Part 2: I’m The Morning Shift Manager At A Small Animal Shelter In Rural Indiana — On A Monday Morning In February I Found A 12-Year-Old Beagle Tied To Our Gate With A Backpack. The Letter Inside The Backpack Made Me Sit Down On The Cold Concrete. Eight Months Later I Got A Phone Call I Was Not Expecting

I am going to tell this slow. The slow part is the whole story.

I got Buddy inside the shelter at 6:43 a.m. on February 12th, 2024.

The first thing I did was put him in our smallest intake kennel — a quiet kennel we use for senior dogs and dogs who are coming in stressed. I put a heated mat on the floor. I put the stuffed lamb from Lena’s backpack on the mat. I put a small bowl of warm water down. I put a small portion of his own food — the food she had packed for him — in another bowl.

He drank the water. He sniffed the food. He did not eat right away. He picked up the lamb in his mouth and carried it to the back of the kennel and laid down with it between his front paws.

He had stopped shivering by 7 a.m.

By 7:15, my coworker Marisol Espinoza-Carey, 31 years old, our staff veterinary technician, had arrived. She is the woman I trust more than almost anyone on this earth. She has been with the shelter for four years.

I showed her the backpack.

I showed her the letter.

She read it. She sat down in the break-room chair next to me. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. She said, “Solange. We have to find her.”

I said, “I know.”

She said, “Solange. He’s twelve. With arthritis.”

I said, “I know.”

She said, “He is going to be hard to place. Even from us. Senior beagle, twelve, on daily medication. Most of our adoption applications are for younger dogs. You know this.”

I said, “Marisol. We are not going to place him with anyone. We are going to find Lena.”

She looked at me.

She said, “How.”

I said, “I don’t know. But we are going to figure it out.”

I want to tell you what we did with the information we had.

The information was thin.

We had a beagle named Buddy. We had a half-empty bottle of carprofen from a vet clinic in Marion, Indiana — a town about 25 minutes south of Wabash — prescribed to a patient named Buddy under an owner’s name that the pharmacy label only listed as “L. K.” We had a photograph from July 2016 showing a young woman in her late twenties on a porch with a younger version of Buddy. We had a first name: Lena.

That was it.

Marisol called the vet clinic in Marion at 8:30 a.m. on February 12th, 2024. The clinic was the Marion Veterinary Associates on East Highland Avenue. She talked to the front-desk receptionist. She explained the situation.

The receptionist — a woman named Mrs. Estrella Pope who has been working that desk for 16 years — said she remembered Buddy. She remembered Lena.

Mrs. Pope said Lena had brought Buddy to the clinic for almost a decade. The last appointment had been in September of 2023 — five months before — when Lena had brought Buddy in for his arthritis check-up and his carprofen refill. She had paid in cash. Mrs. Pope said she had noticed Lena had lost weight and seemed tired, but she had not pushed it.

Mrs. Pope said the last full address they had on file for Lena was a small rental house on West 6th Street in Marion. She said Lena’s last name was Klugel. She gave Marisol the address and a phone number that had been on file.

Marisol called the phone number from the shelter office at 9:15 a.m.

The number was disconnected.

We drove to the West 6th Street address on Marisol’s lunch break.

The house was empty. There was an eviction notice on the door dated November 8th, 2023 — three months before Buddy had been left at our gate. The landlord, whose phone number was on the notice, told us by phone that Lena Klugel had been a tenant for six years and had been a good tenant until she had lost her job in May of 2023. He told us he had given her three months of late rent before he had to evict. He told us he was sorry. He told us he did not know where she had gone after she left.

He told us she had a small dog with her when she moved out.

I asked him what kind of dog.

He said: “Older beagle. She called him Buddy. She used to walk him in front of the house every morning. She loved that dog.”

I sat in the passenger seat of Marisol’s car for a minute after she hung up.

I said, “Marisol. We have to find her.”

Marisol said, “Solange. She has been in her car for six weeks. In February. In Indiana. She might not still be alive.“

I had not let myself think that.

We drove back to the shelter.

I want to tell you what we did next.

I called the Grant County Sheriff’s Office non-emergency line that afternoon. I asked if there had been any reports of a homeless woman named Lena Klugel in the area. The deputy I spoke with — a 38-year-old man named Sergeant Gareth Hollings — told me he could not share that kind of information about a private person, even to a shelter manager. But he also told me, off the record, that he would put a note in the system to be on the lookout for her and to make sure she got resources if any deputy had contact with her.

