Animal Appetite

won’t mention this, will you? Because once Multitudes comes out...” “It’s strictly confidential.”
    “The fact is,” Estelle confided, “that what I can’t remember I’d greatly prefer to forget.”
    I wished Estelle success with her novel and hung up. The Dennehys’ outside lights were still illuminating Kevin’s empty parking place. Rita’s heels and Willie’s nails clicked quickly down the back stairs. Shooing Rowdy and Kimi out of the way, I moved toward my kitchen door to warn her to let no one in. As I opened the door to stick my head out and speak to her, she opened the outside door.
    Randall Carey stepped in.
     

Thirty-Two

     
    Rita continues to blame herself. She shouldn’t. How could she have known? She tells me that it never occurred to her to be suspicious. It wasn’t as if Randall Carey had had a shaved head and worn black leather studded with metal and emblazoned with the emblem of some notorious gang. On the contrary, he wasn’t even wearing that stupid-looking tweed hat. His suede jacket and khaki pants were unexceptional, and the weather was cold enough to justify his leather gloves. Nothing about his appearance that night gave Rita any cause for alarm. What must have been the sudden pallor of my face might have concerned her, but by the time Randall Carey had a strong grip on my kitchen door, she and Willie had clattered down the outside steps.
    I have repeatedly asked myself what I should have done. Screamed? Bolted? Hollered to Rita to run and call the police? Even if I’d tried to shriek, I’m not sure I’d have succeeded. The muscles in my throat felt frozen, and my mouth and tongue were almost painfully dry. What impeded me from barging through the door or turning around and fleeing through the front of the house was, I am sure, my ingrained habit of never, ever giving the dogs a chance to get loose. I cursed myself for following the safe practice of storing my revolver in one closet, the ammunition in another. I could, I suppose, have dashed to the side yard and shouted for help. Leaving Rowdy and Kimi to follow? Leaving them alone with Randall Carey?
    He stepped into my kitchen and closed the door softly behind him. The leashes hanging there swayed back and forth. I must assume that Rowdy and Kimi sensed that something was wrong. Instead of jumping on Randall Carey or even greeting him in their ordinarily hospitable fashion, they stood calmly on either side of me.
    “Hannah,” Randall Carey said.
    Holly, I wanted to insist. Holly, not Hannah. I said nothing.
    “I have come to offer my most profuse apologies.” Carey’s customary self-mockery was missing. He looked soft, round, and harmless.
    I cleared my throat. “I have lost all interest in Hannah Duston,” I said hoarsely. “I’m not destined for the scholar’s life. I don’t have the training. Besides, the world of academe is much too gory for me.” In a gesture of helplessness, I raised my right hand to my breast. In my ears, my voice sounded hollow, distant, and scared. I hoped that Randall heard it as the falling petal of a frail flower.
    He didn’t reply immediately, but ran his eyes around my kitchen until his gaze locked on the stack of books and papers that rested on the counter. Leah’s list of references was there, of course, the list that included his own dissertation. So was the photocopy of Lewis Clark’s book. Without turning his back to me, he took a couple of roly-poly, plump-boy steps across the linoleum and caught sight of the photocopied book. I edged backward. The dogs backed up with me. In teaching them correct heel position, I’d trained them to ease themselves toward me or away from me, forward or backward, as needed. They seldom, however, backed up without a reminder. In any case, heel position— place, as I tell the dogs—means sitting at my left side, and both dogs were standing squarely, Rowdy on my left, Kimi on my right.
    Words came to me unbidden, and not pagan words, either: “And sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty: From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” If Randall Carey hurt me or my dogs, I hoped that whoever judged him showed no compassion. Those whose “tender mercies are cruelties,” I thought. The phrase was one that Cotton Mather had used to describe Hannah Duston’s captors. Its source? The Book of Proverbs: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”
    I