“Ruddy, my God, my God,” she said. “Don’t die, don’t die, please don’t die.”
He’s dead.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m not dead.”
“What? What?” She wildly shook her head, pulling her wet hair away from her face.
“I’m not dead, Katie. You saved me. I love you.”
“I love you, too. Ruddy, I was so scared.”
“You did everything right, Katie. Everything.”
This was her. The woman I could trust, the woman I could hold, the woman I could love forever. I looked into those amazing eyes and I wasn’t falling further in love, I was rising up to it, being lifted.
She helped me stand up. My foot felt utterly destroyed, my leg below the knee bleeding and in terrific pain. My shoulder wound felt safe to come out and play, too, and gave me a jolt as we staggered toward the truck.
“I think I’ll let you drive,” I told her.
This actually made her laugh. I took a deep breath. I had a lot to tell her, and wasn’t sure how much of it she needed to know, or already knew. But her mom had participated in killing her father, and Marget and Burby and Wexler were mass murderers. That was what I was going to tell Strickland, anyway, so that much she needed to hear from me.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s take a ride.”
Epilogue
I was afraid.
Well, okay, not afraid, but nervous, somehow.
Alan’s body was interred underneath the heavy stone with the memorial plaque, and I’d come down a few times before to chat, sitting on the stone bench. His voice might be gone from my head but I still felt his presence, and the urge to talk out loud to him was so strong I’d succumbed to it without thinking a few times before I’d caught people regarding me warily. Now I limited my discussions to this place, to this bench. People did that, right? Came to talk to their dead friends? Normal people?
“So Alan, hey,” I greeted.
I sniffed in the clean air, not expecting an answer or anything, but just giving a normal pause to the conversation. It was early June and Michigan was acting as if it had taken an oath to be Hawaii. The sky was impossibly blue, the leaves had burst out of hiding and were lifting their faces to the sun. Birds were singing, bugs were buzzing, and people were delinquent on their car loans. A perfect day.
“So the reason I’m here is to ask you something. It’s been more than a year since that day at the river, the day you saved me. A lot’s happened. My sister…” I trailed off. I hadn’t realized I was going to talk about Becky. “She’s a different person now. You’d hardly know her. The married life, it really agrees with her.
“We’ve rebuilt the Bear, and Jimmy’s sort of managing the place. Not the books, Becky still does that, but you know how people love him. He greets everyone; it’s fun.”
I sighed. I was avoiding it.
“Then there’s Katie. Mostly, she’s doing really well. She and her mom aren’t talking, but that’s no surprise. The DA declined to prosecute, says there wasn’t any evidence, but Katie knows what happened, what Marget did to you, and she’s not letting it go. I don’t know how you would feel about that.
“Anyway, about Katie. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Alan. Every moment I’m with her, I’m happy. And I’m good for her, too, Alan. I really am, which is why, okay, I want to ask her to marry me. So that’s why I’m here. I’m just letting you know. Man to man. Your daughter, if she says yes, will be married to a repo man. Like that.”
I let it sink in. I had a foolish grin on my face—this was the first time I’d said it aloud. “I’ll be a good husband to your daughter, Alan,” I finally added. “The married life, it’ll agree with me, too.”
I stood, feeling oddly relieved. “Okay then,” I said. I looked over to where Jake was sniffing at a headstone. “Jake, respect the dead,” I warned him. He glanced back at me and did exactly that, lifting his leg and giving a deferential sprinkle. “Great,” I muttered.
I turned back to the large rock. “You were right. Life’s too short, you have to say what’s on your mind. I really miss you, Alan. You were the best friend I ever had. I hope I get to see you again, someday. Good-bye, Alan.”
I walked away, clapping my hands so Jake would join me for the ride back home.
