Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

the iguana out of trouble? Surely it had been open when Sophie was having the seizure or how else would Bianca have been able to fetch the medicine? But I couldn’t remember one way or the other. I could only remember Sophie lying in front of the couch, the dogs lying there with her, one on each side.
    I opened the bedroom door and, keeping Dashiell out, slid out into the living room and headed for Sophie’s small kitchen, making a big circle around the place she’d fallen, just in front of the couch, got some greens, and, leaving the dogs where they were, slipped back into Sophie’s room.
    How did Sophie do this? If the iguana freaked when it saw a dog—and why wouldn’t it?—-how did Sophie juggle these animals? And why had she taken on such a high-maintenance pet when she already had two dogs that needed care?
    That’s when I remembered the cat she fed on six. Maybe the lizard was also one of those little jobs she took on to help pay Mel for walking Bianca.
    As ironic as it seemed, taking care of someone else’s animal so that she could pay someone to walk hers, it made sense. It took far less effort to feed an indoor pet than it did to exercise an adolescent bull terrier.
    With the iguana fed and safe, I began my search for information by checking the nightstand, feeling both the excitement and the dread I always felt going into someone’s home and poking through their things when they weren’t there. There’s a terrible feeling of trespassing, even when there isn’t anyone around to mind.
    But if no one was around, who had called me and kept the line open long enough for my answering machine to record the sound of their breathing?
    And why?
    There was some Tylenol in the nightstand, a small hairbrush with long red hairs tangled in the bristles, a copy of My Dog Tulip with a place mark two thirds of the way through. I picked it up, then put it down, reminding myself to pay attention to the job and not get lost in thought. There was a nail file, a small silver ring, a picture of Sophie as a little girl, smiling, a box of tissues.
    Most of the snooping I would be doing would be about as interesting as getting stuck in rush-hour traffic. Still, there was some chance I’d get that question answered and all the others as well, a chance that by trying to decipher Sophie’s life via the paperwork she’d left behind I’d make some telling discovery. I might find a notation in her calendar, a canceled check, a letter from a former lover, the address of a long-lost relative, something completely unpredictable that would afford me a startling insight, some trivial piece of information that would turn out to be important.
    Despite past experience, I had the feeling that there’d be no great finds at Sophie’s. The cops had already gone through the place with a fine-tooth comb, removing anything and everything that might have some meaning. They, too, needed to find relatives, though they were more interested in notifying next of kin than in finding a home for two bull terriers. And since the same information I needed would be valuable to them, there might not be a calendar or an address book for me to look at.
    But there’d be something, I told myself. There was always something.
    Standing on the desk chair, I pulled down shoe boxes marked with the dates of the last three years from the top of her closet. If the cops had taken her current bank statements and checkbook, last year’s tax receipts should give me some of the information I needed. I particularly wanted the name of Sophie’s physician, thinking that he or she would be likely to have on record the names and whereabouts of any family members. At least I might be able to get that out of the way.
    As I set the boxes on the desk, I thought about my earlier conversation with Ruth, and what she’d said about Sophie promising to get her on the list for a Blanche clone. Had Sophie lied to Ruth? Or had she been less than forthcoming with me about her reason for wanting to locate Side by Side? I wondered if she’d thought that helping her friend get a seizure-alert dog would seem less compelling than the story she’d told me, a tale of altruism, of concern for the greater good. Or if either reason was the truth.
    There was a small photo album on the shelf in the closet.
    I took that down, too, placing it on the desk, next to Sophie’s laptop. Working fast now, anxious to see what I’d discover, I opened the computer, turned it on, and listened to it