All Shots

Ted Kaczynski, whose name is intoned in awed tones around here not because he was the Unabomber but because he was a Harvard math major. After all, how much intelligence does it take to be a psychotic multiple murderer? But to graduate from Harvard with a degree in mathematics? That takes brains. Cambridge, my Cambridge.
    The Harley had a Maine license plate. I grew up in God’s Country, the beautiful state of Maine. My father and my stepmother lived there, but Buck and Gabrielle never left home without their dogs, so the bike definitely wasn’t theirs. I ruled out my husband on the grounds that he, too, would never buy a vehicle that failed to provide room for his dogs. Besides, he was canoeing in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. With him were two of our five dogs: Lady, his pointer, and India, his German shepherd bitch, bitch being a good, clean word in the dialect of the dog fancy, meaning, as it does, female, unless preceded by the words son of a, in which case it means the same thing in the dog world as it does everywhere else. So, as the owner of the Harley, Steve was out. A Harvard classmate of my cousin Leah’s? A few Harvard students had motorcycles, the men presumably to show that Harvard men could be real men, too. And the women? In a few cases, maybe to prove the same thing. Leah, with her red-gold curls, would’ve looked even more spectacular than usual on the Harley, but she, too, would’ve rejected any mode of transport that excluded big dogs, and in any case, she was chronically broke.
    So, when I let myself into the kitchen, I half expected to find Leah there with a classmate whose early and middle adolescence had been exclusively devoted to conforming to the highest expectations of the Harvard Admissions Committee and who was now staging a belated, if normal, adolescent rebellion by becoming the reincarnation of James Dean. My cousin was, however, nowhere in sight. Seated at my kitchen table was a big, tall, handsome man with strong features that made him look like Michelangelo’s statue of Moses and thus like Charlton Heston as Moses, too, but with the broad forehead, the oversized eye sockets, and the prominent nose of the marble version. The biker lacked the horns of Michelangelo’s Moses, of course, and if he was playing Moses at all, it was a beardless Moses at age thirty or so, a Moses with dark curly hair. It’s possible that my brilliant dogs discerned the resemblance. Having evidently cast themselves as the children of Israel stunned by the wondrous sight of the tablets, Rowdy and Kimi had prostrated themselves before the man, which is to say that they were on their backs with their white tummies exposed and their white snowshoe paws waving in the air. The pose ordinarily represents nothing more than a demand for a belly rub, but it’s important never to underestimate Kimi, whose accomplishments in a previous existence probably include a degree in mathematics from that place down the street. In fact, my first thought about how the biker had entered my house was that Kimi had let him in. Impossible! It was, I feared, remotely possible that she had figured out how to open the back door, but I was sure that she hadn’t learned to unlock it. My second thought was that the uninvited visitor—intruder?—had found the key that I kept hidden under one of the trash barrels. Equally impossible. Absolutely no one but me knew about it. Even Steve didn’t know.
    “Holly Winter?” the man asked. “Hope I didn’t startle you.”
    “Not at all,” I said. “I habitually walk into my house to find strange men in black rain gear dripping puddles onto the floor. The phenomenon bothered me at first, but I’m used to it now.”
    He rose and extended a big mitt of a hand. “Adam.” What came to mind was the palindrome: Madam, I’m Adam. It even put a nervous little smile on my face. “Madam, I’m Adam,” I said as I shook his hand. “A palindromic visitor.”
    The dogs were now on their feet and had their dark almond-shaped eyes fixed on me. People who don’t train dogs often say, “Don’t your dogs love you! They watch you all the time.” My dogs certainly do love me, but the adoring gaze that always returns to my face is a carefully trained behavior.
    “The girl with the red hair told me to wait inside,” the man said. “Out of the rain.”
    Leah. Who else? Who else would’ve given free run of my house to a strange man who’d arrived here on a motorcycle in the rain but who