“No tags?” my father asked, bending down slowly and wincing a little as he did so, until he was crouched in front of the dog.
“No address or owner,” I said, “just a name. Murphy.” Upon hearing this, the dog stopped scratching himself and sat up at attention, tail thumping on the ground again.
“Hey there,” my dad said softly. He rested his hand on the dog’s head and scratched him between the ears. “Between you and me,” he said, almost confidentially to the dog, “you don’t smell too good.”
“So what should we do?” I asked. I knew, vaguely, mostly from TV shows, about shelters and vets’ offices, but had never had any experience with them myself.
“Well,” my dad said, pushing himself to his feet a little unsteadily, “I think the first thing is to talk to the neighbors, make sure he’s not just someone’s pet who wandered away. And then if nobody claims him, I think there’s an animal shelter in Mountainview.”
“What’s going on?” Gelsey asked as she stepped onto the porch, not wearing her tennis or her dance clothes, but instead, a pink sundress with sandals, her hair loose and hanging around her shoulders. Her eyes widened when she looked at the dog. “Did we get a dog?” she asked, her voice raising excitedly on the last word, making her sound actually twelve for once, and not twelve-going-on-twenty-nine.
“No,” my father and I said together.
“Oh,” Gelsey said, her face falling.
“I should get to work,” my father said, turning to head inside. He was still working on his case, the FedEx truck still arriving with files from his office. The deliveries were no longer happening every day, but had gone down to two or three times a week. My dad had also taken to closing his laptop screen if any of us leaned in for a look, fueling Warren’s speculation that he was also spending a lot of time of this mystery project of his. “Can you handle this, Taylor?” he asked, nodding down at the dog. The dog was now scratching his ear with his back paw, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his fate was being discussed.
“Sure,” I said, even though I would have very much preferred someone else handle it, as my experience with dogs had been pretty much limited to watching Top Dog. I started to leave, to begin the process of talking to the neighbors, when I caught a glimpse of my sister still standing on the porch. When I was her age, I rarely just hung around the house. I always had something going on with Henry or Lucy. But, in fairness, Gelsey hadn’t been here since she was little, and she wasn’t the greatest at making friends. I glanced at the house next door and remembered the girl I’d seen. “Gelsey, come with me,” I called to her. “And bring the cookies.”
chapter seventeen
WE HEARD THE ARGUMENT BEFORE WE MADE IT TO THE FRONT steps. It was impossible not to hear it—there was just a screen door, and the words carried all the way out to the gravel of the driveway, where Gelsey, the dog, and I all paused.
“You knew what this would do!” a woman’s voice, shaking with anger, rang out. “I told you back when we were undercover. You’ve killed Sasha with this, you heartless bastard!”
I looked at the front door again, then took a small step in front of my sister. Undercover? Who had ended up next door to us? “I’m not sure,” I said quietly, starting to take a step away. “Maybe—”
“You can’t blame this on me!” a man’s voice rang out, sounding equally angry. “If you’d done what you were supposed to in Minsk, we wouldn’t be here!”
The woman gasped. “How dare you bring up Minsk!” she yelled. “It’s just…” Silence fell, and then, sounding perfectly calm, she said, “I don’t know. It’s a little too much, I think.”
Gelsey frowned at me, and I just shook my head, totally lost, but thinking that there might be a better time for us to ask these people if they were missing a dog. And we didn’t even have the oatmeal raisin cookies with us. When we went to bring them, my mother had told us she’d tossed them out after a week when it became clear they were never going to be eaten. “Let’s come back later,” I said, taking another step away. Gelsey tugged on the dog’s collar, using the makeshift leash—a length of pink satin ribbon, the kind she used for her pointe shoes.
“Hey there!” I glanced up and saw a woman standing in the doorway on the front porch. She looked like she was in her mid-thirties, and was dressed casually, in jeans and a T-shirt that read IN N OUT. She had long, pale blond hair and shielded her eyes from the sun. “What’s up?”