Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

“At first I thought you were going to have me arrested,” Katie said, “and then after all the dogs died, I thought you were going to kill me.”

The screen door banged. “Forgot my cars,” the little girl said and scooped them into the tail of her T-shirt. Katie tousled her hair as she went past, and then folded her arms again.

“‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I was going to tell you when you came to kill me,” she said. “‘It was snowy. He ran right in front of me. I didn’t even see him.’ I looked up everything I could find about newparvo. Preparing for the defense. How it mutated from parvovirus and from cat distemper before that and then kept on mutating, so they couldn’t come up with a vaccine. How even before the third wave they were below the minimum survival population. How it was the fault of the people who owned the last survivors because they wouldn’t risk their dogs to breed them. How the scientists didn’t come up with a vaccine until only the jackals were left.

“‘You’re wrong,’ I was going to tell you. ‘It was the puppy mill owners’ fault that all the dogs died. If they hadn’t kept their dogs in such unsanitary conditions, it never would have gotten out of control in the first place.’ I had my defense all ready. But you’d moved away.”

Jana banged in again, carrying the empty whale glass. She had a red smear across the whole lower half of her face. “I need some more,” she said, making “some more” into one word. She held the glass in both hands while Katie opened the refrigerator and poured her another glassful.

“Wait a minute, honey,” she said, “you’ve got Kool-Aid all over you,” and bent to wipe Jana’s face with a paper towel.

Katie hadn’t said a word in her defense while we waited at the vet’s, not “It was snowy,” or “He ran right out in front of me,” or “I didn’t even see him.” She had sat silently beside me, twisting her mittens in her lap, until the vet came out and told me Aberfan was dead, and then she had said, “I didn’t know there were any left in Colorado. I thought they were all dead.”

And I had turned to her, to a sixteen-year-old not even old enough to know how to shut her face, and said, “Now they all are. Thanks to you.”

“That kind of talk isn’t necessary,” the vet had said warningly.

I had wrenched away from the hand he tried to put on my shoulder. “How does it feel to have killed one of the last dogs in the world?” I shouted at her. “How does it feel to be responsible for the extinction of an entire species?”

The screen door banged again. Katie was looking at me, still holding the reddened paper towel.

“You moved away,” she said, “and I thought maybe that meant you’d forgiven me, but it didn’t, did it?” She came over to the table and wiped at the red circle the glass had left. “Why did you do it? To punish me? Or did you think that’s what I’d been doing the last fifteen years, roaring around the roads murdering animals?”

“What?” I said.

“The Society’s already been here.”

“The Society?” I said, not understanding.

“Yes,” she said, still looking at the red-stained towel. “They said you had reported a dead animal on Van Buren. They wanted to know where I was this morning between eight and nine A.M.”

I nearly ran down a road worker on the way back into Phoenix. He leaped for the still-wet cement barrier, dropping the shovel he’d been leaning on all day, and I ran right over it.

The Society had already been there. They had left my house and gone straight to hers. Only that wasn’t possible, because I hadn’t even called Katie then. I hadn’t even seen the picture of Mrs. Ambler yet. Which meant they had gone to see Ramirez after they left me, and the last thing Ramirez and the paper needed was trouble with the Society.

“I thought it was suspicious when he didn’t go to the governor’s conference,” she had told them, “and just now he called and asked for a lifeline on this person here. Katherine Powell. 4628 Dutchman Drive. He knew her in Colorado.”

“Ramirez!” I shouted at the car phone. “I want to talk to you!” There wasn’t any answer.

I swore at her for a good ten miles before I remembered I had the exclusion button on. I punched it off. “Ramirez, where the hell are you?”

“I could ask you the same question,” she said. She sounded even angrier than Katie, but not as angry as I was. “You cut me off, you won’t tell me what’s going on.”

“So you decided you had it figured out for yourself, and you told your little theory to the Society.”

“What?” she said, and I recognized that tone, too. I had heard it in my own voice when Katie told me the Society had been there.

Ramirez hadn’t told anybody anything, she didn’t even know what I was talking about, but I was going too fast to stop. “You told the Society I’d asked for Katie’s lifeline, didn’t you?” I shouted.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what’s going on?”

“Did the Society come see you this afternoon?”

“No. I told you. They called this morning and wanted to talk to you. I told them you were at the governor’s conference.”

“And they didn’t call back later?”

“No. Are you in trouble?”

I hit the exclusion button. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m in trouble.”

Ramirez hadn’t told them. Maybe somebody else at the paper had, but I didn’t think so. There had, after all, been Dolores Chiwere’s story about them having illegal access to the lifelines. “How come you don’t have any pictures of your dog?” Hunter had asked me, which meant they’d read my lifeline, too. So they knew we had both lived in Colorado, in the same town, when Aberfan died.

“What did you tell them?” I had demanded of Katie. She had been standing there in the kitchen still messing with the Kool-Aid-stained towel, and I had wanted to yank it out of her hands and make her look at me. “What did you tell the Society?”

She looked up at me. “I told them I was on Indian School Road, picking up the month’s programming assignments from my company. Unfortunately, I could just as easily have driven in on Van Buren.”

“About Aberfan!” I shouted. “What did you tell them about Aberfan?”

She looked steadily at me. “I didn’t tell them anything. I assumed you’d already told them.”

I had taken hold of her shoulders. “If they come back, don’t tell them anything. Not even if they arrest you. I’ll take care of this. I’ll…”

But I hadn’t told her what I’d do because I didn’t know. I had run out of her house, colliding with Jana in the hall on her way in for another refill, and roared off for home, even though I didn’t have any idea what I would do when I got there.

Call the Society and tell them to leave Katie alone, that she had nothing to do with this? That would be even more suspicious than everything else I’d done so far, and you couldn’t get much more suspicious than that.

I had seen a dead jackal on the road (or so I said), and instead of reporting it immediately on the phone right there in my car, I’d driven to a convenience store two miles away. I’d called the Society, but I’d refused to give them my name and number. And then I’d canceled two shoots without telling my boss and asked for the lifeline of one Katherine Powell, whom I had known fifteen years ago and who could have been on Van Buren at the time of the accident.

The connection was obvious, and how long would it take them to make the connection that fifteen years ago was when Aberfan had died?