Animal Appetite

swallowed. After a long while he said, “If they had seven or eight children, he must have figured out by then that Hannah could take care of herself without any help from him.”
    I subsequently learned' that Nathaniel Hawthorne had had an identical take on Thomas and Hannah Duston. Thomas Duston, Hawthorne wrote, probably “had such knowledge of the good lady’s character as afforded him a comfortable hope that she could hold her own, even in a contest with a whole tribe of Indians.”
    “There is that,” I agreed. “Killing and scalping ten People doesn’t just come out of nowhere. And, of course, she had ample motive. She’d watched them murder her child, and she was terrified of what was going to happen when they got to the settlement, wherever it was. Canada. But lots of people were taken captive, lots of women, and I’ve never heard of anyone else who did what she did.”
    “You’re going to take Rita’s money after all?”
    I’m a freelance writer. Besides, this is going to be more work than I planned. By the time I’m done, I’ll have earned five hundred dollars.”
    “Round-trip plane fare to Minneapolis is—”
    “No! I’m donating it to Malamute Rescue. That’s the deal I worked out with Rita. Besides, for the millionth time, if you won’t go to Owls Head with me, I am not going to Minneapolis with you, especially since I have already celebrated, if you can call it that, an early Thanksgiving with my father. And I am not doing Thanksgiving here and then going to Minneapolis for a late Thanksgiving—”
    “We could still try to get tickets for—”
    “No! It’s too late to fly, it’s the busiest travel time of the year, and I’m not driving all that way, and you know that your mother would much rather see you without me around, anyway.”
    I’ll spare you the rest.
    The next morning, I was the first one up. After letting the dogs out in the yard for a minute, I leashed Rowdy at one end of the kitchen and Kimi at the other. Food is the one thing they’ll fight over, food and anything that resembles it. Rawhide. Dead squirrels. Rats, too, I suspected. I hoped that none of my neighbors was putting out poison. As soon as I opened the closet door to dish out the kibble, the dogs started yelping and screaming. As I added fresh Bil Jac from the bag in the refrigerator, both dogs were lunging and plunging and bawling. The bedroom door opened. Steve emerged and remarked at the top of his lungs, “Still starving them, huh?”
    After breakfast, he checked what I was relieved to hear him pronounce a nicely healing wound on one of Rowdy’s front paws. See? Steve really does make normal house calls. Then, without kissing me good-bye, he left for his clinic, and when I’d tidied up, taken a shower, and walked the dogs, I called the police. I call the police
    all the time, not because I’m one of those nuts who are always hearing imaginary burglars, but because my next-door neighbor and friend, Kevin Dennehy, is a Cambridge police lieutenant. Sometimes I need to reach him at work.
    Even at home, Kevin refuses to answer the phone with a cordial hello. Instead, he barks out his last name as if he were responding to a military roll call that grated on his nerves: “Dennehy!”
    “Kevin, it’s Holly,” I said.
    He softened. “Hey, how ya doing?”
    “Fine. Listen, could I ask you a favor? I’m writing a story about a guy who was murdered in Cambridge eighteen years ago.”
    “Girl reporter. You get sick of dogs?”
    “Never. When the guy’s body was found, he was in his office, and his dog was tied to his desk. It was supposed to look like suicide, but the dog gave it away. When the guy was alone there, the dog was always loose. His business partner murdered him for some insurance money. The partner died in a car accident before your boys could arrest him. Officially,” I added, “I suppose it’s still unsolved.”
    Kevin lapsed into a mock-Irish accent. “Eighteen years ago, I was but a slip of a lad meself.”
    “Yes, Kevin, but miracle of miracles, records were presumably kept even before you joined the force.”
    “Of sorts,” he conceded.
    I gave Kevin names—-John Winter Andrews, Shaun McGrath—and the date of Jack’s murder.
    “Relative of yours?” he asked.
    “Not that I know of,” I answered.
    After that, I made a trip to the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library and returned home with a pile of photocopies and a stack of scholarly books that had nothing