All Shots (8 page)

On that same Sunday morning, the other Holly Winter
also searches databases. Those of interest to her, however, contain information on human beings and specifically on human beings named Holly Winter. The Argali directory lists eleven of us, two in Cambridge, of course, and the remaining nine dispersed throughout the United States in the manner of chain-store franchises, an image, I should note, that occurs to me, the dog-loving Holly Winter, and not to the unfanciful Holly Winter who thinks of images as graphics that display data. By searching other directories, she discovers 154 listings for us, but to her annoyance, there are many obvious duplications. Even so, she prints the complete listing of our addresses and phone numbers.

As to her interest in me, she finds that the database for the City of Cambridge shows the property at 256 Concord Avenue as having a land area of 4,004 square feet; and the building, a living area of 2,819 square feet. The Exterior Wall Type is coded as WOOD-SHN-SHK, the Roof Material as ASPHALT-SHNG. Those dopes at city hall! Why not pick one abbreviation for
shingle
and stick to it? The assessed value, which is, I am happily convinced, below the market value, strikes her as high. The photograph shows a simple three-story red house with white trim and a little porch. What I find to be the charm of the place is lost on her.

Google provides a tremendous amount of information about me. In particular, the other Holly discovers the opportunity to learn far more than she wants to know about dogs. That’s not hard: what she wants to know about dogs is absolutely nothing.

When I say that I never work on weekends, I mean that
I don’t sit down and write. Because my work and play are both about dogs, my weekend play often does end up as the subject of a column or an article. For instance, when I returned home after my brief encounter with Mellie, I worked on a little project destined to find its way into print, namely the construction and application of what’s known as Shirley Chong’s doggie nail file. Unfortunately, I don’t know Shirley Chong, who is a dog trainer and, as her invention proves, an outright genius. Here’s the problem she solved: A lot of dogs hate having their nails cut, and a lot of dog owners hate doing canine manicures. The usual method requires the owner to grasp the dog’s paw and use clippers to trim the nails without hitting the quick. If the dog squirms, it’s easy to take off so much nail that the dog yelps in pain, bleeds all over everything, and forever after turns tail at the sight of clippers. What’s more, even experienced owners who can see and avoid the veins in light nails find it difficult not to quick black nails. At best, traditional nail trimming is a necessary but joyless process. With Shirley Chong’s nail file, the dog not only files his own nails but has a grand time doing it. Or that was the idea.

I’d printed out the instructions from the Web site, www.shirleychong.com/keepers/nailfile.html, and on a recent trip to the hardware store had bought the kind of adhesive tape that’s applied to steps to prevent people from slipping. My basement had supplied a spare board about a foot across and three feet long. It took almost no time to stick the tape to the board and thus to construct a malamute-sized, very coarse file. After that, I crated Rowdy and Sammy, supplied myself with a clicker and cubes of chicken and cheese, and set out to teach Kimi to rake her front paws on the giant emery board. I could’ve used food alone, but the clicker, a little noisemaker that you pair with treats, was meant to speed things up, and so it did. Ten minutes after we started, I was sitting on a kitchen chair with the board propped up in front of me and pinned in place by my feet and knees, and Kimi was happily scraping the coarse surface with one front paw and then another. When she dragged her nails on the file, I clicked and fed her a treat. Magic! No, operant conditioning: behavior followed by positive reinforcement increases in frequency, intensity, and duration. Behavior: raking nails on board. Positive reinforcement: the clicker, a secondary reinforcer or event marker; and food, a primary reinforcer. Of course, I’d still have to trim Kimi’s dewclaws the old way, and teaching her to do the nails on her hind feet would be a challenge. Even so, success!

As I was saying just that to Kimi, the doorbell rang, and she abandoned her new pursuit to dash to the front hall in the hope that UPS or FedEx was delivering goodies for dogs.

“Sunday,” I said. “How do I explain that one? Nothing in this for you, good girl.”

