Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

running around and me sitting still and freezing, a young woman came up to me and pointed to a little mutt. She’s been here all morning, she said. I don’t think there’s an owner here.
    People did that sometimes, dumped a dog they no longer wanted at the run, figuring one of the dog lovers there would simply take her home. We walked around together and sure enough, no one there owned the little girl. Or knew who did. And just as we were discussing which of us would take her home and see if we could find her a permanent place to stay, a young man opened the double gates, went up to her, and hooked on the leash he pulled out of his pocket.
    The woman I’d been talking to flew at him, asking him how dare he leave his dog unattended for all these hours. Hey, he said, I had something to do. With that, he turned to leave, the little dog trotting along behind him.
    I stopped at the drugstore on the corner of Tenth and Bleecker, asking all three dogs to sit in the corner near the pharmacist’s counter. Then I asked him what “teratogenic” meant, the word that came up as a possible side effect of every single medication listed at the epilepsy site. The dictionary at Sophie’s had said it meant “monster-making.” The pharmacist said what that meant was that it could affect the fetus, if someone was taking one of these medications when pregnant. So unless Sophie could have survived nine months of seizures without medication, she hadn’t had the choice about whether or not she would be a parent.
    I asked him how anticonvulsive drugs worked, what happened when you took them, what they might interact with badly, and if they ever worked for a while and then suddenly stopped being effective.
    Walking home, I wondered what difference any of that made now. Sophie was dead. It no longer mattered whether or not she’d pined for the child she couldn’t have, or if she’d be alive if Bianca had gotten there a minute sooner, or if the pup had gotten there in time but the meds hadn’t worked. I unlocked the gate and watched Dashiell ran on ahead through the dark tunnel and into the sunlight of the garden, the bullies close behind him, thinking that even if it hadn’t been a seizure that had killed her, but salmonella, so what. The only thing that counted now was finding a home for her dogs. And toward that end, I still had a lot of checking to do.

Chapter 15
    I Sat There Holding the Ph one

    I could hear the house phone when I came out of the tunnel that led into my garden. I ran for the door and got it just as the machine was picking up.
    “Don’t go away. I’m here.”
    I waited for the machine to click off. Whoever was on the other end waited, too. “Rach?”
    “Marty. Hey.”
    “Listen, I passed on the info you gave me about the iguana.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Burke said he didn’t know what he’d do without you.“
    “Oh, great. Now what? Iguana jokes? Look, Marty, I said it was a slim chance. I knew that. But I think it’s better to have all the information—”
    “You did the right thing, Rachel.”
    “Only?”
    “Only it wasn’t salmonella.”
    “You got the ME’s report?”
    “We did.”
    “And?”
    “It wasn’t a seizure either.”
    “What?”
    “It was something she ingested.”
    “I don’t get it. Like what?”
    I wondered if it had been something she ate at dinner, if she’d gotten a really bad case of food poisoning.
    “It was the pill she took, the capsule.”
    No more jokes. His voice serious now.
    “You mean the dog brought her the wrong medication?“
    “What the hell does the dog have to do with this?”
    “She taught the dog to get her medication on command. The older one, Blanche, alerted her when a seizure was coming. Sometimes twenty minutes before, sometimes two minutes before. When she was out of the house, she carried the medication on her, in a little belt pouch or a fanny pack. So it was always available. But at home, shit, she could be in the bathtub or asleep when the dog gave her the word. So she taught the little one, Bianca, to get her the meds and bring them to her.”
    “The clone?”
    I sighed audibly. “Yeah—the clone. So what are you saying, she should have taught her to read the prescription bottle more carefully?”
    “Good thought, but it wouldn’t have helped. It was the right container.”
    “I don’t get it.”
    “What she ingested—Ms. Gordon—the particular pill she took, it wasn’t her medication.”
    “What was it?” I asked,