The Dogs of Littlefield (30 page)

There was a tremendous pause, a vast in-suck of breath. Then Mrs. Downing struck the first notes of “Let the Earth Resound,” and in perfect unison they opened their mouths to sing.

— —

These concerts were always so
lovely, everyone agreed afterward, milling in the lobby by the two sets of double glass doors, which someone had propped open to let in the evening air. Amazing, isn't it, still light at eight o'clock! Tables had been set up by the Parent-Teacher Organization, laden with plates of cookies and brownies on white paper tablecloths with plastic cups for the bottles of pink lemonade. The children—so sweet—singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “La Bamba”—they were
good,
too—but how quickly they were growing up. It was kind of heartbreaking. One minute they were in kindergarten, drawing rainbows, astonished by the butterfly garden, by a gecko in a tank, by
everything,
and the next, in middle school, shouting words on the bus that would make a rap star cringe. And yet they sang like angels. Soft cheeks, clear bright eyes—with that look, perhaps not of wonder anymore, but at least not of overmuch concern. Fixed ahead on something that no adult could see, something that went on and on, past the low horizon.

Having eaten all the cookies and brownies, the children dashed in and out of the crowd in the lobby—bow ties askew, braids coming undone—while their parents watched them fondly and talked among themselves, comparing summer vacation plans or sleepaway camps in Maine (Do kids really need a Claymation studio? What happened to archery?), gazing out through the open glass doors to the school lawn and the parking lot. There was the usual mention, too, of whatever had been in the news: congressmen forced to resign for assaulting staffers, high schools installing metal detectors, new untreatable viruses.

Yet whatever they were discussing, what the parents really said to each other was: This moment will never come again. The setting sun will never catch just like so in the branches of that birch tree, planted in memory of that boy on the plane, or gleam exactly like this along the needles of those white pines by the parking lot, or turn those cirrus clouds that color of pink above the flagpole, the air will never again feel this soft and still.

Our children, our children. Oh, how
can
it be?—the earth is turning on its axis; we will all be left behind.

— —

“A really nice concert,” everyone
said to Margaret, who truly had done a remarkable job of accompanying those kids, even when they speeded up the tempo in Rodgers and Hammerstein's “A Grand Night for Singing.” At the end of the performance, Margaret was called up onstage and given a bouquet of orange gerberas and yellow sunflowers in a beribboned cellophane sheath, presented by one of the children, in gratitude for “saving the show,” as Mrs. Dibler put it, by filling in for the lost accompanist. And she had agreed to accompany the chorus next year! Bill and Julia clapped energetically at this presentation, as did everyone seated around them. Clarice Watkins and Hedy Fischman were one row ahead; they had come together—Hedy said she never missed a chance to hear children sing, claimed it cleared her sinuses—and next to them, Naomi and Stan Melman. Matthew was there in a ripped black T-shirt, satanic and mortified, slouched in a seat beside his mother, holding a video camera.

But the real star of the concert was Hannah Melman. She'd had a solo during “Seasons of Love” from
Rent
. Bill was astounded by the depth and complexity of her voice. A contralto. He'd always thought of Hannah as a silly kid who was obsessed with supermodels. But as she began to sing that night, pert, freckly Hannah and her miniskirt faded away and a sixty-year-old black woman stepped forward, a woman who'd spent her life cleaning rooms in cheap motels off a Mississippi highway, humming church songs as she dragged a mop across cracked bathroom tiles. A woman who'd known love, loss. Mostly loss. Tears came into his eyes. Was suffering
always
there, ready to leap into any voice, no matter how unlikely?

“Wow,” he'd said to Julia when Hannah was done.

She'd frowned at him as he kept clapping. Naomi was blowing her nose and Stan had his arm around her. Even Matthew's mouth hung open. Bill glanced over at Clarice Watkins in her violet turban to see if she had registered this phenomenon, but she was staring straight ahead and seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.

“Well, thanks,” Margaret was saying now in the lobby, looking flushed. “It was fun.”

“You were really good, Mom,” said Julia shyly.

“Wasn't Hannah amazing?” Margaret smiled. “Such range!”

“
Won-
der-ful performance,” said the chorus director, tapping Margaret's arm as she passed by. “Though the children were a
lit-
tle out of control. By the way, I don't know if you've met my husband, Eric.”

“Oh, no,” said Margaret, as she was introduced to a small man in a blue suit. He had a pale, bony face and a dark goatee. At the sight of her he drew back his lips in a rabid smile.

“Pleased to meetcha. Great show.” Then he staggered away after his wife.

“What's with that guy?” said Bill. Margaret shook her head.

It really had been a good show. Margaret had sat up straight on the piano bench in her turquoise dress, eyes so blue, slender and graceful, face serious, focused, alight, unhaunted, nodding every so often when the children managed a particularly high note. It was probably wrong to wish she would keep playing “Seasons of Love” instead of Schumann, but maybe this concert would encourage her to mix up her repertoire.

As he watched Margaret receive congratulations from children and their parents, smiling and cradling her bouquet of flowers, it came to Bill for the first time that maybe their problems were just problems, even if they were unresolvable. They had been married a long time. This summer, they would go back to Wellfleet (unless they did not) as they had every summer, to the same small gray-shingled cottage with dark green shutters and the driveway of crushed oyster shells. For a week they would swim every day, even if it rained. He and Julia would play Hearts, sitting on the sandy braided rug, while Margaret read novels on the brown sofa that sagged in the middle. They would go into town and order fish and chips for dinner on the pier and afterward drive to the ocean and walk on the beach, listening to the waves, the air mild and full of salt, each pebble throwing a long, singular shadow onto the sand. And he would look out at the ceaseless, swelling sea and know that whatever it was that was missing was going to stay that way.

