Roll Over and Play Dead (7 page)

I pondered the matter the rest of the day, closed the store as the beer garden across the street began to draw customers like a magnet, and walked to my apartment. There was a postcard from Miss Emily that extolled the beauty of the Southwest and mentioned her growing fondness for tequila sunrises at sunset. There was a short note from Peter, mentioning how crazy his mother made him and how crazy I made him in an altogether different (and presumably preferable) way. He hoped to be back in Farberville Sunday.

I called Luanne Bradshaw to see if she wanted to see a movie, but there was no answer, and after a minute of thought, I remembered she’d gone out of town to visit her daughter. No one else I could think of sounded interesting, so I resigned myself to an uneventful evening of news, weather, and a cozy mystery novel. One of the joys of being single.

I was reading the newspaper when the telephone rang. Supposing it was for Caron, I picked up the receiver and in a desultory voice, said, “Hello.”

“Mrs. Malloy, this is Lydia Horne. I’m sorry to have to call you this late in the day, but we had a teachers’ meeting after school and Mr. Higginbotham rambled for hours about the shop budget. Then my car battery was dead, and I had to wait until my husband got off work to rescue me with jumper cables.”

“Sorry to hear that,” I said.

“It happens,” she said. “In any case, Caron’s situation was discussed at the meeting, and I’m afraid we’ll have to follow the policy.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, paying more attention. “Are you one of Caron’s teachers?”

“Her biology teacher. Didn’t she consult you about her stand and the possibility of expulsion?”

I rubbed my face with my free hand, trying to recall the conversation in the car about biology. It hadn’t gone anywhere beyond a vague reference to an impending telephone call. The receiver was in my hand, and it seemed the ball was in my court. “Expulsion?” I echoed cleverly.

“You mean she hasn’t told you what I said in the middle of the week? I’m surprised to hear that, Mrs. Malloy, especially considering the severe consequences of her action. I assured her that I understood, and to some degree sympathized, but I had to warn her that the faculty disciplinary committee might vote to uphold the administrative guidelines.”

“What are we talking about, Mrs. Horne?”

“Why, Caron’s refusal to dissect a frog next week in lab.”

“Did she offer a reason?”

“She spoke very eloquently about her position as an animal rights activist. I myself was impressed, and as I said, felt some sympathy. But Biology I is mandatory for all sophomores, and one requirement for a passing grade is full participation in all lab assignments. No exceptions are allowed, and failure to comply with a teacher’s explicit instructions is grounds for expulsion.”

I reminded myself of my earlier observation concerning the danger of an erumpent social conscience—or the convenience of a politically defensible posture when confronted with the pristine white belly of a dead frog.

“I’ll talk to her,” I said grimly.

“I wish this wasn’t a problem. We encourage the students to take responsibility for themselves and their environment, and to develop a personal philosophy to guide them. Then we turn around and tell them to ignore their beliefs and follow the rules. I was rather surprised by Caron’s vehemence, but none of us can predict what’s going on inside a teenager’s mind, can we?”

I assured her that I certainly couldn’t, told her I would talk to Caron immediately, and agreed to come to the high school Monday morning for a conference with the principal. None of this left me in a good mood, and the more I thought about my daughter’s transformation from oblivious to all creatures great and small to dedicated animal activist, the more I doubted the sincerity of her stand. Which was going to get her expelled from school. Conferences, tedious meetings, the expense of legal representation, the tuition at the nearest (or farthest) convent—all of it because she didn’t want to examine a racine interior in the name of knowledge.

It was almost a rite of passage, I told myself. One could not make the transition to adulthood without the obligatory hell of pimples, neurotic teachers, dim-witted parents, back-stabbing best friends, and the opportunity to cut a frog into little bitty pieces in Biology I.

I decided to call and delicately inquire into her motives before I ripped out my hair or overindulged myself in scotch, both appealing possibilities. Inez’s mother answered the phone, and I asked to speak to Caron.

“The girls are planning to spend the night at your home tonight,” she said. “They told me they were going to make posters of some sort.”

“I must have misunderstood,” I said, not yet ready to alarm her. “I’ll call Rhonda Maguire’s house and see if they’re painting in the garage.”

Once I’d hung up, though, I didn’t bother to look up Rhonda’s number because I knew damn well they weren’t there. Mentally vowing to ground Caron for the rest of her life, I picked up my purse and went to pay a little visit to Willow Street.

