Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [55]
“I read the obituary. Liz had a dog that we took care of since he was a puppy. She’d been coming here for about five years. We were hoping that nothing bad had happened to the dog. Didn’t he have his tags on?”
“No, just a reflector tag, nothing else. He’s a big guy, probably around ninety pounds, although he was thin and dehydrated when I found him. Easy temperament. A few white hairs on his chest.”
“That could be him but it could also be a lot of black Labs. I offered to install a locator chip in Cooper, but Liz didn’t like that idea.”
“Cooper? The dog’s name is Cooper? Lloyd will be very pleased to know that we’ve finally figured out his name.”
The dog had been lying on his side in the afternoon sunshine on the kitchen linoleum. At the sound of his name, his head came up and his legs contracted, bringing his body to standing, as if he had heard a bugle call.
The vet continued. “We had heard nothing about the dog being found in her house. She would have been found a lot quicker if the dog had been there. He would have alerted someone. I’ve seen that happen before.”
“If this is Lloyd…Cooper, there’s something I need to know. He was injured when I found him. Shot with an arrow.”
Rocky heard the controlled silence on the other end of the line. “During bow season, I see about one dog every other week that’s been shot. It’s not uncommon,” said the vet.
“But the dog was shot on the island. We don’t have a bow season here. I know Elizabeth was an archer. I can’t help but put some of this together. Her death was probably a suicide; there is no reason to think otherwise, according to a police report. I’m asking you to speculate about something. Did you ever see anything that would make you wonder if the dog was mistreated?”
“This is Maine. We have people who still think that taking care of a dog means chaining it up in the backyard and throwing food to it once a day. Cooper is a great dog because he’s got great genes and because he had an owner who trained him and took good care of him. Are you asking if I think Liz tried to kill her dog? Absolutely not. Not unless she completely lost her mind.”
Rocky didn’t say it, but she thought, don’t you have to do just that to be twenty-eight years old and kill yourself?
“The other thing about bow hunters is that if they mean to kill a dog, they will. A dog won’t bolt and run like a wild animal. They’re an easy target. Any dog that I’ve ever seen that was shot by arrow had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was always an accident.”
Rocky thanked the vet and hung up. She pulled on a jacket and the dog skittered to his feet and headed for the door. She wanted to clear her head with sharp air; an accommodating blast from the northwest welcomed her into icy arms. She pulled up the hood and walked with Cooper, crisscrossing every trail along the beach, through the dried beachgrass. They sat together in the twilight; Rocky uncomfortable on a damp log, the dog peacefully gnawing a stick, until the chill in her bones forced her up.
In the middle of the night, Rocky continued to feel the steady caffeine-driven thump of her heart. She had not been asleep since she turned out her light three hours earlier. With each turn from her back to her side, to her stomach, to the other side, the dog rustled on the floor, his sharp leg joints rearranging, claws clattering, sighing impatiently as if he wished he slept with a less rambunctious human.
Rocky’s thoughts reached for the woman she had never met, who had stayed long enough on the island to leave a wounded, and loved dog, and then die in Orono. Rocky sat up and flicked on the light. This woman, Liz, had been young, twenty-eight, but right at the age where you can see the first plateau of adulthood, where a young woman might leave behind the tentativeness of being afraid to appear too serious, too sober. She had just purchased a house, how did everything go wrong? The first hint of daylight was still hours away. She got up and pulled on a sweater and