Chapter 23
I came back out that front door and looked at the railing and my whole body stopped.
The leash was there. Unhooked, just hanging there against the wood like it had always been empty. Goldie was gone.
I stood on that porch for a full three seconds before my brain caught up to what my eyes were telling me and then I was off the porch and down the steps calling her name before I even made a conscious decision to move.
“Goldie. Goldie!”
Up the walkway, out to the sidewalk, both directions.
Nothing. No movement, no sound, no curly fur bounding toward me from anywhere.
I went left because that was the direction we usually walked and I was calling her name and my voice was already doing the thing it did when I was trying not to cry, that tight high pitch that I hated the sound of.
I made it half a block before I turned around and went back because maybe she had gotten loose and gone around the back. She hadn’t. I checked anyway. Called her name at the side gate, at the back fence, everywhere that made and didn’t make sense.
Brendon came out the front door when he heard me.
“What happened?” He was already reading my face before I answered.
“She’s gone.” My voice broke on the second word. “I hooked her to the railing and ran inside for two minutes and she’s just gone.”
He was off the porch and past me immediately. He went to the railing and looked at the unhooked leash and I watched his face go through the same sequence mine had. Disbelief then alarm then that particular expression that Brendon got when he shifted into problem solving mode, jaw set, eyes moving.
“The camera,” he said, already pulling out his phone.
I looked at the ring camera mounted above the door and felt something sink in my stomach before he even checked it.
“Baby.” His voice came out different. Flat with something behind it that sounded like guilt. “The battery has been dead. I’ve been meaning to change it for a week.”
I looked at him.
“I kept forgetting,” he said. “I was going to do it this weekend.”
I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t say anything that wasn’t going to be unfair to him in that moment and I knew it.
He hadn’t done anything except be busy the way he was always busy and forget a small thing the way people forgot small things.
I knew that. But standing on this porch with an empty railing and no dog in sight I needed something to be somebody’s fault and his face was right there.
“Let’s just look,” I said instead. “She couldn’t have gone far.”
We went up and down the street for forty minutes.
Brendon went one direction and I went the other and we met in the middle and separated again.
I knocked on three neighbors’ doors. One didn’t answer.
One had an elderly woman who said she hadn’t seen anything.
One was a young guy who had just gotten home from a night shift and looked at me with genuine sympathy and said he was sorry, he hadn’t seen a dog.
I was crying by the time Brendon found me on the corner.
Not quiet crying either. The ugly kind that I had no control over, the kind that came from somewhere past logic and reason, from the part of me that had raised this dog from eight weeks old, that had driven her to every vet appointment and bought her the expensive grain free food and let her sleep at the foot of my bed sometimes.
Goldie was my dog before she was anything else. That was my sweet girl. And someone took her.
Brendon pulled me into his chest and held me and I let him even though some part of me was screaming about something I couldn’t say out loud.
“We’re going to find her,” he said into my hair. “I promise you we’re going to find her. And if we don’t—”
I pulled back.
“If we don’t,” he said carefully, reading my face, “we will find the same breed, same coloring, same everything. I will find you the closest thing possible—”
“Don’t.” I stepped back completely. “Don’t ever say that to me again. You cannot replace her. She is not a thing that gets replaced. She is my dog and there will never be another Goldie and you shouldn’t even be thinking like that right now.”
He held his hands up. “You’re right. I’m sorry. That was the wrong thing to say.”
“Yes it was.”
“I’m sorry baby.”
I turned away and pressed my hand over my mouth and stood there for a second trying to get myself under control.
He meant well. He always meant well. That was just Brendon, trying to fix the unfixable, trying to offer a solution when there wasn’t one yet.
I knew that. It still made me want to scream.
We posted on three neighborhood apps and two lost pet Facebook groups by the time we got back inside.
Brendon made flyers on his laptop in twenty minutes, a good photo of Goldie I had on my phone, our numbers, a reward amount that he put higher than I suggested because that was also just Brendon.
