Free Year of the Dog by Shelby Hearon

grazing.”
    Mom hushed him. “Give the girl a break, Talbot. She’s got a boyfriend maybe who happens to be someone else from the someone here who she spent the last five years of her life married to. That’s the number one and only thing we need to know.”
    â€œYou look after yourself,” Daddy said, “hear me? You understand?”
    Mom had the last word. “The next time you go over there to see her, you could take along one of Mr. Greenwood’s books, that’s nothing but a compliment, which I’m sure he’d be glad to sign to be accommodating to someone that’s in the family.”

13
    Dear Mom,
    I thought you and Daddy would like to see some different photos of Charlotte than the ones I sent before, and hope they will get your mind back on a matter of major interest to you and off the teacher named James, who I know only in a friendly way.
    Here is the big clock on the outside wall of the old red brick store which has the Woman in the Moon on the face and different objects for the hours. So the Judge can remember that he heard the gunshot at half-past frying pan before the parade began. And here is his house, which I figured out by counting the ones he passes every morning on his way to enjoy a cup of coffee with his neighbors: the one with the gazebo, the one with the greenhouse, the one with the turrets on top. And the white frame building is the old meeting house where he has his office. Now you can see the locations as you read over the books.
    Take care of yourselves, and eat lots of summer peaches for me.
    Love,
Janey
    * * *
    What I didn’t mention to my family was that after having had the nice tea with Aunt May and her friend Kitty Boisvert, I was wild to get back to Charlotte to hunt for some connection between the books and the women.
    On the way, though, wanting it to be a learning trip for Beulah as well, I took a back road off the highway so she could have a walk, a trudge really, on a winding dirt lane between an apple orchard and a horse farm. After all, there was no guarantee her blind person would live in a city with curbs, traffic lights, and crowds. She might wind up the companion to someone used to rail fences, livestock and farmland.
    Once in town, Beulah perked right up. She had been here before: lots of grass, no sidewalks ! I headed us straight for the library, having reread the part of The Prisoner of Charlotte where the Judge hears a gunshot just as the fire siren goes off, the ambulance wails, the town clock strikes ten, and a parade of a hundred school children with drums marches down the street and around the landmark one-room schoolhouse. When a prominent citizen turns up dead on the steps of the Congregational Church a short time later, the Judge recalls another wrong-doing committed under cover of a similar deafening din: a falsely convicted prisoner set upon by dogs during a raucous prison riot. And—this being the part that interested me now—he walks down to ask the librarian with the curly gray hair to look up the old news account of that miscarriage of justice, and confirms that he has found the secret past of the dead man, and a lead to the killer.
    Afterward, the two chat together about the morning’s parade: “ A cacophony of sound, ” the Judge declares. To which the librarian replies, “I would rather have called it a dissonance of noise. ” And standing in the well-lit library while the lady at the desk admired Beulah’s Companion Dog vest, I could imagine hearing plain as day the voices of Aunt May and her friend Kitty, because that’s exactly the way theytalked. Maybe, I decided, Bert Greenwood wasn’t Aunt May’s boyfriend at all but a friend to the two women instead; perhaps they both helped him out and he put them, disguised, in his mysteries.

14
    JAMES HAD BEEN to my house before, coming by to get me to walk downtown to meet Pete and the kids who hung out with them. A couple