Oscar: The woman is destroyed, gibbering and blubbering, and it’s clear suddenly that this dog, this dachshund, is not merely her dog but actually her “son,” to the point where through the tears she even refers to him as “her little fur-baby,” which sounds weird and somehow porny to Atlanta’s ears, and for a moment that thought lets her escape the woman’s grief—grief that is as deep and dark as quarry water, as hungry and wet as a chest wound, and when the woman has that glimmer of hope because she thinks Atlanta knows something, all Atlanta can do is panic and hang up on her.

The vizsla: Turns out a vizsla is, in fact, a dog, a red Hungarian retriever whom the man says he was breeding to be a hunting dog, but everyone around wanted pointers or spaniels and didn’t know what the hell a vizsla was, and so nobody bit, and now the man doesn’t know what to do, and Atlanta almost (almost) reminds him that it doesn’t much matter now because the dog is gone, though he doesn’t seem to care about the dog so much as he’s pissed about the “lost investment,” and when she gets off the phone she thinks, Ugh, people.

Lucky: It’s a little girl who answers, maybe nine, ten years old, and she tells Atlanta that her mother is outside pulling weeds and her father’s not home, and so Atlanta takes a chance, asks about Lucky, and then the girl tells a story that pries open Atlanta’s breastbone and punches her right in the heart. The girl woke up briefly at night when one of her parents let Lucky out to go to the bathroom, and it was only five minutes later when the girl woke up again and heard Lucky yelping—in the girl’s words, “screaming”—and then after that she heard people laughing and the screech of tires, and she even said that outside the house they found burned-rubber tire tracks on the street and curb, and does Atlanta have Lucky? Atlanta tells her no, and it punches her heart again to say it, and the girl doesn’t cry but she says the saddest, quietest little “Oh” that Atlanta’s ever heard.

Four phone calls over the course of an hour, and Atlanta feels tense, her guts pulled taut like a clothesline. And she feels sad, too—the sorrow heavy as wet clothes hanging from the line and pulling it down, down, down toward the ground.

But at least she learned something.

All four of the people on the phone told her when the dogs were taken.

They were taken at night.

And they were taken within a couple miles of one another up on Gallows Hill.

In the same neighborhood as Jenny and Sailor.

Atlanta starts looking through her closet for dark clothing.