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© 2017 Steven W. Horn. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system—except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine, newspaper, or on the Web—without permission in writing from the publisher. Request for permission should be submitted to Granite Peak Press, P.O. Box 2597, Cheyenne, WY 82003, or email: info@granitepeakpress.com.

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Her face was frozen to the icy ground. Her decomposing scalp had slipped forward in wrinkles above the dark sockets of her recessed eyes. Blonde hair, almost white, spilled over her pallid features as if she were hiding beneath it. His breath caught in the back of his throat. Just a child, he thought, maybe ten or twelve years old. Her body was curled into a tight fetal position, her wrists crossed under her chin, her knees touching her elbows. She had been cold.

Sam Dawson was cold too. He could taste the Wyoming air, sharp and metallic against the roof of his mouth. His nostrils flared against the sunless hollow, detecting the soft fragrance of pine, the pungent odor of decomposing aspen leaves, and the aroma of sage that drifted across the stream from the open meadows above. Tiny droplets of condensation formed under his nose as his breath escaped in foggy surges. He glanced at L2, who showed no interest in the corpse. Sam, not the dog, had found the girl. “You call yourself a bloodhound,” he mumbled softly, without knowing why. There was no one to hear him. The waters of Crow Creek swallowed his words and murmured its own incoherent whispers, the confused gossip of the stream spirits.

Sam leaned his rod case against a snow-covered boulder and placed his wicker creel on the ground. Bending down, he gently pushed her hair from her face. A gray eye, opaque, stared blankly from the blackness of its shrunken socket, a cloudy window to a young soul long departed. Her lips were pulled toward the ground as if sucked down by a subterranean vacuum. Her formless face reminded him of a freshly dipped taffy apple placed on a hard surface to cool. She had not been dressed for a Wyoming winter—black jeans, white sneakers, and a burgundy windbreaker.

Her back was huddled against the cold north-facing slope that rose sharply above her. An embroidered patch appliqué lay upside down next to her. Sam picked it up. It was a gray capital M, with Minnie Mouse standing coyly against the left leg of the block letter. Minnie’s red polka-dot bow and oversized yellow shoes added splashes of color. A few broken threads remained along the edges of the patch, and the dark outline of the missing letter was clearly visible against the slightly faded jacket. Tiny oblong pellets—rodent feces—littered the nylon folds of the windbreaker where it met the earth. He had seen several ground squirrels on his hike into the canyon. They scampered among the boulders and pine trees that lined the narrow valley floor. Like Sam, they were eager for spring and were busy assessing winter’s toll. It appeared the jerky little rodents had removed the appliqué with surgical precision. Nothing else had been chewed.

Sam sighed. “All I wanted to do was go fishing,” he whispered. He looked upstream, then downstream. There was no place more desirable, more rugged or remote within a hundred square miles. He imagined a black woolly bugger, with a flash of red and a gold bead, arcing gracefully over the stream and then back over his head as he placed the wet fly into the swirling eddy behind a boulder. Why me? Why always me? he thought. What is it with me and dead people? I’ve been here too many times before to think it doesn’t mean something. It was 2008. Only four months had passed since his grisly discoveries in northern Minnesota the previous November. Still, none of it compared to the mess in Colorado more than eight years earlier. That’s why I live in Wyoming, he reminded himself.

He was only thirty miles from Cheyenne and even fewer road miles from Laramie, as the crow flies. But it would take at least an hour to reach the nearest trail or road. What were you doing way out here, Little Mouse Girl? he thought, staring down at her frozen remains. She had been some mother’s daughter, some father’s little girl. Somewhere, someone missed her. He would have. He knew about little girls. He had raised one. Sidney had been about six when Sam and her mother divorced. Now she was midway through her second year of law school and had become the self-appointed, live-in guardian of her father, whom she viewed as a dangerously inept societal misfit.

Sam pulled the small flip phone from his fishing vest. Sidney had insisted that he take the intrusive little device even though cell service in the area was nonexistent. He held the phone at arm’s length and slowly turned in a circle while watching for the little bars to light up next to the satellite dish icon. No bars appeared.

