Dead Dogs and Englishmen by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Page B

before.
    She nodded. “Yup. Soon as I call Brent. Soon as I get this report turned in …”
    â€œSoon as the moon turns purple …”
    â€œDon’t you worry about it.”
    â€œI won’t,” I answered.
    She let me off at my mailbox. I slammed the car door behind me and she peeled off in a shower of stones. I was so pissed at her the stones felt good, hitting my bare legs. One more thing to be mad at Dolly Wakowski about.

Jackson picked me up at exactly two-thirty, the immaculate white Jaguar sliding to a stop in front of my rose arbor in a cloud of dust and gravel pings. When he got out to hold the car door for me, he was resplendent in a white linen suit with a white tee shirt under the jacket. The guy would have been perfectly dressed for an afternoon soiree in colonial India, or maybe in Java. How about a pre-war plantation in South Carolina? Well—not the tee shirt and no socks with his loafers—but his air of noblesse oblige was firmly in place.
    I, on the other hand, wasn’t half bad either, despite needing a haircut and wearing old make-up I’d scraped out of the bottle. Although it was hot, and I’d been tempted to wear shorts and a tee shirt, I’d dressed in my best blue slacks and my next-to-best white tee shirt with only a little yellow staining under the arms. Because even I could be self-conscious about my appearance, I threw a yellow cotton jacket over my shoulders and gathered my blondish hair back into a ponytail tied with a white silk scarf over the red rubber band that held everything in place.
    We made quite the pair as we drove past beautiful Torch Lake into the hills beyond.
    _____
    At the guarded gate to the Hawke estate, where Jackson and I stopped and were cleared to proceed by a uniformed sentinel, we were sent on through a thick wood with snarled, dense underbrush. Ahead of us, as the road twisted and straightened, a low, dark-roofed house rose sinuously from the ground. The house was of stone, with the long, low sweep of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Waters. It was a house meant to become part of the landscape around it—a rock cliff built into the side of a rugged hill. The front of the house went on forever, curving at a far corner where a wall of mullioned windows looked into a thick copse of trees. The closer side curved back toward what must have been a garden. We parked beneath a low portico and climbed the wide stone steps to a door with stained glass panels that were oddly of doves and gargoyles. I thought I glimpsed Cecil Hawke’s English background in small touches that would have been as much at home in the Lake Country of Great Britain, as here, in the woods of Northern Michigan. Above the door, a carved lintel read All hope abandon ye who enter here. I thought it a bit much—Dante’s hell—but Jackson touched my arm and nodded at the devilish warning, smiling at the man’s cleverness.
    Off to the east of the house, set back a ways, I’d noticed a huge U-shaped barn, like the mews I remembered from an English trip early in my marriage. The center, surrounded by the wings of the two-story barn, was enclosed by a high wire fence. Inside the fence the ground was churned and muddy as if trampled by many animals, not visible today.
    Further east of the barn were small outbuildings and even further off I could see a low, gray, bunker-like cement block building. There were no windows in the building, nor any in the dark, octagonal building beyond it. Low-cut pastures stretched as far as I could see, with what looked like a thousand sheep grazing—small white blobs set against the bright green of the grass and the bright blue of a clear sky. I caught the slightest tinge of manure on the hot breeze. The sound of baaing drifted faintly from the far fields.
    Jackson pushed the doorbell and leaned back on the heels of his loafers. He crossed his hands in front of him and rocked, turning to beam down one of