The Case of the Mixed-Up Mutts

by Dori Hillestad Butler

  “Jazzy, listen to me,” I say. “There’s got to be another way.”

  “I don’t know what it is,” Jazzy says.

  The door opens and Jazzy jerks her leash out of Kathy’s grasp.

  “Peaches!” Kathy calls, lunging for the leash.

  Peaches? Is that what Kathy calls Jazzy?

  Jazzy darts through an Irish setter’s legs and is out the door.

  “Don’t let Jazzy go by herself!” the other dogs urge me on. “You have to go with her. You have to help Jazzy find Owen, and you have to help Muffin get back to Kathy!”

  They’re right. I don’t know if Muffin could find her way back to Kathy by herself. I don’t even know if I can find Kathy once Muffin and I leave Owen’s grandma’s house. But I can take Muffin back to Connor and Mom’s house. And then together we can figure out how to find Kathy.

  “I have to go,” I tell Connor. He is the one who is most likely to understand me. “But don’t worry. I’ll be back.” I pull my leash out of Connor’s grasp and make tracks for the door.

  “Buddy!” Connor exclaims. “What are you doing?”

  Connor starts to run after me, but he’s too slow. “Mom!” he screams. “Can you grab Buddy?”

  “Go, Buddy!” the other dogs shout. “Don’t look back! We won’t let your humans catch you.” They all move in between Mom and me.

  “Somebody, grab Buddy!” Mom cries.

  But I am already out the door after Jazzy.

  Jazzy glances over her shoulder as I catch up to her. “Hey, this is kind of fun,” she giggles. “I’ve never run away before.” She skips into the street.

  “JAZZY!” I scream as a car swerves around her. “BE CAREFUL!”

  “BUDDY! COME BACK HERE!” Mom yells. I feel her feet pounding on the pavement behind me.

  There is an opening in the traffic.

  I feel bad about running away from Mom, but I have to. I have to follow Jazzy.

  “This way!” I tell Jazzy. I tilt my head toward a different street. There are houses over there.

  Jazzy slows to look at me. “Is Grandma’s house that way?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” I say. “But we have to lose all those humans that are chasing us before we can look for Grandma’s house. I think we can do that if we run through those backyards over there.”

  “Okay,” Jazzy says.

  “Look for cars this time,” I warn her.

  We look both ways, then dart across the street ... across somebody’s front yard, and around to the back. I hope there isn’t a fence back there.

  There isn’t.

  Jazzy and I keep running. Through backyards. Over and around fences. Back to a front yard. Across another street.

  I put my nose to the ground. “Hey, I think we drove on this street to get to obedience school,” I tell Jazzy. I’m pretty sure I smell Mom and Connor’s car.

  Jazzy sniffs the edge of the street. “I think I smell it, too.”

  And we seem to have lost the humans. For now, anyway.

  We follow the car trail back to Connor’s house.

  We pass Mouse’s house along the way. He is resting under the big maple tree in his front yard.

  “Mouse!” I call to him. “Look who I found.”

  Mouse raises his head. “HEY ... IS THAT JAZZY?” He comes to greet us at the fence.

  “Yes, it is!” I say as we hurry on past.

  “Nice ... to ... meet you ... Mouse,” Jazzy puffs. She’s getting tired, I can tell.

  We can’t slow down, though. “No time to chat,” I tell Mouse over my shoulder. “But guess what? I’m taking Jazzy home!”

  “THAT’S GREAT,” Mouse calls back. “BUT THEN WHO’S GOING TO MOVE IN WITH CONNOR AND MOM WHEN YOU GO TO SPRINGTOWN?”

  I can’t think about that right now. The trail Mouse and I left when we came back from Owen’s grandma’s house should be around here somewhere. If I can find it, we should be able to follow it in reverse.

  “I have to get Jazzy back to her house before the humans catch us,” I tell Mouse.

  I sniff. Ah! There it is!

  “Switch to this trail,” I tell Jazzy.

  We follow the new trail up one street and down another. For some reason it doesn’t take as long to find Jazzy’s house now as it took us to come back the other morning. But that’s probably because we have a trail to follow.

  “We’re getting close,” Jazzy says, speeding up. “I smell Grandma. I smell Owen, too!”

  I smell Muffin!

