Happy Halloween to all who celebrate! Just a note that the really spooky episode occurs next week. Alas, I couldn’t make it coincide with the holiday. Check out the Postscript to this Episode for Halloween-y reading suggestions.

I clung to the idea that I had twenty-four hours, meaning Sam would be back at the farm before Sheila went into active labor. (Surely that’s what he’d meant by “up to twenty-four hours,” right?)

Even so, I was up all night.

Oh, I told myself I was going to bed, she’d be fine, sheep have been giving birth for millennia without human help, etc. But then, after tossing and turning and worrying, there I’d be again, grabbing the flashlight from its hook by the door, shoving my feet into the too-large boots I’d found on the porch (recognizing the symbolism, and the irony, in wearing my dad’s boots), and stomping out to the paddock to check on her progress.

By about five in the morning Sheila was still on her feet, though she seemed tired, and anxious. I allowed myself an exhausted internal chuckle at the idea that I know what constitutes “anxious” in a sheep, and yet I am taking a stand on that hill, declaring unequivocally that Sheila was visibly disconcerted. She followed me into the barn where Sam, bless him, had prepared a bed of fresh straw, and had set out a bucket of water and some rags.

Just before heading home the night before, he’d gone over the basics of what I’d need to do after Sheila gave birth. Wipe down the lamb’s face, he’d said, to clear away the placenta. Tickle its nose and make it sneeze, if necessary, to jump-start its breathing. Dip the umbilical cord in iodine, to avoid infection. And encourage Sheila to lick her baby, for bonding. (Ah. How does one “encourage” a sheep to do something?)

And let’s not forget the terrifying-sounding instruction to “strip the teats,” to bring on the milk.

If anything looked hairy, Sam had said, call me.

“How will I know hairy from woolly?” I’d said, trying to joke my way around the tension.

“You’ll know,” he’d said, gently.

He’d also set out a few things I preferred to ignore: latex gloves; some kind of lube (it appeared to be similar to the stuff people use for sex); and a rectal thermometer that was so small I couldn’t help but imagine accidentally losing it inside the sheep, if I had to use it.

But I’ll never have to use it, I told myself. Sam said twenty-four hours, and we’re only at, what, thirteen hours? So, after getting Sheila settled in the barn, I went back to bed.

And missed the whole event.

By the time I returned, bleary-eyed, cup of coffee in hand, Sheila was nursing not one but two lambs.

I’m not married, except possibly to my job. I have no children, and have no desire for kids of my own. But at that moment, watching the two miracles, I was flooded with a fierce, maternal protectiveness, a tidal wave of emotion.

That’s the sleep-deprivation talking, I told myself.

Reminders: Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting), and the Cast of Characters here. Episode links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved

Marta is as entranced as I. When she arrives after school that day, we sit side by side on a bale of hay outside the pen, and simply stare at the new family. The soft snores when they sleep, the noisy suckling, the endearing grunts from Mama Sheila, everything exudes wellbeing and contentedness, spreading in concentric circles outward, until we are enveloped.

Before I arrived on the island last weekend, Sam shared with me the tension between Marta and her mother. He explained that Susan had withheld information from Marta about her father, and told me how deeply Marta resented the omission, especially after her father died. That, in turn, resulted in ambivalence about the impending marriage between Sam and her mother. “I think she thinks her mom is trying to make up for it by giving her me,” he said, “as a kind of . . . replacement dad.”

Sitting with Marta and watching the little family in the barn, it occurs to me that we, the cynical about-to-be-aunt and the tender soon-to-be-niece, are kindred spirits, bound not by fancy like Anne of Green Gables and Diana Barry but by our brokenness, both haunted by the ghosts of our fathers.

Sometimes, Marta tells me things. Like how she found a wallet in the woods that turned out to be connected, somehow, with the dead body in the apartment complex. And her first kiss. And how just last month she ran away, ended up at her teacher’s house, and went home the next morning. She tells me she thought that might make her feel better, but it didn’t.

I am utterly unsure how to respond, so I say nothing, which seems to suit Marta just fine.

Two days after Sheila gives birth, another ewe begins to go into active labor. It’s Janis Joplin this time, an older ewe Sam named—over Dad’s objections—because of her hoarse, Joplinesque bleating. Thankfully, it’s mid-afternoon this time, and Sam and Marta are already here.

Susan is here, as well, and I can see the anger in Marta’s eyes at the encroachment onto what Marta is clearly thinking of as “our” space. Marta’s and mine. I’m touched, of course, but also a little bewildered. How did this wildly intelligent pre-teen imprint on me, the least nurturing person in her little world?

Pretty quickly, all of us who are gathered in the barn can tell there’s a problem. Susan reads aloud from one of the manuals, and shows us the illustrations. Together we figure out how the tiny feet now sticking out of Janis Joplin’s vaginal opening—not words I ever imagined myself saying—should be presenting, versus how they actually look. Slowly, slowly, slowly, Sam pushes on some of the little hooves, and pulls on others. Finally, the lamb is out, but it’s not breathing.

Neither are we.

Janis Joplin lies on her side, panting, the whites of her eyes showing. Sam picks up the baby, a girl, and rubs her down. There is no movement from the tiny form. Sam perseveres, patting her chest, blowing into her nostrils, and I am all at once aware that my entire body is tense with anticipated grief.

And then there is a cough, and another, and the lamb shakes her head, and we sigh, a collective breath of relief.

I look at Marta, and at Susan, and at Sam. We are all crying.

Susan, wiping her nose on a piece of burlap, says to Marta, “That’s how I felt when you were born,”

“You did?” Marta says.

Instead of answering, Susan opens her arms, and Marta falls to her knees, and buries her head in her mother’s lap.

I’d be lying, of course, if I said everything was copacetic between mother and daughter after that. There’s no such thing as an even keel, with adolescents. Or so I’ve been told, and my own observations seem to confirm the dictum.

But it was clear a dam burst, a wall came down, the earth shifted, and some measure of forgiveness was given and received.

Sam pulls me aside a few days later, leading me to a corner of the barn where I assume he’s hoping Marta can’t hear. “I hate to bring this up,” he says, “but I can see you and Marta are getting really attached to the lambs. I just want to warn you . . . I mean, don’t forget . . . we have to slaughter them in four or five months.”

Marta must have the ears of a barn owl, since I can see she heard his words, but even if Sam had successfully kept her outside the loop, my reaction would have been the same. She and I shout, almost in unison, “No!”

Sam shakes his head. “I know, I know. I feel the same way. This is one of the reasons I didn’t want to take over the farm. But this is how the farm supports itself. And they have a good life until it’s time, right? They hang out in green pastures with their—”

“—We’re not killing them,” I say. “I’m a vegetarian for a reason, you know.”

Whatever they “hang out with,” whatever idyllic picture he’s trying to paint, it’s lost on me.

“I’ve got a laptop,” Marta says, through gritted teeth.

“And?” Sam says, looking puzzled.

I have to admit her statement sounds like a non sequitur to me, as well.

“Take me home now,” Marta says to Sam. “Please. I’m going to look up every other non-lethal . . . thing you can do with sheep. For money, I mean. I’ll come up with something. And Sam?”

“Yes?” Sam says, now visibly curious as well as intimidated.

“I’m never eating meat again. I’ll tell Mom when we get home, too, so she can, y’know, adjust the meal plans.”

Sam wisely says nothing, not even to suggest Marta may need to do more cooking for herself if she’s going to issue edicts about what she will and won’t eat.

It doesn’t occur to me until that night, when I’m alone again, that Sam’s phrasing assumes I’m going to be here in four or five months, when it’s time to slaughter.

The arrogance is breathtaking.

I have a job, a home, a life.

A thought creeps in, moving sideways as if to escape detection from my conscious brain: but I don’t have a Marta. A Janis Joplin. The smell of sheep dung on new grass. The sound of soft suckling in the barn.

I’ve been insanely busy since then. The lambs are coming fast and furious now, and Sam’s reminded me that as soon as all the pregnant ewes have given birth it’ll be shearing time.

Oh goody.

And, in spite of the fact that I’m officially on leave, with all time-sensitive matters delegated to my colleagues, I’m still nominally engaged in some ongoing case work with my office, working remotely through the on-again off-again internet at the house.

As a result, I’ve had zero time to reflect on Sam’s proposal. Once, and only once, he tried to broach the subject again, but I cut him off with a brusque comment. And then I realized I sounded just like Dad.

Two weeks into my one-month leave of absence, when My cup runneth over sounds like a grotesque understatement, someone drops off a dog, anonymously. No joke, I open the barn door and find a Border Collie puppy in a basket, like freaking Moses in the reeds.

Let me just say that Border Collie puppies are God’s answer to crack cocaine and fentanyl. You want irresistible and addictive, agents of pleasure and pain in equal measure? Get a Border Collie puppy.

The thing is, as with raising sheep, I know absolutely nothing about training puppies of any kind, much less the delicate dance of training a herding dog. To make matters worse, this one appears to be a few sandwiches short of a picnic, a brick short of a load, a pickle short of a barrel.

Eli, the old man with the wild eyebrows, stops by. Together we watch the dog chase its tail until it falls over, managing to fall in a somersault rather than the more traditional sideways flop.

“Looks like this one would be out of his depth in a mud puddle,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say, morosely. “I’ve decided to name him Doofus.”

Doofus runs toward us, trips over a pebble, and lands in a heap on top of Eli’s feet.

“But he makes up for it by being cute as a bug,” Eli says, smiling down at the pup.

Meet me here next week when, in spite of his ridiculous ineptitude, Doofus leads the way.

Postscript: If you’re still hankering for something spooky, check out Valerie Williamson’s posts (anniemoranmysteries.substack.com). Throughout the month of October she’s got posts about the Jersey Devil, the War of the Worlds radio show, Mischief Night, the Devil’s Tree, and other historical spookiness from depression-era New Jersey, where the Annie Moran mysteries are set. And while you’re there, check out Annie Moran and the Search for Baby Bitty and the sequel, coming soon (I hope)!

This episode is for you, Dad. May it bring you pleasure in the hospital, where pleasure is hard to come by. I am so very glad I had you for a father and not the Jens Jensen of this part of the story!

After the tour of the property, Sam heads over to Susan and Marta’s place, leaving me back at Dad’s house. I’m trying to keep the fire going, but it is definitely not my forte. (There is electric baseboard heat, but it’s a poor defense against the February chill.)

As evening approaches, I check that the gun safe is slightly ajar, for easy access. I know it would be rational to be concerned about safety, under the circumstances, but I can’t seem to muster any real fear, and these precautionary steps are just pro forma; peace seems to be a physical presence here, as if the very air is imbued with molecules of serenity.

I wander from room to room, pausing in each one to look out over the rain-drenched fields.

In spite of the dung and the mud, and the decrepit barn, and the house that is in desperate need of long overdue maintenance, there is an inherent beauty to the farm, a sense of home that permeates everything. How is that possible?

And even as I acknowledge the connection, I reject it. There’s no place like home (again with the sappy movie lines) is never going to be my refrain. Dad failed to make any effort to make this a home in any meaningful sense. He doesn’t deserve my loyalty, didn’t earn the right to whisper from beyond the grave Preserve my legacy . . . care for my sheep.

Which raises the question: do I need to have fond feelings for him to answer the call? Or, conversely, am I insisting on selling the farm just to take my revenge on the old man? Underneath the obvious issues—I’m a lawyer with a good job, I have a nice condo in Seattle, and I know absolutely nothing about raising sheep—there is a more fundamental issue: am I even capable of making a decision based on compassion and loyalty?

My father’s hard heart is lodged somewhere in my DNA. I think perhaps I need to wrestle with that, find out if, besides the farm, curmudgeon is all the inheritance he left me.

The opportunity to see if I possess the milk of human kindness presents itself much sooner than I would have imagined.

As in, the very next day.

I’m chasing the problem of what to do with the farm like a hamster on steroids when I run into Sam and Marta at the Apple Cart Grocery. It’s Monday afternoon, and I’ve been here for a grand total of approximately two days, though in some ways it feels like I’ve settled in already, as if I’d never left.

Sam looks, as always, slightly bemused but generally content.

Marta looks like she’s carrying a personal thunderstorm with her.

I don’t really know how to talk to or even how to act around a twelve-year-old, so I go for what I hope is hearty and affectionate.

“Hello again, brother o’ mine,” I say. “How go the wedding plans?” (We talked that subject into submission yesterday, but I can’t think of anything else to ask, at the moment.)

Sam accepts the hearty/affectionate greeting at face value, and says something about everything going swimmingly, and then he asks how I’m doing with the sheep.

“Baaad,” I say, still trying for lighthearted.

Marta turns to me with a surprisingly astute look. “I take it you’re not a fan of farming?” she says, sounding like a mini-adult. A mini-me, if we’re being honest.

“I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m doing,” I say. “And I’m not sure I want to put the work in to figure it out.”

Sam shakes his head at me in mild rebuke. “I’ve been holding down the fort since Dad died,” he reminds me, “and you know I can’t take it on permanently.” This subject was also covered ad nauseam yesterday, and it occurs to me that he, too, is declaiming for the twelve-year-old audience. “I’d love it if you decided to stay,” he says. Again. “I can help out after work, and on Sundays, like I did when Dad was alive, and Frank and Kasumi and Caroline and Ben and Liam and Geena . . . we’d all be there for you. But I can’t keep it up. I’ve got my own job to worry about.”

“And your poetry,” Marta says.

This is my first glimmer into Marta as a real person, not a stand-in for preadolescents in general. She knows my brother is a poet, and she seems to appreciate that about him.

He nods. “And my girlfriend.”

Aaaand there’s that thundercloud again.

“How about you, Marta?” I say, to distract her from what is clearly her least favorite subject. “Are you interested in learning the ropes? Wool, lambing, sheep shit . . . what’s not to love?”

Once again I am surprised by her reaction. She doesn’t scowl, or make a sarcastic remark, or even roll her eyes. In fact, she appears to be giving the idea serious consideration. This is a girl who will soon be my niece, so I’m thinking maybe this is a chance to get to know her better. “If you’re interested in watching me make a fool of myself,” I say, “and maybe learning something into the bargain, come with Sam tomorrow, after school. Our first round of lambs is due this week.”

Sam smiles. “You know they don’t give birth on schedule, right?”

“Either you’re helping me or you’re keeping your nose out of my business!” I say, and I know I sound angry. I am angry, suddenly, that he’s forcing me to address a lifetime of paternal neglect all at once, and expecting me to become a temporary shepherd at the same time.

But I think I should hide my feelings, at least while Marta’s standing here, so I turn back to her. “I’ve got two different books that are some variation on Sheep Farming for Dummies, and I’ve read them both front to back.” This is true. I found the books on a shelf in the living room. They are ancient, and appear to be the only books Dad owned. I wasn’t planning on reading them, but I had nothing else to do. “Both books say the ewes should be due in February. It’s February, so I’m expecting to see some lambs.”

“Good luck with that,” an old man with alarming eyebrows says, coming up behind me.

“Hello Eli,” Sam says.

“Hello Sam,” the man who is apparently named Eli says. “Sorry to eavesdrop. You must be Lesley, Sam’s sister.”

“Guilty as charged,” I say.

“You’re even prettier than Sam described. But don’t worry, I’m not a dirty old man trying to hit on you. Just a former farmer, offering to lend a hand.”

“A hand, advice, encouragement . . . I’ll take what I can get,” I say, self-consciously adjusting my ponytail. No one in Seattle gives unsolicited compliments, or advice, to complete strangers, but it seems to be par for the course here. I don’t say anything about our plans for the farm. I’m not going to air our familial spat in front of this unknown man, this Eli, so I don’t challenge his assumption that I’m caring for the sheep rather than simply arranging for their disposition, or that I need help with that task.

My invitation to Marta is sincere, but that doesn’t mean I’m planning on getting involved in the lambing.

And anyway, I guess I kind of hope the sheep know what they’re doing when it comes to giving birth, and I will just be a spectator.

Reminders: Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting), and the Cast of Characters here. Episode links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved

Sam’s kicked his campaign into high gear, stopping by each afternoon after work to see how I’m doing, to see if any lambs have arrived “on schedule.” Nothing of any real interest happens on Tuesday, or Wednesday, so each day he spends time showing me the basics. Refilling (and occasionally cleaning) the water trough, replacing the saltlick, setting out the supplements, checking each sheep for injuries or signs of parasites or problems with their hooves, tossing a bale of sweet-smelling hay down from the loft onto the barn floor, and then distributing it where the sheep can reach it.

On day five, after wrestling a bale across the loft, and then shoving it, with much grunting, over the edge, I lose my balance, and fall on my ass—which is preferable to falling over the edge of the loft, though still not exactly ideal. An attack of sneezing and coughing follows. Sam waits patiently from the floor below.

“Look at me bucking hay!” I shout, once I’ve recovered my breath. “I feel like a real sheep farmer now!” There’s just a hint of triumph in my voice.

Coming around the corner behind Sam, Marta snorts. “Yeah, if being a real sheep farmer means being really good at falling on your butt.”

Sam tells me “bucking” means tossing the hay up, not down, and visibly struggles not to laugh. He quickly gives in, and then he and Marta are leaning against each other, giggling helplessly.

“Hey, Curly and Moe, I could use a hand up here, whenever you’re done laughing at me.” I sound sour but, surprisingly, I’m not.

“Wait,” Sam says, his voice suddenly serious, and urgent. “Do you hear that?”

We wait, and listen. There’s a bleating sound, but it’s somehow different. Lower. More guttural. Even as I’m marveling at how I’m able to recognize “normal” and “not normal” after just a few days, Sam heads out of the barn, yelling as he goes, “That’s a ewe in labor. Follow me!”

I climb down the ladder and jog out, behind Marta. The ewe is not in the barn, or even in the paddock immediately beyond the barn. As a matter of fact, the sound is growing fainter.

“Wouldn’t she lie down, if she’s getting ready to give birth?” I ask, after catching up to Sam and Marta.

“Not right away,” Sam says. “Ewes are often restless during this first phase, and also they want to move away from the rest of the flock, find a quiet place where they won’t be disturbed.”

“The barn is a nice quiet place,” I point out. “A nice, quiet, civilized place to give birth.”

Sam shrugs. He’s still walking, still scanning the horizon and listening.

“There,” he points. At the top of the rise there’s a group of massive boulders. We trudge up the hill and find the ewe standing behind the boulders. She looks up at us, and I find myself wondering if she’s glad we’re here, or if she resents the intrusion.

“Does she really need us?” I ask.

Sam doesn’t answer. He’s busy making calming sounds in the sheep’s direction, a sort of kissing/clucking/cooing sound, as the ewe paces restlessly. And then, “We won’t know at first. Sometimes it all goes smoothly, sometimes we need to lend a hand.”

Ah. What the hell does “lend a hand” mean, vis-à-vis sheep labor?

We stand in a semicircle, watching, for a few minutes. And then it starts to rain. “Um,” I say. “Sam? How long does it usually take?”

He smiles. “This stage can take up to twenty-four hours,” he says. “Before the pushing starts. Especially for a first-timer, like Sheila here.”

I’d forgotten her name, and I’m embarrassed, and then annoyed. I’m a lawyer, for god’s sake. I can cite statutes and cases and the rules of evidence up the wazoo. In thirteen years of practicing law, I have never needed to remember a sheep’s name, never had a judge say to me, ponderously, “Will counsel please state, for the record, the name of the defendant sheep?”

“The good news is that we can still coax her back to the barn,” Sam says. “Hopefully.”

I’m not too keen on that “hopefully.”

“Marta, would you run back to the barn and get a handful of oats, and one of the old apples in the barrel?”

Without a word of objection, Marta dashes off, and quickly returns with a small burlap bag containing a couple of scoops of oats and a wrinkled apple. Sam holds out a small handful of the oats and makes those odd sounds again. At first it looks like Sheila’s going to ignore him—I imagine her saying, in a husky, bleating sort of voice, “I’m a little busy here, bub”—but eventually, she lifts her snout and allows herself to be led down the hill and into the paddock outside the barn.

“We’ll leave her here for now, since she needs to be able to move around as her labor progresses,” Sam says, closing the paddock gate behind us. “We can try to get her into the barn later.”

“You’re, like, a freaking ovine midwife,” I say, but the sarcasm is performative; I’m actually in awe of my brother right now.

Meet me here next week when a dog adds to the chaos.

