Chapter Two
My dog, Gracie, is a rough collie, the breed with the big coat and long, pointy nose. Those of a certain generation — or any generation familiar with old TV reruns — will say, Lassie.
I gusted out a sigh that set Gracie’s ears twitching.
Lassie Syndrome sets expectations for Gracie of dignity, beauty, calm, courage, and the ability to warn everyone that Timmy’s in the well.
I think she’s beautiful. Otherwise . . . Perhaps to avoid thinking about those other qualities, I reminded myself that Lassie Syndrome pre-dates Lassie.
It started with a real dog named Lad, the subject of fictionalized stories that writer and Lad-owner Albert Payson Terhune started publishing in 1915, then compiled into a sort of novel in 1919.
I read the book as a girl, during the stage when I ingested copious books on dogs and horses. Misty of Chincoteague, Big Red, Black Beauty, The Black Stallion, and of course, Lassie Come Home.
Even stripping away the fictional aspects and Terhune’s early Twentieth Century lens, Lad was quite a dog. Loyal, smart, and with a moral and ethical code lacking in many humans.
And, yes, he was a collie.
Then, along came Lassie.
She arrived in the 1938 book Lassie Come Home, set in England. Nothing would stop her noble heart’s determination to reunite with her boy.
Okay, I’m getting a little sniffly. (Which is why Bambi, Old Yeller, and The Yearling were not among my childhood reads, thanks to my mother’s accurate assessment of my tolerance for tragedy.)
Anyway, Lassie, the female dog in the book, was played by male dogs in movies and TV series, reportedly based on the belief males had better coats. That subterfuge would have demanded creative camera angles to pull off if not for the full collie coat.
There was plenty of drama for Lassie and her family, and she was always the heroine, performing feats of daring and training, punctuated by a polite bark. That branding created the Lassie Syndrome, with many expecting all collies to behave like that.
Some collies get surrendered to breed rescue groups like the one I adopted Gracie from because a dog didn’t match a particularly pernicious subcategory of the syndrome — Lassie, Straight Out of the Box.
That’s when the dog is expected to be Lassie without any effort by the human.
I don’t know that Lassie, Straight Out of the Box is why Gracie was surrendered to a rescue group, though I’ve got my suspicions.
Gracie, too, has her suspicions. About a lot of things.
Don’t get me wrong, she loves most people after an initial assessment. But she approaches new situations with a dollop of reserve, if not downright wariness.
Put all this together, and I felt more than a little pressure about training.
Thoughts of tonight’s class triggered memories from shortly after I arrived in North Bend County, when Clara and I — more precisely our dogs — found a dead body at the dog park.
By unraveling several murder cases since then, Clara and I had achieved something of a reputation. Despite Clara being the public face of our endeavors, this was not comfortable for me.
I have a past I don’t want stirred up in the present.
That was true even after telling Teague about that past more than three months ago, only to discover he’d known for a while.
I am a detective, he’d said. I must truly love the guy, because I didn’t smack him.
I still hadn’t told Clara, which led to fretting about telling Ned, too, because how could I expect Clara not to tell her husband? At the same time, I fretted about how many other people to take into my confidence. I didn’t want who I’d been for fifteen years to change who I was now.
Also, a court case stemming from the first murder I’d come across in real life might take that decision out of my hands. I’d been on the cruise ship where the murder took place as my former self — the purported author of Abandon All, the bestselling book that spawned the huge movie.
Purported author because Kit wrote the book, not me.
Having been around traditional publishing all her adult life, Kit knew a submission from her would not be treated the same as from a hot young author — hot as in writing talent. Kit maintained my being fresh out of college at the time and not plug-ugly helped, too.
So, I became the titular author, while Kit kept writing.
What started as a lark defined me for fifteen years. Until Kit pushed me to find a new life all my own.
That’s when I encountered that first real-life murder with the upcoming trial.
Too many in North Bend County coming across coverage of the trial could say, Hey, wait a minute. Isn’t that Sheila Mackey? The woman with the wild collie dog who lives in that 1940s colonial?
Pop. There’d go my new life.
Don’t get me wrong, living with Kit had been an adventure. But this was me.
Oh. Look at the time.
Too late to call off going to tonight’s class.
I turned off the computer.
An entire writing session without a word written.
How does that happen?