LAGUZ
Water, That Which Conducts
Thnnck!
The .22-long bullet buried itself in the damp soil of the hill just to the right of her target, abruptly reminding Brenna that the sights on the old rifle were slightly off and she'd need to adjust them. Which she did, and promptly shattered the bit of a stick she'd jammed into the ground as a target.
Not that she was far away from it, certainly not far enough to crow about her marksmanship. But if she ended up firing this thing, it would be at close range. And the real point to the exercise was to trigger the years of target plunking she'd done in her teens, to reengage her handling and safety practices.
Besides, although she counted herself lucky to have avoided Roger during her time at the store bathing Druid, she was happy enough to imagine him here on the hill in a Manager Effigy. She pumped the old shell out of the chamber and the new one in, and settled the rifle to her shoulder. Thnnck!
She found a certain satisfaction in solitary target shooting, especially with the relatively quiet .22. No big kick, no rendingly explosive noise, just sighting, shooting, and working the smooth pump for another round. The creek burbled behind her, glinting in the sun; the hill blocked out the rest of the world before her, and the breeze that played in her bangs could almost—with some imagination—be called warm.
But she couldn't stay here forever. Aside from the fact that she had just run out of shells, there was a lost dog waiting to go home, and she didn't imagine he was terribly happy to be crated while she was gone. She needed to get him and walk on over to Emily's—not close but the next house north, a newer home built on the edge of the Calkins' recently sold farmland lots. A quick phone call had put the girls onto the computer search, and with any luck they'd have the information she needed by evening.
She double-checked to make sure there was no shell in the chamber, pointed the gun at the ground, headed for the hill—and stopped short. The old shrine, her hound's gravesite . . . she hadn't been there since the final snow had melted. So she walked along the hill instead, further out from the house, following the whimsical creek bed until the great oak loomed above her. Her tattered sneakers gave her perfect purchase in the grassy sod; twenty-four hours ago it would have been just the other side of muddy out here, but now she had nothing more than pleasantly soft ground beneath her feet. Up the hill she went, straight to the grave, where she set down the rifle and knelt, reminded of the first time she'd been allowed to shoot, and how the old hound had hung by her legs, always touching her, bumping her . . . worried about her, as if the loud noise might harm her.
He'd been shot once; X-rays later in life had shown the birdshot still buried in his haunch. So he had had good reason to worry—or so he must have felt.
She had loved him for it then. She loved him for it now. She shoved back the long sleeves of her hooded sweatshirt and tenderly straightened the site marker, an arrangement of rocks chosen for their size and shape and which, at the time, she had put a great deal of effort into creating. They were just plain old rocks, nothing more, but it didn't really matter. All that mattered was that seeing them helped her to remember him.
Rocks straightened, she let her sleeves slip back down over the heels of her hands—a hand-me-down from Russell, this one was—and placed one palm flat on the earth, remembering those years. And the years after them, when she had seemed practically able to speak to any dog that wandered by, to intuit their needs and the meanings of their slightest body language. Or that's how it had seemed at the time. At almost twenty-nine, she had a more jaded view of the world, and didn't particularly trust that things had been as she remembered them.
And all the same, she wished she could experience life on that level again. Simple. Not fraught with daily struggles just to make sure she could do her job safely and professionally. Being with dogs to be with them, and not ending up in adversarial relationships with animals who spent the afternoon with her now and then and didn't want to be there at all.
"I love you, old hound," she told the gravesite, and pushed herself to her feet, brushing off her damp knees, thinking of that terrible year when she had found the place desecrated, when her father had died and horror seemed to hang over this area for the rest of the year. Which didn't mean that the tiny trickle of a spring couldn't use a cleaning; it generally did. Leaves settled there, and the grasses grew long and bent over into it. Brenna moved over to tend it and stopped short, eyes narrowing.
Not a leaf, not a stick, not a single stray stem . . . she couldn't remember ever having seen it so . . . tidy. It looked as though someone had put giant lips to the spring from the other side and given a mighty puff, clearing away every stray bit of everything.
