Terrier Terror, page 3
“Yes, he’s got an excellent command of all of the obstacles, and we were in sync today from start to finish.”
“Drat!” She grimaced. “That’s exactly what I was afraid you were going to say. This means you must work all the harder with Sophie Sophistica the Third. You need to go into the ring with the attitude that SST cannot lose.”
Uh, oh. Whenever she called Sophie “SST,” as if she were a jet, she was edgy and would watch me like a hawk and find fault with my every move.
She took a step toward me and pointed at my face. “Can. Not. Lose.” I had to battle back the urge to snap at her finger.
“The thing is, Valerie, every dog can have a bad day, or bad luck. I assure you that I will expect Sophie to be at the top of her game and to win. If she doesn’t, I’ll be disappointed. But you have to know, Valerie, I will be putting in the same amount of time and energy into both dogs. If you can’t accept that, you can still handle Sophie yourself.”
She snorted. “You’re twice as fast as I am. We’ll lose. You’re our best chance.”
“If you think I’m your best chance, why did you encourage Jesse to hire me?”
“Because he will lose, and I don’t want him to claim his injury deprived him of his victory. He doesn’t have the sense of purpose or the passion he needs. He’s half-committed to breeding dogs. He’s half-committed to agility trials. He’s half-committed to being a software consultant. He’s half-assed. It’s one thing to lose to a breeder who is dedicated to this pursuit of bringing brilliant, beautiful animals into the world. But I cannot and will not lose to a backyard breeder who just fiddles with breeding Airedales. Let alone one who connived and conspired to breed my dog with his! He bribed my new hire last year to bring Bella to the show. Nobody with half a brain could have believed the story she concocted! Claiming that she thought the doggie diapers were a costume? If I hadn’t been under the weather at the time—” She broke off and made a dismissive gesture.
I hadn’t heard anything about Valerie having been ill at the time, but before I could ask about that she plunged farther into her diatribe. “Honestly, Allie! You’re young, but you weren’t born yesterday. You knew from the start that I demand excellence from my personnel and my dogs. I want Dog Face and his dog-faced owner to lose in such a way that he can’t blame his handler. Or blame anything other than the fact that I have the superior dog.”
Yikes! She was turning red and was literally spitting mad. I was going to have my head on a platter if Sophie lost. “Um, okay. I get it, and I’ll do my level best with both dogs.” I paused. “Although, Valerie, if you’re trying to intimidate me so that I’ll work harder to have Sophie win, that won’t work. As far as I’m concerned, I want both dogs to tie for first place.”
“I understand. That’s what I expect from you. You’re very consistent with how far ahead of the dog you are, how and at what point you give commands, verbally and nonverbally. I also know that the arithmetic the AKC uses to even out the sizes of dogs is flawed. The twenty-inch class wins best dog some ninety percent of the time. And guess what size class DF is in.”
“Twenty inches. I just got back from—”
“Twenty inches,” she repeated. “Yet my SST took the crown last year and is nationally ranked. DF is a rookie.”
“But even so—”
She waved at me with both hands. “I know. You’re working with the dogs’ different temperaments and what not. And sometimes rookies win.”
“Right. I’m a little surprised you didn’t scarf up the most-experienced and highest-ranked handler for Sophie...Terrington Leach.”
“I did. Then he backed out. He decided to limit himself to presenting in conformation alone this year. Didn’t I already tell you that he was the one who recommended you?”
“No, you didn’t. And I’m really surprised. I don’t know why he would recommend me. We’ve only met a handful of times...most recently at the Denver show last spring. He didn’t even recognize me.”
“He said he knew you by reputation as a dog whisperer.”
“Ah.” I held my tongue and smiled a little, remembering Baxter teasing me by calling me a “dog cooer.” I considered myself a dog therapist, not some kind of a Shaman who could peer into a dog’s eyes and communicate nonverbally. However, as someone who wears many hats within the canine world, I really shouldn’t worry about how others chose to describe my headwear.
