The Wrong Dog Read online

  “So, the veterinarian came out and explained the procedure to you?”

  “I didn’t actually get to meet the veterinarian. As soon as we were inside, Lorna locked the door behind us, then took Blanche’s leash out of my hand and headed for the door on the other side of the waiting room. ‘Wait here,’ she said. ‘This will take only a minute.’

  “I’d never allowed anyone to work on my dog without me being there, unless it was surgery, like when Blanche was spayed. But I was…”

  “Hooked?”

  Sophie nodded.

  “And it was so fast, the way she took her and walked away, but also, what she’d said was true. She and Blanche were back in no time and Blanche didn’t look any the worse for wear. She put her paws on my legs, then up on my shoulders, and laid her big face against my cheek. I could feel her tail slapping against my legs. Everything seemed normal.”

  “And then?”

  “Lorna took me out, locked the door, and said I’d hear from her when my puppy was ready. I wanted more. I wanted to know where the cloning was going to take place, was it there, at that office, or at some lab, and who the surrogate mother would be, what kind of dog, what breed, and I wanted to know when the pregnancy took so I could count the weeks until my puppy was born and then count the weeks until I got her, but I just stood there on the corner, dumbfounded by it all. I thought, Be quiet, be grateful, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  I wondered why she hadn’t thought, If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

  “Lorna lit a cigarette and then gave me a little wave. ‘See ya,’ she said. And walked away. I didn’t have anything, not a piece of paper, not a phone number—nothing. In fact, Lorna’d said she’d call me, but she’d never asked for my phone number. And it’s unlisted. So I began to think it was some sort of scam. But what? They hadn’t asked me for any money. And whatever they’d done to Blanche had taken only a few minutes and Blanche appeared to be fine. So I just stood there, long after Lorna had left. And then, disheartened, I went home.

  “Seven and a half months later, I got a phone call from Lorna.”

  “At work or at home?”

  “At home. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know. Maybe she has a relative at the phone company.” Sophie shrugged. “She said, ‘When are you going to the run next?’ But she didn’t wait for an answer. She just said, ‘I can meet you there with your puppy.’”

  I leaned forward, literally as well as figuratively drawn into Sophie’s story.

  “I was so stunned,” Sophie said, “all I could think to say was that she shouldn’t bring the puppy into the run. ‘Too many germs,’ I blurted out. ‘Meet me at the fountain instead.’ She agreed and we made a time. When I hung up, my heart was pounding so fast that Blanche came over, her forehead crazed with wrinkles, then she backed up and barked, as confused, I guess, as I felt.

  “That was a Sunday, too. I got there first, looked all around and didn’t see her. So, of course, I began to think it was a gag, a pretty elaborate one, and that she wasn’t coming at all.

  “But then I saw her. She was carrying Bianca in her arms. As she approached, I looked down at Blanche, then back at Bianca. She was like a miniature of my dog, the same in every way.”

  Wouldn’t any white bull terrier look pretty much like any other white bull terrier? Isn’t that the whole point of having a standard? But I kept that thought to myself.

  “She handed me the puppy and took a pack of cigarettes out of her coat pocket, scowling at them before taking one out. ‘Will you need me to report to you? Or to anyone?’ I asked. I felt foolish. I was acting as if I was in a spy movie. Maybe she’d hand me a tape with my instructions and it would self-destruct after I played it. I didn’t know what to think. Or what to say.

  “‘We know everything we have to know,’ she said. She put the cigarette in her mouth and began to fish around in her pocket for matches. ‘Under the cellophane,’ I told her. Isn’t it weird that I remember that? But I do. I remember everything—what the sky looked like, how there was a guy on Rollerblades in the dry fountain, headphones on, singing and dancing, his arms up, his eyes squeezed closed. And this homeless man with torn rags wrapped around his feet, his skin all encrusted with grime, staring at me and the dogs. He looked so poor and I felt so rich.