It was after eight o’clock. Miss Emily’s house was dark, downstairs and in Daryl’s apartment. Culworthy’s house was dark, too, and no one answered my insistent knock on Vidalia’s door. I wasn’t sure where George and Helen lived, but I doubted it mattered since I had a strong theory as to their collective whereabouts.

They were being attacked by pit bulls or being blasted by a shotgun. Or both.

Vacillating between anger and fear, I sat in my car and tried to decide what to do. If Peter was in town (and I seemed be thinking that much too often recently), I could have called him, explained the situation, and elicited at least token police protection while storming NewCo. The sheriff, off duty by now, would not be happy to hear the group was trespassing and dodging vicious dogs and shotgun pellets.

The sheriff had sent Deputy Rory Amos with us because he lived near NewCo. I drove to a convenience store and found his name in the telephone book, although the address was of the route and box variety and therefore of no help. Crossing my fingers, I called the number.

Deputy Amos answered. I quickly explained the situation, then listened while he cursed under his breath for a long while. He finally exhaled loudly and said, “You’re right to suspect they’re in danger. Churls won’t hesitate to loose the dogs and the law’s on his side.” He described his house, one of those along the NewCo road, and told me to get there as quickly as possible.

The half hour it took to drive to his house seemed like an eon, having entertained myself with ghastly images of Caron, Inez, pit bulls, and reconstructive plastic surgery. Deputy Amos lived in a small, bleak box. Lights were on inside, as was the porchlight he’d told me to watch for. I hurried to the door and knocked.

A young woman in tight designer jeans and a translucent blouse opened the door. Her short, dark hair had been coached into an elaborate style that included wings and a frizzy cascade of bangs. Her makeup was equally artistic, if heavy-handed. “He went down the road apiece to listen for gunfire,” she said in a high, breathless voice, her chest heaving slightly as if she were expecting a handsome encyclopedia salesman. “You’re supposed to wait here.”

In that she did not move, I assumed she meant on the porch. “Are you Mrs. Amos?” I said.

“It ain’t legal, but we’ve been living together for three years, ever since I got out of school.” Tapping her foot impatiently, she glanced at her watch, leaned forward to look at the darkness behind me, and scowled. “I’m already late to meet some friends at a bar in Farberville. Tell Rory I may decide to sleep over at Darla’s tonight and I’ll see him when I get back.”

She went past me to a mud-splattered sports car parked beside Deputy Amos’s less remarkable truck. Minutes later the taillights blinked a farewell as she drove toward the highway. I went to the edge of the road, displeased at the instructions to wait, and finally got in my car and drove in the opposite direction to the NewCo gate.

My headlights caught Deputy Amos standing in the ditch. He was in uniform, and to my relief, armed. I parked, then went over to him and said, “Did you hear anything?”

“The dogs sound pretty excited, but I haven’t heard a shotgun,” he said, trying to sound like a grown-up cop but not succeeding. “I ran down here soon as I got your call. Could be you’re wrong about the folks coming back here at night. They didn’t look completely crazy.”

Declining to debate that issue, I went to the gate. A light atop a utility pole beside the house shone on the cars and truck parked in the weedy grass. The house was lit from inside, but drapes blocked the windows and there was no indication whether Churls was home or not. The dogs, however, were definitely there; I could hear a discordant symphony of wuffly barks, growls, and howls. The sound chilled me.

“We’ve got to go in there,” I said frantically. “My daughter and her friend are there with the others. Is your gun loaded?”

“I don’t know what Sheriff Dorfer’s gonna say about this,” he groaned. “I tried to get hold of him, but he didn’t call me back, so I guess he’s out of pocket. This is trespassing, sure as we’re standing here.”

I climbed over the gate, halted within reach of it in case I was to be attacked by pit bulls, and then went toward the house. I could hear Amos as he clattered over the gate. He was still panting as he caught up with me, but neither of us had anything to say.

The dogs in the corridors of cages reacted to our arrival with varied degrees of interest. Some barked or leapt against the metal fencing; others did not move at all. A few were so engrossed by the noise from behind the house that their heads did not turn. The barking and howling came from these captives, I realized as I struggled for air; the pit bulls in the pen were growling like bulldozers on an uneven terrain.

We raced around the corner of the house and froze. The dogs were in the pen, attacking a figure sprawled on the concrete floor. Blood splattered as one swung its head up, a hunk of flesh in its mouth. Another was latched onto its victim’s throat. Even with its jaws clamped shut, the dog managed to growl in a rhythmic drone. The third bounced frenetically from one end of the body to the other.

“My God,” I said, clutching Amos’s arm. “Stop them!”

His face was ghostly in the dim light, and his voice broke like an adolescent’s as he said, “There’s someone in there.”