It made the tracks at the spring stand out rather starkly. Far too starkly for Brenna to miss. And after a youth spent tracking this critter and that on the farm just for the fun of it, far too starkly to mistake for the newly encroaching coyotes or, even less likely, fox.
Dog.
But not dog running across the area, or dog hanging around for a drink and making a mishmash of prints. Dog tracks coming from the spring, deep-set and clear in ground that was now dry enough to hold them that way, and heading for the creek. Digging deeply into the ground just at the spring, the way anything does when it's bolting into instant speed.
She followed them to the creek—they weren't as clear where the grass thickened, just a tuft or two of sod out of place along the way—where two deep prints showed how the dog had launched itself into the wide, relatively deep water. Not water over her head, but certainly over the top of any boots she might choose to wear, so she stopped there.
Dog on the run. Dog full of fear. Dog with Cardigan-sized prints.
Brenna went back to consider the spring.
Dog out of nowhere.
After a time she quit looking for answers where there weren't any, collected the gun, and returned to the house. There she had the middle section of the sub for dinner, fed the dogs, let Sunny hang out at the end of the longe line long enough to finish the dishes for the past few days, and then put Druid on a leash for the walk over to Emily's. The girls, she rightly thought, would love his silly long-bodied shape and his expressive ears, and until she had a better understanding of his puzzling responses, she'd rather have him with her than crated alone in her house.
The strong light of the day was finally fading when she presented herself at Emily's door and said, "What computer wonders have you wrought?" as Jill, the youngest, answered the door.
In response, Jill said, "Oh, he's so cuuute. But what happened to his legs?"
"That's how they're supposed to be," Brenna said, but she might as well not have bothered, as Jill leaned back and bellowed, "Marilee! Come and see Brenna's new dog!" Druid quailed at the sound, but then, so did Brenna.
"He's not my—" she started, and gave up, because Marilee had arrived and both girls were on their knees, petting and kissing and making gooey admiring noises. "Here," she said, and handed them the leash. "Don't frighten him, d'you hear? He's been through a lot in the past few days."
Whatever it might have been.
Emily, a sheaf of papers in hand, leaned against the kitchen archway and nodded at her daughters. "They're okay with him?"
"Even if he has one of his . . . moments, he's not going to do anything to hurt them," Brenna said, repeating the reassurance she'd given Emily on the phone. "If he was going to bite, he'd have nailed me by now." Given what she'd put him through, and how frightened he'd been at moments. Definitely not a fear-biter. Fear-freaker, now . . . that label, she'd paste on him. "I'd be more concerned about what two little girls could do to him—if they weren't yours."
"Okay, you get points for that last bit," Emily said. "Come sit down. Want some soda?"
"Anything decaf," Brenna said. It was, after all, her day off. She took a seat at the table, in a kitchen that was the antithesis of her own—too new to carry the hint of generations past, bright and open and airy. And peach-colored. Every time she came here, Brenna left with an impulse to paint her own kitchen, but when she got home she would realize again just how many other things needed attention, too—a new sink would have been outstanding—and so never got around to any of it. "What'd you find out?"
"A whole lot of nothing, I'm afraid," Emily said, pulling a one-liter bottle of Sprite out of the refrigerator and hunting through the freezer for ice cube trays that actually held ice. "The girls were delighted to play detective for you, but they couldn't find any kennel with the name of Nuadha, no matter what the breed. They did find the Web site for the national Cardigan club, and emailed the contact person. You gotta love email—they got an answer just a few moments ago." She set a glass in front of Brenna, but her expression didn't hold any triumph. She sat across from Brenna and pulled the coated elastic band from her ponytail, only to regather her shoulder-length hair and confine it again.
"Don't tell me," Brenna said, and felt all of her hopes for an easy resolution to Druid's fate fade to nothingness. "They haven't heard of any such kennel, either."
"They suggested that it was a fanciful call name as opposed to the dog's actual kennel name."
"With champion at the front of it?"