Note: Episodes 21-23 revisit the relationship between Lesley, her brother Sam, and their father Jens Jensen (Rest In Peace). If you’d like to remind yourself of their history from the first book in the series, Who Laughs Last, you can find the episodes here and here. Also, be aware (beware?) that Lesley has a potty mouth.

One thing I can tell you for certain: it’s not like in the movies.

It seems everywhere you look there are stories and books and films about loveable curmudgeons, hard and crusty around the edges, unexpectedly soft on the inside, like a goddamned molasses cookie. But the reality is significantly less charming.

My father, the inimitable Jens Jensen, wore his identity as Island Curmudgeon like a badge of honor. It feels to me more like a cone of shame.

I don’t know how I survived childhood with even a smidge of gentleness. Hell, maybe I’m kidding myself—maybe I didn’t. I am a lawyer, after all. A prosecutor, no less. Though I’m currently on a leave of absence to address Dad’s estate, that leave ends in thirty days, at the beginning of March, and I am already looking forward to getting back to my life. Litigation is messy, but it’s got nothing on the chaos of wading through family history.

Sam tells me Dad didn’t used to be so hard. Sam’s two years older than I, so he remembers more clearly the years before everything changed for our family. I had just turned ten when Mom and I moved to Seattle, so I don’t remember much about my life before we left. Mostly I remember the taciturnity, a word I didn’t know then but came to appreciate in later years.

I do have one memory, blurred by time, as if the action took place under water, so that it’s hard to decipher whether it’s an accurate record or conjured from something my mother told me. I’m a chubby toddler—I know I was chubby, I’ve seen the photos—and I’m following Dad around on the farm, skipping and galloping behind him, and then I’m turning over a five-gallon bucket and standing on it, looking into the pen where an injured sheep is recovering. When the sheep ambles by and rubs against the slats of the pen, I lean over and bury my sticky little fingers into the oily, fragrant wool. And here’s the part that makes me cry, every goddamned time: I remember Dad realizing I wasn’t right behind him as he’d thought, and I remember that he stopped, and looked back, and then he held out his hand for me.

Not exactly Father of the Year behavior, but he could have kept going, left me to my own devices, and he didn’t.

Now, of course, my father is gone, and my mother predeceased him, and there’s no chance to ask either of them questions, questions that suddenly feel urgent and immediate.

Did you find Dad’s reserve romantic, once, Mom? Was it a strong-and-silent mystique kind of thing, or did it feel oppressive from the start?

And

Were you ever anything other than a curmudgeon, Dad?

And most of all

Does it hurt, living inside such a hard shell, a spirit or a ghost wearing a body like a haunted house?

I need to know, because sometimes I fear I’m turning into my father, in spite of my mother’s efforts to whisk me away before his emotional detachment could poison me.

But there’s just me, no one to ask. Grandpa Sy left the farm to Mom, she abandoned it to Dad, Dad left it to Sam, Sam took care of everything, with the help of Liam and Geena and Caroline and Ben and . . . what’s the other woman’s name? The woman of Japanese descent? Kassie, maybe? No, Kasumi, and her husband Frank. And now, more than a year later, Sam is saying he doesn’t want it, he’s going to marry Susan and neither of them is interested in raising sheep.

As if I am?

I don’t even know what to call them. Is there a different name for the girl-sheep and the boy-sheep?

Good God, what would I do with a herd of sheep?

Wait, is it called a herd?

The ferry dumped me on the island this morning, and I feel like the red-headed stepchild, unwanted and out of place. Or maybe a better analogy is the citified mouse visiting her country cousin.

Sam will be over later today, and we’ll come up with a plan of attack to deal with everything, so at the end of my leave of absence I can pack up and go back to being a city mouse.

For now, I’m sitting on a bench in the barn, there’s the smell of hay and ancient and not-so-ancient sheep shit, and—although I’d never admit it to Sam or anyone else—I’m surprised to find I kind of like the smell.

Should I be doing something, while I’m waiting for Sam to show up? I’m trying to remember what Dad might have taught me about caring for sheep, before we moved away, but all I can conjure, besides the one sweet memory of hand-holding, is silence. Occasional sarcasm. And then more silence.

A couple of years ago, I came back to the island. It was my first visit in decades. I came to see Sam, and only Sam. It should have been safe—according to Sam, Dad never left the farm if he could help it—but there we were at the Presbyterian Garden Sale and there was Dad, and I hugged him, without stopping to think about all the years between, and he held onto me as if I was the dinghy to his sinking ship. We had an almost normal conversation at dinner, Dad and Sam and I, though Sam did most of the talking. (I have come to believe Sam took up poetry to fill the brooding void in our home.)

Afterward, I returned to Seattle, and I thought maybe my father would try to make up for lost time. Write me a letter once in a while. Call me. Send a carrier pigeon, for fuck’s sake.

Nothing.

Sam’s always been the quintessential big brother. Though I’d make no bets on his victory in a physical altercation if someone was bullying me, at least I know he’d try. When we were kids, he came to Seattle to stay with Mom and me regularly, of course, and after she passed away, he continued to visit me. We’d go out to dinner or coffee or breakfast or something, and sometimes he’d spend the night on my couch before heading back to the island the next day. (Oh, he’d complain about “the accommodations,” but he’s just so damn good-natured even his complaints are goofy and affectionate and full of gentle humor.)

Whenever the subject of Dad came up, Sam’d make excuses for him, try to claim Dad would love to spend some time together. “Why doesn’t he ask me, then?” I’d say.

“He’s just a grouchy old man,” Sam would say, a darling grin painted on his face as if that explained it, justified it. “He doesn’t know how.”

I love my brother. But my feelings about my dad? As the saying goes, it’s complicated.

In the movie Up the curmudgeon softens, takes care of the boy whose father refuses to provide the love the boy needs.

In the movie As Good As It Gets, the Jack Nicholson character (Melvin) never changes, so the Helen Hunt character (Carol) is left to decide whether she can be happy with a man who is, constitutionally, never going to be anything other than cranky.

I know, deep in my bones, As Good As It Gets is closer to reality, but I long for Up instead. And if I can’t have it, am I going to simply “shake the dust of this crummy little town,” like Jimmy Stewart says in It’s a Wonderful life?

It seems all I have right now are questions without answers, so here’s another one: am I really considering making critical life decisions based on a bunch of sappy movies?

I’ve come here, to this ridiculous island, with one goal: help Sam sell the farm, and get back to my real life.

We should have done this last year, when Dad passed, but neither Sam nor I had the emotional capacity to address the issues at the time. My plan is to go through Dad’s belongings with Sam, identify anything either of us might want to keep, then work with the local realtor—Strawberry? Her name is some kind of fruit, I forget which kind—to put the farm up for sale.

Another option, one Sam has raised several times, is to find a caretaker who would continue the family legacy. The idea feels . . . exhausting, and I have marshalled all my arguments against this option, in anticipation of Sam’s arrival later today.

Sam shows up after he’s finished his delivery route at the post office, bearing a casserole for dinner, eggs from a neighboring farm for breakfast, a bag of coffee, and a box of sweet orange tea.

“I’ll stay here tonight,” he says, after kissing my cheek. “Tomorrow is Sunday so I’m off work. And I’m guessing it might feel weird sleeping in the house alone. I mean, it’s out here in what we islanders call the wild west.” He makes up a poem on the spot about the isolation, nothing but the fields and the forests and the storm-tossed sea.

“And sheep,” I add. “Don’t forget the sheep.”

“And sheep,” he agrees. “Also, I probably should have told you but . . . .”

He hesitates, and looks away, and I am immediately puzzled. Sam is a wordsmith, for one thing; being at a loss for words is unusual for him. Also, he’s such an open and cheerful soul that I’ve occasionally wondered if it’s a façade, if there’s darkness lurking just beneath those kind eyes. (There’s not. As far as I can tell, it’s one hundred percent genuine.) The fact that he’s obviously reluctant to share something, and just as obviously trying to figure out how to phrase whatever it is, piques my curiosity.

“I should have explained before you came . . . .”

Again with the unfinished sentence.

“You know how I told you about the boat that washed up?” he says. “With a bag full of money? And how the money turned out to be counterfeit?”

“I don’t think you told me it turned out to be counterfeit. And if you’re hoping I can prosecute the counterfeiter while I’m here, prepare to have your hopes dashed. I work for the King County prosecutor’s office, remember? Counterfeiting is outside our jurisdiction. Way outside.”

“No, that’s not it,” Sam says. “It’s just that . . . around the same time all that happened, there was also a dead body in the apartment complex in the village. Where I live.”

“What the hell, Sam! Are you in danger?”

“No, nothing like that,” he says. “I mean, not as far as I know. We don’t really know much, right now.” He makes the face that I know from years of experience means he’s curating his thoughts before sharing. “It’s . . . well, there’s a possibility of some bad actor. Maybe even someone on the island.”

He looks down at his hands, the slender, elegant fingers of a mailman/poet, not the hands of a hero. Or a farmer, for that matter. “I’m just thinking you might not want to be alone out here. On your first night back, anyway.”

This is unexpected.

After considering his words for a moment, I ask, “Doesn’t Dad have guns?”

“Yes,” Sam says, hesitating again. “Yes, of course.”

“Show me where they are.”

Now it’s his turn to look quizzical.

“There have been a couple of threats against the office,” I say, “and one against me personally.” I’m enjoying the fact that I’ve turned the tables on the conversation, and now it’s my turn to be mysterious and cryptic. I relent almost immediately, when he looks worried. “I purchased a pistol, and took shooting lessons,” I tell him. “I can take care of myself, if anything happens. You don’t have to babysit me.”

And then, seeing that he’s not assuaged, I add, “I’m glad you’re staying tonight, though. It might get kind of lonely out here.”

What I don’t tell Sam is that lonely is the opposite of how I felt, sitting in the barn and waiting for him to arrive. I’m not interested in evaluating my mixed emotions, with or without his input, so I keep those thoughts to myself

After he shows me the gun safe and I write down the code, he lights a fire in the woodstove. I guess I should have thought of that, but my condo in Seattle has a gas fireplace you turn on with a switch. Holly Homesteader with an axe and some kindling is definitely not me.

He puts a kettle on top of the woodstove, for tea. It’s a big cast iron thing that looks as though it’s been sitting there for centuries. And then he says, “C’mere,” with the irresistible air of a delinquent older brother showing his baby sister the ropes. I follow him to a narrow cabinet in the hall, and he shows me Dad’s whisky stash, in case I want to add a little something to my tea. Which I do.

After dinner, and a very pleasant evening of catching up while the fire heats my body from the outside and the doctored tea warms me from the inside, we toddle off to our respective bedrooms.

Reminders: Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting), and the Cast of Characters here. Episode links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved

It is beyond strange to sleep in my childhood bed after all these years.

I wake up once, and immediately wonder if I heard something outside, if there’s someone connected with the money and the dead body wandering the property with criminal intent but, hearing nothing, I fall back to sleep.

In the morning, after breakfast, I pull out a yellow legal pad of paper and a pen, and suggest we start talking logistics. Sam takes a breath, obviously preparing to say something, runs his fingers through his hair, looks out the window, and then puts his hand on my arm and asks if I would ever consider staying, and running the farm.

Preposterous doesn’t even begin to describe the idea, and I say so.

“Walk with me,” he says, summoning a Godfather-esque accent.

In spite of the electric shock still vibrating in my bones, I laugh. I laugh because no one could be less capable of pulling off a mafioso impression than my brother, and because everything feels ridiculous right now, and because laughing is better, so much better, than weeping or raging or . . . silence.

As the cold morning light creeps over the farm, he leads me around the perimeter of the property, and introduces me to each of the sheep. By name, of course.

I have to fight an urge to dig my fingers into their wool.

About halfway through the tour, I shout triumphantly: “Ewe!”

“What?” Sam says, looking down at my feet. “Sorry, did you step in it?”

“No,” I laugh again. “I just remembered what a female sheep is called.”

Meet me here next week, when Lesley invites Marta to join her in learning about sheep.

Letter to Sheriff Tom - p. 4

Sheriff, please forgive another lengthy aside, but I think it will explain why I did what I did.

Something I’ve come to realize in six years as an educator: we are prone to getting involved (or, if you can stomach the double negative, we are incapable of not getting involved). Nothing else explains why we endure long hours, endless frustration, and public humiliation.

(Exhibit A on the public humiliation front: the stick figures that pass for illustrations in my classroom. Whatever genetic traits my birth parents have, I’m guessing artistic talent is not one of them. Every year some student boldly asks of something I’ve drawn, “Ms. Boy, what is that supposed to be?”)

We endure the stress and embarrassment—for ridiculously low pay—because we can’t sit on the sidelines when we see someone who needs help. We see a kid who can’t read or doesn’t have shoes that fit, or a generation that has no critical thinking skills, and we simply have to jump in and try to mitigate the situation.

My point is that as soon as I realized there must be something wrong with Genevieve, I couldn’t just sit home and do nothing.

Here’s my journal entry from December 15—the Sunday after the Bulletin failed to come out.

Journal 12/15/2019

I had a plan, really I did, but it fell apart almost immediately. I was going to try to warn Genevieve, and also, finally, have that conversation I should have had years ago.

As soon as I arrived at the apartments, I realized I didn’t know which apartment was Genevieve’s, so I found myself essentially lurking in the area. I guess I was hoping for some sort of sign from the universe. Like Inigo Montoya looking for the spot on the tree that will open the secret passage that leads to the torture chamber where they’re holding Westley.

And lo and behold I did get a kind of sign. Jesus the dog came out of the courtyard between the buildings, greeted Al and me benevolently, and then led us to Unit 4.

Jesus barked, and I knocked, but it was a good couple of minutes before Genevieve answered, which is a long time if you’re standing in the cold hoping the worst that will happen is you’ll make a fool of yourself, worrying over nothing.

Genevieve looked bad. A filthy polyester robe, greasy hair, halitosis so terrible I could smell it from where I was standing on the welcome mat.

“Um,” I said.

Yay, me. Perhaps I should have given more thought to what I would say, before jumping into the situation uninvited.

She ignored the oh-so-articulate Um. “Hi Danny,” she said dully. “Come on in.”

She didn’t so much lead me inside as remove herself from the doorway and slump into a tattered recliner near the window. Jesus and I followed her inside.

The remains of several meals sat, decaying, on the kitchen counter. A waste basket, overflowing with used tissues, was tucked under the dinette table.

My heart almost burst with pity.

“I, uh, wanted to talk to you about . . . that guy I saw you with at The Coffee Hut,” I said. I seemed to have lost all power of articulation. “You know. The big guy.”

“His name’s Mac,” Genevieve said.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I don’t really know how to go about this, so I’ll just . . . spit it out. I don’t think he’s safe.”

“He’s gone,” Genevieve said. “And you’re right, I think he might be.” She stopped, as if that was the end of her thought, and pain visibly settled onto her body, a phantasm with an almost tangible presence. “Bad,” she finished. “I think he might be bad.”

She told me the whole story, then. Speaking in a monotone, she talked about the heady days of her youth in San Francisco, and her time writing reviews for the Chronicle. That much she’d shared before, but then she went on to talk about Mac, his addiction, the break-up, and the chance meeting, twenty-eight years later.

“I don’t think I can survive two heartbreaks from the same man,” she said in a whisper, as if she was afraid her heart might overhear, and decide to quit beating.

Letter to Sheriff Tom - p. 5

I sat with her for as long as I could bear the miasma of sadness, washed a few of the dishes moldering on the counter and took out the trash, and then I headed out, promising myself I’d send in reinforcements.

There was so much I’d wanted to say to her, but now was not the time.

Maybe that time will never come, and I’ll just have to live with that.

After leaving Genevieve’s place, I ran into Jim and his dog, Rambo (such an absurd name for such a dear dog). I told him Genevieve could really use a visit, maybe some of his famous brown rice and broccoli casserole. (Who would have guessed a water district engineer could cook? I’ve started attending community gatherings just so I can get some of that casserole.)

Then Al and I made our way to the Apple Cart, where we saw Marta and her mom. I told them both that Genevieve needed some “island TLC,” and Marta hugged me as if I was the one suffering. Susan said she’d spread the word, and said she’d ask Sam to do the same.

Mrs. Prewitt was standing nearby, in the aisle, and she said, “We’ll take some cookies over.” “We” referred, of course, to herself and Hubert. Ah well, I thought. Maybe in this case a ghost dog is just what the doctor ordered.

Ronwen and Buddy were also in the checkout line, standing next to Eli, and it occurred to me that I’ve seen them here, together, several times. I wonder if they are an item now? Well, more power to them.

“Buddy and I will stop by,” Ronwen promised.

Sheriff, I just want to interrupt the narrative from my journal to say something. Ronwen’s promise, and all the other responses I heard that day, reminded me how truly fortunate I am to live in this community. Torrential downpours, perennially empty shelves at the store, ferries that are late or cancelled without warning, no sidewalks or hospitals (or mail delivery, if you live in the village) . . . these are real but minor annoyances, washed out to sea the first time someone sends word around that an islander needs help, needs a friendly ear, needs a hot meal they didn’t make or buy. We take care of our own, and on that cold wet day in December, we took care of Genevieve.

Okay, now that I’ve given you the background, I can jump ahead again.

As I mentioned in the section of my January 20 journal entry that I shared earlier in this letter, last weekend some of the islanders met up to fix Ronwen’s roof. Though I wasn’t there, I heard all about the project, and I’m sure you did, too. For a few days after the roof was done, that was all anyone talked about. On the Looser Island Facebook page, at The Coffee Hut . . . it was like a badge of honor flashed with pride: “Yep, we worked right through the storm, pounded away on that roof like there was no tomorrow, but we got ‘er done.”

I missed the event, but I was home that evening, when Marta showed up on my doorstep.

By the way, I know teachers are not supposed to have favorites, but I absolutely do, and Marta’s it. From the moment she fixed those dark eyes on me and smiled her gap-toothed smile and lisped that she really “liketh animalth,” it was all over for me.

Before I dive into the next part of my journal entry, I want to ask you a favor: if you put any of this in any official report, please don’t include the details of my conversation with Marta, below. It’s desperately personal to her, and she is fragile (all kids are at that age). As I said earlier, cutting and pasting the journal entries was easier for me than summarizing, but also, it allows you to see what a vulnerable state she is in. I’m hoping you will help keep an eye on her, make sure she’s not spiraling.

“It takes a village” is more than just a saying, here on the island.

One more thing: I would request that your official report state I was the one who found the wallet, or better still list it as an anonymous tip. I understand that the Sheriff’s Log has to be accurate and complete, but if there is a murderous thug running around on the island, I don’t want Marta to be a target.

Letter to Sheriff Tom - p. 6

Back to my January 20 journal entry:

Al and I were just settling in to watch TV and finalize the lesson plans for the following week when our quiet, cozy evening was interrupted by a frantic pounding at the door.

I opened the door and found Marta, standing in the rain, crying.

I pulled her in, helped her take off her wet coat, settled her into a chair so she could remove her equally drenched shoes, handed her a wad of tissues, and then it all came out in a flood of sobbing and hiccupping. Rage at her mother (“She’s trying to replace my dad with Sam, like I’m supposed to just forget about my real dad and pretend we’re a big happy family!”), grief (“I want my dad, not just some stupid man my mom is sleeping with! No matter how nice he is!”).

And her first kiss.

When she was describing it, I could almost picture the words, as if she was speaking in all capital letters, or describing a sign with blinking lights on a marquee: THE KISS.

And then she told me about finding a wallet in the woods.

I could tell she wanted to talk about her mother and Sam and THE KISS, but I felt the need to be somewhat pragmatic, so I asked to see the wallet first. I opened it, looked at the contents, and then I said, softly, the way one would speak to a frightened puppy, “You know we have to turn this over to the sheriff, right?”

Marta nodded, still sniffling.

First things first, I gave her a hug, dripping hair and all. As with a skittish animal, sometimes wordless kindness is the first step. Al got in there too, nuzzling Marta’s ankle.

After that, Marta sat back in the chair and blew her nose, and I knew it was time to address everything else.

I took a breath, and dove in. The memory is already fading, even though it’s only been a day, but to the best of my recollection I said something along these lines: “I can’t give you your dad back. Your mom never ‘had’ your dad, so for her Sam is a new thing, not a replacement of something old. I don’t expect you to be happy for her, but you might get to a place where you’re happy for yourself, because instead of just one parental figure who loves you, now you have two.”

