Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

and lie down, I take a pill and find a place to sit down until it passes.”
    “What about Bianca, how does she alert you? The same way?”
    “That’s just what I was about to tell you, Rachel. She doesn’t. She doesn’t alert me at all. For a while, I thought they’d given me the wrong dog, just any white bull terrier, not a clone. But for the life of me I couldn’t think of why someone would pretend to clone my dog and then hand me a free, uncloned purebred bull terrier pup. It’s not as if I paid to have this done and they had to produce a pup to keep my money.”
    “There was never any question of that, any suggestion that you pay or contribute, nothing like that?”
    She shook her head.
    “Did they talk about your estate, about mentioning Side by Side in your will?”
    Sophie laughed. “Estate? You’ve got to be kidding. There is none. I only have what I earn and I spend every cent of that by the time the next paycheck is due. I only teach for three hours a day, Rachel, because of . . .” Her voice trailed off. “When my kids take art and gym, I get to eat a snack and lie down. If not, there’d be no way I could do what I do. What I get paid, it’s barely enough to live on. When I can, I do little extra jobs, mostly for the dogs, for special food for them and to pay for Bianca’s walker. He’s much, much cheaper than all the other Village walkers, but still, by the end of the month, it adds up.”
    I nodded. “So, no money up front and no request to bequeath them anything.”
    What was the catch?
    “After a couple of months of worrying, I decided I needed some answers.”
    “Did you try to find Loma then?”
    Sophie took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, then put them back on quickly. I’d heard that light bothers some epileptics, but she apparently spent a lot of time outside with the dogs. Maybe she was just tired.
    “No, I didn’t. I took Blanche and Bianca to a vet and asked for a DNA test.”
    “A vet?”
    Sophie exhaled. “I didn’t want to go to our regular vet, just in case.”
    “In case what?”
    “I didn’t want to be laughed at. I didn’t want someone I had to deal with thinking I was crazy. Even with the new vet, I lied. I didn’t ask him to please have my dogs tested to see if one of them was a clone of the other.”
    “What did you ask?”
    “I said I’d gotten both girls from the same breeder and that his practices were being challenged by the AKC, a question of parentage that might put Bianca’s papers in jeopardy. I said I’d been told that Blanche was Bianca’s mother, and I wanted to know for sure.”
    “And?”
    “He asked me what difference it made now. He said, ‘Don’t you love your dogs?’
    “I said I did, but that I was thinking of breeding Bianca and I wouldn’t get a fair price for her puppies if she lost her registration. I said I had to be sure of her parentage before I bred her, that the test would give me something to take to the AKC.
    “ ‘Or it wouldn’t,’ he said.
    “ ‘Exactly,’ I told him. ‘Either way, I have to know.’ ”
    “Did he do it?”
    She nodded. “He shrugged and took cheek swabs. He said he had to send them to Michigan State, to their DNA lab. He said it would take a few weeks and that he’d call me. Then, as an afterthought, he said he hoped I got the results I was after. I was glad he wasn’t my regular vet.”
    “And?”
    “The report came back saying, gee, this is very rare, but it appears that Blanche and Bianca have identical genetic markers.”
    “So she is a clone.”
    “That’s not the conclusion the vet came to. He said the lab must have made a mistake. He said the markers couldn’t be identical. Then he explained the facts of life to me, as if I was an idiot. ‘The offspring gets fifty percent of its genes from the mother—that would be Blanche—and fifty percent from the father,’ he said. The pattern is random, which genes each pup will get from its mother and which from the father. But in this case, it appears your dog has no father.’ Before I could say anything, he said, ‘Oh, sure, it’s possible to have all the markers identical, but so rare as to be suspect.’ He said they must have tested one dog’s samples twice. He apologized for the lab’s error and the delay it would cause and suggested we run the tests again.”
    “And you said?”
    “I told him it wasn’t an error. Then I made the mistake of telling him why.”
    “And he said?”
    “That’s not the