In the kitchen, he noticed that the pantry door was open, the light on. He looked in to see if Einstein was there, but the only sign of the dog was the message that he had spelled out sometime during the night.

FIDDLE BROKE. NO DOCTOR. PLEASE. DON’T WANT TO GO BACK TO LAB. AFRAID. AFRAID.

Oh shit. Oh Jesus.

Travis stepped out of the pantry and shouted, “Einstein!”

No bark. No sound of padding feet.

The shutters still covered the kitchen windows, and most of the room was not illuminated by the glow from the pantry. Travis snapped on the lights.

Einstein was not there.

He ran into the den. The dog was not there, either.

Heart pounding almost painfully, Travis climbed the stairs two at a time, looked in the third bedroom that would one day be a nursery and then in the room that Nora used as a studio, but Einstein was not in either place, and he was not in the master bedroom, not even under the bed where Travis was desperate enough to check, and for a moment he could not figure out where in the hell the dog had gone, and he stood listening to Nora singing in the shower-she was oblivious of what was happening-and he started into the bathroom to tell her that something was wrong, horribly wrong, which was when he thought of the downstairs bath, so he ran out of the bedroom and along the hall and descended the stairs so fast he almost lost his balance, almost fell, and in the first-floor bath, between the kitchen and the den, he found what he most feared to find.

The bathroom stank. The dog, ever considerate, had vomited in the toilet but had not possessed the strength-or perhaps the clarity of mind-to flush. Einstein was lying on the bathroom floor, on his side. Travis knelt next to him. Einstein was still but not dead, not dead, because he was breathing; he inhaled and exhaled with a rasping noise. He tried to lift his head when Travis spoke to him, but he did not have the strength to move.

His eyes. Jesus, his eyes.

Ever so gently, Travis lifted the retriever’s head and saw that those wonderfully expressive brown eyes were slightly milky. A watery yellow discharge oozed from the eyes; it had crusted in the golden fur. A similar sticky discharge bubbled in Einstein’s nostrils.

Putting a hand on the retriever’s neck, Travis felt a laboring and irregular heartbeat.

“No,” Travis said. “Oh, no, no. It’s not going to be like this, boy. I’m not going to let it happen like this.”

He lowered the retriever’s head to the floor, got up, turned toward the door-and Einstein whimpered almost inaudibly, as if to say that he did not want to be left alone.

“I’ll be right back, right back,” Travis promised. “Just hold on, boy. I’ll be right back.”

He ran to the stairs and climbed faster than before. Now, his heart was beating with such tremendous force that he felt as if it would tear loose of him. He was breathing too fast, hyperventilating.

In the master bathroom, Nora was just stepping out of the shower, naked and dripping.

Travis’s words ran together in panic: “Get dressed quick we’ve got to get to the vet now for god’s sake hurry.”

Shocked, she said, “What’s happened?”

“Einstein! Hurry! I think he’s dying.”

He grabbed a blanket off the bed, left Nora to dress, and hurried downstairs to the bathroom. The retriever’s ragged breathing seemed to have gotten worse in just the minute that Travis had been away. He folded the blanket twice, to a fourth of its size, then eased the dog onto it.

Einstein made a pained sound, as if the movement hurt him.

Travis said, “Easy, easy. You’ll be all right.”

At the door, Nora appeared, still buttoning her blouse, which was damp because she had not taken time to towel off before dressing. Her wet hair hung straight.

In a voice choked with emotion, she said, “Oh, fur face, no, no.” She wanted to stoop and touch the retriever, but there was no time to delay. Travis said, “Bring the pickup alongside the house.”

While Nora sprinted to the barn, Travis folded the blanket around Einstein as best he could, so only the retriever’s head, tail, and hind legs protruded. Trying unsuccessfully not to elicit another whimper of pain, Travis lifted the dog in his arms and carried him out of the bathroom, across the kitchen, out of the house, pulling the door shut behind him but leaving it unlocked, not giving a damn about security right now.

The air was cold. Yesterday’s calm was gone. Evergreens swayed, shivered, and there was something ominous in the way their bristling, needled branches pawed at the air. Other leafless trees raised black, bony arms toward the somber sky.

In the barn, Nora started the pickup. The engine roared. Travis cautiously descended the porch steps and went out to the driveway, walking as if he were carrying an armload of fragile antique china. The blustery wind stood Travis’s hair straight up, flapped the loose ends of the blanket, and ruffled the fur on Einstein’s exposed head, as if it were a wind with a malevolent consciousness, as if it wanted to tear the dog away from him.

Nora swung the pickup around, heading out, and stopped where Travis Waited She would drive.

It was true what they said: sometimes, in certain special moments of crisis, in times of great emotional tribulation, women are better able to bite the bullet and do what must be done than men often are. Sitting in the truck’s passenger seat, cradling the blanket-wrapped dog in his arms, Travis was in no condition to drive. He was shaking badly, and he realized that he had been crying from the time he had found Einstein on the bathroom floor. He had seen difficult military service, and he had never panicked or been paralyzed with fear while on dangerous Delta Force operations, but this was different, this was Einstein, this was his child. If he had been required to drive, he’d probably have run straight into a tree, or off the road into a ditch. There were tears in Nora’s eyes, too, but she didn’t surrender to them. She bit her lip and drove as if she had been trained for stunt work in the movies. At the end of the dirt lane, they turned right, heading north on the twisty Pacific Coast Highway toward Carmel, where there was sure to be at least one veterinarian.

During the drive, Travis talked to Einstein, trying to soothe and encourage him. “Everything’s going to be all right, just fine, it’s not as bad as it seems, you’ll be good as new.”

Einstein whimpered and struggled weakly in Travis’s arms for a moment, and Travis knew what the dog was thinking. He was afraid that the vet would see the tattoo in his ear, would know what it meant, and would send him back to Banodyne.

“Don’t you worry about that, fur face. Nobody’s going to take you away from us. By God, they aren’t. They’ll have to walk through me first, and they aren’t going to be able to do that, no way.”

“No way,” Nora agreed grimly.

But in the blanket, cradled against Travis’s chest, Einstein trembled violently.

Travis remembered the lettered tiles on the pantry floor: FIDDLE

BROKE… AFRAID… AFRAID.

“Don’t be afraid,” he pleaded with the dog. “Don’t be afraid. There’s no reason to be afraid.”

In spite of Travis’s heartfelt assurances, Einstein shivered and was afraid- and Travis was afraid, too.