter, was called in only after the data had been collected. Even so, she approves of CAMP’s goals. Surely the world is improved by stripping away this ghastly media trash and giving the imagination free rein! Also, she approves of the membership of the CAMP Advisory Board, including as it does Zach Ho, a Harvard classmate of hers, a man with just the sort of keen intelligence that attracts her most.

The Cambridge Dog Training Club meets at the Cambridge
Armory, which is on Concord Avenue near the Fresh Pond rotary. The club serves a wide area, but a fair number of Cantabrigians attend classes, so I decided to ask around to see whether anyone knew Mellie. Instead of training one of my own dogs, I worked at the desk as people checked in. Then I helped to teach the puppy kindergarten and the beginners’ class. Since this was the first Thursday after Labor Day, it was the first night of training after the summer break. The desk was busy because of all the new people signing up and paying, so I felt useful. I put a little notice about Strike on the desk, but no one responded to it. The classes weren’t as much fun as you might imagine because the club asks handlers to leave the puppies and the beginner dogs at home for the first meeting. The first day of school can be as exciting and stressful for dogs as it is for children, but dogs, of course, respond by barking, and if they’re present, it can be almost impossible to communicate basic information to the handlers. Still, I had a good time and even managed to find a couple of people who knew Mellie. Both of them said that she was a sweet person who genuinely loved animals and who did some informal pet-sitting, dog walking, and boarding. One of the people knew Mellie from St. Peter’s Parish, which is a Roman Catholic church on Concord Avenue, a few blocks from my house as you head toward Harvard Square. It seemed to me that there had to be a church closer to Mellie’s house than St. Peter’s, but when I said just that, I learned that although Mellie sometimes attended Mass elsewhere, she remained a regular at St. Peter’s, in part because she was used to it, and in part because one of the priests there, Father McArdle, had promised her parents that he’d look out for her and had kept his promise. Mellie, I remembered, had mentioned the name.

I got home to find a message from Steve on the machine. “I know you’re at dog training,” he said in that deep, calm voice I adore, “but my cell’s not working much here, and I managed to get through, so I thought I’d tell you that we’re okay. We’re fine. We’re great. I love you.” My effort to return the call was useless, but I did leave a message. I said nothing about the murder. If Steve knew that a woman named Holly Winter had been shot to death in Cambridge, he’d inevitably worry. He worked tremendously hard and deserved this vacation. I’d tell him everything when he got home.

I could not, of course, protect myself from knowledge of the murder, but the remembered sound of Steve’s voice soothed me to sleep, as did the thought that Leah would return in an hour or two and that I wouldn’t be alone in the house. Not that I was. All three dogs were in the bedroom with me, Sammy in his crate, Kimi the bed hog jammed next to me, and my ever-hopeful Rowdy curled up on the floor beneath the silent air conditioner. In the morning, I awakened with the thought that Holly Winter wasn’t all that unusual a name and that people with really popular names must get used to having their namesakes murdered all the time. If I were Mary Kelly or Lisa Johnson, it would still have been eerie to come upon the body of a woman with the same name, much weirder than merely reading about her death in the newspaper, but the principle was identical, and meaningless coincidences did occur, that is, coincidences that were just that and not dog-meaningful reminders to hunt for hidden patterns and obscure interconnections. Furthermore, I had a busy day and, indeed, a busy weekend ahead, with no time to reread Conrad’s
The Secret Sharer
or otherwise to dwell on the creepy matter of doppelgangers.

By the time Leah got up, I had fed the dogs, done my morning chores, taken a shower, and called Mellie. Strike had not returned. Consequently, I’d posted messages about her to all of my malamute e-mail lists and the lists for dog writers, with the request that my posts be forwarded to other lists. I’d also prepared and printed copies of a lost-dog flyer that gave my phone number and promised a reward. Leah got up at nine and arrived in the kitchen with her curly red-gold hair damp from the shower and piled on top of her head in a sort of bohemian beehive. She looked perfectly lovely and entirely innocent of such crimes as giving Harley-riding strangers the run of my house. I toasted an English muffin for her and gave her a cup of coffee. Then I told her about the previous day.

“You were looking for a lost dog and you found a dead body?”

“Bodies are dead bodies,” I said.

“And her name was Holly Winter? That’s…after the guy on the Harley was looking for her?”

“I told Kevin about that. But she’d been dead for…I don’t know. Days, I think. The biker couldn’t have left here and then murdered her. And it really has nothing to do with me. I’ll know more tonight. Kevin and I are having dinner. Until then, I’m just going to stay busy. I’m taking Rowdy and Sammy to the LaundroMutt. They’re both entered tomorrow. After the show, Buck and Gabrielle are coming back here. They’re staying here Saturday night.”

“Lucky you.”

“Leah, really! I love having Gabrielle here, and she’s pretty good at keeping a lid on my father. And at least Steve is away, so I don’t have to try to keep Buck from grating on his nerves.”

“Do you want me to stay? I was going to move out tomorrow, but I could stay another few days.”

I’d have loved it. “No, of course not. But thank you. All your friends are coming back. You’ll want to see them.”

“If you change your mind…”

“I’ll let you know.”

“But I’m going to help you groom.”

“You don’t have to.”

“The LaundroMutt is a cool place. I want to.”

“I’d love it,” I said.

