Chapter 1 #2
They want to sleep in bed with you. If you are standing at the sink, you may find your Griff sitting on your feet. When you sit down, your Griff will be in your lap. Can you handle that as part of your lifestyle?
Who could handle that as part of their lifestyle?
Val wondered. What kind of person could have anything stuck to them twenty-four hours a day and not flick it away like the pest it was?
Did Griff owners have no appreciation of independence?
Did they dislike freedom? What had Val gotten herself into?
Later that night, as Cash whimpered and cried and barked I hate you! from inside her crate across the bedroom, Val knew she had no one to blame but herself. She had conducted her breed research too late.
It wasn’t Cash’s fault that she was wired to be anxious, excitable, and annoying as hell.
Genetics were a cruel lottery that couldn’t be rigged, and if that weren’t enough, the environment she was raised in had not done her any favors.
There was no telling what Cash had endured before being abandoned.
Who understood this lethal combination better than Val?
As her state-sanctioned social worker once said, Nature loads the gun, but nurture pulls the trigger, which Val’s adolescent mind rightly took to mean There’s no hope for you, kid.
Val tried to remember this while silently counting backward from one hundred to keep from wringing Cash’s howling neck.
This is an intelligent breed, but sensitive, the Rescue Alliance website had said. The Griffon will not respond to rough handling, hitting, or excessive shouting. They will, however, respond well to guidance given with kindness, consistency, and love.
Eventually Val lost her nerve, releasing Cash from the crate and placing her onto the cloud-soft, circular pillow bed the PetSmart lady called a “Poof.”
“Happy now?” Val failed at her attempt to sound calm and collected. “From here I can watch you sleep, and you can watch me sleep, quietly.”
Cash clenched her little jaw to the Poof’s downy fuzz and thrashed it about like enemy vermin. She wanted in on Val’s bed, which she communicated by growling and standing up on two legs with her front nails gripping the top of Val’s mattress.
“Absolutely not.” Val considered having a dog in one’s bed to be in the red zone of the grossness scale, but Cash persisted, hopping up and down, begging, pleading.
It went on this way long enough to become mind-bending, especially because Val was certain Cash could have made the jump onto the bed with minimal effort if she tried.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Val said when the clock on her nightstand flipped to three a.m. “You don’t need my help.”
The repetition had become relentless. Over and over, Cash would back up, false-start, false-start, lose her nerve, whimper, growl, begin again.
“You can do it!” Val shouted, against her better judgment and contrary to her own desired outcome. “I’ve seen you jump twice as high!”
Exhausted and worn down by the need to be proven correct, she said, “If you figure it out on your own, I’ll let you stay up here.”
It was only the next morning, after waking up with Cash curled like a baby fox in the bend of her knees, that Val recognized how marvelously she had been conned.
In fact, if Val learned anything from those first forty-eight hours with Cash, it was that she had underestimated the role of manipulation in the dog-to-human social contract.
But this was a challenge she was determined to see through.
The amount of money Val could make on this Silas Kennerson job might be enough to take the rest of the year off, travel a bit, go someplace warm for the winter, see another country, or even another continent.
Val had been next to nowhere beyond a handful of the United States—she just didn’t have the means, but she did have the vision.
And she was not about to give anything up on account of one badly behaved dog, whether that dog was an evil genius or not.
“Ready?” Val stepped out of the Nova, careful not to nick the door of the BMW X5 she’d parked beside.
Cash was up and alert in her car seat, recognizing they’d arrived someplace significantly grotesque by the faint odor in the air.
Leash clipped to harness, Val set the dog onto the pavement and steered her across the parking lot toward the double-gated entryway to the park.
One whiff of the assembly beyond the gates and Cash charged ahead, pulling Val along with the strength of a miniature bull.
“Don’t you dare embarrass me, now,” Val said, shocked to hear her mother’s threat of choice fresh from her own mouth. She noticed, too, the tight grip she had on the leash, how she’d unconsciously wound it around her hand, braced for a bare-knuckled tug.
This was what she had to fight against—her own inclination toward impatience and violence, learned from her parents or inherited.
