Chapter 1

Marlon Teague slid the form across the counter with two fingers, the way a man deals a card.

"Your dog was a stray," he said. "No owner, no tag, no chip. He was humanely euthanized Monday afternoon."

Ora Dell Sizemore looked down at the paper. Her name was already typed on it. Ora Dell Sizemore, 1104 Bledsoe Ridge Road, Wren County.

"He's not a stray," she said. "He's mine. His name is Duke."

"Records say different."

"Then let me see the record."

Marlon leaned back against the counter, khaki polo stretched over his middle, county badge swinging on its lanyard. "There's no record to see, Miss Ora Dell. He's gone."

The shelter smelled of bleach and wet concrete and something older underneath it. A radio played back in the kennel row. A dog barked twice and quit.

She had driven forty minutes in her son's old car with her red vinyl purse on the seat beside her and the implant card from Barlow Animal Clinic folded inside her wallet. She had it. She just hadn't gotten it out yet.

"Monday," she said. "Somebody came in my yard Monday morning and took him off his chain."

"We picked up a stray Monday."

"He had a collar on."

"Not when we got him."

The man behind her in line cleared his throat. She'd noticed him when she came in - square-shouldered, feed-store cap, a plastic bag in his hand with a rabies tag in it. He'd been waiting patient, the way people wait in a county office.

"Excuse me," he said. "Ma'am. Sir."

Marlon's eyes moved past Ora Dell and went flat.

"No he hasn't," the man said. "I bought that dog from this office on Tuesday."

The room got very quiet. The radio kept playing.

"What did you say?" Ora Dell asked.

"I bought him. Seventy-five dollars, cash, Tuesday morning, out the back door." The man shifted the bag to his other hand. "Brown hound, white on the chest, notch out of his right ear. Wouldn't take a biscuit off me. I figured he was homesick."

Ora Dell turned back to Marlon. His neck had gone red above the collar of his polo - that slow flush she'd seen once before, at a deacon's meeting, when somebody asked him a question he didn't like.

"Mr. Yancey," Marlon said. "Step on back to my office."

"I ain't finished."

"Step on back."

Ora Dell put both hands flat on the counter. "Tuesday," she said. "You told me Monday he was dead. And Tuesday you sold him."

Marlon picked the form up, folded it once, and slid it into his pocket. "That form's an acknowledgment of notification," he said. "Sign it or don't. Doesn't change anything."

Lurlene Cade had come out of the intake room with the big book in her arms. She was sixty, thin as a fence post, and she would not look at Ora Dell. She looked at the floor, the counter, the wall.

Ora Dell walked out into the parking lot with her purse on her arm and her hands shaking.

The man in the feed cap followed her. He took his hat off when he got close.

"Ma'am," he said. "I still have him. He's out at my place on Cutler Bend. Won't eat." He turned the hat over in his hands. "And I've got no paper saying he's mine, either."