Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

it. It wasn’t the point of our first conversation, and, unfortunately, there wouldn’t be future ones in which she could add to what she’d told me.
    Back at the desk, looking at the screen, my eyes felt really tired. So, leaving the laptop on, I began to poke through the desk drawers, finding a folder for the dogs, with printouts from their veterinary visits. Bingo. I had in my sweaty little hand the receipt for the DNA test. It had been done at Mark Murray’s office. Finkelstein, the vet with sweaty hands, was either an acupuncturist or had one at his office. That’s where Blanche had gone off and on for the last eight months. Dr. Cohen must have been the dogs’ regular vet, which made sense, since her office was the closest to where Sophie lived.
    I looked through the rest of the file, photos of both dogs, apart and together. If not for the fact that Sophie had printed the name of the dog on the back of each picture, I wouldn’t be sure who was who. Of course, in the full-body shots you could tell. Blanche was heftier. Bianca still had the narrow body of an adolescent. But in those Norma Desmond close-ups, Blanche and Bianca could not have looked more alike.
    I went back into the living room. Dashiell had gone out and was searching the garden now, my little workaholic. But it was the bullies I’d come to see. They were asleep on the rug, leaning against each other. When I crouched down, Blanche opened her sleepy eyes, thumped her tail once, then went immediately back to sleep. Bianca’s legs were twitching, her eyes moving rapidly under closed lids. I looked at the black smudge on each dog, the pink strip along the crest of their noses, the one dark freckle near the leather of their noses, slightly left of center, then their feet. Both dogs had clear toenails on their front paws, except for the left-outside toe. Those were black.
    I wondered what the chances were of finding two dogs so identical in appearance.
    Big deal, Chip would say, it wouldn’t be difficult to find a dozen dogs whose nails looked just like that.
    Still, I would have said.
    Because I couldn’t find anything on either dog that didn’t match the other exactly.
    And while I was looking, because I would have been as happy as anyone else to believe that Blanche had not been cloned, Dashiell barked again.
    I went quickly into the garden, hoping to get to him before he woke the neighbors. It was late, and most of the windows I could see from the garden were dark now. He was at the wooden fence, standing in the flowers, standing right in the place where the flowers were bent. I called him back and went to investigate, seeing nothing on the ground, even parting the flowers with my hands to try to find what he had. When I turned and shrugged, he barked again, his front paws coming off the ground, his ears rising and, this time, only one folding down again.
    “Come and show me,” I said.
    And he did.
    He bounded up into the raised bed and hit the repaired slats behind me with his nose. I heard the wood creak as the new boards scraped against the older part of the fence, and suddenly, I could see into the garden next door.
    “Good boy .”
    I pushed the slats myself, seeing that the opening would be big enough for a person to come and go, assuming the person was crouched and duck-walked through the opening. Obviously, someone had done just that, because this was the only place where the flowers had been stepped on.
    But what did it mean? If Sophie had died of a fatal seizure, what difference could it possibly make if there was an opening in the fence between her garden and the one next door?

Chapter 13
    Stop Right Where You Are, I Said

    I went back inside and was about to put away the dogs’ file when I remembered something. So I took everything out of the folder, reading each item, then putting it back, one at a time. I found what I was looking for in the middle of a pile of notes, little slips of paper that looked like the ones I had in Dashiell’s file, things jotted down in a hurry, sometimes abbreviated, while on the phone with the veterinarian. I held the slip of paper in my hand and looked at it. It was the list of Bianca’s shots. I wondered if Loma had copied them down from the puppies’ file at Side by Side. Or if the vet who’d given the shots to Bianca and the other two clones had written it. With ragged edges, even the beginning of one of the words missing, it had obviously been tom from a larger piece of paper. When I