All That I Dread Read online

  All That I Dread

  A K-9 Search and Rescue Story

  Linda J. White

  Copyright 2019 Linda J. White

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations in books and critical reviews. For information, contact Windy Bay Books, P.O. Box 4, Somerville VA 22739.

  The persons and events portrayed in this work of fiction are the creations of the author. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover design: June Padgett, Bright Eye Designs

  First Printing, May 2019

  Printed in the United States of America

  Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version) copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishing. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  White, Linda J. 1949-

  All That I Dread/ Linda J. White

  ISBN-13 978-0-9912212-6-4 Paperback

  ISBN-13 978-0-9912212-7-1 ebook

  For Becky,

  whose encouragement, enthusiasm, and help

  have kept me going

  Amid thoughts from visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men,

  dread came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones shake.

  Job 4:13-14

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Linda J. White

  1

  Suddenly, the ground gave way under my feet. Welcome to my life.

  I slid partway down the ditch on slippery Virginia red clay. My dog kept going. I could hear him crashing through the forest. I forced myself to my feet, grabbed a root, and pulled myself up the slope. Which way had he gone?

  Luke answered the question for me. He came racing back through the woods barking, jumped up, and planted two big feet on my chest. I stumbled back, my arms windmilling.

  Emily put her hand in the middle of my back and shoved me forward. “Go, go!”

  “Thanks,” I cried and raced after my large German shepherd.

  The subject of our search was an “elderly man who had wandered off from a home nearby.” Actually, he was a search-and-rescue dog handler named Nathan Tanner. I didn’t know much about him, only that he was the training director of the volunteer SAR group I wanted to join.

  When I caught up to my dog, I found him dancing around the guy.

  “Okay now, play, play!” Emily instructed.

  I jerked the Kong out of my pocket. “Good dog! Good Luke.” I threw the toy for him, admiring his body, his athleticism, his grace. His black-and-gold coat gleamed in the sunlight filtering through the trees. Pride filled my heart.

  Three more tosses and I ended the game. “Good dog, good Luke! Enough, now.” I shoved the toy back in my pocket and held up my hands. Luke waited a moment, then turned and found a stick to harass.

  I looked at the others, trying not to grin. My dog had worked it!

  “They performed really well as a team,” Emily said, looking at Nathan. Sweat beaded her brow. The 75-degree day carried with it a boatload of humidity.

  The man brushed his clothes off, twigs and leaves fluttering to the ground. I profiled him, old habits dying hard. He stood about five feet eight, maybe a hundred and sixty pounds, mid-forties, with thick, dark-brown hair that matched his full beard. He had the most striking blue eyes I had ever seen. Did he wear colored contacts?

  When he spoke, I detected a soft southern accent. “The dog did find me, true enough.” Nathan cocked his head. “He’s part-trained, you say?”

  I tore my attention off his eyes to respond. “His prior owner started working with him, but I have no idea how far he got.” A clinical description of a much more complex situation.

  Nate pulled a toothpick out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth. “Why is it you want to do this?”

  I raised my eyebrows. What difference did it make to him? “Luke’s a big dog. He’s too smart and has too much energy to just hang out. He needs a purpose, a real job.” And so do I, I wanted to add. Investigating divorcing couples just wasn’t cutting it.

  “He’s big for you.”

  “I’m stronger than I look.”

  Emily chimed in. “He almost knocked her flat back into a ditch. He needs a new indication.”

  “That was his indication? To jump on his handler?” Nate shook his head. “That’ll never do.”

  “No big deal. I can train him to do something different.” Luke trotted over and nudged my hand. I stroked his head and scratched him behind the ears and around his neck, while I kept my eyes on Nate. The dog leaned against me. He’d been doing that lately. I didn’t know why.

  Nate stared at the dog, then lifted his gaze. “Ever had a dog before, Jessica?”

  I met those blue eyes straight on, raising my chin. “When I was younger, I had an Aussie. We competed in agility.” Images of joyful, happy Finn flashed in my head. “He was the top-ranked agility dog in the nation in my freshman year of college.”

  The skin around Nate’s eyes softened a little. A good sign. So I continued. “I know how to train for obedience and agility. I’ve just never done search and rescue before.”

  “How long you had him?” Nate gestured toward Luke, who had moved away and found another stick.

  “Six months.” I pulled a water bottle off my belt and took a long drink, my mouth suddenly dry.

  “And he’s how old?”

  “Two and a half.”

  Nate shook his head, frowning. “We do a lot of work in the woods. You got to deal with ticks, mosquitoes, snakes, hills, rocks, swamps, nasty weather, cold, heat.”