  “Lorna lit her cigarette and inhaled deeply, as if she was hungry—like that poor man must have been—and the smoke would fill her up. She blew a long stream out toward the center of the fountain. ‘Anyway, we know where to find you if we have any questions.’

  “‘There were three?’ I asked her. She didn’t seem to hear me. ‘There are two more Blanche puppies?’ ‘Yeah, sure, two more,’ she said. ‘But you only get one.’ She was one strange lady. She just turned to go. ‘How old is my puppy?’ I asked after her. ‘Eight weeks today,’ she said without turning around. ‘Has she had shots?’ Lorna turned back, dug around in her pockets, and handed me a piece of paper. Before I’d unfolded it to see the list of inoculations and dates, she’d started to walk away again. ‘Thank you, Lorna,’ I called after her. ‘Thank them for me, will you?’ She raised the hand with the cigarette and gave a little wave. That was the last I saw of her.”

  “No phone calls? No nothing?”

  “Uh-uh. Nothing.”

  “And when was that, the day you got Bianca?”

  “Fourteen months ago.”

  That made Bianca sixteen months old. No wonder she had so much energy.

  “I believed her. I believed all of it, at least once I got Bianca I did.”

  “And now?”

  She didn’t answer my question. “Now I have to locate Side by Side,” she said.

  “How come?”

  “When a seizure is coming, Blanche will get real close to me with this concerned look on her face. First she licks my hand, almost frantically. If I’m sitting—at school, or on the bus, or at home—she’ll crawl up onto my lap and start that frantic, worried licking on my face. Then she jumps off and starts pulling on me, to get me to my bed, or just down on the floor. I always have the pills with me, on me, in a pocket or a little pouch. So I take one out and as soon as Blanche sees the pill, even before I put it in my mouth, she calms down, sighs, and waits for me to lie down. Then she lies down next to me and waits it out. If a seizure starts even though I’ve taken the pill, she gets on top of me and licks my face until I wake up again.”

  “What if you’re out walking?”

  “She’ll stop. It’s like trying to get a building to move. She just won’t go. And when I tug, or turn to look at her, she starts to whine and pull toward home. If I’m not close enough to get home and lie down, I take a pill and find a place to sit down until it passes.”

  “What about Bianca, how does she alert you? The same way?”

  “That’s just what I was about to tell you, Rachel. She doesn’t. She doesn’t alert me at all. For a while, I thought they’d given me the wrong dog, just any white bull terrier, not a clone. But for the life of me I couldn’t think of why someone would pretend to clone my dog and then hand me a free, uncloned purebred bull terrier pup. It’s not as if I paid to have this done and they had to produce a pup to keep my money.”

  “There was never any question of that, any suggestion that you pay or contribute, nothing like that?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did they talk about your estate, about mentioning Side by Side in your will?”

  Sophie laughed. “Estate? You’ve got to be kidding. There is none. I only have what I earn and I spend every cent of that by the time the next paycheck is due. I only teach for three hours a day, Rachel, because of…” Her voice trailed off. “When my kids take art and gym, I get to eat a snack and lie down. If not, there’d be no way I could do what I do. What I get paid, it’s barely enough to live on. When I can, I do little extra jobs, mostly for the dogs, for special food for them and to pay for Bianca’s walker. He’s much, much cheaper than all the other Village walkers, but still, by
the end of the month, it adds up.”

  I nodded. “So, no money up front and no request to bequeath them anything.”

  What was the catch?

  “After a couple of months of worrying, I decided I needed some answers.”

  “Did you try to find Lorna then?”

  Sophie took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, then put them back on quickly. I’d heard that light bothers some epileptics, but she apparently spent a lot of time outside with the dogs. Maybe she was just tired.

  “No, I didn’t. I took Blanche and Bianca to a vet and asked for a DNA test.”

  “A vet?”

  Sophie exhaled. “I didn’t want to go to our regular vet, just in case.”

  “In case what?”