Emily shrugged. "Don't ask me. I don't know anything about this sort of thing. Now, if you want to talk cross-stitch—"
Brenna waved her to silence and Emily smirked. Any time Brenna became too full of jargon in her talk of dogs, Emily—who cross-stitched like a fiend and regularly sold patterns to stitchwork magazines—interrupted with chatter of her own specialty. "Well, the point is that we aren't going to locate the owner through them. Or even through the Web, it seems."
"You really ought to get yourself a computer," Emily said. "You could keep business records on it—"
"What business records?" Brenna snorted.
"—if you had your own business, and you'd be surprised what kind of resource the Web can be. You know the girls would be glad to show you how to use it, or you could go to the library—they run little classes on using the Internet all the time."
"Yeah, yeah," Brenna said, by way of saying, you're right but we both know I'm not going to rush out and do anything about it. "Let me get this dog squared away first."
"Looks like that could be a while." Emily sipped her own soda, and raised an eyebrow at Brenna.
"Don't remind me. I'm going to be in trouble with this one, Em."
Emily shook her head. "I don't know why you keep breaking your heart, taking these dogs in. If you're going to do it, hand them straight over to animal control, why don't you? Quit pouring yourself into them and fixing all their woes only to have to give them up."
"If I didn't fix their woes, half of them wouldn't be able to find new homes. And the other half would be dead through animal control if I didn't hang on to them as long as I do, waiting for their owners."
"So you always say. But we both know animal control does a pretty good job, if the owners care enough to check around. I think you just like the excuse."
Brenna, at a loss for any cogent argument, stuck out her tongue. Things hadn't changed much, it seemed; that had always been her answer to Russell, also. Russell, older and teasing her about her useless mutts, about how he did things that mattered—at the time, earning a letter on the school math team, already heading for his part-time job at the carpet store he had eventually bought out and expanded.
Not so many years between them, but a seemingly unbridgeable gap that had widened beyond repair the day he had found her with a new dog, a large, starving adolescent with a short, ruddy coat, handsome head, and what she'd immediately thought of as a permanent bad hair day because of the roughened hair on its back. He'd been more thoughtful, then, hadn't ribbed her or made fun of the animal, ugly in its emaciation despite its solid build and the 48injuries it had sustained. Injuries from human hands, which made her decide against looking for its former owners. In fact, after she had the dog fed up and responding happily to humankind again, he had casually mentioned he knew of a good home. She'd talked with the man, concurred, and placed the dog.
A year later, she had seen news of the dog's big win in a regional dog show. A Rhodesian Ridgeback, it was, and apparently quite a handsome one. But Brenna knew it couldn't be the dog the man claimed it to be, with the parentage and breeding behind it that he spoke of so glowingly in the printed interview. And Russell had just laughed. "His own dog got hit by a car," he said. "Yours was a perfect ringer. And where do you think I got the money for the junior prom? If you'd been more careful about reading the local weekly, you'd have known he lost the dog and could have had the money for yourself."
Her mother knew, if only she had been willing to see. And if her father had realized, he'd have done something, she was sure—but she couldn't bring herself to tell him and see it hurt him. So that was when she'd started reading up on breeds, a subject which hadn't truly mattered to someone who rescued dogs in whatever size, shape, and color they came to her. And that was when she stopped truly trusting her brother, who never understood her ire. "I never did anything wrong," he had told her. "I just sold him the dog. Not my business what he did with it."
No wonder she spent more time here than with her brother's family in town, and knew Emily's girls better than Russell's two boys.
The girls came clattering down the stairs and into the kitchen, Druid at their heels—leashless—and looking attentive and interested in all the little-girl things he'd been exposed to. Fashion dolls and stuffed animals . . . his fascinated expression led Brenna to decide on the spot that he hadn't been in a family with children, at least not girl children.
Nine-year-old Jill, perpetually chubby, freckled, and heading toward braces, held a brush in one hand and a comb in the other; Marilee—equally freckled but beginning to trade her baby fat for height—carried a surfeit of hair goodies, combs and elastics and a few things that Brenna couldn't even identify.