As usual, spring was coming slowly to the Laramie Mountains. Sunny days were separated by bitterly cold nights. Wind-packed snowdrifts streaked the north-facing slopes, while the south slopes portended new beginnings. It was late March, too early in the season for fishing. Sam knew there would be ice and snow. But it was spring break at the University of Wyoming, he’d had his fill of apathetic students, and he desperately wanted to go fishing. He suspected he was at a crossroads in his life, and brook trout would show him the way. Fishing was a diversion, an excuse to be alone, to think, to reconsider, to reconcile, and to change direction. He believed a midlife crisis involved choices, but he couldn’t figure out what his were. Poverty had made his life simple. Now a dead girl in the forest was complicating it again.

Sam scanned the area. Dark clouds, almost navy blue, gathered in the west. The temperature was dropping. A huge old-growth ponderosa pine directly across the stream would serve as a landmark. Nearly four feet in diameter, it had escaped the logger’s saw back in the 1880s, when the entire area was clear-cut for railroad ties to help push the Union Pacific west through southern Wyoming. The area, which had been too steep and rocky for draft horses to skid logs from, had also proved too rugged for a little girl, cold and lost. He pulled his pocket watch from his vest. It would take him almost two hours to get to the nearest landline, his house phone. He looked at the dark western sky. It was going to snow. “Let’s go,” he said, slapping his leg for L2 to follow. He could not make himself look back at the lifeless body of the little girl frozen to the ground.

Leaning forward, Annie George pressed her nose and lips against the cool glass and exhaled slowly. Stepping back into the room, she watched the foggy smudge disappear. Blowing snow scoured the landscape in hushed confusion. The gray vanes of the windmill spun wildly in the fading light, its galvanized tail thrashing from south to east with each blast of wind. Gnarled cottonwoods, bare and dark, heaved restlessly, groaning silhouettes against the storm’s bleakness. Night descended slowly in Horse Creek valley without form or shape, only a blending of earth and sky. Long, swirling waves of snow poured over the Laramie range and descended on the high plains. Annie missed the defined seasons of Iowa. There was no spring or fall in Wyoming, just nine months of winter, occasionally interrupted by a mild day or two that lulled unsuspecting outsiders into thinking the worst was over.

Sam was late. He had promised her a trout dinner. He and Sidney would bring everything; it was to be their housewarming gift. She and Sam had argued about the house. He had made his case for her to remain in the Cheyenne apartment where she had lived since moving to Wyoming a few months earlier. But she wanted to live in the country, and Wyoming had lots of country to choose from. It redefined rural. “The most sparsely populated state in the nation” was an understatement. She had not seen another human being since Sam and Sidney had helped her move in a week earlier. The old one-story ranch house was broken down, a weathered hull of its prewar utilitarian design, with wavy-glass windows and only one entry door. It was all she could afford.

Annie had placed most of her savings into a business account she had established for her new publishing enterprise, Cowboy Press. Sidney was the “big picture” woman, the idea person and marketer. Annie served as owner, editor, chief cook and bottle washer of the fledgling business. An eye for details was her forte. Above all, Annie believed in Sam’s artistry. His photographs were more than pictures. They spoke volumes to the viewer—each image a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

But something besides his visual images caused a light feeling deep within her and a shortness of breath. She had made the mistake of a lifetime when she pushed him away eight years before. What had seemed insurmountable at the time, she now viewed as insignificant, considering all they had been through. She thought it funny how time and experience can change one’s perspective. Still, there was the fact that Sam was a distant cousin. There was a degree of genetic relatedness that neither of them could take back. She would publish and market his work and help rebuild the career he believed he had lost. In the process, perhaps both of them would find what they were looking for. If it didn’t work out, she could always go back to being an environmental microbiologist, or even a waitress again if she had to.

Annie stopped and stared at the cordless wall phone next to the refrigerator. The white plastic reflected dull yellow from the bug-spattered single bulb hanging in the center of the greasy ceiling. She gently picked up the receiver and placed it to her ear. The silence caused the hair on her arms to bristle. The lights flickered once and then went out. Outside, the storm raged.

