Free Stud Rites by Susan Conant Page B

attitude toward the other that I strive to model, Kimi was breakfasting inside the Bronco, and Rowdy was using the blacktop as a tablecloth. Kimi’s head was still in her dish. Rowdy was scouring his with his tongue.
    ”All done, big boy?” I bent over. When I lifted Rowdy’s empty dish, he kept licking it. As I held it for him, my eyes drifted and then froze. On the macadam just under the rear of Betty’s van lay, of all things, Comet’s reliquary, the Alaskan malamute lamp—pink granite base, brass rod, shedding dog, Iditarod shade and all—Sherri Ann Printz’s donation to Rescue’s auction. After the showcase, I realized, Betty and I had both neglected to gather up the valuable items reserved for Saturday night’s live auction. At some point, Betty must have remembered our lapse and returned to the booth to remove the Inuit carving, the jewelry, the antique wolf prints, and Sherri Ann’s lamp. The framed prints were bulky, heavy, and fragile. The lamp, of course, sat on granite. It would’ve required a six-armed Amazon to carry the entire load at once. Betty was in her seventies. At a guess, she weighed barely a hundred pounds. Instead of making repeated journeys through the exhibition hall, the corridors, the lobby, and the maze of hallways and staircases that led to her room, and instead of asking for help, she must have made a single trip with her van, returned it to its original spot next to my Bronco, and carried some or all of the items the short distance to her room.
    What I didn’t understand was why the damned lamp was underneath Betty’s van. Her aging memory? It was usually better than mine. Forty years her junior, I’d entirely forgotten the valuables until now. No, Betty loathed that lamp, and she resented Sherri Ann’s use of Rescue in her bid for a seat on the board of our national breed club, a campaign that was heavily focused on beating Freida Reilly. In all arenas, political ambition baffles me. If the United States were populated exclusively by people like me, the race for the White House would be a sprint in the opposite direction, and presidential debates would be fights about who’d have to get stuck with the job this time. But glory isn’t wasted on everyone. In vying for the honor of election to the board, Sherri Ann and Freida both wanted the support of the pro-Rescue faction of the club, and Betty took violent exception to what she saw as Sherri Ann’s hypocritical effort to seduce our vote with her lamp.
    With Rowdy and Kimi barricading the narrow space between Betty’s van and my Bronco, I grabbed an old dog blanket that I keep in the car, and slipped it under the van and over the lamp. Taking special care not to damage the lamp, I pulled it across the blacktop, lifted it up into my car, and settled it on the floor where the passenger’s feet belong. I hid the lamp under the blanket, locked the car door, and took the dogs for a quick walk, during which, I might add, they failed to find the body of James Hunnewell. Maybe they sniffed in some special way, but after all, they’re dogs; they always sniff. If they pulled on their leashes, what do you expect? They’re Alaskan malamutes. But I may have missed some subtle sign. I was preoccupied. We were not engaged in a cover-up, I decided. Betty or I might well have locked the lamp in my car for safekeeping; we just hadn’t happened to do so. Well, now we had. All I’d done, really, was to change history. A half hour later, when I’d showered and dressed for the day and was following the tortuous route to the Lagoon, where breakfast was served, it occurred to me that during the Watergate affair, the conspirators had probably expressed the same sentiment. Betty Burley, however, was no Richard Nixon.
    Despite the tropical vegetation, both organic and plastic, and the plethora of ukeleles, feathers, and paddles on the walls of the Lagoon, the only Hawaiian foods on the breakfast buffet table were several bananas that rested