Animal Appetite

will tell me about some woman he says is a nice person but who is really dumpy and homely, and then, to me, she’ll look like the cover of Vogue. Or he’ll think that someone is a knockout when I think she looks like a million other people.”
    “So what’s the ethical dilemma?”
    “Do I tell Kevin about Tracy Littlefield? Also, do I tell Brat about Drew? Or, maybe, do I tell Tracy about Brat and let her decide?”
    “No to all three,” said Leah firmly.
    “Thank you. It’s so comforting to have a Harvard student in the family.”
    “Think nothing of it. Speaking of which, I have to get back. Oh, there’s one more Hannah thing you’re going to want to take a look at. It’s all about her. I’m getting it for you. It’s an old dissertation.”
    “Widener didn’t have it?”
    “Widener doesn’t have dissertations. The new ones are in Pusey, but after nine years, they get moved to the depository. I put in a request on Tuesday, I think it was. They probably have it for me by now. I just couldn’t carry any more today.”
    “Are you allowed to check it out?”
    “I don’t know, but if it looks good, I can Xerox it for you.”
    “It’s a whole dissertation about Hannah?”
    “That’s what it sounds like. It’s called... It’s on the list I brought.” She got up and fished through the stack of books and articles she’d left on the counter. “My reference list is here somewhere. Here it is. ‘An Analysis of Interpretations of a Unique Captivity Experience: A Contextually Based History of Evaluative Approaches to the Legend of Hannah Duston.’ ”
    Leah handed me the list. I scanned it. My eyes locked on to the title of the dissertation. And then on to the name of the doctoral candidate who’d written it.
    “I’ll be damned,” I said. “How unlike him. He never told me he wrote his thesis on Hannah Duston. No wonder he knows all about her.”
    “Who?”
    “Randall Carey. The guy who wrote the chapter about Jack’s murder.”
     

Twenty-Nine

     
    I rented my third-floor apartment to its present tenants under the misapprehension that in installing the wife, Cecily, in my building, I’d pulled off a major coup in the world of dogs. Imagine my shock when I found out that Cecily wasn’t a real judge. In fact, she has no connection at all with the American Kennel Club; all she does is sit on some circuit court. She doesn’t even own a dog. She and her husband do, however, dote on their two immense smoke-colored Persian cats, Learned and Billings, who spend their lives sunning themselves on the carpeted window perches that enable them to peer safely and disdainfully down at the side yard.
    As befits a judge even of the non-AKC variety, Cecily is a person of tremendous poise and dignity. Today, although she was home with a ferocious sinus infection that blotched her cinnamon skin and painted dark shadows under her reddened eyes, her hair was still in its usual neat cornrows, and when I stopped in before running my errands to ask whether I could do anything for her, she was wearing her quilted red plaid housecoat with the authority of a judge’s robes. She didn’t need anything, she assured me, but thanks. Her husband was away for a week on business; she had no domestic or social obligations. She’d spend the day drinking ginger ale and catching up on her paperwork. She gestured to a chair that, like the cats’ perches, overlooked the side yard.
    My initial disappointment about Cecily’s true judicial position had quickly turned to the same irrational fear I had about Rita: that unless I kept the property up, my perfect tenants would move elsewhere. Today, mindful of Cecily’s presence, I was especially eager to maintain the tony tone appropriate to the rents I charge. Consequently, as soon as Leah left, I turned to the task of splitting and stacking the remaining wood. Besides, as I’ve suggested, although training dogs is my first-choice form of meditation, splitting wood runs a close second, and I wanted to let the matter of Randall Carey and his doctoral dissertation rattle around in my head more or less on its own. The temperature outside had warmed to the mid-thirties, but a warning breeze blew from the north, and the sky looked like one immense blue eye of a Siberian husky the size of the cosmos. Whenever a car approached on Appleton, I’d glance down the street to see whether Kevin was finally returning, but after an hour, only a single small birch log remained to be