"Time for the ritual torture," Emily said. "It's what you deserve for coming over here and flaunting that hair in front of two little girls with short hair imposed upon them by their wicked mother."
"It's on my head, is all," Brenna said, but smiled. Emily's girls had no monopoly on their attentiveness; little girls too young to have been fully socialized often reached out to touch her hair in the store, usually with soft exclamations of delight.
"Hide it under a hat the next time," Emily responded, unruffled. "Go get her, my little hair stylists."
Already they were behind her, releasing her hair from its braid and finger combing it, as gentle as always.
"I just learned a new way to braid," Marilee said with enthusiasm. "It'll look so cool with hair this long. It's called a fishtail braid."
"Now that sounds attractive," Brenna said, but she slid down in the chair so she could relax, the groomer being groomed. If only half her own canine clients could learn to enjoy the tug and massage of the process.
Of course, she wasn't sure she'd enjoy it nearly as much if she, too, had mats. But without them she enjoyed it well enough to drift away in thought, Druid dozing by her feet. At least, until the voices started up.
They came to her in a murmur, as though she were stuck in a verbal collage. Male and female, none of them familiar, expressing themselves in incomplete sentences as though they came from a low-volume television with someone hopping through channels. Druid twitched against her feet, dreaming, but her awareness of it didn't distract her from the voices. Authorities have labeled itshedding rabies, said a male voice, and another man found dead in the city said a woman. Vaccine and too late and then an official-sounding voice that said take your dog out and back again, please. A few jumbled commands—things like stay, Druid, it's only for a little while and Druid, no! And oddly, in a voice that seemed familiar, . . . local groomer Brenna Lynn Fallon succumbed today—
Brenna jerked alert, barely aware of the girls' exclamations that they hadn't thought they'd pulled her hair. What the hell was—
And Druid jerked awake, looking dazed and disoriented. And then he looked at Brenna, and he screamed—a human sound no dog should ever voice. He flung himself backward, and even as Brenna would have grabbed for him, a dizzying vertigo clutched her; in the instant it took for solid ground to return, he was gone, and all three of the Brecken women, youngest to oldest, were staring wide-eyed at his wake.
"Oh-kaay," Emily said, turning both her gaze and her expertly raised eyebrow on Brenna.
"What the hell—" Brenna said, out loud this time, and then realized she was in the presence of young ears. "You guys didn't hear that." She grabbed an elastic from the table and brought her hair around. The fishtail braid was indeed cool, but apparently tedious in execution, for it was only a third of the way down her back. She overrode the girls' protests and fastened it where they had stopped.
"Do me a favor," she told them, talking over them, and her words hushed them fast enough. "Help me find him. He's probably hiding behind or under something. Don't try to get close to him. He's too afraid right now, and it wouldn't be kind to him."
Young women on a mission, they rushed from the kitchen.
Emily caught Brenna's eye and shook her head. "You told me he was strange, but . . . Brenna, just what is it you think you can do with that dog?"
Brenna had no doubt that if Druid had been on a leash, they would all have been treated to another incident of flailing and foaming and shrieking, and she sighed, meeting Emily's gaze long enough for an honest shrug. "I don't know. But you saw him . . . when he's normal, he's a charismatic and well-behaved dog. If I can only figure out what's causing the behavior—"
"The behavior," Emily said, and laughed without humor. "The behavior! Brenna, the dog is hallucinating! He's the doggy equivalent of a homeless man who's not sane and won't take his drugs!"
Brenna could only stare off in the direction of Druid's flight, bemused. Local groomer Brenna Lynn Fallon succumbed today . . .
Just how crazy did that make her?
Crazy enough to go back to work. On Saturday, no less, a day Brenna was used to working but one that always lasted several hours longer than she was actually scheduled, even double-teaming with Elizabeth and with someone pulled off the floor to wash the dogs.
Not someone who actually knew what they were doing, of course. One of the guys from the back of the store, whom Roger must have figured was large enough to handle the big ones. And who obviously loved dogs.
