Our new dog Zoe has still not shown up, and something happened today that makes me think she never will.

I was driving around looking for her when I saw a woman outside her house near her car. As soon as I stopped, she started towards her front door. I spoke up and told her I live up on the mountain and was looking for a lost dog. She said they had not seen any dogs around there, and wanted to leave it at that. I tried to show her a photo on my phone, but she said no, just tell me what the dog looks like. So I did. She said she would keep an eye out and let us know. I wondered, how? She doesn’t have our phone number.

At the time I thought her behavior was odd, but maybe just fear of a stranger. The woman’s behavior and demeanor made me uncomfortable. To me, it was clear that something was going on with her. A few hours later a thought suddenly hit me and left me with a rare feeling of certainty: someone at that house shot Zoe.

I know that’s a big jump; there was nothing in our exchange that could pass for even the weakest of evidence. But that leap to certainty has happened to me probably five times in my entire life, and I have learned to trust it.

It explains a lot. There is no reason Zoe would not come home unless something prevented it. Sam came home, but only a day after they disappeared. He knows his way around, so there was a reason he didn’t come home that night. Seeing someone shoot Zoe would explain it in a number of ways. If someone fired a gun near him, I know he would run away as quickly as he could, which would explain why he wasn’t shot. But he wouldn’t forget or desert Zoe, at least not right away.

Someone on out local Facebook group recently posted about someone shooting a little dog in the head with a .22. I don’t necessarily think the woman (or more likely her husband) shot that dog, too, but it just shows that we have people like that. It’s not rare in the rural South for people to shoot strays. Not common, but certainly not unheard of.

Also, the woman has to have recognized me. I recognized her car because I have seen it many times while walking the dogs, and I always wave at the people who pass me. That means she has seen me and Zoe over the two months we have had her. So she knew the dog I was looking for.

The house is less than a half a mile from our turn-around point, so it was not too far for the dogs to have wandered.

I had planned to write a post about my search for Zoe, and to compare it to trying to solve a 500-piece crossword puzzle when you only have only five pieces. Now, in my mind, the entire puzzle has fallen into place.

I told Leah what I thought. She thought we should do something. However, I don’t have any real evidence to back up what I believe happened. Writing it out makes it clear to me how skimpy and meaningless it all seems on the surface.

A lot the works of the mind are hidden. Thoughts and memories swirl around beneath our consciousness. Sometimes we don’t know why we think what we think. In this case, the things I have mentioned plus everything else in this sad affair simmered in my subconscious. My subconscious has been working on this. It finally reached a conclusion and pushed it up to my conscious mind.

I don’t expect anyone to believe that the woman or her husband shot Zoe. The police would laugh at me if I told them my “evidence”. It probably seems a little crazy for me to have reached my conclusion, because I can’t articulate everything that went into it. Some of it is buried in my subconscious, and it would take a while to dig it out. But I don’t feel the need. Whatever it is that has convinced me, I trust it.

Once I reached that conclusion, I felt entirely differently about Zoe’s disappearance. The desperate urge to look for her simply evaporated. The worry about what happened to her, what’s happening to her right now, what will she do on Saturday night when the strong storms hit, all of that worry turned to sadness.

I had some color lost-dog posters printed today, but the only reason I’m going to put them up around the mountain is for Leah’s sake. I think Zoe is dead, and there is nothing I can do about it.

I hope I am wrong. I hope I open the door into the garage Saturday morning and find her looking up at me.