“You’re welcome,” I called after him.
I might as well have been talking to myself.
The woods were thick with underbrush, but the Shepherd slipped through the thick cover effortlessly. No sound alerted me to the direction he had taken. When I stepped off the path and peered into the trees, I saw no sign of him. The dog had vanished as suddenly as he’d appeared.
If I hadn’t still been holding the empty wrapper in my hands, I might have wondered if I’d imagined him.
6
“There you are,” said Aunt Peg. “Bertie and I were wondering where you’d gone off to.”
The two of them were waiting for me outside the door to the main lecture hall. It was nearly time for Charles’s speech, and judging by the crowd that had gathered, most of the symposium participants planned to attend. The room’s double doors were wide open; even so, with the crush of people in the entryway, there was a wait to get through.
“I hear you’re supposed to be keeping an eye on me,” I said to Bertie.
She flushed guiltily. “Frank made me promise. I think Sam put him up to it.”
“And you gave in? You of all people should know better. I’m pregnant, not incapacitated. When you were pregnant, did anyone follow you around?”
“Actually, yeah…Frank did. It just about drove me crazy. Eventually I had to tell him that if he didn’t stop, I’d reconsider the whole idea and not have the baby.”
“I’ll bet that worked,” Peg said dryly.
She ushered Bertie and me into the flow of traffic. “If we don’t find seats soon, we’ll have to settle for a back corner somewhere. Considering what Margo said last night, I’d just as soon have a good view of the proceedings.”
“Have you heard any more about Charles’s speech?” I asked, as we found three empty chairs on the aisle in the middle of the room.
“Not a blessed thing. If Charles is up to something, he must be planning to spring it on us as a surprise. Or maybe Margo was mistaken and it was all just a false alarm.”
At the front of the room, Margo stepped up to the podium and asked for silence. Stragglers found their seats. Conversations died away. Everyone waited expectantly.
“I’d like to welcome you to the first annual Rockwall Mountain Symposium,” she began. “I trust you’re all having a wonderful time so far?”
People nodded in agreement. There was a smattering of applause.
“Excellent. It’s my pleasure to present our keynote speaker, Charles Evans. For most of you, I would imagine that this is a man who needs no introduction. Charles has been a force in the world of purebred dogs since he won the Junior Showmanship class at Westminster in…” She paused as if trying to come up with the year. “Well, let’s just say it was quite some time ago.”
Charles, standing off to one side, nodded in acknowledgment of the teasing jab. The audience laughed appreciatively.
“In due course Charles became one of the top professional handlers the sport has ever known. Some of the dogs he presented are known in the annals of their breeds as legends. His skill, his flair, his innate ability to bring out the best in every dog he showed changed the look of presentation for the generations of professional handlers that followed.”
She was laying it on pretty thick. I wondered if Margo was hoping that if she piled on the accolades, Charles might be convinced to abort whatever subversive plan he had in mind.
If so, the symposium director was certainly giving it her best shot. The introduction droned on and on. Finishing with his handling career, Margo began to praise Charles’s superior skills when he moved into the next phase of his profession and became a knowledgeable and discerning judge.
I slumped in my seat and reconsidered my earlier opinion. Maybe Margo’s plan was to bore the audience to sleep before she relinquished the podium in the hope that that would mute the effect of whatever it was Charles had to say.
I took a look around the room. Though a majority of the attendees were already aware of Charles’s accomplishments, most were listening politely.
I’d have expected to see Caroline Evans sitting right down in front. Instead she was seated not too far from us. Rather than listening to her husband’s introduction, she was fooling with something in her lap. It looked like she was text-messaging someone on her phone. No doubt she’d heard all this before.
When Margo finally stopped speaking and Charles stepped forward, the applause was thunderous. Whether the response was for Charles himself, or whether the audience was simply relieved to finally have the program move forward, it was hard to tell.
“Good afternoon,” Charles said.
His voice was deep and soothing. It rolled out across the room like the voice of wisdom. And the voice of authority.
We all sat up and began to pay attention.
He looked around the room. “What a pleasure it is to see so many familiar faces here today. Old friends and, I hope, some new ones too. I’m here to talk to you about the future of a sport that we all know and love. Of course, I’m referring to the sport of dogs.”
Despite his opening, Charles spent the next fifteen minutes speaking not about the future, but rather about the past. He gave a brief history of dog showing in the United States and talked about how much the dog world had changed in the thirty-plus years of his own involvement.
Earlier sportsmen, he told us, had defined the different breeds of dogs by their function and usefulness. In the intervening years, however, generations of dog fanciers had revised and reshaped those breeds with the result that the dogs we knew today often looked very different from their forebears.
None of this came as a shock to anyone in the audience. Some of the listeners were nodding as he spoke; others were desultorily taking notes.
Then Charles paused and took a deep breath. “We now come to the heart of the message I want to deliver. Conscience compels me to say something that may not be entirely popular. Something that many of you may not want to hear. Please bear in mind that throughout my entire career, one thing has remained true. I have always, always put the welfare of the dog first. It is something I shall also attempt to do today, no matter what the consequences of my actions might be.”
People who had begun to relax, sat up straight again. Those who were taking notes, turned to a fresh page.
“Uh oh,” Aunt Peg said under her breath. “Here it comes.”
I could see Margo, sitting off to one side of the dais. Her fingers were knit together tightly in her lap. Her expression was strained.
Charles, by contrast, looked calm and composed. He grasped the sides of the podium between his hands and gazed out over his audience.
“Unfortunately in its current state, the sport of dogs has become a somewhat unnatural activity. Driven by the desire to produce dogs that will excel in the show ring, putting the need to win above all else, breeders are manipulating canine genetics in the quest to produce a perfect specimen. A quest that has not only proven elusive but has also worked to the detriment of many breeds. One only has to look at the narrow, pointed head of the Collie, the profuse, almost unworkable coat of the Poodle, or the reproductive difficulties of many of the Toy breeds to see how true this is.”
“I would beg to differ,” Aunt Peg said under her breath.
No surprise, she sounded annoyed. As soon as Charles had uttered the words, I’d known that the reference to Poodles would make her bristle.