Laughing, Sonny held up a bottle of wine to me. “My contribution to the meal. Maybe I should have brought dog biscuits.”
In all this time, Hero, who had been lying quietly in his crate with the door open, had not moved or made a sound. As I took the wine and thanked her, Sonny noticed the newcomer. “Well,” she said, rising, “who is this?”
Sonny was a tall, slim-built woman whose prematurely gray hair and porcelain skin gave her a kind of natural beauty that she never enhanced with makeup or artifice. She was probably in her fifties—only about fifteen years older than I was—but she suffered from a debilitating form of rheumatoid arthritis that sometimes was so severe it actually immobilized her. She had had a good summer and claimed a noticeable improvement in her symptoms since Mystery had come into her life. But I noticed tonight she had brought her cane and used it to balance herself as she stood. Immediately I felt a pang of chagrin for letting my dogs jump all over her.
I said, “I’m calling him Hero. We don’t know his real name yet. He’s just visiting.”
I would tell her the full story, of course. But, I admit, I wanted to get her initial reaction to the dog before I said anything more.
She went over to the crate, and I thought she was going to bend down to pet him. It’s never a good idea to invade the personal space of a strange dog, and I started to say something to that effect, but I didn’t have to. She suddenly drew in her breath and straightened up, closing her eyes. I moved quickly toward her, thinking she was in pain, but she opened her eyes then and looked at me. She said, “What
happened
to this poor fellow?”
I answered cautiously, “What do you mean?”
She looked at the dog again. “Such despair,” she said softly. “Oh, you poor, poor thing.”
I said, hesitantly, “I don’t suppose . . . I mean, you’re not getting any impressions of what might have happened, are you?”
She was silent for a moment, and then I saw her repress a shudder. “Just terror, confusion and a noise like thunder. I’ve never known such a . . . a dark chaos. Oh, it’s so sad.” She looked at me gravely. “He says his life is over. Everything is all over. For heaven’s sake, Raine, don’t you have any idea where he came from?”
For a moment it was hard for me to speak. I had to clear my throat. “I think I’d better open the wine,” I said.
As I poured the wine, I told Sonny about yesterday’s gruesome find and Hero’s ordeal. When I was finished, she nodded, unsurprised. “So that’s the thunder I keep hearing.”
It took me a moment. “Oh. The gunshot.”
She sipped her wine, watching Hero from one of the two chairs I had drawn up in front of the fire. The old house was drafty, and in the winter I had all of my meals in front of a fire. “What an awful thing for him. He must have felt so helpless, being locked outside the door.”
“I don’t even like to think about the kind of person who could do something like that.”
“We can never know another person’s heart, Raine. She must have been very deeply disturbed.”
I suppose she was right, but I couldn’t seem to find much sympathy for the deceased under the circumstances. I was spared from answering by the distant sound of the oven timer. I took a quick sip of my wine and set the glass on the occasional table. “Be right back.”
“Do you need any help?”
“No, just relax.” I grinned. “Even I can manage paper plates and leftovers.”
A beseeching look from the hearth rug was Cisco’s way of reminding me what a very good dog he had been—particularly considering the fact that Mystery had settled down not three feet away from him with one of his favorite toys—so I said, in passing, “Okay, boy, release.”
And then the oddest thing happened. Predictably, Cisco bounded to his feet and went straight for the toy with which Mystery was teasing him. But at the same time, Hero emerged from his crate just as though he too were responding to the word “release.” He stood there for a moment, looking confused. Sonny extended her hand to him and called his name softly, but he didn’t even glance at her. He turned around and went back into his crate.
I shook my head helplessly and continued to the kitchen.
“I’ve been kind of working with him,” I explained to Sonny as we settled with our plates of warmed-over chicken and dressing at the little table I’d drawn up before the fire. “Just trying to see how responsive he is, you know. The thing is, I think someone really put some time into training this dog. For one thing, look.”
