Animal Appetite

is she?”
    “She, ” Rita whispered, as if Kevin might overhear, “is something I’ve been trying to talk him into for a long time.” Rita, for once, put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “He has finally decided to do something about his chronic occupational stress.”
    “Sex therapy!” I exclaimed.
    Rita looked put out. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
    “What makes you think he needs sex therapy?” Steve demanded of me.
    “Damn it, Rita! Where is he?”
    For the sake of drama, I am sure, she let a few moments of silence fall before she spoke. Her voice was low and intense. “Kevin Dennehy,” she announced, “is spending the week at a stress reduction workshop in the Berkshires. He is at this very moment at a retreat in the hills of western Massachusetts communing with Nature, and I forbid both of you to utter a single word to him about it or you’ll destroy all my hard work. This is something that’s crucial to his physical and mental well-being, and it has taken me more than a year to talk him into it.”
    “She has been trying,” I informed Steve. “That’s true. I can’t believe he’s really done it. Is this the place where you go around tracking raccoon spoor?”
    “It’s an ashram,” Rita replied defensively. “It combines meditation and breathing exercises with seminars about lifestyle changes. As I understand it, it does involve hikes in the woods.”
    “Rita,” I said, “Kevin is a city kid. He’s afraid of trees.”
    Steve agreed. “He sees a tree, he sees a mugger lurking behind it.”
    “Precisely why he needs this week,” Rita said smugly. “He’ll return a new man. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back upstairs.”
    After she left, Steve said, “I’m going to Rialto. You coming or not?”
    “You canceled the reservation.”
    “I’m going to sit in the bar and drink. Alone.”
    “Give me two minutes to change my clothes.” I hesitated. “If you want company.”
    He did.
     

Nineteen

     
    On Saturday morning, after Steve had left for his clinic and I’d finished such daily chores as vacuuming up dog hair and washing my own, I made a fresh pot of coffee and covered my kitchen table with every bit of material I’d gathered about Jack Andrews’s murder: Jack’s obituary, Shaun McGrath’s, the photographs Claudia had given me, the notes I’d made about my conversation with Brat Andrews, the Violet Wish portrait of Chip, Randall Carey’s book with the chapter about the murder, and the list of people I’d phoned to inquire about the mysterious Tracy—that tall girl, as everyone called her—who’d handled Jack’s show dogs. On the kind of yellow legal pad to which every real writer is addicted, I jotted notes about Gareth Andrews’s mad rambling: rats, dead and alive, their sharp teeth, the stench of death, Claudia, Oscar Fisch, the recovery movement, “Uncle” George Foley, and John Winter Andrews, who, in his son’s deranged mind, now and forever drank rat poison, yet did not die.
    The surviving members of Jack’s family, I thought, had told me all they were willing or, in Gareth’s case, able to relate: Even if I ignored Oscar Fisch’s plea to stop “harassing” Claudia (and her child, too, of course), I’d probably learn nothing new. Had Claudia, in fact, stolen the library copies of Mass. Mayhem ? Breaking into her house on Francis Avenue, I decided, wasn’t worth the risk. There was probably an elaborate alarm system, and I was a dog writer, not a cat burglar; I’d certainly get caught. Brat, I felt convinced, had said everything she intended to say. As to Gareth, I had no illusion that I could distinguish between his delusions and whatever more-or-less accurate memories he retained. It occurred to me, however, that if Gareth had been on Fayerweather Street near the time of Professor Foley’s death, whenever that was, his purple parka and aqua backpack-—never mind his behavior—would’ve made him memorable. As one more odd duck paddling and quacking in Harvard Square, Gareth might be easy to overlook; near Governor Weld’s house, however, there’d be watchers on guard for just such rare birds. Oscar Fisch clearly didn’t want to talk to me. Randall Carey claimed to remember no more than he’d written in a book ten years earlier. Despite extensive efforts, I’d had no luck in tracing the untraceable tall Tracy, whose short brown hair might now be long and gray, and who might have switched from golden retrievers to