Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli - Dead Dogs and Englishmen

Dead Dogs and Englishmen: An Emily Kincaid Mystery 2011 by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli.

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First e-book edition 2011

E-book ISBN: 9780738732176

Book design by Donna Burch

Cover design by Ellen Lawson

Editing by Connie Hill

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Dedication

To friends and family who make my books possible: my sister Mary Lou Kane Colucci, Rainelle Burton, Carolyn Hall, and Annick Hivert Carthew.

To Higher Self Book Store, where they gave me my teaching start in Traverse City.

To Bernard Hanchett for his help on crows.

For my good friends Mardi Link and Aaron Standermy intrepid Murder Takes a Road Trip buddies.

To Ken Bryson for his amazing knowledge of area history, and Cathy and Fred Rowe for letting me move their property to a different location, and then hide dead bodies on it.

To Arlene Heffelfinger for the canned fish; Eva Sears for great storiesif she doesnt find them in this book theyll show up in Emilys future; and Linda Radtke of the Kalkaska Museum and Margaret Beebe of the Kalkaska Library for their wealth of great local lore.

And Greg Hughes, a good friend in law enforcement.

And, as always, for Tony.

The deadly summer of the worm began in spring when the tent worms crawled into my northwest Michigan woods after May blossoms faded on the wild cherry trees and tiny leaves first appeared on the Juneberry; when the trees bloomed again with thick, gauzy webs at every fork of their branches. Each of the sticky, white webs woven into the blackened and sickly trees writhed with thousands of worms. I tried not to notice the moving webs when I walked with Sorrow, my happy lump of a mixed-breed dog. I hoped the worms would go away, that maybe the birds would feast on them. Maybe, I thought, theyd turn into moths and be nothing more than a nuisance after summer dark, pulsing around my porch lights and bombarding the window screens with buzzing thumps.

That wasnt what happened. None of that.

In June, the worms tore open their throbbing webs and marched up the newly leafed oaks and maples, chewing as they climbed, stripping every treethese evil, voracious, Bernie Madoffs of the natural world.

By July, the forest was turned upside down and backward, as was my life. The oaks and maples were bare. Bright sun poured into places that should never see the summer sun: damp places in deep woods; small caverns under the exposed roots of old basswood trees; thick beds of leaf mold where the morels grew in May. Other mushrooms tried to poke through last years leaves but dried and disappeared quickly. Wild flowers were sparse. The loamy earth slowly turned brown. In places it cracked open.

We tried, Sorrow and I, to stay happy as he snuffled chipmunk houses and howled at fox holes now caught in pools of sunshine. My shady paths were where ideas for novels simmered, my mysteries that didnt sell although I thought them greator maybe not great, but pretty good . Now, sadly, the only thing I found as I walked were steady, tinkling streams of black tent worm shit falling on the old leaves and on my head. I wanted to stay with the usual paths but had to give them up as, spitting and angry, I took my sad dog back to our little golden cabin near the shore of Willow Lake to give us both a shower, getting the slime out of our respective hair and fur, and off my skin.

In early July I gave up the woods completely and we kept to roads, to gravel and cement, and looked longingly into the suffering forest. Sorrow didnt seem to mind worms pooping on him; and didnt mind if shady walks were sunny, if no mushrooms grew, if wild leek and purslane patches were few and far between. He was a creature who decided early on to be happy and never let go of happy thoughts as he bounced merrily through lifeunless he got caught chewing one of my sandals, or sneaking away from a steaming pile hed left, inadvertently, Im sure, in the middle of my living room Oriental rug.

The quiet woods were one of the many reasons Id left Ann Arbor and the newspaper I worked on to come to northwest Michigan after a bad divorce left my ego bent back on itself like a piece of cheap wire. Jackson Rinaldi, my ex-husband, a good-looking, forty-one-year-old, cheating jerk of an English professor from the University of Michigan, was one of the biggest reasons Id run to the north woods to find peace and write the mysteries Id been dying to write, and to live a life Id only dreamed of living back when every day was filled with appointments and meetings and interviews and deadlines and I had no idea who I, the real Emily Kincaid, was beyond a journalist and an aggrieved wife. Mid-thirties, starting over, and still not sure I could make it in the woods by myself. Sometimes everything was too muchlike winter and being jobless. Sometimes I regretted that Id tossed my old life away. But there were those other times, times when I wanted to pat myself on the back and wanted to click my heels in the air. Times when I wanted to shout out how happy I was.

Now my ex had come to stay near Traverse City, on sabbatical, writing his giant tometo end all tomeson Chaucer and his pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. He was far enough away from Willow Lake to keep from being a pest. Close enough by phone, e-mail, and need to be a nuisance.

That particular hot morning, 83 degrees at nine a.m., Sorrow and I climbed to the top of our gravel drive. Up on Willow Lake Road I waved halfheartedly to three noisy crows sitting in a white pine. The crows had become a source of solace and inspiration for me since Id convinced myself they were my muse and my guardians. Woods people came to me with stories of crow intelligence, crow ingenuity, and crow prescience. I believed it all. Crows gave me the mystery novel I was trying desperately to sell, and seemed always to be around when I needed a bird to lean on. Today they shook their black heads and cawed, probably comment ing on my white legs in old denim shorts and my washed-out tee shirt and my blond and brown hair caught up on top of my head with a tortoiseshell clamp.