The coroner wore black brogues, their wingtips shined to perfection. His tweed sport coat, white shirt, dark necktie, and dress slacks were as out of place as his black Cadillac Escalade parked in Sam’s remote mountain driveway. Sam stared at the septuagenarian’s shoes. He explained to him they had several miles of rough trail ahead of them that included deep drifts of snow. “What you see is what you get,” the old man shouted above the wind as he stuffed a GPS unit into his trench coat pocket.

A nervous deputy sheriff, with all the adornments of his trade hanging from his torso, attempted to take charge by unfolding a topographic map on the wet hood of his truck. Tiny white missiles of sleet ricocheted noisily off the paper. “Sir,” he barked at Sam. “Can you indicate on the map, as best you can, where you believe the alleged body of the deceased to be?” Sam stared at him for a long moment, his eyes narrowing, his anger rising. This guy must have a brain the size of a peanut, he thought.

Sam had already argued with the dispatcher, then some undersheriff about the location of the body. They had questioned whether it was indeed in Laramie County. He had given them the coordinates, including township and range—right down to the quarter section, as he read from his own topographic map spread over his kitchen table. They wanted it to be in Albany County, out of their jurisdiction. “It’s about a hundred yards into Laramie County,” Sam had insisted. “It’s yours,” he finally blurted out, annoyed by their attempt to pass the buck.

Sidney picked up on her father’s irritation with the deputy sheriff. She raised her eyebrows and shook her head at him. “Be nice,” she whispered as she pushed her thick glasses up the bridge of her nose. Her long dark hair encircled her face. Sam was momentarily caught off guard by her striking resemblance to her mother, Marcie.

Without speaking, Sam shone his flashlight on the deputy sheriff’s map and deftly tapped his finger on the canyon. He noted the brown contour lines at forty-foot intervals blurred into a dark knot, as though someone had spilled spaghetti over the pale-green forested sections of the map. The thin blue line representing Crow Creek intersected it.

The coroner pulled out his GPS and started pushing buttons. He turned in a circle, holding the unit in front of him with an outstretched arm, squinting against the bursts of snow. Sam resisted making any comment about placing too much confidence in an electronic device. He preferred a simple compass and a map, no batteries required. Sidney had repeatedly cautioned him that his technophobia wasn’t shared by the rest of humankind.

The county search and rescue team, who had pulled up the driveway in a boxy-looking emergency vehicle, strapped on body harnesses, backpacks, and assorted gear that were both noisy and heavy. Sam looked upward to determine how much light remained. An ever-darkening mass of storm clouds had gathered overhead. Flurries were in the process of giving way to a full-fledged storm. It would be dark in half an hour. “If you want out of there before midnight, we should leave now,” he said to the deputy. His daughter stood in the doorway of the converted cow camp bunkhouse that now served as home. “Sidney,” he said, “call Annie and ask her if she’ll take a rain check for tonight’s dinner. We’re already too late and it’s starting to snow. Besides, I didn’t catch any fish. Keep L2 inside so she doesn’t track us.”

“I’ll save you something to eat,” Sidney called back. She pushed her hair away from her face and glanced at the blackened sky.

Without asking if everyone was ready, Sam pushed through the throng of dark-clad officers and disappeared into the forest. The white-haired old man in a trench coat followed obediently. He wore no hat.

The open doorway of the barn appeared intermittently through the swirling haze. Like the house, the dilapidated structure was without electricity. From the mud porch window Annie tilted her head left, then right, squinting to make out what she imagined to be someone standing just inside the black rectangle of the entryway. She thought of the swampy darkness of the Wapsipinicon bottoms in eastern Iowa, where she had grown up. In fading light, a stump could easily transform into a bear or mythical beast that struck terror in her heart.

Annie knew her fear was irrational, that her mind was playing tricks on her, yet she was afraid to turn away. She continued to stare at the barn, turning her head ever so slightly, hoping her peripheral vision would add clarity. The figure appeared to be wrapped in a dark blanket that covered its shoulders and the back of its head. The specter seemed to fade around the edges, became fuzzy, shapeless, then disappeared completely into the whiteness of the storm. Annie opened her mouth and gasped as if she were drowning in a foggy ocean. It was almost dark, and the storm showed no sign of stopping.

