Home Is Where Your Bark Is

Chapter 33

Jenna jerked awake. She must’ve slipped into a doze while staring out into the snowfall. It was damn mesmerizing. She dragged a hand over her face and let out a yawn. A quick check of her iPad showed it was after midnight. If sentry duty was making her sleepy, it had to be worse for Jake, who was still out driving in this.

Around ten o’clock, a comment on Alyssa’s post about Seven had stirred up hope and changed where Jake was searching.

I saw him!!! I called out for him but he ran off. He was walking straight down S. Paulina at W. 35th!

The woman had called Jake as well and, after talking to her, he believed it was a credible sighting. Prior to this, Seven’s last known location—where he’d gotten free of his collar and leash—had been twenty miles south of here. Jenna had guessed as much right off the bat, but pulling up Google Maps had confirmed it. As of this new sighting, he was ten miles closer than before.

This wasn’t random. Seven was making his way home.

Getting up from her spot on the floor by the window, Jenna stepped into Jake’s several-sizes-too-big slippers and coat and headed out of his condo, leaving the door ajar and clomping downstairs in the too-big shoes. Earlier tonight, she’d set out bowls of Seven’s food by both the front and back entrances, hoping he might linger by the door if by any chance she missed his approach.

Opening the door, she brushed as much as she could of the new-fallen snow off the kibble and scanned for paw prints but didn’t spot any. No tracks were out there but her own and Jake’s from earlier, which were now snow-covered and hardly visible. After doing the same thing at the back entrance, she returned to the front and stepped outside, but first left the rug hanging out the door so that it wouldn’t close behind her. Jake had told her the door code, but in case she remembered it wrong, she had no interest in getting stuck outside in the cold for a second time in one night.

She walked down the gangway to the sidewalk lining the desolate street, the too-big slippers sinking deep into the snow, the crunching sound as unexpectedly comforting as the snowfall itself. Far down to the left, a snowplow was crossing at an intersection. Jenna cupped her hands to her mouth. “Seeeveeen. Here, boy. Here, Seeeven!” Because she didn’t want Jake’s neighbors throwing darts at her, she kept it to a few calls, then trudged back inside before the cold really began to sink in.

She shut the exterior entrance behind her, kicked off the snow from her slippers, and trudged up the stairs. Inside Jake’s condo, she kicked off the slippers, hung up his coat, and headed for the kitchen to heat water in the kettle, thankful Jake had a decent selection of teas. Normally, if it was much after the lunch hour, she went for herbal teas, but tonight called for caffeine.

Before heading to the bathroom, Jenna checked for a missed call. Jake should be checking in again soon. He’d found Seven’s prints exactly where the woman had indicated seeing him and had followed them for over a mile before losing track of them again at Mariano’s parking lot in Riverside Square that was in the process of being plowed. The last time they talked, nearly an hour ago now, he’d been circling it, trying to pick them up again.

Jenna was just leaving the bathroom when her iPad rang out, and she jogged over to answer it. “Hey there! Any luck?”

“Not an ounce. His tracks don’t pick up anywhere, I tell you.” Frustration peppered his tone, and he sounded a bit hoarse. “Dumpsters line the building behind the shopping center, and his tracks circle a few of them, but the service road alongside them was plowed too. I guess he traveled down it, but the strip mall butts against Bubbly Creek, and there’s a line of hedges and trees at the back edge of the property. I got out and walked some of it, thinking maybe he went down for a drink, but I never found any tracks. I doubt he stuck around here. I’ve been yelling for him nonetheless.”

“I was just outside doing the same thing.”

“Oh yeah?”

Jenna pulled the shopping center up on Google Maps. “Jake, Marino’s is a bit east of the trajectory between where he was spotted on Paulina and here, but technically, it’s about a half mile closer to your place than where he was last seen.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. The only problem is that just north of here is the Chicago River. The only way he would’ve been able to cross that anywhere close to here is over the Ashland Avenue Bridge, and I can’t see him doing that. Last week, I couldn’t get him over a ten-foot-long pedestrian bridge over a dry creek at a park without him trying to bolt.”

Jenna closed her eyes at the thought of Seven trekking over a bridge as big as the Ashland Avenue one, and she did her best to keep her fear out of her tone. Jake didn’t need her adding any tension to his experience. “There are pedestrian crossings on both sides of it,” she said. “I’ve used them more than once, on foot and on a bike. If he wanted to get across badly enough, maybe he would try it.”

Jake let out a sharp breath. “It’ll kill me if he’s headed home, and he gets hurt along the way.”

Tears stung Jenna’s eyes. “Hardly anyone’s out in this. He’s got that going for him, Jake.”

“Yeah, I keep telling myself that.”

