The Purloined Poodle Read online

  “Oh, we have a bulletin board,” Tracie said. “Or an online forum or whatever you call it. All the owners and trainers who go to shows in this region are on there.”

  “Ah, gotcha. So maybe that’s how you’re being targeted?”

  Tracie and Earnest looked at each other with slightly widened eyes which in humans means that they are either surprised or something happened in their pants.

  “Could be,” Earnest admitted.

  “But how would someone know who has a Grand Champion hound?” Atticus said.

  Earnest closed his eyes—no, he squeezed them shut really hard and kinda made a growly face that showed some of his teeth. Atticus says that’s called a wince. Which, now that I think of it, could also mean that something happened in Earnest’s pants, but it probably meant he was doing one of those oh-god-I-am-such-an-idiot speeches inside his head.

  “We have little stars by our names. And our biographies list it, without fail. It’s an ego thing. We’re proud.”

  “Shit,” Tracie said. “That probably is how they’re finding us. I should get rid of my star and rewrite my bio.”

  “But if that’s true, Tracie, you know what that means?” Earnest said. “Whoever’s doing this is one of us. A trainer, I mean. An expert with hounds.”

  “Shit, shit, shit,” she said. “I gotta go change my profile thingie right now. Sorry.” She glanced quickly at Atticus. “Nice to meet you, Connor. Maybe I’ll see you here again.” Then she took off after her hounds, calling, “Lizzie! Mr. Darcy!” and Atticus made a tiny sound of amusement.

 

  Those names are from Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen.

 

  Yes, the Keira Knightley version. But it was a book first. I like these people who name their hounds after literary characters.

 

  That’s right. He turned back to the man and his boxer.

  “How many people do you think are on this bulletin board, Earnest?”

  “A couple hundred, maybe? I’ll have to check. I mean I definitely will. This is something I can share with the police. Thanks.”

  “Not a problem. Do you mind me asking—out of those couple hundred, how many of them are owners of Grand Champions?”

  “Oh, only fifty or so, at most.”

  “That’s a fairly large pool of targets. These abductions could go on for some time.”

  “God, I guess so.”

  “Listen,” Atticus said, “I have a friend on the police force here in Eugene, a detective.”

  Ha! That was a lie. Atticus and the police did not get along. But Earnest didn’t know that.

  “Really?” he said. “Not Detective Callaghan?”

  “Yeah!” Atticus gushed. “How do you…?”

  “He’s the one working Jack’s case. If you can call what he’s doing working. He doesn’t seem to have much interest in it.”

  “Well, maybe I can do something about that. Would you mind telling me the address of this bulletin board? And giving me the names of the other victims? All I got was Julia Garcia and Ted Lumbergh.”

  The web address was a bunch of gibberish to me, but I did catch that the French bulldog’s human in Bellingham was named Delilah Pierce, and the Airedale terrier’s human in Hillsboro was Gordon Petrie.

  “Thanks,” Atticus said. “So let’s say I’m a schmoe who’s just stolen a Grand Champion stud. Or five of them. How do I turn that into a profit? Do I place ads online or in newspapers?”

  “Oh, I’ve been looking for stud advertisements around here, believe me,” Earnest said. “Nothing so far.”

  “Just around here? Not nationally?”

  “Well, how would you figure out which one is my Jack? The number of poodle studs out there is huge. I’d have to check each one in person to see if it’s really Jack, and that’s not feasible.”

  “Got it. So whoever’s doing this is probably shipping the hounds out of the region and turning them into money machines elsewhere.”

  Earnest deflated. “Most likely. He could be anywhere by now.”

  “Well, we have an idea of where to start. We have five specific breeds to look for, so that gives us a search pattern. We might be able to narrow things down since so much is online and searchable now. And we have a pool of potential suspects on your bulletin board.”

  “I guess we do, huh?”

  “Have some hope, there. I’ll talk to the detective and see what we can do.”

  “Yeah? Hey, thanks, Connor.”

  “No problem.”

  They traded phone numbers and shook hands and then Atticus said goodbye. I hoped Algernon would be in a better mood if we ever met again. But I understood why he was upset: I know I’d be pretty wrecked if someone took Orlaith. She was always off with Granuaile in Poland and other places these days, pregnant with our puppies, and though she always came back eventually, I missed her something awful while she was gone. It was so much fun to have another hound to talk to as well as play with. I knew Atticus had gotten into the habit of bringing me to the dog park to take my mind off her and enjoy playing with other hounds, but that was only like a week or something out of every day.

  “Come on, Oberon,” he said, walking toward the tree we used to shift in.

  I asked, trotting after him.

  Of course not. We’ll make sure no one’s looking.

 

  I was going to ask you about that. Technically it’s none of our business.

 

  That would make most of the world our business, Oberon.

 

  That’s not actually our job.