If only he'd ever washed one.
Brenna, swooping in to get her next clip job and crossing mental fingers that the dog was actually dry, found Deryl towel-drying a Collie-mutt and spotted the tell-tale slick of fur at a glance.
"He's still got soap in his hair," she told him, shouting out of necessity; all the dryers were going, all the crates full.
He gave a look of disbelief, clearly not able to comprehend that he'd missed some soapy spots or, more likely, that he'd missed them and she'd been able to see them. "But I've already got him half dry."
As if that was relevant. "Doesn't matter," she said, gesturing at the tub with her chin, her arms already full of West Highland Terrier. "Put him back in and rinse him again. If you don't get the soap out, he'll itch and we'll rightly get blamed for it." She freed an arm from the Westie, balancing the dog in her grip just long enough to point. "There. And there. Get those spots rinsed enough to make your fingers squeak."
And still the doubt.
"Just do it!" she said in exasperation. "You're getting paid by the hour, not by the dog!"
He frowned, hesitated, and thought better of it. When she left the room he was reinserting the unhappy dog into the tub.
Elizabeth was hard at work on a Samoyed who apparently hadn't been brushed all winter. "It's no wonder they hate us," she muttered to Brenna as she used the razor-sharp blades of a mat comb on the dog's haunches; it tried to whirl and snap, but she had it well secured.
Brenna didn't even bother to respond; it was a rhetorical grumble they perfected each spring. Instead she cranked the table up, deposited the Westie, and got to work. "And how are you today, Miss Daisy?" she said, and presented her face for licking.
"No fair," Elizabeth said, still grumbling. "You got to do Daisy last time she was in."
"Gotta be quick!" Brenna told her, grinning. Daisy came on a regular schedule, had a lovely coat, a sweet temperament, and solid conformation . . . good breeding, shining through. Grooming her always made Brenna remember what had attracted her to the job in the first place. Not just working with the dogs, but working with them in a way that they both enjoyed. Not just cleaning them up and putting them through a clipper assembly line, but turning it into an art of sorts, taking handsome little dogs like Daisy and putting a smart breed clip on them so they'd want to strut out of the shop.
And the hardest thing about Daisy was that although she knew to stand, she kept trying to give kisses. With a comb attachment, a little stripping work and thinning sheers, Brenna had Daisy spiffed up with a perky Westie breed cut and a tiny pink bow at the base of each ear. "You're too cute!" she told the dog, and escorted her to one of the front crates. Just in time; her owner would be along in fifteen minutes for pick-up.
By which time Brenna would be snacking on carrots and granola bars. "Everything else is still drying," she told Elizabeth, pulling off her grooming smock. "I'm going for lunch, and maybe even that break I worked through this morning."
"Fine by me," Elizabeth said, discarding a slicker brush's worth of hair on the floor. "I'll no doubt still be working on this dog when you get back. I hope you warned the owners that there would be matting charges."
"Oh, yes," Brenna said. "We had the my dog's not matted conversation. I provided visual aids and won the day." What she had done was to stick several wide-toothed combs into the dog's hair—where they stayed upright, quite securely anchored by the mats.
They kept combs on the front counter expressly for that purpose.
But she didn't have to think of that now. She could grab her lunch, her current paperback thriller, and let the rest of her brain take a deep, restful breath in the employee break room, where the biggest challenge was resisting the beguiling whisper of the snack pastries in the vending machine.
Which was where she was when Roger's new buddy sauntered in and poured himself a cup of coffee, a sheaf of photocopies tucked under his arm. She didn't look up from her book; peripheral vision identified him easily enough, although he wasn't moving with the same facility she had already associated with him. And he took no special note of her, not until he carefully eased into one of the folding metal chairs across the table from her and came out of his preoccupation long enough to recognize her. "How's that dog?" he asked, but his voice didn't sound especially solicitous. Making conversation.
