Flawed Dogs (5 page)

“Your uncle seemed to lose interest in dogs after your parents were . . . were . . .” Mrs. Beaglehole trailed off.

“You can just come out and say it,” said Heidy. “Eaten by schnauzers.”

Mrs. Beaglehole spun around and gave the smirking girl the evil cow eye. The woman was shocked at her coolness toward her parents. Why not coolness? Heidy had never known her family, really. Her memories of her parents were like dim figures peeking out from a thick fog. All she’d known for the last eight years was a girls’ school in the freezing hills of Minnesota and platoons of behemoth penguins pretending to be nuns.

Mrs. Beaglehole continued: “Your uncle sold off all the beautiful dogs. All! So beautiful. Like tossing out Louis Vuitton handbags!
Snort!
” This was the first of many snorts of displeasure. Heidy read somewhere that water buffalo snort before they ram people. “Your uncle Hamish now mostly spends his time alone. Doesn’t seem interested in much of anything. I arrived a few years ago to take care of things while he . . .” She snorted. “He’s not well. Which is why he sent for you.”

This time Heidy snorted.

She was going to demand the truth about her parents’ deaths . . . and why her uncle had sent her away years ago . . . but changed her mind. She looked at the rows of empty kennels passing by. “There aren’t any dogs left here AT ALL?”

Mrs. Beaglehole brightened visibly. “Why, yes, dear. Mine. That makes one!”

Heidy felt her bag move as the dachshund chewed his first banana taffy.
Two,
thought Heidy.

The car pulled up to the grand house’s grand entrance, where Heidy’s door was opened by a younger woman in a neat housekeeper’s apron who didn’t make Heidy think of cows at all. A quiet baby was slung tightly across her back in a sling. “Heidy McCloud! I’m Miss Violett. I look after your uncle’s house. And the cooking. And my Bruno here, of course.” She held up the baby’s socked foot.

Mrs. Beaglehole snorted. “He looks like an Indian papoose, Violett.”

Miss Violett took Heidy’s hand and looked at her with a softness that she wasn’t used to. “Your mother and I were good friends when we were girls. I used to play with her in this very house. And isn’t it funny . . . now I’m back looking after her brother.”

“Actually, Miss Violett, that is my job,” injected Mrs. Beaglehole with an edge to her voice. “You see to lunch.”

Mrs. Beaglehole climbed onto a step leading to the front door, so that she was slightly higher than either of them. “Come along, your uncle is waiting to see you. You’re off a button with your sweater, dear.”

Heidy followed Mrs. Beaglehole into the entry. She gasped. Dark-paneled walls soared to a ceiling three stories above her. Straight ahead, a grand staircase curved upward into darkness. In fact, the entire house was dark. But that’s not what made the girl stop and stare.

The dogs. Ghosts of McCloud family purebreds. The walls were covered with them. In huge paintings eight feet tall, they sat rigid and regal, as if stunned into bewildered awe by the glory of their own fabulousness.

A Bolivian flat-nosed spittin’ spaniel. An orange-crested Dutch baby dusenstruegal. A Chinese kissin’ tellin’ terrier. Many more, far more exotic. Heidy let out another long, low whistle.

Which again made the dachshund hiding inside the bag across her shoulder stop chewing the taffy and reflexively blurt out:
“What! Hello! I’m here! My tongue ith thtuck to the woof of my mowth.”

He said this in dog, of course, and it emerged as a garbled yip. Heidy heard it and tried to cover it up by shuffling a large chair next to her. Mrs. Beaglehole glanced about. “Moles,” she sniffed.

There was another set of ears nearby, however, far less easily fooled. A large poodle with a red bow came tearing in from the kitchen, barking maniacally.
“I HEARD THAT! WHO WAS THAT!?”
he yelled.

Mrs. Beaglehole spun around and threw her arms wide. “There’s my darling champion to be! Heidy, THIS is Cassius.”

Heidy stared at the pathetic creature. Beachball-size explosions of fuzzy hair erupted like creeping blobs of attacking white broccoli across the entirety of the starved beast’s shaved skeleton. “Is he going to die?” asked Heidy.

“On the contrary. He’s going to win Westminster one day,” said Mrs. Beaglehole, reaching down through miles of poodle fur and fluffing it up to an even more terrifying extent.

Cassius turned to Mrs. Beaglehole with a lick to her nose. She thrust out a hand to stop him. “Tut! No lickies, Cassius! You
know
only on my feet and before bath time!”

“I shall count the minutes until paradise, madam,”
mumbled the poodle, rolling his eyes. He looked around the room. He’d heard a yip. He knew a yip when he heard one, and it wasn’t a stupid yard mole. He ate them all the time and they never yipped.

Unless, he thought, you started at the tail and went veeeery slow.

“Heidy! Come to me, Niece!” a man’s voice said from the darkness above the stairs. The girl froze. Then she moved to the source of the voice as commanded, climbing the stairs slowly. She peered into a vast, dark room.

“You got my letters?” asked the voice of Uncle Hamish somewhere in the black depths of a huge chair. Cassius stood nearby, eyes glowing like embers.

“Yep. Got ’em,” said Heidy, standing in the doorway, unsmiling.

“You look like your mother, Heidy,” said Hamish.

“Well, that’s a relief, Uncle. People start looking like their dogs after enough time.” She stared at her uncle. “It’s been eight years. I figured I might start looking like the nuns.”

Hamish was silent for a moment. “I know you’re angry, Heidy,” he finally said.

He suddenly stood up into the firelight. He was still in his pajamas, and his hair was long and mussed. “I knew how to sight the slightest detour in the backbone of a Pookishtan dingle hound from two hundred feet. I could massage out the kinks from the curls of a crested Capetown kinkapoodle. I knew how to nurse twenty puppies with twenty bottles with two hands and another five with my feet! Twenty!”

Hamish pointed at Heidy. “But I couldn’t braid a six-year-old girl’s ponytail.”

“I do my own braiding,” said Heidy, not buying it for a second.

He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry. Parenting you would’ve made as much sense as Cassius here herding sheep.”

“The horror,”
said Cassius.
“The grass stains.”

Heidy felt the bag on her shoulder move. The dachshund wanted out.
I do too,
thought Heidy.

Hamish collapsed back into his huge chair and put his face in his hands. He spoke quietly this time. “It . . . it was
me
who dreamed of finding a champion Tibetan yak nibbler hound. It was
my
dream. But when the hot air balloon went down in the storm over the Himalayan mountains, it wasn’t me in it. It was your parents. I had sent them instead.” He looked up at the little girl. “Me. It should have been me.”

Hamish looked empty. The dogs in the paintings seemed to peer down at the rumpled man with cold judgment.

“I think I died too, Heidy. This was no longer a place for life. Or show dogs. Or little girls.”

He collected himself and stood again. “But you’re older now. There’s something I want you to see.”

Hamish moved unsteadily toward the towering window, covered with a heavy curtain tapestry. “All I want now . . . is for you to stay. All this . . . McCloud Heavenly Acres will be yours. Soon. It’s time you made it so. This house. This world.
Yours.
”

“Mine?” sputtered Heidy.

She suddenly noticed Mrs. Beaglehole standing in one of the room’s dark corners, listening and watching her carefully, quietly. Cassius sat next to her, doing the same. The huge poodle rose and moved to Heidy, where he slipped his long bony nose into her hand dangling at her side so that her fingers cradled his chin. He looked up at her with coal black eyes.
“No. Ours,”
said Cassius.