but he wasn*t smiling. "I know you didn't mean for this to happen," he said, "but I have to tell you that it was a stupid thing to do. There's just no other word for it."

"I know, I know, you don't want a lecture," he interrupted. "Believe me, I don't like giving one, either. But it's part of the job. You just don't leave the animal in a car on a hot day like this. That's what causes heat stroke, which is what your dog has, and which could have killed her."

Jenny shook her head. "The windows ... I left -- "

"You left them cracked," he interrupted again. "You should have put them halfway down at least. Better yet, you shouldn't have left her there at all. Don't do it again."

Jenny stopped trying to explain. What could she say? The truth would just sound like a lie, like she was trying to worm her way out of feeling guilty.

The doctor must have seen the misery in her face, because his expression changed. His eyes softened and so did his voice. "End of lecture," he said. "I'll keep her here tonight and watch her tomorrow. But you should have her back on Monday." He smiled for the first time. "She seems to be basically healthy, except for a weight problem. But we can talk about that when you pick her up."

Jenny couldn't smile back. She was afraid she'd burst into tears. The best she could manage was another thank you on her way out.

Her car was exactly as she'd left it, two doors open, grocery bags dumped beside it. The firozen waffles would probably survive; she wasn't sure about the meat. But the ice cream was now a vanilla puddle topped with melting chocolate chips. Jenny found a rag in the trunk and cleaned up the mess as well as she could, then got in the car and headed home.

The tears finally came as she left town and started down the long empty stretch of road that led to her tumoff. At first she tried to blink them back, then she gave up. There were no other cars to run into anyway. She wiped her face with one hand, steered with the other, and tried to figure out what had happened.

This was no prank, she knew that. Putting someone's pet in danger wasn't prank material. Had Brad done it? He'd been in town. But so had Dean -- he didn't have anything against her, did he? Plenty of other people had been around. It didn't have to be someone she knew, doing something hateful. It could have been an accident. A good deed gone wrong. Maybe Peaches had woken up, started howling and throwing herself against the doors, and then some passerby had rolled up the windows to keep her firom leaping out. It was hard to believe that whoever did it could be totally ignorant about the temperature inside a closed car, but it was possible, she guessed. She didn't want to believe that someone had done it deliberately.