An hour later, we were at the LaundroMutt, which is, as Leah had said, a cool place, a self-service dog wash on the Fresh Pond rotary. Leah had Sammy in one of the big stainless-steel tubs, and I had Rowdy in the one next to it. Sammy, I should note, is a funny malamute. For one thing, he loves to fetch balls. He’ll keep retrieving as long as I keep throwing. Kimi regards this behavior as a sign of mental aberration. As Sammy flies after a ball and returns it to me, she watches him with an expression of perplexed disdain. For another thing, Sammy likes water. Kimi doesn’t mind it and will even go swimming, but Rowdy hates water. What he detests is the sensation of water on his skin, especially on his belly. I’d had to lure him into the stainless-steel tub with a fistful of roast beef, and even using the treat, I’d had to shove him up the folding ramp to get him in. Now that he was hitched to the tub and soaking wet, he was behaving himself in the sense that he wasn’t fighting to escape, but he was bellowing complaints that must have been audible in Harvard Square. When the dogs were thoroughly rinsed, we used the big professional dryers to blow them dry. My latest grooming discovery, the Chris Christensen 27mm T-brush, did an admirable job of grabbing hair that would otherwise have flown all over the place, and the T-handle minimized wrist strain. Even so, by the time we finished, most of the air in the LaundroMutt had been displaced by malamute undercoat, which probably lined our lungs. Leah is a decent groomer, but I’m better with nail clippers and scissors than she is, so I cut the dogs’ nails and then neatened their feet with a little trimming. Father and son looked spectacular, thus prompting me to check the sky for the black clouds that laborious show grooming generates. I swear that the harder I work on a dog’s coat and the better he looks, the more likely it is that rain will pelt down and, worse, that in spite of extreme vigilance, the dog will somehow find a gigantic mud puddle and transfer its contents to his coat. The sky had not yet darkened. Not
yet
.

I posted one of the flyers at the LaundroMutt. When we got home, Leah left on her bike—her bicycle, of course, not a Harley or the like—with some flyers to post in the Square, and I went to Loaves and Fishes for food shopping, made a beef stew to serve to Buck and Gabrielle the next evening, checked the guest room, and was just sitting down to squeeze in some work time when the phone rang.

“Francie here.”

I was elated. “Has Strike turned up?”

“Sorry. No. No news at your end?”

“Nothing. I’ve posted to a lot of lists. That’s the most effective thing to do. I’ve also started putting up flyers. The other thing would be to contact the owner and find out whether Strike headed for home, but when I asked about the owner, Mellie clammed up.”

“I have no idea why. Mellie does do that, though.”

“Maybe you could talk to her. She knows you, and she’s just met me. Among other things, the owner has a right to know what’s happened.”

“It’s possible that Mellie made some kind of promise. She takes promises seriously. And concretely. Her universe is very black and white.”

“But why would she…? Well, maybe. I guess it could be a divorce situation, a sort of custody battle, and one of the partners could’ve stashed the dog with Mellie. Would you see if you can find out? See if you can get Mellie to say anything.”

“I’ll try, but I probably won’t get anywhere, especially with Mellie so anxious. After what happened to Zach’s house sitter.”

“Is that Dr. Ho?”

“Lovely man. One of Mellie’s mainstays. He’s the one who gave her the DVD player and set it up for her. He somehow managed to make it so simple that she can use it. I wish someone would do that for me! And he tracked down all those DVDs about dogs.”

“I wondered,” I said. “She actually does know a lot about dogs. I wondered where she’d picked up the vocabulary.”

“Well, that’s where. She watches those things all the time. Some Scandinavian earth mother. I don’t know.”

“Turid Rugaas,” I said. “Does Dr. Ho have a dog?”

“Fish. Except that the poor things are probably all dead now. That’s why he had this house sitter, really. He’d’ve been better off hiring Mellie, but he knew she’d have trouble. Something about different tanks on different days, and if you overfeed them, they die. And the truth is, I think he was reluctant to give her the responsibility. Not that Mellie would’ve particularly wanted to be responsible, either, not for that long. Three weeks. And he’s in Africa. It isn’t as if he could come running home if there were problems.”

“So, Holly Winter, the other one, was…”

“What?”

“That woman and I have the same name. It’s very—”

“She’s unidentified,” Francie said.

“Are you sure? What about her car?”

“What car?”

“A little blue car. In the driveway. The parking space next to the house.”

“That isn’t hers. It’s Zach’s.” Francie cleared her throat. “We think, uh, the neighbors think…” She paused. “Zach has a little weakness.”

“For cars? That one didn’t look—”

“No, not cars. He has an eye for the ladies, so to speak.”

“He got one of his girlfriends to house-sit? I don’t see that that’s—”

“He hadn’t necessarily known her for very long.” Hesitantly, she added, “Meaning for more than a few hours. He, uh…”

“He picks up women,” I said. “At bars? Clubs?”

Francie laughed. “Not at all! We think his favorite place is Loaves and Fishes. You know those tables at the front? He buys sushi and then…”

“He picks up women at a health food supermarket? That’s—”

“Zach is very attractive. Charming. Very appealing. Why he…well, I have no idea. But he does.”

“Maybe he likes his women well nourished,” I said.

After a moment’s silence, Francie said, “I think I consider that a sexist remark.”

“Not at all. The preference must extend both ways. The women are presumably picking him up, too. For all we know, they lurk at the sushi counter and trail after him. Or it’s a process of perfect equality. The raw fish acts as an aphrodisiac on both sexes alike, and whatever happens after that is strictly between consenting adults.” I paused. “Unless, of course, one of them ends up dead.”