Animal Appetite

Audubon’s The Birds of America or maybe a photographic study of Monet’s garden, Cape Cod, or the south of France: things you’d like to see, places you’d like to go. In Cambridge, it’s Dante’s Inferno. You work it out.
    “Sherry?” he offered. With an author, flattery will get you anywhere.
    I don’t know which kind of sherry I hate more, dry or sweet. “I’d love some,” I said enthusiastically.
    He rose, crossed the room, and passed through the book-filled dining room to what I assumed was the book-crammed kitchen. I noticed that he had the build of a little boy: short, with a round head, and plump in the middle. When he moved, he rocked a little from side to side. In his absence, I tiptoed to his desk and snuck a glance at what proved to be the title page of the manuscript. It read:
     
    Dent-U-Stick Industries:
    An American Corporation
    by
    Randall Carey, Ph.D.
     
    I now knew how Randall Carey earned his living: He wrote corporate histories on contract. His present subject was a famous manufacturer of dental adhesive. I returned to the couch. If he found out the true subject of my usual literary endeavors, he’d probably smirk, too.
    Returning with a bottle of dry sherry and two actual, if not very fancy, sherry glasses, Randall poured a drink for me and one for himself. Raising his glass, he said, with a note of self-mockery, “Santé!” He downed the sherry in his glass.
    “Santé!" I took a sip. Yick.
    “In memory of Jack Andrews,” Randall Carey said.
    “Yes. You knew him?”
    “Met him once. Very briefly.”
    “Well, I’m working on a little article about his murder, and a couple of things have come up that bother me. One is this whole business of the dog being tied up.”
    “Dog’s,” he said absently.
    “What?”
    “Possessive with the gerund. ‘Dog’s.’ Preferably, ‘the dog’s having been tied up.’ ”
    “Well, yes,” I conceded. “Anyway, it just doesn’t jibe. Brat—Bronwyn, Jack’s daughter—told me that on the night Jack was murdered, after his body was found, the dog went home with Shaun McGrath. And then the way Shaun McGrath died. What happened was that he ran his car into a tree to avoid hitting a loose dog. I mean, if he liked Jack’s dog, Chip, well enough to take him home, and if he sacrificed his life to save a dog he didn’t even know, why did Chip have to be tied up when Shaun was in the office?”
    “Holly—may I?”
    “Of course.”
    “I’m sorry not to be more helpful, but the book came out ten years ago. My publisher made a lot of promises and then never did a damned thing to promote it. The ludicrous title, by the by, was not my idea. And then they let it go out of print before it went on sale.”
    Randall was, I saw, attempting a joke. I attempted a chortle. I sympathized about the difficulties of being a writer.
    “The book must have sold okay, though,” I told him. “At least, a lot of local libraries bought it. Strangely enough, though, it’s missing from all of them.”
    At his insistence, I gave him the details. He seemed genuinely mystified. Although I hated to tackle those vowels again, I admitted that I’d finally located the book at the Bryn Mawr Book Sale. Giving up on finding the opportunity to pour my sherry into the potted palm, I heroically drained my glass and started to thank Randall for letting me barge in. “Oh, I had one other question,” I said. “Did you know that Shaun McGrath played chess?”
    “Barely remember a thing about him,” Randall confessed. “So, is this what you do? You devote yourself to true crime?”
    Should it seem that I make fun of my fellow residents of Our Fair City, hear this! In ridiculing Cambridge, I am surely mocking myself. In the ever so Cantabrigian atmosphere of Dr. Randall Carey’s stinky library, I let slip a word or two about my interest in Hannah Duston. Randall Carey knew exactly who she was. He was impressed. Releasing Rowdy and Kimi, praising them, feeding them bits of liver, I said not a word to Carey about Dog’s Life magazine.
    Cambridge gets to everyone.
     

Thirteen

     
    “Claudia’s child is in pain,” confided Oscar Fisch.
    Karma: In the long run, fair is fair. Sometimes in the short run. No sooner had I returned from Randall Carey’s than Claudia Andrews-Howe’s second husband, Oscar Fisch, phoned to insist on paying me a visit. I tried to put him off. I said I was busy. In fact, Rowdy and Kimi hadn’t eaten. Neither had I. I’d missed lunch.