Blame It on the Dog Page 12

  The subdued roar of the Jefferson’s’ Cadillac interrupted his reverie. They parked in the free space at the foot of the steps.

  Fighting irritation at having his memories disturbed, General Perez pasted on his politician’s smile and said, “Good morning Andrew, Emma. You’re out bright and early today.”

  “We’ve had a horrible night, General, just horrible”, said Emma.

  The General knew better than to ask Emma to explain so he peered over his glasses at her husband and said, “Andrew?”

  “It hasn’t been all that bad, General. Actually, it turned out quite well, once we got the bleeding stopped.”

  “Bleeding? Which of you was bleeding?”

  Emma’s voice was almost, but not quite, a shriek. “Not us! It was that Mr. Chance. He bled all over my beautiful backseat. Can you get blood out of leather? It’s not the same as damask, you know. My little brother bled all over Mother’s…”

  “Andrew?” he interrupted her.

  “Now, Emma, Mr. Chance couldn’t help it. It was my fault. I just didn’t get the bandage tight enough. And there wasn’t enough of it. It was…”

  The General waved the statement away, saying, “Tell me what happened. And try to stay focused. Take it one step at a time.” He used his quiet command voice, the one he saved for highly emotional situations. He had learned that a calm voice, regardless of his true emotions, helped the other person – or persons – calm themselves so he could get the facts he needed to make decisions, either tactical or strategic. It also carried a hint of steel. He had worked a long time on that and it had the desired effect. It even seemed to quiet Emma. “Tell me why Mr. Chance was bleeding.”

  “He said he was standing by the lake studying the place you told him they found Nellie Schmidt. But that didn’t make any since to me. Nellie was found closer by the dam. Why did you…”

  “Andrew.” He waved his hand again, like a Jedi knight, “That is not important. What happened to Mr. Chance?”

  “Oh, right. Well, he said the cliff just fell on him. But his dog barked and he looked up and saw it falling.”

  “And? What happened next?”

  “Uh, he said he jumped away but something hit his leg and he fell in the water. Said he almost drowned. And then he swam to the side of the lake and pulled himself out. That’s when Emma and I found him.”

  “It was his own fault, his own fault. Why was he swimming in the middle of November like that? That’s what happened to my great-aunt Heloise, I remember it like it was yesterday: she went swimming in January and she caught pneumonia and…”

  “Emma, please. The General doesn’t want to hear about your great-aunt Heloise.”

  “Why not! She died! She was so pig-headed! People just do what they want and don’t care about anyone else. Outrageous, that’s…”

  “You were saying you found him, Andrew.” He shot Mrs. Jefferson a lightning bolt glare that silenced her.

  “It was his dog, the little white one? He was in the middle of the road, barking and running in circles. We almost ran over the little fella. He kept carrying on until we got out of the car and followed him. That’s when we found Mr. Chance. He was bleeding a lot from a big gash in his leg. I made a bandage out of his shirt…”

  “And my scarf, my beautiful, beautiful scarf: it’s ruined! You can’t get blood out once it’s…”

  “And Emma’s scarf. Then we loaded him up and took him to the hospital. We were going to come home but Emma decided she wanted to stay to see that he was all right. She really does care about people, Sean, even though you can’t always see it. Well, we waited around until way after midnight and must have gone to sleep. By the time we woke up it was today, so I took Emma to Margie’s for an early breakfast. She gets cranky when she hasn’t eaten and…”

  “He’s a very fortunate young man,” said the General, his blue eyes lost in the distance. Andrew could feel the great man’s concern for Gabe radiating from him like warmth from a blazing fire. “And you say the dog was to blame.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. He’s a fine dog, Sean. Mr. Chance is fortunate to have a dog like that. Oh, no, I wouldn’t blame it on the dog.”

  “Yes. I believe he is. And a very fortunate young man, Andrew, to have you – and Emma – there to help him. I believe he’s lucky to be alive.”

