Read Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog for Free Online Page B

revenge. Go big or stay home is the motto, especially when it comes to getting even.
    I hoped that’s all that would happen this week. And why not? If we could goof on one another, humiliate a fellow professional by getting his dog to appear to be breaking a command during a lecture or demo, let’s say, wouldn’t that be enough?
    Chip, to my left, his back to me, was deeply engrossed in a conversation with Boris, to his left. And Woody, to my right, was chatting up Sam, clever man. I sawed my steak and looked across the table, thinking of all those people in all those singles bars who had to try to look as if they were having fun, sitting all alone nursing a drink, figuring that this was it for the rest of their lives. Rather than feel pitifully ignored, I decided to test my theory.
    I turned slightly and clicked my tongue to get Betty’s attention, and secure in the knowledge that I would not be heard above Boris’s bombastic pronouncements, I gave Chip’s shepherd her signal to search for drugs. Betty rose up without moving a paw, slowly, the way Dracula rose from his coffin in Nosferatu, and remaining still, nose in the air, she trolled for a scent. Then quietly, the stealth shepherd began to make her way around the table, air-scenting, occasionally stopping to poke at a purse or a briefcase to release the scents inside.
    I took a peek at the program while I waited for Chip to notice. Audrey was speaking in the afternoon. I wondered how she’d feel following Beryl, but when I looked up, she didn’t seem to be thinking about her talk at all, not the way she was locked in conversation with Marty Eliot.
    There were thirteen of us around the table. I hoped it wasn’t an omen. Nearly everyone, well, everyone except me, was engrossed in dinner and conversation with the person to his left or right. The real tension wouldn’t start to build, I figured, until people started lecturing, at which point everyone but the speaker would think he’d just heard a tale told by an idiot. Watching Betty make her way around the table, I was hoping no one had a video or slide show. God knows what might happen in die dark.
    Bucky was regaling Tracy with a great story, how he trained Meryl’s dog, went on safari with Sly, or prepared the Laddie Boy Bulldog for his latest commercial. Rick Shelbert and Alan Cooper were arguing across Cathy Powers’s dinner. Looking from one to the other, she seemed to be at a tennis match. Rick looked pretty angry, but he kept his voice down, and I wasn’t able to catch a word. Then Betty made her find. She was standing behind Audrey, pulling the world in through her nose. Suddenly she sat, her nose pointing to Audrey’s purse. She barked once.
    Chip stood so quickly his chair tipped over. He started around the table and then stopped cold. As he turned, everyone else did too. Now they were all looking at me. I stabbed a piece of potato with my fork, shrugging as I lifted it to my mouth and began to devour it whole. Surely no one would expect an explanation when my mouth was full. Anyway, how was I supposed to know that Audrey used controlled substances to help her make her otherworldly connections? For all I knew, she really did have second sight, or whatever the hell it’s called.
    Betty was praised and returned to her place, and everyone else went back to the conversation I’d so rudely interrupted with my prank. I was still being neglected, but at least I felt I had set the proper tone for getting out one’s aggressions. It wasn’t until the plates were being cleared that I noticed Audrey staring hard at me across the table. I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back, her dark eyes burning in my specific direction.
    It wasn’t until she’d stopped working as a hairdresser and had started working with pets that she’d begun telling people she was one-third Indian—Seminole, I think. Or was it Cree? Whatever. I guess she learned a different biology than I did, but she was dark, and her hair