Valerie looked at her Rolex watch. “Time for you to get started. I need to get dressed. Today’s Standard course in the exterior ring should be all set up. I’ve got two more Brownie troops getting their badges in...animals or farming or something here today. In exchange, they’ll be a mock audience in the stands an hour from now, so you’ll move into the barn enclosure then. One of the den leaders will act as the judge and will be timing you.”
“So the same deal as last Saturday. Got it.”
“Yes, well, hopefully a full second better than last Saturday.” She gave me a smile so forced-looking it was more of a grimace.
Per usual, I played with Sophie for twenty minutes. I suppose only dog owners can begin to know that having a dog as a pet allows us to act like kids and just play to our heart’s content.
“Are you ready to go to work now?” I asked Sophie. She yipped twice and hopped with all four paws leaving the ground. When training, the better phrasing would be to simply state: “work.” But I tended to chatter away at my charges when I was stressed. Jesse talking about Valerie having a “Mr. Hyde” part of her personality had, for some reason, lodged itself into my brain.
Suddenly, a horrible vision of Baxter, lying prone in an agility ring, wormed its way into my brain. I whipped out my cellphone and called his phone.
“Hey,” he answered.
I sighed with relief.
“Hi. I just called to say I love you.”
He chuckled, and waves of joy and love ran through me at the sound. “Are you going all Stevie Wonder on me?”
“Not quite. His singing voice is better than mine.”
“What are you up to?” he asked.
“Training Sophie. And being paranoid that we’re walking into a major trap.”
“In other words, pretty much par for the course, yes?”
“Pretty much.” I looked at my watch. I shouldn’t have indulged myself by calling. This was an interruption of Sophie’s routine; she expected to be racing around the course like an adorable little banshee. “I’ve got to go.”
“I love you, too. Thanks for the call.”
I smiled back at Valerie and called out, “Forty minutes,” meaning how long it would be until I wanted her and the girl scout troops in attendance.
Truth be told, I didn’t especially like Valerie. I had the utmost respect for her, however. She knew how to train show dogs, and I’d learned a lot from watching her. I glanced again at today’s course diagram. Valerie was making Sophie run through the tunnel at three different points in the course. Our surrogate judge would stand to one side of the center of the tunnel. The tunnel was Sophie’s weakest element, and frankly, mine as well as far as coaching her. In a competition, handlers weren’t allowed to carry food or treats into the ring. As for speeding up Sophie through the tunnels, I’d tried a few things—tossing a ball to chase in the tunnel, calling “go get it” and throwing a treat through it. Those tricks had increased her speed a little. Now that we were following competition rules in our practices, I settled on calling, “Whee!” as I ran and calling “good dog” when she beat me to the tunnel exit. That procedure worked best when the judge was stationed anyplace other than the tunnel. If I had to run around the judge to reach the tunnel exit, Sophie easily outran me without full effort. Hence, Valerie’s decision to position the judge in the worst possible place for me.
Self-timing with a stopwatch was not sufficiently accurate, but all four of Sophie’s run-through times looked great to me. I put her on leash, and we left the outdoor ring and went into the competition arena. Dozens of girl scouts squealed in delight at the adorable doggie. The prevailing cry was: “Oh, she is so cute!” I literally bit my tongue to stop myself from joking to the crowd, “Thank you, but what about this dog?”
Oddly, Valerie was not in the audience yet; she was always prompt. A fortyish woman walked up to me and we exchanged greetings. She showed me her stop watch and said Valerie had done a thorough job training her to play her role as the judge.
“Have you seen Valerie recently?” I asked.
“No, that was back when we first arrived...a couple of hours ago. Should we go ahead and start?” she asked.
I hesitated. “She likes to be in the audience herself.” I didn’t want to give Sophie’s leash to the stand-in judge; that might confuse her about the role the actual judge would play during the real thing. “I’m going to take Sophie with me and make sure Valerie isn’t tied up with something.”
As we left, a cumulative groan of disappointment arose from the kids, and I called out, “We’ll be right back.”