  “I didn’t want to be laughed at. I didn’t want someone I had to deal with thinking I was crazy. Even with the new vet, I lied. I didn’t ask him to please have my dogs tested to see if one of them was a clone of the other.”

  “What did you ask?”

  “I said I’d gotten both girls from the same breeder and that his practices were being challenged by the AKC, a question of parentage that might put Bianca’s papers in jeopardy. I said I’d been told that Blanche was Bianca’s mother, and I wanted to know for sure.”

  “And?”

  “He asked me what difference it made now. He said, ‘Don’t you love your dogs?’

  “I said I did, but that I was thinking of breeding Bianca and I wouldn’t get a fair price for her puppies if she lost her registration. I said I had to be sure of her parentage before I bred her, that the test would give me something to take to the AKC.

  “‘Or it wouldn’t,’ he said.

  “‘Exactly,’ I told him. ‘Either way, I have to know.’”

  “Did he do it?”

  She nodded. “He shrugged and took cheek swabs. He said he had to send them to Michigan State, to their DNA lab. He said it would take a few weeks and that he’d call me. Then, as an afterthought, he said he hoped I got the results I was after. I was glad he wasn’t my regular vet.”

  “And?”

  “The report came back saying, gee, this is very rare, but it appears that Blanche and Bianca have identical genetic markers.”

  “So she is a clone.”

  “That’s not the conclusion the vet came to. He said the lab must have made a mistake. He said the markers couldn’t be identical. Then he explained the facts of life to me, as if I was an idiot. ‘The offspring gets fifty percent of its genes from the mother—that would be Blanche—and fifty percent from the father,’ he said. The pattern is random, which genes each pup will get from its mother and which from the father. But in this case, it appears your dog has no father.’ Before I could say anything, he said, ‘Oh, sure, it’s possible to have all the markers identical, but so rare as to be suspect.’ He said they must have tested one dog’s samples twice. He apologized for the lab’s error and the delay it would cause and suggested we run the tests again.”

  “And you said?”

  “I told him it wasn’t an error. Then I made the mistake of telling him why.”

  “And he said?”

  “That’s not the point. The point is that I need you to find the people at Side by Side for me, Rachel, this Lorna West person and whoever she works for. They’re spending God knows how much money on this project and the seizure-alert ability doesn’t come through. They ought to be told that, that it’s probably not an inheritable ability. They’re going to break the hearts of whoever they gave those other puppies to. And their own as well. I have to find them and tell them. You will help me, won’t you?”

  I sat there for a while, saying nothing. Then I turned and looked at Bianca, asleep behind the bench, so hidden in shadow that she looked like a gray dog, not a white one. Or was that just dirt?

  Sure, scientists had cloned a sheep, some mice, and some cows. And the South Koreans claimed to have produced the first stages of a human embryo, then they’d halted the experiment for ethical reasons. Still, this was all too fantastic to believe, that someone would be willing to spend millions to clone dogs for other people, out of the goodness of his heart.

  Or did he think that once he’d accomplished this, cloning dogs with special abilities would be worth money? Was he planning on, let’s say, cloning Morris the cat, Lassie, Benji? A triple-crown-winning racehorse? Was that it? Was it about money after all?

  “Can I think this over?” I asked, the only sensible idea I’d had all day.

  “Well, sure.” She stood and picked up Bianca’s leash from where it lay next to her on the bench. “If you feel you have to.”

  When she turned to look at me, I saw there were tears in her eyes.

  “Sophie, I…”

  “No, I understand. That vet didn’t believe the story either. He had a good laugh at my expense. When he pulled himself together, he told me cloning dogs was not commercially viable. You lose a lot of embryos, he said, and it’s very expensive. He said that either the dogs were from totally inbred strains or there was a mix-up at the lab.”

  She gently unwrapped Blanche, who I could now see was wearing the red service-dog vest. She was stiff when she stood, but her tail began to wag as soon as she was up. She was a fantastic-looking dog, that great egg head with a flush of pink along the slope of her nose where the fur was nearly negligible. The only other color, aside from the black of her nose, the dark area right under it, and her small, deepset, dark eyes, was a single black spot at the lower-outside corner of her right eye, like a smudge of mascara.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow with an answer,” I said. “I promise.”

