Read Online Paws before dying by Susan Conant - Free Book Online

sorry.”
     

Chapter 7

     
    WITH the rigid formality of adolescence, Leah dressed herself in only one layer of nonathletic black and wound the indomitable radiance of her hair into a subdued knot for our visit to Jack Engleman. In lieu of attending the Sunday morning funeral (do I need to make excuses? I could not go), I’d had a fancy basket of fruit delivered to the house. It was a poor substitute, I know, but Jack wanted the funeral small and the burial private, Bess had told me, and she’d suggested that we visit sometime in the late afternoon.
    “Are you nervous about it?” I asked Leah as she artfully mounded the chicken salad on a platter of lettuce.
    “No. Why would I be nervous?”
    “I don’t know. I thought maybe you’d be afraid everybody would be crying. Or you wouldn’t know what to expect.”
    “I don’t exactly know what to expect, but it won’t be anything I can’t handle,” said Leah, a human malamute, after all.
    (“Projection,” my friend and tenant Rita commented later. “You project a lot onto that kid. Just who was anxious?” Obviously, Rita is a therapist, and not the physical kind.)
    On my way out to the car, I saw Kevin Dennehy attacking the scrubby row of barberry between his mother’s yard and mine with a pair of rusty hedge trimmers. I once tried to talk Kevin into replacing the ugly, prickly stuff with something classy like hemlock or juniper, and I even offered to split the cost. He rejected the proposal, and although he never said so outright, I had the impression that I’d made a serious gaffe, like offering to pay for half of a new Audi to avoid the humiliation °f having his Chevy visible from my kitchen window.
    When he saw us, he quit stabbing the barberry and lumbered over, holding the pruners with one hand and wiping the sweat off his face with the other.
    He rumbled in my ear in what was, I think, supposed to be a whisper: “Can I have a word with you?” When Kevin lowers his voice, he adjusts the pitch, not the volume. When I sent Leah back inside to put out extra water for the dogs and make sure the answering machine was on, he said, “The wake?”
    We’d seen him on our way back from shopping, and I’d told him about Rose.
    “Sort of. Visiting the house.”
    “Pacemaker,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Gadget implanted in her chest.”
    “I know what a pacemaker is. Rose had one? So that’s why... What’s this secrecy business? A pacemaker isn’t a treatment for VD or something.”
    “Eliot Park,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “You still going to dog school there?”
    “I know what you’re worried about. The graffiti, right? You think there’s some sinister connection with dog training at the park, between dog training and the graffiti and what happened to Rose. Well, the only connection is that Rose lived near the park and trained her dog there, so she’s the one who arranged to have the club use it. If we’d never been there, she’d have been training in the tennis courts. The club had nothing to do with anything. But obviously her death was less of a freak accident than we thought. I mean, a pacemaker? With water and electricity?”
    He shrugged.
    “Hey, how did you know that Rose had a pacemaker?”
    But Leah came down the back stairs, and Kevin wagged his big head back and forth. He apparently didn’t want to discuss an autopsy in front of her. He managed to lower the volume of his voice for the duration of two syllables: “Inquest.”
     
    The woman who opened Jack Engleman’s front door had coarse salt-and-pepper hair swept away from the thick, moist skin of her face, and short, stubby fingers with blunt nails. She introduced herself as Charlotte Zager, told us she was Jack’s sister, and then grabbed my hand and twisted it as ferociously as if it were a decayed molar with stubborn roots that was resisting extraction. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she was a dentist.
    The smallest of the three or four baskets of fruit on the tables in