Here to Stay (4 page)

Sissy tossed her shoulder-length, straight hair, still wet from swimming.

“In any case,” she said, “Evan’s a clown, and he’s obnoxious, and I’m glad you didn’t get in a fight.”
And I was right,
she thought,
that Elijah and Lucia aren’t that way about each other. Well, maybe she is about
him.

Sissy, on the other hand, was over Elijah Workman. Well, over the way she used to be about him. Right now, he was interesting primarily because he was the kind of person her mother wanted her to have nothing to do with.

“Go over the dam,” she instructed.

“Why?”

“Because my parents are at the club, and they’ll come back over HH.”

He’d reached a Stop sign, and when he’d come to a halt he looked over at her. “You mean, you’re not supposed to be doing this?”

“No,”
she insisted. “I just mean that I’ll have to listen to…” she sought for the right words and settled on “…advice.”

He did not pull ahead. The street was quiet, no one behind them.

“About what?”

Why must he be so annoyingly direct? And what could she say? She wasn’t about to tell him that her mother wouldn’t want her spending time with him. Her dad might not even be crazy about the idea. Of course, her dad wasn’t crazy about her having a boyfriend at all. Instead, he encouraged her to learn all about the colleges she might want to go to. He had the right idea; she knew what she wanted, and she wasn’t going to let a boyfriend stand in her way.

“My father’s worried I’m going to get a boyfriend,” she decided to say.

“Ah.” Elijah thought this over for a moment, then edged the Thunderbird forward. “If that’s all.”

T
HEY SAT
on one of the docks near the fudge shop, each with a Coke, and let their feet dangle in the lake. Sissy had fed coins into the jukebox inside, and they could hear it playing “Blue Moon” by the Marcels.

“Do you still show your dog?” Elijah asked her. “In
Obedience?” Over the years, he’d learned some of the terminology of the American Kennel Club.

“No. I tried to get his UD—Utility Dog—for a while but we weren’t having much luck. And I’ve been busy.”

“You were in the play,” he said.

“Yes. That’s what I’m going to do. I want to study performing arts, acting and dance. That’s what I love best. What about you?”

Elijah shrugged. His father drummed it into his head every day that it was good to be
practical,
and what interested Elijah was animals. His father had said, “Then, become a veterinarian,” but that wasn’t precisely what Elijah was hoping to do. He wanted to know why animals behaved the way they did. “I’m not sure. Something with animals.” He confessed, “I could be happy watching them all day, trying to figure out what’s going on in their heads.” He quoted something he held in his head always. “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.’ Henry Beston.”

Sissy turned, stared at his profile as he looked out on the dark lake. Finally, he looked back, and she said, “Say that again.”

He smiled, that dazzling, wolfish smile and repeated the quotation.

“Will you please write that down for me?” she asked.

“Sure.” He looked at her for a moment. “I suppose you have your date for the prom lined up.”

She nodded and suddenly laughed, confident and far from the ugly duckling of their junior high school days. “But just for future reference—I would have said yes.”

Elijah grinned, a bit mischievously. “What if I asked to kiss you?”

A smile curved her wide, beautiful lips, showing her dimples, which, when combined with her well-defined cheekbones, gave her a unique loveliness. Braces gone, straight white teeth. “That would be quite interesting.”

Elijah searched her violet eyes. “I’m asking.”

She grinned at him. “Yes, Elijah Workman.”

He had to touch her hair, push it back from her creamy skin. Touch one pale eyebrow. “You’re really beautiful, Sissy. You’re…classy.”

She winced.

“What?” he asked.

She looked pained. “When someone says someone is ‘classy’…”

Elijah suddenly understood. “It’s a sign that he’s not?”

She gave him a smile that asked forgiveness for the observation.

“I’ll remember,” he said, and he kissed her mouth, felt her lips move under his, kissing him back. The girl had kissed before. And by the time they drew apart for a moment, he knew something else.

Sissy Atherton liked him.

A lot.

The music on the jukebox changed to the Everly Brothers’ “Let It Be Me.”

She said, “Will you dance with me, Elijah?”

“Here?” He looked around the deserted dock, stood up and reached for her hand.

Then, she was dancing in his arms on the dock in the moonlight and saying, “Don’t you think this is the most beautiful song? I’m a very romantic person, Elijah.”

She said this with the impish smile that took his breath.