Acknowledgments, Apologies, and Afterthoughts
Ruddy McCann is based on a real person: me. Well, okay, I didn’t play football for Michigan State or have my football career cut short by a prison sentence or play football in high school or play football. I’m under six feet tall instead of over, and I couldn’t be a bouncer in anything tougher than a donut shop. But I was, for several years, a repo man in northern Michigan. I was born in Petoskey, and have spent at least some portion of every year of my life in the East Jordan / Charlevoix area. When I was repossessing cars, I lived in Traverse City and had a lot of customers in Kalkaska. So if you’re looking at the book jacket photo and thinking the author looks suspiciously like someone you saw driving away in your pickup truck a couple decades ago: yes, that was me. I feel pretty awkward about the whole thing and I’m hoping we can put it behind us.
Ruddy McCann and I will both be back in the as-yet untitled sequel, as will the cast of characters from the Black Bear and, of course, Jake the dog.
Being so familiar with my subject and the local geography can be a curse, because I assume I know all the answers to everything, when in fact my memory can’t even accurately describe yesterday’s lunch. I apologize for any errors I’ve made in the telling of this story, whether they be related to distance, topography, or history. For example, there is a Patricia Lake and it does appear to be pretty steeply banked, but I couldn’t find a way to get down to it and therefore described it entirely from my imagination. I’ve never been in the Charlevoix County Sheriff’s station, which is probably a good thing, and I most likely made a mash of the procedures for arresting someone who reports a dead body found in the woods.
None of the characters except Ruddy are based on real human beings. Well, Jake’s personality is a lot like my dog Tucker’s—Tucker hates to go for a walk. What kind of dog hates to go for a walk? All he ever wants to do is sit at home and read e-mail.
I’ve made a lot of fun of northern Michigan, especially the weather, but the truth is I love the area—it’s in my bones. In fact, there is currently no Black Bear Bar and Grille in Kalkaska, but I think it would be a great idea to open one! Make it exactly as described in the novel! My wife doesn’t care how many exclamation points I slap on this concept; she lives in Los Angeles and is not moving to any place where she would have to use a snow-thrower.
But speaking of my wife: Cathryn, your ideas and edits, as always, dramatically improved this novel through every draft. Thank you so much for your contributions, so vital to my work, and thank you for marrying me because I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t wake up every morning and see your face.
Submitting a manuscript to a publisher and then getting editorial notes is a bit like dressing a child for school and then having the teacher call to complain that you sent your first grader to class wearing a tennis shoe on one foot and a moon boot on the other. Since this actually happened to me, I can attest to how painful it is. Thank you, Kristin Sevick, for your tact, and for your great ideas and thoughts.
I feel lucky to be with Tom Doherty, an imprint of Forge, a division of Macmillan. I think I got that right. Thank you, Linda, Tom, Karen, Kathleen, and everyone else for adopting me and publishing my novels and making them a priority and a success.
Thanks Scott Miller of Trident Media for living in New York so I don’t have to, and for helping reinvent me as a novelist instead of a humor writer.
Thanks to my three Steves for being my Hollywood Triple Threat: Younger, Fisher, and Iwanyk. Iwanykly, Iwanyk is Younger than Fisher. Deb, thanks for working Deuble time.
Thank you Gavin Palone for being a sword and a shield. I’m proud to be working with you.
Thank y
ou Tracey Nyberg and Rodney Ferrell for the great Christmas present!
Thank you Monica Perkins for organizing and caffeinating my office. Now that you’re here I have time to write!
Because my writing didn’t cover the bills for so much of my life, I developed the habit of always having a day job. Currently that job is producing independent movies, and by the time you are reading this I hope at least one of them—Muffin Top: A Love Story—is in theaters and available via VOD. Elliott Crowe has taken on the majority of the work that I was supposed to do. Thank you, Elliott, for literally saving the movie. And thanks to the people who contributed to our Kickstarter campaign so that we could take our finished film on the road! There were a thousand people, but I want to specifically thank Katherine Fugate, Liz Cameron, Linda Slater, Jay Kogen, Joyce Kemph, Roger and Vivien and Burke and Kellie, Laura and Dick Flanigan, Barbara and Robin Foster, Sudy Hurst, Niki McDowell, Tim Gillin, Ginger Truitt, Geoffrey Jennings, Tracy Beckerman, David Tausik, Ellen GoldsmithVein, Gigi Levangie Grazer, Monsie Cameron, Jennifer Altabef, Nitanee Paris Lawson, Jeff Jacobson, Pamela Norris, Kati Johnston, Iris Dart, Lissa Collins-Gudim, Alex Gudim, Melissa Berryman, and Diane Edwards.
