Perhaps they’d never stopped enjoying the landscape here. To this day, Olga Swenson seemed fond of the Pinetum and topiary garden. What gave her the strength to continue residing on the shore of a body of water that had taken her husband’s life?
If deepening dusk endows rhetorical questions with significance, it serves even better to clothe those who pose them with an air of wisdom. Or so it was for Liz Higgins, walking through the snow along Lake Waban that cold December evening. The farther her feet and her thoughts carried her, the more convinced she became that Olga Swenson had chosen well when the widow decided to confide in Liz.
But Liz’s confidence was in for a blow.
Night fell as Liz came to the edge of the woodland and approached the western gate leading into the topiary garden. Relieved the gate was not chained shut, Liz took comfort in knowing that beyond the rhododendrons, the scene would open up until she reached the Pinetum. Then, even when the walk darkened amid the collection of conifers, she would be closer to the well-lit college pathways and her car.
Rounding the rhododendrons, she looked ahead eagerly towards the balustrade-bounded walkway.
Much brighter.
Bright enough to reveal the silhouette of a Doberman pinscher, posed in an unmistakably challenging stance.
Liz froze in her tracks. Then, very slowly, she turned to retrace her steps.
The Doberman advanced.
She halted.
So did the dog.
With her back to the watchdog, Liz listened for its approach. The only sound in the moonless night was that made by the reporter’s own rapid breathing.
Wasn’t it always said dogs can sense your fear? And that attack dogs were more likely to strike if they smelled your cowardice?
Liz took in a few long breaths through her nose, exhaling each from her mouth. Perhaps she’d slowed her breathing. But her heart did not stop pounding. Surely she must be broadcasting her terror.
Liz felt a breeze on her face. It was blowing from the direction of the open space. Good. Her scent would not be reaching the dog. But that was small comfort when she had no idea if the dog had continued to approach her.
She had to know if the Doberman had gotten closer. Slowly, she turned her head and then her shoulders, too.
She saw the dog had held its place, but now that she moved, he did, too. Straight toward her.
Haunches forward, the dog took several steps. The movements were slow, precise, light-footed.
Liz took a few leaden steps away from the animal.
The hound halved the distance between them.
There was nothing to do but test one remaining hope. The dog might stop following her if she crossed the property line. Steadily and slowly, Liz covered the remaining few yards to the gate and passed through it.
Then Liz’s breath was not the only noise in the night. She heard the short pants of the Doberman, too.
Liz knew it would be madness to strike out into the dark woods with the dog on her heels. At least on the Hightower Estate there was the hope of someone hearing her if she screamed. So, slowly bringing her forearm across her chest in case she had to protect her face, Liz turned and, to steady herself, softly muttered the first song that came to mind.
“God rest ye merry gentleman, let nothing you dismay. . . ”
Then, one snow-muffled step at a time, she rounded the rhododendrons.
At first, the dog was nowhere to be seen. Then she spotted him in the fantastic landscape, standing, ears pointed toward her, in front of a corkscrew-shaped topiary. Placing front paws lightly on the snow, he advanced, sniffing. In his new location, the breeze would blow Liz’s odor of fear straight to him.
The dog made a sudden change in posture.
Was he teasing her before attacking? The damnable beast seemed to romp in her direction, circling a gumdrop-shaped conifer before flying down the hillside straight towards Liz.
Liz lifted her arm in front of her throat. But the dog did not leap at her. Instead he circled round and round Liz’s statue-still form and finally sat down in front of her. Louder than her heaving breathing, more steady than her throbbing heartbeat, there was another sound.
Flop, flop, flop, flop.
A stubbed tail beating against the tightly trimmed branches of a topiary shrub.
Amazed, Liz did not question the change in her circumstances. As she walked along the balustrade through the Pinetum and out the eastern gate of the Hightower property, the Doberman trotted at her side like her own protector. At the gate, the dog halted and sat watching her protectively until Liz crossed the arched stone bridge that led, at last, to the lamp-lit campus walkway.
In her car, Liz turned up her heater until the windows steamed over and her teeth stopped chattering. Then she removed her jacket. Pulling her arm out of a sleeve, she found a thin, nearly threadbare scarf that was not her own. It must have gotten caught there when her jacket was hung on a hook in the Swenson mudroom. Holding it to her face, she breathed in the subtle scent of another human, an odor that must have saved her life.
Liz turned on the defroster and, when the windshield cleared, pulled her car out of the faculty club parking lot. It felt as though an entire evening had passed, but it was only 5:50 p.m. She should have called in to the newsroom much earlier to report what she was up to, and now it looked like she would be late for her meeting with Cormac Kinnaird, too. With the faculty club closed, she drove to Wellesley Center to find a phone booth.
“Pissed.”
That was how Dermott McCann described himself at learning Liz had no story for him. When he gave her a piece of his mind about the late call-in, she gave him a piece of hers.
“Why don’t you arm your reporters with up-to-date technology? Have you heard of a cell phone?”
“Some reporters take pride in being up to date for their own sakes. Christ, how do you have a personal life without owning a cell phone these days? You know we’d pay for calls you make for us, if you submit the receipt.”
“But not for the basic bill or the phone itself. Thanks a lot!”
“You got a chip on your shoulder?”
“More than that. If I’d had a cell phone an hour ago, I might have been spared a threatening encounter with a Doberman!”
“Yeah, yeah. A likely story.”
Hoping he’d be lingering over his banjo at Tir Na Nog, Liz left Kinnaird a phone message. Saying she’d been unavoidably delayed, she asked the doctor to phone her at Gravesend Street, where she planned to stop and change her clothes before heading to the Somerville pub.
By the time she arrived in her Pike-side abode, Liz was so beat that she would have greeted with relief a message from Kinnaird postponing their encounter. She wanted nothing more than a very hot shower and an equally steaming bowl of soup. She treated herself to one after the other, and then fell into bed. It was just 7:10.
At 9:30, the ringing telephone startled her awake. It was her mother calling from Mexico, where she and her partner were spending the winter in his Airstream trailer.
“I was gearing up to leave you a voice-mail message, Liz,” she said. “I thought you’d be out on the town or with friends the Friday before Christmas.”
Liz gave her a nutshell account of the story she was covering and told her mother how frustrated she was about the weekend falling just when she needed a business day to follow a great lead.
“You don’t need a business day to take a ride in a New York City taxi. Why don’t you go down to the city and follow up on that taxi receipt you found? You could stay with Aunt Janice and have a good laugh while you’re at it.”