Animal Appetite

inched backward. Again, the dogs moved with me. At the edge of my vision, to Rowdy’s left, was the door to the kitchen closet. Not far beyond it lay the interior hallway. In the hallway was the coat closet where I’d stowed the ax. Beyond the hallway was the front door.
    Randall Carey reached into the right pocket of his suede jacket and took out a small glass bottle. From his left pocket he produced a plastic packet of what it took me a second to recognize as raw hamburger. Until then, Rowdy’s eyes had been fixed on my face, and Kimi had been looking back and forth between Randall Carey and me. Now the raw meat captured the dogs’ exclusive attention.
    “Eighteen years ago,” he said plaintively, “nobody gave a sweet goddamn about women and Indians.” Through the back window of the kitchen, I could still see Kevin’s empty parking spot. My mind’s eye was fixed on the image of the ax. “Jack Andrews did,” I said.
    Randall held up the small glass bottle and tilted it admiringly back and forth. He might have been a little boy administering chloroform to a butterfly.
    Stalling desperately for whatever time it would take Kevin to get here, I said, “Just to satisfy my curiosity, how did Jack get hold of your dissertation?”
    Randall Carey sneered. “Foley sent it to him. Without my permission. With a letter explaining that one of his graduate students had produced a dissertation worthy of publication that might be of interest to the general reader.”
    “Jack Andrews was a former student of Professor Foley’s. They were old friends.”
    “Of course.”
    “So why didn’t Jack Andrews just go to Professor Foley? No, wait! I know! Jack Andrews did the same thing that Professor Foley did eighteen years later. They both wanted to give you the chance to turn yourself in. They didn’t want to do it.”
    “The expression that eludes you, Hannah, is to rat. Fitting, isn’t it?”
    Again, Hannah! Again, I made no protest.
    “They wanted you to go and confess to Harvard yourself. They didn’t want to rat. But in your own way, you sure did make them squeal.”
    “Your mind is unpolished,” Randall informed me, “but not entirely devoid of potential.”
    “Speaking of potential,” I said, sneaking a glance out the window, “here’s the thing I don’t get. Why did you bother? Why didn’t you just write your own dissertation?”
    He gave a chuckle that I think was supposed to sound British. “Money, madam! Filthy lucre! The unfortunate state of my financial affairs forced me to act in haste. In those days—perhaps the rule has changed—one had to be registered for the semester in which one received one’s degree. My course work was done, my pockets were all but empty, and Harvard”—here, he stretched out his patrician vowels—“and Harvard, Fair Harvard, expected me to hand in an acceptable dissertation instanter or fork up for the next semester.”
    “How long did Jack Andrews give you to turn yourself in?”
    “A fair man. A gentleman. He attempted to die like one. I watched. Common sense forced upon me that repugnant precaution. Alas, the man was an addict. All too common, far too common in one of a refined sensibility. Addicted to caffeine. On that Friday, the first of November, he called me to his offices, a rat’s nest, I might comment, to grant me a week in which to settle my affairs, as he put it, and present the full truth to the esteemed George Foley, who, if the veritas be known, probably hadn’t done more than scan the pitiful work before officiously shipping it off. On that occasion, I noticed that the fellow Andrews was hopelessly addicted to caffeine, which he consumed in the form of coffee from a large thermos. On the following Monday, supplied with the means of my salvation and having made an appointment with Mr. Andrews to discuss my supposed crime, 1 returned after that ridiculous excuse for a publishing house had closed for the day, I waited for my opportunity, I medicated the coffee, and I tarried to observe.”
    “Professor Foley didn’t give you a week, I gather.”
    “The code of the gentleman is not, alas, what it once was. He demanded immediate action. I obliged. But enough of all this. ‘The time has come,’ as the Walrus said. Rats, I find, are a great convenience. One is so tempted to set out poison.”
    “I have dogs. I would never put out rat poison.”
    “Your devotion, my dear Hannah, is apparent.”
    “My devotion is very well