Free The Dog That Whispered by Jim Kraus

she needed to do that since it was now empty.
    Clark looked up as she approached.
    “All done?”
    Hazel shrugged.
    “I guess. There wasn’t much in there. Just this one envelope. Some old stock certificates. I doubt they’re worth anything.”
    Clark stood and unlocked the gate with the key that was attached to his belt on a metal string of some sort.
    “Well, miss, you never know. I would check with Mr. Hild, one of our personal bankers…”
    They all must be personal bankers. The bank is lousy with them .
    Hazel smiled, mostly to herself. Her mother often said that about any excess.
    “He knows all about stocks and things like that. He could quickly determine if they have any value or not.”
    Hazel thanked him and made her way back to the information desk to find Mr. Hild, thinking that little would come out of this and she would be no further to getting to the bottom of her mother’s…other life—her former, secret, hidden life—than she was when she first discovered the photograph.

    From half a block away, Wilson could see that all was not well at his home. Or at least it was not how he had left it earlier in the day.
    Sort of .
    His mother stood at the start of the walk, almost on the sidewalk, holding what appeared to be a leash.
    It is a leash .
    No doubt Thurman was at the other end of the leash, and Wilson refrained from calling out, thinking that if he did, Thurman would get excited, lunge toward him, pull his tottering mother over, and she would break a hip. She would never forgive him for it and she would be forced to move into his house so Wilson could provide round-the-clock medical care.
    Not that. Please, not that .
    Instead, he waved silently. He was nothing if not cautious.
    And careful. And often worried about what might happen, even if those things never did happen as he imagined them occurring.
    There was another figure standing near his front door: a woman—a woman whom Thurman was seated next to. The dog was obediently sitting still, grinning, his hindquarters vibrating in anticipation of seeing Wilson again. The woman was not young, but neither old—younger than Wilson by perhaps a decade, with short, straight black hair, near luminescent in the sun, cut in a stylish manner, Wilson assumed, a style that required some hair fashion awareness. She had a hint of Middle Eastern about her, with a slight darkness to the tone of the skin on her face and her bare arms—perhaps Israeli, perhaps some other ethnicity.
    Not Nordic for certain .
    “Wilson,” Gretna called out. “I missed Thurman. Emily drove me over. I hope you don’t mind that I used my emergency key.”
    Mother, that emergency key was for when I fell down the steps and was lying in a pool of blood—not because you missed a dog you only possessed for two weeks .
    “No. That’s okay. But be careful. Thurman could easily knock you over.”
    His mother waved away his objection with a sweep of her hand.
    “Nonsense. We’ve already walked around the block and Thurman has been a complete gentleman the whole time. Right, Thurman?”
    Thurman was up now, bouncing, doing little canine cha-cha steps, awaiting Wilson’s greeting. Now within the radius of the leash, he did jump up and rush at Wilson, obviously excited, and obviously fully aware of the limits of the leash and the stability of the woman who currently held it.
    Wilson bent down and patted his head, Thurman bouncing and grinning and growling, Where were you?
    Thurman had asked that question every time Wilson returned home, and no matter how often Wilson explained that he had to go to work, to school, Thurman seemed to be unable to grasp the concept.
    Wilson was fairly certain that dogs would not be able to understand the convoluted process of work and money and all the rest of the abstract ideas that capitalism involved.
    Or perhaps it was that Thurman just enjoyed posing the ritual question.
    “Good dog, Thurman,” Wilson said. “Good dog. I’m home now. It’s