Animal Appetite

For once, I felt like cooking myself a real meal. Besides, I’d been skipping my prayers: Hannah Duston’s abductors had said theirs three times a day, yet here it was, Tuesday, and I hadn’t trained my dogs since Saturday morning. Nonetheless, in our little skirmish, Oscar Fisch won. I later learned that his specialty at the Harvard Business School was the art of negotiation.
    I, the loser, hung up and bustled around microwaving some frozen eggplant parmigiana for myself, tying the dogs at opposite ends of the kitchen, doling out their combination of dry kibble and fresh Bil Jac, and waiting the two or three nanoseconds it took them to eat. Tonight, as soon as I freed Rowdy, he headed for Kimi’s dish, and as soon as I untied her, she dashed to his. While the dogs scoured each other’s empty bowls, I changed out of my boots and into running shoes, replaced the wool jacket with a respectable-looking fleece pullover, and ran a brush through my hair. Then I tidied up the kitchen and the living room, and ate my eggplant.
    Just as I finished washing my plate, the bell rang, and the dogs went flying to the front door and stood by it grinning in happy expectation and silently wagging their plumy white tails. So inexpressibly useless are they as guard dogs or watch dogs that I always forget how they look to a stranger who doesn’t know dogs. How do they look? Big, dark, and scary. When I opened the door to admit Oscar Fisch, instead of striding after me, he flattened himself against the nearest wall. So taken were Rowdy and Kimi with this fascinating behavior that they sniffed Oscar’s feet, nuzzled his hands, and otherwise tried to determine what was wrong with him. The fear of big dogs was beyond their ken.
    I took pity on Oscar, whose tan had vanished. His face was now a deeper green than the patina on the bronze Hannah Duston. Ordinarily, I’d have put the dogs in the yard, but our neighborhood rat invasion was making me slightly paranoid. For one thing, my dogs are very affectionate. I didn’t like the idea of a post-rat lick on the face. Besides, for all I knew, rats carried horrible diseases that could infect dogs. I reminded myself to ask Steve. My great fear, though, was that one of the dogs would eat a rat that had ingested poison. A dog who has eaten the kind of rodent poison you buy at the supermarket can be treated with vitamin K, but the treatment has to start promptly, and, of course, you have to know that the dog swallowed the poison and precisely what it was. Alone in the yard, my dogs might silently murder a dozen rats larded with who knows what toxic materials.
    “I’ll put the dogs away,” I told Oscar Fisch. When I’d shut them in my bedroom, I took Oscar’s overcoat, hung it up, invited him to take a seat in the living room, and offered coffee. The couch being the only place to sit, that’s where he sat, but he refused the coffee. I brought a chair from the kitchen and joined him. Now that the dogs were locked up, his color had returned. His almost complete baldness somehow added to the vigor of his appearance. The trousers of his pin-striped three-piece suit were tight over the knees; he wasn’t the kind of man who took care to preserve the creases.
    “I am here,” he began, “to appeal to your good nature.”
    “I have none other.”
    “Let me speak frankly.” He reminded me of tapes of Richard Nixon: Next he’d want to make one thing perfectly clear.
    “Do,” I said.
    “Without meaning to, you have been harassing my wife.”
    After mulling over the disappearance of all those copies of Randall Carey’s book, I’d certainly felt like harassing Claudia. According to Brat, her mother had “about a hundred” copies of Mass. Mayhem. “If I’ve been harassing her,” I said, “it has been entirely unintended. When I met both of you at Marsha’s bat mitzvah, Claudia seemed more than willing to tell me about Jack Andrews’s murder. I never intended to do anything except take her up on what felt like an invitation.”
    And that’s when Oscar leaned forward and, in low, confiding tones, said, “Claudia’s child is in pain.”
    Bronwyn was in her late twenties. Gareth must now have been about thirty-four. Neither was my idea of a child. Could Claudia and Oscar possibly have had a baby? Had I grossly overestimated Claudia’s age? If not, the couple might still have adopted. In that case, though, why was he referring to the little one only as Claudia’s? Could she have had