  “Well, I wasn’t! I wasn’t lucky! I lost my very best scarf and had my car destroyed… I wasn’t lucky. I’m never lucky. Why do bad things happen to such good people? We’re good people, aren’t we? Aren’t we? Andrew?”

  “Mrs. Jefferson, you’ve had such a difficult time. Wouldn’t you feel better at home, in your own house? Hummmh?

  “Well, yes, yes I would. That’s very thoughtful of you, General Perez. Andrew, General Perez is right. Take me home. Take me home right now. I don’t want to be here anymore. He’s such a nice man. I wish you were as nice as he is. If you were as nice…” she whined.

  In deep thought, General Perez watched Andrew shepherd his wife to the car and drive up Serenity Place to their home. He stood, watching, for a long time, and never noticed whether Emma stopped talking or not.

  CHAPTER 20

  JANE STEERED THE Camry the final 50 yards down the entrance road to Mountainview Villa and rolled to a stop. She gasped at the transition. “This place is gorgeous! It reminds me of Aspen.”

  “Aspen?”

  “Yes, Aspen. Don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, sure. Without the Aspens. And the snow. And all the beautiful people. Big Bear Lake, maybe. Without the lake. Or the bears.”

  Arms propped on the steering wheel she said, “You are not nearly as funny as you think you are.”

  “Really? How about half? Am I half as funny?”

  “I’ll give you half.” Gazing around at their surroundings, she added, “It would look more like Aspen if there were Aspens and snow. But it is still beautiful.”

  “No argument from me, though the view from the valley has lost some of its allure. Being buried alive always has that affect on me.”

  “Well, take me down there so I can see for myself. I’ll bet it’s not nearly as bad as you say it is.”

  At the bottom of the hill, she stopped the Camry just before the dam and said, “Wow, this is gorgeous, too. I can see why people want to live here. I’d love to live here!” She pulled through the water flowing across the dam and parked in the grass on the left shoulder.

  “Is this the best place to stop?” she said.

  “It’ll do. Let’s get out and take a look around.” Gabe opened his door and yelled.

  Four white feet vanished beneath the open door. The dog had used Gabe’s injured leg as a springboard and now he was gone, headed for who knows where. His master, on the other hand, was doubled over, eyes and jaws clenched tight.

  “I’m gonna kill ’im! I swear I’m gonna… those… Aaargh!”

  “Did that hurt?” Her left hand did a poor job of hiding a badly stifled giggle. “Are you all right?”

  Unbidden, a tear rolled down each of Gabe’s cheeks. One had the decency to stop midway while the other dribbled languidly from his chin, to splatter on the right leg of his last new pair of pants. Beside it was a seep of blood noticed by neither of them.

  “I picked a lousy day to leave my gun at home. I thought Jimenez said I wouldn’t have any pain until tomorrow?”

  “He probably didn’t know about Tigger. And it’s probably best you did leave your gun at home: you wouldn’t want to do anything you’ll regret later.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “He’s only a dog, Gabe. He wasn’t trying to hurt you, he just wanted out of the car.” Her finger was aimed at the dog whose right leg was raised in the time-honored position of dogs throughout history. “See? He had to go.”

  “That is my fondest dream: that he would go. Anywhere. Swimming, maybe, with a backpack full of rocks. I’ll even pack his bags.”

  In front of him, the dog was shifting his weight from foot to foot, tail a-
quiver. He had a gnarled stick in his mouth which he spat to the ground in front of Gabe and Jane.

  Gabe rolled his eyes. “Are you kidding me? He actually thinks he’s going to con me into throwing that piece of…”

  “I’ll throw it for you, Tigger,” she said as she squatted and reached for the stick.

  Tigger danced back a couple of steps and flipped his body around in mid-air. Jane gave a gleeful giggle and heaved the stick over his head. Tigger’s eyes never left it as he raced away.

  “He is so cute!”

  “Oh, puh-leeze.” He strolled to the lake and studied the bank on the off chance that there was still evidence of Nellie Schmidt's accident. Jane trotted up beside him and said, “So, how’s the leg?”

