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huskies, but malamutes, and what she really, really wanted for her most special wedding present was a beautiful little malamute puppy. Her friends told her that she was out of her mind. Besides, they said, she’d never talk Greg into it.
    ”Oh, yeah?” Crystal replied. ”How much you wanna bet?”
    The smug note in her voice made me uneasy. Leaving the stall, I took a place at the sink next to the one where Crystal was, of all things, brushing her teeth. Unable to keep my own mouth shut, I said, ”You know, I couldn’t help overhearing. I thought you should know that there aren’t any puppies for sale here. You aren’t allowed to sell puppies at a show.”
    Crystal’s self-satisfied expression made me wonder whether she’d already written someone a check. ”That’s show grounds ”, she informed me. ”Otherwise, it’s nobody’s business but your own.”
    Show grounds? Crystal, who couldn’t tell a malamute from a Siberian, seemed a strange source of the dog person’s phrase. Odder yet was her understanding of the American Kennel Club’s sharp distinction between secular terrain and the hallowed precincts of a show site. As I fluffed up my hair in front of a stretch of mirror, I pondered the matter. While I was touching up my lipstick, Crystal flounced out, drink in hand, and her friends followed. I’d just zipped my cosmetics bag when the door to the ladies’ room opened to admit Cubby’s adopter, Jeanine, who wasn’t just weeping, as she’d been when her dog was in the ring, but sobbing hard. With her was a woman who just had to be her sister. Both were tall and lean, with long, straight black hair, fine features, extraordinarily large hands, and long fingers tipped by nails tinted a shade of rose-brown that picked up the color of Jeanine’s rather drab suit and the flower print of her companion’s silk scarf. Catching sight of me, Jeanine covered her face with those immense, elegant hands. I immediately asked what on earth was wrong.
    Her companion answered for her. ”We had an unfortunate little experience. I’m Jeanine’s sister. Arlette.”
    We shook hands. ”Holly Winter. I placed Cubby with Jeanine. Jeanine, can you tell me what happened?”
    ”Jeanine,” Arlette said firmly, ”you know, this does not have to be a big huge deal. Get it through your head: This was not an attack. It was just some ignorant people who didn’t even know who we were, okay? So would you go and wash your face in cold water? And blow your nose and pull yourself together.”
    As Jeanine moved obediently toward a washbasin, I again asked what had happened.
    ”It’s nothing,” Arlette answered. ”We were on our way back to the car. With Cubby. We’re parked at the opposite end of the hotel, because when we drove in this afternoon, we noticed there was a field there, and it seemed like a good place to let Cubby do his thing. So we left the car there. Anyway, just now, when we’d almost got to the car, there were some people talking and—”
    Jeanine lifted her wet face from the sink to wail: ”Men.”
    ”Deep voices,” her sister explained. ”It was very dark. The lighting out there really isn’t adequate. Anyway, all that happened was that we overheard a couple of phrases that got Jeanine all upset. And for no good reason! Have you got that, Jeanine? For no good reason!”
    Jeanine took a seat on one of the dainty little white chairs arrayed along the counter in front of the long mirror. The ladies’ room didn’t supply paper towels, just machines for drying your hands, so she was blotting her face with tissues from her purse. I caught her eye in the mirror. ”Jeanine,” I said gently, ”could you tell me what they said? Obviously, it was something painful. I want to know what it was.”
    ”It was about B-B-Betty’s mongrels,” she stammered.
    ”The killer phrase,” Arlette added, ”was ’trash dogs.’ But they were not referring—”
    Jeanine abandoned repairs on her face to snarl: ”Oh,