Useless Bay(3)

I hated the guy. Not just because of his looks, but because he was perfectly comfortable half-assing an important job. My four brothers and I had our faults, but not finishing a job you’d started? That was a sin. This Liston guy had to go down.

I charged toward the truck, determined to wrench it open. I knew there’d be a canine scrum, but if Sammy could deal with it, so could I. I even had my hand on the door handle when, with some kind of animal supersense, Liston turned around in the driver’s seat and looked right at me. The windows were up, and the aggressive dogs were all barking and howling to be let out, so I couldn’t hear what he said. But I could see his lips as he pointed at me and mouthed the words Stay . . . Good girl.

I froze. It was as if Liston’s greasy hands had snapped a leash around my neck. I didn’t want to obey him, but I did. With his greasy hair and his piercing eyes, he scared me into submission.

Then he drove off, kicking up a rooster tail of pollen in our circular drive.

I stood there staring at nothing for a while before I realized that Patience was leaning against me. Without knowing I was doing it, I was stroking her long velvety ears. Her eyes were half closed, as if she were on vacation right there in our front yard.

I made two vows that day. The first was that since I hadn’t been able to rescue those other dogs, I would finish rescuing Patience.

The second was that I was not going to back down from any more bullies. The next time some alpha wanted to pick a fight with me, I would fight back.

? ? ?

A month later, Sammy came running into my room and said, “Hey, Pixie, whaddaya think this means?”

I didn’t know what he meant, since he wasn’t carrying anything and since, as we’ve seen, Sammy isn’t long on planning. Or explaining. All I knew was that something had his dander up. His eyes were narrowed the way they were in math class.

I followed him to Mom’s home office. Mom herself was nowhere to be seen. Sammy kept checking over his shoulder, like we were government spies about to hack international DEFCON codes—even though she was just a telecommuting code monkey for some gaming company.

Her e-mail was up on her monitor, with the message that had Sammy so perplexed. At first, it looked like spam—the message began, “Dear Customer.” It was from Liston Kennels. The body of the message read, “We’re all praying for Hal’s safe return. In the meantime, we’ll continue to serve you and the furry members of your family as best we can.”

I read it four times. I could see why Sammy needed someone to help interpret it.

“‘Safe return.’ Do you think that means he’s been in a hiking accident?” he said.

I wondered the same thing. So I pulled up the Seattle Times website, thinking I would have to dig for information, but I didn’t. There was Liston’s troll face right on the front page. He did not look like a happy man. The way he looked, if he could’ve thrown a pinch collar over all of us and given us a good yank, he would’ve. The headline read: Dog Trainer to the Stars Missing, Presumed Dead.

“Oh my God! Dean! Lawford! Frank! You have to see this!” Sammy yelled, grossed out but also excited.

Here was the story, the best we could tell: Hal Liston had an ex-wife. The ex-wife had a new boyfriend. The new boyfriend, for whatever reason (and I could imagine many, beginning with the grungy hair), did not like Hal Liston. The new boyfriend was in a rage when he left the apartment he shared with Hal Liston’s ex-wife.

She, worried about what might happen, called the police. The police went to Liston Kennels and found an empty house, with a rug missing from the living room. The hardwood floors where the rug had been were a lighter shade than the boards around them and smelled strongly of bleach.

Nothing else.

What the police did find two days later was the new boyfriend’s car, abandoned in a parking lot that backed out onto a particularly deep and swift part of Puget Sound. With the toilet-cleaner kind of current.

The trunk of the car did not smell like bleach. It was saturated in blood.

None of us knew how to make sense of the story. We’d seen the guy only twice in our lives—once when he picked up our dog, and then when he dropped her off. Only Patience knew Hal Liston, and she wasn’t talking.

Gradually, over the years, the incident morphed into a pickup line my brothers used on girls. “Did you know that our dog was trained by a murdered man?”

But I could never bring myself to think of it that way. Every time I opened my mouth to talk about it, I felt like someone had thrown a noose around my neck and pinched me speechless.

I will never forget the smile on Hal Liston’s face when he told me to stay.

And he was never found. His body was still out there, somewhere in Puget Sound.

Useless Bay, where we live, on the southern half of Whidbey Island, is where the saltwater current vomits up what it doesn’t want. After a high tide, the saltwater lagoon below our bluff is always littered with broken Frisbees, pieces of a Styrofoam cooler, deflated Mylar balloons, and signboards for fishing companies that have been out of business for twenty years. And the rest, the rotten and stinking: corpses of harbor seals, corpses of halibut with two eyes on one side of their heads, corpses of sailboats that haven’t been moored properly elsewhere.

I don’t believe in predetermination. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe that certain people are “susceptible” to messages from the other side.