ANZUS
The Messenger
She made it home somewhere between sunset and darkfall, her headlights splashing a long path up the steep, narrow driveway to the farmhouse at the crest of the hill—the same hill that wound away to the south, right of the house and barn, and upon which sat the oak and gravesite she'd managed to keep up even after all these years. Not including that one spring when she'd been so distracted with her father's illness, and someone—someones—had invaded the fallow pasture and wreaked havoc at the oak.
There was no sign of Sunny as Brenna parked in the pole shed that served as a garage; she thought briefly about the dogs, and the unnatural silence of the night made her wish that she had climbed out of the car with her hands wrapped around a baseball bat instead of the super sub sandwich that would keep her fed for three nights. And then Sunny cut loose from inside the house, a beautiful Redbone bawl that ought to be sounding out in the woods for squirrel and coon—if only the young hound had had the faintest drive to hunt.
With her relief came the realization of how tired she was. Thank goodness there was no livestock waiting—although the knowledge that her unpredictable work life kept her from putting a horse in the old pasture, or even a goat or two to keep down the weeds, created its own resentment. At least she had today's small victory on the scoreboard, a patch of ground she'd won and kept for her own—the Wheaten had gone home with a new appointment for dematting and a bath, the owner's ire assuaged partly by sincere apologies but mostly by the coupon for a steep discount.
Roger had not been pleased. But Roger had been coming off his happy nodding conversation with the dismissive stranger and, occasionally, even Roger seemed to sense when he had pushed Brenna too far.
With deliberate effort, she put that part of her day behind her, and redirected her thoughts to more pleasant things. The sub sandwich and a nice cold soda, and then a long soak in the claw-footed tub that hunkered in the corner of the recently remodeled bathroom. She hadn't had any choice about that, not when a long-undetected leak sent the toilet through the floor and into the basement, but she was glad for the results—fresh, desert rose tile, the resurfaced tub, plenty of shelves, and faucets it was actually possible to turn off.
And despite the upkeep she was glad her brother Russell hadn't wanted the farm, though he had maintained his perceived first claim as son and oldest child even as he passed on it. She needed it more than he, he'd said—he could make his own way.
She'd never been sure why he had thought she couldn't.
Sub. Soda. Soak. She mounted the steps to the half-enclosed front porch—vertical slats below the handrail, open above—making the habitual observation that the third one sank a little too easily beneath her weight and ought to be replaced. With the sub, her coat, the cargo bag that served as a purse and carryall, and her mail jammed under one arm, she reached for the porch door.
Something whined.
Feral dogs. Roaming pack at the boiling point.
Something whined on the porch.
Brenna froze, her hand on the door latch. Yank it open, bolt inside—but any sudden movement could trigger an angry dog—or worse, a frightened dog, unwittingly trapped in the corner of her porch. Open the door slowly and slip inside—but any retreat could trigger excited prey instincts. Turn and face it—but that could be seen as a challenge.
For pity's sake, just stand here indefinitely, until this sub is so stale you can beat the creature to death with it.
It wasn't a pack of whines, it was a single whine. It wasn't an eager whine, it was a distressed whimper. Intermittent, with no sound of movement, no tick of claw against the hard painted wood.
Brenna turned around.
At first she saw nothing, until, blinking in the darkness, she became convinced that there was nothing to see. That it hadn't been on the porch, but under it, and now had fled. And then it whimpered and stirred, and she saw the faint sheen of an eye reflecting the dim night light from the dog room on the other side of the door.
As eyes went, they weren't terribly far from the ground.
"Hey," she said to it, a low-key and noncommittal response, just to lob the ball back into its court again. But there was no more forthcoming, and she opened the door behind her, snaked her arm around to feel the wall until she hit the light switch, and squinted in anticipation of the bare overhead bulb.
The dog had had no such warning; when the light blazed, it started, jumping into a jerky flight—but losing courage and freezing up instead. Brenna had all the time in the world to look it over—and she still wasn't sure what she'd found.
Ears, that was for sure. Big ears, upright like a German Shepherd's, and just as large as a Shepherd's even though the dog's head wouldn't reach her knee, not even if it had been standing alertly instead of cowering, its short legs spraddled out and its toenails digging into the porch as though at any moment it might go flying off the face of the earth from centrifugal force. She could almost hear its terror, its indecision, a fast babble of runrunrun and which way should I go, whichwaywhichway and don't move, don't move, can't be seen if I don't move.
