Diane Davidson - The Main Corpse

The sheriffs department had branded Jake an unreliable bloodhound. When the dog’s handler of many years retired, the new handler insisted Jake had lost the scent on three consecutive trails. Jake fell into disrepute, was released from his Furman County K-9 unit, and ended up in a kennel. When the hound lost weight and became despondent, an activist group of dog-lovers obtained his release from the department and put him up for adoption. Seizing an opportunity, Tom had brought Jake home last month. Brought him home gleefully. Unrepentantly. As if to mock me, Jake raised his howl an octave and several decibels.

I burrowed under the handmade king-size quilt Tom had presented to me on our first anniversary. Yes, I loved Tom, I 10ved him to pieces. I just didn’t love Jake, even if my good-hearted husband had brought him home because my son had been pleading for a pet from time immemorial. Now the two males in my life seemed to have found new meaning in nursing the wretched animal back to mental and physical health. Unfortunately, despite a layer of batting over my ears, I could still hear unreliable, untrustworthy, unhappy Jake. Perhaps he needed to share his misery.

He wasn’t the only one who wasn’t happy this morning. Depression surfaced. I wished Tom were back in our warm bed, so I could forget the feeling of defeat that inevitably comes on the morning after a bad catered event. Disrupted party, no bookings, sullied reputation looming. Not to mention the possibility of going out of business. I groaned. Even a bloodhound’s plaintive wail couldn’t drown out the memory of Marla screeching. Now, six too-short hours later, I was in no mood to order Jake-reincarnated-from-the-Baskervilles to be quiet. Not that the The Howler would pay the slightest attention to me, anyway.

As I hauled myself out of bed, I remembered I had a solitary booking for the day – an anniversary dinner for the Kirby-Joneses, buyers for a local gift store who had just returned from Kenya. Weddings and anniversaries were usually my bread and butter in June. This June, however, it seemed as if people either were not getting married, were getting divorced, or were celebrating their anniversaries in Fiji. Today’s job would be the perfect antidote for worry. I had been thankful for it, even though it had posed a few problems.

I stretched through my yoga routine and recalled all the fun Macguire and I had had planning the menu for the Kirby-Joneses. Twenty-five years ago, well-wishers at their wedding reception had so besieged the newlywed K-Js that the bride and groom had left Washington’s Congressional Country Club ravenous. So we drove and drove, and then we stopped and had this wonderful Italian food, Mrs. Kirby-Jones had wistfully informed me at our planning meeting. It was at a marvelous place called Guido’s on Rockville Pike. I wore my pink dress with the double-orchid corsage.

As it turned out, the Kirby-Joneses desired a menu offering Italian items that exactly matched the dinner they’d had right after their wedding reception. I’d promptly acquiesced. After all, most. food orders are emotionally based.

I moved from the yoga asana known as the Sun Greeting to some leg stretches. I recalled poor Macguire’s unhappy face when he’d reported back to me. His painstaking investigations had revealed that Guido’s-on-the-Pike in Rockville, Maryland, had gone out of business over a decade ago. Guido, now deceased, hadn’t bequeathed any menus to his heirs. Of course, I had not revealed these details to Mrs. Kirby-Jones. As I said, I was frantic for work. I just need to know what you ordered, I’d said confidently to my new client. Don’t give it a second thought, I’d maintained, we’ll ask the restaurant for their recipes and it’ll taste just like Guido’s. With what I considered promising resourcefulness, Macguire had located a single back issue of Gourmet that contained Guido’s-on-the-Pike recipe for Bolognese sauce. So now I was committed to serving pizza with goat cheese, ravioli in white wine cream sauce, lasagne verde with Bolognese sauce, tossed salad, Italian bread, and tiramisu to twenty people. But in April, when I’d booked the event, hoping we could serve dinner on the Kirby-Joneses’ expansive deck, I hadn’t figured on an incessant downpour on June 6. Maybe that was why Jake was howling. Somebody had left him out in the rain. I wanted to howl, too.