I gestured toward the canine population that surrounded us. Cisco, the dog in whom I had invested countless hours of training, lay obediently at my feet, his eyes fixed upon my fork, long strings of drool hanging from his jowls. Begging at the table is, by any other name, still begging. Mystery was a bit more subtle about it. She sat prettily a few feet away, but the way she watched every bite Sonny took indicated that she was by no means a stranger to the good things that come from human plates. Even my three crated dogs were sitting at attention, rubber bones forgotten, hoping for a morsel to be tossed their way. But Hero lay quietly in his crate with the door open, indifferent to tantalizing aromas and the other dogs’ interest, while we enjoyed our meal. That was the way a dog with perfect manners was supposed to behave.
Sonny pointed out, “He’s probably too depressed to be interested in food.”
“Well, there’s that,” I agreed. “But watch this.”
Without getting up from the table, I said, “Hero, here.”
Hero slowly got out of his crate and came over to me. Ignoring both Mystery and Cisco, who were actually distracted enough from their fixation upon the plates of food to turn and sniff him as he passed, Hero sat beside my chair.
I said, “Down.”
He shifted his weight to one hip and lay down.
“Roll over,” I said.
The dog obligingly showed his belly.
“Impressive,” agreed Sonny, raising an eyebrow. “And if he does all this for a stranger, imagine how well he’d perform for the person who actually trained him.”
“Exactly,” I said. I knew she would understand. “It’s not every day you meet a dog like this.”
To Hero I said, “Release,” and he got to his feet.
He started to go back to his crate, but Sonny stretched out her hand. “Come here, sweet boy.”
“Don’t feed him from the table,” I warned, unnecessarily.
Hero turned his head toward Sonny’s outstretched hand and sniffed it disinterestedly. She ran her hand over his big, blocky head, tugging at his ear. He tolerated her petting, but did not respond to it. Mystery, however, was starting to look annoyed, so I said, “It’s probably better not to give him too much attention while we’re eating. We don’t want to start a dogfight.”
“That’s the last thing this poor guy needs,” agreed Sonny, and then she hesitated. “Wait a minute. What’s this?”
Her gentle stroking had pushed one of his floppy ears backward, and even from my seat across from her I could see a darkish smudge against the pale pink underskin of his ear. I left my chair and sank down to my knees to examine it.
“It’s a tattoo,” I said, looking up at her.
She looked as surprised as I felt. “A tattoo? Who tattoos their dog’s ear?”
“Actually,” I said slowly, “it used to be a fairly common practice before microchipping. People with field champions, expensive breed stock, any kind of valuable dog, wanted to be able to identify it if the dog was stolen.”
“Good heavens. Is that what he is, then, do you think? A field champion?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Hardly anybody tattoos anymore.” I didn’t think it was necessary to add that the reason the practice had been mostly abandoned was because thieves had discovered that the simplest way to eliminate a tattooed dog’s identification was to cut off its ear.
“Well, obviously somebody does.”
My heart was beginning to pound with excitement. “Some laboratories,” I admitted, “who do research on domestic animals. A few police departments, but none around here. And”—I slid my arm around Hero’s neck as I looked up at Sonny, suddenly filled with certainty— “service dog organizations.”
Chapter Five
There are dozens upon dozens of agencies in the United States that supply service dogs to people who are blind or otherwise disabled, and all of them do remarkable work. Most of them actually retain legal ownership of the dogs they train even after they are placed with a person with a disability, and perform regular follow-up visits to make sure the match is still going well. All of them keep excellent records.
I started calling as soon as anyone could reasonably be expected to be in the office Monday morning, and I was a bit disappointed when the two biggest agencies, Leader Dogs for the Blind and Canine Companions for Independence, both reported that the tattoo number I read off was not one of theirs. After that, I decided to concentrate on agencies in the Southeast. On the fifth try—Coastal Assistance Dogs, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina—I hit pay dirt.