“All we can do is trust him to take care of himself. He’s been loose before and been okay.”

He was quiet for several seconds before responding. “Yeah. He has.”

“What if you came here for a bit, and I headed out for a while, so long as you trust me to drive your Jeep in this.”

“Thanks for offering. I do trust you, but I can hold out a while longer. I’ll head to the bridge though. As fast as it’s snowing, it’s hard to tell, but the tracks that I have seen could very well be a couple hours old. Some of them have been so covered over, they’re almost impossible to spot. If he did cross that bridge—if he’s coming home—he could be miles past it by now.”

“He very well could, which is why I keep watching out the window.” The kettle began to whistle, and Jenna jogged over to it, taking the iPad with her. “You said to make myself at home, so I’m making a cup of tea.”

“Great. What kind?”

“Something with caffeine.”

“I think I have both green and black. In the cabinet to the right of the stove.”

“I remember from before, and I’ll go with black. Watching the snow fall is darn near hypnotic.”

Jake chuckled. “Yeah, it is. I stopped and got an extra-large coffee earlier.”

“I bet you needed it.” Jenna immersed a tea bag into a mug of steaming water and laid the tag over the side. “You know, I was thinking earlier about something I read when I was a kid. It was about a dog who traveled across most of the United States to get home to his family after he got lost while they were on vacation. He crossed mountains and deserts and rivers. I remember crying like a baby to know that a dog could love his family that much.” Jenna’s soft laugh stirred up the tears that were still so close to the surface, and she dabbed at the corner of her eyes. “It was one of the things I added to my arsenal about why I wanted a dog so badly.”

“Bobbie the Wonder Dog, right?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“I read an article about him a couple years ago. Pretty incredible feat, close to three thousand miles, I think.”

While the tea steeped, Jenna returned to the front window, iPad in hand. Jenna was about to bring up how Bobbie was some breed of collie, too, when something caught her attention—not movement, but tracks. They trailed along the sidewalk and joined up with hers at the entranceway of the building. They weren’t human footprints, either, but animal tracks, the best she could tell. Raising up on tiptoe and pressing her forehead against the window, Jenna peered downward, finding the bowl of kibble barely in view. Nothing was there, but the tracks led straight to it. “Jake, there are tracks leading right up to the door! And they weren’t there just a couple minutes ago, I swear!”

“Dog tracks?”

“I think so. I can’t tell from here.” She ran for the door and shoved into her still-wet boots rather than Jake’s slippers in case she needed to trek out further into the snow this time. “The call will drop as soon as I step out of the range of your Wi-Fi, so I’ll call you back when I get inside.”

“Sure thing, but I’m on my way now. I’ll see you soon.”

Jenna grabbed the coat Jake had lent her and dashed down the steps so fast she nearly lost her balance. Over nine miles! Could he really have made it here that quickly in snow this deep?

She threw open the door to find a bit of the kibble had been tossed over the edge of the bowl, and the prints in front of it were most definitely canine. Rather than heading back up the walkway, they wove through the landscaping along the side of the condos.

Following them, Jenna jogged around the side, the streetlights casting an uneven glow along the landscaping. She fully expected to spot him standing by the back door as she rounded the corner, but he was nowhere in sight. His tracks led right to it though, then off into the back parking lot.

“Seven! Seeeven!”

Jenna took off in their wake, terrified she’d lose track of them, but nothing aside from the street had been plowed around here yet, and his prints were the only thing breaking up the virgin snow. They led behind a second building then, as a fence blocked the way, toward the street again. Jenna’s feet turned to ice in her still-wet shoes, but she pushed ahead faster, the snow deep enough to work the muscles in her legs.

It wasn’t until Seven’s tracks veered sharply alongside Rockwell that Jenna realized where he was heading—straight toward her place. Perhaps he’d smelled her scent on the kibble, or perhaps he was drawn to the yard where he’d played with Jake dozens of times, but he was heading along the same path he and Jake traveled every afternoon on their way to play in the yard. Jenna squinted ahead in the darkness beyond the streetlights, attempting to catch a glimpse of something aside from falling snow.

Cupping her hands, she yelled as loudly as she could. “Seven! Here, boy! Here, Seven!”

She’d just broken into a jog when a movement in the distance caught her eye. Something a few hundred feet ahead had just stepped out from behind a tree and was watching her, and Jenna caught the reflection of a pair of eyes in the beam of a streetlight.

“Seven!”

That was when she heard it, clear as day. A single, high-pitched bark.

“Come here, boy! Come here, Seven!”

She could make him out in the darkness now, a shaggy black-and-white dog jogging toward her, tail wagging and mouth gaping open—somehow completely ordinary and miraculous at the same time.

Seven had come home.