Suddenly blessing the day he’d found her and afraid of the strength of that feeling, he said, “Yeah. Me, too.”

Echo Springs, Missouri
February 8, 1962

I
T WASN’T
Sissy’s parents’ way to forbid her to date a particular boy, especially when the boy wasn’t a high school dropout showing up on a motorcycle, smoking cigarettes, with a fifth of vodka in the pocket of his leather jacket. Instead, her mother, in particular, became increasingly and subtly cool toward Elijah Workman and created situations in which she believed Elijah would be out of his element and would show his gaucheness.

Encouraging Elijah and Sissy to have their pre-Valentine dance dinner at the Echo Springs Country Club was one of these ideas. Elijah had begun to notice the trend—and wondered about it. Much of the comfort he’d felt with Mr. Atherton when he was young and dog-sitting for the Athertons had disappeared. In fact, the Athertons had found “a nice girl we know” to take care of the dogs when the family went to shows.

Sissy said, “You would go as our family’s guest. I mean, you and I would have our own table, and my parents, theirs.”

He and Sissy walked along the shore in front of the Athertons’ lakeside cabin, bundled against the cold. The Athertons were spending the weekend in the cabin, and Sissy had invited Elijah to come down for the afternoon and for dinner. He had refused the dinner invitation, saying he needed to study.

Now he knew he had to do more. “Sissy, this isn’t really working.”

“What?” she asked, glancing over at him. She wore a white angora beret over her bright yellow hair. She was so tall, model-thin and elegant. He was tall, too, six feet, but he didn’t feel elegant. He had the family’s beaky nose and he always shaved immediately before seeing Sissy, but the hair on his face seemed to grow so fast and dark.

“Sissy, your folks don’t like me.”

“Yes, they—”

He shook his head, stopping her. “And I don’t like the way things are going. I don’t own a car. We’re always going places in yours. If I were to take someone else out, I’d borrow my dad’s truck,
if
he’d lend it. If we were going to a dance, I’d pick a restaurant where I was welcome.”

“You’re welcome at the—”

“But I don’t belong. Don’t you see? And Sissy, you’re going away in the fall, and with my dad being sick. I have obligations here.”

His father had some kind of lung ailment and had been in and out of the hospital.

“You’re saying you want to break up with me,” Sissy said, sounding a little shocked.

“I’m saying that it doesn’t really matter what anyone wants. We’re on different paths.”

Sissy glanced at him. She’d always suspected that Elijah didn’t like her as much as she liked him. Sexually they were on the same page. He was as eager as anyone, though also conscious about, maybe troubled by, how far things were going, seeming more protective of her virginity than she felt. When he’d once choked out that they
needed to stop, Sissy had wanted to ask why, but had a feeling Elijah might think less of her, so she’d agreed.

Yes, Elijah was very straitlaced and Sissy
was
excited about going to Sarah Lawrence in the fall. She knew her life would change then. But Elijah was so darn…handsome? More than that. There was something about him that would not let her go.

Now, however, she would have to let go.

He stopped walking on the rocky beach dotted with patches of snow and looked at her. “Sissy, things are getting too serious between us. If our futures were going in the same direction, I’d want to marry you. But you have other plans, and you should follow them.”

“You have plans, too!” she cried. Elijah had been admitted to several colleges, had won two scholarships. He wanted to study animal behavior, maybe teach someday.

He shook his head. “Sissy, my father is
dying
. I hope he won’t, and my mother doesn’t know just how sick he is, and I’d like you to keep the information to yourself. It’s something Dad has told me because he wants to make sure my mother and my brothers and sisters are cared for.”

“You’re going to sacrifice everything for them?” She heard her own words, heard how self-serving they sounded—perhaps she was being childish wishing that Elijah would serve his own desires first.

“It’s not a sacrifice,” he said sharply.

Sissy could hardly believe he felt that way. If he did—well, they really were pretty different. Still…She drew herself up. “Well, I get the point. Do you want me to drive you home?”

He shook his head. “I’ll hitch.” The way he’d gotten there. Hitchhiking and walking from the road.

Her mouth formed a grim little line. “I guess I’ll see you at school then.”

He nodded, looked as though he wanted to say something. Or ask something. But eventually he turned away.

Elijah knew that if he told Sissy what he wanted, she would grant it. And she would never understand why he didn’t ask, why it wasn’t right. There was no future for them. So why should he ask for one last kiss?

