The Dog That Whispered Read Online Free Page A

had come upon an emergency that required two towels.
    And at that, he smiled to himself, just a little, but much less than Thurman was grinning.
    Wilson knelt down next to Thurman and began to towel off the excess water. The coats of retrievers and water dogs appeared to be designed to shed water quickly, so a single towel was all that was really required. But he took the second towel and grabbed at Thurman’s feet, making sure the bottoms of the paws were dry.
    Thurman leaned into him, his head against Wilson’s shoulder, growling and rumbling as he tolerated Wilson’s attentions.
    Wilson stopped and leaned back.
    “What?”
    Thurman turned his head and re-growled.
    “You like my pool?”
    Thurman smiled.
    “Really?”
    Thurman nodded this time and tried to widen his grin.
    “Really,” Wilson said, his tone dry and tending to the ironic and definitely to unbelief.
    As he listened, that is exactly what Thurman’s growls sounded like: I like your water.
    Thurman turned back toward the pool, and if Wilson had not held on to his collar, Thurman most likely would have launched himself back into the water to prove that he meant what he said.
    “You expect me to believe that you understand?”
    Thurman appeared a bit offended, or as much as an oddly grinning dog can look offended, and growled.
    I understand .
    Wilson stared at Thurman.
    “I’m going senile,” he said, “just like my mother. Two peas in a pod.”
    And when Thurman growled in reply, Wilson tried not to pay attention to him. But if asked, he would have said that Thurman had said that he shouldn’t worry about things like that, since other things were going to happen to make all of it make sense.
    Or something like that.

Chapter Four
    I N P ORTLAND, O REGON , at the end of a residential lane filled with tidy Craftsman-style houses and cozy bungalows, Hazel Jamison stood outside one particular house, carrying three GARAGE SALE signs under her arm. The sale was scheduled for the weekend, and that gave Hazel four more days to finish organizing her mother’s worldly possessions and pricing them.
    “She was a bit of a pack rat. She never married, so she never had a husband to sort of keep control of the clutter,” Hazel had told her employer when asking for the time off. “I know crafters will love what she has—yarn and cloth and old clothes and antiques and all sort of bric-a-brac. A couple of sewing machines. A couple of boxes of knitting needles. A couple of bushels of yarn for future projects. Nothing all that valuable, but I don’t simply want to pitch it. She had a knack for finding things that other people thought were useless and turning them into something beautiful and wonderful.”
    She entered the home she had grown up in and where she had not lived for nearly two decades.
    Not much has changed. Still the same artwork and sofa and lamps. The rug might be new.
    As she walked from room to room, she began to make a tally of what was left to process—what she would sell and what was obviously headed for the Dumpster that was coming at the beginning of the next week. Whatever did not sell in the sale and was too far gone to donate would be dumped.
    “And there’s a lot of junk hiding out here,” Hazel said to herself. “There’s still the attic and the garage and the basement.”
    She walked into her mother’s bedroom, also mostly unchanged over the last few decades. There were a few pictures of Hazel, snapshots, tucked into the mirror—Hazel in grade school, Hazel in high school, Hazel with her college cap and gown.
    She sat down at her mother’s dressing table and picked up one picture, a small photo, trimmed to fit a tiny square frame. It was a photo of Hazel and her mother at a county fair somewhere—early dusk, a Ferris wheel in the background and both of them with goofy, happy grins on their faces, both holding on to large pink puffs of cotton candy.
    Hazel looked at it for a long time and began to softly cry, shedding the tears