Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

need to ask him something. It’s really important. Do you have his address in Metuchen?”
    She unzipped her small purse and pulled out her calendar, flipping to the part that held her addresses.
    “Nice town,” she said. “Lots of old houses. I only went once. I smuggled Parker onto the train with me. She and Murray were really tight. Best friends.” She nodded. “I don’t know,” she said, closing her address book and squinting up at me, the sun in her eyes. “Where’d you get this?” She looked at the photo of Herbie, then back at me.
    “From his ex-girlfriend,” I said, thinking I was so close now, hoping I wouldn’t blow it, hoping she’d open the book again and give me his address. Never mind, I thought, Metuchen, New Jersey, I could get it from the operator, tell her it’s a new listing.
    “Sophie?”
    I nodded.
    “I guess it’s okay then,” she said.
    She didn’t know.
    She pulled a piece of paper out of the purse, fished around and found a pen, and wrote it all down for me: Herbie Sussman, 1132 Bellamy Road, Metuchen. “He had a problem with his phone number,” she said, dropping the calendar into her purse. “It belonged to a cab company. Can you believe that? They’re supposed to wait a year, I think. Or is it six months? Whatever. They must’ve waited a week. He’d come home, his voice mail was full. He’d missed God knows how many calls. He just E-mailed me about it. So that number’s dead and he doesn’t have the new one yet. You want his E-mail?”
    “Sure.”
    She wrote that down.
    “He was pissed,” she said.
    “About the phone number?”
    “About his job moving him out to Jersey. But he didn’t think it was a good idea to quit, not with all his credit-card debt; you know Herbie.” She looked up at me again, covering her eyes with one hand, squinting anyway. “Oh, that’s right,” she said, “I forgot. You don’t know him. Well, don’t tell him I told you he’s in debt. I have enough people pissed at me right now.”
    I thanked her, took the picture back, and continued around the run anyway. Who knows what else you can learn, asking around. Well, usually nothing. But you never know, I’d thought, the excitement growing.
    I’d E-mailed Herbie the moment I’d gotten home, told him I was a friend of Sophie, his ex, asked if I could come out and see him, there was something important I needed to ask him. He must have been on-line because I’d gotten his answer right away: “Why not ask me via E-mail?” I wrote again, saying I was an old-fashioned girl and I’d rather talk face-to-face. He wrote back saying, “Sure, whatever, you want to schlep all the way out to Metuchen just to ask me a couple of questions, why not?” He’d said he’d be home all morning. Then he’d asked me to give his regards to Sophie.
    He didn’t know either.
    I told him I’d be there in an hour and a half.
    It was the same voice it had always been since I’d gone on the train with my mother when I was seven, to visit her cousin in Atlantic City: “The northeast corridor train to Trenton, ready on track three, all aboard.”
    And like sheep being herded through a small gate by a Border collie who had been bred to disregard the fact that he was outnumbered, the crowd turned around and headed for the escalator that led to tracks three and four, the music that filled the main room fading as we rode down to the tracks and moved, as one animal, onto the train.
    As the swell narrowed and squeezed into the door to the closest car, I grabbed the first seat I could, across from a woman with big hair, taupe nail polish, rings on three fingers, including the pointer, too much perfume, and an ankle bracelet of a type I hadn’t seen since I was a kid and Laura Weisbart got one from the only boy in ninth grade who didn’t have zits. But he had full braces and so did Laura. You don’t want to hear the comments.
    The vista out the window wasn’t any better. Though it was September, there was nothing green in sight. The sky hung thick and low, a sickly gray. Off in the distance gigantic smokestacks poured chemical waste into the Jersey air. The ground was brown, the trees leafless, the air visible. We passed a factory that was flying the flag. Old Glory, in the Garden State, was red, gray, and blue. It was not a comforting view.
    But halfway there, everything greened up, and even close to the tracks there were rows of pretty little houses with neat front lawns and asters or mums along