 

  That’s Mahatma Gandhi you’re paraphrasing there, not a self-help guru.

 

  All right, I’m with you. I just want you to understand this might take a bit of work. It’s not like television. You might get bored.

 

  Yes, I’ve heard you say so on more than one occasion. But it’s always in response to a show you just watched, and it’s not going to be like that, where everything gets wrapped up nicely in an hour. Lab results won’t conveniently come back in a few minutes—not that we’ll have a lab to begin with. We won’t have access to police records or equipment or any legal authority. We might not get anywhere with this.

 

  No, that’s not what I’m doing. I’m trying to manage your expectations. I do want to try because I don’t like the idea of someone possibly abusing those hounds.

 

  Atticus shrugged. It’s possible. Humans are capable of terrible stuff.

 

  Yes, and even worse than that. Whatever the situation is, I’m sure Jack and these others are not as happy as they were with their owners.

 

  Chapter 2:

  The Man

  with
the

  Big Salami

  When I first heard the phrase “the game is afoot” in a Sherlock episode, Atticus had to explain both to me and his Archdruid Owen that it didn’t mean the game was a foot, because that didn’t seem like much of a game to either of us.

  “How do ye make a game out of a fecking foot?” the Archdruid groused. “Doesn’t it just stand there growing toenails? Or are ye supposed to dodge when it tries to kick ye?”

  Atticus said it was a metaphor. If the game was catching the bad guy, and it was afoot, then it was moving, the criminal was getting away, and we had to get moving too if we wanted to catch him.

 

  Right. So we need to go home first. I have to look up their addresses and then we can get started.

  We arrived at the tree we used to shift in, and Atticus looked all around to see if anyone was watching us. When he put his hand on the trunk of the bound tree, I reared up on my hind legs and put one paw on the tree and the other on his shoulder. He shifted us to Tir na nÓg, the Fae plane that connects to everything, and then to our new place in the Willamette National Forest, where he had a bound tree next to the McKenzie River. We sprang up the steps to the backyard deck and then through the door. Atticus went straight to a laptop and I went straight for the water. For some reason he always wanted me to drink from the bowl instead of the river. He was afraid I’d get sick from some kind of bacteria in the water, but I’d taken a few drinks anyway when he wasn’t looking. It was super cold and refreshing and I didn’t get sick so I didn’t see what the problem was, but I was going to follow procedure this time. When you’re detecting you have to follow procedure. Unless you’re a rogue cop like the ones on television, which usually means you also have substance abuse problems and marital troubles and get suspended a lot.

  When I was finished hydrating, Atticus was almost finished looking up addresses. He had some kind of map displayed on his screen, which I didn’t really understand how to read, but he absorbs things like that really well and doesn’t have to print things out or write them down, just like I don’t have to write down a smell if I want to remember it later.

  “Okay,” he said aloud, which he liked to do whenever it was just the two of us. “I know where to go. We’ll have to jog around a little bit like always, but nothing terribly long. We’ll visit them in order of abduction. Remember that these are all dog owners who might have additional dogs. They have high standards of behavior regarding hounds, so I’ll need you to display your best manners. No leg humping or peeing on their property.”

 

  “Reminders don’t hurt.”

 

  “Point taken.”

  We shifted down to some evergreen trees near Bend, Oregon, which Atticus said was to the southeast, and it was just a tiny bit colder somehow. A squirrel chattered at us and normally I would have stopped right there and recited Ezekiel 25:17 to him like Jules did to Brett in Pulp Fiction, but we were on a mission and I didn’t have the time to deliver The Full Jules.

  Bend smelled like bread and rotten vegetables, so thank the gods of all good smells for whoever baked the bread. I passed so many hydrants and light posts without even stopping once because they were outside our mission parameters. I was determined to be an efficient hound detective because that poodle needed our help.

  Ted Lumbergh’s house turned out to be on the outskirts of town with a lot of land attached and a pond behind it. Atticus commented that this meant Mr. Lumbergh made his money doing something else besides training Brittany spaniels. But he certainly had plenty of them left—they were barking at us long before we made it to the front door.

  Mr. Lumbergh answered the door looking like a collection of wrinkles, both on his skin and his clothes. He had ceased to care about laundry in a previous century. He had a scowl for Atticus at first but when he saw me sitting next to him his whole face changed and he completely ignored my Druid. This happens a lot because I’m very handsome. He smiled with dazzling white and even teeth that Atticus had taught me to recognize as dentures.

  “Well, hello there,” he said in a strained, raspy old voice. “Who might you be?”

  “This is Oberon,” Atticus said, and added his own name, but Mr. Lumbergh just talked right over him.

  “Hello, Oberon! You’re quite the wolfhound. I don’t remember seeing you in any of the shows around here.”

  “He’s not a show dog, just very well-trained,” Atticus said. I wagged my tail but didn’t move otherwise.