What it was missing in length of leg it made up in length of body, but other than that the details were completely obscured in the stark chiaroscuro light and shadows of the overhead and the thick, all-encompassing coat of gritty dark mud soaking into the dog's coat.
Cardigan Welsh Corgi, she could tell that much. Nothing else had all that ear and so little leg—with the possible exception of a dock-tailed Pembroke Corgi, the queen's choice of breed—but she could quite clearly see a tail, flung out behind like a rudder, the quiver of it the only movement in the dog's body. Male dog, another glimpse told her.
Brenna didn't move. The dog didn't move. Sunny barked a query, her voice sweet enough to drive a tree hunter to tears, and the dog whimpered again, a sound that seemed to have been torn right out from the depths of his body.
This is starting to get more than silly. He wasn't going to hurt her; she couldn't stand there all night. Her feet hurt, the tub called, and some ill-advised soul had left a rare-breed dog loose to get lost on the turf of a roaming dog pack. "Look," she said to the dog, a matter-of-fact tone on the soothing side, "why don't you just—"
And he screamed—he screamed—and somehow flipped his long body around and flung himself over the side of the porch. Even having seen it, Brenna had no idea how he'd managed. "Damn," she said into the darkness, straightening and only then realizing she'd been slightly crouched, and that her back hurt along with the rest of her tired parts.
She didn't even think about going after him. Chase that? No point. She would eat, bathe, and go to bed—and in the morning she'd call animal control and report the sighting, so if they were on the alert for a Cardigan, they'd at least know where he'd been.
Sunny greeted her with much happiness and not the least resentment that interesting things had been happening just out of her sight; she cared only for the food that Brenna poured after dumping her own things on the kitchen table beyond the dog room. Sunny wasn't Brenna's dog, not really—never had been. She had arrived a reject, undernourished and severely lacking in intelligence, trail sense, and the potential ever to find another home. She adored Brenna—when she happened to notice her—and spent most of her time sitting in the yard watching the world happen around her, perfectly content that way. For visitors she'd bark a couple of times with a slightly puzzled expression, as if she were trying to remember if barking was what she was supposed to do, and then she'd give up and offer slobbery kisses instead.
Brenna thought it was more like having a pet rock than a dog, but in a strange way Sunny suited her current life perfectly. She didn't miss Brenna, she didn't get into trouble, and she wasn't wasted potential in any category—hunting, tracking, obedience, or agility work. She filled her role in life perfectly by being the sort of dog at which cat owners could point and feel superior.
Brenna gave Sunny's floppy gold-red ears a rub and placed the bowl in front of her big wire crate. This room was large for the mud and laundry room it had once been, and just a tad small for the dog and laundry room it now was. Aside from the old washer and dryer, it held several folded wire crates of various sizes, several nested rubber garbage cans for dog food which she un-nested at need, narrow metal shelves with grooming and medical supplies spilling over the edges, and a discreet stack of clean dishes. Not to mention Sunny's water dish, around which she'd spilled enough water to support the Loch Ness monster. Or the laundry, on which she'd been sleeping instead of the perfectly good dog bed; if it had been dirty before, now it qualified for the heavy-duty cycle.
Dropping her boots by the door, Brenna closed off the mostly unheated dog room and padded into the living room to kick the heat up from its frigid daytime setting. March first it might be, and sometimes warm enough for a vest over a sweatshirt, but on a day with lake clouds the house held a chill with vengeance. Pulling her hair from its doubled braid helped; she scrubbed her fingers through it, massaging her scalp, and let it fall to warm her neck and shoulders and the sides of her face. Then she found her slippers, hopping to put them on as she made her way to the first floor bedroom, where she made a face at her own absentminded distraction, pulling them back off so she could shed her work pants.
Tired, all right. If she had tried to stay and work that Wheaten, she'd have been too tired to stop for the sub and too tired to eat it, anyway. She'd pay for pulling the stunt with the discounted rescheduling—Roger would give her a passive-aggressive cold shoulder for a week—but it had been the right thing to do. Someday Roger would realize that groomer injuries happened when the groomers were exhausted—not quick enough to avoid the unexpected snap of a jaw, not alert enough to see it coming.
She and her hair were tangled in her Pets! store shirt, struggling with her bra hook, when Sunny sounded off. "Nice timing," she grumbled at the dog—but rushed to disentangle herself all the same. It was the stranger bark, one Sunny seldom used; all the world was a friend by her definition. Brenna jammed a nightshirt over her head and a sweatshirt over that, and stumbled into a pair of excessively well-worn jeans—one of these days she would put her foot right through the seat of them—and hopped back down the hall slippering her feet.