We printed them at the home office and he said he would put them up on his way to work.
I called into work while he was getting ready. Told Ashley to handle the training class and to call me only if something was urgent. She didn’t ask questions because she could hear my voice and she knew what it meant.
Brendon kissed my forehead before he left. Told me he loved me, told me to call him the second I heard anything, told me again that they were going to find her.
I watched his car back out of the driveway.
Then I picked up my phone and called Griz.
It rang. And rang. And went to voicemail.
I stood in my living room and looked at the empty dog bed in the corner of the room and called again. Voicemail again.
Now I was moving from grief into something else. Something that had sharper edges. I was getting pissed.
I got in my car and just drove. No destination, just moving through the neighborhood and the surrounding blocks with my window down calling Goldie’s name at intersections like she was going to come trotting around a corner.
I drove for forty minutes and covered probably a two mile radius and found nothing and nobody and came back home and sat in my driveway and called Griz again.
This time it picked up.
But he didn’t say anything. Just dead air on his end and then background noise filtering through and I was about to say his name when I heard it.
A voice. Female. Laughing at something. Talking in that easy familiar way that women talked when they were comfortable around someone.
I sat very still.
And then underneath the woman’s voice, underneath the background noise and whatever was happening on his end without him knowing the call had connected—
Barking.
I knew that bark. I had heard that bark every single morning for years. The specific pitch of it, the pattern, the way it went up at the end like a question. I knew my dog.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at the screen like it was going to explain itself to me.
Then I put it back.
The woman laughed again.
I hung up.
I sat in my driveway and I felt something move through my body that started in my chest and spread outward and I recognized it immediately because I hadn’t felt it in a long time but I had grown up feeling it and it was the specific heat of being played.
He had my dog.
He had my dog and there was a woman there and she sounded completely at home wherever they were and Goldie was barking in the background like everything was fine while I had been driving around this neighborhood for an hour crying.
I was going to lose my mind.
I opened my phone and pulled up the tracker app. The little dot was moving. I watched it for a moment until it stopped and the map showed me a location that was about twenty minutes from where I was sitting.
I started my car.
I called him back twice on the way and he didn’t answer and I was gripping the steering wheel so hard my knuckles were aching and I didn’t care.
Three years. Three years I had that dog.
And this man had come into my life like a hurricane and stolen my pet and apparently had a whole woman he was giving my baby to.
Was this what he did? Was all of this some kind of game and I was the one sitting here thinking it meant something?
I thought about the hotel room. About the way he had looked at me when he said he wanted all of it. Every word he had said, the way he said it, the certainty behind it. I had believed him. I had actually believed him.
My phone rang. Him.
I let it ring twice because I needed two seconds to get my voice under control before I answered.
“I have the dog,” he said before I could speak. “She’s safe. She’s been fed and she’s comfortable.”
“You have a woman there,” I said.
“Ivy—”
“I heard her. The call connected and I heard her, then I heard my dog and I need you to listen to me very carefully right now.” My voice was shaking and I was not entirely sure it was from anger anymore but I was going to call it anger.
“I don’t know what you think this is or what kind of games you’re out here playing but you do not get to steal my dog and have it over there with another woman like that’s acceptable.
I don’t care who she is. Get her away from you.
In fifteen minutes, if you care about that girl at all you will have her somewhere else before I get there. ”
“Would you just—”
“Don’t.” I cut him off. “Don’t talk to me right now.”
I hung up.
He called back immediately. I watched his name on the screen and let it go to voicemail.
He called again. Voicemail. Again. I turned my volume down and focused on the GPS and the distance ticking down and tried to breathe through the thing happening in my chest that was equal parts fury and hurt and something else I refused to look at directly.
The GPS brought me to a PetSmart.
I sat in the parking lot for exactly two seconds after I pulled in because I saw them before I even found a spot.