My mind flailed and floundered, trying to think what to say next. Another deep breath. Time to turn this around, say something positive.

“And you’ve just had your first kiss! Oh girlfriend, that’s something to celebrate, and I have just the thing!”

I padded into the kitchen, fetched the two champagne flutes which constitute the full contingent of adult-beverage glasses in my house, and filled them with bubbly liquid.

Marta was visibly disappointed that the liquid turned out to be sparkling cider rather than champagne, but then she laughed, the mercurial nature of adolescence taking over again.

“It was a really good kiss,” she said, and raised her glass in a toast.

“Here’s to really good kisses,” I said.

We clinked, and drank, and the fire crackled. I glanced over at the doorway, and saw the sodden backpack, and considered the fact that it was at least an hour after the time when most people have dinner.

“Marta,” I said, “does your mom know where you are?”

She hesitated, then shook her head. “I ran away,” she said.

“Ran away?” I said blankly.

“The bulldozers were coming.”

I’m sure that comment is mystifying to you, Sheriff, so here’s the explanation. I give all my students a book on their birthday, and when Marta was my student, I chose a book called Sylvester the Mouse with the Musical Ear. In the story, Sylvester loves the musical sounds of nature, and when the bulldozers come to dig up his fields, he decides it’s time to leave, time to find a new home.

I didn’t realize until that moment that Marta’d built a whole life-philosophy around the book.

As I sit here writing this letter, I’m no longer sure I made the best choice, for her.

Letter to Sheriff Tom - p. 7

Back to my journal entry.

“I was going to camp in the woods,” Marta told me. “You know, where the ruins are. I think I kind of hoped the ghost would get me.”

“The ghost?” I said, thinking I should be focusing on her desire for something to “get” her, but temporarily stuck on the idea of an apparition on the island.

“Yeah, Missy and Jenny said they saw a ghost out there.”

“Ah.”

“But . . . it’s cold outside. I walked for a while, and got colder and colder. And I’m not really even sure how far away the ruins are. I’ve never walked there, before.”

She giggled, and then bit her lower lip. “I guess it wasn’t much of a plan.”

As evidenced by my spectacular failure at Genevieve’s place, I am intimately familiar with failed plans, so I was sympathetic. But I still needed to figure out how to keep one of my favorite young people safe. I needed to be the grown-up, not a co-conspirator.

I put on a solemn look, to impress upon her how foolhardy her actions were. “Marta,” I said, “a bunch of money washed up on Ronwen and Nash’s beach, then a dead body showed up in the apartments, and now you’ve found a wallet in the woods, with ID inside that I’m reasonably certain doesn’t belong to anyone living here on the island. We don’t know if they’re connected, and we don’t even know what happened to the man whose body was found. But until we know, wandering around alone, in the dark, is dangerous.”

Her shoulders sagged, and she looked down at the pile of tissues in her lap.

And then I said, “I’m going to call your mom and let her know you’re safe. She’ll be frantic.”

“You think so?” Marta said, all sarcasm and prickles again.

“I know so.”

Marta sighed, and outside the ancient wind soughed and then howled and blustered, in sympathy and solidarity with the incredible challenge of being twelve.

Okay, I never said I was any good at solving problems, only that I am compelled to try. In this case, the jury is still out on my efforts, and I’ll have to wait until Marta reaches adulthood for a final assessment of the cumulative effects of the guidance of parents, teachers, and friends.

And as much as I hope we get to the bottom of the whole boat/dog/money/body affair, my bigger hope is that we islanders will join hands to help Marta navigate this part of her life, to help her find her way.

Before the bulldozers get her.

So there you have it. Now you know everything I know.

Once again, I apologize for the length of this letter. Seven pages is a lot, I admit. I could go back and try to cull all the irrelevant bits, but I’ve already taken too long to get this to you, so I will just leave it as is.

All my best,

Danny Boy

Meet me here next week to read about Lesley Jensen’s return to the island, and her role in finding another piece of the puzzle.

Two important postscripts:

(1) Regarding Marta’s desire that the ghosts would “get” her, if you or anyone you know feels hopeless or overwhelmed please please please tell someone who loves you, or call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline 988. You matter. You are loved. You are enough.

(2) Regarding the close relationship between Marta and her former teacher, and the time they spend together, I was reminded in a recent abuse-prevention refresher course that this can be a red flag/grooming behavior. It is an ongoing source of sorrow for me that this is the world we live in. Growing up, I would have loved to have a wise, funny, kind mentor like Danny Boy, and at the same time I recognize how problematic that could be. But this is fiction, and in my fictional world, there is only good that comes of their relationship.

Journal 1/20/2020

I need to remember that I am not the narrator of the whole story, just my little piece of it. I’m one page out of hundreds, that’s all.

I often think of myself as the narrator of not only my life but the lives of others around me. I imagine motivations and fears . . . I make excuses for them and for myself . . . . I tie myself in knots to meet what I believe are their needs, what I am convinced are their desires.

But I think the truth is that, most of the time, I have no idea what others are thinking and feeling. Underneath the carefully curated exterior we all present to the world lies a mystery. I don’t really know anybody else, and nobody else really knows me.

Sometimes I don’t even know myself, but that’s a separate issue.

And it’s not as if anyone’s demanding to hear my life’s story, or asking about the inner workings of my psyche.

Maybe that’s because I’m a teacher? Those of us who teach young children are simultaneously revered and dismissed. Educators are vitally important to our social structure, blah blah blah, but teachers are boring.

I can admit this, as painful as it is. Stories of children wetting their pants or learning the alphabet? Who wants to hear those stories?

But I finally have a story worth relating, and I can say with reasonable confidence that I am the narrator of this part of this story.

Because it was my dog who first recognized that there was something wrong, something rotten, about the stranger in the village.

And it was me that Marta visited on that dark and stormy night, to share what she’d found.

I suspect her discovery will turn out to be a key piece of the whole puzzle.

Letter to Sheriff Tom - p. 1

January 25, 2020

Dear Sheriff Tom:

I visited your office on Monday, and delivered the wallet that was found near Ronwen and Nash’s place. You then asked me to provide a written statement, and what follows are my best efforts in that regard.

A preliminary comment (or cautionary note, if you like): I love to write, and I am obsessive about writing in my journal. When something interesting or odd happens, I usually write about it that same day, before I forget the details. Although I am somewhat reserved in person (IRL, as the kids say)—having learned that, especially with my students, listening is more important than lecturing—I am quite chatty on the page.

It’s very rare that anyone asks me about anything (other than how much food their child ate at lunch and why does he have paint in his hair). Most people ignore me, in part because I’m a teacher, but also because I’m a woman. I know things are better than they used to be. Yes, We’ve come a long way, Baby, and women are closer to having equal rights than we’ve been at almost any time in history. But “equaller” is not the same as equal.

In a world still dominated by men, a woman named Danny Boy sounds like a joke. Men who are eager to talk with me when they know only my name literally walk away when they meet me, as if I’ve tricked them into believing I was someone who counts.

I can only shake my head at my parents. They think my name is hilarious. They’re my adoptive parents, but that’s neither here nor there, except for the fact that I don’t find it all that funny; I did not, apparently, inherit their sense of humor. (I’ve considered telling people Danny is short for Danielle, but I am pathologically addicted to telling the truth.)

Anyway, whether it’s my gender or my career, nobody pays any attention to me. So my journal is where I remind myself my words matter. To me, at least. And because it’s the only place I can speak freely, there is a lot of what most people might think of as extraneous stuff in there.

I’m telling you all this since there are places in this letter where I simply cut and pasted from my journal entries, rather than trying to summarize. I did manage to focus on the two key entries: December 15, the day after Genevieve failed to publish the Bulletin on schedule; and January 20, the day after Marta visited me. Useful entries, in other words. But the long and the short of it is this: I imagine the information in this letter is more fulsome than what you need.

I apologize in advance.

With all those caveats in mind, here’s part of my January 20 journal entry.

November is soggy. December’s even worse, and January is no better. Drenched, is the best way I can describe it. As I said to Ella the other day, when we were chatting about the weather in the staff room, the ground is so waterlogged it sometimes feels as if the shoreline is just waiting to become, once again, part of the ocean, as if Looser Island is in imminent danger of sinking back into the sea like some kind of Atlantis.

An Atlantis with potluck weddings and dogs named Jesus and an unusually high number of curmudgeons, Ella said. (I love working with that woman—a true kindred spirit.)

The inevitable result of all that rain is that early winter is the time when any roof more than a few years old begins to leak.

So it was no surprise to see in the Bulletin that Ronwen’s roof sprang a leak at the end of December. And of course, true to “the island way,” practically every able-bodied person volunteered to help fix the roof, in January.

I would have been there if it hadn’t been for my doctor’s appointment, but thank goodness I was home for the aftermath.

Al and I were just settling in to watch TV and finalize the lesson plans for the following week when our quiet, cozy evening was interrupted by a frantic pounding at the door.

I opened the door and found Marta, standing in the rain, crying.

Letter to Sheriff Tom - p. 2

I started this letter with my journal entry from January, but something you should understand is that for me, the whole saga began a month earlier.

So let me back up, and tell you about what happened in December.

As you know, my sweet Al has the sunniest of dispositions. Her real name is Uncle Albert, but only a few of my former students know that. I imagine you might be wondering: do I have my pronouns mixed up? Or am I positing my dog is transgender? None of the above.

A few years ago, I signed up for a Dachshund puppy, one of the last litters of the famous/infamous Looser Island Ilsa. I was told three were already spoken for, but I could have the fourth, if there was one. I let my students pick a name, in advance.

You know the Kitterer family, right? Well, Sully was in my class at the time, and his older brother, Jacob, was obsessed with The Beatles, so Sully brought Jacob for Show and Tell, and Jacob lugged an actual record player into the room, and played an actual record for these kids who have only heard recorded music on Spotify.

(Being the sheriff, you probably mostly hear complaints, so let me just take this opportunity to say something nice about our community. Aside from funding woes, and the ridiculous acronym L.I.E.S., I feel like I’ve landed in a plum position. One of the many benefits of a small island school district with K – 12 in one building is that a seventh grader can just walk down the hall so his younger brother, who reveres him, can “share” him.)

Anyway, Jacob played several songs from different albums, including the song Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey. That is, of course, technically post-Beatles, Paul and Linda McCartney, but I didn’t point that out at the time.

And if you think you’ve seen weird you haven’t seen a bunch of first and second graders singing about living a little and being a gypsy and getting around . . . .

Well, the students voted unanimously to name my (prospective) dog Uncle Albert. When the pups arrived, the fourth one was female, but by then the die was cast.

Al doesn’t seem to mind her name. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, she’s a perpetual ray of sunshine who doesn’t care what you call her as long as belly rubs, treats, and/or walks are involved.

And she truly loves everyone. Little Daisy walking her goat on a leash, or old Mrs. Prewitt talking to her invisible Pug Hubert. Attorney Larry muttering to himself and sometimes to his Greyhound Beatrix. (Have you noticed Beatrix sometimes looks as though she’s muttering right back at him?) Refugee Pelabo or second generation farmer Jens Jensen (may he rest in peace). Gay or straight or queer, male or female or trans or gender fluid, whatever the ethnicity or color, Al greets all and sundry with a friendly snuffle and an exuberant tail-wag.

Except the man I now know was Genevieve’s former lover, Mac.

Letter to Sheriff Tom - p. 3

As you also know, Al and I live just up the hill from the Maple Lane Apartments, the scene of all the recent hullabaloo. “Modest” is the kindest word I can use to describe our house, but my parents helped me buy it, and it is cozy, and it is home. For a young teacher on a very limited salary, that’s about as good as it gets.

Al and I rattle around quite happily in our house, and I consider it a bonus that we live within walking distance of the village, which means it’s easy and usually pleasant to combine running errands with giving Al her daily exercise.

One Saturday in December—Pearl Harbor Day, believe it or not—I managed to convince Al to brave the rain. (She is a hearty soul most of the time, but oddly fastidious about getting her paws wet.) On this particular day, I practically had to drag her out of the house, but she seemed to get into the spirit of the thing once we were outside. We walked to the Apple Cart together, our heads down against the steady, ceaseless downpour.

A few minutes into the miserable experience, after we’d passed the Maple Lane Apartments, we saw a large, bearded, intimidating-looking man walking toward us on the muddy, barely-graveled path that passes for a sidewalk in the village. (Wouldn’t it be lovely to have real sidewalks? Sigh.) The man was in his early fifties, I would have guessed. He smiled at us, and I looked up briefly to avoid running into him, and smiled back, instinctively. When someone smiles at you, the principles of civility dictate that you smile back. But I immediately felt there was something off about his smile.

Al felt it too. For the first time in her life, she growled.

I apologized, and made a show of scolding her, and she looked up at me reproachfully as if to say: I’m protecting you from someone who is clearly a bad apple, and this is the thanks I get?

I didn’t think too much of it, except that I was left with a vague disquiet, an exacerbation of the feeling that had settled oppressively over all of us on the island ever since the body was discovered in the apartments. We went on our way, Al and I, and I told myself it was nothing.

It wasn’t until the next day, when we saw Genevieve and that same man having coffee at The Coffee Hut, talking intimately and holding hands, and Al was so upset she made a beeline to where they were sitting and barked—barked—at the man, that I became sincerely concerned. (I know small dogs, and especially Dachshunds, have a reputation for being yappy, but Al almost never barks. Other than at squirrels or the ubiquitous rabbits, of course.)

The Saturday after our Pearl Harbor Day encounter, the Looser Island Bulletin failed to appear online.

Now, I am a relatively recent arrival to the island (as you know, anything less than twenty years counts as new, around here, and I arrived as a freshly-minted teacher just out of college six years ago). Still, I have picked up a thing or two about island life, and it’s my understanding that nothing, but nothing, had ever interrupted publication of the Bulletin, and so I was worried about Genevieve, and I made up my mind to reach out to her, maybe even share my misgivings.

I’m twenty-eight, younger than Genevieve by more than two decades, and as I just mentioned I’m not a born-and-raised islander, both good reasons to feel uncomfortable giving unsolicited advice.

Also, there’s my history. And Genevieve’s. I’m going to skip the details on that admittedly enigmatic statement. (I’m aware of my penchant for asides, and I really am trying to rein it in.)

Suffice it to say, for all of the above reasons I felt some uncertainty about whether to speak up. And I wasn’t sure how I was going to go about it. Hey, I think your new boyfriend might be, like, an axe-murderer, or something? seemed . . . insufficient, to put it mildly.

I just knew I needed to try.

Meet me here next week to read Danny Boy’s plea to join hands to help Marta.

Postscript: “Hands across the water” is the phrase that shows up in the Paul and Linda McCartney song Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, but the original phrase their song riffs on is “hands across the sea,” which is a longstanding phrase popularized in an 1899 march by John Philip Souza, representing friendship among the United States and the peoples of all nations.

Which feels to me like a pretty good aspiration for our time.

Also, if you think of it as “Hands across the Salish Sea,” you will understand why it felt like the perfect title for this chapter, because it is the hands across the island, all reaching out, that help bring peace and equilibrium to Marta and the other island residents.

Susan stands outside the Breckenridge farmhouse. Waiting, trembling, praying.

She’d made dinner, eaten dinner, and washed the dishes, certain Marta would burst through the door full of fire and rain, but the door remained stubbornly, willfully closed.

Then the fears emerged, the fears that plague every adult who bumbles through parenthood, the thoughts no one will give voice to, not even in private, lest speaking the words conjure the reality, like Frankenstein’s monster, in the storm. The what-ifs and worst-case-scenarios.

Susan’s already been to Lauren’s house and Sam’s apartment. She’s called Marta’s best friend. The Breckenridge farm is the fourth place she’s tried even though, under the circumstances, she probably should have started here.

Caroline opens the door. “Hey Susan. What’s up?”

“Marta.” Susan says, as if that’s a complete sentence. “Marta’s gone. Is Randy here?”

“Randy!” Caroline screeches into the bowels of the house.

Randy appears a minute later, and smiles shyly. “Hi Marta’s mom,” he says.

“Is Marta here?” Susan asks.

“No?” Randy says.

“Nope,” Hannah says, emerging from the hall, one sock on and one foot bare. “I’d know if she was here. Inspector Clouseau over there,” she jerks her head in the direction of her twin, “wouldn’t notice a cannon ball even if it hit him in the head.”

Randy rolls his eyes and Caroline starts to ask what that has to do with anything but Hannah interrupts and says, “I’ll help you look for her.”

“Me too,” Randy says. And then, “Hey, do you want me to email her first? We traded email addresses today.”

“Her laptop’s still in her room,” Susan says. “And she doesn’t have a phone.” She doesn’t tell them what she found in Marta’s room, the laptop open and turned on, an email to Randy: I’m running away. But the email was unsent, a proclamation suspended in time.

“You should bring the dogs,” Max says, from the kitchen. “They can, like, sniff out bodies and stuff.”

“Not helping,” Hannah says.

“I’ve got Shelby with me,” Susan whispers, as if she’s afraid speaking too loudly might offend whatever spirit watches over almost-teenagers. And aging dogs. And frightened parents. “Sam stayed at the house, in case she comes back.”

“Let me grab my coat,” Caroline says. “Ben!” she shouts. “I’m going out with Susan! Randy and Hannah are with me!”

Armed with coats and exclamation points and love, the four humans plus one dog venture into the cold, wet night.

Meet me here on Saturday for Danny Boy’s letter to Sheriff Tom.

During the holiday break, the school-aged children have been instructed to stay together and find something to do in the village. Since the only thing to do in the village in the middle of winter is sit in The Coffee Hut nursing endless cups of tea, cocoa, and (for the older children) coffee, the result is a lot of annoyance for owner Amelia, only slightly counterbalanced by a small bump in profits, and the extra love Sylvia the-cat-who-thinks-she’s-a-dog receives.

Once school is back in session, hover-parenting quickly becomes unsustainable, and by mid-January Susan and the other island parents have settled on an agreement that the kids who walk to and from school will always walk in groups.

“Nobody knows if there’s even really any risk,” Susan says to Marta, while explaining the restoration of Marta’s freedom. “Could be that guy was living in Theresa’s apartment with permission. Maybe he just had a heart attack or something, and Theresa was so busy moving to Hawaii or Florida or wherever, she didn’t know anything had happened.”

Marta shrugs. As far as she is concerned, her mother is simply chafing at having to act like a real parent for once. But she isn’t going to complain about the renewed freedom, so a slight, irritated movement of her shoulders is her only response.

“I’ve been thinking,” Marta tells Sam, during their next Saturday afternoon poetry-writing-hangout session. “I’m twelve now, probably about time to get a boyfriend.”

The look in Sam’s eyes is comical, and Marta laughs. “I’m not talking about sex,” she says, deliberately saying aloud the word she knows will make him cringe. “Just, you know, dating.”

Susan recovers more quickly than Sam. “Got your sights set on anyone in particular?” she says.

“I wouldn’t tell you if I did,” Marta says.

The temperature between mother and daughter has continued to plummet since the day Susan asked Marta’s opinion about marrying Sam. Sam visibly tries to keep the peace, and Susan continues to extend olive branches, but Marta is having none of it.

Later that day, Marta repeats the thought to Ms. Boy, and says she is looking forward to experiencing passion, not just reading about it.

Ms. Boy does not ask for context, or demand to know what Marta’s been reading about “passion.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me I’m too young to be talking about this stuff?” Marta challenges. “Aren’t you going to give me some motherly advice? Because my own mom sure isn’t going to.”

They are sitting in Ms. Boy’s living room again, a reprise of the fire and cookies confab from the previous month. (This time the sustenance to Ms. Boy’s attempts to help Marta navigate the mysteries of growing up, the lembas to their journey, is a batch of flourless peanut butter chocolate chip cookies; Marta’s discovered a heretofore unknown love of baking, after her successful attempt at brownies for Genevieve.)

“Okay, here’s my advice,” Ms. Boy says. “One: call me Danny. If you’re going to try to be an adult, act like an adult. All the adults I know call me by my first name. I haven’t been your teacher for years, so there’s no need to stand on ceremony with me. Second, don’t go looking for love or passion or whatever. It’s not the kind of thing you can put on your to-do list. When you meet the right boy—”

“—or girl,” Marta interjects.

“—or girl,” Ms. Boy agrees, “you’ll feel love or what-have-you, and he or she or they will feel it too. Or not. And when you do fall in love, and it’s reciprocated, if you have any questions, you might consider talking to your mom.”

