Animal Appetite

handle of her hatchet. You’d think someone would’ve dynamited the whole thing by now.”
    “ ‘Are here,’ ” Steve read. “Are they?”
    “An Indian woman and child escaped. The woman survived. There’s a record of it. Maybe she sent people back.” I wondered aloud about the burial practices of Hannah’s captors, the converts to Roman Catholicism J who had prayed three times a day. In the soggy ground beneath us, perhaps, were the bones of murdered children.
    Infanticides, indeed.
     

Ten

     
    Monday morning was rainy and dreary. Armed with the title of the book that had a chapter about Jack’s murder and, thanks to Kevin Dennehy, with the date of Shaun McGrath’s death, I went to the Brookline Public Library. As I approached, I noticed near the front of the building a Civil War memorial that I’d taken for granted in the happy days of yore when my professional interests had centered exclusively on dogs. Like most other public monuments in the United States, this one depicted a male Caucasian. He wore a uniform and rode a horse. The only public statue of a dog I’d ever seen was the one of Balto in Central Park. And Balto was a male. Men of color? On a frieze in Boston, a Civil War memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers. Women? One. Hannah Duston. Twice. In Haverhill. In Boscawen. I was in a good mood to read obituaries.
    Shaun McGrath’s was short. He’d grown up in Arlington, which is just north of Cambridge, and his funeral mass had been celebrated at a church there. The survivors were listed as his parents, James and Shirley McGrath, six brothers and sisters, and a variety of nieces and nephews. After graduating from a local business college, McGrath worked for a computer firm and then joined Damned Yankee Press. Interestingly enough, from his high school days on, Shaun McGrath had been an avid chess player. At the time of his death, he’d been the president of a local chess club. And this was a man who’d supposedly made no backup plan in case Jack’s murder failed to pass as suicide! I also located the account of McGrath’s fatal accident on Memorial Drive. It was a paragraph long and said only that he’d run his car into a tree. It didn’t mention Jack Andrews, the police, or the Siberian husky Shaun had died to avoid hitting. It didn’t say that this man, in whose presence Chip had supposedly been tied, had taken the dog home after Jack’s corpse was found.
    According to the catalog, the main branch of the Brookline Public Library owned Mass. Mayhem. The author was, as Brat had said, one Randall Carey. The publication date was ten years earlier. The book was supposed to be available. The call number, MASS 364.15 C something, sent me to the section about true crime in the commonwealth, the same section that I’d checked on my last visit. The book was not, however, in its allotted place on the shelf. I returned to the terminal and checked the entire Metro-Boston system. Eight local libraries owned, or at least had owned, the book. It was, however, listed as missing from six of the eight, including the main branches of the Boston and Cambridge public libraries. Brookline’s copy, supposedly available, was, as I’d just discovered, not on the shelf. Newton’s main branch was supposed to have a reference copy, one that did not circulate.
    Before I left the Brookline library, I asked a librarian about what seemed to me the odd disappearance of Mass. Mayhem from so many places. She was a plump, intelligent-looking woman. When I told her the call number, she smiled knowingly. “So you’re one of those three sixty-four fifteen types, huh?”
    Momentarily flustered, I felt like explaining that I was actually a wholesome type whose professional interests focused on dog training and the polar regions, and whose recreational reading consisted mainly of novels by Charles Dickens, Barbara Pym, Elinor Lipman, and the inimitable Jack London. As I turned red and began to sputter, the librarian took pity on me. Many of the library’s most irreproachable patrons, she assured me— upstanding members of the community, civic leaders, socially prominent mothers, even—never checked out anything except true crime. Hearing the news, I had to wonder what kind of place Brookline really was. Were comparable suburbs all across America also populated by citizens of guileless, upright appearance and demeanor whose true passion was true crime?
    As I drove along Route 9 from Brookline Village to