"The fourth," said Toomer.
Dessa nodded slowly, as though she had expected that.
"And then I needed a job," she said. "We all did. The man at the church said y'all were hiring, and I thought, well. And I came in on the sixteenth for my interview, and I walked the front row, because I couldn't not. And there was one run with a card on it that said AT VET. That's all. No picture, no dog. I didn't think nothing of it."
"He was at Dr. Ackerly's," Cassius said quietly, from the door. "Fifteenth to the seventeenth. That cut on his foot went bad and she had to open it up."
"And after that I was on Leeds Avenue," said Dessa. "I didn't come in the front. I don't come in the front. Today's the first time, because of my check." She put her hand on the bag. "And I had this."
There was a silence. Major sighed in his corner. Toomer looked at the girl on the floor and then at the dog, who had not taken his eyes off the pink bag, and then she looked at Pinckney Prioleau, because somebody had to, and he was looking at his wife.
Adelaide Prioleau was sitting very straight in the split vinyl chair with her hands folded on the red leather leash in her lap. Her face had gone white. Not pale, white, the white of a sheet of paper, and her mouth was pressed shut, and she was looking at the dog with an expression Toomer could not have described then and could only describe afterward, when she knew what it was. It was the expression of a woman watching someone open a letter that she had written to herself a long time ago and never sent.
"Miss Gadsden," Pinckney Prioleau said. "I am very sorry for what happened to your family. I mean that sincerely. I want you to know that." He cleared his throat. "But I have to ask. You'll understand why. How do we know?"
"Pinckney," said his wife.