The beast hopped out of the crate, and we saw he was twice the size of Patience, with his balls still intact and swinging, of course. The first thing he did was pee on a tire of the giant truck, showing off his giant penis and copious amounts of urine. The message was clear: Dan in the Down Vest was compensating for something. We had a hard time taking him and his dog seriously, which may have colored what happened later.
Dad came out of the house with one of Grant’s shirts. After many handshakes and politenesses of “I’m real sorry for your troubles,” Dan thrust the shirt under the beast’s snout. Tonka put his nose to the ground and went straight to the garage, then he pawed at the door until we opened it. He galumphed to a spot by a pile of cable that had some blankets piled into what looked like a nest.
The blankets were just the kind we threw over the rowboat and the kayaks, but they’d been arranged in a way to seem comfy. Under different circumstances, I wouldn’t have minded curling up in those and taking a nap. I loved the places where we hung up the boats. To me, they smelled of early-morning mists rising off the water and staph infections from dirty oars. Nirvana.
Tonka sniffed around for a while, then the beast walked nose-down back out of the garage and to the gate, where he stopped and looked stupidly up and down the street that led along the shore.
There was no aroo sound.
There was no more sniffing.
The trail was cold.
Sammy had emerged from the lagoon at this point. He came up to where Dad and Mere and I were standing mutely, watching Tonka do nothing.
He broke the silence. “What’s going on? They brought in Tonka?” he said, as if he couldn’t believe that anyone were so desperate.
I said what we were all thinking. “That dog is a moron.”
“He’s not a moron, actually,” Sammy said. “He’s just a male, so he pees on everything he sniffs.”
Mere rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Total moron.”
She smiled slyly and exchanged a look with Sammy that lasted a little too long.
I glanced at Meredith, and she quickly looked away. Was I imagining things, or was something going on between those two?
“Look, whether or not the dog is a moron, it’s obvious the trail ends here, on the shore road,” Dad said.
“So if we believe the dog, Grant got into a car, right?” I said. “We can call in the people walking the grid and trolling the bay and issue an Amber Alert.”
“Wait just a second. Have we thought that maybe he went willingly with someone and that maybe he’s safe?” Mere suggested. “He went willingly with Pixie in the rowboat.”
It was common knowledge by now. Pixie hadn’t been in good enough shape to tell everyone last night, so I told them that she was the one who had taken Grant out. Then, when she got home from the hospital, she told the sheriff everything she remembered.
“He’s a minor, and whoever took him didn’t have my consent,” Dad said. “So it’s a kidnapping. Even if that someone was a Gray. And I will prosecute whoever took him to the full extent of the law.” He glared at Sammy.
“Whoa,” Sammy said, backing up. He had come here to help us out and instead was getting a fight from a man whose wife had just died, so that put him in a position where he couldn’t defend himself.
“Dad,” I said, “you can’t think after all this shit that they’re still playing . . .”
It was right then, when we were standing in the drive arguing, paying no attention to what was going on around us, that the second-best scent hound in Washington State began to bay.
fifteen
PIXIE
When we finally filled Patience’s grave, Dean marked the spot with a stick. Not a cross, because Mom would have yanked it out of the ground and winged it into the lagoon.
So a stick.
He asked me if I wanted to say a few words.
I said what was expected of me. “Patience. You ate Shih Tzus. And goose poop. But you found things.” I stopped. I remembered that first day, bicycling back from my brothers, the last child, the one whose only superpower was that she was the Girl. But how, after I started working with Patience, I had gotten a reputation for being a finder of lost things—a reputation my brothers didn’t quite share, even though they were keen to help out.
I thought of her trembling that first day, the way she crept out of her crate, and how I had to keep her from howling, and how it gave me a purpose that I hadn’t had before. “You found me,” I finally said. “So thank you.”
Dean tamped down the dirt with his shovel a little better, and I looked around. With Patience, I knew what to do. Without her, now what?
“That’s that, then,” Dean said, wiping the rain across his face. Drips of water hung from his nose. Mine as well, I was sure.
And then it happened. One of those weird moments that told me, no matter what the doctor said, I wasn’t normal. Not after what had happened in the bay and when I came out of it.
There. Under the eaves of our house.