Such a pet-rearing approach would not fly with the dog lovers Val was tasked with winning over, and the only way to successfully embed herself in their group was to be convincing as one of them.
With her next foot forward, she inhaled a calming breath, unclenched her fists, and let the leash unravel to a more merciful hold.
There was a sign on one of the front gates designating the field to the left as the “small dog area,” defining small as under twenty-five pounds. Another sign read, “No barking,” which, in context, was as perplexing as a riddle.
Cash, confident in her supersized ferociousness, strained toward the section for big dogs.
“No! This way!” Already Val was yelling.
Once inside the proper area, she secured the latch on the gate behind them and reminded herself that she was not to scold this dog in front of these people. This would be a crowd that fed their animals organic raw diets, got them groomed at pet spas, and bought them seasonal wardrobes.
Right on cue, a furball in a pink princess dress came yap yap yapping as Val released Cash from her leash.
Unsure of what to do next, Cash eyed the princess with skepticism.
“Go ahead.” Val urged her forward. “You can play.”
Cash took a seat, dubious.
“Don’t be scared,” Val said, just as Cash got body-slammed by one of those whatever-doodles—a curly, white lunatic clearly over the twenty-five-pound limit that should have relegated it to the “big dog area.”
“Chester! You say you’re sorry right now!” A woman came Val’s way. She was wearing natural-looking makeup and understated diamonds likely worth a tidy sum. Her shirtdress was the embodiment of chic comfort, but she added a touch of sophistication by cinching her waist with a belt.
“You’ll have to excuse Chester,” she said. “He doesn’t like dogs with smushed faces.”
This was supposed to pass as an acceptable, and in no way politically incorrect, explanation?
I don’t like your face, Val wanted to say to this woman she had already pegged as the park’s resident popular girl. And your cocker-doodle-do is an asshole.
Cash seemed to recover fine once Chester was out of sight.
“You must be new. I’ve never seen you here before.” Popular Girl wandered back toward the clique of women from which she’d emerged, not bothering to check if Val was following her.
Val did follow her, because she already recognized one member of the hive as June Kennerson—the Wife.
She was about five-foot-nine with long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Like Popular Girl, June was wearing a dress, but hers was a brightly colored sundress with a flowery print, which she had paired with strappy sandals.
She looked summer-ready even though it was only mid-May, yet the sun did seem to shine with more radiance over her than all the others.
“What is your dog?” Popular Girl asked over her shoulder. “A pug mix?”
“A Brussels Griffon,” Val replied in her practiced pronunciation.
“Boy or girl?”
Val had done her homework before arriving.
Statistically, this affluent DC suburb was the best-educated city in the US, which meant these people weren’t just rich, they were also supposed to be smart.
Yet, as she introduced herself to each of the park regulars, she was asked the same question—“Boy or girl?”—countless times.
A few even asked a second time, rephrasing it to “Is Cash a he or a she?” The confusion, Val finally realized, was that Cash was a girl dog with a gender-unspecific name, wearing a blue collar.
No one, it seemed, could get their brains around this.
No one, except for June. The first question she asked was “Is her namesake Cash, as in Johnny?”
It was Cash as in cold, hard. But Val answered in the affirmative.
“She must be great at walking a line.” June laughed in an embarrassed way at her own corniness, and then, as if to double down, she added, “I bet she still hasn’t gotten over the fact that her coat isn’t black.”
The husband—Silas—had said June was beautiful, but most men willing to hire a PI to keep tabs on their wives thought they were beautiful, even if they were total frogs.
In this case, the husband was right. June had the physical glow of a California Dream Girl and the unassuming inner warmth of the girl next door.
Val could immediately see how they worked as a couple, with June’s bordering-on-intimidating good looks, tempered by her goofy sense of humor, and Silas’s dreamy boy-next-door quality humanized by an awkwardness that came off as self-deferential.
He was overeager to please; she was easily delighted.
They were a match made in heaven. Except for the fact that June lacked the sinister quality Val had picked up on in Silas.
He had a definite ick factor beneath the surface, whereas June gave off a simple, friendly, what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of vibe.
Val was finding it hard to imagine June cheating on Silas, but all sorts were unfaithful. Years of PI work had taught her nothing if not that.