Marta shakes her head vehemently, tossing the long part of her new punk-haircut across her face.

“All right, you know best, I’m sure,” Ms. Boy says. “I don’t have any other generic advice, but you can always ask me anything, and I’ll always try to answer honestly and fully.”

“I know about consent, and condoms,” Marta says, once again deliberately trying to provoke a reaction. “What else would I need to know about?”

“Oh Marta,” Ms. Boy says. “Don’t conflate sex with love. The one may follow the other, when you’re older”—Marta closes her eyes, to mask the secret relief she feels at hearing that she might not have to understand everything right now, that some things can wait until later, when she’s older—“but they are not the same thing. As for what else you might want to know about romantic relationships . . . .” Ms. Boy stands up, and goes to the kitchen. “There’s too much. I can’t even ‘sum up,’” she says over her shoulder, quoting a shared favorite movie.

Marta makes a puh sound that she hopes is sufficient to convey her deep discomfort at constantly feeling so discombobulated. She catches her reflection in the antique full length mirror standing in the corner, noting that between her scowl and the warped glass surface she looks slightly maniacal, and the image gives her great satisfaction.

On the third Saturday in January, most of the able-bodied people on the island show up at Ronwen and Nash’s place to fix the roof, including Marta and Susan. Marta is certainly old enough to learn the ins and outs of roof repair, but there are plenty of adults already perched on top of the cabin, so she heads toward the beach.

Randy, one of the Breckenridge twins, asks if he can tag along. Marta nods, trying not to show the panic his question invokes. She doesn’t know Randy very well, since he is a year ahead of her. He might fit the bill, potential-boyfriend-wise but, never having had a boyfriend, she can’t be sure.

She is suddenly unsure of a lot of things, and her casual assertion that she knows everything she needs to know comes back to haunt her. “Comes back to bite me on the butt is more like it,” she mutters.

“What?” Randy says.

Marta shakes her head, mortified that she’d said the words aloud.

Walking on the beach with Randy turns out to be more like walking with a puppy. He runs ahead, then runs back and jogs in circles around her, shouting questions.

“Favorite book?” he says.

“Too many favorites to pick just one!” Marta says, frowning at the idiotic question. “But I’m reading the third book in the Peculiar Children series, and I’m enjoying it. I hope to have the whole series done by spring break.” It’s a test, of course, to see if he knows the books, to see if he recognizes that a love of reading is intrinsic to who Marta is.

He fails the test.

“Favorite music?” he says, trotting backward and nearly tripping over a log, catching himself at the last minute.

“Mozart, Bach, and eighties grunge,” Marta says. Casting about for something interesting to offer to the conversation, she says, “Did you know Genevieve Macy used to be the press reviewer for Blue?”

“No way,” is Randy’s oh-so-articulate response.

“Way,” Marta says. “She told me when I was over there playing Crazy 8s with her like, I don’t know, maybe last year?”

“You play cards with an old lady?”

“Get a grip, Randy. She’s not that old.”

“Hey, are you, like, named after that kid in The Sound of Music?” Randy says.

“Yes,” Marta says.

Once again the thought lands with a thud: if this is what falling in love is like, she might need to reconsider her plans.

They walk to the end of the sandy part of the beach, and then sit on a rock looking out over the sea. Marta thinks of how she’d describe the way the wind leaps and soars over the water, making whorls of light and shadow on the surface. Randy is a distraction to her musings.

After a minute or two, she starts to shiver. Randy puts his arm around her, and rubs her upper arm, and the place where his hand is feels like it’s on fire, as if he is some kind of wizard.

“What are you thinking?” he says quietly, leaning closer, his breath soft on her ear.

“I’m writing a poem in my head, trying to think of the right words,” she says.

Even though the nascent poem has fluttered away, unfinished.

“Can I read it when you’re done?”

“Yes.”

“When you’re done coming up with the words, can I kiss you?”

“Yes.”

Later, she tries to describe the kiss, in the journal Sam gave her. For the first time since learning to write, the words refuse to come. The warmth of his hand on her arm is doubled, tripled even, by the warmth of his lips on hers. She cannot put it onto the page, and just thinking about it makes her wish they were kissing again.

“Doughnuts are here!” Caroline Breckenridge yells, from the other end of the beach. Marta and Randy pull apart, both sets of cheeks burning.

Randy follows his mom but Marta, unwilling to go back to the roofing project, lest she have to look at Randy and decipher how he is feeling, or worse, how she is feeling, wanders into the woods behind Ronwen and Nash’s house.

It is soft, here, and quiet. The trees drip onto the pine-needled forest floor, and the occasional bird who has braved the rain gives an experimental twitter. In January, there is none of the avian riot of sound that spring will bring. Marta looks up a couple of times, recalling the complaint by the professor in another favorite childhood book, The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, about people never looking up but, like the character in the story, she just gets her face wet.

Resigned to looking down instead, she trudges along a barely visible path. A moss-covered boulder forces a branch in the path and she hesitates, torn between continuing to walk with the hope that moving forward will stop the crazy pinging of her mind and her heart, or turning back so she can at least sit in a warm car until her mom is ready to go home.

And that’s when she sees it: a brown leather wallet, protected from the elements by the boulder and the overhanging trees, mostly camouflaged by the detritus underneath.

She picks it up, unfolds it, and takes out the contents, one by one.

Some cash, a few hundred dollars’ worth, in crisp, new-looking twenties.

A driver’s license from Arizona, long since expired.

A toothpick, still in its plastic wrapper.

A scrap of torn paper with a handwritten note that says: Maple Lane Apartments Unit 2.

On the drive home, Marta considers her options. She desperately wants to talk to someone, but rejects each of the obvious choices out of hand.

Not her mom, absolutely not, she’d just try to act all motherly and it would make Marta want to scream. They used to be able to talk to each other like normal people. They used to be friends. But now her mom’s all about being a role model and . . . shit like that. (It pleases her to think in swear words.)

Not Sam. Dear, goofy Sam would just dither even more than Marta.

Not her grandmother. Marta can’t begin to imagine talking to no-nonsense Lauren about her first kiss. And if she tried to talk about the wallet and the note about the manager’s apartment (the place where a body was found), her grandmother’d probably just ask why Marta’s hanging onto someone else’s property.

Not any of her friends from school.

Not Randy. He may be a good kisser but everything is . . . too uncertain. Maybe an email? Electronic communication feels safe. Safer, at least.

“Did you have a nice time walking on the beach with Randy?” her mom says, speaking in that carefully casual voice that makes Marta feel like an unexploded grenade.

And suddenly everything everything everything is too much.

As soon as they pull into their driveway, Marta jumps out of the car and runs into the house. She stuffs a few clothes and a power bar into her backpack, and grabs the sparkly pink piggy bank that should be embarrassing but she’s had it so long it doesn’t even occur to her to be embarrassed. Just before leaving her room, she opens her new laptop, types a few words, hesitates, then runs out, out of her room, out of her house, into the rain, ignoring her mother’s Where are you going? Dinner will be ready soon! Marta! Come back, I’m talking to you!

The bulldozers are coming, it’s time to go, time to find a magic guitar or some other place where she can still hear the music.

Meet me here mid-week for a mini-episode about what happened next.

Reminders: Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting), and the Cast of Characters here. Episode links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

The delightful podcast with Holly B. Gutwillinger, Ramblings from the Little Shed, has posted our interview from July!

Watch and listen here:

Ramblings From the Little Shed

Tail Waggin', Page Turnin': Dogs, Drafts & Substack Serials with Shari

Episode Summary…

Listen now

a month ago · 1 like · Holly B. Gutwillinger

And while you’re there, check out all the other wonderful podcasts and subscribe to see future podcasts. Holly regularly interviews fascinating writers and other creatives, and her podcasts almost always involve dogs or other pets (and often include flannel shirts, too). Holly’s interviews are friendly and fun, and I feel so honored to be part of her lovely work!

It was decided, as Marta had known it would be as soon as her mother broached the subject, that Susan and Sam would get married. There was some talk of making it a joint event with Missy and Jenny, but ultimately that idea was discarded; Jenny’s role as Island Eccentric meant no one could rely on her to set a date or take any other organizational action. Truth be told, if the island had been the kind of place where paper invitations went out, it was unlikely Jenny could be trusted to even get them into the mail, notwithstanding her position as postmistress.

“We’ll just enjoy their ceremony if or when it happens,” Sam said cheerfully, “and make our own plans separately.”

They selected a day in September, and decided to hold the wedding on the stretch of sand abutting the village that is so small the county designated it a “pocket beach.” Heads bent over a piece of paper on the kitchen table that held both Sam’s and Susan’s scribblings, they agreed on a potluck dinner, followed by dancing to whatever tunes the Hackanaw Head Howlers decided to play.

Susan asked Marta if she’d be the flower girl, and Marta, putting every ounce of contempt she could muster into her response, refused.

Reminders: Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting), and the Cast of Characters here. Episode links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved

After the discovery of a body, in early December, at the Maple Lane Apartments, there is a time of intense, free-floating anxiety. Susan insists either she or Sam will meet Marta at school and walk her home every day.

Marta objects, but feebly, pro forma; just now she objects to everything.

Around the middle of the month, Marta and her mother are standing in line at the Apple Cart (where else?), when they run into Ms. Boy. Ms. Boy tells them she’s just been to visit Genevieve Macy, to see if she’s okay, since there was no Bulletin the day before. Ms. Boy says Genevieve reconnected with a former boyfriend (do you still call it a “boyfriend” even when you’re old? Marta wonders), and then reported him to the sheriff, and now he’s disappeared.

“I don’t know the reasons,” Ms. Boy says, “all I know is that now Genevieve is desperately unhappy. I’m thinking maybe you,” she points at Susan, “and all of us,” she gestures to the others standing in line, “can kind of spread the word, and rally around our friend?” She poses it as a question, but it is clear the islanders take it as a mandate. This is, after all, what Looser Islanders do.

Marta knows none of her classmates would even think of going to visit some older lady in the apartments, but over the years she’d spent more than a little time with Genevieve, listening to her stories and playing Crazy 8s and War and Gin Rummy. Also, she’s seen the notebooks piled everywhere in Genevieve’s apartment, and she knows Genevieve is a writer not just of the Bulletin but also of journals and stories and even the occasional poem, which makes her a kindred spirit. Besides, though anything over thirty seems ancient when you’re twelve, she knows that technically fifty (which is how old Genevieve is, she knows this because she attended the party) doesn’t really qualify as old.

She bakes a batch of brownies that turn out quite tasty, in spite of the fact that the cocoa powder in the pantry expired in 2011. (Susan’s not much of a cook, yet another black mark against her, in Marta’s mind.) She cuts them and wraps them in tinfoil, and heads over to the Maple Lane Apartments.

After knocking, while waiting for Genevieve to answer the door, she looks down the walkway toward the manager’s apartment, wondering if the ghost of the man who died is hanging around, hoping for revenge. Perhaps coming here alone was a bad idea, but the alternative was asking her mother to accompany her, and that is a firm no way.

Genevieve opens the door, but it is Jesus who greets Marta. Genevieve is an empty shell, an automaton in human skin, and Marta is struck dumb. What can she possibly say to this person who normally talks nonstop, and now seems practically catatonic? She’d had some thought of asking about the boyfriend, when they’d known each other before, what caused them to break up, maybe even why she’d reported him to the sheriff, but now she recognizes all those questions will fall like salt on an open wound, or perhaps like pebbles tossed into the abyss.

After sitting in almost unbearable silence for a few minutes, Marta pulls out the first Peculiar Children book and sets it on the table next to the tinfoil containing the brownies.

“Ms. Boy gave this to me last month, for my birthday,” she says. “I’m finished with it—I’m kind of a speed reader. I think you might like the story.”

More silence.

“It’s written by this guy named Ransom Riggs, which sounds like a nom de plume, but I guess it’s his real name.” She’s loved the French phrase for a writer’s alias since she first heard it, and flourishes it whenever the opportunity arises.

Genevieve doesn’t look up, or comment on how clever Marta is for knowing what a nom de plume is.

Finally, Marta says, “Well, I guess I’d better go.” Where or for what purpose, she couldn’t have said, she only knows it feels imperative to get out of that place. She pats Jesus’s soft, smelly head, and leaves.

Marta’s been looking forward to many aspects of adulthood, including falling in love, and she’s enjoyed plotting out a journey from now until college graduation and, eventually, marriage. But now she thinks her plan might need tweaking.

If this is what being in love does to you, she wants nothing to do with it.

For Christmas, Ms. Boy gives Marta the second book in the Peculiar Children series, with these words: “The closer you get to thirteen, the more you might feel yourself a stranger, a peculiar child in a world of normals.”

Marta nods, thinking she’s already there.

Sam gives Marta a refillable leather-bound journal with a daily prompt inside. “It’s for writing poems or stories,” he says, “or whatever comes into your head.” Marta is pleased to know Sam thinks whatever comes into her head is worthy of commemorating, though she herself has her doubts.

Her mother gives her a gift certificate to a department store in Seattle, with a ferry ticket and a promise to take her shopping over the winter break.

Her grandmother surprises everyone by giving Marta a laptop computer. As owner of the Apple Cart, Lauren is financially comfortable, in spite of her lackadaisical attitude toward accepted business practices. (It is, for instance, a source of endless frustration to islanders and visitors alike that the sole grocery store on Looser Island is only open Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night.) But she is not wealthy, so neither Susan nor Marta had expected such an extravagant, expensive gift.

“Well, this is . . . a little over the top,” Susan says, when Marta opens the gift.

It is common knowledge on the island that Susan withheld the information from Lauren that Lauren’s son Bill was Marta’s father, even going so far as to have Bill sign a confidentiality agreement.

Since discovering the truth, Lauren had been heard to say on a not-infrequent basis that Susan had “swanned off” to Spokane without even telling her that she (Lauren) had a granddaughter, and when they came back she (Lauren) had to find out through a combination of the rumor mill and using her brains.

“I didn’t think anything of it at first,” she’d said to Ronwen once, shortly after one of the ubiquitous Water District Board meetings. “I mean I didn’t think anything of the fact that Susan was pregnant. She and Bill had broken up a while before that, and Susan got around, you know,” she’d said, gesturing with her head at Susan, who was just gathering her things to leave the Community Center. “But when they came back from Spokane, when Marta was five, I couldn’t help but see. Marta laughs the way Bill does. She’s got the same dark hair with the same cowlick on the left side of her face. And you can’t keep shoes on that girl to save your life. Just like Bill.”

Marta had been hanging about in the lobby, hidden from sight behind a row of fake potted palms donated by somebody years ago and kept in place for fear of offending the generous-hearted if aesthetically-challenged somebody, and she’d overheard the conversation. That was how she’d found out Lauren’s son Bill was her father. Though she was only nine at the time, she was already an old soul, and rather than confront her mother, she said nothing, only nursed the hurt, and made excuses to talk to Bill during those short periods of time when he returned to the island to help his mother in the store.

Solemnly: “Are you going to get any more Choco Krispies in, do you think?”

“I’m afraid the company is no longer making that cereal, Marta. Would you like me to see if I can find another cereal that’s similar, and order it for you?”

Shyly: “My mom can’t find the Hackanaw Farm apples. Do you have any in the back, maybe?”

“Let me check, Marta.”

Marta had noticed her dad said her name as often as possible, as if it was a talisman, or an incantation.

But then, less than a year after she’d learned their shared secret, he died, taking with him any hope of ever being able to run to him and throw her arms around him and call him, joyously, openly, Dad.

Then, and only then, did Susan confess to Marta what Marta and everyone else on the island seemingly already knew.

Now, Marta understands her grandmother’s gift on a visceral level. Everyone else in her grandmother’s family either died or abandoned Lauren, and Lauren’s wounded, keening heart hopes to forge a meaningful relationship with the only remaining bit of family, of Bill, left to her. The laptop isn’t a bribe, a love-me-because-I-buy-you-extravagant-gifts, it’s a thank-you-for-still-being-here.

Susan sets up the laptop with a few muttered curses at the woman who could have been her mother-in-law, clearly annoyed that Lauren has shown up everyone else in the gifts department, and just as begrudgingly connects the laptop to the internet, and helps Marta create her own email address.

Some would have said it was long overdue—most children have cell phones and email accounts and even social media accounts by the time they enter sixth grade—but Marta has been content, until now, to live a somewhat luddite existence, in spite of the fact that her mother runs the island’s only tech support business.

And then, as is uniquely common to this tiny island community, the computer gathers dust. There is so much to do and see and read and be, and that leaves precious little time, according to Marta and her compatriots, for scrolling and posting and all the other ways a young brain can be corrupted by the content of an electronic device.

Except for once, when Marta is home alone with only the pounding rain on the roof for company, she Googles everything she’s heard from Genevieve and others about Genevieve’s history. She finds confirmation that, for a while, Genevieve Macy was the press reviewer for the band called Blue, and reads a couple of archived reviews, just for fun, learning for the first time the meaning of “going down a rabbit hole” on the internet. Then she Googles the man she now knows was Genevieve’s boyfriend. By then, she’d spent more time with Genevieve, who had eventually shared the story of her relationship with Mac. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, Marta discovers the man is wanted for various crimes.

“Well that’s freaky,” Marta says aloud, feeling fleetingly that perhaps her mom wasn’t overreacting, after all, when she insisted that she or Sam walk Marta home from school.

She finds herself wishing, fleetingly, that she could undo all the moments that led to her staring at a screen that holds this disturbing information.

Meet me here next week for Marta’s brush with falling in love.

Note: The Episode about Susan’s history with Marta’s father, in Book 1: Who Laughs Last can be found here. The Episode about Lauren’s many losses, also in Book 1, can be found here.

Even though Marta’s house is on a hill above the village, nowhere near Ronwen and Nash’s cabin on Kameme beach, and thus she has no possible claim to the money, fantasies about what she might do with “a bag full of cash” dominate her thoughts for days afterward.

When she takes a breath to blow out her birthday candles the following weekend, Please let a bag full of money land at our house, too is the silent wish that precedes the successful extinguishing of all the candles, and afterward there are many happy hours of imagining what she will do if her wish is fulfilled.

Twelve is an odd age, partly rooted in childhood, just peering into adolescence from the cliffs overlooking that perilous ravine. The idea of a trip to Disneyland can still make Marta’s heart go pitter patter, but it would also be nice, she thinks, to have a car that doesn’t break down every other month, something shiny and bright rather than dull and scratched and pockmarked with rust, something she might not be ashamed to drive in a few years.

Thus preoccupied (one might even say obsessed), Marta is completely unprepared for the moment, a few weeks later, when her mother upends their shared universe.

Again.

“We should talk.”

In Marta’s (admittedly limited) experience, nothing good ever follows that statement. She is curled up on the couch reading My Side of the Mountain, the susurration of the rain outside an invitation to stay in, hunker down, shut out the world with a good book. Next to her there is a plate that, until recently, held what her mother likes to refer to as “story sustenance” aka chocolate. The plate is currently empty of all but the wrappers from a handful of chocolate kisses.

“Okay,” Marta says, guardedly.

It is the weekend after Thanksgiving, and thoughts of the holiday break from school and Christmas wish lists to be compiled and cookies to be baked are uppermost in Marta’s brain. There is no room, she thinks, for Serious Conversations.

In an attempt to avoid whatever “we should talk” presages, Marta says, “Shouldn’t you be, like, passing out coffee to Sam and everyone else protesting the evictions at the apartments?”

Susan shakes her head, and gently removes Shelby from the ancient recliner so she can sit facing Marta. Shelby grunts her disapproval, and moves across the room to lie at Marta’s feet. Shelby is thirteen, one year older than Marta, but her canine intuition is still unerring, and she seems to understand Marta is going to need a warm body nearby.

Susan sighs, and brushes the hair out of her eyes. (Unfathomable eyes, Marta had said once, after learning the word. It was intended as a criticism, since Marta had asked what her father was like, and Susan had been, as always, cagey.)

“You know that Sam and I have been dating off and on for a few years, right?”

“Yes,” Marta says. She opens her mouth to add something but stops, unwilling to make this conversation any easier for her mother.

“And you know he asked me to marry him a while ago, and I turned him down.”

“Yes, I know,” Marta says, a dark pool of something like dread forming in the soft places in her heart. “Just like with my dad.”