I shoved him forward. “You’ve got to stop them. Shoot them!”

He took his gun from the holster, grasped it with two shaking hands, and shoved the barrel through the fence. He hesitated so long I wanted to leap on him, screeching, but at last three rapid gunshots exploded in the night. The growls did not stop. He fired three more times.

The growls ceased. The dogs in the cages in the side yard were startled into silence.

My ears reverberating with the sound, I forced myself to approach the pen. What was left of Newton Churls did not move. No flicker of life could be seen in his eyes, widened in fear and pain, nor in his curled, bloodied hands. His clothing was shredded and stained with blood. The dogs were slumped on him; the one clamped on Churls’s throat had not loosened its jaws even now. Blood seeped from the ragged black holes in their sides, dripping onto the floor to mingle with what was already there.

Deputy Amos sank down in the grass and placed his gun on the ground in front of him as if the pen were a shrine. “Oh, my God,” he said in a stunned voice. “Oh, my God.”

I was gulping back acid, and my voice was no more in control than his. “There’s no question that he’s dead.” My knees buckled sharply, and I sat down beside Amos. The silence was as suffocating as a heavy blanket. I closed my eyes, but the red spatters were impossible to escape and I felt myself beginning to sway.

“Oh, my God,” Amos repeated. He said it several more times before he began to cry silently.

I don’t know how long Deputy Amos and I sat on the grass outside the pen, his gun in front of us and the only sound the screeches of a bird far away in the woods. We were still there when the dogs at the side of the house began to make their strange wuffly noises.

“Mother?” said a thin, terrified voice.

I didn’t turn around. “Are you and the others unharmed?”

“Yeah, we’re okay. What happened…?”

Their feet shuffled as they came nearer. I recognized Culworthy’s snort, Vidalia’s gasp, and Daryl’s stunned voice as he said, “Holy hell, there’s someone in there.”

A muffled cry was followed by a retching noise; whose, I did not know or care. The low babble expressed shock and horror. I patted Deputy Amos’s shoulder and stood up. The commandos were dressed in dark clothes, and their faces were smeared with black makeup. In different circumstances, I would have found them comical. Now, in the shadowy light, they looked like ghouls. “Newton Churls is in there,” I said. “His dogs attacked him and Deputy Amos had to shoot them.”

“Is he dead?” asked Inez faintly.

I nodded. “Very much so.”

Helen was holding onto her husband’s arm, and she propelled him along for support as she approached the pen. “This is terrible. We can’t just leave him like that.”

Vidalia was hanging onto Culworthy’s arm, but rather than propelling him, she was dragged along as he came forward and said, “Damn indecent to leave him there. Accident, but his fault for having vicious animals, I should say. The breed’s known to attack, have to expect it.”

“This was no accident,” I said. “It was murder.”

Deputy Amos struggled to his feet. “Murder? These dogs are trained to attack. He baited them with puppies and cats so they’d develop a taste for blood. Even a trainer’s not safe with them, and Churls damn well knew it.”

“I’m going to throw up now,” Caron announced calmly, then covered her mouth and ran to the back fence. Inez followed her at a prudent distance.

“Why murder?” Culworthy snapped.

“Surely it’s an accident,” said Vidalia, nodding.

I ignored them and looked at Amos. “There’s a padlock on the cage door. Newton Churls may have gone in there for some reason, but he wouldn’t lock himself inside the pen with the dogs.”

Amos went over to the lock and grabbed it. “We’ve got to get this off,” he said, yanking at it so frantically that the whole pen rattled.

I shook my head. “You’d better call the sheriff.”

“He plays poker on Fridays, and he’s not gonna like this.”

“Neither, one assumes, did Newton Churls.”

He went into the house through the back door. The commandos regrouped nervously, except for Caron, who was clinging to the fence while Inez patted her back. “Well, did you find any proof your animals are here or have ever been here?” I asked angrily.

Culworthy cleared his throat. “No proof, actually.”

“What, actually?” I said.

Helen was still hanging onto her husband, but she had regained some of her composure. “We weren’t here long enough to put the complete plan into action. George and I were to see if we could find any animals being kept in the woods, but he forgot to check the flashlight batteries before we set out. He returned to borrow a flashlight. After a few minutes, I became nervous and followed him. That’s when we heard the gunshots.”

Daryl Defoe said, “I took down license plate numbers and went around to the shed to see if there were any more animals there. All I found were some busted cages.”

