The Dog of the North

THE DOG OF THE NORTH Elizabeth McKenzie Copyright 4th Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk HarperCollinsPublishers Macken House 39/40 Mayor Street Upper Dublin 1 D01 C9W8 Ireland This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2023 Copyright © Elizabeth McKenzie 2023 Cover design by Ola Galewicz Elizabeth McKenzie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Information on previously published material appears here. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008561413 Ebook Edition © March 2023 ISBN: 9780008561437 Version: 2023-01-19 Dedication For C.E.R. Epigraph “For a while I went berserk and wished it would never end …” Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Part 1 Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Part 2 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Part 3 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Elizabeth McKenzie About the Publisher Part 1 1 My plan was to catch the ten o’clock train from Salinas to Santa Barbara, seeing as I had no car and a few problems to deal with there. It is never convenient to be without a car in California, but I was pretty sure I would be able to borrow my grandfather’s Honda station wagon once I arrived. And Burt Lampey would pick me up. Though I had to leave suddenly, the timing was good, as I’d been living in a motel for the past three weeks and was looking for a good excuse to quit my job. You might say the Santa Barbara crises had been timed perfectly for my circumstances. Extricating myself from Santa Cruz, the site of my most recent failures, was very welcome, actually a relief. So I took a bus to Watsonville, transferring to another that would take me through Castroville to the station, and, seeing as how chaotic things had been recently, the thought of being a passenger with nothing to do for the day but sit still while in motion was something to look forward to. Even so, I was on edge. After all, I’d be facing two unpleasant situations through which great anger was sure to be directed at me. I was used to being the object of anger, especially recently, but that didn’t make it any easier. Adding to my general unease were thoughts of what I was leaving behind. In the past twenty-four hours I’d abruptly left my job, burning a bridge that I was happy to cross for the last time, and I’d confronted my husband, Sherman: I know all about Bebe Sinatra and the cocaine. True, I took the cowardly way and wrote emails, but they were masterpieces of obfuscation. In no way did they reveal the depth of my disgust at what precipitated this rupture. They were the whimper rather than the bang at the end of my world, but I could not move forward if I were to permit myself the full brunt of my feelings. As the bus neared Salinas, I started to breathe evenly. A hair glinted on my sleeve; I pulled it off and let it fly out the slightly opened window into the fields of brussels sprouts and artichokes flanking the highway. A rotten smell, like that from the neglected vegetable bin at the bottom of my last refrigerator, was blowing in. Despite the fact that I was finished with Sherman, I wondered where he was and what he was doing, and if I’d always wonder, no matter how humiliating the final days of our time together. For instance, last month, pouring Sherman’s dirty clothes into the washer, I discovered a slightly worn pink thong. “Yuck, what’s this?” I said. “Oh. I found a bag of stuff at a bus stop. Thought maybe you might like it.” Repulsed, I held up the abbreviated scrap. “But the back part went up somebody else’s buttock crevice.” “Can’t you just say crack like everybody else?” Sherman said with disgust, peeling back yet another layer of his true feelings toward me. “Sure. Whose crack was it anyway?” Nothing but anguish would compel me to say a thing like that. Eventually I boarded the train and settled in. Just after the Zephyr left the station, the train door whooshed open, ushering in a cloud of patchouli oil and the sound of jingling metal objects. A woman came up the aisle and purposefully took the seat across from me. Small brass bells and coins had been sewn onto her billowy patchwork skirt. She then made eye contact and asked if I’d like to have my palm read for twenty dollars. Twenty dollars was a lot to me, but there I was, heading off into a great unknown. Once I dealt with the issues in Santa Barbara, my future was up for grabs. I was like the strand of hair blowing out the window, uprooted, alone. If ever there was a time I might want my palm read, this was it. So I agreed to it and she took my right hand and began to study the fleshy side, tracing her finger along some of the lines. At last she said, “I can see that in your past lives you experienced many episodes of aggression. Here”—she pointed to