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animal cowered in the crotch of a March-bare maple, fifteen feet above the ground.
    A cat. It had to be a cat. But then it barked again, Amy squinted and the animal slightly shifted its precarious position. It
was
a dog, high up in the tree.
    Kids must have put it there. Amy’s blood roiled; she didn’t understand cruelty to animals. What did people get out of it? How could they? This was just a puppy!
    It barked again, piteously. Amy called, “Just a minute, tiny dog, just a minute don’t move! It’ll be OK!”
    A ladder. Whoever put that dog up there had used a ladder, and it didn’t make much sense to carry a tall ladder a long way. So it might still be around somewhere.
    Pepper spray in hand, pocket flashlight turned on, she peered cautiously down a nearby alley. Three trash cans, one overturned, and something scurrying away from the flashlight. Her heart stopped until she saw that it was an alley cat, not a rat. However, no ladder. Could she stand on the trash can? No, not high enough. She saw nothing else she could climb on, either.
    Back to the tree. It wasn’t full-grown; she could reach her arms around it easily. A lower branch, not very sturdy-looking, grew from the trunk about six feet above ground. Amy jumped, caught it, and tried to pull herself up onto the branch. It broke and she fell.
    “Ow!”
    Fortunately she’d landed on the stretch of dirt, sparsely covered with dead grass, between the street and sidewalk. She’d torn her jeans but nothing on her seemed broken. If her old gymnastics coach had seen that move, she’d have been off the team in a New York minute.
    The dog shifted again and yelped sharply. Amy leaped up to catch it. “No, puppy, don’t jump! Don’t jump! I might miss you!”
    The dog whimpered.
    Cursing, Amy put both arms around the tree and started shinnying up it. The rough bark tore at her hands. But she reached the place where the broken branch had joined the tree, grasped the stub of branch still attached, and got herself up onto it. The palm of one hand was bleeding. By balancing carefully, she could extend the other hand to within a foot of the dog, but no farther. Now she could see it more clearly: a little mutt with curly gray fur, floppy ears, and terrified dark eyes.
    “Now, come here, puppy, that’s it, come closer—come on, now, you can move—dammit, come to me, you stupid animal!”
    The dog vanished.
    Amy gasped and looked down. It must have . . . but no, it hadn’t fallen. Neither had it shifted to a position where she couldn’t see it. The dog was just
gone
—there one second and not there the next.
    A chill ran over her, as distinct from the cold she already felt as a blizzard from a snow flurry. The dog hadn’t been there. It must have been a phantom in her mind. . . . Oh, God, what if she couldn’t tell her phantoms from reality. . . .
    The chill passed. The dog had not been a phantom. She had seen it. Whatever it was, she had actually seen it. Once, in the science museum on a sixth-grade field trip, a curator had demonstrated a three-dimensional hologram. He had made a rose appear on a table, a rose so real-looking that the kids had all exclaimed and rushed forward to touch it. Amy still remembered the eerie feeling when her hand had gone through the rose. Had she just seen a hologram of a dog in a tree?
    But who would do that? And
why
? This wasn’t the sort of neighborhood to host high-quality tech equipment. Also, the hologram of the rose had shimmered around the edges, especially when you got close to it. She had been a foot away from the dog, and she would have bet her life that it had been a solid, fleshy, breathing, terrified animal.
    In a way, she had bet her life.
    Still, getting down from the tree was easier than getting up. On the ground, Amy gazed upward. Nothing. Her left palm was bloody, her jeans had torn, the bruises on her body were beginning to ache.
    “Damn you,” she said loudly, to anyone who might be listening. Then