But then Julia would ask for ice cream or Margaret would say something funny. The cottage was full of earwigs, but he was used to that by now.

“So what's next?” he cried, suddenly exultant. “Ice cream, anyone?”

No one was interested. It was almost nine on a school night and everyone was bent on getting home. Tomorrow was another day. In a few minutes the parking lot had all but emptied, and the Downings' car was joining a stream of headlights disappearing down Rutherford Road under a navy-blue sky crowded with stars.

S
uch a hot morning. Only ten o'clock
but already sweltering. Even at dawn, when Margaret had sat barefoot in her nightgown on the kitchen steps with a cup of coffee, watching the oak crowns turn from gray mountains to green leaves and the pool go from black to mauve, heat had been gathering, almost visibly, a solid, muscular presence, and the breeze brushing against her face had felt like fur.

“What do you want?” she had whispered aloud.

Now Naomi and Hedy were with her on the patio by the pool, drinking iced coffee and fanning themselves with their hands. Hedy's little dog, Kismet, was sitting on her lap, though it was too hot for a dog in your lap, but try telling that to the dog. Naomi had stopped by to pick up Hannah, who had spent the night with Julia, and Hedy, hearing voices next door, had walked over to see who was visiting Margaret.

“Is it too early for wine?” asked Naomi.

Sunlight sparkled on the surface of the pool, and the scent of chlorine mixed with the dense, sweet musk of Margaret's roses in bloom by the back door. They were talking about the “case,” as everyone called it, which had at last been cracked. According to a front-page story in the
Gazette
that morning—Naomi had brought over a copy and was reading aloud—the police were right all along: someone had been trying to poison coyotes. Acting on a tip last week, the police had interviewed a pest-control supplier in Mattapan who produced sales records showing that a ten-ounce package of arsenic had been sold the previous September to an Eric Dibler, of Littlefield, Massachusetts.

It was the environmentalist who had spoken at the town hall meeting last fall. Margaret recognized his name, and also pointed out that he was the chorus director's husband. When confronted by the police, Dibler had confessed. He claimed the coyote population was out of control; since coyotes had no natural predators in the New England suburbs—“Other than the Massachusetts Turnpike,” interjected Naomi—he was attempting “to complete the food chain and restore a natural order.” The dogs, he was also quoted as saying, were “collateral damage.”

He remained unrepentant about the dogs. They had no natural predators, either. Charges had been filed. He had been fined $2,000 by the ASPCA. A civil lawsuit was also being considered.

“Well, hallelujah,” said Naomi.

Five dogs poisoned in all, Hedy noted, tapping her walking stick against the patio flagstones, making a monotonous calculative sound. Margaret interrupted to wonder at the strangeness of Eric Dibler being married to the middle school chorus director. An unsettling coincidence, Naomi agreed, adding that children in a middle school chorus had plenty of natural predators. But such a relief that the perpetrator had finally been caught. Now they could rest easy, knowing that someone would be held accountable for what had happened to those dogs.

Because it could have been anyone—friends, neighbors, all of them were suspect.

“Which really wasn't fair,” said Naomi.

It had been awful, hadn't it? For months they'd all been looking over their shoulders, the whole village, thinking something prowled in every shadow.

Margaret sighed and reached over to pet Kismet. Hedy was still tapping her walking stick.

“Five dogs,” she repeated. “Four of them died at the park, yes. But what about the sheepdog?”

“Boris?” said Naomi.

Boris, Hedy pointed out, had not been poisoned in the park. He was not collateral damage. He died on the sidewalk in front of the Dairy Barn, tied to a parking meter. Who could explain that? And the ugly graffiti, the outlines of which still clung to stone steps and storefronts?

A breeze rippled across the brilliant pool and scintillated into the trees. Margaret put a hand to her eyes as everyone fell to discussing theories about the graffiti. Hedy said the young Pakistani who had worked at the Forge was a candidate. Always seemed angry and why else return to Pakistan unless the police were onto him? Naomi confessed that in a dark moment it had crossed her mind that Matthew might be responsible for the graffiti, though of course that was nuts. He was a good boy, just going through a difficult period, fancied himself an anarchist (what teenage boy didn't?), but now that he'd started working at Radio Shack his mood had improved. He got good employee benefits, by the way. Also, he was shaving every morning. Frankly, her suspicions centered on Wayne, the Happy Paws dog walker, who'd always struck her as unstable. Economic resentment could have affected him: she'd spotted him at the Forge, reading Marx. The gardeners were not off the hook, either.

Whoever it was—Could it have been more than one person? A copycat, even?—he'd gotten what he wanted. Attention. Revenge. General unrest.

But Hedy was right: whatever the graffiti vandal had wanted, there remained the question of Boris, a dog deliberately poisoned on a weekday afternoon a few days before Thanksgiving, outside an ice cream parlor on a busy sidewalk.

The sun rose higher and the pool grew more dazzling. They talked on with their hands shielding their eyes, Naomi offering various explanations and Hedy dismissing them. As she listened to this discussion Margaret dropped her gaze to sprigs of wild thyme sprouting greenly between the patio flagstones.

It did not matter, she thought, that the village was suddenly full of clean-shaven young men. Or that last month's Clean Up Littlefield Day had been a success, with a record number of volunteers, every scrap of litter in the park picked up, new wood chips for the elementary school playground laid down, and white boundary lines redrawn for the soccer field. It did not matter that a new petition for an off-leash dog park had once more been put forward, or that the aldermen were once again considering options and a trial period and preparing for a vote, or that a counterpetition was being filed. All that longing for rightness in the world, from every side of every issue, did not offset one cold fact: someone had liked the idea of poisoning dogs and had decided to try it. Not out of any apparent conviction—even a wrongheaded conviction—but simply to see what it felt like to kill something.