Susan winces, and then continues. “I turned him down because I thought it would be too hard on you. To have a . . . kind of dad come into your life again.”

“Don’t make this about me, Mom,” Marta says. “You turned him down because you didn’t want to have to worry about anyone else. One kid was already more of a burden than you really wanted.” She glares at her mother, who is visibly vibrating with the need to respond, to deny, to defend herself, and then she says, “Let me guess. He asked you again, and you said yes this time.”

Another flinch tells her she’s guessed correctly.

“Look,” she says, “if you want to marry Sam, marry Sam.” She leans over and rests her hands on Shelby as if grounding herself. “He’s a nice guy. I like him. He’s not my father, and I won’t call him Daddy or . . . whatever. But just leave me out of it.” Dread has turned to anger with the suddenness of a fierce, fickle wind blowing over the ocean, and all at once being in the same room with her mother, waiting for her to fight back, is unbearable. She gets up, knocking her book to the floor, along with the plate, scattering tiny bits of tinfoil everywhere, including on Shelby’s patient back. Normally reasonably tidy, Marta’s final act of rebellion in the moment is to leave without picking anything up. Grabbing her jacket from the hook by the door, she stomps outside. Shelby trails after her but stops short of the threshold.

When the door refuses to slam behind her, Marta opens and closes it again, yanking on it with all the force her newly-twelve-year-old arms can muster.

Outside, the weather matches her mood. What had been a steady downpour is now blowing sideways in a furious gale, hurling pine needles and then, when Marta reaches the shore at the bottom of the hill, brine from the sea. She pulls her hood up and holds it closed under her chin, trying to decide where her rage will take her. A friend from school who might lend a sympathetic ear, or an adult who could give wise counsel? It’s a pity she doesn’t have a Mrs. Whatsit or a Gandalf to advise her. Hell, she thinks, finding pleasure in the mild swear word, she’d take Aslan if he appeared, though ideally she’d prefer a feminine point of view.

For that reason as well as the particular circumstances of the situation, Sam is out.

Mrs. Prewitt would just tsk tsk her, which would be irritating. Genevieve Macy would cackle empathetically, but there is a very real chance that whatever Marta says to her would end up in the Looser Island Bulletin. And then she thinks of Ms. Boy.

Sylvester the Mouse with the Musical Ear had initiated a friendship that blossomed as Marta grew older, and Marta trusts her former teacher more than anyone else in her life. Turning, she trudges back up the hill, her increasingly wet pants and shoes punctuating her misery as she makes her way to Ms. Boy’s house, drenched in anger and, inexplicably, grief.

“Do you like Sam?” Ms. Boy asks.

Hot spiced cider (real cider, from Looser Island apples) and homemade snickerdoodles have been produced, as if Ms. Boy knew Marta was coming. Ms. Boy’s tiny, dilapidated house has a woodstove, and the remnants of a fire are glowing peacefully, having spent their wild crackling hours earlier.

Fire, cookies, cider, and a friendly face—Marta should be happy, but instead she looks at the fire and thinks: a good mother would have made sure their home had a woodstove, instead of barely functional baseboard heating in a poorly-insulated ramshackle house. Why couldn’t Ms. Boy have been her mother, instead of Susan? “Sullen” is a new look for Marta, and she finds it empowering.

“Of course I like Sam,” she says. “Everybody likes Sam.”

“Enough to welcome him into your life as a stepfather?” Ms. Boy is sitting on the floor, crosslegged, her long black hair hanging over one shoulder. She seems genuinely curious.

“I guess so,” Marta says. “But that’s not why I’m . . .” What is she? Resentful? Unhappy? “ . . . furious,” she says.

Ms. Boy refills Marta’s mug without being asked, and when she sees Marta reading the words on the mug—

O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place

—she explains, “It’s a quote from the Yeats poem, ‘A Prayer For My Daughter.’ I bought it because I love the idea of being rooted in this ‘dear perpetual place,’ but the entire poem is a bit much. Yeats basically hopes his daughter will be sweet and vacuous, avoiding arguments and strong opinions.” She pats Marta’s shoulder on her way to refill the cookie plate, and says, “You, my dear, are the opposite. I’d much rather all the girls and women in my life be intelligent and fiercely independent. Like you.”

Though she normally loves intellectual conversations with her former teacher, just now Marta doesn’t want to talk about dead poets or feminism. “I don’t understand why my mom has to be like this,” she says.

“Like what?” Ms. Boy calls from the kitchen.

“I don’t know. Why did she have to get pregnant with me? I mean, Jesus, there’s this thing called birth control.” She watches Ms. Boy for signs of shock but there is only an understanding smile. “And then she turned down my real father’s offer of marriage. Which . . . fine. Whatever. We’re okay, the two of us. Most of the time. But she’s been stringing Sam along for a few years. And now suddenly she’s asking me what I want, asking me if I’m okay with her marrying Sam, as if she cares what I think. She’s so . . . self-absorbed.”

If Ms. Boy sees the irony in an accusation of self-absorption from a not-quite-adolescent, she wisely keeps it to herself. “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” she says. “I know you and your mom moved to Spokane when you were younger, so she could go to college. I arrived here shortly after she brought you back to the island, so I can’t really comment on her choices before then. But, I wonder, even if you’re right, does saying that make you feel any better? Does it change the situation?”

As Marta thinks about how to answer, she contemplates the anomaly that is Ms. Boy. The island’s population consists of the minimum number of children necessary to populate the school; their parents (many of whom, for unknown reasons, started a family later in life and are now closer to middle age than young); a few old farmers still attempting to wrest a living from the land while battling arthritis and every other ailment common to aging; and a lot of retirees. Marta’d seen in a Bulletin article last year that the average age on the island is fifty-nine, and she’d realized when she read it that meant most islanders must be in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. At twenty-eight, Ms. Boy stands out. Tall, lithe, and attractive, her former teacher radiates vigor and easy grace.

Somehow that makes a difference, that Ms. Boy is not only kind, and perceptive, but also young and pretty. It is easier for Marta to hear hard truths from a lovely young woman that she adores.

“I guess not,” Marta says finally. “I guess it doesn’t change anything. And it sure as hell doesn’t make me feel better.” Again the furtive glance to see if the island’s first- and second-grade teacher will scold her for her language, but Ms. Boy is, as always, unflappable.

Ms. Boy stands up and pokes the fire. “Happy birthday again, by the way,” she says. “How does it feel to be twelve?”

“It sucks to get old,” Marta says. “In all the books, things happen when you’re eleven. Harry Potter, Reynie Muldoon . . . . Eleven is in the past, now, and it’s still the same old same old for me.”

“Jacob in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is sixteen,” Ms. Boy points out. “And Sam Gribley in My Side of the Mountain didn’t hit the woods until he was twelve.”

Marta shrugs. “Thanks again for the Peculiar Children book, by the way. But I don’t think I have hidden monster-hunter talents, and I’m not cut out to build a tree fort and live in the wild.”

“Did you have a nice birthday, at least?” Ms. Boy asks.

Another shrug. “I wished for a bag of money to show up at our house, like at Ronwen and Nash’s place, but I got nothing. Zip, nada, zilch.”

Ms. Boy sits down again, lifts her own mug, and makes a cheers motion toward Marta. “Here’s to birthday wishes and winning lottery tickets. May our wishes come true some bright day, preferably before we’re old and gray.”

“You’re a poet and don’t know it,” Marta says, fighting the buoyant feeling that creeps over her whenever she’s with Ms. Boy, in spite of her efforts to stay angry. “Maybe you should marry Sam.”

Meet me here next week, when a gift from Marta’s grandmother gives Marta access to information she wishes she could unknow.

Marta remembers some things oh so clearly.

Being born is a bit of a haze, of course. First steps, first words—she only knows what her mother told her.

But the first book? The first time she read rather than being read to, jumping up in triumph after the last page and shouting I did it? That memory is crystal clear: Sylvester the Mouse With the Musical Ear.

Marta’s first grade teacher had moved to the island shortly after graduating from Seattle University, her certificate still shiny and new like a penny just released by the US Treasury. The young teacher with the wonderfully quirky name (Danny Boy) delighted students and parents alike in so many ways, not least of which was a practice of giving every child a book as a birthday gift, even going so far as to mail a book to children whose birthdays fell during the summer.

Marta was in Ms. Boy’s very first class, and Ms. Boy later told Susan, Marta’s mother, that she recognized in Marta a kindred spirit, a strong and intellectually curious mind with the heart of a poet, who rejoiced in the wind and the soft touch of an animal’s fur and the sweetness of a happy ending, and she told Susan she’d chosen Marta’s book accordingly.

Though neither teacher nor student knew it at the time, that book would go on to inform much of what Marta became, from that moment forward.

Published in 1961, Sylvester the Mouse with the Musical Ear follows a country mouse who likes nothing better than to listen to the sounds of nature in the grassy meadow where he lives. When bulldozers dig up the fields to make way for new highways and houses and shops, Sylvester has no choice but to leave. He wanders through the city until he finds a music store, and inside the store, a perfect home. It has a round hole for going in and coming out, just like his country home, with strings across the opening that make beautiful music when he goes in, and when he comes out. People passing by the store hear Sylvester’s comings and goings and imagine there is a magic guitar that plays itself. The legend grows, until one day Tex appears, a man who loves music but who has no guitar. When he discovers Sylvester is the secret behind the “magic” guitar, the two become fast friends, and empathetic readers can almost hear the orchestra swelling in the background as mouse and man travel into the sunset to make beautiful music together.

The book planted a seed, which grew into a sapling, which matured into a tree of philosophy that Marta would have characterized, if she had been inclined to philosophize at the tender age of six, thusly: when life gives you bulldozers, pack your bags and find your magic wherever it may be.

Marta’s first question, upon hearing the story, was Where, Mama, is the music store on Looser Island?, to which Susan could only shake her head and admit that the island had no music store, and Marta sobbed uncontrollably at the thought that there would be no place for displaced mice to live.

Her second question was Mama, will you teach me to read so I can read Sylvester the Mouse with the Musical Ear to myself? Of course her mother said yes, and relayed the request to Ms. Boy, and together they worked to unlock the mysteries of literacy for Marta. As a result, Marta was well on her way by the end of November, the month she turned seven.

(As an aside, her penchant for working on her new skills by trying to read Looser Island signs presented various problems. For example: Apple Cart Grocery. “Cart” is fairly straightforward, under the basic rules of phonics. But “Apple?” What is that silent “e” doing at the end of the word? And don’t even think about trying to teach a new reader the word “grocery.” In what other context is the letter “c” pronounced “sh”? Marta posed these questions and more to her mother, but the answer was so often a wry shrug, and “It just is, honey.”)

In spite of the vagaries of the English language, Marta loved the way the mysterious characters resolved into words on the page, and how the words assembled themselves tidily to weave a tale. She loved the idea that she could conjure up whole universes of lonely mice and kindly musicians, now that she had the power of words.

After she was on the path to reading proficiency, she started writing, and then every oyster contained a pearl, every challenge and disappointment held the hope of a happily ever after. She wrote about the sparkling sun on the Salish Sea, the smell of molasses cookies at Bonnie’s Bakery, the ridiculous sounds seals make. When she ran out of things she could see and taste and smell and feel and hear, she wrote about guinea pigs that have adventures by night and turn into slippers by day. She wrote about evil warlocks and charming but independent-minded fairies, and Santa Clause’s need for a rest after Christmas.

She read and she wrote, every spare minute of every day.

When she learned that her mother’s boyfriend, Sam the Postman, was also a poet, another new world opened for her.

Marta was enamored of Sam because he seemed to like his life even when it wasn’t going as planned, and even when it seemed ordinary and dull. He enjoyed delivering the mail and writing poetry, he appreciated his cranky father, old Jens Jensen, before Mr. Jensen passed away, he was fond of his cranky sister, Lesley (like father like daughter?), he loved his girlfriend Susan, and he relished time spent with Marta.

Sam was Marta’s first experience with contentment, and that became, for a while, another guiding principle in her life.

For a long time, Marta didn’t know who her father was, didn’t know that he had offered to marry her mother but her mother’d turned him down, didn’t know he lived in Seattle but visited frequently, haunting the places where Marta and Susan might be, just to be near them.

She was nine before she found out, and the following year, her dad was in a car accident that ultimately proved fatal, and so she was left mourning not only the loss of her father, but the loss of even the potential for a relationship with him.

Four months into her tenth year of life, sitting in a hospital waiting for her dad to die, Marta asked Susan why she’d refused the offer of marriage, and Susan held Marta too tightly.

“I didn’t love him,” she said.

Then, for the first time, Marta questioned whether she’d been lied to by all the stories and songs that said her dreams would come true if she wished upon a star, or tapped her heels together three times, or moved into a guitar.

And she became convinced that was a betrayal by her mother, first and foremost.

Reminders: Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting), and the Cast of Characters here. Episode links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved

“What rhymes with ‘change’?” Marta asks, addressing the question to the universe rather than to the other inhabitants of the kitchen.

First grade has been in the rearview mirror for six years, but Marta’s love of reading and writing has only intensified. She and Sam are sitting in the kitchen, companionably writing poetry together. The table, a tiny square of wood with white ceramic tiles on top—barely big enough for Marta and Susan and a meal—currently holds two writing tablets, and a plate of cookies (not homemade, unfortunately, or even Bonnie’s-Bakery-made, but c’est la vie, as Susan likes to say).

There are also various writing implements because, as Sam says, “You need to have options so your muse can choose.” Then he adds to the collection a fountain pen received as a promotion from Sal’s Septic, even though it seems unlikely Sal’s Septic can provide anything like inspiration.

It is Saturday afternoon, which means Sam is done with his work until Monday, Marta has no school, and Susan has declared—perhaps unreasonably and uncharitably—that people who ask for IT support on the weekend need to get a life outside their computers.

“What rhymes with ‘change’?” Susan says. “Well, let’s see. Mange. Grange. Strange.”

“You, madam, clearly have no poetry in your soul,” Sam says.

“Yeah, Mom,” Marta says, sourly. “Who wants to read a poem about mange?”

“The mange is strange, stays mainly in the grange,” Susan says, scowling affectionately at the two of them.

“My Fair Lady,” Sam says. “But quoting one of my favorite movies, or rather, misquoting it, does not earn you a Get Out of Poet’s Jail Free, my love.”

“Uh huh,” Marta agrees. “That’s not poetry.”

“Maybe I’m a maverick who makes her own rules,” Susan says. “Or maybe you’re right. But I’ve never claimed to be a poet. That’s your bailiwick. Speaking of which,” she nabs one of the cookies and pops it into her mouth, whole, and then, speaking around the mouthful, “you two have been at it for an hour. Let’s go for a walk, or—”

“It’s pouring outside, and the porch thermometer says it’s forty-six degrees,” Marta says.

“Okay, then let’s . . . I don’t know, make popcorn and rent a video.”

“Rent a video?” Sam says. “Susan, it’s been ten years since that video rental place on the island declared bankruptcy.”

“Okay, let’s call a truce on making fun of mom-slash-Susan,” Susan says. “Can we just find something we all like to do?”

“We were doing something the majority of us like to do,” Marta says, with more than a hint of pre-adolescent snarkiness. Marta sees the look of surprise on Sam’s face, and feels a twinge of guilt, and then more than a twinge of annoyance. “What, you can do sarcasm but I can’t?” she says. And then she relents. “I vote for renting My Fair Lady,” she says. “Streaming,” she adds, to distinguish her suggestion from her mother’s anachronistic idea. “And since the storm ruined what was probably my last chance to go trick-or-treating without anyone looking at me like I’m a delinquent, and it’s my birthday week, I think my vote should count more than anyone else’s.”

“All in favor say Aye,” Sam says, and then, without waiting for a response, “the ayes have it, motion passes unanimously.”

While Sam searches for the movie on the various streaming services Susan had either paid for or pirated from a friend or neighbor, Susan scrolls through the Looser Island Bulletin on her phone.

“Ohhh,” she says, drawing out the sound and pursing her lips.

“What?” Marta says. The last time she’d heard that sound from her mother, her father was lying half in and half out of his car, having swerved to avoid a rabbit.

“A boat washed ashore at Kameme Beach, after the Halloween storm. You know, Ronwen and Nash’s place?”

Marta nods.

“The boat had a dog in it, and a bag full of cash.”

Meet me here next week when Marta—who is not quite a teenager—nevertheless reacts in typical teenage fashion to her mother’s announcement that Sam has proposed.

Footnote 1: I used to write stories with my mother. We’d go into separate rooms, write something, and come back to share what we’d written. There was always chocolate involved. The first story I have a memory of writing was, in fact, about guinea pigs that turned into slippers by day . . . .

Footnote 2: The image at the top of this Episode is a photo of my current copy of Sylvester the Mouse with the Musical Ear. My grandmother gave me the book when I was very young, and it made such a lasting impression on me that, even though my original copy was lost over the years, I found a copy to share with my children, and then another copy for my grandchildren.

The magic lives on.

NOTE: In this Episode, Henry Johnson considers, but ultimately rejects, the idea of ending his life. Email me if you want to know key plot developments without reading this Episode. Even if you decide not to read, I hope you will scroll to the bottom for some marvelous photos!

As most of you know, these chapters were written and scheduled for posting months in advance. Though I’ve never promised only rainbows and unicorns, I did promise #happydistraction. Sometimes, reality is too much, and reading about fictional characters’ grief adds to that too-muchness. This week we lost Dolly Parton and Tim Curry, and there have been still more grievous attacks on our constitutional rights and international alliances. And don’t even get me started on this week’s further erosion of integrity and compassion and human decency. I can only guess at what personal tragedies and traumas some of you may be facing. If you need to find yourself some literary rainbows and unicorns just now, I will understand completely.1

If you are on the fence about reading, rest assured that Dr. Johnson finds a way through, and even a measure of joy, by the time this Episode ends.

The March 7 Bulletin includes a notice that the disease they’re calling COVID-19 (all caps, as if lower case letters couldn’t possibly describe the horror) has hit Washington state, and all schools and most public services will shut down by mid-month.

As if that’s not enough, the Sheriff’s Log in the March 21 Bulletin announces that the feds have mostly solved the mystery of the boat/dog/money/body saga, and there’s nothing happily ever after about the ending of that story.

After reading the sordid details in the Sheriff’s Log, Dr. Johnson has Genevieve make an appointment for Missy, so he can tell her she’s not “Mad Mad Missy,” she really did see something, it just wasn’t a ghost.

“So that’s that,” he says, before leaving for lunch. “Now we know.”

“Doc,” Genevieve says, “This whole thing, the dead guy in the apartments, the pandemic . . . none of it has anything to do with you. With us.” She breathes noisily into her paper surgical mask. “I mean, yeah sure, we’ll have to set up our own protocols for testing for the disease. And we’ll need to treat anyone who gets it, of course. And they’re working on a vaccine, so we’ll have to, you know, take care of administering that, too. I just mean . . . none of this is your problem. Don’t . . . don’t take it to heart.”

He nods, recognizing once again what a gem Genevieve is, a shrewd and perceptive soul nestled within a no-nonsense, get-things-done exterior. She’s prescient, he thinks. She knows I’m just done. Done with dead bodies in apartments and counterfeit money showing up on beaches and fear and distrust intruding into every conversation and a deadly pandemic grinning from the corners as if it’s the Grim Reaper’s idiot assistant.

Done with everything.

He heads to the ruins again, only now, for the first time, he takes Rosie. With Mary’s conspicuous absence, there doesn’t seem to be any reason not to bring the dog.

Rosie is uncharacteristically subdued on the short path into the woods, and when he sits in the unbearably hard stone chair, she rests her head on his knee, patient and still, for the moment.

He thinks, as if it’s a novel idea, that it would be good to lay everything down. To let someone else be the bearer of bad news, let someone else be haunted by the quiet tears sliding down cheeks, sometimes but not always followed by I want a second opinion or are you sure?

He thinks of the trauma he’s served up, as if he was a waiter at a restaurant in purgatory. Diagnosing Kasumi’s cancer . . . . Notifying Caroline that her childbearing days are over, practically before they began, because of her unicornuate uterus . . . .

And he torments himself, deliberately, with all the tragedies he’s seen, the pain he’s witnessed, in his years of practicing medicine. A grim procession of broken and diseased bodies parades the halls of his mind: the compound fracture, with the bone jutting through a gash of broken skin that looks like the Joker’s humorless, red-painted grin; the pustules and cracked skin and agony of shingles; the cancerous cells that take over, gleefully reproducing, crowding out healthy cells.

