Animal Appetite

back those words. At least I hadn’t mentioned Leah. Or had I? No, I was pretty sure I hadn’t. Unless Randall Carey had suddenly decided to go to Pusey Library and, by wild coincidence, happened to see Leah returning his dissertation, she was safe. I suppressed the impulse to call her number. If she’d followed my instructions by promptly returning Randall Carey’s plagiarized ticket to his doctorate, she’d still have had to sprint across the Yard to reach her room by now. I had no reason to believe that she was even headed there. The chances were good that she’d gone directly to the dining hall. I could imagine her surrounded by friends, swearing about chemistry, and, with a grin, insisting that the mystery meat was substandard dog food. 1 wished I’d made her promise to call me back.
    I picked up the phone and, instead of running next door as I’d ordinarily have done, dialed Kevin’s number. His mother answered. I asked when she expected Kevin home.
    “Any minute now,” she replied.
    “Have you heard from him this week?”
    “Not until an hour ago. He called to say not to worry.” She again assured me that Kevin would be back any minute.
    “Well, the second he gets there, would you tell him that I have to see him? Right away.” Feeling foolish, I added, “It’s police business.”
    “Police business,” she repeated. “I’m writing it down.” Before I hung up, she said “God bless!”
    By now, Rowdy and Kimi were nosing around and woo-wooing in expectation of dinner. “If I feed you,” I informed them, “you’ll need to go out, and I would really rather not leave here until Kevin’s back. So just hang on another few minutes.”
    Keeping Kevin’s driveway in the periphery of my vision, I looked up Tracy Littlefield’s number and dialed it.
    She answered. “Tracy’s Doggone Salon!”
    “Holly Winter,” I said. “Tracy, I have a question that’s probably going to sound off the wall, but... Tracy, are you alone? Is Drew there?”
    “Yes indeed!”
    “Yes he is?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s okay,” I said. “Maybe you could just answer yes or no? It’s not about... Well, okay, here it is. Shortly before Jack, uh, died... Let me backtrack. Did Jack ever use the Haverhill library? Did he ever take a book out or go there to look anything up?”
    “Funny you should mention it.”
    “Shortly before he died?”
    “Very.”
    “Sunday?”
    “No.”
    “Saturday?”
    “Keep going.”
    I worked backward to the Thursday before the murder.
    “You got it. Could we make this quick?”
    “I’ll try. What he wanted was an old book about Hannah Duston. And One Fought Back. It was in some kind of special collection.”
    “Yes.”
    “And did he find it?”
    “Sure did!” Then she said she had to go. I thanked her and hung up. So Jack hadn’t trusted his memory. Once something had jogged it, he’d gone to the trouble of taking a new look at the old book. Sometime before Thursday, he’d seen Randall’s dissertation. His suspicions had been aroused. He had, however, written his report on Hannah as a schoolboy; he probably hadn’t so much as seen Lewis Clark’s book since then. And the charge of plagiarism was not one Jack would have made lightly. Jack had gone to Harvard. He’d have been fully aware of the extreme seriousness of the crime within the university and of the consequences of discovery for the scholar who’d stolen another’s words. On Thursday, Jack had gone to Haverhill to compare the two texts, Lewis Clark’s and Randall Carey’s. By Thursday night, he’d had proof of Randall Carey’s guilt. Four days later—two workdays later—at sometime after five o’clock on Monday afternoon, when he’d been in his office, he’d drunk coffee that Randall Carey had somehow laced with the sodium fluoroacetate that Jack himself had obtained to poison rats and had carelessly tossed in the trash.
    And, unbelievably, Kevin Dennehy still wasn’t home. “Damn!” I told the dogs, whose restlessness was increasing by the minute. “Damn! I really am sorry. One more quick phone call, and he’ll be here, and then I’ll feed you.”
    As the words left my mouth, I heard a soft metallic jingling and a muffled bang. My heart pounded. The dogs silently moved to the kitchen door. Even more eagerly than usual, they stood there wagging their tails. Rita’s high heels clicked reassuringly on the floor of the back hallway. The jingling: her keys. The bang: the opening of the outer