The Dead Season (5 page)

She looked at the slightly soggy business card with relief while Max danced around her feet. “Thanks,” she said. “At least I’ll know he’s safe.”

I assured her that we provided the best care anywhere and bent down to pet the Lab’s shoulder. “He’s a great looking dog,” I said. “How old?”

“Four,” she answered immediately. “My parents gave him to me for my birthday. He’s a special dog. That’s why I wanted to have him with me when I took this internship.”

“You’re both lucky,” I told her. “Not many workplaces are dog-friendly.” I gave Max one last ear rub and turned to my potential new employer. “Thank you for the tour,” I said.

“I look forward to working with you,” he replied, taking my hand again in his firm, dry one. “And your dog, of course.”

“I have some things to work out first.” Like who was going to run Dog Daze now that we had an actual playing client. “I’ll let you know first thing in the morning.” I bent and scratched Max behind the ears. “Bye, Max. See you soon.”

Heather smiled at me, and Max tried to jump up and lick my face. Heather hauled him back just in time, and I laughed. I couldn’t help noticing that Paul did not, and his tone, when he spoke, was a little sharp. “If you’ll excuse me, Miss Stockton, I have students to attend to and so does Miss McBane. I look forward to hearing from you.”

And just like that, he turned and walked back down the hall to his office.

Heather started to hurry away as well, but I managed to catch her eye. “Be sure to bring Max’s shot records when you bring him in,” I said.

She said, “No problem. I had to get everything updated before I brought him out here.”

“I figured. You’ve been here awhile, then?”

She shook her head, flashing me a quick smile. “This will be my first trip out. I got here just after Christmas.”

Now I was confused. I dropped my hand to Max’s head, absently massaging his one crooked ear. “But I saw Max’s picture in the yearbook.” I nodded to the book on the cocktail table.

It was as though a shutter came over her eyes, and her face. “No,” she said flatly, “you didn’t. We just got here.”

“But—“

“A lot of dogs look alike,” she said firmly, tightening Max’s leash. “I have to go.”

I didn’t often make mistakes about dogs, but I had not kept her here to talk about Max. I said quickly, “Do you mind if I ask you something?”

She pulled Max close to her and looked at me uncertainly.

“Why would a man who doesn’t like dogs want to make them a part of his therapy program?”

She wound another loop of the leash around her hand. Poor Max was standing on his tiptoes now, tongue lolling, still fantasizing that he could break away and jump up on me at any moment. Heather’s lips compressed briefly. “It isn’t dogs he doesn’t like,” she said, and there was no mistaking the note of bitterness in her voice. “It’s anything—or anyone—he can’t control.” Alarm flashed in her eyes as she seemed to realize what she had said, and she added quickly, “What I mean is, discipline is the cornerstone of the New Day program. Structure is essential to recovery, and it’s important to demonstrate that to the students in every aspect of their lives here.” She tried a quick apologetic smile. “So an out-of-control dog isn’t a very good role model for out-of-control teenagers.”

I replied easily, “Well, I guess I can’t argue with that.” I tried to chat with her a little more, but she seemed nervous and anxious to get away. It could have been simply because her dog
was
out of control, and as anyone who’s ever tried it knows, it’s very difficult to have a normal conversation while trying to keep a seventy pound Labrador from mauling the person you’re talking to.

But I thought it was more than that.

And I also thought her first answer to my question about Paul Evans was the most accurate one: he didn’t like things he couldn’t control, which I suppose was not an unusual characteristic for someone who ran a camp for wayward teenagers. Every now and then, I’d get a guy like that in one of my obedience classes, but he never lasted long. For one thing, those kinds of men don’t have the patience to train a dog. For another, they never, ever tolerate taking orders from a woman.

If I did decide to take the job with New Day, I could tell already it would be a very interesting ten days.

CHAPTER F
IVE

I
was perusing the literature from the New Day Wilderness
Program
later that afternoon when my phone rang. I pushed a button and the rather handsome face of the person who had given me the phone for Christmas appeared. “Hi, baby,” he said.

“I am not your baby,” I told him and made sure to frown, even though I was happy to hear from him and I knew he had only said that to annoy me.

“Sorry, wrong number.”

My relationship with Miles Young was somewhat complicated, although it had definitely been on the upswing the past few weeks. On the one hand, it was he who was responsible for the desecration of my mountain in favor of a fly-in resort community and, in principle, he represented everything I had spent my life standing against. On the other hand, well, I really liked him. And he was perhaps the main reason I didn’t feel completely comfortable throwing stones at my philandering ex-husband. After all, I had moved on, too.

“Say, Miles,” I said, pushing aside the New Day paperwork and turning back to my computer, “Do you know how to upload photos to a website from this phone?”

“Not a clue,” he replied cheerfully. “Why don’t you ask the expert?”

The picture on the screen tilted, followed by some clattering in the background, and the close-up face of Miles’s nine-year-old daughter Melanie appeared. “Raine, look what Pepper can do!”

The screen tilted again and then focused on a golden retriever puppy who was holding a perfect sit and staring fixedly at the dog biscuit balanced on the end of her nose. Even as I started to cheer, I heard Melanie say, “Pepper, sit pretty.” And the puppy slowly raised her front paws, balancing on her hindquarters for a good two seconds without upsetting the dog biscuit perched on her nose. Melanie declared, “Release!” just as the puppy started to wobble. The dog biscuit toppled from her nose and the puppy snatched it midair.

I laughed out loud in delight, clapping my hands wildly. Cisco, who had been snoozing by the fire, came bounding over to investigate, and the two Aussie sisters soon followed. I tried to pet them all before their happy noses and wiggling butts knocked the phone out of my hand. “Melanie, that’s great!” I said. “Pepper, good girl!” I laughed again as the screen was filled with a sniffing golden retriever nose. Cisco pushed his own nose under my hand and tried to lick the phone, but I rescued it just in time.

