Dead Dogs and Englishmen Read Online Free PDF Page A

car windows, mailbox destruction, wife beatings, runaway kids. Plenty to keep him busy. Dolly sold me on helping her by telling me I had a better chance of a fulltime job on the newspaper if Bill saw what a good crime reporter I was. Maybe things didn’t actually work that way in the journalism business anymore, but I’d figured it wouldn’t hurt.
    Eugenia, as always, stood behind her glass counter near the door. She glanced up, frowned, and stuck a pencil into her huge mop of blond hair that covered her ears, most of her forehead, and cascaded down her neck.
    â€œHaven’t been around much, Emily. Seems like ages.” Her frown didn’t go away. I got the feeling not being around was a kind of sin in Leetsville—or cause for major alarm.
    â€œYa know,” she went on. “People who live alone back in the woods should see to it they call somebody or come in to have a talk from time to time. Otherwise, we get to thinking maybe you’re dead out there.”
    I shook my head. “Eugenia. Don’t you think Harry would, just maybe, call somebody if he found me dead?”
    She bit at her bottom lip, punched a button on her cash register, then surveyed the contents before closing the drawer and giving me a dead-on look. “Emily. I know you’re new up here …”
    There went the last five years down the drain.
    â€œâ€¦ and maybe you’re not onto the ways of the woods, yet.” She hesitated, nodding to Jake Anderson of the Skunk Saloon as the tall man came in and took a booth by the front windows. “But if you want to keep us from worrying you gotta check in from time to time. That way we don’t waste time thinkin’ about you. You see?” She raised her plucked and drawn-in eyebrows at me, and gave one of those tight smiles people give when they’re mad as hell but not willing to own up to it. “I got a little story for you.”
    She rested her forearms against the counter, above a handwritten sign that clearly said: Please do not lean on glass.
    â€œOld Selma Tompkins from down south of Kalkaska. Take her for instance. Lived alone well into her eighties. Tough old bird. Never wanted any help, not even somebody looking in on her once a day or so. Always had this woodstove to keep her warm in winter. Lugged the wood in herself, she did. One winter—and it was a bad one—she went out to get her load of logs, and the shed door closed and locked behind her. There she was—sitting alone until they brought her out feet first, stiffer than a board. Came from that shed bent like a chair. Now, if she’d just not been so stubborn and let folks help her a little bit, maybe drop by once a day, she coulda been found and got out of there before she turned into a popsicle.”
    Instructive story. Chastened, I nodded. “Sorry. Been busy.”
    â€œStill trying to write them books?”
    I nodded.
    â€œNo luck?”
    â€œSome. I’m waiting to hear.”
    She stood back, her face lighting up. “Be great if you sold something. I’ll tell you what. You ever want to have a party to announce your book selling, or when it comes out, or whatever you writers celebrate—why, you can have it right here, at EATS.”
    I thanked her for the offer. She was too many steps ahead of me. First came acceptance by the agent, then word of an offer from a publisher, then making changes and getting the book turned in on time—so many steps to having a published book in my hands and actually celebrating. But EATS was a fine place to start dreaming.
    Most of the booths were empty so I took one off in a corner by myself. Gloria came over, her tennis shoes sticking to the brown linoleum with a sucking sound, and took my order for a BLT and diet Coke. I tried to catch Eugenia’s eye, to beckon her to join me, but she was busy talking to a group of women from the Leetsville Library.
    My sandwich came in record time so I settled