She hesitated, tempted to pretend she was so absorbed by her reading that she didn't hear him and trying to pin down the faint accent in his words—not English, but too elusive to identify. He wasn't dissuaded; she felt his gaze through the book between them and finally she lowered the book to the table, careful to miss the remains of her lunch. "He's strange," she said noncommittally. "He's about the strangest dog I've ever dealt with, if you want to know. But I suppose somehow I'll manage."
"If you decide you want help, give me a call." He took a card from his shirt pocket and shoved it across the table at her.
"You know," Brenna said, feeling her mouth take over and knowing that she would probably regret it later, "if I was going to ask someone for help, it sure wouldn't be someone who makes that . . . face at me."
"Which face would that be?" he said, and she could swear she heard amusement. Not outright humor, just . . .
She couldn't tell, and it frustrated her. "The one you're probably making right now—" she said, finally and fully looking away from the book, and then cutting herself short. Whatever his expression, this was certainly the first time he'd had a couple of stitches in one eyebrow and dark purple bruising all the way down the side of his face . . . as if a heavy fist had skidded up from jaw to brow and come to an abrupt stop there. "Well, okay," she said, finding it odd to meet his gaze and those same clear, deep blue eyes as her own—familiar eyes in an unfamiliar framework. "Probably not that exact face. But under all the colors, pretty much identical." She imitated it for him. "Anyway, working with dogs is what I do."
Undeterred by her response, he nudged the business card toward her. Thanks to the stickiness of the table—there was a definite cabal of employees who thought a magic fairy would descend from the ceiling to clean up their mess once they'd gone, but it never seemed to happen—the card didn't go far, but Brenna reached for it anyway. She recognized the logo from his SUV right away, a generic dog silhouette circled by words. Gil Masera, it said. Dog Obedience and Behavior Specialist.
As she looked up from the card he shrugged and said, "Sometimes it's good to have a backup."
Obedience trainer? Talking to Roger, hanging around the store? Great—it was a probably a professional thing, then, that look. That judgment. Trainer techniques looking down on groomer techniques. She put the card back down where she'd gotten it, in the middle of the table, struck by a sudden bad feeling. "What is it you're you doing here?"
"Having coffee. Listening to you get straight to the point."
"It's better that way—I don't get a very long break." She flashed an annoyed look at him. "Why," she repeated, "are you having coffee here? Why does your presence make Roger deliriously happy? And why did do you look at me the way you do—" for he'd done it in the parking lot, too, more or less, "—and don't deny it."
He withstood the barrage with no change of expression, aside from one barely discernable wince when the coffee touched his split lip.
Maybe it would leave a scar, she thought, and gave it some hope.
He leaned back in the rickety chair, wincing again, but ignoring her blatant scrutiny of his physical woes. "I'm having coffee here because I'm here. I'm here because I'm trying to arrange the necessary layout to hold obedience classes in this store. Roger's happy because he thinks the classes will increase the customer base, and because he didn't think he'd talk me into signing on since I don't need his customer base."
"Then why did you? Sign on, I mean." Straight to the point, why not. "And don't think I didn't notice you didn't answer my last question."
"The church I used to work out of not only raised their rates, they kept taking my class space at the last minute." Straight to the point, right back at her. And there was something in his voice that let her know he answered because he chose to, and not necessarily just because she'd asked. "Roger made me a better offer."
No doubt. Brenna had gotten one of those herself, luring her away from her last job. And she'd questioned Roger carefully about her professional concerns, all of which he had assured her would never happen—and every one of which now occurred on a daily or weekly basis.
But let Gil Masera find that out for himself.
"The faces," Masera said bluntly, "are because I don't like big commercial grooming setups. I've seen the way the dogs are handled in those situations. I've even picked up the pieces."
Brenna's composure slipped. "You've never even seen me work! And you've probably picked up the pieces of what happens when a dog doesn't even see a brush until it's so matted that the owners drop off the mess for someone else to deal with, all while demanding that the dog's coat be saved."
"I've seen enough," he said, not narrowing his eyes so much as lowering the lids in a way that might have made someone else look sleepy but just made him look like a big cat waiting to pounce.
