In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) by Neil S. Plakcy

as soon as the first crack rang out he scurried for the safety of the dark area under my bed, and I had to get down on all fours, grasp a handful of hair at the back of his neck, and drag him out when the storm passed.
    He didn’t like fireworks or motorcycles either, and when a delivery van pulled up anywhere in the neighborhood he began to bark. Reasoning with him did no good. “He’s three houses down, Rochester,” I’d say. “Thank you for warning me but you can go back to sleep now.”
    Instead he would pace around for a while, all his senses on alert on the off chance that some evil UPS driver would be delivering a package to me. The nerve of those guys in brown.
    I didn’t know if he’d had any phobias before, but he sure did now. He always had to know where I was in the house, and even if he was asleep on the carpet at the foot of my bed, and I tiptoed downstairs, he woke and followed me.
    It was particularly annoying when I was trying to clean up or organize—I’d be moving things between office and bedroom, or trying to make the bed, and there would be this huge golden retriever underfoot. “Settle down, Rochester!” seemed to have no effect. Only when I stayed in to one place in the house—the bed, the kitchen table, the computer—could Rochester do the same.
    The next day, the two Puerto Rican women Ginny had hired to clean Caroline’s house stacked a dozen boxes in my garage, all labeled by the room where the things had come from. Rochester was very eager to sniff each box and I had to manhandle him back into the house to get ready for his evening walk.
    Even after we returned, Rochester was determined to get into those boxes, so I opened the first one he sniffed, just to show him there was nothing there for him.
    It was a box of books, and the one on the top was called Befriending Your Golden Retriever . I picked it up and flipped through sections on weaning, feeding, and training. Rochester was very interested in what I was doing, and nosed the book as I turned the pages, until I saw a picture that looked so much like him he could have posed for it.
    The dog in the photo was the same honey-gold color, with the same squarish head. They both had a couple of curlicues of golden hair mixed into an otherwise straight coat, and the same large, alert brown eyes. The other photos showed that there was a lot of variation within the breed—some goldens were thinner, with narrower faces, and they ranged in color from ivory to deep red. But Rochester was the star, what the book called “the breed standard.”
    “Hey, boy, that’s you,” I said, pointing. He sniffed the page.
    Caroline had made some notes throughout the book, in margins, particularly in the section on training, and I’d been able to understand what she meant. But here, she had written a cryptic series of numbers above the picture that looked like Rochester. I wondered if it was a phone number—there were ten characters in the sequence. Could it be a golden retriever owner, or breeder? Maybe whoever it was knew something about Caroline that would help Rick understand what had happened to her. I decided I wanted to show him that I could investigate, too.
    I carried the book with me to the office and turned on Caroline’s laptop. I was still nervous about doing anything regarding Caroline, however legal, on my own computer, because I worried that Santiago Santos wouldn’t approve. I Googled the number—but it turned out to belong to an industrial cleaning service in Terre Haute, Indiana. Oh well, so much for showing Rick. I wasn’t done investigating, but that number was a dead end.
    By this point, Rochester had given up on sniffing at me, and gone to lie down on the carpet behind my chair—locking me in place, because I couldn’t move the chair backwards without running over him.
    Since he’d adopted me, I decided I’d have to do what I could to make a good home for him. I went back to Caroline’s laptop and started Googling