Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

tested.
    There wasn’t anyone in Sophie’s backup address book with the last name of Gordon. Nor was there an Aunt Beth or an Uncle Craig. There wasn’t anyone with the first name of Herbie, either, or anyone with the first initial h. She’d apparently expunged the bum. But kept his photo on the refrigerator.
    While I was checking things out and making notes in my old-fashioned, paper notepad, I could hear dogs’ nails clicking in the other room. I stopped and listened. For a moment, I thought Bianca and Dashiell might be wrestling again, or chasing each other. But it was only one dog walking around. When Dashiell barked, I thought someone might be at the door. But as soon as I walked out into the living room, I realized he’d gone back to his search.
    He was sitting next to the couch, totally pleased with himself. When he saw I’d come, he barked once more. I pulled the coffee table back and knelt, close to where Sophie had fallen. There, under the sofa, was a pair of red slipper socks.
    “Good boy,” I told him, reaching under and taking them out. “Excellent boy. Go find.”
    Back at the computer, I sat still for a moment, just listening. When Dashiell crossed one of the rugs, there’d be silence. Then I’d hear the comforting click of his nails again. The sound changed when he was in the kitchen, on the terra-cotta tile. I heard him drinking from the water bowl, his tags clanging against the pan, then the tick-tick of his nails resumed, and trusting him to do his job, I went back to mine.
    The bedroom blinds were open and, though I hadn’t switched on the garden lights, they were on. Perhaps there was one of those sensors that turned on the lights automatically when it got dark. I left the blinds open, looking out every once in a while at the shadows of the bushes against the wall of the little cottage. The one small window, on the upper floor, was dark. I thought that perhaps whoever lived in the town house beyond used the cottage as a studio, an office, or even a guest house. Or else whoever lived there wasn’t home.
    Before I had the chance to do much more, Dashiell barked again, one woof, summoning me to hurry up and see what he’d found.
    He had nosed open the hall closet and there on the floor, in between the snow boots and a pair of sneakers, was a set of keys.
    I bent to scratch Dashiell’s neck with one hand and scoop up the keys with my other. Turning the keys over in my hand, they looked familiar. I opened Sophie’s door and tried the keys. Why would a set of keys to her apartment be on the floor of the closet?
    When I turned, I had my answer. There was Bianca, her tail wagging furiously. I tossed the keys over to the rug, and she scrambled on the wooden hall floor to go and retrieve them, bringing them back, dropping them at my feet and waiting for another toss. Good for Sophie, I thought, playing with more than just a ball. But, still, using live keys seemed strange to me. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t pick them up if she dropped them, as if she’d been in a wheelchair. When she couldn’t function, it seemed to me, the only thing she needed was her pills. Perhaps this was Herbie’s set, returned to Sophie when they broke up. That made sense. That could explain why she’d given them to Bianca to use as a toy, why she’d turned something unhappy into something cheerful.
    I gave Bianca one more toss, then put the keys on top of the bookshelf outside the small kitchen, stopping for a moment to look at Sophie’s cookbooks, thinking how sad it was, all that organic food, all those healthy meals, and she had died so young anyway. It wasn’t as simple as eat this, don’t eat that, exercise, take your vitamins. There were genes involved, what you got along with the fiery red hair and the porcelain skin, what booby traps lay hidden, waiting for the right circumstances—inordinate stress, the deterioration of age, an inopportune infection, and God only knows what else. And there was luck involved as well, whether yours was good or not so good. Sophie’s, apparently, had been not so good.
    Reading some of the material posted on the epilepsy site, I’d learned that the disease was sometimes caused by trauma, not genetics—a deprivation of oxygen during birth, head injury, physical abuse, a car accident. But just as many cases were considered idiopathic, meaning no one knew what had caused them. Either way, lousy luck. I hadn’t asked Sophie her history and she hadn’t volunteered