  “Sounds great!” I smiled. “I live in the country. I run mountain-trail races. I’m used to all that.”

  “Once in a while, we have an urban search. There you’ve got concrete, heat, noise, fumes, and sometimes folks who aren’t happy to see us.”

  “Raised in the city. So no problem.”

  “Now and then we spend the night out in the woods, by ourselves, in makeshift shelters …”

  “I did that in Girl Scouts!”

  “… sittin’ over a dead body.”

  My heart hit my chest wall with a thud. I searched for a quick comeback. I had nothing. “Part of the job,” I said finally. It sounded weak, even to me.

  Then I remembered something I’d read on the Battlefield Search and Rescue website. �
��Don’t you have different teams? Live search teams and cadaver teams?”

  Nate paused a moment before he agreed that yes, they did. I straightened my back.

  He took a deep breath. “Look, if you want to give this a try, I won’t stop you. I’ll give you the forms when we get back. But here’s the thing: When I look at you, I see a big, half-trained, rowdy dog and a small woman.”

  I opened my mouth to retort, but that guy talked right through my reaction.

  “I’m sorry that’s not PC, but I’m tellin’ you what I see. Maybe you can do this. Maybe you cain’t. We’ll find out soon enough.”

  2

  Why was Nathan Tanner so negative? I had no idea, but I’d faced plenty of discrimination from men before and he wasn’t going to stop me. No way.

  Emily volunteered to help me prepare for the initial tests. Her own dog—a border collie named Flash—had cut his foot on a search and was on injured reserve for a while. An elementary school teacher, she had time to work with me in the late afternoon. Honestly, I was happy she volunteered and not Nathan.

  We began on a cloudy, cool Thursday in September. I knew from reading that Battlefield Search and Rescue volunteers worked everything from lost kids to wandering adults. They also searched for human remains buried underground or in lakes or left in remote areas. Crime victims, suicides, lost souls—all eventually became dust and ashes, but the remarkable noses of the dogs could still sniff them out.

  “A dog has about two-hundred million olfactory receptors in his nose,” Emily told me, “compared to about six million in a human’s. A dog can smell a teaspoon of sugar in a million gallons of water—enough to fill two Olympic-sized pools.”

  Wow.

  Ten thousand other facts followed, all of which fed my interest, and I scribbled them in the small, black, Moleskine notebook I always carried in my back pocket. There was more to SAR than I’d realized—more training, more equipment, more details, more of a time commitment. Still, the thought of working with Luke and finding some lost kid or wandering dementia patient fired me up. My life needed to count for something. My father had taught me that.

  However, I needed to watch one thing—overworking. When I get my mind on something, I pursue it. But with dogs, you get too serious, and they’ll shut down. With them, it’s all about play. Make it fun. Good boy, good boy!

  So I limited myself to two training periods a day, and I kept them short. My methodology worked. Within two weeks, Luke had passed the initial tests—heeling on leash, ten-minute stay, recall, and aggression evaluation. That gave us official candidate status! Now, we had one year to complete all the challenges to become operational. That was the rule.

  Emily said our next task was to retrain Luke’s indication that he’d found the victim we’d been searching for. She suggested I teach him to grab a long, braided-cotton tug toy tied to my belt. It turned out to be much better than having his eighty pounds jumping on me. After a couple of weeks, he nearly had that down. Plus, he was getting pretty good at searching out a cotton ball soaked in birch oil that I hid in increasingly difficult places.

  While I worked with Luke, Emily trained me. She showed me how to puff a little baby powder in the air to find the wind direction, how to follow a topographic map and use a GPS, how to map out a search plan and chart features that had been searched. She demonstrated how to pack for the field, how to use the handheld radio to stay in touch with the base, and most importantly, she instructed me on safety and crime-scene preservation.

  That I already knew, but I took notes anyway.

  There was so much to learn, but I loved it. Finally, something besides adulterous husbands and runaway wives occupied my mind.

  Sometimes, when we worked on weekends with the Battlefield group, I would see Nate watching us across the field, a black-and-white springer spaniel at his side. He seemed to be studying us, arms crossed. It looked to me like he was perpetually frowning.

  “What’s his story?” I asked Emily one day when we were packing up.

  “You should ask him, Jess,” she replied. “He’s an interesting guy.”

  Interesting?

