The Adoption Receipt Led Back To Our Volunteer Sign In Book

I asked Dana to send her receipt to Mara before she left. She sat in her car to do it, the duck bed still on her lap.

“I thought I was helping,” she said.

“So did I, when I signed a travel form.”

Malcolm told her we were making a simple mistake into a crime. Dana shut her window while he was still speaking.

That afternoon, he moved into the guide bunkhouse he rented near Wilmington. He took his skis, his clothes, and the framed photograph of himself on a ridge. He left our wedding picture facedown on the dresser.

I turned it over, then put it in a drawer.

Mara told me to preserve messages and keep a list of what I knew, separate from what I feared.

I wrote four headings on a clean page: Dogs. Savings. Payments. Helper.

Under Dogs, I wrote Still Here.

It steadied my hand enough to keep going.

Under Savings, I wrote the old balance and the new one. I left the space between them empty. Malcolm had counted on me being too ashamed to ask where that money went.

I remembered skipping a needed coat because he said our costs were high. I had patched the cuff with dental floss. He had bought new ski boots that same week.

The coat still hung beside the kennel door. I touched the rough white stitches before I sat down again.

“One number at a time,” I said aloud.

Comet raised an ear. He liked any work that began with a clear voice.

There were only two volunteers whose names began with N. Ned Cole hauled snow fencing and repaired crates. Nora Pike worked Tuesdays and Thursdays. She also kept our volunteer calendar and used the kennel tablet to send reminders.

Nora had brought me soup when my mother died. I had once slept against her shoulder on the way home from a search test.

I did not write her name under Helper.

Not yet.

Saskia came over after work with a borrowed document scanner. We set it beside the dryer, where the dogs' towels were still warm.

“Ask both of them the same questions,” she said.

“You sound like Mara.”

“She charges more.”

Ned answered on speaker. He had seen the collection van on the volunteer calendar but thought it was taking the dogs to practice.

“Who entered it?” I asked.

“Can't tell on my phone. Nora printed my week for me.”

Nora called back twenty minutes later.

“Oh, honey. Malcolm told me you'd be upset.”

“Did you send updates to a woman named Dana?”

“Malcolm asked me to help with messages. I thought you knew.”

“Did you tell her I had a breakdown?”

“Those weren't my words.”

That was an answer with a small door built into it.

“Send me everything you sent her.”

“I can't find it tonight. My internet's awful.”

The line went quiet. In the background, I heard a printer pull a page through.

“Tomorrow, then,” I said.

Saskia waited until I hung up.

“Write down the time.”

I did.

The next morning, I opened the volunteer sign in book. Every entry listed arrival time, dog worked, and kennel key number. We needed those details for safety. A person could not enter a scent exercise without someone knowing where they were.

The four forged transfers had been sent on October 8 at 8:16 p.m.

Ned's last entry that day was 4:10. Nora's was 8:40.

Beside her name, she had written, Inventory With M.

M could mean Malcolm. It could also mean mat washing, though nobody in our kennel had ever called it that.

I photographed the full page, including the blank lines. Then I put the book away.

“Don't fill the gaps yourself,” I told Birch.

He sneezed on my sock.

Mara sent a demand for the business records behind Alder Reach. She also asked the other side to preserve emails and files. From public business records, her assistant found an address for the company.

It was a rented mailbox in Brattleboro.

There was no shelter listed. No board. No kennel site.

Malcolm was the company's manager.

That evening, Dana forwarded the rest of her messages. The sender had promised Fern could be collected early if Dana paid before Friday.

One attached invoice showed a different dog name in faint gray letters beneath Fern's: Comet.

Someone had reused a form.

Saskia leaned over my screen.

“Look at the bottom.”

There was a $600 line marked Placement Support. It was included in the $6,000 fee, not added to it. The small print named a coordinator.

Nora Pike.

Four dogs. Four fees. If the invoices matched, Nora stood to receive $2,400.

I stared at the page until the letters stopped looking like her name.

At seven, I heard a knock on the kennel door.

Nora stood outside with my spare key in her hand.

“Before you get the wrong idea,” she said, “you should hear what Malcolm promised me.”