She was a good girl, too. Containing her impulse to leap on the door and subsequently to offer our unknown caller an exuberant and possibly unwelcome greeting, Kimi sat a yard away from the door. Her dark eyes were bright and eager, and her tail was brushing back and forth across the floor, but her stay was solid. I opened the door.

The woman was about my age. There ended the similarity. Her hair was dark and almost as short as a man’s. She was only about five feet tall and so thin that everything about her was sharp and angular. Her nose was little and pointed, her eyes were dark and small, her lips were thin and pursed, and she had a slightly undershot bite. Her black jersey skirt and top could have been chosen to attract dog hair. On her bony little feet were black flats. She toed out badly. Although she wasn’t carrying the usual clipboard, handouts, and petitions, I wondered whether she could be soliciting for some good cause. In a sense and from her viewpoint, I was right: the good cause was herself.

“Holly Winter,” she said.

“Holly Winter,” I said with a smile that she didn’t return.

“May I come in?” Her tone was formal and cold.

“Of course. Kimi, okay. Good girl.”

Holly Winter, the other, didn’t even glance at Kimi, who, with the weird prescience that still unsettles me, headed directly for the living room. The woman’s stiff manner had made me reluctant to return to the kitchen. She seemed anything but the kind of person who’d sit there chatting while my dog filed her own nails. On the contrary, the other Holly would, I sensed, consider the activity bizarre.

Our living room is perfectly conventional. It has a small fireplace, a couch, two upholstered chairs, and the usual lamps and low tables. My office is packed with trophies, ribbons, framed certificates, show photos, and other dog paraphernalia, but except in December when there’s a Christmas tree loaded with dog ornaments in the living room, the decor is proof to myself that my life hasn’t gone entirely to the dogs. The day was still so dark that I turned on three lights, but I just gestured my visitor to a chair and didn’t offer coffee or tea. Kimi, too, withheld any welcoming overtures. Holly took a seat on one side of the fireplace, and I sat opposite her. Kimi lay down at my feet and watched my face.

“I’m sure you’re aware of this horrible business,” she said.

I nodded. “Of course.”

“Zach Ho,” she said.

“The owner of the house.”

“A classmate of mine.” In Cambridge,
classmate
means at Harvard, presumably on the grounds that other colleges have no class. “And an, uh, acquaintance. We serve on an advisory board together.”

“As I understand it,” I said, “he’s in Africa and totally out of touch. Unless there’s something I haven’t heard? Have the police been able to reach him?”

“Oh, the police! The police are useless.”

“That hasn’t been my experience with the Cambridge police.” By nature, I’m the sort of straightforward person who gets her hackles up and blurts out,
The hell they are, you condescending snot
! This my-experience tactic was Gabrielle’s. It always worked for her. In fact, it more than worked: she ended up making friends with everyone. The DEA agent? He was probably calling her all the time for advice about dealing with his parents and improving his love life.

“Then your experience must be very limited,” the other Holly said. “Or in a role other than mine.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” That wasn’t a Gabrielle tactic. I honestly missed the insinuation.

“As someone who is the victim of identity theft,” she said, “I take a personal interest in finding out the facts.”

My hackles were now up. “As opposed to an impersonal interest? My information was stolen, too, you know. The police must have told you that. The woman, the murdered woman, apparently went through my trash. But she didn’t actually commit identity theft. It certainly looks as if she intended to. But she hadn’t done it, at least so far as I know. My bank accounts look fine. I’m going to check my credit. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. Have you?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

She shrugged. “Nothing yet.”

“The poor woman is dead. She’s hardly in a position to steal anyone’s identity. Yours, mine, or anyone else’s. In comparison with what happened to her, our problems are nothing.”

“I don’t appreciate having my situation minimized and trivialized, and I have to ask myself why you have such an investment in downplaying a serious crime.” A certain immobility of expression and stiffness of body gave her an androidlike quality.

“The serious crime is murder. Pilfering other people’s bills and bank statements isn’t in the same league.”

“Were you in Cambridge this summer?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

Kimi slowly rose to her feet and moved to the left side of my chair.

“I was abroad,” said Holly Winter.

