Part 3
The call remained unanswered, but the word tomorrow followed Jonah home. It appeared in small obligations. Mica’s breakfast had to be soaked before morning. Her prescription needed collecting Friday. The tag on her collar carried Jonah’s phone number, a promise made to strangers that someone would answer if she got lost.
He kept those promises with military precision and ignored the one waiting on his phone. By February, Mica would eat while Jonah occupied the same room. On good days she slept beside the radiator instead of beneath the table. On bad days a slammed car door sent her back to the mudroom, where Jonah would later find three careful pieces of food beside his boots.
Gus Bell noticed both kinds of days. He was sixty-eight, a retired utility lineman with white hair, a red wool cap, and hands scarred by forty years of ice, wire, and other people’s poor maintenance. Retirement had made him a volunteer for Alder Bay’s winter outreach program and an energetic trespasser in Jonah’s kitchen.
He first arrived with a portable radio he claimed was broken. Jonah switched it on. Music filled the room.
“Intermittent,” Gus said.
“Dishonest.”
“I brought cinnamon rolls.”
Jonah stepped aside. Gus never reached for Mica. He put half a roll on a plate for Jonah, drank two cups of coffee, and discussed a loose transformer brace as if Mica were not watching him from beneath the table. On his fourth invented repair visit, she stayed in the open. On the sixth, she sniffed the red glove hanging from his back pocket.
“She has standards,” Gus said.
“She eats out of my boot.”
“Selective standards.”
Mica’s fascination with handled objects soon extended beyond Gus. On walks she collected a child’s mitten, a mail carrier’s cap, and a wool scarf Ruth Danner had dropped from the porch of her yellow house. Mica never chewed them. She carried each for several yards, nose working over the fabric, before setting it down near Jonah or turning toward home. Ruth, who was seventy-nine and offended by assistance on principle, came to retrieve her scarf.
“Your dog is a thief,” she said.
“Unproven.”
Ruth pointed at the scarf beside Mica’s bed. Jonah glanced down. “Circumstantial.”
Mica watched their faces, then nudged the scarf toward Ruth’s boot. Ruth’s mouth softened despite her effort to prevent it.
The first person who frightened Mica in weeks was a driver for Northstar Home Support. His blue service van was parked outside the community center while he unloaded insulated grocery bags. A work glove fell near the rear tire. Mica took it before Jonah saw it.
“Hey!” the driver shouted. “Get that away from her.”
Mica flattened against Jonah’s leg, the glove still in her mouth. The driver came closer. “That dog needs a leash.”
Jonah held up the leash already in his hand. “Stop walking at her.”
“She stole my glove.”
“And I’ll return it.”
The man stopped, but his voice had done its work. Mica released the glove and shook all the way home. That evening she left most of her dinner untouched. By midnight, food had reappeared behind the mudroom curtain.
Jonah sat on the kitchen floor without calling her. After ten minutes, Mica came in and lay beyond his reach.
“All right,” he said. “We go from here.”
Gus heard about the incident from Ruth, who heard everything. He came over the next morning without a fake repair.
“Northstar’s been touchy lately,” he said. “Short on drivers. Shorter on patience.”
Jonah poured coffee. “That’s not my business.”
“Might be.” Gus took a small spiral notebook from his coat. “Beth called Ruth to confirm a completed Northstar visit. Ruth said nobody came, then told me.”
“And the others?”
“I asked around my volunteer route. Two more people remember no visit on days Northstar marked complete.”
“Memory isn’t a route log.”
“No. That’s why I wrote names, not conclusions.”
Gus tapped the notebook. Jonah recognized the method. A lineman did not call a flicker a grid failure, but he did not wait for the substation to burn before checking connections.
The forecast radio warned of a severe lake-effect storm arriving the next evening. Gus wanted to verify six high-risk residents before it did. The county was reviewing Northstar’s records, but roads could close before paperwork caught up.
“Take the tracked utility rig,” Jonah said. “It’s fueled.”
“I’m asking for you, not your machine.”
Jonah’s jaw tightened. “Then ask somebody healthy.”
Gus studied him. “You don’t get to decide you’re useless and call it consideration.”
“You don’t get to turn my medical history into a volunteer schedule.”
Mica rose from beside the radiator. Gus noticed and lowered his voice.
“Fine. I’ll check the list myself.”
He put on his gloves and left before finishing his coffee. Jonah stood at the sink, angry enough to wash the same mug twice. Gus’s red cap crossed the yard between their neighboring properties and disappeared into his workshop. Jonah could have followed. He could have said he would drive for an hour or make calls from home. Instead he closed the curtain.
The storm arrived six hours early. By dark, Alder Bay’s streetlights were pale disks in blowing snow. Jonah secured the generator, brought in firewood, and checked the exhaust vents. Mica followed him closely, uneasy at the wind striking the siding.
At eight, Jonah texted Gus, “You done proving a point?” No answer came. At eight-thirty, he called, but the phone rang until voicemail.
Jonah told himself Gus was with the county team. At nine, Mica began scratching at the mudroom door. He clipped on her long line and opened it just far enough to let them into the white rush outside.
She did not turn toward her usual patch of yard. She pulled toward the low fence between the properties, nose down, bracing against the wind. Jonah followed until the line snagged on a buried shrub.
“Mica, enough.”
She lunged so hard that one shoulder slipped partly free of the harness. Jonah caught the chest strap, shortened the lead, and followed as she plunged into the drift beside the fence. She came up carrying a red leather lineman’s glove. She dropped it on Jonah’s threshold and pulled toward Gus’s dark workshop…
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