looked at the empty bed. “What about Beau?” she asked, going to the door and opening it all the way.
“I’m looking at him from my bedroom window,” Mrs. Beabots continued, “and he’s digging a hole at your back fence. From the looks of it, pumpkin, he’ll hit Shanghai in less than an hour.”
“He’s doing what?” Sarah went to the back porch, leaned over the railing and nearly dropped the cordless phone. “I’ll call you back, Mrs. Beabots. And thanks.”
“Anytime, pumpkin,” she said and hung up.
Sarah nearly flew down the back porch steps and across the lawn. “Beauregard Jensen! What are you doing?”
Clumps of mud and dirt sailed into the air and dappled Beauregard’s copper and golden fur in a crazy quilt pattern.
Sarah raced up to the golden retriever, still yelling his name, but he paid no attention. If anything, he dug harder and faster.
A dollop of mud went slinging through Beauregard’s hind legs and smacked Sarah in the forehead.
“Beau! Stop it, this instant!” she shouted, wiping the mud off her face.
Beauregard kept digging. He splattered Sarah’s freshly dry-cleaned camel-and-black silk suit. Sarah dodged the mud rain and went around to the left of the dog and tried to grab his collar and pull him out of the deep hole he’d dug. Though she tried to steady herself in her tan pumps, she slipped on the grass, which she’d been far too prideful about, and fell rump-side down. She knew she should change out of her business suit in order to avoid serious damage to her clothes, but she’d be late for work if she didn’t get Beau out of the hole and back into the house.
“Of all the days in my entire career, did you have to choose today to act like a dog?”
Beauregard paid no attention to her and kept flinging dirt.
“What are you doing? And why are you doing this?” she asked, frustration spiking the edges of her words. Another clump of dirt hit her on the cheek.
“That’s it!” Sarah pulled with all her might and hoisted Beauregard out of the hole and away from the fence.
Beau snarled at Sarah.
She snarled back.
Beau glanced back at the hole and Sarah knew he was thinking about defying her, just like a misbehaving child. “Don’t even think about it, Beauregard Jensen. Just look at you! You’ve made a terrible mess of yourself. It will take me hours to clean you up and I have to be at work.”
Dragging Beau behind her, which was a serious feat of strength and adrenaline, Sarah trudged toward the driveway. “You have to have a bath and there’s no time left. It’s off to the groomers for you!” Sarah pulled on Beau’s collar again, but the dog had relented to his fate and now walked, head forlornly hung, next to his master and supposed superior creature.
Sarah ordered Beauregard to sit on the driveway next to her Envoy as she went to the garage, got an old plastic tarp and draped it across the passenger’s seat. She stood aside as Beauregard jumped into the SUV.
“The tarp will hopefully keep my car clean, but believe me, it’s going to take professional fumigation to get your dirty dog smell out of here!” Sarah slammed the car door.
She went back to the kitchen, grabbed her purse, portfolio and lunch and locked the house.
As she walked around the flagstone path to the front yard, she saw Mrs. Beabots standing on the front sidewalk, hand up to her forehead to shade her eyes from the brilliant morning sun. “Showed him whose boss, din’t cha?” Mrs. Beabots asked.
Sarah had lived on Maple Avenue all her life, and for as long as she could remember, Mrs. Beabots had not only lived next door, but she had also felt that whatever was happening in the Jensen household was her prerogative to know. Mrs. Beabots was not a gossip, and blessedly, she didn’t share the information. She simply believed she could not help the ones she loved if she didn’t know their business.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Beabots never understood that Sarah despised being late to work—or late to anything, for that matter. Mrs. Beabots loved to talk. Talking helped whittle away the hours of her very lonely life.
“I have to get Beau down to Puppies and Paws and then I have to be at work...”
“I know, dearie. I know. You gotta run.”
“I do,” Sarah said, sliding into the car.
“When you get home tonight, I can help you fill that hole back up. Perfect place for a start of my peonies,” Mrs. Beabots offered.
“I just don’t know what possessed him to dig like that,” Sarah said. “Beau has never been a digger.”
Mrs. Beabots turned her thin face toward Sarah’s backyard. “Could have been the fact that last night when Beau came home with that dead squirrel, you tossed it over the fence into the old Samuels’ yard.”
Sarah shuddered as she remembered when she’d let Beau out just before her bedtime. She had been preoccupied with her presentation and last-minute adjustments to her drawings, and hadn’t realized Beau was taking an abnormal amount of time outside. As always, she’d left the kitchen door half-open, and when he came in and pushed it open all the way with his snout, Sarah had turned around in time to see a dead squirrel, stiff with rigor mortis, clamped between Beau’s jaws. Off her chair in a shot, she whisked a kitchen towel off the countertop, threw it over Beauregard’s face and wrenched the squirrel from the dog. She shrouded the dead animal in the towel and immediately went out to the backyard. It was a new moon, black-as-pitch night, but Sarah knew exactly how many paces it was to the north side of her yard, where a six-foot high, white-wood fence separated her property from the Samuels’ estate. With one mighty swing of her right arm, she heaved the dead squirrel over the fence.
Turning around, she found Beau standing directly behind her. If she hadn’t heard his loud panting first, she would have fallen over him.
“Don’t ever do that again, Beauregard Jensen,” she warned with a wag of her finger and a steep arch to her eyebrow. Not that he could see her expression in the dark.
Sarah grabbed his collar and yanked him toward the house. She remembered now that on the way back, Beauregard had paused and looked back at the fence. It wasn’t until she shouted his name and gave his collar another tug that he followed her obediently.
Sarah knew now that Beauregard had started plotting his strategy for retrieval at that very moment. She wondered if he’d thought about it all night.
Sarah looked back at Mrs. Beabots, who was patiently holding her arms at her sides, the skirt of her black-and-white-polka-dot dress fluttering around her legs. “That house has been vacant for two years. I didn’t think anyone would mind,” Sarah said glumly.
“You shoulda buried the squirrel out of Beau’s sight.”
“Why?” Sara asked.
“Because, pumpkin. That critter was his prize. Dog’s always gonna go for his prize. He’s a retriever.” Mrs. Beabots smiled her thin smile and nodded.
Sarah watched after the little bird
