4 Woof at the Door (10 page)

Chapter 8

I rose, horrified. Beside me, Paige Atkinson gasped. Her hands flew to her face. I raced down the concrete stairs, darted through our empty dugout and onto the field. By then, most of our team as well as a few members of Hank’s team had circled Russell.

I shouldered my way through the cluster of concerned onlookers. Russell was on the ground, groaning. At least he was conscious and breathing.

Hank, meanwhile, had stopped just past the collision on the third-base line. He had a grin on his face. Loud enough so everyone could hear, he leaned over Russell and said, “It was an accident. Sorry. But you shouldn’t have been in the base path.”

“And you shouldn’t have been barreling down the baseline toward him!” I knelt, filled with rage at Hank and with empathy for Russell. His face was contorted with pain. “You knew full well that you were already out!”

“Was I? Oh, Jeez. I didn’t realize.”

“She’s right, you asshole!” Tracy shouted. I looked up. If anyone on our team could take out this thug, it was Tracy Truett. “Russell’s filing criminal assault charges against you!”

That statement drained the cockiness from Hank’s mannerisms. He gestured at our leftfielder, who had trotted in-field to join our useless crowd. “I thought he dropped the ball. Guess I did make a mistake.” He glanced down at Russell again. “Sorry. I got too caught up in the excitement of the game. Good thing you’re so short, or I might have broken some of your ribs.”

It was all I could do to stop myself from screaming at him, “You want to see something short?” and kneeing him in the groin.

By then Russell, his forearms crossed over his midsection in obvious pain, had managed to sit up. The umpires were talking to him, telling him to stay put while they got an ambulance, but Russ shook his head emphatically and struggled to get to his feet while avoiding touching his hand down for balance. My heart lurched at the sight of him in so much pain, straining so mightily to save face. If I thought he’d have let me, I’d have thrown my arms around him and cried on his behalf.

Several of Hank’s “Wolves” spat vitriolic remarks at Hank, even though he was their captain and team sponsor. Hank threw up his hands, shouted, “It was an accident,” and returned to his dugout. The crowd began to disperse as Russell slowly made his way off the diamond.

To my surprise, Beverly was uncharacteristically crying and repeating: “I’m so sorry,” to Russell, shooting hateful glares in Hank’s direction.

When no one else could overhear, I headed to Hank’s dugout and muttered to him, “Your claiming that this was an accident isn’t fooling anybody. That was an asinine, cowardly thing to do! You may be taller than him, but he’s twice the man you’ll ever be!”

A couple of the men on our team flanked Russell as he made his way out of the playing field through our dugout. He waved them off, and the umpires called out for everyone to return to their positions. We already had one extra female player in my spot. Another male player was sent in to sub for Russell at catcher. The game would go on. No damage done. Just a brief injury time-out.

Again to my surprise, Beverly said she couldn’t continue as pitcher. She dried her eyes and swapped positions with Tracy on second base.

In the meantime, I trotted back across the back of the dirt in-field and into our dugout where only Russell remained as he collected his belongings. I felt horrible for him. He was determined to pretend that he wasn’t in agony, but his face and forehead were dripping with sweat from the effort. Wordlessly, I rubbed his back.

“The bastard broke my collar bone!”

Not knowing what else to say, I muttered stupidly, “Maybe it’s just a sprain.”

“I’ve had a broken collar bone before! I know what it feels like!” He had scooped up his small canvas athletic bag from underneath the bench in the dugout and waved off my attempts to take it from him. “I got it,” he muttered gruffly.

Paige met us as we exited the dugout. She had paled and her hands were trembling as she tried to hold back her hair, which the breeze was blowing toward her face. “I am so sorry, whoever you are,” she said to Russell. “I don’t know what gets into my husband sometimes. Just send me the bill, and I’ll cover the cost of your medical care. Allida knows my address.”

“Nice of you,” Russell replied as pleasantly as he could under the circumstances.

She gave him a tight-lipped smile and me an embarrassed nod, then she turned on a heel toward Hank’s dugout.

I watched her walk away, wondering what, if anything, she’d say to her husband about this. I had a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that this was just the beginning—merely battle lines being drawn. This seemed to be caveman stuff, wolves and clubs, and I’d somehow sparked a prehistoric blaze in the awful people that Beverly happened to live near.

