Page 66 of Base Block

“I don’t think it’s a big deal. Would it help if I told you something embarrassing about me?”

“Um, I guess. What have you done?”

Well, there were a few things, but first she had to calculate the statute of limitations in order to determine how much she could say. “This was all in Connecticut, so criminal statues are different there,” she cautioned. “Of course, most of it was federal.” Then came a laundry list of offenses. Fraud, embezzlement, bribery, money laundering…

“Anara, really?”

“It happened when I was a juvenile, so my record is sealed,” she said. “I was helping my dad. Have you ever heard of Harold Hirsizlik?”

“Um, should I have?”

“You would, if you were interested in white-collar crime,” she told me. She sounded surprised by my ignorance. “He was imprisoned for several years and is currently on probation. I told you that.”

“You certainly did not tell me that!”

“I mentioned that he won’t be coming to my wedding, and that’s why. He could try to get permission to travel but he’s not interested, anyway. That’s all right because I don’t care for the ‘giving away’ tradition, so I don’t need to walk with anyone.”

We rode for a while in silence while I took that in. Then I had questions about the crimes that had led to those charges, and she was happy to explain in a non-incriminating way. “I don’t do any of that now,” she stressed. “I wouldn’t. But it’s part of my past and I can’t erase it. I don’t really want to, since it led me here. I would have gone to a private college, an expensive one, instead of a state school. I would have studied different things in order to join my dad’s business, which I wouldn’t have liked as much. I wouldn’t have met Demitrious and that would have been the shittiest thing in the world.” She shook her head slowly, marveling. “What would my life be without him? What would his be like? We both would have been despondent.”

For the rest of the trip, we switched to lighter topics than our pasts. It wasn’t as long a drive as the bus trip that had brought me from my former home in Washington to Los Angeles (that had been about thirty hours) but it still took a while. We had to slow down as the rain started to freeze and then turned to snow.

The largest problem wasn’t the weather, though. I found out about it when I got a call from the dog trainer at the “camp” where I had dropped off Maverick for his weekend training.

“What?” I asked the guy on the phone after he said something that didn’t make sense, something about an elopement. I glanced at Anara’s engagement ring and asked, “What does that mean?”

I didn’t understand his next statement either so I put the call on speaker for her input. “Your dog is, uh…unfortunately Maverick has gone walkabout and is on, uh, hiatus. From our facility. Temporarily,” he said.

Anara got it right away, despite how many words he’d used to try to hide his meaning. “Maverick ran away?” she asked.

The answer was yes. “Are you kidding?” I demanded. “You’re professionals!”

“He’s a tough dog,” she noted to me and the guy on the phone agreed.

“We were hoping that you might be able to come by early to help us locate him,” the man told me.

My next call was to Callum, who had just landed. I explained what had happened much more clearly than the dog trainer, so he got it right away. “I’ll head over there now,” he said. “Hell.”

When Anara and I finally arrived, she wanted to stay and help, but I sent her home. “You want to see Demitrious more,” I reminded her and that was absolutely true. Since she hadn’t wanted to text and drive, I’d been listening to their phone calls for more than an hour and it was lucky that Heidi hadn’t been in the car with us. Her emesis would have gotten a lot worse.

I hadn’t actually paid much attention because I was so worried about the dog. After his previous owner had left for Turkmenistan, he had survived on his own for a while before landing at the animal shelter. But it was a lot colder now than it had been then, and it got dark a whole lot earlier so there was more chance of him having a problem with cars on the roads. As soon as Anara stopped, I jumped out of my seat and ran into the building, the same place I had dropped off Maverick just this morning and assumed that he would be ok.

They hadn’t found him. “Mr. Frazier and my manager are out on ATVs looking,” the girl at the desk told me. “We didn’t know that he was Callum Frazier’s dog!”

It wasn’t her fault, I reminded myself. Things happened that were beyond our control, which was what I had heard from an ER nurse and an obstetrician when Aunt Simone had passed away. But some things were within our control! Watching Maverick should have been one of them.

“Who let this happen?” I asked her furiously.

“Um, you’re gonna have to talk to my manager.”

He was out on the ATV, though, so I had to wait. Rather than doing that inside, I went back into the snow, which was forming a blanket on the ground. I used the flashlight from my phone and walked around, calling his name. Callum always worried about me getting cold but I usually didn’t notice it much. I tried not to notice it now, because I had to find Maverick.

It seemed like hours had passed and the snow was much thicker on the steps of the building, when I heard engines in the distance. I heard barking, too.

“Callum? Maverick!” I yelled, and the barking increased. I saw two headlights approaching and there they were, Callum riding and awkwardly gripping a large, wriggling animal.

“No way,” he told Maverick as he turned off the motor and they dismounted. “Don’t pull me. I’m not letting go. Maverick, sit!”

For a dog that had recently escaped from professionals, he behaved extremely well when ordered like that. He plopped right down but continued wiggling his butt and I ran over to hug them both.