  “Bah. What a waste,” Mr. Lumbergh replied, keeping his eyes on me as he talked. “You could go far with a hound like that. I don’t suppose you came here looking for a trainer? I’m semi-retired now, but I’d reconsider for a hound like Oberon.”

  “We’re actually here about your Grand Champion that got abducted.”

  “Huh?” That tore his eyes away. “How do you know about that?”

  “We were just talking to Earnest Goggins-Smythe in Eugene. His poodle, Jack, was taken earlier this week.”

  “That so? I hadn’t heard. Damn shame.” The wrinkles twisted and scrunched around his face as he tried to remember Atticus’s name. “Who are you again?”

  “Connor Molloy. An amateur investigator. The police aren’t doing much so I’m doing what I can. Mind if I ask you what happened to your Brittany spaniel?”

  Ted Lumbergh shrugged. “Sure, I’ll tell you. It’s quick enough. Is Oberon okay around other dogs?”

  “Sure.”

  He waved us in. “Come on through to the backyard then.”

  His house was dimly lit and smelled of leather, dusty books, and dry salami. Not the typical Genovese variety, though: This was ciauscolo from the Marche region of Italy. If he shared that with his hounds, I would count Mr. Lumbergh among the finest of humans.

  He led us past several rooms and a kitchen to a sliding glass door where I could see and hear several excited hounds. They were all barking and wagging their tails, and Mr. Lumbergh calmed them down with a few curt commands shouted through the glass. They were well-trained.

  Go ahead and play with them, Oberon, Atticus told me privately as we followed Mr. Lumbergh out to the deck. I’ll fill you in when we’re done.

  There were four Brittany spaniels wagging their tails, all cute and eager with their brown-spotted white coats and floppy ears, and as soon as I cleared the door I darted to the right, where there were stairs leading down to an expansive lawn, and their toenails on the wood scratched and scrabbled to follow after. Once I hit the lawn, the race was on. It was fine Bermuda grass for a while, then untamed scrub grasses around the pond, and right then nothing sounded so good as a nice course around the water feature. I gave the legs a good stretch—longer legs than any spaniel—and dared Mr. Lumbergh’s hounds to catch me. They didn’t have a prayer because Irish wolfhounds were bred to hunt down deer and actual wolves. We’re fast and have mad stamina.

  “Ha haaah! Lookit ’em go!” Mr. Lumbergh crowed as his hounds barked and pursued me. They had a pretty good deal here, I thought. Lots of room to run and stuff to smell, the occasional pair of birds to scare up here and there. They might even get deer or elk running through here sometimes, because there were some woods beyond the pond and nothing else I could see; Mr. Lumbergh’s property was either extensive or backed up to forest land. I wondered how his hound had been stolen among all these others. Were they all tranquilized with darts? Or maybe sent to sleep by some tainted meat thrown over the fence? Humans liked to take advantage of our hunger sometimes. Atticus saved me from a poisoned steak once.

  When I got to the far side of the pond, I stopped and turned, barked a couple of times in a friendly hello, and waited for the spaniels to catch up. We introduced our noses to one another’s asses then and confirmed that we
were all friendly doggies with privileged access to fine meats thanks to our humans. I wished I could ask them questions the way Atticus was asking Mr. Lumbergh, but they didn’t know any language yet beyond a few training words, and they might not know anything more than Algy did about Jack’s abduction if they were tranquilized. We played and nipped at each other for a few minutes until Atticus called me back.

  “Oberon! Let’s go!” he shouted, and I took off, letting the spaniels trail after.

  I asked him as I approached the deck, and his answer returned through our mental bond.

  Hound’s name was Ulysses. He wore a different collar than the rest of these others which made him easy to identify. They were fed some drugged snacks and Ted says whoever did it must know dogs pretty well, might even have some decent veterinary knowledge. Our theory about the thief being a member of that bulletin board community is probably a good one.

 

  No. Earnest either didn’t know that detail about this abduction or forgot to tell us.

 

  Sadly not. He doesn’t post on the board all that often and can’t think of anyone who’d have it in for him.

  When Mr. Lumbergh asked if he could give me a slice of that ciauscolo for being such a good hound, I was determined to find Ulysses for him if I could. Think of the size of the salami he would give me for that!

  We all scrambled inside to the kitchen and Mr. Lumbergh pulled out a lovely salami and a cutting board. The Brittanys knew what was up: They all sat around him in a circle, tails wagging. Ciauscolo isn’t a dry, hard salami, but soft and almost spreadable on crackers or bread once you remove the casing. And it’s melt-in-your-mouth delicious—not that I would ever let meat hang around in my mouth long enough to melt! He cut five thick slices, removed the casing from each, and tossed one to every hound in turn. Oh, suffering cats, I sure do like being a detective!

  Chapter 3: