The door closed. Mara heard the deadbolt slide across. On the walk home, she noticed the silver sedan had disappeared.
Inside, Nisha was speaking on the phone to a woman named Rena Solis, the county’s former racing-track veterinarian. Rena had examined dogs at Rook’s Run years earlier and still volunteered for emergency animal transfers. Nisha put her on speaker.
“Every dog can be identified independently,” Rena said. “The identification tattoos are inside their ears. Some of the kennel’s old records are unreliable, but the dogs aren’t.”
“Somebody offered money for them,” Mara said. “Why these seven?”
Rena paused. “Because they’re trained to do something nobody has explained to you yet. And I’m not certain the people coming after them know what that something is.”
“They’re racing dogs. They run.”
“Not this group. They stopped racing before the kennel closed. They were being moved to a place called the Annex, an old agricultural exhibition center beyond the county line. Rook’s Run called them demonstration animals. I was never allowed to examine them there.”
Nisha interrupted. “Demonstration of what?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
When the call ended, Mara found Owen sitting on the floor beside Cedar. The dog’s breathing had finally settled. Owen had placed a small wooden block in front of him, a toy from the kitchen’s puzzle drawer. Cedar nudged it to the right, waited, and nudged it again when Owen moved it back.
“He keeps doing that,” Owen said. “He likes the one with a corner missing.”
Mara watched. When Owen placed the block to Cedar’s left, Cedar ignored it. He waited until the boy moved it to the right of his front paws, then tapped twice.
“Maybe his left leg hurts,” she said.
“Maybe. But he does it every time I say ‘ready.'”
Owen demonstrated. “Ready?”
Cedar lifted his narrow head and gave two deliberate taps.
Mara did not know whether the trick meant anything. For the first time all day, though, the dog’s behavior did not look like fear. It looked like a memory somebody had taught him to keep.
That night she slept on the couch beside the sunroom. The pool lights remained off, the side gate was reinforced, and a carpenter’s bar rested against the garage door. At two in the morning, she awoke to the sound of someone dragging a metal object across pavement. She looked outside. At the far end of the street, the silver sedan was back.
It drove away when she switched on the porch light, but not before she saw that the rear plate was covered in mud. Someone had taken care to make the numbers unreadable.
4. The Annex
The next morning, Mara and Nisha drove to the old agricultural exhibition center. Owen stayed with a neighbor named Frances who knew the dogs and had already offered to help with feeding. Mara hated leaving them, but the officer assigned to check on the property had agreed to pass the house twice during the day.