A Coca-Cola truck stopped for him, and when Elijah opened the door, he heard the Everly Brothers on the radio, singing the first song he and Sissy had ever danced to.

A hearing-impaired woman brought her service dog to Mass. While the congregation sang, I happened to glance at the animal and found him gazing at her with a rapt and joyful expression. I remembered the howls of our German shepherds, their spontaneous singing.
Perhaps they howl to praise.

—
Among the God Dogs,
Elijah Workman, 1990

K
ansas City, Missouri
June 1, 1969

A
N
A
MERICAN
K
ENNEL
C
LUB DOG SHOW
was an unusual place to find an undercover operative for the Midwest Region of the Humane Society, but that was where twenty-five-year-old Elijah Workman ended up, searching out a dog thief. The thefts would not have come to the attention of the Humane Society were it not for one of the stolen dogs being found dead.

The case was ugly, and the Humane Society was liaising with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Before his mother began working in an insurance office in Echo Springs, Elijah had served as a sheriff’s deputy. Then
the Humane Society had recruited him, and he’d become one of their highest-paid investigators, which admittedly still earned him less than he’d made as a cop.

Special Agent Paul Hilliard, who’d left the Echo Springs Sheriff’s Department to join the FBI, was tracking the thief because the torture and death of the dog seemed connected to some murders occurring in the same area and at the same time. Other FBI agents were nearby, as well, in case they found the perpetrator on the premises.

Another member of the team was Barbara Watson, a Humane Society representative from the regional office, who was on hand to take care of any stolen dogs to which their quarry led them. If they found the person they sought. Barbara was also undercover, but she was miserable in that role—or so Elijah felt.

Paul and Elijah were dressed as handlers in pastel jackets, white shirts, ties and good trousers, and Paul was escorting his Boxer, Odysseus, who was an AKC champion entered in the show, all which improved their cover. On the way to the show, Elijah had asked Paul if the FBI had ever noticed that the kinds of people who hurt animals often also liked to hurt people. In his line of work, Elijah
had
noticed this. People, however, could sometimes take care of themselves.

Animals could not.

Paul said he
personally
had noted the point, but he didn’t think the Bureau as a whole subscribed to the idea.

Barbara, a blonde with a very round face and wrists almost as big as Elijah’s, was dressed as a groomer, wearing trousers and a blouse with a blue smock over them.

“Now look at that,” Paul said to Elijah in an undertone. “Ring two.”

Distracted momentarily from watching the grooming area, where several of the thefts had occurred at previous shows, Elijah glanced toward the ring where a tall blonde in a pale blue suit and high heels, her hair in a French twist, ran around a ring with an Afghan Hound, other Afghan Hounds surrounding them. The shade of hair, like sweet corn, drew Elijah’s attention, making him think immediately of Sissy.

She had great legs and a tall, statuesque figure.
It’s got to be Sissy
. He wished he had eyes in the back of his head, so he could wait till she turned around. Instead, he had to watch the grooming area. The thief and probable murderer seemed to hit the biggest shows in the area. All, so far, had been Midwestern shows.

How in hell did he do it? Most groomers were women; the few men stood out. Elijah found it hard to believe that no one would notice an unfamiliar man taking a dog from the show. A man dressed as a handler maybe? Or an actual handler?

In the car on the way to the show, Barbara had said, “Those AKC people are capable of anything.”

Barbara believed that the American Kennel Club was the root of all evil, insisting that people shouldn’t breed dogs when there were so many unwanted animals languishing in pounds around the country. Her anti-AKC prejudice was one reason Elijah would have preferred to take along a different officer, but that decision had been in someone else’s hands.

Elijah watched a middle-aged red-haired woman wearing a pink smock over her clothing brush a handsome Samoyed. She worked near the edge of the area, not far from the handwritten sign which read:
WARNING: LEAVE NO DOG UNATTENDED! BEWARE OF DOG THIEVES!

If people followed those instructions, the dog thief would be stuck, which was why Barbara was here working on an Alaskan malamute named Whiteout who had wound up at the pound and was posing as a show dog. Elijah thought he looked good, but Paul had said his conformation was lousy. Nonetheless, Whiteout was their bait. “I doubt he’ll tempt our man,” Paul had said, though he’d flatly refused to allow them to use Odysseus as the lure.

