The Last of the Winnebagos

“We’ll let you know if we find out who’s responsible,” Hunter said, and they left. On the way out to the street the uniform tried to tell him what he’d found, but Hunter cut him off. The suspect has a house full of photographs of dogs, therefore he didn’t run over a poor facsimile of one on Van Buren this morning. Case closed. I went back over to the developer and fed the eisenstadt film in. “Positives, one two three order, five seconds,” I said, and watched as the pictures came up on the developer’s screen. Ramirez had said the eisenstadt automatically turned on whenever it was set upright on a level surface. She was right. It had taken a half-dozen shots on the way out to Tempe. Two shots of the Hitori it must have taken when I set it down to load the car, open door of same with prickly pear in the foreground, a blurred shot of palm trees and buildings with a minuscule, sharp-focused glimpse of the traffic on the expressway. Vehicles and people. There was a great shot of the red tanker that had cupped the jackal and ten or so of the yucca I had parked next to at the foot of the hill.

It had gotten two nice shots of my forearm as I set it down on the kitchen counter of the Winnebago and some beautifully composed still lifes of Melmac with Spoons. Vehicles and people. The rest of the pictures were dead losses: my back, the open bathroom door, Jake’s back, and Mrs. Ambler’s public face.

Except the last one. She had been standing right in front of the eisenstadt, looking almost directly into the lens. “When I think of that poor thing, all alone,” she had said, and by the time she turned around she had her public face back on, but for a minute there, looking at what she thought was a briefcase and remembering, there she was, the person I had tried all morning to get a picture of.

I took it into the living room and sat down and looked at it awhile.

“So you knew this Katherine Powell in Colorado,” Ramirez said, breaking in without preamble, and the highwire slid silently forward and began to print out the lifeline. “I always suspected you of having some deep dark secret in your past. Is she the reason you moved to Phoenix?”

I was watching the highwire advance the paper. Katherine Powell, 4628 Dutchman Drive, Apache Junction. Forty miles away.

“Holy Mother, you were really cradle-robbing. According to my calculations, she was seventeen when you lived there.”

Sixteen.

“Are you the owner of the dog?” the vet had asked her, his face slackening into pity when he saw how young she was.

“No,” she said. “I’m the one who hit him.”

“My God,” he said. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” she said, and her face was wide open. “I just got my license.”

“Aren’t you even going to tell me what she has to do with this Winnebago thing?” Ramirez said.

“I moved down here to get away from the snow,” I said, and cut out without saying goodbye.

The lifeline was still rolling silently forward. Hacker at Hewlett-Packard. Fired in ninety-nine, probably during the unionization. Divorced. Two kids. She had moved to Arizona five years after I did. Management programmer for Toshiba. Arizona driver’s license.

I went back to the developer and looked at the picture of Mrs. Ambler. I had said dogs never came through. That wasn’t true. Taco wasn’t in the blurry snapshots Mrs. Ambler had been so anxious to show me, in the stories she had been so anxious to tell. But she was in this picture, reflected in the pain and love and loss on Mrs. Ambler’s face. I could see her plain as day, perched on the arm of the driver’s seat, barking impatiently when the light turned green.

I put a new cartridge in the eisenstadt and went out to see Katie.

I had to take Van Buren—it was almost four o’clock, and the rush hour would have started on the divideds— but the jackal was gone anyway. The Society is efficient. Like Hitler and his Nazis.

“Why don’t you have any pictures of your dog?” Hunter had asked. The question could have been based on the assumption that anyone who would fill his living room with photographs of dogs must have had one of his own, but it wasn’t. He had known about Aberfan, which meant he’d had access to my lifeline, which meant all lands of things. My lifeline was privacy-coded, so I had to be notified before anybody could get access, except, it appeared, the Society. A reporter I knew at the paper, Dolores Chiwere, had tried to do a story a while back claiming that the Society had an illegal fink to the lifeline banks, but she hadn’t been able to come up with enough evidence to convince her editor. I wondered if this counted.

The lifeline would have told them about Aberfan but not about how he died. Killing a dog wasn’t a crime in those days, and I hadn’t pressed charges against Katie for reckless driving or even called the police.

“I think you should,” the vet’s assistant had said. “There are less than a hundred dogs left. People can’t just go around killing them.”

“My God, man, it was snowing and slick,” the vet had said angrily, “and she’s just a kid.”