He thanked me for caring.

He said, “Ma’am. Most people don’t ask. Most people just take the dog and move on. You’re doing something different.”

I asked him if he had any suggestions for me.

He said, “Ma’am. There’s a winter warming shelter run by the Grant County Family Services at the First Methodist Church on Adams Street in Marion. They open at 7 p.m. nightly during cold-weather emergencies. Most homeless folks in the area cycle through there. The intake coordinator is a woman named Rashida Beckett. She knows everyone. Call her.”

I called Rashida Beckett at 4:30 p.m. that afternoon.

Rashida was about 60 years old. She had been running the winter warming shelter intake for 11 years. She had a tired, kind, no-nonsense voice.

I told her the story.

She was quiet for a long time after I told her.

She said, “Solange. I know Lena. She has been coming through the warming shelter on cold nights since December. She has a dog with her every time. She has been refusing the cot because the dog can’t sleep with her in the shelter and she won’t leave him in the car alone. She has been sleeping on the floor in the lobby with the dog next to her on the nights it gets below 20 degrees. Otherwise she sleeps in her car. She is forty-two years old. She used to be a substitute teacher. She lost her job in May after she had a series of small strokes that the doctors think were caused by a heart valve issue. She has not been able to work since.”

She paused.

She said, “Solange. She told me last week that she was going to give up her dog. She told me she could not keep him warm anymore. She told me she was going to do it on Sunday night because Sunday was a 19-degree forecast and she had not slept a full night because she had been holding him to keep him warm and she could not keep doing it. She said she had been to your shelter once during a school field trip when she was a substitute teacher and that you had clean kennels and she had heard you were a good shelter.”

I had to put down the phone for a minute.

I picked it back up. I said, “Rashida. Is she there now.”

Rashida said, “Solange. She has not come back since Friday. We are open tonight. I will tell you the moment I see her.”

I am going to tell you something I have not told many people.

After I hung up with Rashida that night, I drove to my apartment. I picked up my 14-year-old daughter Saoirse from her after-school program. I made us dinner. I tucked her into bed. I did the dishes.

Then I sat in my kitchen at my small folding table and I wrote a letter.

I want to read you what I wrote, because I am going to tell you what I did with it next.

The letter said:

“Dear Lena —

My name is Solange Whitcombe. I am the morning shift manager at the Wabash County Humane Society. I found Buddy at our front gate at 6:31 a.m. on Monday morning, February 12th, 2024. I read your letter. I have read it many times since.

I want you to know three things.

The first thing is that Buddy is safe. He is in a warm kennel. He ate his food. He is sleeping with his lamb. He took his half-pill this morning.

The second thing is that we are not adopting him out. We are holding him. We are holding him for you. We are not going to put him on our adoption list. We are not going to let him be adopted by anyone else. He is yours. He is going to stay yours until I can get him back to you. I do not care how long that takes.

The third thing is that you are not a bad person. You did the bravest thing a person can do for someone they love. You did the thing that hurt you the most so that he could be warm. I am not angry with you. I am not disappointed in you. I am writing this letter so that you will know.

Please come find me. I am at 1810 South Wabash Street, Wabash, Indiana. I am there every weekday morning starting at 6:30. Knock on the front gate. I will come let you in.

Bring whatever you have. Bring nothing if you have nothing.

Buddy is waiting. So am I.

With love and without judgment,

Solange”

I drove to the First Methodist Church in Marion the next morning before my shift. I gave the letter to Rashida Beckett. I asked her to please give it to Lena the next time she came through.

Rashida took the letter. She put it in a manila folder. She wrote LENA K. on the front of the folder.

She said, “Solange. I will give it to her. I will tell her you came.”

I drove back to Wabash. I started my shift at 6:30.

I waited.

I waited for eight months.

I want to tell you what those eight months were like, because the waiting is the part of the story I almost did not include.

Buddy stayed at the shelter.

He was not adopted out. Marisol and I told the rest of the staff that he was a special case. We told our shelter director, a woman named Mrs. Pernella Bouchard-Wilkes who had been director for 14 years, what we were doing. She did not approve at first.

She told us, on the third day, “Solange. We cannot hold a dog indefinitely for an owner who may not come back. We have a waiting list. We have other dogs who need this kennel. We have a budget.”

I told her, “Mrs. Bouchard-Wilkes. I will personally pay for his board if it comes to it. I will pay for his food. I will pay for his medication. I will not let him go to another home. He is hers. She is coming back.”

