Whom Dog Hath Joined Read Online Free

glove
from his pocket and slipped it on his right hand. Then he crouched beside the
building and carefully peered in through the gap, our Stewart’s Crossing
Sherlock trying to intuit the past from a collection of random details.
    He stood up and made a call on his cell phone, then walked
back over to us. “I have to get some stuff from my car, and then I’m going
inside. Hang around until I get a chance to see what’s going on. I want to talk
to you. In the meantime keep the death dog away from the evidence, all right?”
    He walked back toward Main Street, and I knelt down next to
Rochester. “You’re not a death dog, are you, boy?”
    Rochester woofed and nodded his big shaggy head. Then he
licked my face.
    One of the volunteers milling around the Meeting House was
my childhood piano teacher, Edith Passis. She had been a friend of my parents,
and I remembered her as a younger woman at parties at our house, her black hair
teased into a beehive, wearing glasses that feathered up at the edges and
thigh-high black leather boots. She had true Black Irish looks—coal-black hair,
pale white skin and bright blue eyes.
    Now her hair had gone stark white, and a medication she took
tinted her skin a salmon-pink. Though I’d never say it to her face, I thought
she looked like a gerbil, as if she ate chopped lettuce at every meal and lived
in a pile of shredded newspaper. Her blue eyes were still clear, and she was as
sweet-natured and patient as she’d been when I was struggling to learn the
fingering for “The Caisson Song.”
    “Hello, Steve,” she said, coming up to me. “What’s all the
fuss?” She bent down to stroke Rochester’s head.
    “Rochester found a sneaker down there, where the clapboard
has eroded away from the foundation. Looks like it might be attached to a
body.”
    She looked back up quickly. “A body? How terrible. Someone
local? Or a visitor?”
    “Don’t know yet.”
    She put her hand up to her mouth and her eyes crinkled in
sadness. You couldn’t get to Edith’s age, somewhere in her seventies, without
experiencing pain: the general (war, famine, natural disasters) to the personal
(death of her beloved husband, betrayal of her piano-trained hands to
arthritis.)
    I noticed she was wearing the same round button and to
distract her, I asked, “Do you belong to the Meeting?” I’d always thought Edith
was Jewish, because I saw her sometimes at our synagogue in Trenton.
    “I was born a Quaker,” she said. “When Lou was alive I went
to synagogue with him sometimes, but I always felt like a Friend in my heart.
After he passed I found a lot of comfort in coming here.” She shook her head.
“But there was a lot of discord over this construction project. Very
un-Quaker.”
    “Why the discord?” Rochester kept straining to go back to
the sneaker he’d found and I had to keep a close rein on his leash.
    A light breeze swept through the property, scattering some
of the dead leaves at the bases of the trees. “A lot of people don’t like
change,” she said. “When you get to my age… it seemed like such a big project,
so much money, so much disruption.”
    “What kind of work is being done? Expansion?”
    “More like reconfiguring. Our membership has been shrinking,
and we don’t need such a large meeting room anymore. We offer space to a lot of
non-profit groups, and Hannah Palmer felt we needed to remodel and create more
intimate spaces, both for our worship and for these other groups.”
    “Other members disagreed with her?”
    “Politely, of course,” Edith said. “But Hannah is a very
strong woman, and deeply spiritual, as well. I knew her family when she was
growing up. She was always such a serious child.” She shook her head. “We’re a
dying breed, we Friends. We’ve never been ones to proselytize, and so many of
our young people are seduced away from silence and contemplation by the noise
of the world. Hannah has revitalized our Meeting, even if I don’t always