Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

State Veterinary Convention within the hour. After feeding Dashiell, I ran upstairs to shower and change. As I passed my office, I saw the light on my answering machine blinking. As much as I would have liked to know who’d called—even if they hadn’t left a message, now that my brother-in-law had gotten me caller ID—I had something more important to do.
    I could hear the phone again from the shower, but my mind was on other things, and once again I ignored the impulse to put business ahead of pleasure. In fact, to help maintain my resolve, on my way past the office to get dressed, I turned the ringer off on the office phone, and later, between opening the bottle of red wine so that it could breathe and having Dashiell help me collect the clothes that had been tossed in various places around the house, I did the same thing on the downstairs phone.
    Dash, hearing the car as my sweetie circled the block, hoping by some miracle he’d find a legal spot, was at the door, head cocked, a full ten minutes before Chip arrived. The way he tore past Chip to join Betty, Chip’s Shepherd, you would have thought he hadn’t been to the dog run in weeks, that he hadn’t fallen madly in love with another bitch earlier that same day.
    Chip set down his bags and put his arms around me.
    “That’s better,” he said into my hair.
    “How’d it go?”
    “I had a good crowd, seventy or eighty. And I’ve been invited back for next year. They finally understand how much they need me.” He pulled back and looked at me. “Did you miss me so much you could hardly stand it?”
    I nodded.
    “That’s my good wench.”
    We never made it upstairs. We never even closed the door. At first, with the sounds of the dogs mock-fighting as mood music, we did okay. But when they decided to join us, hopping up on the couch and continuing to wrestle there, we began to laugh at all the wrong times.
    “Sex is no laughing matter,” Chip told them. But they just ignored him and went about their business. We had no choice but to do the same.
    “That wasn’t half bad,” he said afterward as we sat outside on the top step drinking wine.
    “Which half wasn’t bad, mine or yours?”
    He started to laugh all over again.
    “So what else have I missed by being away?”
    “I got some work.”
    I took a sip of wine before I began to fill him in on the
    details, watching his expression change, as mine must have hours earlier as I heard the story I was now telling him.
    “That was the big topic at the convention, at least at the dinner it was, arguments about cloning—could they, would they, should they? And a surprising amount of nervous joking to go along with the serious issues.”
    “It makes a lot of people nervous. You know something, Chip, it makes me nervous.”
    “Oh, come on, Rach. You don’t believe that, do you, that the younger dog is a clone? It’s so impractical. Can you imagine what it would cost to do that?”
    “They look exactly alike.” Lame, I told myself, not waiting for Chip to say it to me. “Well, they’re both white bull terriers, so I know what you’re thinking—why wouldn’t they look alike? But they have identical black markings.” I pointed to the outside corner of my right eye. “Here.”
    He sighed. “Rach. That’s fairly common in bullies. You know that.”
    I decided not to mention the little Hitler mustaches, or the strip of pink running up their snouts. Those things were far more common than the black smudge under an eye, looking like die remnants of a healing shiner.
    “You don’t think it’s possible?” I asked.
    “It’s preposterous,” he said. “The work that’s been done in Scotland and Japan, there’s big money behind it because it’s about making money, not about doing good. Rachel, Mother Teresa’s dead. There’s no one doing good anymore.”
    “Then someone’s gone pretty far out of their way to pull this woman’s leg, wouldn’t you say?”
    He didn’t answer.
    “What if what Sophie was told was a lie, Chip? What if this is about money?”
    “How so?”
    “Well, once they have the technology, couldn’t they clone, say, animals that do commercials?”
    “So that Morris the cat could go on forever?”
    “Precisely. There’s a lot of money tied up in those images.”
    “Why not the top-winning show dogs?”
    “Right.”
    “But then why not just do that? Why the whole seizure-alert business?”
    “Because even though they’d be able to prove