Her gaze lifts to mine. “I will treat him right. I’ve never had a dog, but my mother would let me keep him. I know she would.”
I lay a hand on her shoulder. “Keep him? Or take care of him?”
Dorrit wipes away tears. “Both. I would do both.”
“Taking care of him is good. But keeping him? If he does not wish to be kept?”
I lower myself to her level. “Sometimes, you might want to help a person or an animal, and maybe it would be the right thing for them, but if they don’t want it? When we do that, the one we’re really helping is ourselves.” I pat her shoulder. “This part is up to Bobby. We won’t take him away if he wants to stay. Let’s go see what he chooses.”
Chapter Fifteen
We’re in the garden with Bobby. Gray let Roy go. Oh, he won’t get away with what he did, but Gray isn’t going to bother making a citizen’s arrest when McCreadie knows where to find the young man.
Earlier, McCreadie had been unclear on the legality of arresting someone for “stealing” a stray dog. Confining Bobby in poor conditions would be illegal in my world, but not here. Grabbing a child, though? Taking her and threatening her with intent—as Dorrit says—to beat her senseless? That’s illegal in any time.
McCreadie can handle that. This is the part that concerns me—Dorrit and Bobby’s story. We find the dog where we left him, sunning himself on that stoop. On the way there, I stop at a butcher’s, where I buy meat and a meaty bone.
Gray says nothing about the purchase. I’m sure he knows what I’m planning. The man knows me the way few people in my life ever have, and he understands that, however practical I might appear, I am a hopeless romantic at heart. Including when it comes to girl-meets-dog stories. I want this to work out, for both of them, and if I’m fixing the odds, so be it.
I want the happy ending.
I give Dorrit the meat and the bone. Then I tell her to feed them to Bobby while he’s tied, and then, once he’s occupied, untie him. She does that, and he happily continues eating until the meat is gone. Then he laps some of the clean water she’s brought, and he accepts her petting and gives her a lick and lets her snuggle him. When she finally moves back to sit on the stoop, he picks up the bone and trots off out of the courtyard.
We follow, in hopes he might just be hiding the bone for later. He’s not. He takes it down one street and then another, until he reaches Candlemaker Row. He turns into Greyfriars, heads straight to John Gray’s grave, and happily flops down to start gnawing the bone.
Dorrit stands there, watching him, her eyes filling.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper as I bend beside her.
She only nods, her gaze on the old dog.
“There’s a thing my grandmother used to say,” I murmur. “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours. If it doesn’t . . .” I rub her shoulder. “It wasn’t meant to be.”
Her breath hitches. “I only wanted to help.”
“I know. And you did. You rescued him, and you gave him a place to hide until that man was gone. Then you fed him and gave him a bone.” I meet her eyes. “He won’t forget that. You aren’t his owner, but you are his friend.”
Her body convulses in a silent sob, and she throws herself into my arms. That catches me off guard, but only for a moment, before I hug her tight. Then I look up to see Gray watching us, his expression unreadable. He catches my gaze and startles. Then he steps back, leaving us to our moment.
After that, Gray and I track down Davina. I want to finish this with her before she sees Bobby back in his place and tries to claim he returned on his own. Technically, he did, and that might be the loophole she uses to avoid my payment. With someone like Davina, information is power and leverage, and since it’s the only thing I want from her, I need to get this done.
We find her in that pub where she’d taken us. The guy at the door doesn’t even try to stop us this time. He just puts out his hand for his bribe, and in we go. When we spot Davina having a tea and pie in the corner, Gray motions for me to wait.
“Do you wish to have this conversation alone?” he asks. “I would like to stay nearby, in case of trouble, but I know this is a private matter.”
Is it? I don’t know. It’s such a strange situation. If Davina were really telling me my past, that would be private. But it’s not my past. It’s Catriona’s. Yes, I’m in her body, but I’ve never met her. So why do I care? Because while most everything I’ve heard paints the picture of a terrible person—and possibly a sociopath—the longer I am in this body, the more I can’t help but feel some inkling of sympathy for the previous resident.
I know what it’s like to look like Catriona. I know how she’s treated and dismissed, and I suspect she’d been smart enough for that to sting. Her dyslexia and illiteracy only made her seem even more like a pretty face with nothing behind it. That will never excuse what she did to Isla, taking advantage of her kindness. Not what she did to Constable Findlay, romancing him to sell his police information. Not what she did to Gray, holding onto an intimate letter for blackmail. And nothing will excuse her bullying of Alice. But Simon liked her, and when a seemingly terrible person is grieved by a good one, I cannot help but wonder what I’m missing.
Catriona was too many contradictions for me to ignore. An enigma I need to solve. A beautiful girl hell-bent on surviving by doing anything except the obvious solution of the sex trade. A girl who betrayed everyone except her dearest friend, even when his homosexuality had made her uneasy. A girl who seems middle class but ended up in the slums, as vicious as any rat.
What happened to you, Catriona? What set you on this path?
The answer is probably in her brain. Sociopathy. Narcissism. Some faulty wiring that had her family turning her out into the streets. But even that would be an answer, and a small tragedy. From police work, I know how hard mental illness can be on the family, but it is, in its way, like turning someone out because a bad leg means they can’t work. Of course, in this time period, that happens, too. And I suppose, it happens in my world, some people unable to cope with a special-needs child.
So I want to understand. Whatever the answer is.
