Three Dogs in a Row Read online

  While I waited, the occasional car passed, heading in or out of River Bend, and every time I heard the crunch of gravel I thought Rick or the ambulance was arriving. The night was quiet, and a brisk wind rose up, moving the clouds across the sky. Rochester sat on his haunches and began howling, and even though I didn’t like him, the mournful tone pierced my heart.

  There was a coppery smell in the air that I thought might be Caroline’s blood, mixed with auto exhaust and a swampy tang rising from the canal, a few hundred feet away, beyond a narrow wooded area. I felt sick, but I managed not to throw up. Between keeping watch for Rick and trying to control Rochester, I had too much to do to indulge my distress. Darkness fell, but there was a three-quarter moon shining, and I could make out the outline of Orion and his fiery sword.

  Rick was there first, followed by Fire Rescue and a blue and white squad car with “Stewart’s Crossing Police” emblazoned on both sides. I stood off to the side, holding Rochester’s leash, as he strained and barked, wanting to know what was going on with his mom.

  Two guys spilled out of the ambulance and assessed Caroline’s situation. Because they didn’t load her up and speed away, I could tell that my initial thought was correct—she was dead.

  The two officers in the squad car set up a perimeter around the area and Rick called for crime scene investigators. For the next couple of hours there was a flurry of activity—lights being set up, people searching, evidence collected, photos taken.

  I couldn’t remember the last time there had been a homicide in Stewart’s Crossing. It’s the kind of small town that falls under the radar most of the time. We were named for a guy who ran a ferry service across the river, the eighteenth century equivalent of being called Yellow Cab, PA. Our most famous citizens are a minor soap opera actress and a professor at Princeton University who studies why chameleons change color. The VFW post runs a Memorial Day parade, where the kids from the high school drama club dress up as wounded veterans, teenagers wrapped in bloody bandages, hobbling on crutches, plastic guts spilling out of their T-shirts.

  When I was in high school, our chapter of the Future Farmers of America set up a demonstration farm in the parking lot of the high school. Jeff DiSalvo’s prize bull got loose when Jeff was attempting to demonstrate gelding, and it trampled the chicks, the ducklings and two lambs. That was about the extent of the violence in Stewart’s Crossing.

  Since we’d reconnected, Rick and I often met up for a beer at The Drunken Hessian, a place we’d always wanted to get in when we were under age. Now that we were old enough, some of the thrill had worn off, but that’s the way it is with most things. When he came over to talk to me, he reminded me of the only other homicide in town during our lives, a shooting that had taken place there while I was in California. “But we do a lot of accident investigation and reconstruction,” he reassured me. “We have a crime lab and access to a lot of sophisticated equipment through the county.”

  By then, the coroner’s office had taken Caroline’s body away, and Rochester had stopped straining and jumping. Instead, he sat on his haunches at my feet, alert to everything that was going on. Rick pulled out his notepad and had me walk him through everything I’d seen or heard, starting with the three shots. Then he nodded and said, “Good. Now I need you to tell me everything you know about Caroline.”

  “It’s not much,” I said. “I moved into the townhouse in November, but I didn’t meet her until just before Christmas. She works for a bank in center city, but I don’t know the name. I know she has a degree in English from SUNY, and an MBA, but I don’t remember from where.” My voice warbled a little, and I still felt panicky.

  “OK, take it easy, Steve. That’s her dog?”

  I nodded. “She was walking him.”

  “She do that same time every day?”

  “Pretty much.” I saw him write that down, and my brain ran off. So somebody had been watching her, waiting to kill her. Oh, my God.

  “Steve?” I heard Rick say, though I was busy imagining horrible scenarios for poor Caroline. “Stay with me, here.”

  I came back to the present. “Sorry. You were asking?”

  “She have any regular visitors? A boyfriend, maybe?”

  I shook my head. “She mentioned a guy from New York,” I said. “I saw his car in her driveway one weekend-- a black Porsche Cayenne.”

  He asked a lot more questions, and I found it sad that I knew so little about Caroline after living next to her for five months. “OK, why don’t you go home now?,” he said. “I know where to find you if I need anything else.”