Mrs. Bouchard-Wilkes looked at me for a long time.

She said, “Solange. How do you know she’s coming back?”

I said, “I don’t know. But the letter she wrote — she did not write the letter of a woman who was abandoning her dog. She wrote the letter of a woman who was holding on to her dog with her fingernails. She is coming back. I am going to believe that until she comes back or until she dies.”

Mrs. Bouchard-Wilkes was quiet. Then she said, “Okay. Hold him. We’ll figure out the budget.”

She walked back to her office.

Buddy stayed.

I want to tell you what happened in the meantime, because some of it was beautiful.

Buddy turned out to be — and I say this without exaggeration — one of the most beloved dogs in the history of our shelter.

He was 12 years old. He had arthritis. He could not run. He did not bark much. But he had a personality that I do not have words for. He was sweet and patient and gentle and observant in a way that older dogs sometimes are.

He greeted every staff member by name within two weeks. Not their actual names — but he knew which one of us had which schedule. He knew that Marisol arrived at 7 and gave him his pill. He knew that I arrived at 6:30 and let him out into the yard for a slow walk. He knew that our intake coordinator Esmeralda Tucci-Bouvier brought him a small piece of dried liver every Thursday because Thursday was her shift and she had a soft spot for him.

He let the children who came on school field trips pet him. He sat patiently while a 6-year-old once tried to put a tiara on his head. He let the little girl take a photograph with him in the tiara. Marisol still has that photograph on her phone.

Buddy lost weight in his first month with us, which we expected. Cold-stress, transition, the residual effects of months of inadequate food. We put him on a vet-approved gain plan. He gained back the weight by mid-April.

Marisol drove him to the Marion Veterinary Associates twice during the eight months for his arthritis check-ups. Mrs. Pope at the front desk knew the story by then. She refused to charge us for the visits. She told Marisol, “That dog has been one of mine for ten years. I’m not charging.”

I did not see Lena.

She did not come through the warming shelter again after the morning I dropped off the letter. Rashida called me every Friday at 5 p.m. with an update. The update was the same every Friday for thirty-three Fridays in a row.

“Solange. She has not come back. I am still holding the letter. I am sorry.”

I started to lose hope around the fourth month. I started to think — and I am sorry for thinking this — that maybe she had died in her car. That maybe she had moved to another county. That maybe she had been admitted to a hospital and not made it out.

I kept Buddy anyway.

I told myself that even if she had died, she had loved him. She had written him a letter. She had packed him a backpack. She had given him the best she could give him on the worst night of her life. She had earned the right to have her dog kept for her.

On the morning of Wednesday, October 9th, 2024, at 4:47 p.m., my office phone rang.

I picked it up. I said, “Wabash County Humane Society, Solange speaking.”

There was a pause on the line.

A woman’s voice said, “Solange. My name is Lena Klugel. You have my dog.”

I did not say anything for a moment. I closed my eyes.

I said, “Lena. Yes. I have him. He is here. He is safe. He is healthy. He is — Lena, he is sleeping at my feet right now.”

She was silent for a long moment.

She said, “Solange. I just got — I just got an apartment. Yesterday. In Marion. It’s a one-bedroom. The rent is $635 a month. It allows dogs. I have a job at the CVS on 34th Street. I got the job in July. I have been saving every paycheck. I have $2,200 in the bank. I have a heating pad. I have a bed. I have a kitchen. Solange — Solange, can I have him back?”

I sat in my chair and I started crying.

I said, “Lena. Yes. Yes. Yes. You can have him back. You can have him back today. You can have him back right now. Where are you. I will bring him to you.”

She said, “I am at the CVS. I am about to start my shift. Can — can I come tomorrow morning?”

I said, “Yes. Tomorrow morning. Six-thirty. The shelter. I will be at the front gate. Come to the gate. I will open it. Lena — Lena, I have something for you. I have been holding it. It is — it is a letter I wrote you in February. Rashida has been holding it. I will get it for you. Lena, please come.”

She said, “Solange — I know about the letter. Rashida gave it to me last week. That’s how I found you. That’s how I knew you still had him. I have been carrying it in my pocket. I read it every day.”

I cried.

She cried.

We were on the phone for forty-five minutes.

I want to tell you about the morning of Thursday, October 10th, 2024.

I got to the shelter at 5:45 a.m. — forty-five minutes earlier than usual. I had not slept. I had told my 14-year-old daughter Saoirse the entire story the night before and she had asked me to wake her up at 5 a.m. so she could come with me. I had let her come.

