He put away the lighter. Instead of returning the joint to the stash in the tin, he shredded it in his fingers and scattered it on the breeze.

This action so surprised him that for a moment he seined the air with his fingers, trying to recapture the debris that he’d cast away an instant earlier.

Already, the disquiet that thickened into apprehension was further thickening into dread.

While he’d been eating a late dinner on the first bench, he was given signs from which he deduced where he must go. He suspected that time was running out for him to do what he must do.

The thought of riding for three hours in a bus chilled him. If this weight of dread became too heavy, he would feel oppressed in a bus. Claustrophobia would overwhelm him.

Intuition told him to begin the journey on foot. He set out for the coastal highway.

After watching Merlin drink from his large water bowl, Puzzle and Riddle attended Grady’s preparations with interest as he chose two bowls from a cabinet and filled each with cold water from the kitchen tap.

As she extracted the memory stick from Grady’s camera and tucked it in a side compartment of her medical bag to take home, Cammy said, “Neither of us seems to want to speculate.”

“About what?”

“About what do you think?”

“You said earlier-you do medicine, you don’t do theory.”

“Speculation isn’t theory,” she said. “It’s not even up to the level of hypothesis. It’s just blue-skying. It’s what-if, if-maybe, could-it-be stuff.”

“I don’t want to speculate about them.”

“That’s what I just said. Neither of us wants to speculate.”

“All right, then. Good. We’re agreed.”

“But why do you think that is?”

He said, “I don’t do self-analysis.”

She watched him put the two bowls of water on the floor.

Immediately, Puzzle and Riddle went to the bowls, lowered their heads to the water, smelled it, and drank.

Cammy said, “I think the reason we don’t want to speculate about them is because most of the what-ifs we come up with are likely to be scary, one way or another.”

“There’s nothing scary about Puzzle and Riddle.”

“I didn’t say there was. I just said speculating about their origins is going to lead to some scary what-ifs.”

“Right now I just want to experience them,” Grady said. “If I think too much about what they might be, that’s going to color how I interpret their behavior.”

Watching the animals drink, Merlin seemed to strike a proud pose, as if they were good students to whom he had successfully imparted the right technique for drinking from a bowl.

“Anyway,” Cammy said, “you can’t know for sure there’s nothing scary about them.”

“There’s nothing scary about them,” he insisted.

“Not now, they’re as cute as Muppets now, but maybe later when the lights are off and you’re asleep, that’s when they reveal their true grotesque form.”

“You don’t really believe that’s a possibility.”

“No. It’s a what-if, but it’s a ridiculous what-if.”

“Anyway, they’re a lot cuter than Muppets,” he said. “Some Muppets creep me out. Nothing about these two creeps me out.”

“Muppets creep you out? Freud would find that interesting.”

“Not all Muppets creep me out. Just a few.”

“Surely not Kermit.”

“Of course not Kermit. But Big Bird’s a freak.”

“He’s a freak?”

“A total freak.”

As predictably steady, reliable, and self-contained as Grady might be, his conversation could take unpredictable deadpan turns. Cammy liked that. He was smart and amusing, but he was safe.

“Big Bird,” she said. “Is that why you don’t have a TV?”

“It’s one of the reasons.”

Riddle and then Puzzle finished drinking. They sat up on their haunches like a couple of giant prairie dogs, folded their hands on their bellies, and regarded Grady with expectation.

“Maybe they’re hungry,” Cammy suggested.

“They already ate three chicken breasts. And as far as I know, they ate the pan, too.”

“You don’t know these guys are the chicken thieves. There might be another factor-whoever went in your workshop, the garage, whoever switched on the lights.”

“See, this is why I make furniture.”

“What’s furniture got to do with it?”

“When I make furniture, I don’t have to think. My hands do all the thinking for me.”

“Even if Puzzle and Riddle did eat the chicken,” Cammy said, “maybe that’s the only thing they’ve had to eat all day. You don’t want to send them to bed hungry.”

“Because they might eat me alive in the middle of the night? Problem is, I don’t have any more chicken.”

“Give them some of Merlin’s kibble, see if they like it.”

“If I pour bowls of kibble for them, I’ll have to give Merlin some, and he’s already had all he should have for one day.”

“Merlin isn’t fat. You’d have to dole out kibble with a shovel to overfeed him. Give him a bowl, let him celebrate his new friends.”

“They do look like they expect something. Maybe you’re right, maybe they’re hungry.”

He kept forty pounds of Science Diet in the pantry-twenty pounds in a large aluminum can with an airtight lid, and an unopened twenty-pound backup bag. He put a large scoopful in Merlin’s food bowl and a smaller serving in each of two cereal bowls.

The wolfhound was trained to sit in front of his bowl and wait for permission to eat. The word okay released him to his meal.

Puzzle and Riddle studied Merlin and mimicked him, sitting at their bowls. When the dog ate, the two tasted their kibble, found it acceptable, and chowed down.

Needing to go home and get to work with the memory stick from Grady’s camera, still too enchanted to leave, Cammy watched the three eat. “In his way, Merlin’s as wonderful and mysterious as they are.”

Grady seemed surprised. “I was thinking the same thing.”

After his return to the mountains, near the end of his first year, Grady had told Cammy that he’d rediscovered the mystery of the ordinary. He said, if you allowed yourself to be enchanted by the beauty to be seen in even ordinary things, then all things proved to be extraordinary. Shortly thereafter, she gave Merlin to him, a puppy as large as some grown dogs, rough-coated, shaggy-browed, and as magical as the magician for whom he had been named.

Cammy said, “You know High Meadows Farm?”

“That’s the Vironi place, they raise Thoroughbreds?”

“Yeah. Something happened at High Meadows this afternoon, right before twilight.”

She told him about the strange condition of the horses and the other animals.

“Diagnosis?” he asked.

“I was working on it when you called me out here. Now I don’t think there can be a diagnosis because there wasn’t an illness.”

“But you said, they were in something like a trance.”

“I don’t know what this means, it’s just what I feel…” She took a deep breath, blew it out. “There wasn’t anything wrong with them, something was right with them.”

“I can understand why you wouldn’t know what that means.”

She told him about the incident with the abused breeder dogs that had been rescued from the puppy mill. “I didn’t witness the trance part, but I saw the change in the dogs after it, they were happy, totally and suddenly socialized. Somehow, what happened at our clinic and what happened at High Meadows Farm must be related to Puzzle and Riddle.”

“I don’t see how, but I think you’re right. This many wheels of weirdness have to be on the same train.”

The wolfhound and his new companions finished eating. Merlin noisily licked his chops. With their fingers, Puzzle and Riddle meticulously combed the fur around their mouths.

Picking up her medical bag, Cammy said, “I’ll make my inquiries before I go to bed. By midmorning sometime, I should have replies, but I doubt there’s any chance we’ll be enlightened. Then we’ll have to decide what to do next.”