Russell took a sharp intake of breath as he brushed against a fence post. I sighed, certain he wouldn’t want me to embarrass him in public and shower him with words of concern. At the same time, my temptation to blurt out the words I love you was palpable and all but overwhelming. It was the truth. Yet the rational side of me was pointing out to my emotional side that I was currently a wolf-bitten murder witness. These strengthened feelings for Russell might merely be the byproduct of the trauma I’d just experienced. It was a long walk down a big hill to get back to the parking lot, and we were making slow time. Occasional pedestrians coming up from the lot eyed us with curiosity.

“Between you with your collar bone and me with my hand, all we need is a drum and a limping guy with a piccolo.”

Russell glared at me as we shuffled our way to the exit. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

“Apparently not.” We were nearing my car, but he kept going after I’d stopped. “Let me drive you to the hospital.”

“No. I can drive,” he called over his shoulder.

“Maybe, but certainly not well. For heaven’s sake, Russ, you have a standard transmission. How are you going to shift if you can’t move your right arm?”

He lifted his right elbow slightly, wincing in the process. “I can move it fine. I want…” He paused and scanned my face. His own was tense and damp with perspiration. “I want to be alone, okay?”

“Are you trying to punish me? Because that’s what you’re doing.”

He ignored my words completely. It was tearing me up inside to watch Russell fumbling to get his key in the lock. He opened his door.

“Good luck. I hope you don’t get into an accident on the way.” It was a struggle not to start crying out of despair and frustration.

Fuming, I stood with crossed arms, watching as he stalled out twice just getting out of the parking lot. This was ludicrous! If I’d had a baseball bat in my hand, I’d have been sorely tempted to march back down to the field and pound Hank in the kneecaps until he admitted he’d injured Russell on purpose. It wasn’t rational, but it felt as though Hank had targeted Russell because he knew about my relationship with him.

Tracy Truett came up to me just as Russell signaled and then pulled onto the street. “Tell me something, Tracy. Are testosterone and brain waves mutually exclusive?”

“Yep. Game’s over. We lost. What a rip-off! The ump insisted we’d played for a full hour, but he didn’t give us credit for the five minutes that Russ was….” She let her voice fade when she finally registered how very little I cared about our team’s undefeated streak just now. “Is Russell all right?”

“No! He’s got a broken collarbone! Why does everybody keep asking that stupid question when someone’s obviously injured?”

“Whoops. I just pushed the wrong button.”

“He wouldn’t even let me drive him to the hospital. He can barely even move his right arm.”

“That reminds me.” She eyed my left hand. “How did you get your car here? Did somebody drive you?”

“No, but that’s different.” Granted, I couldn’t say how it was different, exactly, except that Russell’s injuries weren’t treated yet, and I was the one offering the ride. And Russell, by God, should have accepted.

“The blind leading the blind. Rather, the righties driving the lefties,” she murmured. She gave me a friendly jab on the shoulder. “Guess what, Allida? I just got the all-time greatest idea for what you can do to help out both yourself and our team sponsors.”

“Sponsors? You mean, your radio station?”

“Yep. I’m putting you on the air during tomorrow’s broadcast. I’ll interview you, and you can talk about what it was like to come face-to-face with an untamed wolf.”

“No way, Tracy.”

“But a story like this will have all of Boulder tuning in. It’s going to help my career immeasurably. You have to do it. Please?”

Tracy’s saying “please” came up as often as the word “pantheon” did during the course of normal conversation. Nevertheless, I was steadfast. “Tracy, I’m not going to do that. Why would you possibly think that I’d be willing to?”

“Are you kidding me? To drum up business! You could use the free publicity.” She spread her hands against the sky as if reading an imaginary banner. “‘Dog Trainer Has Brush With Death From Wolf!’”

“You call that good publicity?”

She chuckled and whipped her cap off her head, her damp, kinky spikes still bearing the cap’s imprint. “Oh, honey, in show biz, there ain’t no such thing as bad publicity.”

“Maybe not. But there is in the dog training business.”

“Aw, come on, Allie. What could it possibly hurt?”