  “Not bad. It only hurts when I…” His foot caught an exposed cypress root and he stumbled. “Ow! Next time you see that mail-order doctor, tell him he can have his claw hammer back.”

  “What claw hammer?”

  “The one he left in my leg.”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you have a tendency toward melodrama?”

  “Sarcasm, yes. Melodrama? You’re the first.” He grinned at her.

  She grimaced, “Lucky me. Are you sure you want to do this much walking? You’ll feel a lot better in a few days.”

  “I need to convince myself that Nellie Schmidt’s death was an accident. And I want to make sure no one tried to kill me – so I can quit being so melodramatic. If I wait… who knows? We could have a flash flood and wash all the evidence to the coast.”

  “Unlikely. Where are you taking me?”

  “Upstream on the other side of these trees. That’s where Sean said she drowned.”

  The grass was still green and soft to walk on but, except for the strip beside the lake, it was showing signs of wilt from the lack of rain. A few more days without precipitation and it would start to turn brown.

  She looked at the blue sky. “I wonder if we’ll get some rain when the front gets here.”

  “Not supposed to. They said it’s a dry front so we’ll just get cold, not wet. We’re almost there,” he said, pointing at a pile of new, white sheets of limestone clogging the stream.

  Without thinking she lifted her hand to her mouth. “Oh, Gabe! You could have been killed! You’re lucky you only had a laceration.”

  “The fish don’t seem to mind, see?”

  The water was crystal clear and new stone was visible scattered along the bottom. Small perch swam beneath a school of minnows; a catfish fed along the riverbed; a black bass flashed away at their approach.

  “How deep is it?”

  “Not sure. The General says five, six feet, maybe deeper in places. The bottom drops fast here.”

  “Where were you?”

  “On the other side. There,” he pointed.

  “Oh.”

  “Stay here. I’m going over for a closer look.”

  “No way – I want to see what you see.”

  Gabe squinted at the cliff. “It oughtta be safe. Can you swim?”

  “Duh, yes. I can jump, too.”

  “Great. Just in case there’s an encore.”

  “Oh? Do you think the mountain is that unstable?”

  “Maybe. The good news is if a human being did the deed he may not know I’m still alive.”

  “Maybe nobody did anything. Maybe it just happened, Gabe.”

  “It’s possible. Come on.”

  Gabe led the way upstream beyond the rockfall to the crossing. The new rocks had backed the water up and smaller rocks had fallen in the stream bed, mixing with their older, smoother counterparts. He chose his path across both the new and the old stones carefully, avoiding those which were obviously loose and unseated. It was tricky business, especially wearing street shoes the way he was, but they both managed to cross without getting wet. The path along the water’s edge on the other side, such as it had been, was no longer; it was buried beneath a rumble of rocks and rubble. He scanned the cliff face from the fall to the rim and then back. Shaking his head, he scratched the back of it and said, “I was standing right there, right where a couple of tons of debris are piled.”

  Jane nodded. “The timing is certainly suspicious.”

  “Ya think?”

  Her pink tongue barely protruded past her lips. Gabe thought they were nice lips. The tongue wasn’t bad, either.

  “How did you escape?”

  “I tried running on the water but I’m not very good at it. Tricky it is. So I dove for all I was worth and swam like the Devil was on my tail.”

  “What made you do that?”

  “Dogface was barking his lungs out. He doesn’t usually bark like that, like his life depended on it, you know? I took a gander to see if his tail was on fire or something and he was staring up at the rim. Right up there.” He pointed. “He was bouncing up and down and barking. Something told me to run and finally my feet got the message and, well…” He shrugged and turned to face the dog. He stared at the animal for a long, long moment before he spoke again. “I was watching all this coming loose;” he swept his hand out over the fallen rocks, “it was like I wasn’t in my body but watching from somewhere else. That’s the second time I’ve had that out of body experience. This time it was like somebody turned off the sound. The whole movie was playing in silent, slow motion. When Tigger broke and ran, so did I.”

