Animal Appetite

black-and-tan coonhounds, Kerry blue terriers, or no dogs at all.
    I again phoned the McGraths, who still hadn’t returned my call. This time, I got an answer. The voice was a woman’s.
    “Shirley McGrath?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    The names in the phone directory, I reminded myself, corresponded to the names given for Shaun’s parents in his obituary. Eighteen years ago, Shaun’s parents had lived in Arlington. This Shirley McGrath lived there, too. She must be Shaun’s mother. If not, I was about to make a real fool of myself. “My name is Holly Winter. I’m a writer. I’m doing a story about the murder of Jack Andrews.” I heard a sharp intake of breath. I went on. “I believe that Shaun was innocent.”
    I listened to about ten seconds of silence. Then the woman said, “We never discuss Shaun.” She tried to be polite: She said good-bye before she hung up.
    “Damn!” I told the dogs. “And damn Kevin Dennehy and his stupid ashram!” I still found it hard to believe that Kevin had, as he’d have phrased it, fallen into the clutches of the Eastern brain snatchers. Kevin’s idea of meditation, for heaven’s sake, was to contemplate the depths of a can of Budweiser. Not that his work was exactly relaxing. I mean, you can see how the prospect of getting shot would fray someone’s nerves after a while. But if Kevin needed to reconnect himself to Nature, why had he listened to Rita instead of me? I could just picture beefy Kevin out in the Berkshires eating brown rice and kelp with a bunch of turban-wearing om-chanters or trailing through the icy forest after some beatifically smiling back-to-the-woods fanatic in quest of inner peace in the hoofprints and dung of a white-tailed deer. Not that I object to Nature. Well, admittedly, I hate brown rice, I’d just as soon eat clamshells as seaweed, and you won’t catch me swathing my head in bed-sheets, but there’s nothing wrong with inner peace. And as for animals both wild and domestic—rats excepted— my unbridled looniness speaks for itself, doesn’t it? The mere sight of Rowdy and Kimi brings a beatific smile to my face, and, more to the point, to Kevin Dennehy’s. So why did he have to go and listen to Rita? Why, oh why, didn’t he just get a dog?
    Turning to a fresh sheet of yellow legal pad, I went through the chapter in Randall Carey’s book in search of the names of people I might have overlooked. I came up with only two: Ursula Pappas, Jack’s secretary, who’d been in Greece when he’d been murdered, and Estelle Grant, described as a typist who had overheard a quarrel between Shaun McGrath and Jack Andrews. Secretary. Typist. Eighteen years had passed since Jack’s murder. Now, Ms. Pappas would be called an administrative assistant. By now, she could be the CEO of a publishing house in Athens. In the years since Jack’s murder, Ms. Grant had probably forgotten how to shift the carriage of a typewriter. Her name could be changed or, Cambridge being Cambridge, hyphenated. She could be anywhere. Both women could be as elusive as “that tall girl.”
    I never found out where Ursula Pappas ended up. According to the ever-useful phone book, however, Estelle Grant lived in Cambridgeport. Yes, she informed me, she was the same Estelle Grant who’d worked at Damned Yankee Press. She’d been temping there when Shaun McGrath poisoned Jack Andrews. She’d been filling in for someone who’d been on vacation in Greece. Temp work, Estelle volunteered, was still her day job. Now, she was polishing the novel she’d been drafting eighteen years ago. As a matter of fact, she’d incorporated Jack’s murder in the plot. I told her that I, too, was a writer. She offered to let me read her book.
    Like every other professional writer, I don’t have time to read my own unpublished manuscripts, never mind other people’s. Furthermore, other people’s unpublished fiction is usually even worse than mine. The characters are often flat. Worse, most of them are human. And when they’re canine? If you love dogs, even under the best of published circumstances, you hardly dare to turn a page because, in book after book, your favorite characters are always getting disemboweled, drowned, or run over, often by the end of the third chapter, and there you are brokenhearted with a few hundred pages still to go with nothing but people, people, people. Anyway, in Estelle Grant’s case I made an exception. I’d love to read her manuscript, I said. I didn’t