The Dog That Whispered Read Online Free

there either. And this door leads to the backyard.”
    Wilson stepped outside himself for a moment and realized how ridiculous, how absurd this all was—him leading a dumb animal around the house as if the dumb animal understood what he was saying—but even so, he gamely pressed on, aware or not aware.
    He opened the back door.
    Thurman’s snout puckered as he drew in a large nosey breath.
    The backyard was fenced, but no one could tell for sure, since the thickets of bushes and pines all but concealed the stockade fence along the property’s perimeter.
    And in the middle of the modest backyard ran a long reflecting pool, some thirty feet long and six feet wide and five feet deep at the far end, gradually sloping up to a depth of two feet nearest the house. The pool was lined with slate and granite with a small fountain at the far end, spouting a steady stream of water into the air and back into the pool with a dignified hiss.
    Wilson, upon his return to peace and civilization, and after his stint in rehab so many decades earlier, had spent his first summer back home, back in America, back in a land devoid of the scarring realities of war. He spent it—the entire summer—digging the pool and reinforcing the walls with rebar, mixing cement, setting the stone, installing the piping, and bringing the water supply out from the house through a trench he had dug by hand from the basement.
    He wasn’t sure then why he had felt compelled to create such a massive serenity pool, all he knew was that he had to do it. Perhaps he was serving penance. For what he had done and what he had seen done. And even now, years and years later, he sometimes wondered why he had worked so hard to build it. And how hard he worked to forget.
    Yet there were moments, slivers of moments, when he stepped outside and stared at the water and the ripples and listened and the sun caught the water just so and the noise of the outside world was muted and stilled by the gurgling water, when all else disappeared save this long, narrow strip of water lined with flinty slate and black granite—there were those slight glimpses into the why of all this.
    He could smile for that brief second and feel balanced, or more precisely, feel nothing at all—nothing hidden, nothing looming, nothing lurking in the shadows.
    For that one, brief pellucid moment, Wilson felt at peace, his soul and his heart and all the rest at total, restful peace.
    The absence of all care.
    For that one moment.
    Then the world and his awareness of it would come upon him, like an unbidden wave against the shore, and he would be standing there with fists clenched.
    But those small moments of peace were enough. Those moments were what kept him together.
    When Thurman caught scent of the water, he tore off in pursuit and launched himself from the closest end, leaping, flying, charging into the air and coming down a full fifteen feet farther with a huge, collapsing splash.
    It all happened so fast that Wilson did not even have time to sputter and curse his outrage at this horrid canine intrusion into that serenity.
    “Thurman!” he shouted.
    Thurman might have growled, but if he did, his splashing drowned it out. He kept dog-paddling to the far end, under the spouting water, then turned around, as if he had been practicing serenity pool turnarounds for years, and dog-paddled back toward Wilson, grinning more like a maniac this time, and less like a lunatic.
    “Thurman! Get out of there. Now!”
    Thurman’s nails scrabbled at the slick slate surround, but he managed to get a pawhold and hauled himself out, an immense grin on his face.
    Retrievers and water. Why didn’t he consider that before he let him out?
    “Stay.”
    Thurman stayed put but shook himself off, water spreading up and out in splayed rainbows as the droplets arced into the afternoon sun.
    Wilson returned with two towels, old towels, from a stack of them he kept in the garage for emergencies. This was the very first time he