In the kitchen, Annie again lifted the telephone receiver and slowly brought it to her ear. Again, she heard nothing. She thought of her cell phone in her purse, but knew there would be no service, since her bargain provider had no towers in the area. She tried to take a deep breath, but her chest sputtered when she inhaled. The dark house overwhelmed her. She could not swallow. She remembered the old Eveready flashlight in the junk drawer and made her way across the sloping linoleum floor, her hands stretched in front of her like a blind person. She rummaged noisily through the tools, bottle openers, tape dispensers, and other household items that had no place of their own.

The ancient flashlight had belonged to Nana. Annie missed her. When she died, Annie’s cousins and their children had descended upon Nana’s modest belongings like a plague of locusts. People she barely recognized, with children she couldn’t name, had acted like looters following a disaster. There was nothing left to hold Annie in eastern Iowa. She had jumped at the chance for a new beginning, to move westward, be a pioneer.

She pushed the switch forward on the flashlight, and a sick yellow funnel appeared momentarily before blinking out. She shook the metal cylinder, then pounded it against the palm of her hand. Still, there was no light. With her free hand she groped around the kitchen, trying to find the source of an abrupt drop in temperature. The skin on her arms tingled as the cold air enveloped her. She remembered her childhood swimming hole in the abandoned limestone quarry near Maquoketa, where frigid underground springs plumed unexpectedly into the green water, turning her lips blue and covering her young body with gooseflesh. This was even more startling, more chilling.

Suddenly she remembered the gray metal breaker panel on the mud porch. Stepping quietly from the kitchen, she felt the relative warmth of the normally cold entryway. She shook the flashlight furiously and again managed a slice of dusky light, which she pointed at the electrical panel in the corner of the room. Annie yanked open the door and ran her fingers down the unlabeled circuit breakers. All the switches pointed in the same direction. The problem was elsewhere.

Eerie noises from the fireplace flue signaled the storm’s intensity beyond the house’s dark interior. Flat, flute-like whistles, akin to a giant blowing across an equally large soda bottle, caused the hair on the back of her neck to bristle.

In the living room, Annie fumbled for sheets of newspaper, quickly wadded them up, and stuffed them into the freestanding fireplace, an inverted funnel of black sheet metal. She added kindling and struck a match to the tinder. Instantly the light reassured her. She sat cross-legged on the floor and stared at the flickering orange and yellow flames. She began to take solace from being sheltered while the wind raged outside. The fire was mesmerizing. Genetically encoded from a million years of staring into its enticing glow, she felt predestined to watch it.

A sleepy Annie was no match for the narcotic effects of wind and fire. She heard the whining protests of an old house under siege, the twisting of rafters, the creaking of floorboards. As her eyes began to close, she thought she saw muted reflections in the living room window of something moving across the doorway of her bedroom. She believed her imagination was the source of an oncoming headache, the pain throbbing in her right temple.

At midnight, she awoke to cold silence. The heart of the storm had passed. There was dead calm. Annie went to the mud porch to view the aftermath. A light snow was falling straight to the ground. Huge drifts of white powder lay between the house and barn in an undulating pattern, a blanket covering the bony backbone of a sleeping serpent. A shaft of yellow light spilled placidly from the open barn door.

Take your seats, please,” Sam said as he glanced at the clock over the classroom door. “Let’s go, people. We’ve got a lot to cover today. We’re talking about ambient light this morning.” They didn’t care. They didn’t want to be there; neither did he. It was Monday morning after spring break, and they still had sex, booze, and fun on their minds. “Shelly, put your phone away, please.”

“It’s a camera, Mr. Dawson,” the suntanned coed yawned.

“It’s a darn poor excuse for one,” Sam shot back. He could tell she wanted to respond that he was a darn poor excuse for a university professor too. This wasn’t his idea of a career choice, and the students knew it. He was as temporary as their attention spans. It was another of Sidney’s bright ideas. He would teach Introduction to Photography. It would just be for a semester, filling in for a professor who was on sabbatical in Paris, studying nude composition and how to create atmosphere for subtle eroticism. Sam needed a sabbatical too. Losing his publisher—plus most of the advance money on his last book—had put him in an income bracket below the poverty level. Book sales were flat. There was Sidney’s law school tuition. Then, he’d used all of his savings to renovate the cow camp cabin into a home. He was forced to accept the university’s offer. Now he was a temporary instructor, the bottom of the pecking order at the University of Wyoming. After taxes he made just enough to buy groceries and gas.