Sunny stood with her nose shoved up against the back doorjamb, snuffling noisily enough to inhale all of outdoors through the narrow crack. The hackles of her short, slick coat raised a dark line at her shoulders and down her spine; she didn't even look up as Brenna entered the cold room, hugging herself and wishing she'd at least taken the time to grab up her vest. She pulled the sweatshirt sleeves over her knuckles and peered out onto the porch.
She had forgotten to turn the light off, so all she saw was the glare of the bare bulb against the shiny enamel paint and pitch darkness beyond. But Sunny growled, a low monotone warning that Brenna couldn't recall ever having heard before. "Shhh," she said absently, not particularly expecting a response, but Sunny shushed all right.
"Gone?" Brenna looked down to ask her.
But Sunny cowered at her feet. She whined, and her eyes showed white, and then she bolted away from the door and ran circles around the room, her claws scrabbling in her usual graceless galumphing stride and her tail tucked so tightly to her belly that she didn't even appear to have a tail at all.
"Sunny!" Glancing from the bewildering dog to the starkly empty porch and back again, Brenna would have reached for her, tried to calm her—
But then she felt it herself.
A whisper of dire gibberish in her ear, a cold brush of fear down her neck; she slapped a hand to it, but this was no bug to brush away—it tickled down her spine and curled her toes and made her recently freed breasts feel tight and naked and exposed against the cold T-shirt. Behind her, Sunny crashed into her own crate and dove blindly inside, heading for the corner, where she hid her face and whined.
And Brenna clenched her jaw to keep from doing the same, clenched it till it ached, and still there was nothing on the porch but a pair of old mud boots and the wispy remains of last summer's potted impatiens. She made her arms into an X in front of her chest, and her fingers peeked out of the sweatshirt sleeves to grasp the material at her collarbones, kneading it without thought, her own hands mindlessly seeking to comfort her. Whispers and tickles and fear and a blind, groping invasion of—
Of nothing.
It left as abruptly as it had come.
Brenna gave a little laugh, sharp and bitter. "This job is getting to me," she told Sunny, ignoring for the moment that Sunny had no reason to let "this job" drive her into a crate and turn her into a whimpering ball of Redbone Hound. "I need more food and less caffeine. Definitely less caffeine." She went in to cut the sub up and pop tonight's portion into the microwave after slathering more of her favorite specialty mustard onto it than she probably should have. By the time the microwave dinged at her, she had a Sprite ready to go and had stuffed a few carrots in her mouth to assuage the inner voice that kept wanting to clamor about vegetables. Heck, there were tomatoes on the sub, weren't there? And onions—those should count for something.
A glance in the dog room showed her that Sunny had not moved, and she squelched the strong impulse to coax the dog out of the crate and soothe her. Sunny wouldn't come out until she was good and ready, and dragging her out would hardly create a soothing effect.
Brenna took her meal into the den—dark paneling left over from the seventies, a sagging couch she'd known all her life, her father's recliner, bought specially for him the year before he died and not something her mother could bear to take along to Sunset Village, the retirement community where she had been invited to stay with her younger sister, Ada . . . it was a room Brenna loved, but not one in which anyone else spent much time. The little television was here, the one that got only two channels no matter how you twiddled the antennae. She flipped it on, found a news-magazine show, and turned most of her attention to the sub.
Too much mustard, all right.
She ate it anyway, with as much—or as little—decorum as Sunny had used to devour her kibble. Then she went and washed the grime of the day from her face, and dusted the insides of her elbows with corn starch powder to get rid of the dog hair that often worked into the skin there. She'd given up on the bath while gathering her wits in the kitchen, not about to sit naked in a tub after feeling so naked and frightened right out there in the dog room. She checked on Sunny—who seemed to have forgotten the entire strange incident, and was hard at work on a bone—and plopped back down in front of the news show. Normally she just opened the back door and gave Sunny the boot until bedtime, but not tonight. Tonight she'd have to rig up something to keep Sunny under control when she went outside. An old longe line from Brenna's childhood horse, maybe, if she could find it.
But for now she settled in for a few moments of important enlightenment. This particular news show segment seemed to have something to do with cruise ships and their chefs. ". . . and you'll be as surprised as we were to learn who really handles the food behind the scenes," as they cut to a commercial.
