The Dog That Saved Stewart Coolidge by Jim Kraus Page B

of the law.
    As he walked this morning, tilting his face into the sun, he wondered what sort of ultimate punishment a dog might receive, a dog who had already stolen more than twenty-five dollars’ worth of merchandise.
    That might make it a felony, right? Maybe it has to be more than that, but still…criminal activity. And habitual. That makes it really serious.

    Tucked away in a nondescript, steel-sided building edging toward the city limits, the offices of the Wellsboro Gazette were just a part of the publishing empire of Tioga Publishing—a rather small part of a small empire and that suited the current editor, David Grback, just fine.
    “Yes, you spell it G-r-back, with no vowel in between the G and the r . Yes, I know it looks odd, but that‘s how they spelled it in the ‘old country.’”
    He had been tempted a thousand times to change it, either legally or just by changing it in his professional life, but he had never gotten around to doing so.
    “It does make me memorable,” he’d once explained to a former girlfriend, who had refused to leave New York City when David apparently lost his mind and resigned from the New York Times to take a job in a town that no one had ever heard of for a salary that the custodian of the Times Building would have dismissed as insulting.
    After ten years of living in a fourth-floor New York City walk-up, with limited hot water and no views, with homeless people—aggressive, panhandling homeless people—living on each corner of his block, he had decided he’d had enough.
    Wellsboro needed an editor and he needed out of New York.
    And for the last seven years he had covered everything from city council meetings in which elected officials spent six hours deciding on paint colors for the new water hydrants in town, to high school sports, which he more or less liked, mostly because at that point the student-athletes were just that, both students and athletes and not jaded by culture or contracts or hordes of obsequious, sycophantic followers.
    As an editor, David Grback had a pedantic obsession with his word-a-day calendar. He had three different copies in his office, each with a different level of difficulty.
    As often as he could, he inserted one of the words into his weekly column—that is, unless the president of the company barked from his office that “no one outside of Daniel Webster would know that word. And maybe not even him.”
    David considered it a game that they both enjoyed. He was wrong, of course, but the company president knew his highly trained editor was working for the proverbial peanuts, so he never announced his great annoyance at the word games, at least not in public.
    But over the last three weeks, David’s quest for a quiet life in the valleys of central Pennsylvania had been mazed (January 17 on the real smart calendar), or befuddled or flummoxed.
    That was when the story of the “dog bandit” first ran. David considered it a semi-cute human-interest story that might generate a chuckle or two, but was amazed—and bemused—at the interest it generated. The reporter, or rather the not-paid-at-the-time and now underpaid freelance contributor of the piece, a Miss Lisa Goodly, a mere slip of a girl but very bright and very energetic, had sparked something in town—something approaching a community-wide dialogue.
    “Is the dog a criminal?”
    “Is the dog a runaway?’
    “You can’t hold the dog accountable—he’s just hungry.”
    “Can we blame the dog for the ills of society?”
    Actually, the discourse never rose to that level, but people are talking about it. And I sense two camps: one that wouldn’t mind catching the mutt for the rewards, and the other who would harbor the fugitive canine to keep it safe from the “man” and the evil authorities.
    On his cluttered desk, he spread out an ad that Bargain Bill had dropped off the night before—a full half-page ad in the main section of the paper, and at full price. The ad featured a