The dog wasn’t by the fountain or the pool, so he started checking for her around the trees. There were a lot of them in the park, and Gaspar would have liked to be able to identify them, to know which was a poplar, which a loquat; he only recognized the pines. He wished they taught that kind of thing at school, instead of about fractions or single-celled organisms. He did well in school because it was easy, but he got bored, he always had. He read on his own: his father could be erratic and he could be scary, but he let Gaspar read whatever he wanted. Now, he was reading Dracula: he had already seen about ten movie versions, and the book was totally different from them all. One phrase had stuck with him, and now the shiver he felt near the fountain wasn’t just because his jacket was lightweight: that phrase seemed terrible to him. “For the dead travel fast.” One character, a travel companion, says that to Jonathan Harker as he’s on his way to the Count’s castle. He had looked for the book in English in his father’s library while his father was distractedly drawing in one of his notebooks. He’d found it immediately and compared it with the Spanish translation, Los muertos viajan deprisa. The English book also said that the phrase was translated from the German, and that it came from a poem called “Lenore.” He asked his father if he had it—he had a lot of poetry books—and his father, without pausing in his writing or drawing, without looking at him, said no. “Is it true?” Gaspar had asked. “Is it true that the dead travel fast?”

His father had finally looked up and said, simply: “Some do.”

Gaspar went running down the steps to the open area with the sculpture of the saber-toothed tiger, then circled the park on the path parallel to Calle Miter. Vicky and Adela were already waiting at the gazebo, near the rose garden. Their faces made it clear that they hadn’t found the dog, either.

“She’ll come back, Vicky,” said Gaspar. “If you want, we can go make copies of a photo of her, and we’ll put them up in stores and on lamp posts. We’ll find her.”

Vicky was crying.

“She’s old, she’s going to get lost.”

Pablo came running up and looked at Gaspar before shaking his head.

“Are you going to offer a reward?” asked Adela. “If you offer a reward, it’s way better.”

“And what money am I going to use for that? My dad won’t pay it.”

“I’ll lend you money, no problem,” said Gaspar, and he asked Adela to go with him to the copy shop later.