"What
is
he up to?" Emily asked, crossing her arms over her chest in a most suspicious posture and giving Brenna a
fess up
look.
Brenna only laughed. "You're not
my
mother," she said. "Save that face for the girls. And whatever that third thing is that you're holding on to, give it up."
"Ah," Emily said. "The
really
awkward one."
Brenna made an impatient come-hither gesture. "Just give."
"It's that fellow from the store. The one I've seen talking to you? The really—okay, I'm a married woman. I won't go there. But you know how Sam hears things..."
"As if I could
not
know," Brenna said. But she didn't like where this one was going.
"Well, he's heard things, all right. And he won't tell me what, because it's just mutterings, expressions, and reactions more than anything. But it could be that this guy's getting in with a bad crowd, Brenna. So just...be careful."
Brenna hunted down her annoyance and decided it wasn't because of the warning, but what she'd been warned about. "He works at the store," she said, and the annoyance slipped out. "That's all."
"That's all I thought." Emily gave her a puzzled look, a silent
what else?
. "But if
I
worked at the same store with him—well, forewarned is fore-armed, don't you think?"
Brenna sighed, already sorry for snapping, or coming close to it, and trying to look at Masera from Emily's eyes—Emily, who would be astonished if Brenna said
he's only spent one night here
with the wicked impulse she barely suppressed. "Yeah. You're right. Best to know." Even if she'd already known. The clues couldn't be hitting her any harder, one after the other. "So I'll see you this weekend, and I'll leave Druid here. I even promise not to lick the girls myself."
"Oh, now that
does
put my mind at ease," Emily said as she headed for the door. "It truly does."
Brenna grinned at the empty space she'd left behind, and yelled after Emily, "Oh, and hey—now that you've figured out how to get here, maybe you should come over more often!"
"Shut up!" Emily shouted back at her, words flung over her shoulder from the sound of it. Brenna looked at Druid and decided he was in complete agreement with her own perspective, but her smile faded quickly enough.
"Nuadha's Silver Druid," she said. "Kind of ironic, isn't it, Mister Dog with the Strange Rabies Tag? I get the feeling you're probably the only dog around that
is
safe for the girls to play with. Not that I understand one damn bit of it."
He cocked his head at her. Clueless. Of course. She might as well be making strange flying saucer noises through her lips. Which, on second thought, she decided to do, and found that it not only made him cock his head from side to side and back again, but his big ears somehow perked so intently that they looked bigger than ever. "Okay," she said. "That earns you dinner. Let's go."
That
, he understood. Five minutes later she was dumping food into his dish and scraping Spaghetti-Os out of a can for herself, not particularly interested in anything that took longer than three minutes to prepare no matter how wholesome it was. She slid the bowl into the microwave as she called her mother and listened to the phone ring, only belatedly realizing it was bingo night at Sunset Village. Right. Rhona and Ada cleaning up in the dining hall, faster on the draw than half the people there. When the machine clicked on, she left only a brief message, and then poured herself some soda. Druid was done eating by then, and he came into the kitchen through the half-open door from the dog room and looked at her quite expectantly, as though he hadn't been fed for weeks and she had the only food in the house. Brenna looked back at him.
He belched resoundingly.
"You know," she said, smirking, "that really does ruin the hungry-dog effect. Back to the drawing board for you. Better yet," she added, pouring herself a soda over lots of ice, "come into the den with me. We can watch the news. Maybe they'll even say something about the rude Pets! manager who won't talk to them."
The microwave dinged, presenting her with overheated Spaghetti-Os—she'd never found the
just right
setting for that particular comfort food, and had resigned herself to blowing endlessly on steaming spoons of pasta and burning her tongue at least once anyway—and she took them and the soda out into the den, knowing Druid would follow. Faced with full hands, she poked the television power button with her toe and plunked down into the couch, freezing at the unexpected crinkling she heard.
Emily's papers
. "You touch, you die," she warned Druid, putting her bowl on the floor so she could lean forward and yank the papers from her pocket. "There. Uplifting television, educational reading, and a repaired barn gate. What more could a woman ask for?"