Sophie was in perfect heel position as we crossed the yard and went through the back door. I gasped as I immediately spotted Valerie on the wicker chair that overlooked the barn. Valerie was slumped over, her face resting on one arm, motionless.
I raced over to her and grabbed her arm. “Valerie?” I cried, fearing the worst and cursing inwardly.
She sat up. I sighed with relief.
“Good grief,” she muttered. “I fainted just now. The room suddenly went gray, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I must have blacked out.”
She looked pale and a little out of it. I grabbed my cellphone in case she needed medical assistance. “Do you feel all right now? Are you dizzy?”
“No, just groggy.”
“Thank goodness. When I saw you slumped over in the chair, I was afraid something serious had happened.”
She snorted and said something under her breath that sounded like a string of curse words. “You’re probably right to assume the worst. But nobody got that lucky.” She glared at her coffee cup on the small table next to her. She dabbed her finger in the last bit of coffee and rubbed it against her thumb, as if testing to see if the liquid was granular. She dried off her hand with a napkin. “It’s the coffee. Someone spiked it.”
“With alcohol, you mean?”
“No, with some kind of narcotic to make me sleepy. If not dead. I always take my coffee black. The only possible explanation is that the coffee itself was spiked.”
“Could the coffee have been decaf, when you expected caffeine?”
She stood up with a slight wobble. I promptly dropped the leash and rushed over to help steady her. Within a second or two, she batted my hands and said, “I’m able to walk. Let go of me.”
She tottered into the kitchen. “I never drink decaf,” she said. “What would be the point in drinking coffee without the pick-me-up?” She reached into the refrigerator, grabbed a full bag of coffee, and held it out to me.
“It’s decaf,” I said, reading the label.
She yanked the bag from my hand, grabbed her reading glasses, and dropped into a chair at the kitchen table. After studying the labels on both sides, she let out a harrumph. “Somebody loused up. Either the shelf stocker or the cashier. I never buy decaf.” She threw the bag into a trashcan.
“Are you awake enough to watch Sophie’s arena run-through?”
“Of course.” She winced as she rose, and as she took a step, she reeled so badly that I grabbed her and steadied her. A moment later, she waved me off. “Let’s just not spread this around, shall we? As far as anybody needs to know, I was tied up in an important phone call. All right?”
“Got it.”
Sophie had been trotting along next to Valerie, her leash dragging after her. Valerie bent down to pet her. Using her squeaky voice, she said, “There’s my little girl. You’re going to win for me and show that mean old Messy Jesse that nobody can mess with us, aren’t you?”
“Um...let’s not lose track of the fact that I’m going to be trying hard to get Dog Face to win, too. It makes me uncomfortable when you’ve got a vendetta against the one other dog I’ll be handling.”
She snorted. “If my little Sophie Sophistica the Third can handle the pressure, so can you.”
“Well, but then, Sophie doesn’t understand what you’re saying.”
Valerie laughed, or more accurately, cackled. Then her mood darkened. “I’ll rephrase. If my enemies get away with their attacks on me and on my business, I won’t live to see another Colorado state competition. You don’t know the first thing about pressure, young lady.”
Chapter 4
To tell the truth, I loved dog shows. I went to one or two in Colorado every year. Baxter and I never missed watching the Westminster on TV. We’d eat microwaved popcorn and talk about each dog, weighing our own favorites. Even so, the next morning, I was sprawled on the carpet of the living room floor, with our three dogs, feeling gloomy. As Baxter left for work at the crack of dawn, he’d warned me he would be gone at least twelve hours today and every day this week. He had already made some improvements yesterday, while I was off training Jesse’s and Valerie’s dogs. He’d replaced last year’s judge by swapping her categories. She was now the judge of the Working Class category, and the Terrier Class was now being judged by a man named Mark Singer, whom I’d never met, but had excellent credentials.
