Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

morning would give up for any reason. Whatever they were trying to gain, or hide, they were in too deep to stop now.
    I hadn’t pretended to look into a store window, see if anyone was following me. I hadn’t stopped off anywhere, to be able to check the street when I came back out. I hadn’t pulled out a mirror, pretended to check my hair, gotten a view of the street behind me. Anyway, even if I’d wanted to do that, I didn’t have a mirror, so I couldn’t. And if I did, what would I have looked for, Joe, going on ahead and then waiting to see if someone would be coming up behind him? If he knew I was there, he would have killed me in the shower, right after killing Dashiell.
    So there were two clones. Maybe a third somewhere. Was Mel Sugarman, or whatever his name was, an epileptic, too? He’d had a seizure, but that could have been from loss of blood. And whatever was in his medicine cabinet and nightstand, or rather whatever wasn’t there, hadn’t made me think otherwise.
    But if he wasn’t an epileptic, why did he have one of the Blanche clones? And why did he lie and tell Sophie he was a dog walker? What on earth could have made him walk Sophie’s dog five days a week, rain or shine, for a solid year when he wasn’t a dog walker and didn’t seem to need the money?
    Sophie had been watched and listened to. Was Mel the spy? Fine. Mel was the spy. But for whom? Himself? And why? What was he after? What was he hiding? Who was Joe? And why did he have Mel’s keys?
    I’d detoured out of my way going home to check out an address on Barrow Street between Hudson and Greenwich. Unless this was another plant, a made-up list by the phone, a fake address book, an apartment set up just to fool me, I was in luck. It turned out to be a private house, a little redbrick Federal, about a century and a half old, and next door, a similar house with a similar stoop, a place for me to sit and listen, close enough to see and hear, if what I now hoped for was so. I climbed the stoop to the pilaster-framed doorway and checked the names on the bells. There was no name, but only one bell. Perfect.
    Heading home, I was lost in thought, figuring out what to do. I barely noticed where I was walking, going on automatic pilot toward Tenth Street. But as soon as I’d turned onto my block, Dashiell snapped me back to reality. As he approached where he lived, he had things on his mind, too, and until I was brought up short by his leash, I hadn’t noticed that he’d stopped to leave his own news item on a tied-up pile of newspapers. I probably shouldn’t have let him do that, but in a city setting, there just aren’t enough upright things for male dogs to mark without making someone unhappy. I thought of all the times I’d been yelled at for letting him lift his leg on the tire of a car, a tree, someone’s stoop, the garbage bags some super was moving out to the curb. Mail storage boxes, no-no. Think about the poor mailman who had to go in there for his next sack of mail. Lampposts? Half of them had those front plates missing, exposed wires on the bottom. Someone at the run had said some dog got electrocuted, peeing on an open lamppost. No wonder there were people who didn’t believe in keeping dogs in the city.
    Standing there while Dashiell sniffed, then hiked his leg again, I began to read the headlines on the tied-up papers, reminding myself that I hadn’t done anything normal for days now, hadn’t read a paper, eaten a decent meal, paid my bills, spent time with my sweetheart.
    Some cops were on trial for brutalizing a citizen. Who could you trust nowadays? Then I thought about Mel again, about the way he’d pulled me around behind him.
    He knew Joe. He knew what Joe had gone there to do. He’d been in it, whatever it was, up to his skinny neck. Then why save me?
    I unlocked the gate, let Dashiell off leash, and walked slowly to the cottage door, listening to the sound of only one dog barking. When I opened the door, Bianca jumped on me, then ran past me to be with Dashiell. I stepped inside.
    Except for the ticking of the kitchen clock, the cottage was silent. There was no bull terrier in the living room. I ran upstairs, thinking she’d gone up to lie on the bed, the way she’d gone to lie on Sophie’s bed, to wallow in the smells of her caretaker. But the unmade bed was empty. I checked the office. Then I ran back downstairs. And down the flight to the basement. Blanche wasn’t there either. When I headed back