We brought Buddy out of his kennel at 6:00 a.m. We brushed his coat. I bought him a small new collar — soft blue leather, his name engraved on a tag. I had bought it in August because I had still believed.

We waited at the front gate at 6:30.

At 6:42 a.m., a 2007 Toyota Camry with a cracked windshield pulled into our parking lot.

A woman got out.

She was 42 years old. She had long dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail. She was wearing a clean black coat over a CVS uniform. She had a black wool hat in her hand. She walked from her car to the gate slowly.

Buddy was at my feet. He looked at her through the bars of the gate.

His head lifted.

His ears came forward.

His tail started thumping. Not fast. Slow. The slow deliberate thump of an old dog who has just recognized the most important sound in the world.

I opened the gate.

Lena stepped through.

She knelt down on the concrete about three feet from Buddy. She did not call him. She did not pat her leg. She did not say his name yet. She just knelt there. She held out her hand, palm up, fingers slightly cupped.

Buddy walked to her. Slow. Carefully. With the slight limp of his arthritis.

He stopped in front of her hand. He sniffed her palm. He sniffed her wrist. He sniffed the cuff of her CVS uniform sleeve.

He recognized her.

I want to tell you what he did next.

He took her wrist in his mouth. Very gently. Not biting. Holding. He held her wrist between his teeth for about three seconds. Then he released. Then he leaned forward and he pressed his entire weight against her chest. He pushed his face into the front of her CVS uniform.

She wrapped her arms around him.

She said, “Buddy. Buddy. Oh god. Oh god. Buddy.”

She sat down hard on the concrete. He climbed into her lap. He was 35 pounds. He fit into her lap the way he had clearly fit into her lap a thousand times before. He pressed his face into her neck.

She cried. She cried in a way I have not seen another adult human cry in my forty-three years on this earth. She cried with her entire body. She cried with her chin on top of his head. She rocked back and forth slowly. She said his name twenty or thirty times.

I sat down on the concrete about ten feet away.

Saoirse, my 14-year-old, sat down next to me.

She took my hand without saying anything.

We watched.

I want to tell you what happened over the next year, because the year matters.

Lena took Buddy home that morning. I gave her the backpack. The stuffed lamb. The half-bottle of carprofen we had been keeping for him. The new blue collar with the engraved tag. A 30-pound bag of senior dog food that the staff had pooled money to buy. A small folder of his vet records from his eight months with us. A photograph that Marisol had taken of him in the tiara.

She drove him back to her new one-bedroom apartment in Marion.

She called me that night. She said, “Solange. He is on the bed. He has not gotten off the bed in four hours. He is just lying on the bed and looking at me. I think he is making sure I am real.”

I cried.

She called me every Sunday night for the next twelve months.

She got a second job in December of 2024, also at the CVS, picking up an extra two shifts a week. She made it to $28,000 a year total income. She is on the Indiana medication assistance program for her heart medication. Her health is stable. Her cardiologist in Marion — a man named Dr. Wendell Patel — has her on a careful regimen.

She has been in the apartment for fourteen months now.

She has not had to give him up again.

She invited me to a small dinner at her apartment in January of 2025. It was the first time I had seen the apartment. It was a one-bedroom on the second floor of a small brick building. It was clean. It smelled like cinnamon. She had three pieces of furniture — a couch, a kitchen table, and her bed — and a few small dishes from the dollar store. She had a heated dog bed for Buddy in the corner of her bedroom.

Buddy slept on the foot of her bed every night, not in the dog bed. The dog bed was for naps in the afternoon.

She made me chicken soup and homemade biscuits. I have not had biscuits that good since my grandmother died in 1998. I told her so. She said her mother had taught her the recipe when she was twelve.

Her mother had died in 2019.

She had no other family. She had been alone in the world for five years, except for Buddy.

I sat at her kitchen table and I ate her biscuits and I cried into my napkin a little.

She put her hand on top of my hand.

She said, “Solange. You held him for me. You held him for eight months. You believed I was coming back when I did not believe I was coming back. You wrote me that letter. I have read that letter probably four hundred times in the last year. I read it every night. It is — it is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me. I want you to know that.”

I said, “Lena. You did the kindest thing for him on the worst night of your life. You wrote him the letter. You packed the backpack. You did not abandon him. You placed him. There is a difference. I just kept him until you could come back.”

She squeezed my hand.

Buddy was at our feet under the kitchen table. He thumped his tail.

I want to write down a few things before I finish.