  We round another corner and there, up ahead, is Owen’s grandma’s house. Muffin is outside. She’s sitting on the top step of the porch with Owen.

  They both turn to look at us.

  “Jazzy?” Owen says, his eyes growing wide. He rises to his feet. “Is it really you?”

  10

  A Happy Ending

  Owen leads Muffin down the stairs. He bends down in front of Jazzy, and Jazzy licks his ears.

  Owen giggles. “It is you. Isn’t it, girl?”

  “Of course it’s me,” Jazzy says, wagging her whole back end.

  “You came back,” Muffin says as she circles me. Her tail is going about a million miles an hour. “And you brought Jazzy with you. Now we can switch back.”

  “That’s the plan,” I say.

  “How did you ever find your way back, Jazzy?” Owen asks. He hugs Jazzy again. “I’m really sorry I took the wrong dog that other day. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “I forgive you,” Jazzy says.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Muffin says. “Now what about me? Are you going to take me to my human?”

  The door to the house opens and an older female human steps outside.

  “Owen?” she says as she marches down the stairs. She’s got a leash in one hand. “What’s going on? Where did all these dogs come from?”

  “I don’t know, Grandma,” Owen says, rubbing Jazzy’s back. “They just showed up.”

  Grandma looks from Jazzy to Muffin and back again. “You’d better put a leash on Jazzy.” She holds the leash out to Owen. “Do you know which one is Jazzy? Those two look exactly alike.”

  “To you, maybe,” Jazzy says with a sniff. “Not to us.”

  “This one is Jazzy,” Owen says, picking her up.

  Grandma rubs her chin. “Are you sure? Do they have tags?”

  Owen crosses his fingers behind his back. “I don’t know what happened to Jazzy’s tags,” he says in a low voice. “I think we lost them.”

  He’s lying! A dog can always tell when a human isn’t telling the truth. Jazzy told me what happened to the tags she and Muffin were wearing that day at the dog park.

  “Well, what about the other dog?” Grandma reaches toward Muffin, but Muffin pulls away. She isn’t wearing any tags, either.

  “We’d better go,” Muffin says.

  I agree. We don’t want Grandma to call the dog catcher. “I’m glad you’re back with your human, Jazzy,” I say. “Let’s go, Muffin!”

  As I turn to head back down the sidewalk, Mom’s car pulls to a stop in front of Jazzy’s house. Mom and Kathy get out of the front doors. Connor gets out the back.

  How did they know where Jazzy and I went?

  “Buddy!” Connor cries, racing toward me.

  “MOM!” Muffin cries, racing toward Kathy. She runs straight into Kathy’s arms.

  I let Connor hug me. “How did you find me?” I ask. But he doesn’t answer. He just keeps hugging me.

  “Are these your dogs?” Grandma asks Mom and Kathy.

  “Yes,” Mom says. “I’m sorry they’re running loose. They got away from us at the end of ... ” she pauses. “Obedience class.”

  “Well, two of them did,” Kathy says. “Yours and hers.” She points to Mom. “My dog has been here for the last two and a half weeks.”

  Grandma’s mouth drops open. “I beg your pardon.”

  “Our dogs got switched. At the dog park,” Kathy explains. “But it’s okay. This one is mine. A
nd I can tell by the way your boy is petting that one she must be his.”

  “How did all these dogs end up here?” Grandma asks. “And how did you know they were here?”

  “We didn’t,” Mom says. “We just started driving around.”

  “I told Mom to go this way,” Connor says. “I saw Buddy running, and I thought he might be heading toward the river.”

  “I don’t know how you knew that,” Mom says.

  “Me, either.” Connor shrugs.

  “It doesn’t matter how we got here,” Kathy says. “The important thing is we did. Can we take our dogs home now?”

  “I don’t know,” Grandma says, scratching her head. “Maybe we should wait until my daughter and her husband get home to help us sort all this out. They’ve been in Europe for the last couple of weeks. That’s why Owen and his dog are here with me. I would hate to see them go home with the wrong dog.”

  “But I know this is my dog,” says Owen as Jazzy licks his face.

  “And I know this is my dog,” Kathy says, hugging Muffin closer.

  “How do you know?” Grandma asks. “Neither dog has any identification. And they look the same.”

  “They don’t look exactly the same,” Kathy says. “There’s more black around Muffin’s nose.”