New headlines, for one
. There they were, still leading off with the story about Elizabeth.
Wait. No.
Someone else.
"This man, recently found dead in the northwest area of the city, has been identified as a known felon." Cue mug shot, replacing the face of the mature, perfectly coifed anchor woman.
Mr. Cocky.
"Alarmingly, the cause of his death has been identified as rabies. Center for Disease Control officers have no official comment on the unheard of number of rabies cases in humans recently, although they're still unwilling to consider it an 'outbreak'." The anchor woman reappeared, with a clever graphic on the screen to the upper left of her head shot, a big red block
R
with a hypodermic crossing it and a jagged, Batman-like
KA-POW
outline around it. "Nor have they pinned down the primary source of these infections, originally thought to be a stray dog—a theory recently dismissed when a local woman came down with the disease."
Cut to a reporter standing outside Pets!, apparently oblivious that directly behind him, a large Malamute was lifting his leg on the fake fire hydrant provided especially for that purpose—although as the seconds passed, he moved to block the view, no doubt directed by the cameraman. Brenna, dizzily overcome with the portent of Mr. Cocky's death, imagined the cameraman's thoughts.
Note to self: Avoid fire hydrant backdrop
.
And then he started talking, and things got worse.
"We're saddened to report that local groomer Elizabeth Reed succumbed today to rabies—only moments ago, in fact—contracted through injuries sustained at this Pets! store—"
Brenna dropped the spoon back into her Spaghetti-Os, dropped the bowl into her lap. Stared at the screen, unheeding of the reporter's words, unable to hear anything but the voice in her head, the memory of a voice that had once sneaked inside her thoughts over Emily's kitchen table—
...local groomer Brenna Lynn Fallon succumbed today...
It was supposed to have been her. It truly was supposed to have been
her
.
And then Druid was staring at her with searing intensity. Whining his whine, so impossibly earnest—
Crowded shelters, dead pets piling up faster than they could be cremated, live ones impossibly crammed together—
On-site reporter: "Officials are suggesting that animal lovers keep their pets indoors or under supervision at all times out of doors."
Closed schools. Special hospital wards. Children chanting rhymes over double-scotch. Emily crying.
Druid whining. A voice from somewhere else, sounding only in her head—
"Shedding Rabies is the term being used for the mutated virus, an illness which incubates more quickly in humans than the well-known counterpart, but slowly in the common carrier animals..."
And there, on the television, a cut to animal control building exterior with voice-over. "The dog and cat drop-off rate has already doubled. Humane Society spokesperson Sarah Monscour suggests that this is an over-reaction, and could lead to the needless deaths of beloved pets."
Conditioned pit bulls in training, ravaging a small dog, clamping down long after the victim went limp in death, blood coating its face and chest. Emily crying.
Emily crying
.
Sarah Monscour: "Please, unless you know your pet has been in contact with a wild or stray animal, don't abandon or give them up. If you're concerned, there's a test available through your veterinarian. It's called the Rapid Fluorescent Focus Inhibition Test and can allay any concerns you might have about your pet and rabies."
Druid whining.
Almost a bark and almost words, warm brown eyes pinned to hers, his front feet on her knees. Not caring about the pungent pasta before him—the smell of which suddenly made Brenna ill. Truly ill, and she realized it just in time to plunge for the bathroom and flip the toilet lid up.
After she'd been sick, when she slid back on the tile floor and up against the tub, her arms wrapped around her knees, Druid crept in—he'd always been wary of the toilet—and whined a different whine. An ordinary sound, a dog confused and worried. He squeezed in under her arm and licked her face.
"They say not to let dogs do that," she told him solemnly. "But it can't be any worse than sticking your head in the toilet."
So they sat together, and she tried to put her thoughts together. Well,
her
thoughts...and thoughts she was certain weren't hers at all.
Parker and Mr. Cocky. Rabies.
Parker's girlfriend and her cat. Rabies.
Parker's barn and Parker's dogs.
Dog fighting
. Small animals ravaged in training. Small animals found by the roadside.
The Sheltie mix, found mauled by the roadside and taken through quarantine, through Janean's hands and into the home of a man now also dead.