Rook sniffed the air in its direction once, with professional interest, and then sneezed and looked away, which I took as a concurring opinion.
It wasn't only the shape, or the volume, though those were wrong for a ninety-pound shepherd on a prescription gastrointestinal diet that produces, I'm sorry to report, something closer to a tidy row of beige cigars. It was the general impression. You develop a sense for it, the way a mechanic knows a bad transmission from the parking lot. I stood there in the gray light with the sprinklers ticking on two houses down and the cicadas winding up for the day, and I thought: Somebody did this. On purpose. And then somebody wrote a letter about it before the sun came up.
That was the part that stayed with me. Not the deposit. The letter. Whoever had found it had found it in the dark, walked it back to a printer, signed it, folded it, and delivered it to my door, all before 5:40 a.m.
I went home and got a pair of nitrile gloves from the box I still keep under the kitchen sink, out of habit, and a gallon freezer bag, and I picked it up. I did think, briefly, about keeping it. Then I thought about what it would mean to be a sixty-one-year-old widow with a freezer bag of a stranger's business in her refrigerator, and I threw it in my trash can and wheeled the can to the curb, because it was Saturday and pickup was Monday and I am, God help me, a rule follower.
I paid the hundred dollars on the HOA portal that afternoon. I wrote a note in the comment field: This was not my dog's waste. Rook does not use common areas. I'd be glad to discuss. I signed it Bernie Kowal, 14 Sandpiper Court.
Nobody replied. That should have told me something, too.
II.
Rook was my husband's dog before he was mine. That's the simplest way to say it, though it's not quite true. Rook belonged to the Fairfield County Sheriff's Office for seven years, and he belonged to Royce for all of them, and for the two years after he retired he belonged to both of us, and now he belongs to me, and I belong to him, and that is a debt neither of us will ever finish paying.
He came to us at eighteen months, a sable German shepherd out of a Czech working line, all legs and opinions. Royce was forty-nine then and had been a deputy for twenty-two years and a K9 handler for three, and he came home from the certification course in Indiana looking ten years younger and smelling like bite sleeve. Rook did patrol and tracking. He found a nine-year-old with autism who had wandered into a cornfield in February. He found an armed robbery suspect under a porch in Lancaster, and he found, on one occasion that Royce never tired of telling at parties, a deputy's lost wedding ring in four inches of snow in a Kroger parking lot. He was not a pet. He was a coworker who happened to sleep at the foot of our bed.
When Rook turned eight and his hips started to go, the county retired him and sold him to Royce for one dollar, which is the standard arrangement. Royce framed the bill of sale. It's on the wall of my hallway now, next to the photo of the two of them at the K9 memorial run, Royce in his dress uniform and Rook in his little badge collar, both of them squinting into the sun with the same expression.
Royce was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer eleven months after that photo. He died fourteen weeks after the diagnosis, which, if you know anything about pancreatic cancer, you know was considered a good run. He died at home in a rented hospital bed in our dining room, and Rook lay beside that bed for the last nine days and would not be moved except to go out, and only then if I walked him, and only then for exactly as long as it took. The hospice nurse, a big gentle woman named Merle, tried to coax him out of the room once on the last day and he did not growl or show his teeth. He just put his chin on the mattress next to Royce's hand and looked at her, and she backed away and said, "Okay, honey. Okay. You stay."