The Hand That Feeds You

21

Before I left for Maine, I had contacted animal sanctuaries that might take Cloud, starting with the gold standard — Best Friends, in Kanab, Utah. I wanted Cloud as close to me as possible, and I thought they might be able to refer me to a suitable place in the Northeast. But every place I tried had a wait list up to a year. And since a “dangerous dog” would be kept by itself and not allowed to play with other dogs or socialize with people other than the handler who would take the dog out to eliminate, it would be a life of solitary confinement. I knew people in the rescue world who felt that there was something worse than euthanasia, and this was what they meant. Dogs went crazy in such a situation, and the manifestations of their misery were many. Could I subject my dog to this? Was choosing the lesser evil the best I could do for Cloud? What was the lesser evil? I wanted McKenzie’s opinion.

I was still sleeping on Steven’s foldout. I made myself coffee and phoned McKenzie’s office.

“Laurence McKenzie’s office,” a familiar voice answered.

“Billie?”

“Yes, may I take a message?”

“It’s me, Morgan.”

“Morgan! We were wondering where you’ve been.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Helping out. His secretary quit on him.” She was making herself indispensable to him.

“When will he be back?”

“Faye, stop clicking your teeth,” Billie said to McKenzie’s dog. “Sorry, what did you ask me?”

“I wanted to talk to McKenzie about Cloud. Every sanctuary I contacted has a waiting list.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m wondering if George was the luckier one,” I admitted.

“You weren’t asking that two weeks ago.”

“I need to talk to McKenzie. Can you ask him?”

“He’s right here. I’m in the outer office. I’ll get him for you.”

Before I could register this, McKenzie was telling me it was good to hear my voice.

I told him why I was calling and asked if he would meet me at Crown Vic’s after work. The former police-car service station on South Second Street was new, thus neutral, ground. I hoped he would not bring Billie; I wanted time with him alone. The thought was obscene under these circumstances. We were going to talk about what makes a dog’s life worth living, and jealousy had no place here. But even with my dog’s life at stake, I entertained petty thoughts and was hurt that he preferred Billie to me.

He was sitting at the bar when I walked in. I was glad he’d chosen a seat close to the fireplace; I was freezing. He jumped down off the stool and greeted me with an outstretched hand. Quite a change from the hug he’d given me the last time I’d seen him. He slid his glass over to me. “Try this,” he said, a surprisingly intimate gesture after the handshake, I thought. “It’s called Angry Orchard Keeper. Whiskey with hard cider.”

Dutifully, I took a sip. I nodded yes, and he ordered one for me, too.

It was still early enough that the dinner crowd hadn’t come in. I liked sitting on a barstool next to him, warmed by a fire. I let myself relax into it for just a moment, before putting my moral dilemma on the table.

“You know your dog better than anyone,” he said. “There’s no clean right or wrong decision here.”

“Maybe George was the luckier one,” I said, testing.

“For what it’s worth, I think that we owe our dogs the best life we can give them, and when that life isn’t good enough, we release them with love. I don’t mean to suggest that that is an easy moment to identify — when it isn’t good enough.”

I saw that he refused to be prescriptive, and I was grateful for that. He was just vague enough that I could make the sentiment my own, if I chose to do so. I also saw that he would not judge me for whichever choice I made. I was grateful for that, too.

“Have you had to make a choice like this?” I asked.

“I had to decide whether I would live. After my wife died.”

“Steven told me about the diving accident.”

“I’m the one who persuaded her to take up diving. She was willing to conquer her fear of deep water for me.”

I wanted to be the kind of listener he was for me. No judgment. No easy consolation. I let him talk.

“I even looked for a reason in books. A Grief Observed, by C. S. Lewis — he wrote it after his wife died, but it was about his loss of faith in God as much as his grief at losing his wife.”

I told him what I knew about C. S. Lewis when he was a boy, how when he was four, his dog, Jack, was killed by a car. The future author would only answer to the name of Jack after that, and even as an old man his closest friends and family called him Jack. I hoped McKenzie did not think I was equating a boy’s loss of his pet dog to a man’s losing his wife. Then I saw that I didn’t have to worry about that.

McKenzie laughed. “Finally, a reason to like C. S. Lewis.”

“Could you eat something? Do you have time? If I ordered macaroni and cheese, would you share it?”

“I’d love to, but I have to be somewhere at seven.”

I glanced at his watch and saw that we had about fifteen more minutes. I thought he might be going to meet Billie, but I wouldn’t ask. Instead I said, “So C. S. Lewis didn’t help, but did you find someone who did? Either on or off the page?”

“I don’t know that this helped, but soon after, I was trying a case in which an elementary school in Connecticut would not allow a ten-year-old girl with cerebral palsy to bring her helper monkey, a little capuchin, to school with her. The monkey was perfectly behaved, wore a diaper so as not to soil anything in the classroom, and was pretty much a model citizen. The girl needed this helper monkey’s assistance in fundamental ways. The other parents and the school board were afraid of diseases they thought the monkey carried, though there was no evidence of this, and the monkey was up-to-date on its vaccinations.

“Turned out, the girl left me little to do in court. She gave an eloquent description of her life before she got Maddie and then told the court what she was now able to do with Maddie’s essential help. One of the most moving examples was also the simplest. She told the court that before she got Maddie, no one ever talked to her at school. Since she started bringing Maddie, she had become popular. All the kids wanted to meet the little helper monkey. She said, ‘I didn’t feel sorry for myself after that.’ And neither did I.”

“You didn’t feel sorry for the girl, or for yourself?”

“Both.”

The irony was almost too much for me, that McKenzie was opening up to me in ways more intimate than when I thought he might be interested in me. Maybe he felt safe enough to confide in me this way now that he was with someone else. But why did it have to be Billie? And why shouldn’t it be Billie?

McKenzie put on his coat and asked me to call him when I had made my decision about Cloud. In parting, he did not offer his hand. He put his arms around me, and we stood like that for too brief a time.

I stayed at Crown Vic’s and, this time, had no interest in finding a man to waste a night with. I finished my drink and glanced up at the TV above the bar. The news was on, and I could barely hear the reporter over the music. But I recognized the woman whose photo appeared on-screen: Pat. The next photo was of a Hispanic man, identified as a migrant worker on the East End of Long Island. According to police, he had just been arrested for the murder of Pat Loewi. The reporter used what had entered the vernacular and referred to the murder as the “Heartless” case.

I was grateful to be in a place where no one knew me, or what I had been thinking. The anonymity obviated the need to feel embarrassed. All this time I had been sure that Samantha was responsible for Pat’s murder. Now I could choose to believe the police, who, after all, were good at their job. The news felt like an invitation to drop what had become, I saw, an obsession, this certainty of Samantha’s guilt. But why couldn’t a migrant worker have been responsible? I thought back to the Christa Worthington murder on the Cape a few years back. The whole town thought they knew who the killer was, and there was a second suspect, too, but, no — three years later, a sanitation worker named Christopher McCowen was arrested and, a year later, convicted for the murder.

I had been a fool to press detectives to investigate a connection between the murders of Pat and Susan Rorke. I had been a fool to suspect Samantha.

The momentary feeling of relief was supplanted by a dark and damning fact I did not want to face. I had fallen for Jimmy Gordon, a small-time, small-town delinquent who grew up to be the kind of predator I studied; my insider knowledge not only failed to protect me, it had led me straight to the predator, and I fell in love with him!

Etta James was singing “At Last.” I moved one barstool closer to the fireplace and ordered the macaroni and cheese.