Animal Appetite

what the small animal was. Once I knew, it didn’t seem so small anymore. Rowdy and Kimi had known right away. The dogs had smelled a rat.
     

Eleven

     
    Ah, Cambridge! I love you! Across the street from Emma’s Pizza—The New Emma’s Pizza: new owners, but the same fabulous crust and peerless sauce—is what has officially been rechristened the Bryn Mawr Book Store, but for at least the next decade will still be known throughout Cambridge by its original name, the Bryn Mawr Book Sale. Although “Sale” suggests a one-day fund-raiser, the store is a permanent used-book shop run by alums for the benefit of the college. Whenever I m in danger of having my entire living space taken over by books, I enter the Bryn Mawr Book Sale with a couple of bags or cartons of literary discards, receive a little slip proving that I’ve made a tax-deductible contribution, and promptly buy the precise number of books I've just given away. I’ve found some great bargains on dog books there, and I always scan the works on Antarctica, which reside directly across a narrow aisle from a little notice that reads
     
    DEATH IS NOW LOCATED ABOVE SELF-HELP
     
    I can never decide whether the news is heartening or depressing.
    So that’s where I finally got a copy of the elusive Mass. Mayhem: at the Bryn Mawr Book Sale. If you’re a book on the lam, avoid Cambridge. Around here, you can run, but you can’t hide for long.
    By the time I got my hands on it Tuesday morning, I’d convinced myself that its chapter on the murder of Jack Andrews held the key to the identity of his real murderer. At Marsha’s bat mitzvah, of course, when I’d first heard of the murder, Claudia had told me that the book named and blamed Shaun McGrath. I didn’t care what the author, Randall Carey, had pronounced in print or what Claudia Andrews-Howe or anyone else believed. Sprinting home from the Bryn Mawr Book Sale, stopping here and there to peek at the chapter, I was confident that it contained a hidden clue. With luck, it would also expose the whole story of Jack’s secret life in dogs and reveal the last name of the tall girl, Tracy, who’d dropped out of dogs and whose last name no one remembered. So excited was I that when I got home, I delayed the thrilling moment of discovery by making a pot of coffee and setting out on the kitchen table a pen and the fresh yellow legal pad on which I, Holly Winter, the Nancy Drew of dogs, would inscribe the name of the real murderer.
    Well, was I ever disappointed. Whoever this Randall Carey was, he’d known less than I did about Jack Andrews. It seemed to me he’d cared far less than I did, too. Maybe his middle name wasn’t Winter. Maybe he hadn’t grown up with golden retrievers. If Carey had ferreted out Jack's hidden life, he’d kept Jack’s secret. The chapter said only that Jack’s dog was a golden retriever; it didn’t even give Chip’s name. According to the book, Jack had had a lot of style, and Claudia none. After her father’s death, Bronwyn had become increasingly masculine, the book said. The son, Gareth, was described as eccentric. For all I knew, he was. I did learn the names of some people who’d worked at Damned Yankee Press. At the time of Jack’s murder, his secretary, Ursula Pappas, had been on vacation in Greece. A temp named Estelle Grant was filling in for her. The chapter referred only to rat poison in the coffee; it didn’t specify sodium fluoroacetate. The only really new information was the suggestion that Shaun McGrath had forged Jack’s signature on the insurance policy; Claudia had not mentioned forgery, nor had Brat or Kevin.
    The themes of the chapter, to the minor extent that it had any, were betrayal and, appropriately enough, disappointment. In the author’s view, Jack had betrayed his children by frittering away money needed for their private-school tuition. Claudia, who came across as lazy and feckless, had let her husband down by working in child care instead of pursuing a lucrative career. The masculine Bronwyn and the eccentric Gareth would’ve been a disappointment to their father, or so the author maintained. Even so, Shaun McGrath had cheated Jack of the chance to see them grow up. When Jack had founded the press, he’d duped everyone, including himself, into believing that he could run a publishing house. Discovering the sloppy way the business actually operated, Shaun McGrath had felt cheated. Even the vacationing Ursula Pappas came across as