Coffee, I thought. I need coffee. I finished dressing for church and went in search of caffeine and the rest of the household. The only family member I could find was Scout the cat, a stray I’d adopted two years ago. He was crouched in a window well watching Jake bark. I would have sworn the cat was delighted to observe the dog’s misery. To date, Scout had made no sign of forgiving us for adopting the hound.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, and stroked his back. know you would have preferred a gerbil.”

Scout’s response was the scathing feline equivalent of hrumph.

“Mom?” came Arch’s voice from behind me. “Why I are you talking to the cat about rodents?”

My son’s appearance this morning was a jumble of tortoiseshell glasses magnifying brown eyes, freckles, tousled brown hair topped with a baseball cap worn backwards, sweatpants, and a too-long, crookedly hanging orange poncho. “Well, Mom?” he said in the reproachful tone he often took with me these days. He straightened his glasses on his freckled nose and waited.

“I feel sorry for Scout. Why is that dog howling, anyway?”

Arch peered out the window and adjusted his cap. “He’s not that dog. Jake’s just excited.”

“About what?”

“About going out with Tom and me.”

“Out where? Aren’t you coming with me to church?”

Arch frowned. “We’re going on a mission, actually. Tom took me to the five o’clock church service yesterday. Jake is feeling a lot better, and not acting so …you know, nervous. We wanted to see if he could get his trust level back.” He paused. When I didn’t protest his attempt to rehabilitate Jake, he plowed on. “Listen, General Farquhar called while you were gone last night. I told him about getting Jake. He wants us to come visit.”

“Who’s ‘us’?” I asked. I hated sounding like an interrogator, but when it came to General Bo Farquhar, there wasn’t much choice. The only guest who isn’t here is General Farquhar, Tony Royce had said. Says he’s too busy. Really. General Bo, who also happened to be Marla’s brother-in-law, had recently finished his prison sentence for possessing rocket-propelled grenades, a large quantity of C-4, Kalashnikovs, Uzis, and all kinds of other contraband. Until he became settled, the general was staying on the estate of some friends who were adapting military technology for law enforcement. I’d heard their thousand-acre spread west of Aspen Meadow was surrounded by closed-circuit cameras and a nine-foot electrical fence. Not the place you wanted to send your son with his untrustworthy dog for a pleasant afternoon romp in the pouring rain.

“Listen, Mom, General Bo says he’s real depressed. He was hoping you could bring him something made with chocolate, since the people who’re taking care of him don’t like it or don’t have it or something. His phone number’s down in the kitchen. Anyway. Gotta fly.” His high-topped black sneakers made squishing noises as he fled before I could raise any more objections.

“Arch, please tell me where you’re going. I won’t veto it. Even though it’s raining, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

The orange poncho rustled as Arch’s short legs hastened down the hallway. “Better ask Tom,” he threw back over his shoulder. “I have to go make sure we have everything. Jake’s getting impatient.”

No kidding. I glanced at my reflection in one of Tom’s antique mirrors, and wondered if what folks said about owners looking like their pets would come to pass. I was still a short, slightly chunky thirty-three-year-old with unfashionably curly blond hair and brown eyes. Jake, on the other hand, boasted a sleek brown body, a long nose, droopy eyes and ears, and a perpetually slobbery mouth. All these attributes, my son had enthusiastically reported, helped him smell better. I pressed my lips together. I wished I liked Jake more, since he made Arch so happy. When I’d divorced his father six years ago, Arch had started begging for a pet. But I was freshly single, financially shaky, and struggling to launch a new catering business, not to mention a new emotional life, and I couldn’t face the idea of tending an animal. I couldn’t picture tearing up endless heads of lettuce for guinea pigs or listening to hamsters race all night on their little wheels. Back then, it was all I could do to maintain myself and Arch and handle the food preparation for nervous clients.