"You come work in the tub room for a week, if you want to say anything like that about this grooming room," Brenna said, her bangs sliding into her face with her emphatic words. She brushed at them in an automatic gesture and poofed them away for good measure, sitting back in the folding chair. "Are you always this abrasive?"
"It's a gift," he said, watching her. "Sometimes it suits me."
She quite definitely didn't know what to make of him. Under Russell's expectant stare she often kept silent, promising herself she'd do things her way as soon as he looked away—which never took long. But now . . . there was some unspoken challenge in Masera's scrutiny, and she gave him an even look in return. Standing behind what she'd said, the good and the bad of it both.
Still, it came as a relief when the door swung open, interrupting their temporarily silent exchange. Sammi Grozny of the People Placing Pets rescue group came in, hunting down a soda. PePP held weekly adoption days out of Pets!, during which the volunteers juggled various cats and dogs, made sure unsupervised kids didn't poke Fido's eyes out, diplomatically discouraged the people who wanted simply to walk away with a new pet, and encouraged the owner-prospects to fill out the initial questionnaire in the process of adoption. Saints, in other words, or so Brenna had always thought.
But not perfect ones. Sammi, who weighed enough that Brenna worried about her health and who never seemed to catch her breath, nonetheless used that breath on endless streams of verbal worrying. "Brenna!" she said, as though Masera weren't even in the room. "I wondered why I didn't see you out front. I wondered if you'd heard about that dog pack—you're right in their territory, aren't you?"
Before Brenna had a chance to answer, Masera said, "No one's seen a single member of that pack."
Sammi ignored him, making her soda selection automatically enough that it was obvious she knew this machine well. "I hope you're being careful."
"Sunny's crated," Brenna said, but she glanced at Masera and realized right away that his own words had been deceptively offhand in delivery; his eyes were watching every nuance of the conversation. "Hold on," she said, balling up the plastic wrap that had held her peanut butter and jelly sandwich and twisting to toss it out. "I'll walk back up front with you."
"Finish your lunch," Masera said, nodding at the remaining baggie of carrot sticks as he swallowed the last of his coffee; Brenna winced at the thought of how hot it must have been. "I'm through here."
It stopped her short, her hand in the act of stuffing the carrots into her Warrior Princess lunch box. He didn't wait for her response, but stood—or tried to. It seemed to take him by surprise, as though his attention had been so diverted that he'd forgotten his battered status. But he pushed himself to his feet, straightened with effort, and tossed his coffee cup at the giant bin in the corner of the room, gathering up his papers.
"Don't forget to come spend some time in the tub room," she said, and gave him a dare-you smile. People forgot she could do that; she had one of those wholesome faces, the kind that take on cheerful as their default expression. Her eyes even tipped up a tiny bit, as if they were always smiling. Sometimes she stood in front of the mirror and tried for sultry, but couldn't ever pull it off. Not with that chin—strong, in a strong jaw, and with a definite cleft. Or with those lips, which had a little uplift in each corner and, just like her eyes, always seemed to imply a smile even when just in repose. And her nose . . . just hopeless. Not that it didn't suit her face, but maybe that was the problem. It wasn't quite what you would call perky, not with that subtle bump on the bridge of it, but it was darn close.
Taken together, her features made people assume certain things of her. Because of her face, they thought her to be incessantly cheerful, and possibly just a little naive. Because she was tall and lean unto gawkiness, with big hands and bony shoulders and a body that, although it had decent dimensions, couldn't seem to assemble itself gracefully, they somehow thought her to be unsophisticated in a charming way, perhaps even someone to be protected, as her father always had.
But she wasn't. She could meet a challenge as well as anyone, and stand up for herself along the way. And that's what her smile said to Masera, a smile she'd startled herself with because she never bothered to use it on people who couldn't manage to perceive it, and here it was. Some part of her had realized the truth before her thinking brain. . .that he could see beyond her features, beyond her appearance.
The hard smile surprised him briefly, much as she'd meant it to—but it didn't seem to put him off, also as she'd meant it to. There was something about him that intensified, leaping to meet that look; something in those hooded eyes.