Elijah studied the redheaded groomer. She kept craning her neck to try to see the far ring, and he suspected she might step away from the Samoyed for a dangerous moment.

Before that happened, however, Barbara, in a very convincing manner, tossed down a comb in irritation, hunted through her capacious tote bag for another, then stalked away from Whiteout, heading for a vending booth that sold grooming tools.

Paul was still watching the blonde in ring two, and Elijah pretended to participate. “Barbara’s left.”

Though the last time he’d seen her had been three years before at a breakfast after church, Elijah had no trouble recognizing Sissy. His heart lurched.
Is her family now breeding Afghans?
he wondered. Or maybe Sissy was working as a paid handler.

He made himself look away, turning at an angle to Paul so that he could see both the Samoyed’s table and Whiteout’s.

The woman with the Samoyed did leave. She strode through the grooming area, stopped at Whiteout’s table
and removed the restraints keeping him there. Whiteout licked her face as she hauled him off the table, snapped on a lead and started toward the exit farthest from Paul and Elijah. Paul slipped away from Elijah’s side to follow her.

Whiteout, however, had his own ideas. He stopped in his tracks, briefly sniffed the groomer’s legs, and lifted one of his own to pee on her.

Whiteout’s cover was blown. This was not show dog behavior.

A groomer at the next table told the thief, “He does that in the ring, he gets no score.”

“Not my dog,” said the redhead with a convincing rolling of eyes.

No one else seemed to notice anything amiss. Elijah headed in the opposite direction around the grooming area, past where a family sat eating hot dogs and watching Yorkshire Terriers in the ring.

Elijah couldn’t see the thief and decided she must have gone the other way. What he did see was a big-pawed white blur dragging a blue lead snatch a partially consumed hot dog from a toddler, who instantly wailed in terror and distress. After one gulp, Whiteout began to lick the sobbing child’s face. The mother set down her own food to rescue her child, and Whiteout ate that, too.

“Loose dog! Loose dog!” someone on the other side of the Yorkie ring yelled. Elijah had no doubt that the thief would abandon Whiteout now that he’d drawn so much attention to himself, and Elijah was right. She’d disappeared, probably returning to her Samoyed.

Someone needed to grab Whiteout, but Elijah
didn’t want to be seen with the canine outlaw and blow his own cover.

The father of the hot dog family set down his food to grab the renegade, who seized that unexpected offering, too, before making his getaway—into the Yorkshire Terrier ring.

A judge screamed, “Someone grab that dog!” while eight Yorkshire Terrier handlers snatched up their charges.

Whiteout paused to mark several spaces in the ring, and a tall, powerfully built handler grabbed the lead. Whiteout sniffed his leg and peed on him.

The handler, though, hardly minding the toy breed in his arms, got down in Whiteout’s face like a naughty canine’s worst nightmare and positively growled, “
Nobody
pees on me, mister.”

Whiteout whimpered and lay down like a penitent in the presence of the Divine and proceeded to lick his paws.

“You look at me when I’m talking to you, you bat-eared excuse for a mallie,” the handler continued, and Whiteout’s ears lay back and he lowered his head some more.

All Elijah could think was,
I want that dog. That dog wants to be my dog.

Barbara appeared at that moment and gave a very convincing, “Oh, God, that damned dog.”

Elijah found himself watching the resumption of the Yorkshire Terrier judging and the handsome handler’s aplomb in returning to the matter at hand. His Yorkie was the judge’s first pick.

Knowing he must find Paul and the red-haired groomer, Elijah started to turn away just as Sissy Atherton hurried to ringside, now leading a toy poodle. She spoke to Tall, Blond, Handsome and Authoritative-
with-Dogs, then exchanged a quick kiss with him. Elijah noticed a rock the size of a shooting marble on her finger.
Ah, well
.

A deeper disappointment lodged in his gut, but he ignored it.

Just then, he saw Paul heading into the crowd and some other men—these in more conservative and predictable FBI dress—fanning out nearby, all of them following a handler in a buff-colored coat leading a handsome sable German shepherd dog.

“S
OMEONE WILL DISPUTE IT
,” Clark said disinterestedly, walking away from the couple to whom he’d just presented a blue ribbon for their Yorkshire Terrier.

