“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” he said, placing the plate, with at least three good cheesecake bites remaining, in front of me. Then he patted my shoulder quickly, just once, before he turned and headed down the hall to his study.
I watched him go, then picked up my fork, settled back in my seat, and wrote back to my friends.
Chapter ELEVEN
I looked down at the dog sitting in front of me, a smallish sandy-colored mix of some kind. This was a one-time walk; his owners usually spent the summers away but were back in town for just a day or two and needed him to get some exercise. The dog looked back up at me, his tail thumping on the ground. “Okay,” I said, smiling at him as I made sure his leash was clipped on tightly. “Ready for this?” I paused when I realized I’d blanked on his name. But in my defense, when I’d gone to pick him up, it had been a pretty chaotic scene. The dog had been running around barking happily, seemingly trying to get himself as underfoot as possible. Classical music was blaring and a girl who looked a year or two younger than me was doing a series of very complicated pirouettes in the kitchen, while a guy who looked like he was probably her brother sat nearby with a thick law textbook, seemingly unfazed by all of this, muttering about torts. It was a girl around my age who’d taken charge, giving me the dog’s leash and instructions for where to walk him.
“Sorry about all this,” she said loudly, trying to be heard over the music, as she gestured behind her. “We usually spend the whole summer at our lake house, but my sister has an audition for a dance company in New York tomorrow, so . . .” She shrugged, and I tried to hide my surprise, since the twirling girl looked like she couldn’t have been more than fifteen. But I’d taken the dog and said I’d be back in about half an hour. Now I knelt down to see if his name was engraved on his tag, but there was just an M, and his owners’ phone number.
“Okay, M,” I said, as I straightened up again, hoping that when I brought him home, I could give a report on how the dog did without having to use his name. “Let’s do this.”
The dog trotted forward, tail wagging, and I started walking him down the long, steep driveway toward the road. As I walked, I pulled out my phone, telling myself I just wanted to listen to some music, pretending that was the real reason right up until the moment I scrolled to my brand-new audiobook section. I’d transferred the discs Clark had given me to my phone two days ago but hadn’t listened to them yet. It seemed like the time had come.
I took a breath and pressed play, and the sonorous voice of a very famous British movie star filled my ears.
“If it had not snowed on the second day of the Aspen moon,” he intoned, and I noticed, not for the first time, how everything sounded better with a British accent. “The life of Tamsin Castleroy would have been quite different. . . .”
I turned up the volume as I walked along with the dog, trying to pay attention so I didn’t miss anything, as I listened to Clark’s story.
? ? ?
“Wow,” Maya said, looking at me with her eyebrows raised. She glanced down at the pile of dogs at her feet. It was the three terriers again, the ones that were normally so hyperactive that my arm was always sore afterward from having to pull back against the leash the whole time. But now they were flopped on the wooden floors of the tiny office Maya and Dave ran their business out of. I had been walking them nearby and figured I might as well stop in with them, since I needed to get a set of keys for a new dog, and this way I could pick up my paycheck. All the dogs looked exhausted, and Tofu—normally the most hyperactive of them all—was starting to fall asleep in front of me, despite the fact that another dog was currently sitting on his head. “It looks like they really got a workout.”
“Yeah,” I said, busying myself by folding up the extra plastic bags I kept in my back pocket, avoiding Maya’s eye. “There were . . . um . . . lots of squirrels today.” Maya nodded, and it looked like she believed me. My explanation was almost as rational as the truth, though—that I was currently devouring Clark’s books, and the dogs I walked were feeling the direct effects of it.