Animal Appetite

betraying Jack. If she’d stayed at work and not gone gallivanting off to the Mediterranean, the chapter implied, Shaun wouldn’t have dared to poison her caffeine-addicted employer. The hint was that Jack Andrews had betrayed even himself: If the man had refrained from coffee, he’d be alive today.
    I dialed Kevin’s number at the station.
    “Dennehy,” he bellowed, as if I’d charged him with being someone else.
    “Kevin, Holly. The report about Jack Andrews: Was there anything in there about Shaun McGrath’s forging Jack’s signature on that insurance policy?”
    “Hey, hey, so we’re on a first-name basis now,” Kevin replied.
    “As it happens, we are. Was there?”
    “No,” said Kevin. “Not a thing.”
    With a growing sense of futility, I consulted the phone book in search of a number for Shaun McGrath’s parents. Boston is more Irish than Ireland. Seriously. I’ve heard that there are more Irish people here than in Dublin. Consequently, even in one of the suburbs, Arlington, I expected to find a few dozen J. McGraths. To my surprise, there was a listing for James and Shirley. The number got me an answering machine. I left a brief message asking to have my call returned. I hoped that the McGraths didn’t assume I was dunning them about a credit card payment or trying to persuade them to have their carpets cleaned.
    Then I took another look at Mass. Mayhem. It wasn’t much of a book, but it was a hardcover, and the copy I’d bought still wore its dust jacket. On the back flap were a photograph of the author, Randall Carey, and a biographical sketch. The picture showed a bland-looking young man with a pipe in his hand. He wore a corduroy jacket. Behind him were shelves of books. The image was too small to let me read the titles. Maybe they weren’t scholarly books at all. Maybe they were nothing but junky would-be potboilers like Mass. Mayhem. According to the bio, Dr. Randall Carey had gone to Harvard College, held a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, and taught at Newton North High School-
    Around here, it’s not unusual to find a Harvard Ph.D. teaching in a secondary school, including a public school. Actually, in the Square, it’s not all that unusual to find a Harvard Ph.D. driving a cab. What does salary matter? Proximity is all that really counts. As these people see it, they’re like electric cars that can travel only a fixed distance; if they don’t keep going back to the power source all the time, they’ll sputter and quit. A call to Newton North High School told me that Randall Carey no longer taught there.
    I followed a hunch and checked the phone book again. Dr. Randall Carey’s address wasn’t far from mine. As I’d done with the McGraths, I left a message on his machine asking him to return my call. I wanted to find out where Carey had heard that Shaun McGrath had forged his partner’s signature. I also wanted to hear anything Carey might have learned about Jack’s murder in the ten years since he’d published his book.
    By now, my work life felt divided between the people I thought of as my murderer, Hannah Duston, and my victim, Jack Andrews, and I was learning to shift rather smoothly from the distant horror of 1697 to the horror of a mere eighteen years ago. As Kevin had noticed, Hannah, Jack, and I were now on a first-name basis. Or I was with them. Whether they called me or each other anything at all was, of course, the ultimate mystery that I certainly couldn’t solve.
    While I waited for the McGraths or Randall Carey to return my call, I went over my notes about Hannah. Nowhere in anything I’d read was there a single indication of the particular group or tribe that had abducted her. Most accounts just called the people “Indians.” An alarming number used what I read as racist obscenities: “squaws,” “redskins.” Cotton Mather had had lots of names for Hannah’s victims: “idolaters,” “persecutors,” “formidable salvages.” Not that I myself would have called them, say, “lovely human beings.” In the raid on Haverhill, the attackers had killed twenty-seven people, including fifteen children. Hannah and Mary were two of thirteen people taken captive or, as the old accounts phrased it, “captivated by the salvages.” As far as I could tell, Hannah and Mary were the only two to survive. It was common practice among Indian captors to kill the very old, the very young, the weak, and the infirm: those who wouldn’t survive