Dog Daze (4 page)

“Is—he—” Aneta’s breathing sounded hoarse to her ears. She felt like she’d swallowed most of the lake. She coughed, clearing her throat. If Esther’s prayer had come true…

“Frank’s wife, Nadine, is working on him now.”

Aneta followed Esther’s chunky frame the few steps to the group. Leaping up from her crouched position near the still doggy form on the mud, Sunny threw her freckled arms around Aneta and began to cry. “You were incredible,” she said through her sobs. “When I was trying to catch the murderer, Esther was already dragging the boat into the water. That girl is strong! Vee sprinted—I mean, the girl can run—then Frank came.” She was gasping too much now to continue talking, and she bent over, hands on her knees.

Aneta glanced at Frank kneeling in wet shorts next to a woman with long hair so black it glowed blue in a sudden burst of sun. She held the puppy close to her face. The long, straight bangs hung over the black, brown, and white puppy and his long, drooping ears. His eyes were closed.

A sour smell, too familiar from the orphanage, wafted to Aneta’s sensitive nose. She looked down at the dog. Sure enough, a thick puddle of tan and green foamy ick lay on the woman’s knees. Suddenly Aneta gasped, shuddering.

Sunny clutched her arm. “Is she—?”

“Yes,” Aneta said, slapping a hand over her own lips.

The woman had her mouth over the dog’s wet, chunk-covered snout. With short, quick puffs, she blew into the loose-skinned mouth.
How can any air get into that long snout?
wondered Aneta. How long had the puppy been without air?

A deep trembling began in the bottom of her stomach. She wrapped her arms around her middle, suddenly feeling cold. That feeling was familiar and not a feeling she wanted to feel. It meant she might cry. When she cried, she very often couldn’t stop. She sounded ugly when she cried like that.

“Somebody—call—somebody.” Gulping, she threw a desperate glance at the redhead. Sunny shook her head, momentarily taking her gaze from Nadine working on the puppy. “This is a dead zone for cell phones. Just here, on the boat-launch area. That’s why Vee took off running. Her cell had no bars.” She patted her shorts pockets. “And I am not privileged to have a cell phone until I’m thirteen.”

A snuffling snort punctuated the murmur of voices. The puppy’s sides heaved violently. Nadine backed up just in time for another spew of yellow foam that cascaded over the young woman’s knees. In the interim, Aneta had somehow landed on her knees in front of the puppy. Droopy lids lifted to reveal saggy, mournful brown eyes.
Well
, Aneta amended,
one brown eye
. The right eye was a strange milky blue and squinted, so the pup looked like he was winking at her. He blinked.

“Wink,” she said softly. “You are Wink.”

They were almost at the community center side door when someone finally spoke.

“How could someone do that to an animal?” Sunny bounced along, her red, fluffy hair glinting in the late-afternoon sun. Her fierce expression shone with sweat. She looked like she was ready to punch the woman wearing the beige Crocs and cap. Aneta had no doubts that she could land a few good ones. “I wish I’d caught her. If I’d had a cell phone, I’d have taken her picture and gotten her on
America’s Most Wanted
.”

Will Wink live?
Aneta wanted to shout the question and interrupt Frank, but her voice wasn’t working once again.

He was answering Sunny. “Some people, when, for whatever reason, the dog doesn’t work out, treat it like trash and simply throw it away. They don’t think animals are valuable, that they are living things that need to be cared for.” Frank’s stride was long, and the girls scrambled to keep up.

“His eyes are weird.” Esther’s voice was matter-of-fact. “He wasn’t perfect.”

Sunny spun around, hands on hips. “So what? Nobody’s perfect. That’s no reason to
drown
him.”

The other girl regarded Sunny and shrugged. “I’m just saying maybe that’s why the woman threw him out.”

“Esther has a point. Some people don’t want a dog that isn’t perfect. But really…” Frank moved into a trot. The girls followed. “We need to find that woman. What she did is against the law. Besides being flat-out wrong.”

“Wink will live?” It was Aneta’s voice. Finally. She pulled her wet tee away from her. It felt chilly, even in the heat. Gram would be sure to ask about
that
!

Everyone halted and eyed her. Frank was the first to speak. “Wink?” he asked. “I thought you girls said you didn’t know the woman.”

That familiar
uh-oh
stomach clutch struck with that many pairs of eyes on her; Aneta regretted spitting out the name. He had become Wink to her when he opened his eyes after Nadine breathed into him. He’d looked right at her, and he had been frowning, the extra skin above his eyes folding deeply. And then he had winked. At her. Saying thanks.

Vee appeared from around the side of the community center. “Nadine called and said the puppy is at the vet. They are going to at least keep him overnight to see… Well, to see.” She shrugged.

“The puppy,” Esther said. “Aneta named him Wink.”

A slow smile, the first one Aneta had seen, curved the wide mouth. “Hey, you’re right. The puppy does. He’s got one eye that’s pretty squished. When he blinks—”

“He winks!” Sunny and Esther chorused. “Aneta, you’re brilliant. That
has
to be his name!”

“Anyway,” Frank said, walking in the door. The girls lengthened their strides to follow him. “Wink’s lungs sounded like they needed help.”

“Is he going to die?” Aneta asked. She swallowed hard in a dry throat. If her best hadn’t been good enough… She wished Mom weren’t on a trip or that Gram were there. She searched the parking lot for her grandmother’s Pink Flamingo scooter, but it had yet to swing into the half-circle parking lot. Mom wouldn’t be home until Thursday. Aneta bit her wobbly lower lip.

Frank surveyed the four sad faces in front of him. He sighed. “Oh boy. This wasn’t in the job description.” Leaning against the door, he folded his arms and stared at his sandals. “I’m not going to lie to you girls. This is not a perfect world.”

