Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

to stay a night or two.“
    “Be careful, will you?”
    “I’ve got an attack-trained pit bull with me.”
    “Seriously, Rachel.”
    “I am serious.”
    The line was open. He was waiting.
    I sighed.
    “I promise.”
    When I walked back to the kitchen, they were all waiting there with accusing looks on their faces. I finished the food, added all the supplements, and fed them. Then I took my salad out into the garden, passing my own reflection in the dark glass, thinking for just a moment that someone was out there.
    Sophie had described the place to me, her paradise. Sitting on a stone bench that was set close to the side wall, I looked around. The ivy-covered brick wall extended from the house to my left to about the middle of the garden, where it abutted a small, stucco back cottage that served as the other half of the fence, separating Sophie’s yard from the one beyond it, the one belonging to the house on West Fourth Street. The wall behind me was concrete.
    The building next door had a two-story extension built behind it, so instead of a garden, there was an extra back room on the two lower floors. Because of that, this area of the yard would be shady much of the day. All around me, there was pachysandra, with a row of hosta along the path. The other side of the yard must have gotten sun in the afternoon because there Sophie had planted flowers—fairy roses, hydrangia, day lilies—though in a month or so, when the cold weather arrived, they’d be gone. At least the ivy and pachysandra would stay green.
    But that would be for someone else’s pleasure. Sophie wasn’t here any longer and her pets would be lucky to have homes, even ones without yards.
    The fence across from where I sat was wooden and old. I could see where slats had been broken and repaired in several places. In front of the fence, the flowers were planted in raised beds. It seems Sophie had pretty much taught the dogs to keep off that area, because very few of the flowers were trampled or broken. Perhaps they’d only gone up there occasionally to retrieve a ball that had bounced out of bounds.
    That’s when I heard the music, a piano concerto. Someone had just put on a CD or the radio, someone whose window was open. I looked around but couldn’t tell where it was coming from. In New York, where buildings are so close and so tall, sound can bounce around the flat surfaces, seeming to come from one when in fact it’s coming from the opposite direction. The music was so beautiful I felt swept away, closing my eyes and just listening.
    When the music stopped, I finished eating and went back to the computer, checking Sophie’s address book and calendar, looking for anyone with the same last name, looking to see when it was she’d been seeing Herbie and if I could find his last name and number in the backup of her addresses. The trouble with an electronic calendar, though, was that instead of crossing out a name, which often left it readable, on the PalmPilot you could delete anyone who was no longer in your life, an old boyfriend, even a relative you no longer got along with. And the next time you used the HotSync function, the name might be erased on your hard drive, too, unless you set up your system to archive the information you deleted on the PalmPilot itself. But since the police had that, this wasn’t something I’d be able to check.
    I decided to check Sophie’s E-mail first, but there were no saved messages. Even more curious, there was no E-mail address book. There was a list of favorite web sites she’d saved for quick, repeated access, and there I found the site of the Epilepsy Foundation. Spending the next hour or so there, I noticed some interesting things. First, I discovered that I probably would not find a wine cellar in the apartment. Epileptics could not safely consume alcohol. Next I checked the long list of anticonvulsants and discovered they all had one side effect in common. They were all teratogenic, whatever the hell that meant. I made a note to drop in to a pharmacy and find out. There was, to my surprise, only a paragraph about seizure-alert dogs. It was a warning, actually. It said that this ability had only been reported anecdotally and that patients should exercise extreme caution in dealing with any school that offered to supply or train a dog who could predict the onset of a seizure. Someone was getting hives at the thought of something so profound working when it couldn’t be scientifically