“Natural light, available light, domestic light, found light, environmental light are all synonyms for ambient light,” Sam began. “Ambient light is real light. If used correctly, it has the potential to create the type of realistic atmosphere that the viewer can identify with. Plus, it allows you to work more freely and be less obtrusive. Lamps, reflectors, flashes, lens flares, diffusers all have their uses, as we have learned, but they take time and money, and they get in the way.”

“Yes, Brittany?”

“Is this lecture posted on the Web?”

Sam turned to her in disbelief. He had answered the same question at least once a week since the beginning of the semester. “No, you’ll actually have to take notes. Which, I might add, requires the use of a writing instrument and paper,” he said, noting that she had neither in front of her. She stared at him blankly. He had watched her as she entered the classroom carrying nothing but her smartphone. She had on a pink hoodie and matching sweatpants with the word ”Juicy” in bold, black letters across her backside. Her pale blonde hair poking out in all directions was as flamboyant as her attitude. Suddenly, Sam saw her face pulled grotesquely to the frozen ground, her hair spilling over recessed eyes. She said something.

“Excuse me?” he said, yanking his mind back to the classroom.

“Will any of this be on the final?”

Ah, the final, Sam smiled to himself. That seemed to be the only thing most of them cared about—what’s on the test. “Tell me, Brittany, what color is your ensemble in the absence of light?”

“What color is your outfit in the dark?”

“Pink. It’d still be pink, I guess.”

“Well, that would be the wrong guess,” Sam said, raising his eyebrows. “It would be black. In the absence of light, everything is black. There is no color. Your outfit appears pink because of the way in which light is bent and reflected back to your eyes. It’s all an illusion, Brittany. Photography is, in a way, an illusion too. It’s about the use of light. There’s nothing more basic to this art form than light. Whether it comes through a pinhole in a black box or through a thousand-dollar lens, it’s light that creates the image.”

Her expression was somewhere between total indifference and contempt. Her lips were pulled downward on one side of her mouth. Like she’s mocking the effects of death and gravity on the face of the dead girl, Sam thought.

“Yes, you can expect several questions about light on the final exam. Better take notes, even if you have a photographic memory. If you can’t see it, you can’t recall it.” Sam turned quickly toward the whiteboard and wrote “blue green.” “The human retina is most sensitive to wavelengths between five- and six-hundred millimicrons, the blue-green portion of our visible spectrum. Which receptors in the retina are responsible for color vision?” He turned toward the class, pointing his marker at them, inviting their response. There was total silence. “Anybody?” He waited. “Don’t be shy.” He waited some more. “Nobody? Does anyone remember the lecture on sensory perception?” Again, nothing. “All right, listen up, coneheads,” he said, putting particular stress on the last word. “You want to know what’s on the final? There will be a question concerning retinal physiology.”

“So, what’s the answer?” Brittany asked with a wide grin on her face.

Sam’s earlier lecture on cones and rods had obviously fallen on deaf ears. He stepped to the lectern, tore a sheet of paper from his notebook, and pulled a ballpoint pen from his pocket. Dodging the tangle of backpacks on the floor, he made his way to Brittany and placed the paper and pen on her desk. “I just told you,” he said, smiling.

Prairie winds moved the chest-high native grasses in rolling waves across the deserted landscape. The seed heads of big bluestem and switchgrass swayed hypnotically. The Plains Indians believed the Nebraska Sandhills to be the most sacred of all places in their limited world. It was their heaven, where the spirit lived after the body died.

It was July 1985. Mel McDaniel crooned, “Lord have mercy, baby’s got her blue jeans on,” from the open doors of the bronze Ford pickup. Grass, wind, water, and sky swallowed the music, sucking it from the air, injecting it into the sand and rich loam of the dunes. A short wooden windmill rhythmically pumped sparkling cold water from the birthplace of the Ogallala Aquifer.

