Now the dog Charles Sutlin had turned out to the theme of Born Free stood in the doorway of the master bedroom of the Burlingame summer home (the Sutlin cottage was on the far side of the take and the two families had never met, although they had exchanged casual nods at the town boat-dock over the last three or four summers). Its head was down, its eyes were wide, and its hackles were up. It was unaware of its own steady growl; all of its concentration was focused on the room. It understood in some deep, instinctual way that the blood-smell would soon overwhelm all caution. Before that happened, it must assure itself as completely as it could that this was not a trap. It didn't want to be caught by masters with hard, hurtful feet, or by those who picked up hard pieces of the ground and threw them.
"Go away!" Jessie tried to shout, but her voice came out sounding weak and trembly. She wasn't going to make the dog go away by shouting at it; the bastard somehow knew she couldn't get up off the bed and hurt it.
This can't be happening, she thought. How could it be, when justthree hours ago I was in the passenger seat of the Mercedes with my seatbeltaround me, listening to the Rainmakers on the tape player and remindingmyself to see what was playing at the Mountain Valley Cinemas, just incase we did decide to spend the night? How can my husband be dead whenwe were singing along with Bob Walkenhorst? "One more summer," wesang, one more chance, one more stab at romance." We both know all thewords to that one, because it's a great one, and that being the case, howcan Gerald possibly he dead? How can things have possibly gotten fromthere to here? Sorry, folks, hut this just has to he a dream. It's much tooabsurd for reality.
The stray began to advance slowly into the room, legs stiff with caution, tail drooping, eyes wide and black, lips peeled back to reveal a full complement of teeth. About such concepts as absurdity it knew nothing.
The former Prince, with whom the eight-year-old Catherine Sutlin had once romped joyfully (at least until she'd gotten a Cabbage Patch doll named Marnie for her birthday and temporarily lost some of her interest), was part Lab and part collie... a mixed breed, but a long way from being a mongrel. When Sutlin had turned it out on Bay Lane at the end of August, it had weighed eighty pounds and its coat had been glossy and sleek with health, a not unattractive mixture of brown and black (with a distinctive white collie bib on the chest and undersnout). It now weighed a bare forty pounds, and a hand passed down its side would have felt each straining rib, not to mention the rapid, feverish beat of its heart. Its coat was dull and bedraggled and full of burdocks. A half-healed pink scar, souvenir of a panicky scramble under a barbed wire fence, zigzagged down one haunch, and a few porcupine quills stuck out of its muzzle like crooked whiskers. It had found the porker lying dead under a log about ten days ago, but had given up on it after the first noseful of quills. It had been hungry but not yet desperate.
Now it was both. Its last meal had been a few maggoty scraps nosed out of a discarded garbage bag in a ditch running beside Route 117, and that had been two days ago. The dog which had quickly learned to bring Catherine Sutlin a red rubber ball when she rolled it across the living-room floor or into the hall was now quite literally starving on its feet.
Yes, but here-right here, on the floor, within sight!-were pounds and pounds of fresh meat, and fat, and bones filled with sweet marrow. It was like a gift from the God of Strays.
The onetime darling of Catherine Sutlin continued to advance on the corpse of Gerald Burlingame.
CHAPTER EIGHT
This isn't going to happen, Jessie told herself. No way it can, so justrelax.
She went on telling herself this right up to the moment when the upper half of the stray's body was cut off from her view by the left side of the bed. Its tail began to wag harder than ever, and then there was a sound she recognized-the sound of a dog drinking from a puddle on