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and second-floor tenant, Rita, was around. Rita is a clinical psychologist. She already thinks that everyone is insane and doesn’t need any supporting evidence from me. “Well, I, uh, I say things to her,” I stammered. Vinnie was a golden retriever. She was my great obedience dog. She had a temperament from the heaven to which she has returned. Goldens are eager to please, but they aren’t necessarily brilliant. Vinnie was. She was quick, insightful, observant, and intuitive. Nonetheless, when she was here with me, our verbal exchanges were a trifle one-sided, and the balance hadn’t shifted since her demise.
    Ceci shook her head sadly. “They have so much to share with us!”
    “Vinnie gave me everything,” I said in her defense.
    “You’d give anything, wouldn’t you,” said Ceci, “to see her again.”
    With no hesitation, I said, “Yes. Anything.”
    “With the help of the gifted, our loved ones approach closer all the time.” With a knowing nod, she extracted an ivory business card from her purse and pressed it on me. Then she made her way to a beige Mercedes.
    I looked at the card, IRENE WHEELER, it read, ANIMAL COMMUNICATOR. The address was in Cambridge.
    “I’ll be damned,” I said to Rowdy. “Irene Wheeler.”
    The animal psychic? The quack consulted by Gloria and Scott? Irene Wheeler.
    I am an animal communicator. Ask Rowdy. Ask Kimi. For that matter, ask Vinnie. If you love your dog, you are an animal communicator. Steve Delaney is an animal communicator. For instance, he’d communicated Gigi’s need to be spayed. But Irene Wheeler, Animal Communicator? No, no, no. Irene Wheeler, Charlatan.
     

Chapter Five
     
    F IVE DAYS LATER, EARLY on Friday morning, I was tempted to call the Gateway to offer some trumped-up excuse to postpone our visit. I’d slept restlessly and awakened with a sense of obligations unfulfilled. Besides having to earn a living, I had to keep a dentist appointment in Newton, and I had to groom both dogs for a show the next day. I always shampoo and blow dry them before a show to make their coats really stand off their bodies, the way the standard says. The standard also says that malamutes are to be evaluated principally on the basis of their original function as sledge dogs. Whenever I get the dogs ready for a show, I feel sorry for the generations of Arctic dwellers who relied on these dogs to act as canine moving vans. What those people must have gone through to make sure the dogs would pull! I mean, unless you spend a terrible amount of time with a forced-air dryer and a brush, your dog doesn’t stand a chance in the ring, so I assume that all this fluffiness the judges like must be absolutely crucial to the breed’s ability to haul heavy freight. But then I thought of Gus, Nancy, and the others, Althea of course, and Helen, and I made my apologies to Kimi and took Rowdy to the Gateway.
    The drive there was dismal. Everything, including the sky, was the color of dirt. Mats of leaves rotted in the gutters. Nature and artifice had cooperated to litter people’s yards with broken tree branches and with scraps of sodden paper and torn plastic. The streets were thick with ice-melting chemicals and sand. Loose black sticky nuggets of asphalt lay everywhere except in the potholes they were supposed to fill. At the edges of parking lots, icy mountains of filth lingered: the unsettled graves of dead snow.
    The Gateway was in Cambridge near the Belmont line, only a short drive from my house, which is the three-story red wooden one at the comer of Appleton and Concord. The Gateway was a new facility constructed of brick, concrete, and plate glass, and surrounded by foundation plantings of evergreens and rhododendrons in beds mulched with wood chips. For the previous week, we’d had mild, rainy weather, a sort of winter mud season, but last night the temperature had dropped thirty degrees, and the Gateway’s parking lot was thick with fresh sand and chemicals that I tried