“No,” I said through clenched teeth. I unlocked my car door. “And furthermore, I’m making a new policy for myself! The first time anyone assures me that something or someone is harmless, I’m running in the opposite direction!”

The moment my key was in the front door of my mother’s blond brick ranch-style house, I could hear the dogs positioning themselves to greet me. Their hierarchy had undergone some changes of late. Sage, my mother’s recently adopted male collie, had begun to exert authority over my dogs—Doppler, a male cocker spaniel, and Pavlov, my female German shepherd. Though physically the second largest, my German shepherd had been demoted to lowest rank, behind the two males.

I petted Sage, who wagged his tail slowly. Truth be told, I loved Sage almost as much as my own dogs, who’d been with me much longer. Sage was a noble animal, though not attractive by show standards. He had a wonderful sable coat worthy of Lassie, but he also had a bumpy Roman nose and one ear that had dropped while the other remained up.

Next, I knelt and greeted Doppler. Lacking the energy reserves to stay balanced, I sat down on the floor. It felt as though a train had hit me. My stitches were throbbing. I hadn’t eaten in hours, but knew that my stomach was too knotted to keep anything down.

Surmising my mood, Doppler licked my face, which he knew under normal circumstances was forbidden. He was a handsome classically featured buff-colored cocker—big brown eyes, tapered muzzle. Patterns of white across his chest and tummy reminded me of cumulus clouds, which is how I came to name him Doppler, after the weather equipment, which was more apt than the names Cumulus or Cloudy.

My beloved German shepherd, Pavlov, had left the room and now came galloping back in. I looked up just as she rounded the corner and raced toward me, gripping the rawhide bone that she’d fetched to show off to me. To my horror, I had an image of being charged by a wolf. I gasped and flinched, barely managing not to cry out in fright.

It took me a moment to calm myself. Pavlov stopped in front of me, dropping the bone as an offering of her subordination. I threw my arms around her neck and buried my face in her fur. I could not let myself be afraid of dogs. Not of my own sweet shepherd, who would do anything for me. I was still in this position when my mother walked into the room.

“Allida, what’s wrong?” she asked immediately.

By the time I looked up, Mom was sitting on the edge of the nearest seat, hands clasped in front of her.

There was no sense in keeping secrets from my mother. She knew me too well, and she would see my bandages soon anyway. I held up my injured hand. “A wolf bit me.”

Her jaw dropped. “What were you doing getting that close to a wolf? Was this at the zoo?”

“No! What did you think?” I snapped at her. “That I was hand-feeding a wolf through the bars? My new client got murdered and….” I paused.

There was no way to tell this story in as few words as I was willing to waste on it. “His neighbor has a wolf, sort of. But the thing is, just for a moment there, when Pavlov came into the room, I was actually frightened.”

I studied my mother’s shocked expression. Facially, my mother and I were almost dead ringers, but she was six inches taller. Tonight, as she did most of the time, her gray-streaked long brown hair was in a braid. She wore a yellow terry-cloth bathrobe and gray slippers.

“Mom, do you know what this means?”

“No! I don’t know what a single word you just said means! Somebody who hired you was murdered today? Is your life in danger?”

“No, just my livelihood.” Not even eight hours ago, things were looking great for me. I’d been on the verge of the four-letter L-word with Russell Greene. Business was not exactly booming, but was at least thumping. My biggest worry had been whether or not I could find a house in Boulder county within my price range. I rubbed my forehead with my good hand. “Can I explain in the morning?”

“No! I have a student in the morning first thing after church, and this isn’t a topic that I can be patient over!”

Mom was a flight instructor. She’d been an inspiration for my brother, a pilot for United. She’d inspired me, too, but not in the employment arena; I had a formidable fear of heights. Ironic that Russell was a rock climber and both of my immediate family members were pilots. The way things were going with Russell, though, it was hard to say if his hobby would matter to me for much longer. At that thought I sighed, then looked up and realized that my mother—who looked as though her internal time bomb might be set to explode—still awaited my reply.

Over a cup of Sleepy Time tea, I filled my mother in on all of the sorry events of the day, deliberately leaving Russell Greene out of the story entirely, knowing that was the one subject I wanted to discuss the most, and yet also the least.