Animal Appetite

to have a copy of...?”
    “Of Daddy’s paper? That probably got thrown out the day he brought it home from school. I’m sure he didn’t have it.”
    “One other thing. Brat, I’m really sorry to keep raising painful topics, but—”
    “You’d rather ask me than Claudia.”
    I cleared my throat. “Brat, you don’t happen to know who adopted Chip? You told me that right after your father died, Shaun McGrath took Chip. But I don’t know where Chip went after Shaun—”
    Brat’s voice was deep and angry: “Is this some kind of joke?”
    “Not at all. Your mother said she found him a good home. I wondered—”
    “Claudia is a goddamned liar. The night Daddy died,' after he didn’t come home, she went over there, and she didn’t have a key, so she called Shaun McGrath, and she sent Chip home with him. And then that slimy little bastard killed Chip, too.”
    “He killed Chip ?”
    Brat’s voice was high again. “He said Chip was stolen out of his car while he was at Daddy’s funeral. 1 always knew better. He wasn’t satisfied with murdering Daddy. He had to go and murder Chip, too.”
     

Twenty-Three

     
    It could be worse. When Elizabeth Emerson was eleven years old, her father, Michael Emerson—Hannah’s father, too, of course—was convicted of cruelly and excessively beating and kicking Elizabeth. Michael Emerson was fined and released. Fifteen years later, in 1691, when Elizabeth, already the mother of one out-of-wedlock child, was charged with murdering her newborn twins, the law presumed her guilty, and not a single witness stepped forward to defend her. During the nine and a half months that Elizabeth Emerson spent in prison before her execution, not a single person visited her. Not her sister Hannah. Not her mother. Not her father.
    So it could be much worse. Still, I sometimes long for the kind of father who calls and announces who he is. “This is Daddy,” maybe? Is that what normal fathers say? I wouldn’t know. Even when my father phones mere acquaintances, there’s no need for the preliminary statement that he is Buck Winter. Whether you hear Buck bellow long distance in your ear or see him close up, the only creature you could possibly mistake him for is a bull moose. Other people’s fathers, I believe, say things like “How are you, dear?” The vocalization of the bull moose, in contrast, is usually rendered as a deep ugghh. Not that my father is unsolicitous. For example, he almost always begins by asking about my dogs.
    Not long after I’d finished my conversation with Brat Andrews, the phone rang and the familiar paternal roar crashed into my left eardrum. The pad cut was healing, I replied. Leah had worked with Kimi this afternoon.
    My father then produced a weirdly smug-sounding version of ugghh while simultaneously speaking comprehensible English: “Tracy, uuugghhh, Littlefield!”
    “How did you find that out?”
    “Guess!” he challenged.
    “Surfing the Internet.” I wasn’t kidding. Buck was, in fact, the principal reason I was not yet on-line. Having him embarrass me at dog shows was bad enough. I had no desire to become his roadkill on the Information Superhighway.
    “No,” he ugghhed.
    This time, I got it. My late mother collected dog show catalogs. “Old show catalogs. I should have thought of it myself. You found Jack’s name—John Andrews’s name—and she was the agent for his dog.” In a catalog, agent means handler.
    As usual, Buck corrected me. “Dogs. Plural. Tracy Littlefield. They co-owned two goldens. Maybe more.”
    “And you don’t remember...”
    The show catalogs had, indeed, reawakened old memories. Instead of supplying a detailed description of the tall Tracy Littlefield, Jack Andrews, or both, my father launched into a critique of their golden retrievers, which, as I’d assumed from Chip’s picture, hadn’t come from my mother’s lines and which, my father claimed, were sound but not typey. “Not typey” was not a compliment; in Buck’s opinion, the golden in question hadn’t represented the essence of the breed. My father seldom says anything negative about a dog. I concluded that on at least one occasion under one AKC judge, one of Jack and Tracy’s goldens had beaten one of ours.
    I was eventually driven to bellow back at him. “Tracy Littlefield’s address!”
    In an apparent non sequitur, Buck replied in tones of grief-stricken disappointment, “You know, Holly, your mother”—here he paused