Miranda Hofstadter, wearing a short jean skirt and cowboy boots, danced awkwardly next to the round stock water tank. She was tiny for a fourteen-year-old, her growth stunted by the hundreds of gin-and-tonics her mother had drunk during her pregnancy. Miranda’s head was small relative to her body. Her eyes were small too, almost Asian in appearance. Her thin upper lip seemed broad and flat, due to the absence of a groove beneath her nose. Red barrettes, one on each side of her head, kept her light-brown hair pulled back.

“Go, girl,” the young cowboy yelled as he hoisted his Coors can into the air. The other three teenage boys raised theirs too, joining in the toast.

“Hey, Miranda, you gettin’ hot? Wanna go skinny-dipping?” said the tall boy with the huge belt buckle.

The others shouted their approval from the tailgates of their trucks.

“She dances like she’s got a bad case of the dry heaves,” the stocky kid said, then spat between his worn-out boots, feet dangling carelessly.

“She don’t say much, does she?” the lanky seventeen-year-old in the black pickup said, pushing back his straw hat.

“I don’t reckon she can talk. I ain’t never heard her say a word,” the boy with worn-out boots said.

“She can talk. She mumbles like she’s got a mouth full of rocks,” the first cowboy said. “She’s got a weird lisp. Sounds like Sylvester the Cat.”

“Hell, that’s what you sound like after a couple of beers,” said the boy in the black pickup. “Maybe the two of you are related.”

“We didn’t bring her out here to have a conversation with her, for Christ’s sake,” the tall boy with the huge belt buckle complained. He pulled a small camera from his shirt pocket. “We brung her here to see her dance naked.”

They all whooped and hollered and gave another beer salute.

The lanky cowboy in the black pickup jumped down from his truck, carefully placed his beer can on the tailgate, removed his hat, and yanked his T-shirt off over his head. “Hey, Miranda, let’s everybody take off our shirts,” he said, with a sweep of his hand to signal the others.

The cowboys eagerly complied, scrambling out of their trucks and pulling off their shirts. Miranda smiled guilelessly as she unbuttoned her sleeveless blouse.

“KAAQ, Double Q Country news at the top of the hour” blared from the bronze pickup. “Vice President Bush met today with New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe, who will become the first schoolteacher to ride aboard the space shuttle Challenger…”

The wind suddenly changed direction. The Sandhills grass pulsed in agitated rhythm, trapped in the wash of wind currents that pressed them into a thick, writhing mass. The windmill’s vane screeched against its springs. From below, Miranda cried out.

“In other news, the Alliance City Council heard arguments last night concerning the placement of trash containers…”

The windmill’s blades spun in a maddening cadence. Erratic crosswinds jolted the vane left, then right. Moving metal parts screeched as if in tormenting pain. Water, the essence of life, ejected from the discharge tube.

“And on a lighter note, Back to the Future opens at the Rialto Theater with showtimes at…”

Miranda’s screams signaled protest and suffering.

Animal behavior therapy demands an understanding of the underlying mechanisms and the adaptive significance of behavior. There are physiological, genetic, developmental, evolutionary, and environmental components that must be considered before therapeutic applications can be made.” Dr. Tom Stevens paced confidently across the front of the small classroom at the Cheyenne Animal Shelter. He wore blue jeans, a white dress shirt open at the neck, and a tan corduroy sport coat—a tall academic type with a Tom Cruise smile and Robert Redford hair. His athletic build and tan belied his authoritarian demeanor.

Annie looked across the aisle. Sidney, resting her chin in her palm, pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, then shot a glance at Stevens, flicked her eyebrows, and smiled. Annie pursed her lips, widened her eyes, and nodded her agreement ever so slightly. Dr. Stevens was handsome.

“Many of the problem behaviors exhibited by companion animals are psychogenic in origin. These problems are unnecessary in that they are preventable and treatable, using behavior modification techniques. Most often, the cause of an unwanted behavior cannot be established solely with the pet or with its owners, but with the complex pet-owner relationship itself.” He looked out over the sparse turnout of mostly women. It was the usual smattering of animal control officers, shelter and humane organization workers, vet techs, breed club members, and housewives who attended his free seminars. Occasionally, a skeptical veterinarian, seeking continuing education credits, would sit through his presentation. He would usually get a couple of referrals, which would more than pay for his time.

