On the morning of May 2, the maid walked into the bedroom and announced that Boodle, the dog, was missing.
“Oh, that’s not possible,” said Stoat.
Desie pulled on some clothes and tennis shoes and hurried out to search the neighborhood. She was sobbing when she returned, and said to her husband: “This is all your fault.”
He tried to hug her but she shook him off. “Honey, please,” he said. “Settle down.”
“Somebody took him—”
“You don’t know that.”
“—and it’s all your fault.”
“Desie, now.”
It was his fault that she was so jittery. In retrospect, he shouldn’t have shown her what had been done to the trophy heads in the den. Yet at the time Stoat was half-wondering if the furtive vandal might be Desie herself; maybe she’d gone postal on him. She definitely was no fan of his big-game hobby—he remembered the grief she’d given him about the rhinoceros kill. And, in truth, it wasn’t difficult to envision his wife perched on the library ladder and using one of the sterling lobster forks—a wedding gift from the pari-mutuel industry—to meticulously remove the simulated eyeballs from his hunting trophies.
But Desie couldn’t have been the one who had done it. Palmer Stoat knew by her reaction to the macabre pentagram on the desk and the wall of eyeless animal faces. Desie had paled and run from the room. Later she implored her husband to hire some security guards to watch the house; she didn’t feel safe there anymore. Stoat said, Don’t worry, it’s just some local weirdos. Kids from the neighborhood breaking in for kicks, he told her. But privately he suspected that both the glass eyeball episode and the desecration of the BMW were connected to his lobbying business; some disgruntled, semi-twisted shithead of a client… or possibly even a jealous competitor. So Stoat had the locks on the house changed, got all new phone numbers, and found an electronics dweeb who came through and swept the place for listening devices. For good measure, he also polygraphed the maid, the gardener and the part-time cook. Desie made her husband promise to set the alarm system every night from then on, and he had done so faithfully…
With the exception of the previous night, when he’d gone to a Republican fund-raiser and gotten so plastered that a cab had to carry him home. The time was 3:00 a.m., an hour at which Stoat could barely identify his own house, much less fit the new key in the door; typing a nonsequential five-digit code on the alarm panel required infinitely too much dexterity.
Still, he couldn’t believe somebody had snuck in behind him and grabbed the Labrador. For one thing, Boodle was a hefty load—128 pounds. He had been trained at no small expense to sit, fetch, shake, lie down, heel, and not lope off with strangers. To forcibly abduct the dog, Stoat surmised, would have required more than one able-bodied man.
Then Desie reminded him that Boodle wasn’t functioning at full strength. Days earlier he had been rushed into emergency surgery after slurping five of the glass eyeballs from Stoat’s desktop. Stoat didn’t notice the eyes were missing until the taxidermy man came to repair the mounts. Soon afterward Boodle grew listless and stopped eating. An X ray at the veterinarian’s office revealed the glass orbs, lodged in a cluster at the anterior end of the Lab’s stomach. Four of them were removed easily during a laparotomy, but the fifth squirted into the intestinal tract, out of the surgeon’s reach. Another operation would be needed if Boodle didn’t pass the lost eyeball soon. In the meantime the dog remained lethargic, loaded up on heavy antibiotics.
“He’s gonna die if we don’t get him back,” Desie said morosely.
“We’ll find him, don’t worry.” Stoat promised to print up flyers and pass them around the neighborhood.
“And offer a reward,” Desie said.
“Of course.”
“I mean a decent reward, Palmer.”
“He’ll be fine, sweetie. The maid probably didn’t shut the door tight and he just nosed his way out. He’s done that before, remember? And he’ll be back when he’s feeling better and gets hungry, that’s my prediction.”
Desie said, “Thank you, Dr. Doolittle.” She was still annoyed because Palmer had asked the veterinarian to return the glass eyes Boodle had swallowed, so that they could be polished and re-glued into the dead animal heads.