“Colonel Culworthy and I were making a list of those POW animals,” Vidalia said, fluttering her hand toward the side yard. “We thought we might present it to the director of the animal shelter, in case she might recognize one from her reports of stolen animals.”

“I didn’t see either of you,” I said. “Deputy Amos and I walked past the cages.”

“I might have ducked into an empty pen for a moment.”

Culworthy’s face was black, but his ears were red. “Thought I heard a noise, like someone escaping into the brush. Went to the edge of the woods, stood there.”

“With his back to me,” Vidalia added graciously. “He was ever so polite.”

I was not. “Who allowed Caron and Inez to accompany you on this idiotic mission?”

“I argued with them,” Daryl said.

“They were most insistent,” chirped Vidalia. “All of us did our best to dissuade them, but it did no good whatsoever. Caron said something about alerting you and the sheriff if they were left behind.”

Blackmail while in her minority. By the time she was twenty-one, who could begin to imagine the depth and breadth of her felonious mind? Colonel Culworthy was bending over the padlock, grumbling to himself, and the others were moving closer to the pen. I suggested we wait for the sheriff in the front yard.

We were doing so on the porch when lights flashed in the road beyond the gate. Doors slammed, and the gate was rattled unsuccessfully. “Deputy Amos!” the sheriff shouted.

I stood up. “He’s in the house.”

“Tell him to find the key for this damn lock, and not to take all night about it!”

I went into Churls’s house. The living room was furnished in Early Salvation Army. The couch was lumpy, its upholstery worn to nothing in some areas and splotched in others. The plastic cover on the recliner was peeling like sunburned skin. The coffee table was littered with beer cans, cigarette butts, and wads of paper. The television set, however, took up most of a wall and was clearly state-of-the-art, with a control panel that might have come off a 747. Even to those of us unenamored of technology, it looked very expensive.

“Deputy Amos?” I called.

He came through a doorway. “I was about to go out the back door. Is the sheriff here?”

“He wants you to find the key to the lock on the gate. There’re several vehicles, and I suppose they need to have access to the…yard.”

“There’s a board with keys in the kitchen. What’s more interesting is what I found on the kitchen table.”

He retreated, and I followed him with a bemused look. Lieutenant Peter Rosen had his minions so well trained that they would swallow their tongues before they’d give me the time of day. Deputy Amos, a truly cooperative chap, wanted to share his newly discovered evidence with me.

There was a battered metal box on the table. It had been pried open and its contents removed. “This is interesting,” I said as I bent down to study it. “If it belonged to Churls, he wouldn’t have had to force the lock. It either belongs to someone else, or someone else did this to it.”

“I checked the house,” he said nervously, “and there’s no one here. No one else living here, from the looks of the bedroom.”

“It’s hard to envision a Mrs. Churls,” I murmured. I went to the board on the wall and squinted at the coarsely printed labels below each key. I plucked one and said, “Here’s the one the sheriff needs. And while I’m thinking about it, your—ah, the woman at your house said to tell you she’s spending the night with a girlfriend.”

“I’ll be here all night, anyway,” he said with a grimace. He sat down at the table, looking very young and vulnerable in the yellowish light from above. “I’ve pulled a couple of bodies out of car wrecks,” he said, almost apologetically, “but we practically walked into the middle of this one.”

“Why would the dogs attack like that?” I said.

Before he could answer (if indeed he could answer), Culworthy came to the doorway and said, “Sheriff wants the key. Sounds agitated.”

Amos made a face at me, took the key from my hand, and went out of the room. Culworthy pointed at the broken box. “What’s this?”

“I don’t know if it’s anything of importance,” I said as I started to leave. I took a second look at the keyboard as I passed it; as I’d thought, the key labeled “dg pin” was hanging in its place.

The sheriff had parked on the lawn and was getting out of his car as we came out the door. The blue light was still rotating, illuminating faces for a dizzying brief second. Sheriff Dorfer halted and gaped. “What’s with the clown makeup?”

Culworthy, Vidalia, and the Maranonis had attempted to wipe the dark greasepaint off their faces, but Daryl still resembled a vaudevillian actor from a racist era. Caron and Inez hovered in the shadows near the porch, their eyes white in contrast to their skin.

“Standard procedure,” Culworthy blustered.

“Standard procedure for what?”

“Covert action.”

The sheriff issued orders to his men, then took a cigar butt from his pocket and lit it, all the while glancing at each of us. He settled on me and said, “Care to explain about these escapees from the funny farm, Mizz Malloy?”

