Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

from dog food, the samples should be collected at least two hours after the dog’s last meal or snack. It said the dog could have access to water at any time, which reminded me of something I’d read elsewhere, suggesting the dog be given water before DNA collection to make sure there weren’t “foreign” particles in the mouth. Sophie must have been told about the mother’s milk contamination by someone else, Loma or the vet she’d gone to.
    VetGen only gave instructions for using their kit and collecting cheek swabs, but I also knew blood samples could be used for DNA testing. It had been all over the news for years.
    As long as I had the computer on, I checked all the PalmPilot files one more time for any mention of Herbie, but found nothing. He’d been expunged. Then I looked for Rhoda references and also came up blank. I checked the desk drawers again to see if there was a file with old photos. Zip. So I went out into the living room to check the bookcase. On the second shelf, stuck between the cookbooks and the bull terrier books, there was a loose-leaf binder. I slipped it out and took it back to Sophie’s desk. And there she was, Rhoda, standing next to Sophie, right on the second page. Only I couldn’t tell which was which.
    I closed the notebook and carried it out into the garden. The lights had come on already, but still the dogs were playing. They’d collapsed in the far corner of the garden, near the ivy-covered brick wall, and they were chewing earnestly on each other’s faces. For a moment, I wondered how Dashiell would react when I found a home for Bianca.
    I heard my cell phone ringing, looked over at Dashiell, then changed my mind and went for it myself, flipping it open as I walked back out to the garden.
    “I saw you from my window,” Lydia said. “I remembered something. Sophie had a cousin. I don’t know how I could have forgotten except that...”
    “Yes?”
    “She never saw him. Not since they were kids. He’s her mother’s brother’s kid. Well, he’s not a kid anymore. Lives in upstate New York. She said they used to talk on the phone, you know, his birthday, her birthday, Christmas.
    His name is Preston. She referred to him as Pres. Stupid name, don’t you think?”
    “Where did you say he lives?” I was already wondering how far I’d have to take the dogs.
    “Cambridge. It’s a little town not far from Albany. Sophie showed it to me on a map once. She said he was always asking her to come up, but she was afraid to travel, in case she got sick. She didn’t want to be that far from her doctor. But she thought about it. He’s in real estate and she used to say she wished she could ask him to find her a little place with some land for the dogs, but she never did.”
    “Because she loved her job?”
    “Because she couldn’t drive. How could you exist in a one-horse town like that without a car? It’s not like there’s a subway. And work, too. Where could she find a job in a place like that? Naw. It never would have worked. It was just a dream of hers. She had lots of dreams, that girl.”
    “Thank you, Lydia. Keep thinking.”
    Sitting on the backless stone bench, I opened the notebook again. There were pictures of Sophie’s parents on the first page, first together, then one of her mom holding the twin baby girls. I looked at Rhoda and Sophie again, on the next page, dressed identically for some occasion in coats with matching leggings, holding hands, smiling. And Ölen I began turning pages and found pictures of Sophie with someone else, not her parents but a grim-looking older woman, a grandmother or a great-aunt. As I turned the Pages, Sophie the little girl, then Sophie the adolescent became sadder and sadder. Finally, there were only pictures of dogs—like the ones in the other album, Blanche, then Blanche and Bianca; no Herbie, no Sophie, nothing more. I went through the book twice, but there were no pictures of Preston Wexford either, unless he was the little boy in the family shot taken a year or two before the accident.
    Sophie hadn’t told her kids the whole story. No wonder. It was just too damn sad to tell, that her parents had died in the crash, too, that she had been the only survivor to be raised afterward by a sour-faced old woman, and as if that hadn’t been enough, to grow up knowing that she faced a lifetime of epileptic seizures to make good and sure she never forgot the day that had so changed her life.

Chapter 22
    Better Safe Than