Nature is a cruel mistress who seems hell-bent on killing everyone off almost as soon as they arrive on this earth.

The discovery of a dead body in the apartments just confirms Henry’s belief that everyone comes to a bad end. Like the man in the apartments, his death will in all likelihood visit him when he is alone, so why not just get it over with sooner rather than later?

It’s cold, so cold, here in the woods. The stone chair grips his body, tomblike. A few snowflakes land on the stone table, but they don’t melt. If he just stays here, eventually he’ll shuffle off the mortal coil, almost by default.

And then there’d be two ghosts at the table.

Rosie lifts her head from his lap with a gently reproachful whuff, and in that preposterous sound something unravels in him, a loosening and a lightening in the bleak tapestry of his musings. Woven into the dark memories there are, unexpectedly, silver threads of joy.

. . . Kayaking around Dragon Island, and hearing a shout from the clifftop, those wonderful, crazy Clarkes: “Permission to fire, sir?”

To which the obvious and only answer is: “Permission granted!”

And then the boom of the potato cannon, and the splash of a potato in the water nearby, followed by the congratulatory barking of Meeka and Juice, the Clarkes’ beautiful Golden Retrievers.

. . . Finding Rosie’s predecessor, a Standard Poodle named Finn (the first to carry the monikers Impossible, Incorrigible, and Oh No!), covered in fluff after “saving” the household from the dangerous attack of a feather pillow.

How Mary had laughed!

He’d grumbled, while attempting to clean the mess (ineffectively, since the broom he was using sent the feathers floating into the air), and he’d bemoaned the fact that now they’d have to find a replacement pillow, which would be difficult, to say the least, because it’s not like anyone on the island sells pillows, and Mary had listened to his pissing and moaning and then collapsed to the floor, giggling helplessly.

. . . The call, just after two in the morning: Can you come over, Doc? Violet’s calving and she’s having a hard time.

I don’t do cows. And—and you don’t have cows. (He’s not at his best in the wee sma’s.)

Yeah, I know, but Violet kind of broke down the fence and came into our field. And Caroline’s off island.

A muffled, bovine bellow, followed by a yelp, and then silence, after which the caller says: Never mind about the cow, now we need you to come see Dave. Violet got upset at all the yelling and she head-butted Dave. I think he might have a cracked rib or something.

. . . The fairy tile that looks like an angry gnome.

. . . The disappointed apple tree.

He sees what’s happening, the epiphany to which Rosie or perhaps his wife’s ghost is pointing: he is an historian, a librarian, a repository of these and so many other wondrous, shimmering moments; dying now would mean pulling a shroud, forever, over that archive.

Maybe someday it will come to that. Maybe someday he’ll find the good memories are not enough, or they’re too much, or he’s done all he can in this life and it’s time to see what comes after.

But not today.

Missy and Jenny announce via the Bulletin that they’ve set a date, so they really are getting married (intuiting that the most common response to their earlier statements in that regard had been a cautiously optimistic That’s great! Congratulations! with an unspoken addendum I’ll believe it when I see it).

Jenny adds that it’ll be on the clifftop at Hackanaw Head, so nobody should be worried about catching COVID. “Lots of fresh air,” she says, and everyone agrees that’s true. The wind howls along the island’s edge there, and the most likely scenario involves wedding cake and temporary canopies being hurled off the cliff by a blast of wind.

“Why they picked Hackanaw Head is beyond me,” Lauren tells Retha.

Henry is once again standing in line at the Apple Cart, but this time everyone looks like an alien, their noses and mouths covered with blue paper masks or cloth masks festooned with desperately cheerful hearts or daisies. Words are muffled, expressions hidden. Being a doctor, he knows the masks are necessary, but that doesn’t stop him from hating them with a passion.

After hearing the locale for the wedding, Retha gives her signature snort, and then says “Eew. Nothing like spraying the inside of your mask with snot. Anyway, what did you expect? Like that guy in that movie says, ‘stupid is as stupid does.’”

“Forrest Gump?” Sam supplies the movie title. He’s standing in line behind Henry. Marta and her mom, Susan, are with Sam, and it looks as though they’re planning on making chocolate chip cookies, but forgot to grab a basket on the way in. Marta’s massaging a package of chocolate chips, looking thoughtful. Susan is balancing a dozen eggs, a pound of organic butter, and a bottle of vanilla extract. Sam’s holding an oversized burlap bag of heritage grain flour, the product of an island grower.

“Yeah, that’s the movie,” Retha nods.

“But it’s not very nice to say they’re stupid,” Marta points out.

“Yeah yeah yeah,” Retha says. “I was using an analo-whatsit.”

“Analogy?” Sam again supplies the answer.

“Uh huh. Crazy is as crazy does. Stupid is as stupid does. Those two are crazy, so it shouldn’t surprise any of us that they picked a crazy place to get hitched.”

“I don’t think they’re crazy, either,” Marta says, carefully pushing a dark strand of hair behind one ear. “I think they’re optimists.” She articulates the word carefully, so as to be heard past her mask.

“That too,” Retha says, and it’s clear she doesn’t think optimist is superior to crazy. “What about you two?” she demands, gesturing behind Marta at Sam and Susan. “Are you getting married or what? Or are you just going to keep on living in sin for the rest of your days?”

Everyone standing in line knows Retha’s being “ironical,” knows her relationship with the almighty is tenuous and skeptical, a relationship that took yet another hit when her favorite cousin died last year.

Sam looks at Susan, who looks at Marta.

Burgeoning adolescence makes Marta as variable as the wind, and she scowls, then sighs, an almost comical combination of resignation and hope, and finally she crosses her arms and tucks her hands, including the hand holding the bag of chocolate chips, into the fold of her elbows. The message, if there is one, would seem to be this: pandemic and romance and mystery be damned, I’m going home to make cookies.

And that, it seems to Henry Johnson, is about as good as it gets.

Meet me here next week for the first episode of Bulldozers, the saga from twelve-year-old Marta’s perspective.

POSTSCRIPT: Ken and Michael Ann Clarke, human caretakers to Golden Retrievers Meeka and Juice, and proprietors of the marvelous potato cannon, provided express authorization to include their names, photos, and other details. Also, thanks to alert reader Beth Andrewes for the wandering cow story (the names and details have been changed from the real sheriff’s log, to protect the innocent—bovine and human alike). Last but not least, thanks to Jennifer Seaich for sharing the photos of her dear Finn (the “scene of the crime” photo, below) and Fergus and Saoirse, all of whom provided the inspiration for Rosie’s predecessor.

From left to right, top to bottom: Juice & Meeka on Frost Island; family members helping Ken Clarke work his infamous potato cannon, first in 2024, then in 2026 (the children’s faces and landscape details have been deliberately blurred); the original Finn at the scene of the crime, and Fergus and his new friend, Saoirse, looking gorgeous.

Reminders: Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting), and the Cast of Characters here. Episode links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved

At some point, Henry stopped touching the fairy tile Mary loved so much. He no longer believed in luck. Not good luck, anyway. Not for him.

And he stopped visiting the ruins. Maybe it was an almost subconscious realization that the Looser Island community needed him to be a stable point around which their madness could whirl and dervish, an acknowledgment that the island’s doctor should be grounded, not given to flights of fancy—or communing with ghosts—to free everyone else to be as harebrained or frivolous as the situation demanded.

Or maybe it was just too painful to see the youthful ghost sitting beside him at the stone table, only to have to give her up when it was time to leave.

Again.

Reminders: Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting), and the Cast of Characters here. Episode links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved

After Missy leaves the clinic, Dr. Johnson tells Genevieve he’s taking the afternoon off. He has no patients scheduled, he reminds her, and he says he’s not feeling well.

“You’re going to the ruins, aren’t you?” she says. “I heard what Missy said. You figure if Missy saw a ghost maybe you will too.”

He shakes his head, but it’s a lie, this head-shaking.

“Don’t do it, Doc. No good can come of trying to call up ghosts.”

“I just need to rest,” he says.

When he arrives, he parks in the unmarked cutout on the side of the road. The ubiquitous rain has stopped, and an unexpected sunbreak dapples the forest floor with light. The effect is dizzying. As he moves deeper into the forest, closer to the ruins, the sun is shut out altogether, and it’s a relief to walk in the gloaming. He notices, as he has so many times before, how his steps on the wet and pungent pine-needled path are silent.

The ruins are not far from Ronwen and Nash’s place. (On a small island, no place is far from any other place, but the ruins are especially close, situated directly inland from the old cabin on the beach.) And he thinks: What if there’s some criminal connected with the wrecked boat and the dead body, wandering the woods? He wonders, briefly, what he would do if he met the proverbial “bad guy,” but almost immediately he knows; he’d put up no fight, just let the criminal do his or her or their worst.

At the site, the sun comes through again, a shaft like an alien searchlight stabbing through the opening in the trees directly above the broken stone table. It should look like one of Mary’s postcard tableaus, Sunbeam in the Woods, but it only adds to the discomfiting surrealism of the scene.

He sits on the same stone chair he always used to choose, when he came here regularly, the chair opposite where the path opens onto the ruins. He tells himself he’s being stupid, he tells himself not to hope, he tells himself to shut up, stop talking, and wait for Mary.

There is a sound, the slightest whisper of a suggestion of a rustle.

Wildlife, of course. Per square foot, the human population is vastly outnumbered by mice and voles and harmless garden snakes and little birds of every shade of brown and gray and black. He sees nothing, but he knows most forest animals have evolved specifically to be invisible among the striped shadows in the foliage. Nevertheless he tenses, wondering if this time things will be different, if Mary is going to make a sound when she appears, if maybe she’ll even speak to him.

He closes his eyes, waiting, and then changes his mind, and peers out from under half-closed lids. Movement to his right. He turns his head and finds a robin—an ordinary, dull, uninteresting bird—staring at him, and then it flies away, quickly, as if it understands it has disturbed a sanctuary for spirits only. This is no place for living creatures.

She doesn’t come.

“I am an idiot,” Henry says softly. “An old, delusional idiot.”

He picks up his creaking body, already sore from the short time resting on the rough stone chair, and shuffles back down the path.

One of his patients recently turned ninety, and he still rides his bicycle everywhere, including the nearly five miles across the island from his home to the village. Henry is sixty-four, but he feels far, far older. Shuffling, creaking, fossilized. The idea of riding a bike across five miles of rolling hills seems preposterous, especially now, when he is weary from the short walk to the car.

Just before the path opens back out to the place on the side of the road where no one is supposed to park but everyone does, he sees a patch of brilliant blue and white nestled between the roots of a tree.

Blue Eyed Marys.

“I’ve brought you some flowers, lovey. A new one Lauren’s carrying at the Apple Cart while they’re in season. They’re called Blue Eyed Marys.”

“Henry,” Mary said, “look at me. My eyes are brown.”

“Well,” he said, “they didn’t have any brown-eyed flowers.”

“You’re ridiculous, and I love you,” she said.

After that, finding Blue Eyed Marys on the cliffs of Hackanaw Head was an annual spring miracle the two of them sought out like pilgrims marching to touch a weeping statue. And it was always the same joke: Look, honey, there’s your flower, the Blue Eyed Mary; then Henry, my eyes are brown; and Well, there aren’t any brown-eyed flowers.

The thing is, Blue Eyed Marys bloom in the spring—Collinsia verna, the first word from the scientist who named them, the second from the Latin word for spring. Tiny soft blue and white flowers tucked among the riot of yellow and white and purple and orange, a veritable carpet of flowers dancing in the cool marine breezes that blow, nonstop, from the sea. It’s December, now. The dusty, thirsty end of summer has given way to the rain and mud and sorrowful flowerless bracken of late fall and early winter. There are no wildflowers on Looser Island in December.

Also, Henry is certain, as certain as a man blinded by grief can be, that there were no Blue Eyed Marys on the side of the path when he arrived, less than an hour ago.

On his way home that afternoon, Henry runs into Missy at the Apple Cart, and she asks in an exaggerated whisper, clutching a package of spaghetti noodles, if he has figured out if she’s crazy or not.

He starts to put his hand on her shoulder but stops, and lets his hand drop to his side. There is something about Missy that speaks of a longing for familiarity, but just now, when she thought he was going to touch her, she flinched. Maybe marrying Jenny will help, he thinks. (He’s heard the rumors of a wedding “someday,” though he didn’t get a chance to ask Missy about it when she was in his office earlier that day.) Or maybe it’s too late for Missy to ever assume human touch is a kindness and not a threat.

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he says, suppressing a sigh.

Eli and Ronwen are standing in the same aisle, perusing the pasta options. This is the second time he’s seen Eli and Ronwen apparently together in the Apple Cart, and he wonders if there’s something to it, some late-life romance blooming between widow and widower. A tide of bitterness sweeps over him. Even if dating was an option (it’s not, since pretty much every woman on the island is also a patient), he doesn’t want a new romantic partner. He wants Mary.

“Now Missy,” Eli says, in a grandfatherly tone, “Why would you think you’re crazy?”

It is an unwritten rule on the island that anything overheard at the Apple Cart is fair game. This seems to be the prevailing philosophy: if you don’t want someone to overhear, and comment, don’t say it out loud in a small island grocery store.

Missy doesn’t tell Eli what she’d told Dr. Johnson earlier, that she and Jenny saw a ghost at the ruins. Instead, she jokes, “It’s okay. Jenny says she loves that I’m cray-cray.” She chortles and adds, “Mad Mad Missy, that’s me!”

Henry does not join in the communal smile. Instead, he takes his organic apples and carrots to the checkstand, hoping his sadness won’t infect everyone else in the store. Or hoping it will.

What right has everyone else to be happy?

As if pain really was contagious, the next day Genevieve’s long lost lover is found. The lover is promptly lost again, and then Dr. Johnson’s stolid, staid, middle-aged nursing assistant does her best impression of a lovelorn adolescent, moping and hiding and crying. How her employer knows about the ordeal is somewhat of a mystery, even to himself—though no more so than usual; island gossip seems to float or fly on the very winds of the Salish Sea. He considers what a good friend would do and, finding no answers within, he gives Genevieve a week to mourn, after which he tells her it’s time to get back to work.

If only there was someone who would say the same to him.

In sympathy with Genevieve, Henry finds his sorrow refreshed, a hellish renewal of a library book he never wanted in the first place. After Genevieve returns to work, he repeatedly asks her to cancel his appointments, tells her he’s sick. Or sick at heart. Even as winter settles on the island, and the weather fixes on miserable as its default, he makes his way regularly to the broken table where his wife’s ghost used to sit with him.

She never shows.

“Who’s the crazy one now?” he shouts into the dripping, perpetual twilight. “Loony. Loco. Insane!”

He tries to remain engaged, to keep busy. In January, he forces himself to stop by the re-roofing project for Ronwen and Nash’s cabin, to joke about the fact that the only way to make sure no one gets hurt is to have a doctor around.

But he doesn’t really believe that. In addition to his own losses, his professional life has been one long litany of other people’s injuries and illnesses. He’s been the source, though not the cause, of so much pain. The irony is inescapable, for a man whose mission and mantra and code is: First do no harm.

Simply being present is neither deterrent nor cure for anything, it turns out.

Meet me here next week when the doctor determines Missy’s not crazy.

Since Rosie came into his life, Henry Johnson has in typical Looser Island fashion brought his dog with him everywhere, including to his office, where she generously acts as therapy dog to every frightened child and weary adult who walks through the door.

There is one, and only one, exception. Henry never brings Rosie with him when he goes to the ruins. The space is too sacred to risk defiling with dog pee or a violent squirrel chase. Also, Rosie is a post-Mary addition, deposited in his home by a well-meaning islander who thought it might help the good doctor “get over” the loss of his wife. Henry goes to the ruins to visit Mary; Rosie, who never met Mary, doesn’t belong in that setting.

After Mary’s death, Henry paced and prowled the island from end to end, looking for some surcease to his grief. In addition to the cliffs looking out to sea, and the rocky patches of public beach where safe navigation required the full engagement of his brain to avoid falling, he often found himself on the path to the ruins. He’d make his way through the deepening silence and, after checking that there was no one else around, he’d sit in one of the stone chairs, and close his eyes. If he was lucky, Mary’s ghost—whether real or imagined, it didn’t seem to matter—would drift in from the cemetery down the road. She’d sit in one of the other chairs, and smile at him, and sometimes she’d reach over and rest her insubstantial hand on his.

He wasn’t exactly young when cancer took her, but in the intervening span he’d aged more than just eleven revolutions around the sun. Over the years, his hand on the stone table grew wrinkled and age-spotted, and the hair on his knuckles turned gray.

Mary was fifty-one when she passed, age starting to catch up to her, as it does with everyone. If she’d lived, her hands would have been their own testament to time.

But at the stone table, her skin is always smooth, and young. Here, her face and neck and hands are those of the woman Henry’d met at a party at a mutual friend’s house, decades ago.

There is music, and then there is Purple Rain.

While he was still a medical resident, Henry attended a party at a friend’s house in a rare moment of being young and human instead of only and always a doctor-in-training. Sitting on a torn and faded blue sofa was a young woman who introduced herself as Mary. Henry sat down next to her, clutching a napkin wrapped around pretzels and apple slices (as if the party had been thrown for a kindergarten class), and, incongruously, a pot brownie.

From his seat on the corner of the couch he swayed in time to the beat, and Mary told him, practically shouting to be heard over the nearby speaker, that she liked the song, just as Purple Rain was reaching its magnificent crescendo.

At least, it sounded like she said Isn’t this music great?

It might have been: Isn’t the muse a plate?

Nothing profound, in other words, unless positing the identity of a muse counts.

But he was smitten, and then, more quickly than he would have imagined possible, deeply, irrevocably, in love.

Poll Results and Reminders

The initial poll results are in: most readers still favor short episodes, and prefer my quirky and imperfect recordings. The poll is open “perpetually” if you’d like to weigh in, but I promise I won’t ask again!

Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting), and the Cast of Characters here. Episode links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved

Mary personified charmingly unpredictable. She reveled in the non sequitur, especially if the non part of it was fanciful. When Henry first met her, Mary was the Children’s Librarian at one of the Seattle public libraries, to the lasting delight of her patrons. The children who attended story hour, high school interns just learning the ropes, and young parents looking for a good book about the Terrible Twos—everyone adored her. Mary was not just loved but practically revered, in part because her blithe spirit loved nothing more than whimsy.

“Honey, the little apple tree in the garden is disappointed,” she once told him, during their first year on Looser Island.

“Why, what have I done now?”

“Yesterday, you left the house without kissing me goodbye,” Mary said.

“How does the little apple tree know I failed to kiss you goodbye yesterday?” he asked.

“I told her, of course,” Mary said, raising an eyebrow.

He made sure to kiss her goodbye the next morning, and every morning thereafter, until the day she said goodbye first, and left him forever.

After every trip to the ruins, Henry went home and had a whisky, neat.

Just one.

He knew the danger of trying to drown one’s sorrows in alcohol, having diagnosed it many times in his patients, so he kept it to a single glass.

He’d stand at the window of the elegant dining room, a room that would be musty and creaking with disuse if the housecleaner didn’t dust and vacuum it every week. With Rosie sitting or lying at his feet, he’d sip his whisky, and look out over the Salish Sea. Standing at that window, he’d seen violent sunsets, the clouds an angry bruised purple streaked with crimson, as if the sun was bleeding. And he’d seen tender sunsets, the sun laying a golden path on waters the hue and consistency of molten silver—“Inspirational poster scenes,” Mary used to call them. And ridiculously cheery sunsets, white clouds on blue sky like a child’s art project made with cotton balls and tempera paints, the setting sun presiding over jaunty white-capped waves plied by even jauntier sailboats, all painted in soft corals and pinks, a gentle goodnight to the islanders.

He never wearied of the view. Through all the stages of mourning, his time looking through that window always brought respite, if only briefly.

Just before leaving the dining room to give Rosie her dinner, Henry would touch the fairy tile in the corner of the built-in china cabinet.

For luck.

“I want a fairy tile.”

“But honey . . . .” Patience and impatience wrestled in his voice. Patience won. “We’ve already picked a northwest lodge motif for the house, and we’ve told the contractor how we want the dining room to look. You said this is what you wanted. We’ll have green tiles and brown tiles, and a few pine trees, for accent. A fairy . . . won’t fit in.”