The first thing. The Wabash County Humane Society wrote a small piece about Buddy and Lena’s reunion for our quarterly newsletter in November of 2024. The piece included a photograph that Saoirse — my 14-year-old daughter — had taken with her phone on the morning of October 10th, 2024, at the front gate. The photograph shows Lena sitting on the concrete with Buddy in her lap, her face buried in his neck. The photograph was reprinted in the Wabash Plain Dealer. Then it was picked up by the AP. Then it was picked up by the Today Show website.

The story went viral in early December.

A GoFundMe set up by my coworker Marisol — without telling me first — raised $74,000 for Lena by the end of December. The money paid off her car loan, her remaining hospital bills from her strokes, and put about $40,000 into a savings account that she has not touched.

She works at the CVS three days a week now instead of five. She has more time. She walks Buddy twice a day. She has started volunteering at the same Marion winter warming shelter where Rashida Beckett works — she takes the 6 p.m. intake shift on Thursdays.

Rashida and Lena are now close friends.

The second thing. Mrs. Pernella Bouchard-Wilkes, the shelter director who initially did not approve of holding Buddy, retired in June of 2025 after fifteen years as director. At her retirement party, she stood up and gave a speech. In her speech, she said:

“The most important thing I learned in fifteen years as director was on February 12th, 2024, when Solange Whitcombe walked into my office and told me she was going to hold a senior beagle indefinitely for an owner who might never come back. I told her she could not. She told me she would. She did. The owner came back. The dog went home. The rules I had been enforcing for fifteen years were wrong in that specific case. We changed the rules. We have changed them in seven specific cases since. Some dogs do not need to be re-homed. Some dogs need to be held.”

She paused.

She said, “Solange Whitcombe taught me how to do my job.”

I cried at her retirement party.

I cried in front of about 60 people.

I do not regret it.

The third thing. The shelter has implemented a new policy, effective March 1st, 2025. The policy is informally called the Buddy Hold. It says: In cases where a pet is surrendered with a written communication indicating the owner is in temporary crisis and intends to recover, this shelter will hold the animal for up to twelve months while reasonable efforts are made to locate the owner.

We have used the Buddy Hold seven times now.

Five owners have come back.

Two have not. Those two dogs were eventually adopted to permanent homes after the twelve months elapsed. We grieved them. We grieved their owners too.

The fourth thing. Lena Klugel had her one-year anniversary of being reunited with Buddy on October 10th, 2025 — about a month before I am writing this post. She invited me to her apartment for biscuits again. She had two new things on her kitchen counter. A small framed photograph of her mother from 1995, and a small framed photograph of the November 2024 newsletter article from the Wabash County Humane Society about Buddy’s reunion.

The headline of the article was: “He Was Held.”

She told me she reads the article on the bad days.

She told me Buddy is 13 and a half now. His arthritis is worse. He moves slow. He still sleeps on the foot of her bed every night. She has a small ramp built next to her bed because he cannot jump up anymore.

She told me she doesn’t know how much time she has left with him.

She told me she is using all of it.

I want to end with the photograph.

I have a copy of it on my office wall.

The photograph is from Saoirse’s iPhone — taken at 6:44 a.m. on October 10th, 2024. The composition is not artistic. Saoirse is 14. She took it in two seconds because her mother was crying and her mother does not cry often.

The photograph shows two figures on cold gray concrete in front of an iron shelter gate. The light is dim because it is dawn in October in Indiana. One figure is a 42-year-old woman in a CVS uniform, kneeling on the concrete, her face completely buried in the neck of an old beagle who has climbed into her lap. The other figure is the beagle himself — Buddy, 12 and a half, eyes closed, head pressed against her collarbone, one paw resting on her wrist.

In the background, just barely in the frame, you can see the corner of a green canvas Jansport backpack with a small enamel music-note pin on the strap. The backpack is sitting on the concrete next to them. It is empty. Everything in the backpack has been returned to them.

The letter Lena wrote — the one that started with “I am homeless. Please don’t hate me” — is folded in her coat pocket in the photograph. She had been carrying it with her since she got the apartment. She had been waiting for the moment when she could give it back to me in person and tell me that she was no longer the person who had to write it.

She did give it back to me, about a week later, when she invited me to her apartment for the first time.

I have that letter framed on my office wall too.

Underneath the letter, in my own handwriting, I wrote one sentence:

“She came back. She always was.”

If this story moved you, follow the page — there are more like Lena and Buddy and Rashida and Solange I haven’t told yet.