I contemplated throwing them to the wolves, or in this case, the sheriff, who was clearly irritated by either the interruption of his Friday evening poker game or the probability of a time-consuming murder investigation. But my daughter and Inez were co-conspirators, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to do the dirty deed. I gave the sheriff a terse explanation of the reason they’d all been skulking on Churls’s property.

Smoke curled from the cigar as the sheriff listened impassively. One of the deputies snickered, but stopped abruptly when the sheriff glared at him and retreated around one of the cars. The fin almost brushed his chin.

“I’ve seen that car before,” I said, blinking.

“It was here when we arrived about an hour ago,” Deputy Amos said, “but it wasn’t here when we came a few days ago.”

It finally came to me. “That car was parked at the Farberville Animal Shelter earlier this week.”

“Whose is it?” demanded Sheriff Dorfer.

“I don’t know. The director was there, along with one employee, who sleeps in a back room at night.” I had a good idea which of the two drove a disreputable, gawdy car and which drove a clean hatchback, but I shrugged and the sheriff ordered one of the deputies to get the license plate numbers of all the vehicles and deal with the state bureau in the morning.

The sheriff peppered us with questions, but no one admitted to having seen or heard anything that related to the fatal attack in the dog pen. As I listened to a repeat recital of their activities, it occurred to me that each one of them had been on his or her own for a few moments, except for Caron and Inez, who’d been clinging to each other like Velcro. And Arnie was somewhere around the area, too, although no one had seen him and the excitement had not lured him out of hiding.

The commandos and I gave our names and addresses to a deputy and were then assigned times to report to the sheriff’s office the following morning to make statements. Once dismissed, we straggled down the road to the gate.

“Where are your cars?” I asked.

“We all came in mine. Color of camouflage and impossible to spot at night. Parked behind a barn,” Culworthy said smugly. “Couldn’t alert Churls to our arrival. The barn serves as headquarters. Cut across the pasture and scaled the fence.”

“We each were issued a flashlight,” Vidalia said. “The colonel and Daryl were ever so careful in the planning. We were told what to wear and given orders. I’m sorry about that horrible man’s death, but the rest of it was quite thrilling.”

“Quite thrilling,” George began sarcastically, then caught a look from Helen and stopped.

I ordered Caron and Inez to get in my car and drove away without further comment to the group. Caron took a package of tissues from the glove compartment and shared them with Inez. I was too shocked and bewildered to lecture them, although I assumed I would recover in due time.

“What are we going to do about Miss Emily’s dogs?” Caron asked timidly.

“We were really, really sure they would be there,” Inez said even more timidly.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The first time we came, Churls had been alerted by a call from the sheriff. If he had any stolen animals on the property, he had ample time to move them to another location. But not this time. You didn’t see him, did you?”

Caron swallowed several times. “No, but Inez and I were so scared we sort of hung around by the place in the fence the entire time, just in case the pit bulls were loose. We were supposed to help list the animals with that gypsy person and that army person. We couldn’t see the back of the house from there.”

“Did you see anybody at all?”

“Everybody had these incredibly explicit orders. Once we were over the fence, we split up. All of them but that Defoe person thrashed their way toward the house, but he kind of melted into the dark. Then Inez thought she saw a bear, which was stupid.”

“There are bears in this area,” protested Inez. “If you’d paid attention in English when we did the section on folklore, you’d know it, too.”

Caron opted to be gracious. “Yeah, like I’m sure the woods are crowded with polar bears. I’m surprised we weren’t attacked by penguins. Anyway, it was seriously spooky, so Inez and I decided to wait.”

“What about that car from the animal shelter?” Inez asked. “It probably belongs to that nasty man who was drunk. Do you think he murdered that other nasty man?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Why was he there?” Caron asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Where’d he go?” Inez asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Will the sheriff find him?” Caron asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Will they arrest him?” Inez asked.

“I don’t know.”

As the experts are so fond of reminding us in their learned articles in magazines lying around doctors’ waiting rooms, with teenagers it’s extremely important to be frank about one’s limitations.

The next morning we made the now customary trip to Miss Emily’s house, then reported to the sheriff’s office at the designated time. The receptionist finished typing a sentence one key at a time, worked her gum into a less obtrusive location, and agreed to let the sheriff know we were there.

While we waited, Helen and George came down the corridor to the front room. George looked as if he intended to continue out the door, but Helen halted and said, “They didn’t find Juniper or the others. They said there were some pens out in the woods, but there weren’t any animals being kept in them.”

“I’m sorry,” I said gently.

“If only George had taken the time to put on his glasses, we’d have a better idea about the man who took the litter,” she said as she gave her husband a cold look.