"Wait till you heal up from whoever kicked the tar out of you," she told him. "You don't want to have to call me in to lift a dog for you."
"Like you did for Roger," Sammi said with a wicked little grin—right on cue, her eyes lighting at the thought. Like all the PePP volunteers, Sammi was grateful for the adoption days allowed by Pets!—but it didn't make her blind to the way Roger managed his people.
"You see," Brenna said. "People hear about these things here. We watch out for one another."
"We do," Sammi said, quite aware that she was playing a role in a larger conversation that she didn't understand, but willing to team with Brenna to do it.
Again, amusement flickered across Gil's face, settling at one side of his mouth. The side with the split lip. "I'll keep that in mind," he said, and left the room—but somehow left some trace of his attitude behind.
It kept Sammi silent and thoughtful. Brenna gave it an internal scowl and jumped up to prowl the offerings of the snack machine, thinking hard about chocolate. She was still prowling when Sammi spoke up. "Who was that? Why don't you like him?"
"Because he doesn't like me," Brenna said, which was indeed what it basically boiled down to. Judging her and Elizabeth simply because of the way they might—or might not, given that he'd never seen them—handle dogs.
"Something didn't like him," Sammi said. "Car accident?"
"Fight, I'm betting," Brenna said, thinking of how similar Russell had looked and moved the time several high school rivals had teamed up to put some hurt on him. Not truly to damage him . . . just to make a point.
A very hard point.
Brenna sat on the corner of the table, struggling with the cellophane on the brownie she had just rescued from the depths of the machine. "Anyway, I am being careful about the dog pack. Not even going out at night. At least I don't have anyone leasing the barn right now . . . though I ought to try to get someone in there this spring." She broke off a piece of brownie, popped it into her mouth, and spoke around it. "Is it true? That no one's actually seen any of the dogs?"
Sammi hesitated, long enough for Brenna to sift through her own recollection of news briefs heard on the radio, going to and from work. Someone had found a mauled cat on the edge of their property and the wounds were determined to be dog-inflicted. Someone else had found a small mutt dead in the woods edging a farmer's field. But had anyone seen the pack? Had anyone seen even a single dog?
Gil Masera knew something, that was for sure.
Or he thought he knew something.
"No," Sammi finally said, picking at the tab opener of her soda. She looked up at Brenna. "But plenty of people have seen what they've done. We've got PePP members out in your area right now—someone found another dead dog last night, a little Jack Russell mix. Some of us volunteered to look for signs of the pack. And Janean is at Lakeridge right now with a second dog—this one's alive. It's hurt, but alive. It'll go through quarantine, and if the owner hasn't shown up, we'll take it on till it heals and place it." She gave Brenna a dark look. "It used to be a real pretty little Sheltie mix. So don't tell me those dogs aren't out there somewhere. And don't you get careless about them."
Brenna held up both hands. "Like I said, Sunny's crated." Never mind explaining Druid, who was crated right along with the hound but had disdained the bone Brenna had left him; his stare had bored into her back as she'd left the house, sending the certain message that he was supposed to be coming with her, regardless of where she was headed. "And I'm not going out after dark, at least not until this whole dog pack thing is sorted out or broken up or whatever."
"Well, good," Sammi said, mollified. She took a swig of her soda while Brenna chewed the brownie—mostly cardboard, but her body seemed to think it was getting chocolate—and said, "Tell me again who that was?"
It took Brenna a moment, since she hadn't said anything on the subject in the first place. "Gil Masera, you mean? Says he's a trainer. Looks like he's going to be working out of Pets! For a while, anyway."
Sammi waggled her eyebrows at Brenna, no part of subtle. "Bet he cleans up nice."
Brenna laughed at her—Sammi was at all times an earthy delight—but her reply was sober and certain. "And I'm betting he won't be here long enough to find out. Guy with an attitude like that? Roger won't be able to hang on to him."
But he knew something. And before he went, she wanted to know what.