Animal Appetite

Newton, the image stayed with me, and I viewed the innocent-looking mock-Tudors and Victorian arks with freshly alarmed eyes. Indeed, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of suburban men and women? No, not the Shadow. How would the Shadow know? The one who really has the scoop on our foibles is the local librarian.
    As I’ve mentioned, the main branch of the Newton Free Library is my summer pick because of its superb air-conditioning. Its bright central atrium also made it a good choice for this gloomy late-autumn day. Just off the atrium, which housed the reference room, was a wall of books about Massachusetts, books that couldn’t be checked out. But could, of course, be lost or stolen. As in Brookline, the copy of Mass. Mayhem was missing. Mass. Mayhem didn’t appear in Books in Print; I’d be unable to order it unless I went to a search service for out-of-print books. Again, I consulted a librarian. This one didn’t rag me about reading true crime. Rather, she clucked her tongue, called up the title on her screen, and advised me that the only available copy of the book was at the main branch of the Brookline Public Library.
    “That one’s missing, too,” I told her.
    I felt relieved when she agreed that the situation really was odd.
    I had more luck in finding material about Hannah Duston than I’d had in locating Randall Carey’s book. Among other things, in a rather recent article in Yankee magazine by someone named Sybil Smith and in an old book about the history of Haverhill, I read that the statue of Hannah Duston in the center of Haverhill was believed to be the first monument in the United States erected to a woman. So much for supposed expertise. I already knew that in 1861, Haverhill had erected a hefty marble monument, not a statue, in Hannah’s honor, but that because of the Civil War, its sponsors had been unable to pay for it. Repossessed, the monument was later installed as a soldiers’ memorial in Barre, Massachusetts. The Boscawen statue went up in 1874, Haverhill’s bronze Hannah in 1879. The Yankee article gave repulsive details about scalping, but pointed out that Hannah Duston must certainly have wrung the necks of chickens and helped to slaughter pigs and cows. On-the-job training. Since I was already immersed in revolting subjects, I thought about trying to find some practical volume about rodent invasions (How to Shoot Rats in the City Without Getting Caught ?), but my stomach turned, and I gave up and went home.
    When I got there, my answering machine had a message from my cousin Leah, who reported the good news that Harvard owned Mass. Mayhem and the bad news that it had been checked out by a professor who’d be entitled to keep it indefinitely. There were three other messages. Two were from dog people who said that they had no recollection of a tall girl named Tracy who used to handle goldens for someone named Jack Andrews. The last was from Mrs. Dennehy, Kevin’s mother, who doesn’t really like me, but loves dogs and approves of what she calls my “kindness to God’s creatures.” She is very religious. “Holly, dear,” her voice said, “I have to tell you that when I went to take out the garbage this morning, a rat went scuttling away from the trash cans! O-o-o-o-h! It gave me the willies! Watch out! They’re right here on Appleton Street!” And not exactly God’s creatures, I took it.
    I wondered whether rats liked dank weather. In the late afternoon, when I walked the dogs, the rain had stopped, but a combination of dark clouds and evening filled the sky. Rowdy insisted on detouring around the puddles, and he and Kimi kept coming to prolonged halts to sniff city smells intensified by the dampness. Because the construction on Huron Avenue was supposed to be the source of the rats, I headed in the opposite direction, down Concord, around the observatory, back up Garden Street, and, eventually, to Donnell, which meets Concord across the street from my house. When the traffic finally let us cross, we hurried, but as I made my way down the short stretch of sidewalk next to the spite building, the dogs’ ears suddenly went up, the hair on their backs rose slightly, and they hit the ends of their leads. Ahead of us, just beyond the Dennehys’ house, a small animal scuttled across the sidewalk and slithered under a parked car. Although I’d been reading and hearing and talking and thinking about the invasion for weeks, it took me a second to realize exactly