Read Online The Dog Collar Murders by Barbara Wilson - Free Book Online

Radical Women called Miko decadent and then went on to say that Gracie hadn’t gone nearly far enough with her analysis of the capitalist and imperialist origins of patriarchy. Gracie managed to respond to her with civility and dispatch, but she didn’t stand a chance against a nasal young woman who wanted to talk about Julia Kristeva’s theories of female language. It was only when some of the audience began to protest that the speaker stopped droning on.
    The protests started at the back of the audience and moved forward like the tide. It was only when the murmuring reached our row that I realized it wasn’t about Julia Kristeva at all.
    “Something happened to Loie Marsh….” The tide broke over us and flowed on.
    “What?”
    “Loie—someone found her.”
    “Who?”
    “Loie. Marsh. She was…”
    “Dog collar.”
    “What?”
    “They said she was strangled.”
    “Loie Marsh was strangled by a dog collar.”
    “Oh my god.”
    The tide of rumor reached the stage, but couldn’t climb it. The panelists looked out, bewildered, at the sea of talk. For an eerie second or two there was a silence. Then someone screamed, very loudly, “You’ve all killed her.”
    In the distance you could just hear the police sirens approaching.

6
    T HERE WERE TWO TYPES of Monday mornings at Best Printing. The kind where everyone came in at exactly a quarter to nine, primed on caffeine or good spirits and ready to get down to work immediately, and the kind of morning we were having the Monday after the conference on sexuality.
    June lolled on one end of the long sofa reading the newspaper and groaning softly. Ray sat on the other end, coaxing Antonia with a pacifier, an adoring, absent look on his face. Penny sat, most unlike herself, in a slumped position over her desk, trying to focus on a cup of coffee. Something about her strongly reminded me of our mother, maybe the way the oversize glasses sat on her small, sharp nose; maybe the way her dry, half curly hair stuck out. Once her short brown hair had been kept artificially perpendicular with mousse, now it had an indifferent perm and was parted on the side. Penny the svelte had gotten careless about her dress too and seemed to go about in stained sweatshirts that she could whip up at the sound of a cry.
    She was definitely slowing down. The first week after having Antonia she’d been, if possible, even more efficient than before. She always seemed to have the baby in one arm, a satchel in the other and her car keys out and jingling.
    June had said, “She’ll get over it. She’s just trying to prove that, unlike most women, having a baby has not changed her in the slightest.”
    Now she leaned her head on the desk and tried to get the coffee into her mouth without lifting the cup.
    Even Moe was uncharacteristically dreamy and stood by the big window looking out at the blue September sky. I wondered if he was thinking about Allen or about the life he’d left in San Francisco. The two of them had moved up to Seattle in July after two of their best friends had died the same week. Moe had been exhausted with grief, but for Allen it was worse. “He’s got survivor’s guilt,” Moe had said, “Except he can’t believe he’s really a survivor.” Allen had turned into a nervous hypochondriac, calling the doctor once or twice a week and constantly checking his body for signs of disease.
    A neat quick man in his thirties, with lots of soft dark curls and blue eyes, Moe was a gem to have around the shop. He was the best cameraman and designer we’d ever had; he was far too good to be working at Best, he could have, and he had had, a very good union job. But he wanted to be out, he needed to be out at work, he said. Now more than ever.
    “Well, it doesn’t look good for Seattle,” said June gloomily from the sofa, throwing down the paper. “Nobody appreciates you while you’re here, so you go away to get famous, you come back and they kill you.”
    “Hanna must be in