Brenna shook her head, hardly daring to do so.
"If we hear a lot of stray talk about the Parker place, we're going to know where it started. And that," he said, so close now that his nose almost touched hers, "
that
wouldn't be good for you at all. You got that?"
Brenna whispered, "Yes."
It was a squeaky, whisper, barely there at all, but it seemed to satisfy him. He jerked the door open wider and gestured sharply at freedom. "Get lost."
Brenna got.
~~~
Were she wise, she would have simply stayed at home after that. What had she learned, after all? That Parker's buddies were just as rough as Sam had suggested. That they were up to something. That they had big dogs. Probably guarding a huge cache of drugs or enslaved Asian women or...whatever. Nothing she was ready to suggest to anyone else—friend or local cop or even 911. Not until she got the chill of Mr. Mean's warning from her system.
Were she wise, she'd stay right there at home. Nursing her hand and her spirit, considering more fully the repairs necessary to the barn in order to house a horse or two. Taking care of business.
But she looked at her life, and the strange factors suddenly intruding into her days, and made the decision to be not-wise. In fact, sitting at the kitchen table, worrying the edges of Masera's business card, thinking of him eating there, thinking of the muzzy look on his face first thing in the morning, Brenna decided she'd had enough of forces acting on her life. Time for her to be a force herself, to act instead of react. Right now, these things
were
business.
Masera knew where she lived. Turn-about, she thought, was extremely fair play.
~~~
She figured it wouldn't be far, not with an address in the same small rural area, and it wasn't. A small ranch house on the other side of the compact town of Parma Hill itself, it sat back from the road a generous distance, without much in the way of trees to create privacy. A few bushes around the hanging sign—she would have mistaken it for a realty sign if she weren't looking—identifying the place as belonging to Gil Masera, dog trainer extraordinaire. White siding, deep teal shutters, a few more bushes to pass as landscaping around the house. It didn't look like the sort of place he'd live in, didn't reflect anything of him.
As if you know him so well
.
There were trees in back, and a fenced-in yard. Nothing that looked like rows of kennels or outbuildings, although her view was almost completely obscured by the house itself and the one strategically placed evergreen at the back corner of the house. She wouldn't get a better look in the back without sneaking around, and she'd had enough of that for one day.
This time, she would walk right up to the front door. Pound on it, if necessary.
She had the feeling it wouldn't be. He'd called someone, fully expected whoever it was to be here. And since there was a vehicle in the driveway—a sporty little miniature Jeep kind of vehicle, not Masera's SUV at all—Brenna pretty much expected that whoever-it-was was there right now.
So she pulled in the long driveway and marched up the walk and reached out to stab the doorbell—and stopped, following a wicked little impulse to make sure her hair ran under her vest and stuffing the end into her jeans at the small of her back. The most identifiable thing about her, hidden.
Then
she rang the doorbell.
She heard footsteps within the house almost right away, but no barking. No young pit bulls gamboling around in
this
house. Maybe there were kennels out back after all.
The door opened, and she knew right away she was looking at Masera's brother through the storm door between them. His younger brother. Not as tall as Masera, he had the same features in different proportions. Masera had a sharply defined nose, vaguely hawk-like, with distinct planes at the high bridge—side, top, side. This man had that...and more of it. And his jaw, although it followed the same straight line, didn't have the same amount of chin to balance it. But his eyes were a familiar deep, clear blue, and his lips, though thinner than his brother's, had the same built-in wry quirk at the corners of his mouth. "
Egun on,
" he said, and then, "Help you?" as though it had been an entire sentence.
"I hope so," Brenna said. "I saw Mr. Masera at the pet store, and I wanted to talk to him about private work with my dog. He's big, and lately he's been growling...I'm getting worried. But I haven't been able to get an answer on the phone number on his card." She waved it briefly and re-pocketed it with a shrug. "I was in the area, so I decided to stop by instead."
The man made a face, the exaggerated face of someone communicating in a second language he doesn't quite know. "Forgot the battery. Again. Very busy most days, Iban is."
Ee-BAHN
, he said, and for a moment Brenna didn't realize he was referring to Masera at all; she just gave him a puzzled stare. And then as she realized he referred to Masera, that this was another name for Masera and it fit so much better than
Gil
to her ear, it was the man who gave a laugh at himself and, still grinning, said, "Gil, I mean. Iban is his first name, but here in the States he uses the Gil name, his second name. Easier, he says."
