Eli looked away. That was enough of an answer.
Before anyone could speak again, a vehicle rolled past the open barn. A black utility truck, moving slowly, with two men in the front. Alma grabbed Mara’s sleeve and pulled her away from the doorway.
“There’s another exit,” she said. “Don’t let them see which car belongs to you.”
They hurried through a side door into the long grass. Behind them, Eli called after Alma, but the truck had stopped near the loading dock and the sound of boots on gravel made all further argument impossible.
Mara and Nisha reached their car by crossing behind a row of rusted animal pens. As Nisha turned the key, Mara saw one of the men leave the truck and head for the barn. He carried a folded canvas bag of the kind trainers used to store supplies.
“What happens Tuesday?” Mara asked.
Nisha drove through the open exit without answering. Her knuckles had gone white around the steering wheel.
5. A Trick with Two Answers
They stopped at a roadside gas station fifteen minutes from the Annex. Nisha parked behind a delivery truck and waited until another vehicle had entered the lot before turning to Mara. “I recognized that equipment,” she said. “Not because I’ve seen Victor’s business. Because my aunt bought tickets to a show he operated in another county. They called it the Listening Dogs.”
Mara stared at her. “You knew about this?”
“I knew there was a stage act. I didn’t know the surrendered animals were the same ones. My aunt thought she’d been given advice by an animal who understood her husband’s death. A dog chose one door instead of another, and afterward somebody told her it was a message from him. She stopped speaking to her sister for almost a year because of it.”
“How could one door do that?”
“The audience supplied its own meaning. Victor supplied the words.”
Nisha showed Mara an old program she had located on her phone. It featured a black greyhound standing before three painted doors under the title THE LISTENING ROOM. Beneath the animal’s image was an invitation to ask a question too difficult for a human answer. Nothing promised supernatural powers. The language was carefully softer than that. Still, as Mara read the testimonials, she understood how frightened or lonely people might hear a promise where the advertisement pretended to offer only wonder.
Mara recalled Cedar’s double tap on the wooden block. “They trained him to do a task. People mistook the task for an answer.”
“Not by accident,” Nisha said. “The trainer made sure of it.”
A pickup pulled beside the pumps. Both women lowered their heads until it passed. Mara hated how quickly an ordinary trip had become something furtive. She had spent the previous morning thinking about a ruined pool. Now a stranger had entered her garage, a former training facility had warned her about buyers, and the dogs she had carried through her front door were being treated like pieces of someone else’s machinery.
