The dog didn’t mind. Her affection was pleasing, just like the muffled “Morgans” she spoke into his fur.

He whined and wagged his tail and licked her neck, hoping this would be one of the times when she took him outside to stretch his legs. When she pulled her face away, her cheeks were wet and salty, and he licked them dry, remembering the salty fish he’d savored when she’d taken him to that crowded place with so many wonderful smells.

Something was different this time. She clipped a leash to his collar and led him into the part of the building where he’d only been a few times rather than out the door that led outside where she usually took him. People crowded him. Most were ones he was beginning to trust. They patted him and praised him and locked their arms around her just like they did him. Soon after, she knelt on the floor close beside him, a treat hidden in her hand as she asked him to sit while one of the people who brought his food loomed over them with an object in his hands, stirring up worry in the dog over what might happen. When the woman wasn’t frightened but smiled up at the man, waiting for something the dog couldn’t comprehend, he let go of his fear too.

When it was over, she brought him out the door she’d first brought him in, all those days ago when his muscles had been weak and he’d still been hungrier than he cared to ever be again.

Then she spoke words that conveyed a tone that made his tail wag just to hear even if he didn’t understand them.

“Come on, Morgan,” she said, patting him again in that special way of hers, “let’s go home.”

Chapter 27

Gabe headed across the meticulously maintained backyard and stepped through the open door of Dr. Washington’s detached garage where Carol, his wife, had said her husband was finding new ways to keep himself busy now that he was largely on the mend from his surgery.

Gabe had been here once before, over Christmas, for a staff party. Albert was a model-train hobbyist and had transformed his garage into something worthy of comparison, on a smaller scale, to the display at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Albert’s collection of Lionel trains ran on a track at tabletop height that traversed tree-covered mountains with ski runs, elk, and bighorn sheep and passed into a model-scale village of nineteenth-century America at Christmastime replete with carolers and tree trimmers and a house that even could have smoke coming out the chimney. A second track circled from the town’s depot to a representation of the Great Plains where Albert had created a display of the Old West with buffalo, horses, grizzlies, and an old mining town.