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might still have, plus a tube of cream that will help to heal his scabs.”
    I scooped up Blue and paid my bill, which listed the cost of the shampoo and cream at a combined total of $38.75.
    All of this drama over something that costs less than forty bucks to correct? I thought. I paid $400 for this dog. Why on earth would people charging that kind of money not have just given Blue these things before putting him up for adoption?
    Back at home, I got in touch with the folks from Lulu’s Rescue. They were horrified to learn of my experience. They said it was the first time they had ever had a problem with a dog from this particular rescue group in North Carolina, and they’d been given no indication that Blue was anything other than a happy, healthy puppy. The photograph of him hadn’t shown any signs of a skin problem, and nobody had ever said the word ringworm in their discussions about him. They promised to do further research and let me know if they could find any additional information about Blue’s past, and they thanked me for all I was doing to make sure he was healthy. Some people, they told me, would have skipped the shampoo and instead just sent him back, rejected as defective.
    It took me a good while to get that repugnant idea out of my mind. I shook my head at the very thought of it, and I spent the rest of the afternoon following Dr. Milne’s instructions. Blue seemed oblivious to all the concern and drama, what with his nap at the vet’s office having recharged his puppy batteries. He scampered and played with Stella until I picked him up in one hand with the bottle of shampoo in the other.
    Not long after I’d finished Blue’s first medicinal bath in the kitchen sink, my telephone rang. The woman on the line said she was Annie Turner, returning my call.
    At least I thought “Annie Turner” was the name the woman had said. She sounded about as different from me as a platypus from a mountain lion. I was born and raised in New Jersey. Unless I make a serious mental effort, I talk as fast as a freight train and sound just as silly as Snooki or Tony Soprano thanks to my “Joisey Gurl” accent. This woman Annie Turner had a Southern drawl and talked slower than a push mower on a hot summer’s day. At first, we couldn’t understand a thing that the other was saying. I asked her to repeat a couple of things a couple of times, until I could discern her pattern of speech. I slowed my own sentences and tried to enunciate the way I do when I’m on assignment as a travel writer in foreign countries.
    Turner said she had fostered Blue at the farm where she lived after he was found at the local animal-control center in Person County. “They gas puppies like him to death,” she said. “They kill 92 percent of all the dogs that go in there.”
    I paused for a moment, trying to digest what she’d just told me.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, shocked into responding even more slowly. “Would … you … please … say that again?”
    “Ninety-two percent,” she said. “They kill almost all of them. We pulled him out at the last minute. He was headed for the gas chamber.”
    Blue, at that moment, was on my backyard deck. He’d gone outside to dry off, and I’d given him a bone for being such a good boy about the bath. I could see him through the kitchen window. He had fallen asleep while chewing the bone, which lay next to him, half eaten. His little puppy potbelly rose and fell with every breath as his wet fur dried in the afternoon sun.
    Gas chambe r? I thought. The words echoed in my brain with a muffled dullness, like the way ears ring in the immediate aftermath of an explosion. Who on earth would throw a puppy like Blue into a gas chamber? Is that even legal?
    I had Dr. Milne’s scrap paper in hand, and I needed her four specific questions answered. Turner was at first open and forthcoming with lots of information, which it turns out included all of the first-known details about Blue’s life.
    Blue,