“You’re right,” Mary said. “But we can hide it. We can put it in the corner at the end of where the built-in will be. It’d be covered by your grandmother’s china. No one would ever see it.”

“Then why have it?” Henry said. “If no one will know it’s there?”

“I’ll know,” Mary said, flashing an impish look at him. “There’ll be a fairy in a hidden corner of my dining room, and the thought will make me happy. Even more happy,” she added, “because it will be my secret.”

The local artist they’d hired to make the tiles pursed his lips at the request. Later, it turned out his talent vis-à-vis a specific image was pretty much limited to pine trees. The fairy looked less like Tinkerbell and more like a misshapen garden gnome that had been used as a soccer ball stand-in. But it was there and it delighted Mary.

After the house was finished, Mary would sometimes stand in the dining room just before dinner guests arrived. She’d look with pleasure at the cherry dining table and chairs, the leaded-glass doors to the built-ins housing a motley mix of china (from two sets of grandparents with wildly different tastes), and the warm wood wainscotting topped by a row of clay tiles, plain tiles interspersed with the occasional pine tree. Just before leaving the room to greet their guests, she’d touch the hidden fairy tile, and she’d smile.

Meet me here next week for Blue Eyed Marys.

“All right, then, tell me what’s going on.”

This is how Henry Johnson—Dr. Johnson, or Doc Johnson, or sometimes just Doc—begins every visit, with every patient.

Even if he knows the situation already.

Which he usually does.

Last year, while standing in line at the Apple Cart, Genevieve mentioned to Ronwen that Mrs. Prewitt’s palsy seemed to be getting worse. By the time Mrs. Prewitt came in for the battery of tests that seems to be de rigueur after a certain age, he’d already researched the latest studies and had samples of the two newest medications for age-related Essential Tremor.

And a few months ago, when he was at the post office waiting in line to retrieve a package, he heard Amelia saying to Gloria that the mail delivery to The Coffee Hut was late, which was odd because Sam was usually so punctual. (Only businesses in the village and homes on the wild western side of the island get mail delivery. Those who live elsewhere have to schlep themselves to the post office to pick up their mail, unless of course they’ve ordered something that will be delivered by Missy through one of the other shipping companies. No one really knows how the decision was made as to who got postal service and who did not, but everyone understands complaining about it will get you nowhere. Besides, hanging out and catching up at the post office is practically a social event, so most of the time it’s okay.)

Gloria said the mail was probably late because Sam twisted his ankle when he was jogging past The Dog House Café. She said she saw him fall, ran out to help, and ended up binding his ankle with a linen napkin from the restaurant.

Caroline, who was also in line, said that must be why he’d only delivered letters and junk mail to The Breckenridge Inn. “So I had to come in to pick up the new sheets we ordered,” she said. “We have to replace the set in Room 4,” she explained, “and you do not want to know what a guest did to the old sheets.”

“Yep, that’s need-to-know information,” Gloria laughed. “And we definitely don’t need to know.”

And then all three women turned to Larry, who was standing in front of Dr. Johnson and behind the women, and asked whether Sam shouldn’t have some kind of medical leave or workers’ comp or something, but he just shrugged. “I do wills and trusts,” he said, sounding almost sullen. “I don’t do employment law.” Everyone in line remembered his brief foray into employment law with Katie and the Apple Cart, and they nodded in tandem, like a row of bobble head dolls.

The next day, when Sam delivered the mail to Dr. Johnson’s office, Dr. Johnson told him he should come in that afternoon for an x-ray, just to be on the safe side. And Sam started to say how did you know but then he smiled, because that’s just the way it is on a small island.

Another time, the doctor passed Retha and Jill as he was walking around the village commons with his Airedale, Rosie (also known as Rosie the Impossible, Rosie the Incorrigible, and Oh-No-Rosie). They were sitting on a bench, talking companionably in the way that is unique to women who have been friends for a long time, and he heard Retha tell Jill she was going to stop by the clinic, even though she “hates effing doctors,” because, she said, “my wrist seizes up when I’m pouring a drink and I’m thinking it might be whaddayacallit, carpool tunnel.”

“Carpal tunnel syndrome,” he suggested, as Rosie dragged him away, and then he yelled over his shoulder, “I’ve got an opening tomorrow. Come and see me.”

But even when he already knows the reason for the visit, still he asks: “All right, then, tell me what’s going on.”

“I start to feel better the minute I hear you say that,” Caroline told him, when she came in to talk about a persistent fatigue and her fears that, you know, that’s what Kasumi kept saying, before she found out she had cancer.

“Kasumi has a couple of decades on you,” Dr. Johnson said. “As do I,” he added, even though that was irrelevant. He’d been feeling his age more and more lately, and when he looked at Caroline’s warm eyes and attractive face he suddenly felt ancient. “With all you have going on, tired is practically an item on your daily To Do list. Honestly, Caroline, the wonder of it is that you’re not more tired. Six kids . . . and how many dogs do you have now?”

“Four,” Caroline admitted, hanging her head as if was shameful to have so many dogs. “And two cats.”

“Right,” he said. “And you have goats to milk and you have cheese to make from the milk, and when summer comes you have to set up your stall at the farmer’s market to sell the cheese.”

Caroline laughed. “And I have an inn to run, and a veterinary practice. Okay, I get it, I come by my tiredness honestly. So,” she paused. “You don’t think it’s cancer?”

He sighed. Why did everyone expect him to make a diagnosis within the first sixty seconds of the visit?

“We’ll run some tests, Caroline, and then we’ll see where we are.”

“That’s the other thing you do that always makes me feel better,” Caroline said, looking pleased. “You poke a needle in my arm and you listen to my heart and make me pee in a cup, and by the time we’re done, all my symptoms are gone. It’s a miracle.”

“That’s me,” he said, “Doctor Miracle Maker.”

So usually he knows at least a little about the situation before a patient shows up in his exam room.

But this time, he’s had no forewarning, no overheard comment at the store or the post office to prepare him, and the response to his kindly All right, then . . . has, so far, only deepened the mystery.

It’s Friday, December 6, and Genevieve has squeezed in an appointment for Missy, just before Dr. Johnson would normally take his lunch. “She seemed pretty adamant that she needed to be seen today,” Genevieve tells him. “It sounded like it was an emergency.”

Missy’s sitting on the examination table when he comes in. She’s kicking one heel against the metal frame like a fractious child, and she startles when he enters. She doesn’t look like she’s in pain or suffering from some desperate illness that would require the island’s equivalent of urgent care. “All right then,” he says, but Missy cuts him off.

“So Jenny and me, we were at the old ruins last night, you know?” she says.

He nods, thinking December is an odd time to head for the woods, but then, Missy and Jenny pretty much define odd.

“At midnight,” she says.

Dr. Johnson’s nod becomes a little fainter.

“It was a full moon,” she says, as if that clarifies the situation.

Dr. Johnson shakes his head. “Missy, a boatload of money washed up on shore, a man turned up dead in the apartments, and we don’t really know how he died or why, or whether the two events are connected. It seems like a bad idea to be wandering around in the woods at midnight.”

“Well, when you put it that way, I see your point,” Missy says. “But that’s why we were there. Jenny wanted to kind of scope out the lay of the land, so we could, y’know, sage the island. And she wants to do the saging on winter solstice, which is coming up soon. December twenty-first. She wants to clear away all the bad JuJu or something, and she said the ruins are sacred, so she said we should do it there.”

“Okay, let’s start over,” Dr. Johnson says. “Why don’t you tell me your symptoms, and we’ll take it from there?”

“That’s the problem!” Missy says. “I don’t have any symptoms. I just think I’m going crazy!”

Reminders

Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting), and the Cast of Characters here. Episode links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved

In the exact center of the island, in a close and stifling wood, there are the crumbling ruins of . . . something. Five stone pillars, five stone chairs, and one massive stone table carved with strange runes and symbols and cracked down the middle, as if someone used the table to act out the Aslan story in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Trailing vines hang from every surface, cobwebs festoon every corner. Dust motes, quivering in the few pale shafts of sunlight that filter through the dense forest overstory, seem suspended in time.

Elsewhere on the island, the wind whistles through the topmost branches of the tall douglas firs and the shorter but still majestic madrones and the dry-moss festooned Garry oaks, or whispers through the ferns (licorice ferns and lady ferns and sword ferns), or dances playfully among the pale pink nootka roses and the yellow profusion of tumble mustard, or roars powerfully over the white-capped waters of the Salish Sea—the wind is a Presence in the San Juan islands.

Here, the wind is not just quiet, it is absent.

Elsewhere on the island, dogs bark and yip and whine and snuffle and howl. On the village commons, rabbits thump out the beginnings of a warning, then give up because, with few natural predators, they are out of the habit of giving or heeding warnings, and scarcely seem to notice if a hawk snatches a fellow leporid from the meadow. (“Hmm, there goes Fred. I liked Fred. Ah well, clover’s especially tasty this morning, don’t you think, Marv?”)

Near the marina on Gull Bay, there is always at least one blue heron who, when disturbed (usually by a human coming to his or her or their boat), whumps the air with its impossibly large wings, and complains about the disturbance, sounding like a cross between a pterodactyl and a cranky old man.

Bald eagles twitter, purple martins chirp, great horned owls rend the air with a most undignified screech.

But here among the ruins, there is absolute silence.

It is unsettling.

Some claim the ruins are Masonic. Others believe a witch’s coven met here and danced in the moonlight. Still others suggest it was a First Nation ceremonial site.

The islanders have resisted all suggestions to call in anthropologists who might examine the ruins and provide a definitive answer. Historian accounts that attempt to solve the mystery gather dust in the Looser Island Library.

No one really wants to know the truth, when the unsolved mystery is so delicious.

A couple of years ago, Dr. Johnson had been standing in line at the Gas-n-Go Mini Mart when he’d overheard Jenny’s theories on the old ruins.

“I think it was the Wiccans and the Samish that made them,” Jenny said, sounding authoritative.

She was so taken up in her musings she forgot what she was doing, and Charlie, the clerk, stood with his hand outstretched to receive the kombucha she was buying.

“M-m-my uncle says that’s white man revisionist-history b-bullshit,” Charlie said, his hand dropping to the counter. “He’s got some Indian in him.”

Jenny corrected him—It’s First Nation—and he looked worried about the idea that he might have been using the wrong words all along.

“Not the . . . F-F-F-First Nation around here in the islands,” he said. “Choctaw is what he is, he says, and he told me stories that would p-put hair on your chest, if you were a man, maybe even if you’re a girl, about how white people tried to connect Indian magic with witchcraft. Right before they burned the Indian guy or l-lady at the stake. He said Indians and witches, they each of ‘em have enough troubles on their own w-w-without lumping ‘em together.”

Dr. Johnson had never heard Charlie speak more than a few words at a time, and he wondered at the young man’s unexpected chattiness. Charlie was shy and be-pimpled and he stuttered, and his conversations with customers were mostly limited to Hey and How’s it going and No M-n-Ms today, huh? His increasing success with learning to play the trumpet from Mrs. Prewitt had already demonstrated a depth of character no one would have suspected, and now this.

But it shouldn’t have been a surprise; the ruins brought out the strange and unusual in everyone.

Now, feeling increasingly befuddled, Dr. Johnson suggests, “Perhaps you should start by telling me where it hurts.”

“It doesn’t hurt anywhere,” Missy says, patiently, as if talking to a slightly obtuse old man.

Maybe that’s exactly what he is, he thinks. Less than all there, an old man with a big chunk of himself missing, a hole in his heart and in his head. A Mary-sized hole.

Even after eleven years, the loss of his wife feels fresh and new and raw.

“I just think I’m losing my mind, and I think you should send me to a shrink,” Missy says. “Because Jenny and me, we saw a ghost at the ruins.”

Meet me here next week to meet Mary and her fairy tile . . .

The “ruins” were inspired by the wonderfully spooky McMillin family mausoleum which, as some readers know, is on San Juan Island. The mausoleum is replete with masonic symbols, and some of the chairs house actual cremated remains. Read more here.

This episode again features cameos by characters from Book 1 and Book 2. If you’d like to read (or re-read) their stories, you can find them in the links below.

Missy and Jenny: here and here and here (spoiler alert in the third link for Book 2: What the Dogs Know)

Caroline and The Breckenridge Inn: here and here

Gloria and The Dog House Cafe: here and here

Larry’s foray into employment law: here and here

Amelia and The Coffee Hut: here and here

Retha and Jill: here and here and here

Charlie learns to play the trumpet: here and here

The art in the gallery, above, has nothing to do with the poll, book launch, or the news for readers. But really, I’ll take any excuse to trumpet their work. The gallery showcases pieces by three of my favorite people, all of whom have generously shared their art with The Dogs of Looser Island over the years: Flower © Gini Chin All Rights Reserved; Little Charlie © Martha Spieker All Rights Reserved; and The Swing © Bonita Taylor All Rights Reserved.

Find Gini Chin’s marvelous writing, art, promo trailers (see below for her latest!), and book covers at Spot312.com, and connect with her on Instagram @gini_chin_designs and @ginichinwrites. Find more wonderful art by Martha Spieker at spiekerart.com, and on Instagram @spiekerart.

News

I can’t give you an end to the war (how I wish I could), or a cure for cancer (ditto), but here’s a smidge—an iota, or a fraction of an iota—of cheerful news: if you’re curious about future episodes, the Table of Contents now lists all the chapters in order, along with the name of the character whose perspective that chapter shares.1

So now you have a sneak preview, just as you’d get from a complete (i.e. not serialized) novel.

Deborah Guyol Book Launch

Friend and writing coach Deborah Guyol is launching Stealing Soutine, the sequel to her novel, Cary Grant Slept Here (a delightful caper with several delicious twists along the way, set mostly in a villa in France). Check out the video trailer by the incredible, multi-talented Gini Chin! Available on all the usual websites, including bookshop.org.

Poll

As we dive into Chapter 3 tomorrow, I wanted to take a moment to check in again.

My polls are not as much fun as Dave Barry’s—no Scottish-and-I’m-offended option (and anyway I’m mostly Irish, so that would never work for me)—but I’d still love to know your thoughts, if you’re willing to share them.

Episode Length. The earlier polls overwhelmingly voted for shorter episodes of 5 -7 pages. I have cheated on two episodes, as there was no natural stopping point until page 8, but I’ve mostly stuck with readers’ expressed preference. Occasionally, it sacrifices the flow (IMHO) to create a stopping point, so I’ve decided to check in again.

We are now 2 chapters and 9 episodes in. We have another 28 episodes (about 7 months) to go.

What say you, friends?

Voiceover. I love love love reading aloud. My dream job would be some combination of children’s librarian for story time and recording audio books. But I know that, no matter how many takes I do, I always make mistakes, stumble over words, etc.

Marvelous friend, musician, and engineer extraordinaire Todd Goldsmith has generously agreed to lend me his expertise and equipment, so I can improve my recordings, but even after that happens it will still be just me, with no formal training or professional qualifications.

Which means I would understand completely if readers prefer the more polished sound of Substack’s voiceover option.2

Thoughts?

Thank you, as always, for reading, for sharing your thoughts, and for joining me on this journey!

Next Saturday, Episode 10: First Do No Harm, Dr. Henry Johnson’s story.

December 7—I’ll always remember the date, right up until the moment I shuck the mortal coil and, hopefully, head heavenward.

On this day, as always, Jesus let me know with a soft whuff that he needed to go out. In spite of the steady downpour I could see through my window, I prepared to join him. With the discovery of the body in Theresa’s apartment, I no longer felt cocooned and sheltered in my home, I felt isolated. Getting out of the apartment was the necessary (if damp, at this time of year) solution.

I grumbled and sighed as I pulled on my voluminous rain poncho and followed Jesus into the cold, wet world, never suspecting that I was facing my own personal Pearl Harbor, that everything comfortable and predictable was about to blow up in my face.

Sitting here, scribbling away with a cup of tea, I don’t know if I now believe it was a good thing I ventured out that day, with Jesus as my only companion. If I knew then what I know now, would it change what I did that day?

Would I have wanted to see Mac again?

Reminders

Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting). Find the Cast of Characters here. Both links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

Note that the next bit is key to solving the mystery, so there is a paywall. Don’t forget that you can activate a 7-day free trial to keep reading, or email me to comp a paid subscription.

Also, some items in the list of historical events occurring on December 11, below, are political. If you prefer not to think about current events you can, of course, skip over the list.

© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved

Read more

“Shall we go for a ramble, Jesus?”

Jesus wags his tail gently in the affirmative. There must have been a time when that tail was practically lethal, but now everything he does is gentle. If I’d said Shall we take over the world in a bloody coup? I imagine he’d turn his kind, intelligent eyes to me and give the dogly equivalent of If you like . . . .

He doesn’t really need my company when the goal is to go out and do his business, but since getting the eviction notice I’ve tried to be a better “puppy parent” (as the kids are calling it these days). I join him on his walks, biodegradable poop bags in my pocket, leash in hand in case a need arises to pretend we (Jesus and I) are in compliance with leash laws.

Once again, I’ve started in the middle, so let me back up and explain that Jesus isn’t my dog in any traditional sense. Some tenant in Unit 4 brought him in, years ago. Yes, that was and remains a violation of the apartment rules, but Looser Island isn’t really a rules-following kind of place. As far as I know, no one has ever raised an objection, or even so much as raised an eyebrow. Until now, of course.

That was at least three tenants ago, but every time a tenant moved out Jesus refused to move with him, or her, or them. I don’t know if each prior tenant actively passed the baton of ownership, all I know is that Jim, the Water District Engineer slash graphic novelist with the ridiculously-named Boxer, approached me as I was lugging my boxes in and explained the situation. He told me he always took care of Jesus in between tenants, and asked if I was willing to take on the task. I took one look at the beautiful black German Shepherd and said yes without skipping a beat. I’ve always loved dogs and Jesus is especially easy to love.

He’s been my faithful companion ever since, and no stupid eviction notice was ever going to separate us.

Reminders

Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting). Find the Cast of Characters here. Both links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved

Back to my story. I’m tempted to stay inside on this cold December day, let Jesus do his thing without me, but I feel restless, and uneasy, and discombobulated, and I’m hoping a walk through the village will help.

You see, I was the one who found the body in Unit 2, and I was the one who made the anonymous call to the Sheriff’s office, and told them I thought someone should check Theresa Scowager’s apartment.

I can’t think of any reason to hide it here. This is my story, and though I always imagine someone reading my history, someday, I can’t think of anyone who might want to peruse my memories, so that’s probably delusional. Other than readers of the Looser Island Bulletin (and, back in the day, Chronicle readers of my reviews of Blue’s shows), no one has ever expressed any interest in my scribblings, so it’s extremely unlikely anyone will read what I’ve written in these pages.

But even if it’s pointless, I’m going to continue as I began so many years ago: at the end of every day, I sit down with a cup of tea, a good ball point pen, and a lined notebook, and I spill my guts. Mundane tidbits and embarrassing secrets (I hate spinach salad, unless it’s loaded with bacon bits and candied walnuts, which kind of defeats the point), and every other detail of the day. Until recently, those recollections have been the very definition of humdrum.

Every so often I go back through some of my journals, not just the most recent but also some of the older notebooks, and I add to the continuing saga that may someday be known as The Life of Genevieve “Vivvie” Macy, 1969 - ???

Who would ever want to read that saga?

Well, I can think of one person, but I don’t know where she is, and she doesn’t know where I am, so I remain pretty darn confident that no one will read these words, which is why I feel comfortable disclosing, here and only here, in this memoir-ish summary of my journals to date, that I was the one who found the body in Theresa’s apartment.

More background for you. I moved into the apartments about four years ago, after the owner of the house I’d been living in sold the property. I was still learning my new CNA duties at the time, so it was a lot of change for me, all at once. I soldiered on. Anyway, a few weeks after I moved in, a woman who lived in the unit above me locked herself out, and on a whim we tried my key on her door. It worked. So we went around and knocked on other people’s doors, and asked if they’d mind if we tried my key, and they all said sure. As best we can tell, apparently all the locks are the same, and all our keys work on all the doors. You (my fictional reader) might think I’d care, but I don’t. I have nothing worth stealing, and I’ve always felt safe from psychos and murderers, here on the island.

Strike that. Reverse it. I used to feel safe, until I found a dead body in Theresa’s apartment.