“Behavioral therapy involves finding out what the problem is, why it is occurring, and what can be done to solve it. Successful treatment is dependent upon five sequential stages.” He held up a thumb. “First, determining the needs of the client.” His index finger popped up. “Second, accurate diagnosis; third, developing a treatment program; fourth, the actual treatment application; and fifth,”—all five fingers were now raised—“post-treatment follow-up. We’ll talk about each of these stages in detail.”

Annie guessed he was younger than Sam by a few years. She would be thirty-six on her next birthday. She thought it funny that—somewhere between forty and fifty—people all become about the same age. She believed Sam was truly in his prime at forty-five, although sometimes he acted older than his years. Lately, he had no patience with her; he seemed preoccupied. Even before finding the dead girl, he had been acting so strangely that she wondered if he was having some sort of career-related midlife crisis. When she complained of being spooked by uneasy happenings in her house, he responded by dropping off L2, a dog bed, and fifty pounds of dog food. On his way out the door, he turned and said, “She has a tendency to chew things. You might watch her a bit.” His proclamation turned out to be an understatement.

The dog had started with Annie’s personal things—shoes, underwear, a purse—but had now upped the ante to include furniture. The final straw was when L2 ate the arm off the couch. Sam seemed unconcerned and simply said, “Better your stuff than mine.” Sidney, however, was her usual compassionate self and offered to help. It was she who had recommended they attend the seminar on animal behavior therapy, advertised in her student newspaper.

With each new question, Dr. Stevens would look at his watch. It was apparent he was having difficulty finishing his prepared remarks. He beamed a smile and was extremely polite with each person who interrupted him. “No, no, it wouldn’t do any good to bring the dog to me. With a treatment plan, you have to realize that a pet and its behavior problem do not exist in isolation from its environment. That includes all members of the family—both human and animal—in which the pet resides.” Sidney looked over the top of her glasses at Annie, then rolled her eyes. They both knew what Sam’s response would be to participating in an in-home therapy program for his bloodhound.

“Look—” Dr. Stevens smiled, but was clearly frustrated by an older woman who continued to monopolize the questions. He started again. “Most problem behaviors are stress-related from either environmental or owner-induced causes. I can only assist the owners in identifying the areas which should be adjusted and then give them the necessary tools, techniques, knowledge, and motivation. Again, the bottom line is that you, not me, have to do the therapy, and it has to be done where the animal lives.”

Annie eyed the clock on the wall and wondered if L2 had broken through the baby gate that confined her to the mud porch and was now laying waste to the interior of the house.

“The four big problems I see with dogs are”—he was using his fingers again—“dog-human aggression, house soiling, destructiveness, and barking. About a third of the time the problem behaviors fall into the ‘other’ category, and these include everything from fear of thunder to eating poop. I once had a client where we identified seven major behavioral issues they wanted corrected.”

“And?” a masculine-looking woman in the front row asked.

“We were able to correct all of them. It took a few months and a lot of work on the part of the owner, but I’m happy to report—”

“Do you ever see animals you can’t fix?” someone in the back of the room asked.

“Yes and no. I can usually modify the behavior of the animal; it’s the owner’s behavior, relative to the animal, that is often most challenging. I should add that I’ve sometimes refused to even develop a treatment plan—when I believed the animal posed a threat to the owners or others. There’s not a dog alive that’s worth the life or disfigurement of a child. A client once threatened to sue me after I recommended they get rid of their Great Dane, who had repeatedly picked up their infant daughter by the head and taken her from the house into the backyard. Multiple cranial punctures failed to convince the child’s parents that the dog should be removed.” The audience recoiled. He had their attention. “An eighty-four-year-old woman, who had been sent to the hospital eight times by her one-year-old golden retriever, still refused to get rid of the dog. When I declined to work with her, she threatened legal action. The bond between people and their pets is—”

More hands shot upward and people began shouting out their questions. Tom Stevens looked at his watch again, thanked the group for their attention, gifted them a farewell smile, and announced that there were refreshments in the back of the room. The audience applauded politely, then surrounded him like a pack of hungry wolves.