Toomer did not go and see what happened. She thought it was none of her business yet.
They left at a little after six. The green Pontiac went first, with Tilly asleep in the back and Bosun's head out the rear window, ears blowing back the way they must have blown in the bow of the Miss Viola, and the pink backpack in Dessa's lap in the front seat. The Mercedes with the cracked windshield went after it, and turned the other way at the road. Toomer stood at the window and watched them both out of sight. She did not know if Charlie Lockwood would make an exception, or for how long. She did not know if there was anything in the Gadsdens' policy for Pinckney Prioleau to find, or if Viola Gadsden would ever bring it to him, or if a black dog with a gray muzzle could learn in one winter what a golden had learned in one summer, or what Adelaide Prioleau would do when she came back on a kitchen floor some morning and Pinckney was not there to come back to. Nobody did.
She went down the hall to the adoption row and took the card that said SUNNY off the empty run, and put it in her pocket. Then she went to the supply room and got two flashlights, and found Cassius in the cattery, and handed him one.
"What's this," he said.
"Every dog in this building," Toomer said. "Every one. And then the warehouse. Inside of both back legs, and the ears, and the belly. I don't care what the intake card says."
He looked at the flashlight. Then he looked at her, and put on his reading glasses.
"Yes ma'am," he said.
They started at the first run on the left. By nine o'clock that night they had done forty-one dogs and found nothing. There were two hundred and seventy left, and the phones would start ringing at seven, and Major was snoring on his blanket in her office under the empty hook where the pink backpack had hung, and Toomer knelt on the concrete in her one good skirt in front of the forty-second, a brown hound with a torn ear who had come in from Awendaw on the fifth of October, and said, "All right, sweetheart. Belly. Let's see who you belong to," and lifted the flashlight.