Gone to the Dogs by Susan Conant

Author:Susan Conant [Conant, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯), Mystery
ISBN: 9780307785466
Publisher: Crimeline
Published: 1992-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14

Geri Driscoll’s theory that Patterson was deliberately letting her squirm had the paradoxical effect of convincing me that he was dead. Patterson might have found the prospect of a family uncomfortably bourgeois, but I couldn’t believe that he’d have risked losing the opportunity to deliver a human baby with his own hands. He’d known Geri for years; he’d have known that to take to the road was to run that risk.

But I cared more about Cliff Bourque—John Buckley—than I did about Oscar Patterson. I called Hope, who had temporary charge of the battered old wooden file box that contains the Cambridge Dog Training Club’s current records. She checked the index cards for the beginners’ class and found one for John Buckley. In place of an address, he’d written “Moving.” If I’d had all day, maybe I’d have started to search the streets of Cambridge for my lone ranger, but I had an appointment late that same afternoon with that famous dog behavior consultant, Dick Brenner, and I intended to keep it.

New Hampshire information gave me Cliff Bourque’s number. I dialed it. A woman answered. I told her my name, explained that I wrote for Dog’s Life, and asked to speak to Cliff Bourque. He wasn’t available, she said, but she liked my column. Could she help? I told her that I wanted to do a story about Chinook dogs. By then, I did.

You know anything about rare breeds? As has been demonstrated, I’m no expert, but I do understand what moves a breed from the faceless hell of nonrecognition to the heaven of acceptance by a major registry. In the words of the American Kennel Club, what’s required is proof of fanciers’ “substantial, sustained nationwide interest and activity in the breed.” People, not dogs, right? Fair enough. Dogs already recognize themselves, and they admit the existence of their brethren, too. Anyway, for admission to the happy purgatory of the AKC’s Miscellaneous class or for recognition by the United Kennel Club (no purgatory there, just damned or saved), you need a national breed club with a registry, as well as sires and dams to enter in the stud book. And you’d better promote the breed. For example, get it written up in Dog’s Life. Thus Anneliese Bourque was delighted to hear from me. I didn’t have to fish for an invitation, and although she must have been surprised that I not only accepted hers but said that I could arrive in an hour, she seemed pleased.

The Bourques lived not far over the New Hampshire border, but far enough north of Cambridge so that our previous night’s rain had crystallized and fallen in a light dusting of snow that clung to the pines surrounding the lime-green fifties ranch, a tract house with no tract. Like all peace-loving kennel owners, the Bourques had no near neighbors. As if to create the illusion of suburbia, though, someone had installed an iron lamppost at the bottom of the long drive, where I parked the Bronco

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