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“True, but there’s Suzie Q.”
She relaxed more. “Oh, Suzie Q didn’t bark at any of us at the Elk Rock. Not the guests, not the workers.”
I came at it from a different angle.
“What do you know about Wendy’s and Brenda’s sleeping habits?”
She snapped her head around toward me. “The two of them—? God, nothing. I had no idea.”
“You still don’t.” I could have tried to explain that if I’d meant the two of them together, I’d have said Wendy and Brenda’s — one possessive apostrophe “s” for the unit. Giving each an apostrophe “s” kept them singular and separate. But I didn’t think that grammatical nicety would have made an impression on her. “Sleeping, as in waking up easily.”
“Oh. Why didn’t you say that,” she grumbled. “How should I know?”
“You were here for a week last summer. You had opportunities to observe.”
Opportunities, yes. Inclination, probably not. With this a lost cause. I should—
“There was one night,” she said abruptly. “Maybe the second night I was there. Some kid started screaming. Guess it was a nightmare, but nobody knew that at the time and everybody came running out of their cabins — you would not believe some of the outfits people had on. Including Keefe in long underwear. Seriously. Long underwear like you’d see someone from centuries ago wearing.” As she spoke of the night, her intonations seemed to recall her attitudes from that time. “And Brenda? She was something from a horror movie, with this stuff all over her face. As if anyone couldn’t tell her it was way, way late for that. And a pair of men’s pajamas, with her feet stuck into her cowboy boots, but not all the way, so she walked like a duck in high heels.”
Without moving her feet, she mimicked an awkward, rolling gait, then giggled.
“Anything else?” I asked the question out of an obligation to be thorough. My coolness was for the mean girl/woman she’d been then. The jury was out on now.
“Yeah. What you asked about. Did I notice something? I noticed Wendy didn’t come out. Only one who didn’t make an appearance, except a honeymoon couple in the farthest cabin. But this kid was in one of those cabins just across from the main house.”
So, either Wendy had the steely nerves to not react to a screaming child or she slept like — excuse the expression — the dead, as Brenda reported.
“You said Suzie Q doesn’t bark. Not even after you were hurt?”
“No.” It didn’t have the feel of a complete sentence. “It was mostly quiet up there with Keefe. Except... Suzie Q was one of the things he did talk about when he talked now and then.
“He said when he first got her, she barked at everything and everybody. Wendy didn’t like that — thought it made the guests feel unwelcomed. She was threatening that he’d have to give up the dog. He said that one day, in desperation, he sat down with the dog and explained the whole situation and what the consequences would be. And he said she stopped barking right then.” She smiled, signaling her disbelief in the story.
“Even if she was left alone?”
“She wasn’t, as far as I knew. She was at his side whatever he was doing. Whenever I saw him go out on the trail, Suzie Q went with.”
“Did that bother the guests?”
“Not that I could ever tell.” A bit of defensiveness crept in. Because she hadn’t interacted with other guests? “I suppose novice riders might have been nervous,” she said with superiority over such riders. “Didn’t take long to recognize that the horses accepted Suzie Q and trusted her to stay out of their way. And she did.
“She also...” She hesitated. “When we were up there, waiting, after... Well, she was... sweet. She spent almost the whole time lying alongside me. First one side, then the other. It was nice to have the warmth, but even nicer to have her.”
“You were grateful to her — and Keefe. Is that why you and your dad gave him the DNA test?”
“Yeah. Mom used to say that to thank people you gave them what they wanted, not what was easy for you.” She ducked her head slightly. “It was easy, but it was what he really wanted.”
“He asked you to get him the DNA test?”
“No. He didn’t know anything about them, didn’t know what they could find out, how it worked. But I knew that’s what he needed — wanted. When I messaged him the test was coming... he was so excited.” With a faint lift of her lips she added, “I was happy for him. I hoped the results would prove that outlaw was his great-great whatever like he wanted. Now it’s too late.”
She’d approached the edge of real emotion. By her uneasy shifting, that would not make it easy to get more out of her.
I went businesslike. “Had you also given him a computer?”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t any good on it at all. That why I moved on to the DNA test.”
“Your father said the results were later than expected.”