"Bet I'm not," Brenna muttered at the television, pulling an old knit afghan off the back of the couch and wrapping it around herself as the commercials droned on. She closed her eyes; at some point the news show returned, diving into its intense scrutiny of shipboard cuisine with a grand display of moral outrage. Brenna drifted away, envisioning those same cameras behind the scenes at Pets!, focusing in tightly on Roger while in the background—
"—regret to report that there were no survivors found on the farm, another entire family lost to this new rabies. Shedding rabies is the common term being used for the mutated virus—"
Brenna jolted awake, squinting at the screen, frantically trying to refocus her thoughts and her eyes on the information they were presenting. Rabies? What? She hadn't heard—
"Not only were most of the workers we found less qualified than claimed, but our hidden cameras revealed unsanitary work habits—"
Back to the cruise ship. No, that wasn't right, they'd been talking about rabies, she was sure of it. A new kind of rabies. . . .
Yeah, right. Or maybe it was just her imagination, fueled by a pack of loose dogs and one spooky moment in the dog room. Brenna drew the afghan closer, curling into a tighter ball on the couch, letting her hair become a shroud in which she could hide while she thought.
And abruptly decided that she didn't want to think. She had things to do, and then she wanted to go to bed. Let Emily tease her about hitting the sack earlier than Emily's two kids; the kids didn't get up as early as she. Holding the afghan around her shoulders, she got a garbage bag and went from room to room, gathering the week's garbage in semidarkness out of sheer laziness when it came to turning on the lights—only to realize, as she reached the kitchen on her way out, that there was no way she was going to put out garbage with the feral dogs running crazed. She left the sack in the corner behind the kitchen door and went through her mail, pulling out the bills and dumping the rest, and then relinquished the afghan long enough to clean up the kitchen sink and table.
She ought to pay some of those bills while the table was clear enough to do it—she had a desk in one of the second-floor rooms, but its main purpose seemed to have evolved into providing a delicate balance of shifting and layered papers—old records, grooming newsletters, and a growing stack of clipped articles on introducing yourself to the computer age, keeping business records, and thrifty advertising methods. She ought to pay some of those bills . . . but not tonight.
Tonight she would beat Em's kids to bed; tomorrow she'd deal with the bills and other such things that hadn't been done over the course of this week. Spring grooming season, getting into gear . . . it was always like this.
Sunny waited for her, back to snorting at the doorjamb. Brenna couldn't blame her; the dog wasn't used to being confined during the evening. "Let me find you that longe line," she said, and started poking around on the metal shelves. Theoretically this was all dog stuff and not horse stuff—the barn held the old horse gear—but maybe if she was lucky . . . she hadn't sorted the shelves in some time, and that gave her some hope.
"Whoouh," Sunny said to her—said to the door, actually, and Brenna jerked to look at her with no little dread—but the dog's hackles were right where they belonged, smooth and slick all the way down her backbone. And her tail swung in an even, happy arc, steady at hip level.
Of course Brenna had to look, even as her hand closed over a tangled skein of flat cotton line. Absently shaking the line out so she could re-loop it around her hand and elbow, she went to the back door. Not so long ago she'd stood here shaking; now there was no menace—only her back door with a light she ought to have turned off burning outside in the cold night.
And there, standing at the top step, was the mud-dipped Cardigan Welsh Corgi. Stone-still, as if he had been that way for hours and would stay that way for hours yet. As she appeared in the doorway, Brenna thought she saw a slight tilt to one of those big ears, but she couldn't be sure; it didn't happen again. Finally she nudged Sunny into her crate and put her hand on the doorknob, slowly turning it.
He heard it, all right. You couldn't get any more alert than that pair of ears, radar-scoped at the door. But his expression was entirely different from the first time she'd seen him. Then he had been terrified beyond rational thought; now he stood at attention, his posture suddenly full of anticipation despite the fact that he hadn't truly moved.
Slowly, she pulled the door open. Slowly, she pushed the creaky screen door out.
They stared at one another.
Finally she said, "Would you like to come in?"
He trotted in as if she had been a doorman holding the door to his personal doghouse.
Her eyes widened; that was all. Until she had the door closed behind him, it was the only reaction she could afford. But she needn't have worried. He went to the center of the shallow room and plunked his bottom down, his eyes never leaving her face—and her eyes never leaving his—as she closed and latched the doors. From her crate, Sunny made a noise of protest—she still wanted out—but Brenna shook her head. "In a minute," she said, never moving her gaze from the mud-coated Cardigan. She crouched down and patted the floor. "C'mere," she said, in an offhand tone.
He came.