  I was being dismissed, which was fine with me. “What about the dog?”

  “What about him?”

  “What do I do with him?”

  Rick shrugged. “Can you keep him until we find out next of kin, see what plans she made?”

  “I’m not a dog person. I don’t know how to take care of one.”

  “You feed it, you walk it, you pick up after it,” Rick said. “Smart guy like you, college professor, you can figure it out.”

  I looked at Rochester. He was a big, hairy, slobbering beast, but he’d just lost his mother, and I remembered the piercing sound of his howls. I could keep him for a day or two. “You’ll call me when you know what to do with him?”

  “Will do,” he said.

  When I tugged on Rochester’s leash and said, “Come on, boy, you’re coming to my house,” he strained to go where Caroline’s body had lain, but I reined him in. He looked up at me, in the glare of the police car’s headlights, and in his face I thought I could see an understanding. His mother was not coming back. He was stuck with me, at least for a while.

  As we walked home, I was lost in thought about Caroline, and Rochester kept stopping every few feet to sniff or lift his leg. As my house came in sight, and with it Caroline’s right next door, I remembered that Rochester had to have food, bowls, toys—who knew what else. All of it locked up inside Caroline’s townhouse.

  We’d swapped house keys after we met, though I’d never had cause to use her key before. Rochester planted himself in her driveway and would not be moved onward, no matter how I tried to convince or drag him. He agreed to walk up to the townhouse’s courtyard, and I let him in through the gate, then pulled it closed behind him.

  “I’ll be right back, boy, I promise,” I said. “I have to get the key.”

  He lay down and rested his head on his front paws, regarding me with a baleful glance. “I promise, Rochester.”

  I hurried to my own door, trying to remember where I’d stored Caroline’s key. I thought it was in my kitchen junk drawer, and I pawed through the take-out menus, loose screws, flashlight batteries and plastic doodads until I found it. I wasn’t quick enough, though; I heard Rochester start to howl next door as I rushed out.

  “I’m coming, boy!” I called. I jumped through the flowerbed between the houses and showed my head over the gate. He leaped up and launched himself at me as I walked in.

  “I didn’t leave you,” I said, reaching down to scratch behind his ears. “I had to get the key.” He rewarded me with a smear of drool across my leg.

  I opened the front door and turned on the light in the living room. I shivered as I realized I was walking into a dead woman’s house, but there was no getting around it. I needed Rochester’s stuff.

  The cushions of the black lacquer futon were covered in a fine layer of golden hair and the Courier-Times had been tossed atop the matching coffee table. A bookcase made of planks and black-painted blocks spanned one long wall, filled with books.

  I followed Rochester into the kitchen, where I started assembling his stuff. There was a lot of it. Food and water bowls, and a half-full twenty-pound bag of dry dog food. A shelf of vitamin bottles, dog shampoo, leashes and collars and flea products. Scattered around the floor were a variety of heavy plastic dog toys and rawhide bones in various states of chewing.

  Caroline’s model has a small bedroom off the living room, which she had fitte
d out as an office, and I found a big empty box there, beneath a sign that read, “I want to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.”

  I was loading the box when the front door burst open and I heard someone say, “Police! Don’t move!”

  I froze like a statue. Rochester, however, did not obey. He rushed toward the door, barking. Then I heard a voice say, “Hey, boy, how did you get in here?”

  “Rick?” I called. “It’s me, Steve.”

  Rick came around the corner from the entry, his gun drawn. One of the uniformed cops was behind him. When he saw it was indeed me, he holstered it. “What are you doing in here?”

  “You told me to keep the dog,” I said. I motioned toward the box I was packing. “I needed his stuff.”

  “How’d you get in?”

  “We traded keys a while ago.”

  “You’re disturbing a crime scene,” the uniform said.

  “I saw the crime scene, Officer,” I said. “It was out beyond the guard house, and there was lots of blood.”

  “The dog’s got to eat,” Rick said. “Let him get the stuff.”