  “And there’s more white on Jazzy’s stomach fur,” Owen pipes in.

  Grandma adjusts her glasses and takes a closer look at each dog. “I’m sorry,” she says. “They look the same to me.”

  Humans are so limited by what they can see. It’s true that Muffin and Jazzy look a lot alike. But they don’t smell anything alike.

  Finally Kathy says, “I think I know how we can settle this. Is your dog by any chance microchipped?”

  “Yes.” Owen nods.

  “I am?” Jazzy asks. “I don’t remember getting ‘microchipped.’”

  “It probably happened when you were young,” Muffin says.

  “My dog is microchipped, too,” Kathy says. “All we have to do is find someone to scan the chips.”

  “What chips?” Connor asks. “What does microchipped mean?”

  “It means both our dogs have little computer chips in their shoulders,” Owen explains. “A vet can scan a chip and find out whose dog it is. You’ll be glad you did it if your dog ever gets lost. Almost any vet can do it.”

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” Grandma asks. “Let’s get in the car and go see your vet.”

  “This dog’s name is Muffin,” the vet says. He holds up Muffin’s leash. “She’s owned by a Kathy Turner, who lives at 308 Park Drive.”

  Technically, Kathy Turner is owned by a dog named Muffin, but humans never get that right.

  “I knew this was my Muffin,” Kathy says. She takes the leash from the vet.

  “And this is Jazzy,” the vet says, handing Jazzy over to Owen and his grandma.

  “Jazzy is my dog!” Owen says happily.

  I LOVE happy endings. But I don’t love vets. “Let’s go,” I tell Mom as I pull toward the door.

  But Mom isn’t in any hurry to leave. “I wonder if we should have Buddy microchipped,” she says out of the blue. “We’ve had some problems with him running away from us.”

  I swallow hard. You want to have me microchipped?

  “Don’t worry, Buddy,” Jazzy says. “It doesn’t hurt a bit.”

  I’m not worried about pain. A microchip proves who belongs to you when there are no tags. The microchips inside of Muffin and Jazzy proved that Kathy belongs to Muffin and Owen belongs to Jazzy.

  If I get a microchip, who will it say belongs to me? Kayla and her mom and dad? Connor and his mom?

  I think I know the answer to that question.

  “Yeah, let’s get Buddy microchipped,” Connor says.

  “We recommend microchipping for every dog and cat,” the vet says.

  “Okay, then let’s do it!” Mom says.

  “Wait a minute! Don’t I get a say in this?” I ask.

  “Don’t you want to be microchipped?” Muffin asks. “Your people seem like really good people. And they must love you a lot if they want to do this. That means they don’t want ever to lose you.”

  “But what about Kayla and her mom and dad?” I say.

  “What about them?” Jazzy asks.

  I don’t answer out loud. But inside, I’m wondering why didn’t they have me microchipped.

  Will I ever know? Will I ever see Kayla, Mom, and Dad again?

  I can’t leave Connor and his mom. Not unless I find another dog to take care of them. And I wouldn’t leave them with just any dog. It would have to be the right dog. One who would take extra good care of them.

  If Sarge goes back to Springtown, he will have to go without me.

  I’m pretty lucky to have found Connor and mom. They’re good people. Just because you have a second family doesn’t necessarily mean you forget your first family. And it doesn’t mean you love them any less.

  I still don’t know whether a dog can have two families or not. But a dog can definitely love two families.

  “All right,” I say. “You can microchip me.”

  The vet takes my leash and leads me down the hall.

  “Hey!” Connor calls after us. “Is it going to hurt him when you put the microchip in?”

  The vet stops and turns. “No. But you can come along if you want. It won’t take very long.”

  Connor grins and hurries after us.

  “Now you’ll never get lost, Buddy,” Connor says, patting my ribs.

  Buddy. That name is really starting to grow on me.

  I lick his leg. It’s nice to love and to be loved.

  We go into another room and the vet closes the door behind us.

  Jazzy is right. It doesn’t hurt when the vet puts this chip inside me. I just feel a little pinch, and then it’s over.

  Now it’s official. I belong to Connor and his mom.

  Forever?

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 2010 by Dori Hillestad Butler

  Illustrations copyright © 2010 Jeremy Tugeau

  978-1-4532-1948-5

  This 2011 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media

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