What Hugo had done to the animals, nobody had put in the paper. The paper had other things to put in it. But Toomer knew. She had started taking them in on Saturday the twenty-third, before the power was back, before the water was safe, and she had not stopped. Dogs off chains that had snapped. Dogs that had gone through windows. Cats out of the trees with their fur full of glass. The county had borrowed them an empty tire warehouse out on Leeds Avenue for the overflow. Toomer had hired on four teenagers at three thirty-five an hour out of a fund the board did not know she had found yet. She had slept, most nights, on the couch in her office, with her own dog, an old three-legged redbone hound named Major, snoring on the floor by her feet.
The hold period on strays was five days by county ordinance. After Hugo the board had stretched it to ten, and then to fourteen. There was not room. There was not money. Every morning the phones started ringing at seven, people from motel rooms and church basements calling to ask if anybody had brought in a black Lab with a white sock, a beagle named Scooter, a little white dog, any little white dog. Every morning the News and Courier and the Evening Post ran another half page of classifieds, LOST DOG, REWARD, PLEASE, Hugo night, Mt Pleasant, answers to Duke, call after six, call anytime, call my mother's number, God bless. Toomer had a stack of them on her desk under a conch shell, cut out with scissors, and she checked the cage cards against them every afternoon until the words ran together.
And some people came. And some dogs went home. That was the part that kept her standing up. But the people who came were looking for their own dog, and nobody else's, and when it wasn't there they went back out to their cars with their faces closed up. And the dogs whose people did not come went on the adoption row, and some of them got adopted, and some of them did not, and Toomer did not talk about the ones that did not, not even to Cassius.
Sunny had come in on the fourth of October. A county officer named Gaillard had picked him up on the shoulder of Highway 17 just south of Awendaw, walking north. Walking, the card said. Not running, not loose, not hit. Walking north on the shoulder at seven in the morning, as if he had somewhere to be. No collar. No tags. Seventy-two pounds, which was thin for the frame of him. Neutered male, golden retriever, four to six years by his teeth. A cut on the left front pad, healing. Ticks. Mud to the elbows. He had let Gaillard open the truck door and he had gotten in by himself.
He had served out his fourteen days in the stray hold without making a sound. That was what people noticed about him first, later, when he went out front. In a building where the barking started at five in the morning and did not stop until the lights went off, Sunny did not bark. He lay in his run with his chin on his paws and watched the door. When you went in he stood up and leaned on your legs, and when you went out he lay back down. He sat when he was asked to and lay down when he was asked to and once, when one of the teenage girls dropped a whole tray of feeding bowls in the aisle with a crash like a car wreck, every dog in the building had gone up like a firework and Sunny had lifted his head, looked at her, and put it back down.
"That's the best dog in this building," Cassius had said that day. "That's somebody's dog."
"Everybody's somebody's dog," Toomer had said.
"No ma'am. That's somebody's."
But nobody came. Toomer checked him against the classifieds every afternoon, and there were goldens in there, a golden with a red collar from Mount Pleasant and a golden named Honey from Johns Island and a yellow dog, possibly golden, from somewhere up in Berkeley County, and none of them was him. The red collar was a female. Honey's people came and looked at him through the chain link and went away shaking their heads.