Meanwhile, I was still checking for falling pieces of sky. Part of my fearfulness was due to a terrible loss I’d endured. Pavlov, my beloved German Shepherd, passed away four months ago from a degenerative spinal disease that Shepherds are especially prone to. I loved my Cocker Spaniel and our two King Charles Cavaliers dearly, but nobody could take Pavlov’s place. She was my protector as well as my loyal companion. That made it all the harder to be confident that my days of stumbling into homicide investigations were behind me. One day, I knew, I would get myself another big dog, but not today, and not this month.
My cellphone rang. I smiled at the caller’s picture; it was Baxter—a face I totally adored. We greeted each other, and he said, “Sweetie, can you reschedule your noon appointment and come up to Fort Collins Fairgrounds? A presenter has apparently gone missing, and we might need you to fill in. He invited his clients here this afternoon and was going to walk them through a couple of laps in one of the arenas.”
I paused, confused. Surely he’d meant for me to fill in as a handler. “In agility trials?”
“No, conformation.”
“But I haven’t shown a dog since I was a teenager.”
“I know. But for the time being, I’d just like to be able to say that you can be the guy’s backup. And reassure a couple of worried entrants. Chances are he’ll show up tomorrow or so and you won’t need to show the dogs in the actual competition. He just hasn’t been answering his phone, and nobody’s seen him is all.”
“By ‘he,’ do you mean Cooper Hayes?”
“Oh. That’s right. You two are casual friends. Sorry, sweetie. My mind’s going in three different directions at once.”
“Maybe he’s not answering his phone because he felt humiliated at being asked to relinquish has job as the Terrier Class manager.”
“Could well be. But he told everyone at the time he still wanted to stay on as a presenter. He undoubtedly feels beholden to the show-dogs’ owners. They’re the ones that pay him. And he’s also willing to be on-call if a presenter gets ill. He told me once he considers himself the dog-show equivalent of a public defender. When newbies don’t know who to hire or aren’t sure if they’re willing to commit to the big bucks, the Fort Collin’s Dog Club has been giving his name to anyone who calls in and asks.”
I already knew all of that about Cooper, but Baxter was talking too quickly to be interrupted. He got a little agitated when he had too many cups of coffee. “There’s only one Terrier that Cooper was supposed to show,” he continued. “A Bull Terrier named Waxy.”
“Waxy? Like candles?” Bull Terriers were short and muscular, with oversized muzzles. Target, the chain store, had a Bull Terrier mascot named Bullseye—not a great name, in my opinion, but better than Waxy.
“I suppose. Can you fill in?
I agreed, although I asked him to call me if Cooper showed up after all. I got ready slowly, then made the fifty-minute drive, hoping the whole time that my phone would ring to no avail. I truly didn’t want to make many pre-show appearances. My taking on two dogs for the agility trials was plenty of work where I was concerned.
There were two or three dozen cars in the parking lot, and I once again felt leery as I entered the larger of the two buildings. My memories of all the acrimony that erupted last year at this venue were fresh in my mind. My heart seemed all too willing both then and now to put me into “fight or flight” mode. My best course of action would be to head straight across the huge space toward Baxter’s office, which he’d described as “underwhelming,” without looking side to side to increase my chances of running into anyone I knew. With luck and a nice, brisk pace, I could avoid being stopped by someone who wanted to rehash last year’s fiasco.
“Hey, Allie,” a familiar voice called. I turned. Not even ten steps inside the door, I complained to myself. It was Tracy Truitt. She was a friend, not a disparaged member of the dog community, but she was always looking for stories for her newsy radio talk show and/or podcast. She was wearing her typical bold colors, fire-engine red Yoga pants with a purple iris pattern on her draped tunic. She strode toward me, saying, “Aha. As soon as I heard Baxter was running the show, I figured I’d see you here sooner or later.”
We exchanged hugs. “He’s not really ‘running the show’. Just the Terrier Class conformation portion.”
“Close enough. But...guess what! I enrolled Bingley in the agility competition!”
I stared into her eyes, assuming she was kidding. Her beagle was thoroughly spoiled and only trainable in spurts. “He’s...never done any agility training, has he?”