  Rick sent the uniform back out to his car, and picked up the box for me, when it became evident that Rochester wasn’t budging unless I had his leash, and I couldn’t manage both dog and box.

  The street was dark and silent. After six months in prison, I loved the freedom of coming and going as I pleased, and I relished the quiet and serenity I felt under the canopy of stars. But the sense of peace I’d always found in River Bend was gone now that violent death had paid a call.

  Rick left the box just inside my gate and returned next door. I hurried the dog across to my house, opened my front door, and unhooked Rochester’s leash. He bounded ahead of me, his nose to the floor, sniffing every inch of my downstairs as I carried his stuff inside and piled it on my kitchen table.

  The last time I’d been around dogs much was when I was in college, back when it seemed everyone wore flannel shirts and blue jeans and had little dogs named Trotsky. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with such a huge creature, but I figured he had to be hungry.

  “You eat yet?” I asked, when Rochester came to sit on his haunches and stare at me. “Probably not. How much of this do you get?”

  I peered at the bag, which was printed in both English and French. I established that he was indeed a “chien de grande race,” or large breed dog, and followed the instructions. I poured half a cup of the dry chunks into one metal bowl and filled the other from the tap. I put both down on the floor by the sliding glass doors that led out to my patio, and he attacked the food with gusto.

  I stood and watched him for a minute. In the space of a few hours I’d seen my neighbor murdered and inherited custody of a seventy-pound dog with a voracious appetite. All in all, not a typical day. And I still had papers to grade. I didn’t have much appetite for dinner myself, so I opened my backpack and spread my work out on the kitchen table. With a big sigh, Rochester sprawled out at my feet, and while I alternated grading papers with worrying about Caroline and wondering what had happened to her, he slept.

  3 – Romantic Hero

  I gave up on grading around nine o’clock, and went upstairs to my bedroom. When he moved into the townhouse, my dad had sold all the furniture I grew up with and bought everything new, including a queen-sized pillow-top mattress on top of an elevated sleigh bed. It’s pretty high, but like him, I’m tall and have long legs so it never bothered me. Rochester hopped his front paws up to the edge of the mattress but couldn’t seem to leverage his whole body up. That was fine with me.

  “Your bed is downstairs,” I said. “This one’s mine.”

  He looked at me. As I started pulling off my shirt, he went down to all fours again, and padded out of the room. “Good boy.”

  Then I heard him running. He came hurtling back into the bedroom, and with a flying leap ended up on the bed, where he settled down and stared at me. “Did you sleep in your mother’s bed?”

  He did not respond, but he kept his eyes on me. “Oh, well, it’s only for a day or two.” I stripped down to my shorts and got into bed, pushing him over to one side. “You can stay, but you’ve got to share.” He seemed to agree.

  Lying there, thinking of Caroline, I remembered the only time I’d been in her townhouse before that night. I’d gotten the job at Eastern, and on my way home from teaching, I often stopped at my favorite spot in town, The Chocolate Ear café, for a raspberry mocha—a reward for reading and grading my students’ ungrammatical papers. The owner, a pastry chef from New York named Gail Dukowski, used the best quality beans, Guittard chocolate syrup, and home-made whipped cream, and despite my coffee snobbery I’d been seduced by the sweet drink. The fact that she was pretty and liked to flirt was a plus.

  A lot had changed in Stewart’s Crossing during the years I’d been away. The feed store had been replaced by a real estate office, the local bank names had been painted over with national ones, and doctors had taken over several of the old Victorians. America’s three obsessions: property, money and health, all sandwiched together in a downtown area that still has one traffic light, though a steady stream of Land Rovers, BMWs, and Volvos are always circling, competing for the few available parking spaces.

  One of the best changes was the opening of The Chocolate Ear. In the 1960s, the old stone building on Main Street was a hardware store where my father bought the odd nail or high-intensity flashlight, and then when it closed it sat derelict for a long time until Gail, who had grown up in neighboring Levittown, returned to Bucks County and opened the café. She painted the interior a pale yellow, which made the room seem sunny even in winter, and decorated the walls with vintage posters advertising chocolate products, many of them in French. The white wire tables and matching chairs seemed like they’d come direct from Paris, though they’d been padded with cushions more comfortable to American bottoms.

