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to get to her feet, no easy job since Yogi is still draped all over her.
    “I have a hunch you two know each other,” I say, displaying my gift for understatement.
    She is giggling and, apparently, incredibly excited. “We sure do. We sure do. God, do we ever!”
    “I’m Andy Carpenter,” I say.
    She nods again. “I know. I saw you and Reggie on television,” she gushes. “I followed you here from the shelter. I’m Karen Evans.”
    “His real name is Reggie?” I ask.
    “Yup. He was my brother’s dog. My brother is Richard Evans.”
    She says the name as if it’s supposed to mean something to me. “How can you be sure it’s him?” I ask, though from Yogi’s—or Reggie’s—reaction I have little doubt that she’s telling the truth.
    “The cut marks. My brother rescued him from a shelter when he was a year old. He had the marks then, and the vet had said that his previous owner had wired his jaw shut, maybe to stop him from barking. Is that the most awful thing you’ve ever heard?”
    “How would the vet know that?” I ask.
    “If you look, you’ll see that there are faint cut marks under his mouth as well. It’s from the wire being wrapped around.”
    I hadn’t noticed that, but I look under his mouth, and sure enough, there they are. If there was any doubt she was telling the truth, that doubt has now been eliminated.
    The Golden Retriever Formerly Known as Yogi starts tapping Karen with his paw, in an effort to get her to resume petting him. She starts laughing again and obliges. “Mr. Carpenter—”
    “Andy.”
    “Andy, do you realize how unbelievably amazing this is?”
    “It really is,” I say, though that seems to be a little strong. She seems like the type who finds a lot of things to be unbelievably amazing.
    “It’s a miracle,” she proclaims.
    “Hmmm,” I say cleverly, not quite wanting to sign on to the “miracle” description.
    She looks at me strangely. “You don’t know what’s going on, do you?” she asks as she realizes that, in fact, I don’t know what’s going on.
    “Maybe not,” I say.
    “My brother is Richard Evans. This is his dog.”
    “I understand that,” I say.
    “Mr. Carpenter… Andy… the State of New Jersey says that this dog has been dead for five years.”

O NCE WE’RE IN my house, Karen reminds me why I should remember Richard Evans.
    He was a U.S. Customs inspector, working at the Port of Newark, who kept his own small private boat at a pier near there. One evening more than five and a half years ago he went out on that boat off the Jersey coast with his fiancée, Stacy Harriman, and his dog, Reggie.
    At about nine o’clock a significant storm was coming in, and word went out to the private boats in the area to get to shore. All of them did except for Richard’s, which was off the coast near Asbury Park, and the Coast Guard sent out a cutter to escort it in.
    When the Coast Guard arrived, no one on the boat responded to their calls, and they decided to board it. They found Richard alone and unconscious on the floor of the deck below, an empty bottle of sleeping pills nearby. There was no sign of a suicide note, and the coastguardsmen had no way to know that anyone else had been on board.
    Richard spent three days in a coma while the police investigated the circumstances. Long before he regained consciousness, they were aware that Stacy and the dog had been on the boat when it sailed, and they had found traces of blood on the floor and railing of the boat. He was immediately arrested and taken into custody.
    Three weeks later a woman’s decomposed body washed ashore, soon identified by DNA as that of Stacy Harriman. Richard was tried for the murder. The scenario the prosecution posed was a murder-suicide, and there was no way for the defense to counter it effectively. The case was not a huge media event, but as a local defense attorney I had some awareness of it.
    The dog’s body was never found.
    “This is the dog,” Karen says.