All Shots

and knows half the city. “Mellie O’Leary.” He smiled. “My mother knows her. Knew her parents.”
    “Mellie is the reason I was there. She was taking care of someone’s Siberian. The dog got loose, and I was trying to help. I’m not supposed to have told you that, by the way. Mellie is terrified of the police. She does pet-sitting, dog walking, in a minor way, and she thinks she’ll get arrested for not having a license. Anyway, Mellie is the reason I was there. She was taking care of a dog that got loose. But the point is... Mellie is... I guess the word is simpleminded. The woman who called me about helping to find the dog says that Mellie locks up and that the neighbors watch out for her, but is she okay there? She lives alone, and it’s only two houses away. Was this murder, uh, personal? Or...?”
    “Looks like a search for something. Probably something small. This Dr. Ho’s got a good sound system, and that wasn’t touched. New computer’s there. He’s a whatchamacallit, social justice type, believes in simple living. It wasn’t some junkie who’d’ve grabbed anything.”
    I nodded. “I saw the food on the floor. Things that had been dumped. So, are you assuming that he thought the house was empty and that Holly Winter surprised him? While he was searching for something.”
    Kevin shrugged. “Hey, don’t ask me. I just found out it wasn’t you.”
    Over our hurried dinner of rotisserie chicken, I tried to pump Kevin for additional information, but if Kevin knew more, he wasn’t saying it.
     

CHAPTER 7
     
    Unbeknownst to me, the other Holly Winter, she who once had a bladder infection, far from having been shot to death while fish-sitting for Dr. Ho, still lives—and still lives where I thought she did, off Kirkland Street. The address had made me imagine her in grand surroundings. Julia Child’s kitchen, now in the Smithsonian, was dismantled and removed from a house in that neighborhood. The late John Kenneth Galbraith, author of The Affluent Society , lived there. How convenient for him! To study personal wealth in American society, he merely had to stroll around the block.
    But Holly Winter, this other Holly Winter, does not occupy one of the grand old places. Elsewhere she might be said to rent a garage apartment, but since her abode is a short Walk from the academic center of the American universe, which is to say, anywhere but elsewhere , she lives on the second floor of a renovated carriage house. Or does she? After a summer in England, she refers to the second story of the not-a-garage as the first floor and takes care never to say apartment when flat can be put to use.
    Her taste is minimalist: simple blinds, no curtains, sleek black couch and chairs, no throw pillows, black filing cabinets, no piles of paper, hardwood floors, no rugs, hundreds of books neatly aligned on bookshelves, no paintings, no prints, no pieces of sculpture, no photographs, certainly no snapshots, and nothing even remotely like geegaws or tchotchkes. She now sits at her teak desk, its surface clear except for her notebook computer, the screen of which displays a document she is drafting for the CAMP, the Cambridge Alliance for Media-free Preschools, an organization that she has recently begun to support by serving on the group’s advisory board. To her annoyance, instead of merely being asked to advise, she has been asked to contribute by analyzing data from a study intended to evaluate the impact of a media-free policy on children in participating preschools and day-care centers. As is invariably the case with projects inspired and implemented by idealistic reformer-educators, the design of the so-called study is a mess, principally because the statistician, Holly Winter, this Holly Winter, was called in only after the data had been collected. Even so, she approves of CAMP’s goals. Surely the world is improved by stripping away this ghastly media trash and giving the imagination free rein! Also, she approves the membership of the CAMP Advisory Board, including as it does Zach Ho, a Harvard classmate of hers, a man with just the sort of keen intelligence that attracts her most.
     

CHAPTER 8
     
    The Cambridge Dog Training Club meets at the Cambridge Armory, which is on Concord Avenue near the Fresh Pond rotary. The club serves a wide area, but a fair number of Cantabrigians attend classes, so I decided to ask around to see whether anyone knew Mellie. Instead of training one of my own dogs, I