"In the States?" Brenna said, and then, although she already suspected, added, "As opposed to...?"
"Euskal Herria," the man said. "You know, the Basque?"
All that guessing she'd done...not so far off the mark after all. Masera was Basque, his brother lived here, and he barely spoke English. She smiled. "I don't know much, I'm afraid. Though I never would have guessed that Mr. Masera's first language wasn't English." Not quite true.
The brother shrugged. "Him and I, we are different. Older brother, younger brother, you know? I am Eztebe. Steven, you would say in
Ingelesez
, but I prefer Eztebe. And I'll answer you what I can."
She didn't even try to repeat his name. His was a slippery accent, never coming down hard on any of the syllables, just skimming over them like touch and go. "About my dog," she said. "I was wondering if Mr. Masera could take him, maybe evaluate him here. Do you have kennel facilities?"
"Small," he said, holding up three fingers. "Full, right now. Gil knows if there will be room soon; I do not."
"Do you suppose I could see them?"
He gave a rueful shake of his head. "Best for Iban to show you. I know too little. When I visit, I feed them, I try not to like them too much. I have his list of classes—maybe you want that, so you can find him at the store? What,
Pets!
is the name, I think? Like calling a garden store
Tree!
, you think?"
She did, she decided, like Masera's brother Eztebe quite a bit more than Masera himself. "I've always thought so," she agreed. "If I want an exclamation point after a word, I put it there myself. They've got lots of good supplies there, but if I want my dog groomed, I'll do
that
myself, too." An opening, big and juicy.
He took it. More or less. "Iban says—" and then he stopped, as if realizing sudden discretion. "He says they are very busy, and to think about this when choosing where to go. Some people want a quieter place for their dogs, yes?"
Well, whatever he'd been
about
to say, what he'd actually said wasn't anything but the truth.
"He says go to the woman Brenna if you go there," Eztebe added. "He says she cares."
Well, huh
. "Thanks," she said, realizing she'd taken this about as far as she could. "I guess I'd like one of those class lists." More to avoid Masera than to find him.
Eztebe nodded, and left the door open while he fumbled in some papers on a small secretary not far from the door. She had the chance to look through the neat house and right out the back window of the small kitchen—yellow, wasn't everybody's kitchen yellow?—to the greening back yard. She'd only managed to sort out the edges of some kennel runs from the visual jumble when Eztebe filled the doorway again. "I'm kind of surprised," she told him. "I thought a trainer would have his own dogs running around the place."
"He lost the old one not long before," Eztebe said, and then corrected himself. "Not long
ago
. No new one yet. Maybe one of the little Welsh herding dogs, he told me."
Well, double-huh
. More truth from Masera. But what about those pit bulls? She was willing to bet that two of those three kennel runs were occupied by the pits, and not by customer dogs. He'd as much as admitted he had them.
Eztebe rustled the papers he held out, looking for her attention.
"Sorry," she said. "Just thinking about my dog. Worried, you know?"
"Talk to Iban," Eztebe said, and then gave her a sudden grin. "But don't tell him I told you that name, okay?" He held the papers out again, and this time she took them. He said, "Class list, price list. You can't find him at the store, use that phone number. Tonight, I put it in the charger myself."
She smiled at him and thanked him and folded the papers up to stuff in her back pocket on the way to her truck. So much for that.
She wasn't sure she'd learned much, at least not much of true relevance. Masera's houseguest was his brother, and his brother didn't know much about much when it came to the dogs. Didn't seem to consider the pit bulls to be Masera's even though Brenna was just as sure they were there behind the house; didn't seem to be so tight-lipped he wouldn't have said if he
did
consider the dogs to be Masera's. After all, he'd told her Masera's secret first name, and more or less told her that their family was Basque, but that they'd had very different upbringings. And that Masera was very busy, but she'd known that. Though she winced at the recollection of her glimpse of his fee list; she'd had no idea he charged $75 an hour when she'd called him, or when she'd insisted that he bill her. Maybe he wouldn't.
Eztebe
hadn't
said,
My idiot brother is obsessed with a woman who lives on a hill, he gets beat up on a regular basis, he knows something about Rob Parker that you don't know, and here's what he's hiding from you
.
For he was hiding something, of that she was sure.
All the same, as she started the truck and backed it down the drive, she found herself smiling. As little as it was, she probably knew just about as much of Masera's life as he knew of hers. It was a start. And with any luck, this was as far as it would go.