  We worked hard, Luke and I. He seemed to know how to handle my OCD. When I pushed him too far, he’d stop and simply look at me, like, “Whaaat?” while panting, a silly grin on his face. I’d make him do something simple—a down or a sit-stay—to “assert my authority.” But then I’d play with him, grabbing him, roughhousing with him on the ground, play-chasing him, until both of us were de-stressed. We slept well on those nights.

  After two months of twice-weekly coaching sessions plus weekend work with the team, Emily approached me. “Hey, I told Nathan you’re doing really well. He wants to try a dry run. Would you be up for that?”

  I shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”

  “I think he wants to catch anything you guys are doing wrong before it becomes entrenched.”

  “He doesn’t trust you?”

  Emily laughed. “He’s the training director. Plus, he knows more than all the rest of us put together.”

  “Okay. What’s the plan?”

  “Just the three of us somewhere up north, plus a search subject Luke hasn’t met. He’s going to check with a park to see if they’ll let us use the area. I’ll let you know when he has it figured out. Probably be on some weekend soon.”

  I thought about that as I got ready for bed that night. Were we ready for a test? What would Nate say if Luke messed up? If I messed up?

  It didn’t matter, I told myself, setting my jaw. We had ten more months to complete the necessary exercises. And if I needed to, I’d take every minute of that, regardless of what Nate said.

  But something disturbed my sleep that night. I woke to a pounding heart and Luke standing at my bedside, licking my hand. “What, buddy?” I sat up, petting him as he nudged me with his nose. I checked my watch—4:14 a.m. I forced my mind into the present. What day was it? What did I have to do?

  I got up, went to the bathroom, and downed a glass of water. Finally, my heart slowed to a normal rhythm. I searched my mind for any fragment of a dream but found nothing. Part of me was thankful for that.

  By the time I returned, Luke had flopped back down on his favorite part of the rug. He followed me with his eyes, not lifting his head, watching as I crawled back into bed. “I know, it’s not time to get up,” I said. “Sorry, buddy.”

  I snuggled down into the covers and soon heard Luke’s soft snoring, but sleep eluded me. So frustrating. Finally, at five-thirty, I gave up. I rose and put on running clothes. By the time I tied my shoes, Luke stood at the door, dancing in anticipation.

  I stepped out into the Virginia fall morning and inhaled the brisk, fresh air. A thousand stars drew my eyes upward. A question emerged from somewhere deep in my soul. Why?

  I didn’t want to think about it. So I shook it off and began running.

  The rhythmic pounding of my feet and the comfortable cadence of my heart settled me. I loved my beautiful dog running beside me, his strong body so in tune with mine. Running forced me to focus on the trail. Dreams and questions got left behind.

  I ran the half mile down the driveway and turned left onto the shoulder of the narrow country lane on which we lived. I kept Luke on a leash for this part of the trip because of the occasional car that passed by. Less than five minutes later, I diverted onto the path my landlord Bruce and I had cut through his forest.

  Bruce had been my first client. My discovery of the double life his soon-to-be ex-wife was living saved him a bundle in the divorce. When he found out I was looking for a place to live, he offered me his downstairs, and I gratefully accepted.

  After settling in, I began running on the country roads around the house. But Bruce was a runner, too, and when I suggested we cut paths through his twenty-six acres of woods, he thought it was a great idea.

  Once I turned and entered the tree line, I let Luke off leash. He happily watered a few bushes and sniffed around. In fact, he disappeared momentarily, but it
wasn’t long before he ran at my side again, choosing to be with me.

  Honestly, he was better than a guy.

  We ran three loops—about five miles—then returned home. Luke collapsed on the floor while I showered. As I finished, I heard my phone signal a text.

  Prince William Forest Park Thursday morning. Meet at Greenway Walmart 0700.

  Thursday! Much sooner than I expected. I took a big breath and texted Emily back: Will do.

  3

  On Thursday morning I drove toward the Walmart parking lot. I had stayed up late the night before, reading the notes I’d made in my Moleskine and double-checking my pack. I also worked with Luke a little.

  The outside temperature gauge on my Jeep’s dashboard read twenty-eight degrees. No matter. I had dressed in layers—good, Under Armour leggings and a long-sleeved tactical shirt—under my other clothes. I’d add my North Face parka when I got out of the car.

  I threaded my way through the lot and spotted Emily standing next to Nate’s old, red Chevy Tahoe. I pulled over to it and rolled down my window. A woman I didn’t know was sitting in the back.

  “All set?” Nate asked.

  “Yes.” I almost added “sir.”

  “Be a thirty-minute drive or thereabouts,” he said, his breath frosty. “Don’t be lettin’ the dog out ‘til I tell you.”