  The café always smelled of something delicious—lemon tarts, strawberry shortcake, or hot chocolate topped with cinnamon. The glass-fronted case was filled with exquisitely decorated pastries—petit fours covered in white fondant with tiny sugar flowers, individual key lime tarts scalloped with whipped cream, fudge brownies studded with walnuts and chocolate chips. The signature cookie was a chocolate version of the elephant ear, a curly pastry with a rich cocoa flavor. An industrial-quality Italian coffee machine churned out mochas, lattes and cappuccinos, filling the room with the sound of drips and foams.

  Usually I stayed at the café to savor my drink, but one Friday in late January there was a water leak in the kitchen, and the sound of the plumber banging away wasn’t conducive to grading. So I took my coffee back home, and as I stepped out of the Beemer, clutching the paper cup and a pile of student essays, Rochester came out of nowhere once again, this time trailing his leash behind him.

  I saw him coming too late, and the coffee and the papers went flying in opposite directions. Caroline was very apologetic, helping me collect all the paper, and then she offered to make me a coffee to replace the one I’d lost. “I have a great espresso machine and I never get to use it,” she said. “Please?”

  I didn’t want to face grading without my treat, so I agreed. “I’m so sorry he attacked you again,” she said, pushing the golden retriever in the door ahead of us. “I took today off to practice handling him. I’ve wanted a dog for ages, but it wasn’t until I moved out here that I had a place for one. He came from a rescue group—can you imagine someone wanting to give up a sweetheart like Rochester?”

  I understood why someone might want to get rid of a gargantuan beast like him—what I couldn’t see was getting him in the first place. “Is that where you went to college?” I asked, as we walked into the kitchen. “Rochester?”

  “No, he’s named after Rochester in Jane Eyre.”

  In that moment, I knew a lot about Caroline Kelly. Though full-figured, she had a pretty face, and she dressed well and knew how to use makeup and hairstyle to her advantage. The low-necked sweater she w
as wearing accentuated her cleavage, and I liked the way her jeans hung low on her hips. I figured she was educated, because she knew Jane Eyre, and successful, because townhouses in River Bend start around $300,000.

  True to her word, she had a very fancy espresso machine. “I’ve got Kona beans in the freezer,” she said, opening the door and pulling them out. “I’ll just slip some in the grinder.”

  I started to like Caroline even more. A woman who appreciated good coffee was a real find. My ex-wife, also known as “The Jewish American Princess of Darkness, Satan’s Favorite Squeeze,” only drank iced tea, heavily dosed with artificial sweeteners. She used to bitch about the smell of coffee in the house, saying it made her nauseous. I’d have to give up brewing my own each time she was pregnant.

  Caroline’s kitchen was full of the latest and most high-end appliances, everything shiny stainless or bright primary colors. I noted her top-of-the-line Kitchen Aid stand mixer, a hanging tray of copper-bottomed pans, and a wooden block of German knives.

  Caroline’s coffee offerings included a half dozen unopened bottles of syrup, from vanilla to orange to raspberry, and a couple of twist-top canisters of toppings. While she bustled around making the coffee, I looked around her house from the vantage point of her kitchen table. The kitchen was at the front of the house, with a big picture window that looked out on the street. The butcher block table matched the blond wood of the cabinets.

  Her decorating was minimalist with a touch of Southeast Asia—a single bamboo screen, teak and bleached linen, with the occasional statue of a grinning monkey or a reflective Buddha. When I asked, she told me that she’d lived in Korea for a couple of years as a teenager, and it had formed her sense of style.

  I could even see it in the way she dressed—very simply, with just a hint of Asian influence. She’d traded her usual sneakers for black Japanese sandals with white socks, and around her wrist she wore a thick gold bracelet she told me was made of Thai gold. “They call it a baht bracelet,” she said. “That’s the Thai money. A friend of my dad’s in the service had one, and he used to joke that if you were ever captured in the jungle you could break a link off to bribe the chief to let you go.”