Vee waved her hands in front of her, signaling frustration. “We’re eleven years old. We’ve seen stuff. Is he or isn’t he?”

For a moment Aneta heard a buzzing in her head, and Frank’s face swirled in front of her. The wish that had begun when Wink winked at her pushed further into her bones. Aneta thought her heart might shatter if Frank said what she thought he was going to say. Now that she had a family who said they loved her and had a home, she had hoped her heart might stop breaking. Now her stupid heart was cracking again. Over a soggy bunch of wrinkles who probably wouldn’t live. Wink.

Mission: Make Mom Love Wink

O
n Wednesday, Gram remembered. They’d spent the day shopping and taking a walking tour of the historical district in a nearby town. A great day, but Aneta was tired. She had her head tipped back, eyes half-closed, watching the trees and the sunlight speckle over her head. The trip had been planned to help Aneta with being sad over the short life of Wink, but it hadn’t worked. He was all she could think about. Gram abruptly pulled to the side of the road.

“On Friday, when you ran inside your house to change out of your wet clothes and grab your duffle bag, what did you do with the lake-stink-and-vomit clothes?” she asked, removing her helmet and turning to her granddaughter.

“Um…,” Aneta said, removing her own helmet.

“That’s what I thought. So they’ve been where? On the floor of your room since Friday?”

“Oh no,” Aneta reassured her grandmother, knowing that the hardwood floors did not do well with wet clothes. “I put them on the washing machine.”

“
On
the washing machine, not
in
the washing machine.”

“Yes.”

Gram jammed the helmet back on her head. “Put your helmet on—we need to make a detour to your house.”

Half an hour later, rather than heading straight to Gram’s, her grandmother pulled the Pink Flamingo through the security gate, down the lane, and turned right into Aneta’s driveway. “You grab the clothes. We’ll wash them at home. I’ll check the answering machine.”

Aneta hit the fridge for a bottle of water on her way to the mudroom and the clothes. The ride had been warm. Once in the fridge, she pulled out a couple of leftovers she’d been supposed to take to Gram’s on Friday. Making a face, she dumped them in the trash, containers and all. Good thing she’d remembered to at least throw them out!

“Aneta!” Gram called from the living room. She appeared in the kitchen with the scooter keys jingling in her hand. “Accelerate, granddaughter. What meeting is a Frank talking about at the children’s section of the library in”—she glanced at her watch, also waterproof with a stopwatch like Aneta’s—”
five minutes
! Time to rock and roll!”

Nine minutes later, Gram dropped Aneta off at the doorway of the library. Gram told her to call her when the meeting was over. “Then you can tell me what this is all about. Does your mother know?”

“Um,” Aneta said.

“I thought as much. Call me when you’re done.” The helmet went on and Gram drove away.

As Aneta approached the children’s section with its red, yellow, and blue flags fluttering from the rushing air-conditioning ducts, she heard Esther’s high, nasal voice.

“We need a plan we
all
agree on, not just you bossing us.”

She ducked behind the stacks that blocked the girls from seeing her. She did not want to be part of this group. She’d been hoping since Friday that Frank would forget about her and go with the other three girls. They certainly did not need her. She closed her eyes and remained motionless.
Think calm, cool, pool water
.

“Well hi, Aneta!” Sunny’s bright voice sounded near her. Her eyes flew open as Sunny twirled past. “Good thing you’re here. I hope you have good ideas. We are not getting along.” She pulled Aneta around the stacks and toward an empty, large desk. The nameplate said N
ADINE
, C
HILDREN’S
L
IBRARIAN
. Aneta could hear Vee and Esther quarreling but could only see the tops of their heads. Why were they sitting on the floor?

Suddenly the two girls giggled. “Oh, squish alert. He’s so stinking cute!” That was Esther’s voice, almost a coo.

Then she heard a puppyish, “Aroo! Arooo!”

Her heart squeezed.
Could it be?

Sunny grinned at her. “Cool, huh! We were all surprised when we showed up.”

In three steps Aneta was around Nadine’s desk, legs trembling. There stood a small wire pen with blankets, a water dish, and an overturned food dish with a couple of bits of food around it. There, also, was Wink. He lolled outside the pen between Vee and Esther, ripples of puppy wrinkles squishing up around his face as the girls petted and rubbed his belly. Every now and then he grunted like a piglet, as if saying, “Don’t stop!”

“He is alive!” Aneta cried, dropping to her knees.

Nadine returned to her desk. She smiled at Aneta. “We just weren’t sure he was going to pull through, and when you girls didn’t call us, we decided we better wait before telling you how he was. We almost lost him two days ago, and then he seemed to perk right up. He’s a survivor, that dog. Then Frank said you hadn’t come up with your idea yet—”

“Our fund-raiser!” Vee said, scooting her legs back and jumping to her feet. “We have to agree on something.” She pulled out her phone and checked the time. “I’ve got to leave in ten minutes.”

“Where do you have to go?” Sunny asked. She had dropped to the floor and was on her stomach, her face nose to nose with Wink’s. A long pink tongue—not Sunny’s—flicked out and licked the redhead’s face. She giggled, scooped up the puppy, rolled to a sitting position, and cuddled him. She glanced up, noticed Aneta’s face, and shoved the puppy toward her. “Here. You named him.”

Soft, warm.
Alive
.

Vee ignored Sunny’s question after spearing the girl with a glare. “What’s wrong with a book sale to benefit the library? I love the library.”

Aneta, holding the puppy under her chin and giggling as the quick licker washed her neck, said without thinking, “It is more important to find the Crocs Killer.”