Animal Appetite

split, and Kevin still hadn’t shown up.
    Just as I was about to slam my ax through the last log, a male voice made me jump. Although my hand didn’t slip, the ax fell closer to my toes than I liked, and I was glad that I’d taken the precaution of wearing my heavy leather boots. Randall Carey, I thought, hadn’t meant to startle me. I felt annoyed at him nonetheless. Even a bookish city dweller, it seemed to me, should have had the sense to avoid suddenly distracting me as my sharp, heavy ax was about to pound down near my left foot. Gripping the ax in my right hand, I kicked the pieces of just-split wood toward the small pile I hadn’t stacked, and said a curt hello.
    Randall Carey was, as far as I could tell, as oblivious to my annoyance as he was to its cause. “Hello, there,” he said, rounding and prolonging the o in hello to achieve what I thought was supposed to be the tone of an Oxford don greeting a rival who has just made a laughingstock of himself by publishing an academic paper containing a misplaced comma in a quotation from Flaubert. Randall wore the same suede jacket the dogs had jumped on. On his head was a gray tweed hat suitable for a movie actor in the role of an elderly Scottish doctor who plays a lot of golf.
    Instead of stowing the ax on top of the woodpile under the stairs, I let it swing lightly from my hand. There was no need to invite Randall to visit, I reminded myself. I certainly wouldn’t invite him in for coffee.
    “The modern-day Hannah rests from her labors,” Randall said.
    “Indeed she does.” I reminded myself that I held the ax.
    In his usual supercilious fashion, he said, “I’ve brought you something.”
    For the first time, I noticed that slung over his shoulder was one of those green book bags that I remembered from trips to Harvard Square with my mother when I was a kid. Was it possible that The Coop still stocked them? Or maybe Dr. Randall Carey, the historian, had preserved this symbol of Cambridge from the days before green book bags were displaced by backpacks. I had, however, no doubt about the contents of his academic artifact. A book bag? Books. Articles. Maybe, belatedly, his own dissertation.
    I contemplated raising my eyebrows and looking down my nose. “Thank you,” I said flatly. “I hate to spoil the surprise, but if it’s a copy of Lewis Clark’s book, I already have one.”
    My first hint that something was amiss came when Randall failed to take the book bag off his shoulder, open it, and pull out whatever he’d brought. From the way he kept looking around at the woodpile, Kevin’s house, mine, the driveway, and the two cars parked in it, Cecily’s Volvo and my Bronco, I had the sense that he found the surroundings unacceptable for some kind of big-deal presentation. Mildly paranoid as I’d become about the rat invasion, I’d stopped leaving the dogs unsupervised in the side yard. They were in the house, and the wooden gate stood open. Uninvited, Randall Carey headed toward the yard. I again noticed that roly-poly, little-boy walk. As if the property were his rather than mine, he gestured to me to follow. Still carrying the ax, I did. I was armed. What risk was I taking? Hannah Dus-ton had killed women and children. With the same hatchet, however, she’d also killed grown men.
    As Randall Carey pulled the gate closed behind us, my eyes darted to the third floor of the house. From behind the window with the cat perch, Billings and Learned peered comfortingly down at me, and I caught sight of Cecily, who was enjoying the company of her cats and probably taking advantage of the natural light to study a law journal or a brief or whatever it was that judges perused. In the person of Cecily, Law and Justice were at hand.
    When Randall Carey turned to me, his face looked weirdly happy and smug, as if he were about to spring some wonderful surprise. I found his silence disquieting.
    “What’s all this about?” I asked bluntly.
    “You’ll see.” By now, he was smiling. He took a seat on my park bench. I remained standing. Finally removing the green book bag from his shoulder, he rested it next to him, eased it open, and reached inside. “Close your eyes,” he said.
    “You must be joking.”
    “Indulge me,” he said. “Close your eyes.”
    I cheated, probably not convincingly, but Randall was busy with the book bag and seemed not to notice. In fact, there wasn’t anything for me to see except Randall’s wide back. The cloth of the