The man who came to the phone after I had been put on hold sounded friendly but concerned. “Miss Stockton,”he said, “my name is Wes Richards. I understand you’ve found one of our dogs?” That last part seemed to hold a note of skepticism, as though he didn’t want to accuse me of misrepresenting myself, but could hardly believe one of
his
dogs was actually lost.
I sat up from the slumped position I had taken in my chair at the kennel office, instantly alert and revitalized. “Your dogs?” I repeated. “Then he is one of yours? That’s your tattoo number?”
“His name is Nero,” replied Wes, “a four-year-old yellow Lab, neutered, approximately sixty-five pounds, tattoo number 6520034. Is that correct?”
“That’s him,” I said, and released a huge sigh of relief. “Thank goodness.”
Nero.
That explained why he had appeared to respond to his name when I called him Hero. Although dogs can eventually learn to recognize hundreds of very specific words and associate their meanings, names for them are just sounds. Nero and Hero, to a dog, sound almost exactly the same.
“But I’m afraid I don’t understand. You said you found him? Ms. White has been an excellent partner for Nero and I can’t imagine him leaving her under any circumstances. I just checked our overnight messages and there was nothing about Nero being missing. Could you tell me where he was found?”
I set down the coffee cup from which I had been about to take a self-congratulatory sip, wincing at the unpleasant duty I now had to perform. I said, “He didn’t leave her, Mr. Richards. At least not on purpose.”
As briefly as I could, I described how the yellow Lab had ended up with me. There was a shocked silence when I finished.
Finally he murmured, “How . . . dreadful. I don’t think anyone here would have guessed that she was unstable. . . . I mean, of course no one did, or we never would have placed the dog. We have very high standards. I just . . . don’t know what to say.”
“The police will be calling you for information on the owner. Up until now, we haven’t had any way of identifying her.”
“Oh,” he said distractedly. “Yes, of course, whatever you need. Her name was Michelle White. Everyone called her Mickey. We’re a small agency, Miss Stockton, and we keep very close track of our placements. We require them to come in once a year for evaluation and what we like to call fine-tuning of the training.” Now that he was talking about dogs, not death, his voice began to take on more confidence. I understood this completely.
“You know, as a team works together they discover certain quirks or peculiarities, and sometimes the handler will develop special needs that we try to address by refining a behavior or even teaching a whole new set of behaviors. The relationship between a person with disabilities and his dog is an ever-changing, ever-evolving one, and at Coastal Assistance Dogs we provide ongoing support.” He seemed to stop himself. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’m rambling. You’re not interested in all that. It’s all just—such a shock.”
“I’m very interested,” I told him. “I’m a dog trainer myself. Mostly search and rescue, and some local therapydog work. I’ve never tried anything as complicated as training a service dog, though.”
“Our dogs are in training for two years before we place them,” he explained, seeming to relax again now that he knew he was talking to a “dog” person. “Then we work with the handler and the dog one-on-one for up to six weeks before we send them home, depending on the needs of the person with whom we’re placing the dog. For the first year, we do home visits every three months, and after that we ask the team to return to the training center for evaluation once a year.”
“When was Mickey White last in?”
I could hear the tapping of a keyboard. “August,” he said after a moment. “And there’s absolutely no notation here that either the trainer or the social worker noticed anything out of the ordinary. She was very happy with Nero, and Nero was working out even better than we had hoped. Of course, she understood that as her condition continued to deteriorate, she would depend on her dog more and more, and it was very important that we continue to refine his training.”
“She had a deteriorating condition?” I said, wondering whether the deterioration had been progressing faster than she had expected, and whether that had led to the despair that caused her to pull the trigger. “Can you tell me what it was?”
He hesitated. “Technically, our records are private.”
I said, “I understand. I was just wondering about the kinds of things the dog learned to do for her. Was she completely dependent on her chair?”
He answered, “She used a chair most of the time, but so far the paralysis had affected only one side. As a trained service dog, though, Nero was able to perform just about any task she might need—from helping to take off her shoes to turning on light switches, picking up dropped items, carrying purchases, even bringing medicine bottles and bottled water. He was thoroughly reliable.”