“I wasn’t. So what?”

Holly Winter, too, stood up. As she headed for the door, she said, “Simple explanations are often best. If one were to set out to steal another’s identity, how very, very easy to target a victim with one’s
own
name.”

“Leave,” I said. “Leave now.”

She did.

I am no thief. And why would I steal someone else’s
identity, anyway? The one I have suits me fine. I have no desire to purloin a substitute. As to the possibility of filching a second identity to add to the first, this one is as full and challenging as I can manage: Steve, of course, and Rowdy, Kimi, Sammy, India, Lady, Tracker the cat, my cousin Leah, friends I cherish, a career I love, a funky house in Cambridge, and my beloved stepmother. My father? Well, the possibility of trading Buck in has occasionally crossed my mind, but who knows what flaws the replacement might have? Buck is unstintingly generous with time, attention, love, and money, and he is crazy about dogs. What if the new model were a stingy dog hater? Among other things, having such a father would transform me, which is to say that it would ruin my life. As to keeping Buck and acquiring a second father, well, Buck is quite enough, thank you. I’m unwilling to risk what could be insurmountable challenges. For example, what if I ended up with two of him?

But Holly Winter hadn’t been imagining that I’d wanted to make off with her life as a whole; she’d been thinking exclusively of money. The thinly veiled accusation was outrageous. I am a person of good character. Furthermore, if someone else’s Social Security number, bank account information, credit card numbers, and passwords fell into my possession, I’d immediately get in touch with their owner. If I wanted to use the information to commit financial fraud, I wouldn’t even know how to begin.

Still, Holly Winter’s suspicion that I had been involved in trying to steal her identity has perhaps left me permanently hypersensitive. Consequently, I want to emphasize that I did not steal a look at her e-mail. Rather, I acquired my knowledge of the message she sent to Dr. Zachary Ho in an honest fashion and did so only later, not on that same Sunday afternoon, when she sent it. But I do know the address she used and the content of the e-mail. The address was the one granted to Dr. Ho by his alma mater, that place down the street from my house that famously leaves its ineradicable mark on its graduates and, if they so choose, leaves its mark on their e-mail addresses, too, in the form of the extension @post.harvard.edu. As an aside, I will mention the obvious, namely, that I am a person who has devoted her life to dogs; who owns two male malamutes; and whose female malamute, Kimi, lifts her leg as a matter of routine and even tries to lift both hind legs simultaneously as a means of demonstrating her commitment to a peculiarly urinary version of women’s rights extremism. In other words, when I say that Harvard leaves its mark, I’m not using some vague and possibly inaccurate figure of speech; I know what I’m talking about.

So, Holly Winter composes e-mail to Dr. Zachary Ho at [email protected]. The post-dot-Harvard is simply a forwarding address, as the other Holly Winter knows: Harvard does not go so far as to provide Internet access to alumni; it just forwards mail. Even so, what Holly Winter seeks is the power to reach Zach Ho, in more senses than one, and power is what she trusts Harvard to have. After all, it’s the second wealthiest nonprofit in the world, second to the Vatican, and if that’s not power, what is?

Big dogs. My answer. Not hers.

This is not the first time she has ever e-mailed Zach Ho, but it is the first time she has ever sent an individual message to him. The members of the advisory board of the Cambridge Alliance for Media-free Preschools, CAMP, occasionally hold what I presume are media-free meetings at media-free households, but they also use e-mail to communicate with one another. Even when she sends a message to the group, she avoids the ubiquitous e-mail
Hi
, which offends her.

I was going to withhold my comments, but I ask you: “on the spot…you are not”! I was not and am not her
type
, but I do my best to edit out unintended rhymes. Furthermore, if I’m about to slip into Lauren Bacall mode by telling a man that if there’s anything he wants, all he has to do is whistle, I don’t preface the offer by telling him that his pets have died and then referring to them as “readily replaceable tangibles.”

I could go on. But I’ll just add that below Holly Winter’s name there appeared her phone numbers: office, home, and cell. Hot come-on, huh?