“Because you grabbed that malamute thing?” Like Clark, Sissy was reluctant to call the disobedient and goofy-looking animal an Alaskan malamute. “Where’s Kennedy?” she asked. Her sister was holding Teddy aka Echo Springs Farm’s Theodore, and Kennedy had promised to take him outside to be exercised before he went into the ring.

Sissy searched the heads for her sister, and what she saw alarmed her. Kennedy’s blond hair looked wild, her face frantic, as she stood outside the restroom screaming at another woman and then began scanning the crowd.

Teddy was not with her.

Sissy felt only half a moment of nausea, of terror, before she, too, began searching the crowd.

Incredibly, she saw him.

Leaving the arena with a man in a buff-colored blazer. Without speaking to Clark, Sissy ran after the dog.

Handling dogs had made her accustomed to running in high heels. The thought of someone stealing Teddy—and she had no doubt that the man in the buff jacket was trying to steal her dog—electrified her.

She jostled a handler leading a Boxer, snapping, “That man’s stealing my dog,” and kept going.

Buff jacket was not looking back.

Outside, the heat and humidity enveloped her, but Sissy ignored them, streaking across the gravel lot filled with station wagons and the occasional Airstream trailer. She screamed, “Let go of that dog, you bastard! You are
not
taking my dog.”

Buff jacket did glance back then.

Sissy was upon him, and yanked Teddy’s leash from his hand. “You’re a terrible person!” she yelled.

“Hey.” He raised his hands as though to tell her to relax. “Calm down. I just wanted to find his owner. I’m glad you have him back.”

“You’re a liar,” she said, shaking with terror for her dog. Then she heard the incredible—a growl, low in Teddy’s throat. She’d never heard Teddy growl at a person in his life. “I’m going to call the police,” she said, “and you’re going to wait for them.”

“No need for that,” he said, backing away from her.

Sissy was torn. Only an evil person would steal a dog. But right now she must protect Teddy, which meant getting him away from this horrible individual. And although there were a few people in the lot, they seemed very far away from Sissy and the dog thief.

Until, abruptly, a sedan pulled up behind the man. He glanced behind him as men in suits got out of the car.

The handler with the Boxer appeared behind her.

She saw badges wink in the sun, heard one of the men say, “You are being arrested for the murder of…”

“Sissy?”

She wheeled around, unsure whom she expected to see. It wasn’t Clark’s voice.

And there, looking like a handler, stood Elijah Workman.

Her heart thumped.
Elijah.

She jerked her attention free of him the same way she would correct a dog in obedience lessons—immediately and firmly. The dog thief was being arrested, and she abruptly remembered the horrible stories she’d heard of recent dog thefts; that was what might have happened to Teddy.

Her stomach revolted, and she spun away from the men and vomited on the hood of a nearby car.

“Sissy! Sissy!”

Clark. He was here.

“You’re all right, Sissy. He didn’t hurt you.”

Another voice—yes, Elijah’s voice—said, “She’s not puking because she thought he’d hurt
her
.”

What a perceptive observation,
was all she could think.

Clark passed her a clean handkerchief, and she dabbed at her mouth and her watering eyes, then crouched beside her dog, who had been whining and now licked her face.

She straightened up finally, half sagging against Clark, and turned to Elijah. “Clark, this is Elijah Workman. He’s from Echo Springs. Elijah, this is my fiancé, Clark Treffinger-Hart.”

E
LIJAH HAD ALREADY DECIDED
this was Sissy’s fiancé, only his name had been a mystery.

However, introductions were interrupted by Elijah’s need to speak with Paul to find out if any of the stolen dogs had survived. He knew, though, that the dogs were going to be a low priority for the FBI. The comfort was that they may have found their man and, if so, the creep would actually end up in jail. Seldom did animal cruelty prosecutions end so satisfactorily. In fact, he’d yet to see a case end that way.

When he was finally free to talk to Sissy, he saw Clark trying to persuade her to return inside, get out of the heat. That sounded like a good idea to Elijah, but she lingered.

“Elijah, I see you’re working, but we’re in town, and Mom and Dad are here. We’d love it if you’d join us tonight for a small party at Clark’s club. It’s to celebrate our engagement.”

Clark’s club.
Ruefully Elijah remembered his own breakup with Sissy, still vivid to him. Well, she’d found someone right for her, Elijah supposed. “I’m not sure I’ll be able—”