Melanie’s plump face appeared again, surrounded by a riot of dark curls and framed by black glasses. “Pretty good, huh?” She grinned proudly. “We’ve been practicing all week.”

Less than a month ago, Pepper had been the runt of a litter of puppies that had been abandoned on my doorstep. Now she was living the good life in an Atlanta mansion with mani-pedis once a week, doggie day care and spa treatments, and a little girl who needed her even more than Pepper needed a good home. These kinds of rewards come rarely in dog rescue work, but when they do, they are worth all the sleepless nights, the mammoth dog food bills, the ruined carpets and the broken hearts that have gone before.

“Perfect,” I told her. “And keep it up. Balancing exercises are great for developing strength in her spine, and she’ll need that if she goes into agility. How’s she doing in puppy kindergarten?”

Melanie, who in addition to being an extremely bright child, had a natural knack for dog training and her father’s tendency to become passionately dedicated to whatever interested her, began to reel off a list of Pepper’s accomplishments. Naturally, she and Pepper were at the top of their class, but she was a bit worried that their instructor might not be qualified to take Pepper as far as she was capable of going. I assured her that Atlanta was filled with top dog trainers, and that when Pepper was ready to move on, I’d make sure she got into one of the best training clubs. Thus reassured, Melanie told me how to upload the photos to my website—naturally, there was an app for that—and put her father back on the phone.

“Guess what I’m going to do this weekend?” I told him, and until I said it, I didn’t realize that I had already made up my mind.

“Don’t even make me guess. We’ll be here all night.”

“Cisco and I are going on a ten-day wilderness hike with five juvenile delinquents to the top of Angel Head Mountain.”

His expression remained nonplussed. “Okay. That I would not have guessed.”

He was a good-looking man with short spiky salt-and-pepper hair and a firm, square jaw line. He was at his home desk with the corner of his laptop just visible and the movement of Melanie and Pepper forming shadows in the background. I could see his fingers moving on the computer keyboard as he added, “Is that one of those boot camp wilderness programs you hear about on TV?”

Clearly, I did not watch enough television. “I guess. I really hate it when you do that, you know.”

“Do what?”

“Multitask.”

“Sorry.” A few more keystrokes, then he said, “Here it is. I thought I remembered something CNN did a few years back. Sending you the video.” He closed the laptop and gave me his full attention. “So what are you and Cisco going to do on this hike across the frozen tundra?”

I made a wry face at him. “It’s not the frozen tundra. It’s just a few nights sleeping under the stars and eating pork and beans. It’s going to be fun.”

“Better you than me.”

“You are pathetic.”

“If you say so. I never knew there was one of those programs up there. How’d you hear about it?”

Miles had spent a lot of time and money investigating everything there was to know about this region before he had decided to invest here, and I suppose I should have been surprised that he was as unaware of New Day as I had been. Instead, I felt a little smug as I informed him, “It’s called the New Day Wilderness
Program
. They’ve been here for over three years, and they lease the land for the hikes from the power company. They use therapy dogs in their program and some of the counselors called me to certify their dogs, so when I went to find out about it this guy, the director Paul Evans, offered me a job as a field specialist on their next hike.”

“Smart fellow. I can’t think of anyone more qualified. What exactly did you say you’ll be doing again?”

“Well,” I admitted, “that part I’m not too clear on, but it pays two thousand dollars.”

His eyebrows went up at that. “For sleeping on the ground and eating pork and beans? Maybe you’d better read the fine print.”

“As long as I don’t have to be responsible for the juvenile delinquents, I don’t care what the fine print says. I’m a minimum wage earner, you know.”

“Well, now I feel bad. Guess where I’m going this weekend?”

“Umm… skiing in the Alps? Rafting down the Amazon?”

“Portugal.”

I frowned a little. “That’s in Spain, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s in Portugal. But you’re right about one thing—it’s warm and sunny there. So while you’re eating frozen pork and beans, I’ll be working on my tan.”

“What about Melanie?”

I try not to get involved in other peoples’ personal lives, I really do. Even the personal lives of people I like. I have enough trouble managing my dogs. But Miles had been a full-time father for less than three weeks, and I wondered if it might be a little soon to fall back into his cavalier globe-trotting lifestyle. Melanie had spent the majority of her life in New York with her mother—or, to be more accurate, at boarding schools with weekends in New York with her mother—who had unceremoniously abandoned custody when she decided to marry a Brazilian tennis player and live out of the country. I’m not saying Melanie had been a particular sweetheart about it in the beginning, but the fact that she had adjusted as well as she had done said a lot about her resilience. I really, really, didn’t want Miles to blow it now. Because in my whole life, there have been maybe three kids that I actually have liked. Melanie is one of them.  Miles said, “Grandma’s coming.”

And in the background, Melanie echoed, “Grandma’s coming!”

Well, that was good. I hadn’t actually thought he’d just leave the country and forget about her, the way a person might forget to feed the goldfish when he went away for a long weekend. But it wasn’t just Melanie, now. He had a whole family to worry about, and, after all, Melanie was practically old enough to take care of herself, but Pepper was just a puppy. “Are you sure that’s a good idea, Miles?” I lowered my voice a little, hoping not to be overheard by the young lady on the other end. “I mean, a puppy is a big responsibility. Does your mother even like dogs?”

For a moment his eyes were blank, and then he realized I was not talking about his daughter. The amusement that twitched his lips was rueful. “My mother was the first adult human Pepper met after you, remember? And she allowed a puppy to pee all over her sisal rugs at the beach house over Christmas, so I think she’ll be fine here. Besides, Melanie has your number.”