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after her group rescued him from the animal-control center, had gone to live on what she described as a farm where she was fostering about twenty dogs. Most of them are Chihuahuas, which she said hold a special place in her heart, but some- thing about Blue’s face made her feel that he was exceptional, too. She said that Blue had loved playing with all of her other foster dogs, and that he practically sang with delight when she rocked him in her arms. He had been learning to sleep and eat in a crate at her urging and without any complaint, and he’d grown especially fond of a big Labrador mix who lived on the farm as well. The two of them had become inseparable, Turner said.
    I thanked her for having saved him, and for all of the work her group had done to bring him to my attention. I assured her that he was loved and well cared for, and that he had, in fact, just returned from a checkup at the veterinarian’s office.
    Then I slowly but determinedly turned the conversation back to its original purpose. I needed to know the cause of Blue’s scabs, and why and how he was treated for ringworm.
    “Oh, he never had a test for ringworm,” she said, about as casually as a mother of five whose youngest child is screaming bloody murder over nothing but a little ol’ scraped knee. “The vet who neutered him said his rash looked like it could have been ringworm, so that’s why the paper says that.”
    “Great,” I said, checking off one of Dr. Milne’s questions from the list. “So where it says ‘treated for ringworm,’ what does that mean?”
    “Well,” she replied, measuring her words, “it means that I treated him for ringworm.”
    I couldn’t tell whether she thought I was some variation of an obnoxious soccer mom, or if she was just uncomfortable about me asking questions in general, but her tone was definitely changing. She was becoming defensive.
    “I’m sorry if I sound pushy,” I pressed, “but my veterinarian asked me to find out exactly how Blue was treated for ringworm. We are trying to make sure he has the best possible care now. Any information you can give me about how he was treated would be really helpful.”
    A few seconds went by, and Turner said nothing. It seemed to me that she was hesitant to answer the question at all.
    I let the silence hang in the air, and after a few more seconds, she filled it.
    “I treated him the way I was told to treat him,” she said. “With bleach and Monistat.”
    Again, I found myself pausing, trying to digest what she’d just told me.
    “Did you say … bleach?” I asked.
    “That’s what I was told to do,” she said. “The veterinarian from spay/neuter said I could treat with bleach and Monistat.”
    Monistat , I thought. Mon-i-stat. I racked my brain until I remembered where I’d seen it: on the drugstore shelf, in the section for vaginal anti-yeast cream.
    “It definitely worked,” Turner continued as I tried to calm my own racing thoughts. “None of my other dogs got the same rash, and some of them are as little as three pounds apiece. He was playing with all of them. They would’ve had it by now if it was contagious.”
    Still, I remained silent. I looked at the thirty-eight dollars’ worth of shampoo and skin cream on my kitchen counter. On a puppy’s skin? On anybody’s skin? Bleach? I couldn’t get the word out of my mind.
    “You know, he also had toxidia when I found him,” she said.
    “Toxidia?” I replied, snapping my attention back to our conversation. “What the heck is toxidia?”
    “Not toxidia,” she corrected me, sounding less like a crazy person and more like someone with lots of animal-care experience. “Coccidia. It’s serious diarrhea. Puppies can get dehydrated from it and die. He lost three pounds in a single week. I got him healthy and put the weight back on him.”
    Turner was now talking with great pride, but I was reeling like an elephant stunned by a dart filled with brain tranquilizers. I again looked out