She said, “Duke’s been waiting for you.” I asked what she meant, and she told me her husband had brought him there in 2022, saying the dog had belonged to his late friend. I told her my husband had died in 2021 and that nobody in our family had owned another dog. She looked at me for a long moment and said the man who brought Duke had used my husband’s name as the emergency contact. Then she said something that made my stomach turn: he’d told her never to let me see the dog. She thought I already knew about him. I asked what my husband had called the dog before she changed his name, and she said, “Buddy.”
I stood there staring at the dog because Buddy had been the name of a dog my husband claimed had died when he was a teenager. The woman went inside and came back with a folder from the vet, including the original intake form from 2022. The owner’s name was my husband’s, but the signature wasn’t his. Under “previous address” was the address of a house I didn’t recognize. I asked her who had brought him in. She said it was a woman who came every few months to pay the bills, always in cash, and she had once told her that Duke wasn’t supposed to be living there permanently. Then she showed me the emergency contact. It was my husband’s old phone number — the number I had cancelled after his funeral.
I asked the woman whether she knew where that number had come from. She said the first time Duke was brought in, the woman had a photograph with her and told the vet that my husband had promised to take care of the dog if anything happened to her. I asked who “her” was. She went quiet, then brought me the photograph. It showed my husband standing beside a woman I’d never seen, with Duke between them. On the back was a date from three months before my husband died and a sentence in his handwriting: “If she comes looking, tell her the dog knows where the money is.” The woman looked at me and said she’d always wondered what that meant. Then Duke suddenly ran into the house, stopped beside an old wooden cabinet, and started scratching at the bottom drawer.
