Scent of the Missing by Susannah

Author:Susannah [Susannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Have a friend long enough, and in time he or she is going to have to break bad news to you. Ellen has been the bearer of bad news more than once. Some of it dog-specific. In 1989, when my husband and I were on a trip to Minneapolis for the Twin Cities Marathon, Ellen dog-sat our Bogie, a Shetland Sheepdog and my first dog. High-energy Bogie had taught me valuable lessons about the perils of puppyhood and boredom, lessons that my husband and I believed we had mastered by the time we went to Minneapolis. Bogie was about eighteen months old at the time.

On the first evening of our trip, I called Ellen to check on Bogie.

"How's it going? How's Bog-dog?" I asked.

She said "Fine," but the word had a tightrope quality to it. A little extra fricative on the F, and the long I sound slightly drawn out.

"Everything okay?"

"Yes." The second yes almost seemed convincing, but when I hung up the phone, I turned to my husband and said, "Something's wrong at the house."

We gave it a few minutes, and then I called her back. Ellen came clean. She hadn't wanted to worry my husband the night before his big run, but the truth was ... Bogie ate a chair.

"Ate a chair?"

I had heard correctly. Bogie had stripped a bentwood rocker completely free of its wicker seat and back, leaving only the curved wood behind. The chair looked, she said, like what cicadas leave behind when they slip out of old skin. Maybe it could be upholstered. The wood was pristine. He had not actually eaten the wicker, though it was gnawed into a pretty fringe—piled up in a soggy little stack in the hallway. And he had done the whole job with an assassin's silent efficiency. One minute, Ellen was watching TV and Bogie was asleep in the hallway. The next minute, the dog was asking her for a game of tug, and the chair guts lay where he had been sleeping.

This was the first piece of furniture Bogie ever ate, but in the course of his extended puppyhood, he also stripped a bathroom of carpet from the comfort of his crate and kindly disposed of a set of mauve hand towels we had received as a wedding present and had loathed for years. When Bogie got through with them, there wasn't enough left to successfully wipe a dipstick. Bogie was a voracious and indiscriminate destroyer of furnishings, whose tastes went everywhere. But he had a private standard. He never once touched a houseplant, a roll of toilet paper, or a shoe.

Fifteen years later, I thought I came to Puzzle wiser. But Ellen's voice on the other end of the phone suggests otherwise. She has been dog-sitting the crew on evenings when I teach a night course. When I call her to let her know I'm on my way home, I hear the guarded tone she'd used with Bogie all those years before.

"What?" I say.

"Your dog," she replies.

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