  Sophie blinked. One tear fell.

  She called to Bianca, and when the pup lifted her head, I got to see her up close for the first time, the wondrous stand-up ears, the great, broad Roman nose, the no-frills dark eyes, and the big goofy mouth, open in a smile. And the single black spot, like an ink blot, at the lower-outside corner of her right eye. The spot was pinched in near the eye and rounded at the bottom, exactly like the one under Blanche’s right eye. They both had smudges of black under their noses, too, square mustaches that made them seem even more comical than they already did, looking at me with their small, pig eyes, both their heads cocked toward their left. Except for girth, which reflected their age difference, they surely seemed to be identical.

  Not knowing what to think, I glanced over at Dashiell, who was grinning, as if he knew a secret. Then I looked back at the two bullies, sitting hip to hip, waiting for Sophie to get her coat on.

  Well, isn’t that what took the seven and a half months, I thought, finding a puppy with just the perfect markings?

  I looked at Blanche, then at Bianca. Then back and forth again.

  “Let’s go get some food,” I said. “I’m starving.”

  Sophie just stared at me, puzzled.

  “I get five hundred and fifty a day plus expenses, with a week’s fee in advance,” I told her. “I know it’s steep, but I’m worth it. Besides, it includes Dashiell’s services.”

  I bent down to pet the dogs and take a closer look while she thought it over.

  She said, “That’s okay. I figured it would be around that. I’ve been saving up.”

  For the first time, there were no questions about Dash’s fee. If anyone knew how valuable a partner a dog could be, it was Sophie Gordon, my new client.

  CHAPTER 3

  Would You Do It? Chip Asked

  I didn’t get home from dinner with Sophie until eight-thirty and Chip was due back from teaching at the New York State Veterinary Convention within the hour. After feeding Dashiell, I ran upstairs to shower and change. As I passed my office, I saw the light on my answering machine blinking. As much as I would have liked to know who’d called—even if they hadn’t left a message, now that my brother-in-law had gotten me caller ID—I had something more important to do.

  I could hear the phone again from the shower, but my mind was on other things, and once again I ignored the impulse to
put business ahead of pleasure. In fact, to help maintain my resolve, on my way past the office to get dressed, I turned the ringer off on the office phone, and later, between opening the bottle of red wine so that it could breathe and having Dashiell help me collect the clothes that had been tossed in various places around the house, I did the same thing on the downstairs phone.

  Dash, hearing the car as my sweetie circled the block, hoping by some miracle he’d find a legal spot, was at the door, head cocked, a full ten minutes before Chip arrived. The way he tore past Chip to join Betty, Chip’s Shepherd, you would have thought he hadn’t been to the dog run in weeks, that he hadn’t fallen madly in love with another bitch earlier that same day.

  Chip set down his bags and put his arms around me.

  “That’s better,” he said into my hair.

  “How’d it go?”

  “I had a good crowd, seventy or eighty. And I’ve been invited back for next year. They finally understand how much they need me.” He pulled back and looked at me. “Did you miss me so much you could hardly stand it?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s my good wench.”

  We never made it upstairs. We never even closed the door. At first, with the sounds of the dogs mock-fighting as mood music, we did okay. But when they decided to join us, hopping up on the couch and continuing to wrestle there, we began to laugh at all the wrong times.

  “Sex is no laughing matter,” Chip told them. But they just ignored him and went about their business. We had no choice but to do the same.

  “That wasn’t half bad,” he said afterward as we sat outside on the top step drinking wine.

  “Which half wasn’t bad, mine or yours?”

  He started to laugh all over again.

  “So what else have I missed by being away?”

  “I got some work.”

  I took a sip of wine before I began to fill him in on the details, watching his expression change, as mine must have hours earlier as I heard the story I was now telling him.