Here’s another bit of background that is important to my current situation. When Theresa deigns to visit, she stays at the Breckenridge Inn. She wouldn’t be caught dead actually living in the apartments she supposedly manages. Pun/double entendre intended. And she rarely, if ever, responds when there’s a problem.

So, after we complained about the terrible smell—I think we called the management company in mid-November, but Theresa didn’t bother to come to the island until November 25—it was a surprise to no one that she showed up, issued a bunch of eviction notices, spent the night at the Breckenridge Inn, and left the island again without actually investigating the situation or solving the problem.

I’d interviewed her, of course, before she left, and was pleased as punch that she agreed to withdraw the eviction notices. But as I told her, we were going to keep on protesting until we saw something in writing. I’m not stupid, and neither are my neighbors. We know a casual comment in a coffee shop doesn’t get you jack-you-know-what, legally speaking.

So Theresa left, and we waited, and protested every morning, standing outside for as long as we could stand the cold rain that is the norm this time of year, but none of us heard anything more from Cruella de Ville aka Theresa.

About a week later, I finally called the management company (a California number—figures), and they confirmed that Theresa had quit, and said they hadn’t found a replacement yet. Theresa’d warned me she was leaving, during the interview, but I hadn’t realized she was truly just going to walk off the job and leave us all hanging.

The smell wasn’t as bad by then, but I’d still get a whiff of something now and then. Knowing no one was going to show up and save us any time soon, I took the initiative and strolled past all the units, and that’s when I realized the odor was localized around Unit 2, Theresa’s unit.

I’d never done anything with my discovery that my key fit all the apartments—I don’t have any desire to go snooping around anyone else’s place—but at that point I decided I’d better take a look.

Something else you should know, to make sense of this: Theresa’s apartment, Unit 2 (there is no Unit 1, go figure) is the last unit on the floor. Beyond her exterior wall is a big old marshy field that can’t be built on because ducks live there, or some such thing. She uses Unit 3, between her apartment and mine, for maintenance storage. In my opinion, it’s kind of outrageous that, with the shortage of housing on the island, an entire unit is unavailable just so management has a place to store the brooms, but what’re you going to do? Also, the tenant in the unit above hers goes off island from November to March (lucky stiff—pun/double entendre not intended this time). What I’m saying is that there is a buffer around Theresa’s apartment that might explain why even I wasn’t sure, until that moment, where the smell was coming from, in spite of the fact that my unit is closest to hers.

As I write this now, I can’t imagine how we hadn’t already figured it out. Or maybe we did, and our brains told us that couldn’t be right. But as I stood on the dusty welcome mat in front of Theresa’s apartment I suddenly knew what I’d find if my key managed to unlock the door.

The key worked, the door opened, and stretched out on the floor in front of me I saw exactly what I already knew I’d see: a body.

I’d seen cadavers during the in-person portion of my CNA classes, but nothing could have prepared me for that. I won’t describe it, other than to say it was horrible.

I made an anonymous call to the Sheriff’s office, even made an attempt to disguise my voice, and then hid in my apartment until I saw the coroner’s van arrive.

A few days later, all of us tenants banded together and hired a cleaning company that specializes in getting rid of the smell of decomposing bodies—who knew such a thing even existed?—and sent the bill to the management company.

The smell was gone after that, but I wasn’t alone in feeling unmoored. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Who was the man?

Was he afraid?

Did he die alone?

And:

Will I die alone, like that? Will they find my body, weeks later? Will anyone care?

And then there was another thought, buzzing around in almost every Looser Island conversation: was there a connection between the boat that washed up on Kameme Beach the day after Halloween, the one with all that money, and the dead man?

It sounds like the blurb on the back of a book-cover: The boat, the dog, the money, and the body.

We’re living in a damn Agatha Christie novel.

It’s not as much fun as you might think.

Meet me here next week for Episode 9, when Mac barrels back into Genevieve’s life . . .

It was rediscovering my old journals that allowed me to put together this sort of . . . pseudo-memoir.

I found the box when I moved into the Maple Lane Apartments, a hodgepodge of spiral bound notebooks, the top set in pretty good shape, the next few dusty and disintegrating, with fading ink, the journals at the bottom speckled with mold, their pages glued together by spores.

Clean white pages with clear crisp script . . . barely legible ramblings . . . festering mildewed memories.

A metaphor for my life, in other words.

After I moved to San Francisco, my parents called every Sunday, when they got home from church. At first, I didn’t tell them I was in love. I didn’t want them to ruin it with questions and cautionary advice. I knew they’d ask When do we get to meet him?, and then they’d send money for plane tickets, and then, when Mac and I arrived, my sister would tear him apart, cell by cell. Polite, midwestern questions would lead to subtle midwestern disapproval that might be lost on Mac but would inevitably poison my happiness.

But I couldn’t avoid them forever. So, after a few months of routinely missing their calls (the lack of clean dishes at my place had reached crisis proportions and we started spending most of our time at Mac’s), I broke down and gave them Mac’s phone number, along with the barest details: we’re dating, no we’re not living together, we just, uh, go to his place “after church,” he’s in construction, his last name is MacNair but everyone calls him Mac. Yes, Dad, like the hamburger. No, Dad, I can’t come for a visit right now. Yes, Mom, I’ll try to come home for Christmas. I’m fine. Don’t worry.

It was during this blissful time that I discovered a knack for journalism. Here’s how it happened.

“Play that one again,” one of my roommates said. (It was either Scott or Todd—I can’t remember which, and my journal didn’t say.) It was a Saturday, and we were back at my place just long enough to take care of some laundry, since my building had facilities and Mac’s basement apartment did not. In between loads, Mac was fiddling with a song he’d written, running those clever, surprisingly nimble fingers across his guitar strings. “I really like it,” Scott-or-possibly-Todd said.

Mac was lost in his music so Scott-or-possibly-Todd turned to me and said, “Vivvie, make him play it again!”

Vivvie was Mac’s pet name for me, and everyone else had just adopted it, as if there was no such person as Genevieve, only Vivvie, which suited me just fine.

Mac smiled, and played it again.

You’d think I’d remember the song, since that was the seminal event, the before-and-after moment, but I don’t. All I remember is that my roommate was right, it was a catchy, punk-rocky tune, with pleasingly angsty words. Pretty soon our other roommate, Suze, came in and started accompanying Mac on drums (by which I mean she played wooden spoons on the speaker and various other hard surfaces), and Scott-or-possibly-Todd started singing along, even harmonizing on the chorus, and I stomped my feet in time and added my voice, and after the fourth or fifth rendition, someone knocked on the door. We all assumed it was going to be some version of Knock that shit off but it was a guy named Brian, who we’d later find out owned a small indie record label, and who wanted to know who was playing that fuckin’ awesome tune? And could he share it with this one band he knew?

Of course Mac said yes, come on in, man, we’ll play it again, anyone got a tape recorder?

Brian played it for the band he’d just signed onto his indie label, a band called simply Blue. Blue was a crazy underground success by, believe it or not, some high school kids. At nineteen, I felt practically ancient when I found out how old they were. Or rather, how young they were.

The Blue kids loved the song, and worked up their own version of it without ever asking Mac if it was okay, or offering him any compensation.

What can I say? We were all young and stupid. It apparently didn’t occur to them to offer to pay Mac, and it didn’t occur to Mac to ask.

Within a short time Mac’s evenings were filled with jam sessions at other people’s houses, sessions that went on for hours, sometimes all night, not just with Blue but with other musicians and musician-wannabes, anyone who had an instrument and space to accommodate a bunch of barely-washed creative-types.

At first, I tried not to feel resentful, but “trying not to feel” something never works. You feel what you feel, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help. And how I felt at the time was pissed, mad as a hornet at the intrusion into our little world.

Mac noticed, and he sweetly tried to make me feel included. “Hey, Vivvie’s got a nice voice,” he’d say during a jam session. “Why don’t we let her do vocals on this one?” But it was an occasional, offhand effort, and it only served to highlight, in my mind, what I’d lost.

A year or so later, when Brian said the band was really starting to get noticed and hinted that their first album was going to be coming out and he wished someone would do PR because anything coming from his own label wouldn’t have as much punch, Mac said maybe I could write up some reviews and get them published in the newspaper, since I worked at the Chronicle. Which was technically true. I had left my job at the coffee shop and I was working for the San Francisco Chronicle. But suggesting I was a journalist who could write reviews stretched the definition of harmless fib to the breaking point—I was a filing clerk and “errand boy” (sans male gender). Mac knew I loved to write, and he remembered, bless his expansive heart, that I had said the Chronicle would consider freelance work, even if the writer lacked a college education, journalism credentials, or experience. All that mattered was that the writing was good, and the story was interesting.

“Fuckin’ awesome,” Brian said. (His vocabulary was somewhat limited.)

So I started attending their shows. I couldn’t have afforded it on my $4.25 an hour wage, but since I now had a title (Blue Publicist), I got in free, and just had to scrounge enough cash for a couple of beers and maybe a sandwich. I’d listen, watch the crowd, and cheer loudly, especially when the band credited Mac before launching into his song. Then I’d write it up, leaning heavily on reviews I’d seen in the Chronicle and other newspapers. The first few times my review was quickly tossed into the round file. (Actually San Fran was prescient, and had already started a recycling program, so unwanted paper was tossed into a rectangular bin headed for shredding and then recycling. But you get the idea.)

Then I hit my stride, and one of my reviews was accepted, and then another. The Chronicle paid a few cents a word, in those days. Woo-fuckin’-hoo, as Brian would say (again with the limited vocabulary, heavy on the f-bombs). Some of my later reviews were even referenced by other outlets, so I did achieve a bit of notoriety.

This went on for a while, and then Blue came out with the promised first album under Brian’s label, which in turn gave greater credence to my reviews. My writing improved and I was unofficially accepted at the Chronicle as the Blue reviewer and publicist. The money for my reviews was crap but it helped that I had also been promoted to Senior File Clerk, which came with a whopping $0.38 per hour raise.

Also, that’s where I learned to love footnotes. If you’ve read the Looser Island Bulletin (989 subscribers, thank you very much), you know how much I adore footnotes. The Chronicle’s Editor in Chief hated them, but I snuck them in regularly by giving him the proof copy without footnotes, and then adding the footnotes in after he’d signed off on the piece. Because I made sure they escaped editorial review, I could say anything in those footnotes, and often did. Political commentary, snarky points about sexism in the newspaper business, bad puns and even worse jokes. Stuff that would have been circled and x-ed out and probably even earned a bunch of red-ink exclamation points, if the editor had seen it, but he never read the paper after it came out.

“I spend every minute of every blessed day editing the paper,” he often said (though he didn’t use the word “blessed”). “Why would I want to read it again after it’s published?”

In short, my life history includes a couple of years in which I was mild-mannered newspaper clerk by day, rock band reviewer by night.

Don’t get me wrong; this is not one of those glorious misspent youth stories. I was never a groupie. I didn’t even really like punk music, and I didn’t enjoy live shows. Words screamed tunelessly into the mic, smoky bars, warm beer, and getting to bed at three in the morning was not my thing. And I missed time alone with Mac. Desperately. He wasn’t actually playing with Blue, but he went to most of their shows. They always called him out, when they played his song, and he always stood up and waved and blew kisses toward the stage. He told me he kept hoping someone would approach him, afterward, ask him to be their songwriter, and then his future would be made, and he could quit that goddamned construction job.

“I thought you liked your job,” I said one morning, when he was repeating that mantra. It was a rare moment of peace, each of us slurping coffee, sitting at the little table strategically placed to catch a few rays of morning sunshine from a window set high in the wall of his basement apartment.

“Me?” Mac said, as if I could have been talking to someone else. “Nah. I hate that fuckin’ work.” He’d unconsciously picked up punk-speak.

“But you told me you could get lost in it, nothing to think about but how to put up a building that wouldn’t fall down in the next big earthquake. No Willie Horton ads, no Gulf war, no Bushian bullshit, just you and your tools.”

“Did I say that?” Mac said. “’Bushian bullshit’?”

“I made that up, but that was the gist of it.”

“You’re amazing with your words, Vivvie,” he said.

“We make a good pair,” I said. “You’re amazing with your hands.”

Then he set down his coffee cup, stood up, and led me back to bed for the first glorious sex we’d had in weeks.

Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Okay, neither of us was into drugs at the time, but almost everyone we knew was. (Also, after Blue went on tour, and Mac followed them around like an overgrown, bear-shaped groupie, addiction came for him as it does for so many in that world.)

But on that one, sun-filled, rumple-sheeted morning, my life was everything I’d ever wanted.

Meet me here next week to read about the discovery of the body, and who made that discovery.

Note: As stated on the Disclaimer page on the Dogs website, and reiterated before every new book in the Dogs series, this is a work of fiction. (And if you really feel like nerding out on disclaimers in general, check out Disclaimers: More Interesting Than You Think.)

The brief history of the band “Blue” was partially inspired by the amazing rise of Green Day (from high school garage band to chart-topping success), but this entire segment is pure fiction; I am aware of no situation that bears even the remotest similarity to the story I’ve created for Mac and Genevieve.

We have a wealth of colorful characters here in the islands, people who have lived fascinating lives, but I am not aware of any connection between any real life resident and the band Green Day, or any situation in which that band or any other failed to pay a songwriter.

Also, I don’t know anyone who matches the description of my Genevieve Macy or her life story. (Though if there is someone out there and she’d like to be included, I’m always happy to do a rewrite!)

Some say Jesus saves.

There’s truth in that statement, but not in the way you might think, at least not for me.

Sorry, I imagine you’re confused: Jesus is the dog who lives with me at the Maple Lane Apartments.

Sweet old Jesus.

He saved me from loneliness, from getting stuck inside my own head, from being mired in the past, from seeing myself on a one-way street with no turnoffs or just-for-the-hell-of-it side trips.

You know who else saved me? Doc Johnson, my boss.

It wasn’t easy getting my CNA at forty-five (five years ago, now), but Doc Johnson was adamant that I could do it, especially after we found out I could take most of the classes online.

“I don’t know any medical terminology,” I said. “Other than the stuff I’ve picked up working for you.”

“You write the Looser Island Bulletin,” he said. “You’re good with words. You’ll figure it out.”

“What if I fail?” I said.

“What if you don’t?” he said.

Long story short, Doc’s confidence in me gave me confidence in myself. Just one of many gifts that man gave me.

I’m not saying he’s some kind of saint (unlike Jesus the dog). He’s still a man, after all. Sometimes, when I go into the exam room to tidy up before the next patient arrives, I discover that while he was in there, updating the chart notes or what have you, he’s been letting fly the most godawful farts, and I have to hold my breath. The Doc loves Italian food, Indian food—if it’s got onions and garlic, he’ll eat it, with the inevitable results.

And he brings his dog Rosie to the office with him. I adore Rosie, but there’s a reason her nicknames are: Rosie the Impossible, Rosie the Incorrigible, and Oh-No-Rosie! The best I can say about it is that her antics distract everyone from worrying about diagnoses, the pain of a shot or a blood draw, etcetera.

And he gets moody, especially when he thinks about Mary, his wife who died.

I’m sympathetic, but I’m also a little impatient. It’s been, what, over a decade? Eleven years, actually, now that I think of it. It’s not that I think he should move on. Christ, grief just seems to hang on like a damn poltergeist that you think you’ve exorcised and then wham! it drops a chandelier on you, out of the blue. It’s just that I think he needs to at least try. Go on a date, talk to a therapist, buy a motorcycle, learn to crochet. Something.

Never having been married before, maybe I just don’t know how it feels.

I do know how it feels to be in love.

And how it feels when the person you love slides out of your life, leaving a chasm that can’t be filled, as if their leaving hollowed out your heart and cracked its shell, and every new drop of happiness that comes in just trickles away through the cracks.

Reminders

Find links to the Episodes in order in the Table of Contents here (new episodes added within a day or two of posting). Find the Cast of Characters here. Both links and Cast of Characters are also available on The Dogs of Looser Island website www.alaughingdog.com.

© Shari Lane 2026 All Rights Reserved

Let me back up and introduce myself.

My name is Genevieve Macy, and I am the part-time receptionist and CNA for Dr. Henry Johnson, and the sole reporter for and publisher of the Looser Island Bulletin. My looks are unimportant, but since readers always seem to want to know, I’ll give you a verbal sketch: I have black hair, and blue eyes that a friend once described as intense. Also, I am “traditionally built,” as the narrator in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency says. I like that phrase. It works in books set in Botswana where that is, presumably, commonly-used terminology; here on Looser Island, most people would just politely refer to me as “heavy-set.”

I’ve gotten over worrying about it. I’ve tried every diet known to man—or woman—and every exercise regime. (God I hate exercise. Lauren at the Apple Cart says the only reason to run is if there’s a bear after you, and I agree.) Since moving into the Maple Lane Apartments and inheriting Jesus-the-dog, I occasionally walk with him, but that doesn’t really count as exercise. At Jesus’s age, it’s a peaceful ramble, nothing to get the heart rate up or burn any calories. That’s okay with me. I am what I am.

I’ve always been this way, or at least, I’ve never been what you’d call petite. Which was not a winning trait for a kid growing up in a small town in Indiana, especially for a slightly nerdy kid who preferred reading and writing to sports or pretty much anything else. After graduating from high school, I knew I had to get away, had to find some place where my entire identity wasn’t summed up by my size, where I could reinvent myself. So I moved to San Francisco, got a job in a neighborhood coffee shop, and rented an apartment with four other kids in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

Just so we’re clear, by 1988 the place affectionately known as The Hashbury was no longer the scene of wild experimentation and free love, though everyone tried to pretend it still was.

Anyway, back to the “I do know what it feels like to be in love” comment.

So, Mac was a friend of one of my roommates, an older man (by which I mean he was twenty-two to my just-barely-nineteen). When I met him, he was dating someone else, a wisp of a thing with no hint of fat on her. No hint of personality, either. Mac had a big beard, big hair, a big booming voice. He went barefoot all the time, even in the cold San Francisco winter. Well, he wore the obligatory steel-toed boots when he went to work at his construction job, but only because it was required. The rest of the time, he carried a beat-up pair of Birkenstocks in an even more beat-up backpack, and only put them on when shoes were mandatory (like in a restaurant, which neither of us could afford, so my earlier statement stands: he went barefoot all the time, except when he was at work). He was an oversized hobbit, hairy toes and all.

From the get-go I fell in love with those toes. That voice. That everything.

I decided to get rid of the girl. I don’t even remember her name, now. Just knew she was toast, history, whatever metaphor you like. Mac was meant for me.

“Anybody else want pizza? I got a bunch of big tips at the coffee shop yesterday. I’m buying.”

“I can’t eat cheese,” Wispy Girl said.

“Your loss. Mac?”

“Pizza?” he said, in the same voice someone might say Nirvana? “I’m in!” he said.

I swear the neighbors in the next block probably heard him. I was surprised they didn’t show up at the door demanding a slice.

He played his guitar while we waited for the delivery. Wispy Girl said the music hurt her ears, and floated away. I moved closer, and asked him if he knew Are You Going to Scarborough Fair, and if he’d teach me to play guitar. I could already picture us, holed up in my tiny bedroom at the back of the apartment, sitting together on my mattress on the floor. (I couldn’t afford a real bed, or a dresser, for that matter, and anyway there wasn’t enough space in the room for any other furniture.) He’d put his arms around me to show me how to play, and then as long as he was there, he’d bury his face in my hair, maybe kiss my neck, experimentally, to see if I liked it.

And I knew I would.

Like it, that is.

It didn’t happen exactly that way, but within a few months Wispy Girl started dating a quiet angry poet who lived down the hall, and Mac and I were playing the instrument of each others’ bodies every night on that old mattress, turning my closet of a room into Shangri-La.

I’ve never been so happy, not before and not since. I know this for a fact, it’s not rose-tinted memory, because I still have my journals from those days, and each page is suffused and inundated with joy. At the coffee shop, there were no rude customers; I had infinite compassion for what they might be going through that made them so surly. Roommates who didn’t do their chores? Ah well, when all the dishes were dirty Mac and I used paper plates, and when we ran out of paper plates we went to Mac’s place, a basement apartment that smelled of mold and sweaty construction boots but that was otherwise clean, because it turned out, unexpectedly, my big burly man liked things tidy.

Meet me here next week for Rock ‘n’ Roll—how Mac “slid out of” Genevieve Macy’s heart. You’ll have to wait for Episode 8 to find out who discovered the body at the Maple Lane Apartments, and still later episodes to learn if Mac is only ancient history.