Thanks to Connection House Inc. for its research into some key aspects of car repossessions that I had forgotten. All I could remember was sweating and panting and fibrillating.
Thanks Fly HC and Hillary Carlip for building and beautifying my websites: wbrucecameron.com and adogspurpose.com.
There are some writers I can always turn to for support, encouragement, and psychological counseling. Thank you Claire LaZebnik and Samantha Dunn—you both are better at this than I am.
Thank you Carolina for listening to me even when I’m spouting nonsense. Thank you Annie for letting me hang out with the popular kids. Thank you Pam Norris for letting me visit Casa de Squillo il Telefono.
Thank you Jody and Andy Sherwood, and Diane and Tom Runstrom, for all you did for my family the fall of 2013.
Thanks to my award-winning teacher sister Amy Cameron for writing the study guides for A Dog’s Purpose, A Dog’s Journey, and Emory’s Gift. All three books are being successfully taught in the classroom. If you, dear reader, know an educator who would be interested in our grant program, please have him or her visit our website to read the study guide and download a grant application!
Thanks Julie Cameron MD for continuing to promote my books to all of your patients. Let’s talk soon!
Chase, you are a master. Chelsea, thanks for G-Bru. Georgia, thank you for Tucker. Eloise, you are a joy—remember, just say “No.” You’re good at it. Gordon, I know there’s some Cameron DNA in there somewhere—probably you’ll wind up getting your father’s looks and my running ability.
My mom sells, on average, 1.45 of my books for every 1.0 people she meets. Thanks, Mom, for being my biggest supporter and best salesperson.
I would never know anything about Michigan if my grandfather hadn’t bought a stone cottage on Lake Charlevoix about eighty years ago. When the cottage passed into my father’s hands, my parents drove their family from their home in Kansas City to the place on the lake every single summer, so that I could experience the same childhood my father had enjoyed as he was growing up. After college I moved to Michigan because I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. My father died October 5th, 2013, right where he wanted to be: in that stone cottage that had been in his family his whole life. Thank you, Cameron Family, for the gift of all those cottage memories. Thank you, Dad, for working so hard so that your children could enjoy such a marvelous home. I miss you and think of you every day.
—W. Bruce Cameron
Monday, March 10, 2014, Marina del Rey, CA
Read on for a preview of
The Dog Master
W. BRUCE CAMERON
Available in 2015 by Tom Doherty Associates
Prologue
At exactly 9:00 AM the uniformed guards at the back of the room pulled every door shut in muscular coordination, the metallic clang echoing throughout the college lecture hall. The security men were grinning: Maintaining the peace on a liberal arts campus mostly consisted of tolerating unruly students while keeping them approximately in line, so this exercise, an annual ritual, gave them a fleeting sense of order triumphing over chaos.
The loud crash of the doors had startled the conversations into silence, and now the students arrayed in the stadium-style seats sat with their necks twisted toward the back of the room. Immediately a loud and urgent pounding of fists on metal proclaimed the desperate despair of those who hadn’t made it inside in time. Then, after just a moment, the pummeling abruptly halted, as the guards on the other side of the double doors told the late arrivals they were tardy and therefore had to exit the building.
It was the first class of the first day of the first semester for these freshmen. Prompt attendance was strictly required.
Welcome to college.
Dr. James K. Morby—“Morby the Mortician,” as he wasn’t supposed to know he was called, broke from the shadows at the back of the stage and strode briskly to the podium. He wore a crisp blue suit, a white shirt, and a tight necktie, an outfit he’d wear for just this first week before slipping into his more habitual plaid shirt and baseball cap. There was a purpose to his clothing, for the careful way his sparse brown hair was combed back, for the clean shave he’d applied to his baby-faced cheeks, for the stern glare in his normally folksy hazel eyes. It was all costumed and choreographed to turn these kids from high school students into college students. Morby had just three classes over the next week to get it done.