  On the far side of the lake the dog was spread out on the cool grass, eyes squinted against the sun, panting, seemingly oblivious to the world around him.

  “He did it again.” Gabe’s voice was filled with quiet wonder.

  “What? What did he do again? Gabe?”

  He didn’t answer. He just continued to look at the dog.

  “Yoo hoo? Earth to Gabe.” She waved her hand in front of his eyes.

  Trance broken, he looked at her. “He pulled the Lassie trick again. Or at least it seems that way.”

  “Lassie? The collie?”

  “Yeah. You know how when the kid was about to fall in a hole or step on a rattlesnake or Martians were hiding around the corner? He never knew what was waiting to do him in but the dog did. The dog always tried to warn him. Most of the time the kid didn’t get it, stupid kid.”

  She searched back in her mind through the archives of television shows long dead. “Yeah, I seem to remember that.”

  “Jane?”

  “Gabe?”

  “Do you think maybe I’m the stupid kid and the dog is Lassie?”

  She extended the back of her hand and touched it to his head. “Gabe, you’re not the kid. And Tigger isn’t Lassie. He’s just a dog and you’re a really nice man who had a brush with death and, I’m glad to say, doesn’t have a fever. That means no infection. Tigger isn’t super dog; he’s just a bright, energetic, inquisitive dog. What happened yesterday was a coincidence that’s all.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All righty, then. Let’s go topside and check out your coincidence theory. If you’re right, and I hope you are, that means there’s no boogey man out to get me.

  CHAPTER 21

  “TELL ME THE name of your ‘boogey man’ again?” Jane was behind the wheel, guiding the Camry’s climb up the steep hill.

  “If there is a boogey man, his name is Chip. Drake.”

  “Chip Drake.” She rolled the name around on her tongue. “Chip Drake. You called him a ‘sociopath’ before. Why?”

  “He had that I’d-just-as-soon-kick-your-ass-as-not look in his eyes.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No. Nobody up here likes him, I mean, nobody. When nobody likes a person there’s usually something wrong with the person. There is definitely something wrong with Chip. I only spent a minute and a half with him and I know it. These people live with the guy.”

  Jane parked as far down Serenity Lane as she could and they walked the rest of the way. At first the vegetation was sparse, clumps of weeds and buffalo grass, an occasional shrub, so the going was easy. A thicket of wild persimm
ons and briars finally blocked their way. It grew all the way to the edge of the small canyon.

  “In August there’ll be a thousand little black persimmons all over this clump of brush. Good eats.” He rubbed his tummy.

  “Good? The only persimmon I ever ate was big, orange, and tasted like cardboard. Bitter cardboard,” said Jane.

  “Obviously not a Texas wild persimmon. Sweet, juicy. But don’t get the juice on your clothes because the stain doesn’t wash out. Makes your teeth brown, too, like chawin’ terbacky, by cracky.”

  “Oh, wow, let’s mark our calendars. I just love brown teeth. And chewing tobacco. Mmmm.” She smiled and he laughed. It was a nice change from the grimness of the bottoms and the drive up the hill.

  “There’s just something about a woman with brown teeth.” Gabe surveyed the thicket from end to end and pronounced, “Impenetrable. Can’t go through it, gotta go around it. This way, city girl.”

  “Well, yes I am. Does that make you a country bumpkin?”

  “No doubt.”

  They followed the thicket until Gabe found a freshly broken trail that looked like it went through to the other side. He stopped and studied the branches and the ground. His face lost all traces of humor.

  ”Here. This is where they went through.”

  “How do you know?”

  “See these broken branches? They’re still green which means they were broken just recently.”

  “Couldn’t some animal have done that?”

  As if on cue, Tigger darted into the brush and was swallowed whole.

  “Animals don’t normally break their way through; they finesse there way through, like he did. They don’t drag heavy metal through the dirt, either.” He pointed to a furrow that appeared and disappeared over the hard ground like a dashed line on a map. “That was made with a heavy metal something. A digging bar, maybe? You might want to go back to the car, save your clothes.”