Animal Appetite

reflexes reminded me that as a mere associate professor, Claudia didn’t have tenure. At Harvard, few women did. According to both dust jackets, Claudia was a nationally recognized authority in her field.
    Then I turned to the task that had taken me to bookline, namely, hunting through microfilm for Jack Winter Andrews’s obituary. I am a minor authority on local libraries. The best (maybe the best in the world) is Harvard’s library system, and my cousin Leah, who’s a freshman, will let me borrow her ID card, but I don’t exactly look like an undergraduate, so I’m always afraid of getting caught and landing Leah in trouble. Harvard takes crimes involving the printed word with the utmost seriousness. Defacing, stealing, or plagiarizing a book is on a par with murder. Cheating on exams is, by comparison, a misdemeanor. Remember Ted Kennedy’s Spanish exam? So I usually ask Leah to get books for me. The Observatory Branch of the Cambridge Public Library is on Concord Avenue directly across from my house. That’s where I go for fun reading. The Newton library has by far the best air-conditioning around; it’s my pick for hot weather. The Boston College Law School Library serves as an especially complete U.S. Government documents depository, as does the BPL—Boston Public Library—which has, in fact, only one big disadvantage: Because it’s located in Copley Square, there’s no place to park. Like the BPL, Brookline had The Boston Globe on microfilm as far back as the year of Jack Andrews’s death, and on a weekday afternoon, I had no trouble in finding a space in its underground garage.
    I hate microfilm. I’m convinced that the technology was invented by someone who loathed reading and wanted to stop other people from doing it, the kind of vile person who’d probably been kicked out of Harvard5 for tearing up books. Every time I sit in front of one of those machines watching the pages whirl by, I get dizzy and my head aches. After shoving the correct spool of microfilm into the machine and struggling to start the tape, I fast-forwarded through old comics, news stories about forgotten scandals, and promises of special deals on new cars now, eighteen years later, rusted and crushed to oblivion.
    Jack had died on Monday, November 4. He hadn’t come home, Claudia had said. She’d gone to his office. She must have gone Monday evening. There was nothing about his death in Tuesday’s paper. In Wednesday’s, his name appeared in the list of death notices. Thursday’s Globe carried the obituary. JOHN W. ANDREWS, PUBLISHER, it was headed. Because we’d shared a name— Winter—and a breed—the golden retriever—I was curiously unsurprised to find that he’d been born in Haverhill. Indeed, when I read the information, I felt almost as if I’d been expecting it, or at least something similar. Hannah Duston, of course, was Haverhill’s local heroine. What solidified my sense of connection to Jack Andrews, however, was that Bradford, a section of Haverhill, just so happened to be the birthplace of my own Rowdy, whose breeder, Janet Switzer, still lived there. Janet was the reason I’d been driving through Haverhill at all and thus had ended up by the statue of Hannah Duston: Before running out of gas, I’d intended to pay Janet a short visit.
    But back to the obituary. Jack attended the Haverhill public schools and Harvard College. After graduation, he worked for a well-known Boston publishing house and then went on to found Damned Yankee Press. He was a member of the Friends of the Arnold Arboretum, the Friends of the Mount Auburn Cemetery, and the Friends of the Avon Hill School. I concluded that he’d been a friendly guy. Generous, too. He was survived by his wife, Claudia Andrews-Howe; a son, Gareth; and a daughter, Bronwyn. The funeral was to take place the next day, Friday, at Christ Church, Cambridge. The obituary gave no cause of death.
    Fighting off vertigo, I searched through the reel for an article about the murder investigation or simply for Shaun McGrath’s obituary. Finding nothing, I succumbed to my headache, rewound the microfilm, and turned off the machine.
    All public libraries in the Metro-Boston system let you access the computer listings of the whole system, but after standing at a terminal and entering every relevant term I could think of—Jack’s name, McGrath’s, murder and Massachusetts—the best I came up with were a few call numbers in the section of the library