“The reason,” he intoned into his microphone, “that you have been assigned seats is so that I may call on you by name.”
Morby waited, watching the students glance at each other before they uneasily rearranged themselves—who knew the seating chart was serious? Morby spotted a bank of empty chairs and then glanced at the screen in front of him. “Thus when I call on Mr. Brosh—are you here, Mr. Brosh? Kevin Brosh? No, you are not here. But had you been here, I would have been looking directly at you.”
Morby paused and savored his mental image of Brosh’s friends telling him that Morby had been looking for him in class. Mr. Brosh would not be absent again.
“Also, the reason you swiped your student ID on your way in and then handed it to a security guard was both to take attendance and to verify that you are who you say you are and not some friend of, say, Kevin Brosh’s, here to swipe his ID for him so that he isn’t marked absent for a class you all know has a policy of mandatory attendance.”
Morby let them mull that one over. He knew that the freshmen who had by plan or chance arrived early enough to clear security and make it to the lecture were feeling a bit smug about themselves at the moment, and he knew their smugness wouldn’t last much longer.
Freshman orientation had taken most of the weekend. Then Sunday, yesterday, the parents had tearfully departed and the students had seized their new independence and ridden it hard into the night. Most of the eyes regarding him now were blurry and unfocused, shimmering with fatigue and hangovers. They caroused, they’d pursued fornication, they’d approached ceramic bowls on humble hands and knees—they thought they had college figured out.
It was up to Morby to jar that notion out of their heads. This was the only 100 level class required for all incoming freshmen, and the only one that accelerated to full speed from the first moment—the other professors mostly ran through their syllabi and passed out materials the first couple of days, waiting for Morby the Mortician to work his magic. Upperclassmen weren’t required to show up on campus until the end of the week, and even when they did, they never pointed out the obvious, which was that Morby’s class wasn’t so much about the subject being taught as it was about the experience itself.
Maybe the older students didn’t know, hadn’t figured it out.
“Your reading assignment is the first five chapters of your textbook on the Upper Paleolithic.” It was 120 pages, probabl
y more than any of them had been required to read in any two-day period in high school. “We’ll have a test on the material and this lecture on Wednesday. Friday your papers are due at the start of class.”
They were bright kids or they wouldn’t be here, but Morby’s class, “Early Humans,” was the scholastic equivalent of being tossed into the deep end of the pool. Wednesday morning they would be dismayed at the depth and complexity of the exam; Wednesday afternoon they’d be panicked over their grades. A scientist at heart, Morby had been tracking Wednesday test performance in a database for a decade, and was proud of the defibrillating effect of his scoring: 75 percent would fail, 20 percent would barely get a D, and a handful of students would freakishly pass.
There had never been an A given on the first test in the history of the class. Morby doubted he, himself, would ace the thing—those questions were hard.
In a cold sweat—how were they going to tell their parents they were flunking out of college?—most of them would dig into their essay assignments with the fervor of the newly converted. Wednesday and Thursday nights the security guards would have far fewer intoxicated students on their hands.
“So: about your essay assignment. For many years, it has been thought that early man lived in peaceful, communal harmony within his family, tribe, and at large with other homo sapiens. Of late, however, a new school of thought has argued that there’s no reason to think that prehistoric man was any less brutal or warlike than we are today.” Morby surveyed his audience, most of whom had sunk into a swamp of complete lethargy. “Your papers will be two thousand five hundred words. Please address this issue, arguing for one point of view or the other. Warlike, or peaceable? I don’t care which side you take, just make sure your logic is sound, your resources reliable, and that your words are your own.”
Despite this last admonition and the prominent warnings about plagiarism on the first page of the student manual, Morby knew that by Monday morning, when the essays, bloody with red ink, were handed back to their authors, nearly two in ten freshmen would find themselves facing academic probation. Raised in the cut-and-paste generation, they literally didn’t understand what constituted intellectual property theft. They also had no idea that there were web sites dedicated to ferreting out cheaters, so that even those students who congratulated themselves on how well they had rewritten someone else’s thoughts would set off alarms the moment Morby entered a few phrases into the applications.