Animal Appetite

But this isn’t all. Some things weren’t in the stacks. I’ve put in requests.” She picked a mussel out of her pasta salad and ate it. “Widener really does have almost everything. It’s a good thing that Harry Elkins didn’t make it to a lifeboat.”
    Harvard’s main library is a memorial to Harry Elkins Widener, who went down on the Titanic.
    “It was hardly a good thing for him,” I said. “Wasn’t he a young man?”
    “No. I think he was in his twenties. Anyway, now he’s immortal. What more could one desire?”
    “Life. And if we’re going to get philosophical, what I’d like to discuss is ethics.” I summarized everything I knew and wondered about the whole history of Jack Andrews, Claudia, Brat, Gareth, Professor Foley, Oscar Fisch, Tracy Littlefield and her son, Drew.
    “You don’t know that Claudia had an affair with anyone,” Leah pointed out. “What you know is that her daughter says she did. And that her daughter hates her.”
    “That’s true.”
    “And that madness runs in the family.”
    “Leah, so far as I know, it isn’t genetic. Besides, the only certifiable person in the family is Gareth. Jack seems to have been perfectly sane, Brat is unconventional, and Claudia is... Well, she stole a lot of library copies of the book with the chapter about Jack’s murder, but I’m sure she doesn’t consider herself a thief.”
    “Kleptomaniacs don’t, do they?”
    “I don’t know. Apparently, her rationalization is that she was portrayed unfairly in the book. Mostly what she is, is erratic. She’ll be melodramatic, and then kind of vague, and then, with Gareth—” I broke off. “But Gareth doesn’t count. It’s hard to imagine how you’d act normal when Gareth’s around.”
    “Maybe he killed his father so he could marry his mother.” Leah paused to devote herself to chicken salad. “Symbolically, one assumes.”
    “One certainly does!”
    “How old was Gareth?”
    “When Jack was murdered? Sixteen.”
    “Oedipus might not’ve been any older than that. I don’t think Sophocles says. You want me to look it up?”
    “Not really. Rita would say that Freud would say that—”
    “So what’s Gareth’s alibi?”
    “For his father’s murder? I don’t think anyone’s ever asked. Jack died sometime after five o’clock on a Monday night. He used to work alone in the building between five and seven. Gareth and Brat were presumably doing their homework or something. I have no idea. They must’ve known about the rats, and they probably knew about the poison. They both used to hang around Damned Yankee Press. I don’t know where Gareth was when Professor Foley died, either. I should ask Kevin to find out. Gareth has delusions about Professor Foley, but then he has delusions about everyone else, too.”
    “What about Brat?”
    “Oh, I’m sure Gareth probably has crazy ideas about her. I don’t remember if he mentioned her, but—”
    “No, I mean maybe she murdered her father.”
    “Brat? She worshipped him. She still does.”
    “How old was she?”
    “Eleven. But it’s really impossible. For one thing, she loved Chip. He wouldn’t have been tied up if she’d been there.”
    “Maybe to keep him from drinking the poison?”
    “That’s an idea. Possibly. But, Leah, Brat venerates Jack’s memory. She adored her father.”
    “So if she found out about Tracy Littlefield? You know, Holly, a lot of parents act as if little kids can’t hear. And she was Daddy’s little girl. Maybe he didn’t quite get it that she could understand, and he let something slip. And then, of course, there’s always Electra.”
    “Who?”
    “She hated her mother for murdering her father.”
    “Brat does hate Claudia, or at least she’s chronically furious at her. But Brat doesn’t think that her mother killed her father. She really does believe that Shaun McGrath murdered Jack.”
    “Deep in her heart,” Leah persisted, “maybe she knows that it was really her mother.”
    “Claudia is at least a plausible suspect.”
    “Is she outrageously gorgeous?”
    “Who, Claudia? No. She’s attractive enough in a Cambridge sort of way. Her husband, Oscar, looks at her as if he thinks she’s gorgeous. Exotic, maybe. He’s very protective. He’s decided that she was the victim of Jack’s financial abuse. And eighteen years ago, she was probably more fetching than she is now. Maybe men think she’s beautiful. Maybe Professor Foley did. It’s always hard to predict. Steve