He not only came, he rested his muddy face against her leg and gave a sigh of contentment that verged on being an outright groan. Surprised, she hesitated, her hand hovering over his filthy coat—and in the end rested her hand on his shoulder, so damn happy to have him there that she couldn't quite believe herself. Didn't believe herself. This was the happiness of a dog long-lost, regained—not the simple relief that she'd pulled a stray in out of reach of trouble. It made no more sense than his flip-flop in behavior.
"Only a little while ago," she murmured, searching for her equilibrium, "you were so terrified of me that you practically did a backflip over the porch rail. Now you think I'm mama?"
Unless he had never been terrified of her at all.
Unless that which had come so soon afterward, that which had so frightened both Brenna and Sunny, had not been their combined imagination at all, and this dog had felt it too.
Something else that made no sense. Brenna shied away from thinking about it.
Sunny's antics in the crate acquired a certain fevered intensity, and Brenna retrieved the longe line, snapped it to Sunny's collar, and tied the end around a porch pillar, all while keeping half an eye on their guest. He sat waiting with all the patience in the world, and when she stuffed her hair down the back of her sweatshirt, grabbed a handful of towels from the top of Sunny's crate, and crouched by him again, he stoically allowed her to sop up what mud she could. That gritty, black mud, as if something had driven him through one of the many local mini-swamps at top speed.
Though she didn't know what it could have been, that wouldn't have caught him. Nimble and speedy as the Corgis were—and well they should be, having been bred to herd cattle—those short legs wouldn't outrun anything big enough to be a threat, not in the long haul.
Then again, she hadn't actually seen anything out there tonight, and he had performed Corgi gymnastics to run from that.
Quit trying to make it make sense. Sometimes things just didn't. What she knew for sure was that she had a Cardigan Welsh Corgi in her dog room, and that even the generous pile of towels accruing beside her wouldn't do anything but soak up dirty water, leaving the grit in his coat and a bath the only recourse. She couldn't be sure—not in this light, not without someone holding him so she could step back and take a look—but she had the feeling he was a fine dog, lots of good bone and without the exaggeratedly twisted ankles so many of them had. Someone would be missing him. She ran her hands around his neck and finally came up with a narrow nylon strip—not a collar, no more than a tag holder. And the tags, too, clinking dully in their wet and mud-coated state.
She tried to make them out, turning them to catch the light, but the engraving would take a good scrubbing before it became legible. The dog cocked his head at her, a quizzical expression, and it was then that she realized how she'd squinted her face up in her attempts to read the unreadable. Alert, then, and plenty responsive. She could stick pencils up her nose and waggle her fingers in her ears without getting anything but a bland stare from Sunny.
Not that she ever had. Ever.
In any case, she'd take him into work tomorrow—stealing a few moments with the tub and dryers was a job benefit for any groomer—scrub him up, clean up the tags, and see what she had to work with. Along with a few phone calls to animal control and the local volunteer adoption group, it would probably be enough to have this fellow home by tomorrow night.
She left the wet collar around his wet neck and pulled out one of the smaller wire crates; a touch too small for him, but for one night he could deal with it. The sharp noise of the shuffled crates put him on edge; his huge ears went from alert to wary as he moved to the far wall, his body hunched and poised for escape—even if there was nowhere to escape to, not this time. Still, no point in making it hard for him; she took the crate into the kitchen and assembled it there, flipping the sides into place with practiced ease and snicking the fasteners into place. She had planned to keep him in the kitchen, anyway—he was too wet to stay out in the cold dog room.
Unlike Sunny, who had been outside quite long enough to take care of her needs. Sunny whined and moaned and threw herself at the door if Brenna tried to keep her inside on a cold night; the most she could enforce was the compromise of the dog room.
Brenna tossed a few towels into the bottom of the new crate and went out to reel Sunny in and crate her with an outlandish bone. She'd been intending to use a slip-lead on the Cardi, but when he got a glimpse of the crate, he pushed his way through the partially open door and installed himself in his new quarters.
Brenna put a hand on her hip and made a face at him. "So you're crate-trained. Show-off." She freed her hair from her sweatshirt and debated whether or not to feed him—he'd need it, but she didn't want to dump food down him when he'd been stressed—and ended up giving him a scant handful of kibble. "Make yourself at home," she told him, deciding she wasn't going to be spooked away from her tub. "I've been waiting for my own bath all day, and I'm about to have it."
He met her gaze for a few moments, and then deliberately turned to the kibble, nuzzling it first and finally settling in to eat with a catlike finickiness.
"I guess I know when I'm dismissed," she said, but couldn't help but linger to watch him, so at home in her own kitchen, the very picture of a content dog. It was almost enough to make her forget the strange circumstances of his arrival.
But not quite.