Page 4 of The Lovely and the Lost

“I’m your mother,” Cady retorted. “I’m allowed to feed you. I’malsoallowed,” she emphasized, “to tell you that I heard there was a party last night up on Hangman’s Ridge.”

Cady had a sixth sense that let her read animals with impressive accuracy. Unfortunately for Jude and me, that knack seemed to extend to her children as well.

Luckily, I had a better poker face than Jude did. “We went. We partied. We came home.” I preempted Cady’s next question. “We behaved ourselves, and Free left when Jude and I did. Happy?”

Cady reached out to push a piece of flyaway hair back from my face. “Ecstatic.”

I leaned into her touch for a moment before pulling back, and Cady let me eat the rest of my PowerBar in peace. Some people found my capacity for silence off-putting, like the act of not chitchatting was the equivalent of spitting in another person’s face. Cady never seemed to mind. She’d fought long and hard to give me back my voice, but she never acted entitled to my words.

If I’d stood there in silence for ten minutes, she would have stood there with me.

“Free was asking me if you’d decided to let the military have Pad,” I said as I swallowed the rest of the PowerBar and let Saskia lick my fingers for crumbs.

“Free can woman up and ask me herself,” Cady responded, in a tone that made it crystal clear that our neighbor wasn’t off the hook for skipping finals yet.

“What if I’m not asking for Free?” I bent down and greeted Pad, who’d been sitting patiently at Cady’s side. Saskia wasn’t pleased to be sharing my attention, but she tolerated Pad the way a person might tolerate a coworker with particularly bad breath.

“If you’re the one asking,” Cady replied, “then my answer is that it depends.”

“On what?” I straightened. Cady had about eight inches on me. Jude might have gotten some of his height from his mystery father, but at least part of it had come from her.

“On you,” Cady replied. She held Pad’s lead loosely in her left hand. The golden retriever sat with her haunches on the ground, ready and alert. “You’ll be seventeen next month, Kira. Only one more year until you can get certified. Pad would be a good partner for that. For you.”

A lump rose in my throat. With the price the military had offered for Pad, we were talking about a substantial sum of money. As much as it meant to me that Cady was willing to make the offer, it hurt, too.

“I already have a partner,” I said.

“Don’t take this personally. I have no doubt that Saskia will be able to blow through most of the exam,” Cady said carefully.

Saskia’s not sociable enough. She’ll never be sociable enough.That was what Cady was saying. No matter how good my girl was at finding lost people, if she couldn’t play well with others—other handlers, other dogs—it wouldn’t matter.

How could Inottake that personally?

“Saskia will be ready,” I replied, my voice lower in pitch than it had been a moment before.

Cady knew better than to argue. “In that case, then yes, I intend to accept the military’s offer for Pad. I know the team she’ll be working with. They’ll take good care of our little prodigy.”

Fully aware that we were talking about her, Pad began wagging her tail.

“You want to take her out, one last time?” Cady asked me. “I can finish up with Saskia.”

That wasn’t really a question—or a request. Saskia needed to be able to work with other handlers, and Cady knew that if I was left to my own devices, I wouldn’t take Pad out again.

I’d never excelled atgood-bye.

* * *

There were two basic methods for directly following a scent path. A tracking dog worked with its nose to the ground. A trailing dog worked with her nose in the air. In addition to air-scenting to cover large areas, Pad was trained for the latter. She could follow a scent wherever she found it, take shortcuts, track a person from one environment to the next.

She blew through every challenge I laid out for her.

“I’m not going to miss you,” I told our resident wunderkind. She responded to the warmth in my voice as I jostled her from one side to the other. When I signaled to allow it, she jumped up, putting her paws on my thighs. I buried my hands in her downy fur and scratched under her collar. “I’m not going to miss you at all, you awful dog.”

Pad tilted her head to the side. Her ears went up.

She hears something,I thought. Unlike most dogs, Pad was unlikely to be distracted by small animals. A squirrel could have danced across the path, and she wouldn’t have batted an eye.

The only thing that Pad was trained to pay attention to was humans.