Animal Appetite

As Randall Carey’s hands flew protectively toward his face, he still grasped the package of raw meat and the bottle of sodium fluoroacetate. As he cried out in terror, one leg of the chair, one spike, collided with the open bottle. Sisera asked for water. Jael brought him milk. Sisera drank willingly. Randall Carey swallowed his poison by accident.
    Sodium fluoroacetate: A few drops can kill a horse.
    But not within seconds.
    Like Sisera, at my feet, Randall Carey bowed, he fell, he lay down. “Hannah,” he murmured lovingly. “Hannah.” A smile crossed his face. “Hannah, I have been a very bad boy.”
     

Thirty-Three

     
    As a dust, sodium fluoroacetate is lethal to inhale. The liquid? I’m still not sure of the potency, if any, of the fumes. For what it’s worth, Kevin Dennehy informs me that the bottle contained a highly dilute solution. When Randall Carey fell at my feet, however, I knew only that I didn’t want to die with him. Also, I had a dog fight to break up, and, of course, I had to get Rowdy and Kimi safely away from Randall Carey before they decided to lick his face.
    Kibble crunching beneath my feet, I backslid into my old role of tough alpha leader. Grabbing Rowdy’s and Kimi’s collars, I ordered, “Cut it the hell out!” I have spent thousands of hours training these dogs. Still, I’m always astounded when they obey.
    Just as the dogs fell silent, the back door to the kitchen crashed open. In his beefy left hand, Kevin Dennehy held one of the big iron wood wedges I’d stashed by the stacked firewood. In his right, he brandished my sledgehammer. Naturally, he reminded me of
    Hannah Duston. By now, everyone and everything reminded me of Hannah Duston.
    I nodded my head toward Randall Carey. “Sodium fluoroacetate,” I said. “Be careful what you touch.”
    Thus it was that Randall Carey did not die alone. Jack Andrews hadn’t died alone, either. Neither had George Foley. Randall Carey had lingered to eat and drink their agony. Randall Carey, too, perished in torment. For all I know, he may yet endure it. I can’t help wondering whether he treated that copy of Dante’s Inferno on his coffee table as a sort of Damned Yankee guide to his own ultimate destination. I assume that he feels right at home.
    While I'm on the subject of home, let me report that, in a fashion disquietingly reminiscent of Gareth Andrews, I subsequently developed a sort of paranoia about my kitchen. Rita said I wasn’t really paranoid. Rather, I was suffering from a phobia caused by post-traumatic stress. “You’re bound to feel contaminated by the whole experience,” she explained.
    The symptom I exhibited was a terrified conviction that a lethal dose of sodium fluoroacetate had seeped into the linoleum or lurked elsewhere in the kitchen— under the refrigerator?—where, sooner or later, one of my dogs would accidentally ingest it. I explained precisely that to the insurance adjuster, a wonderfully sympathetic woman who disagreed with both Rita and me by deciding that I wasn’t crazy at all.
    “I know that the poison isn’t going to come flying out of the floor and leap into their mouths,” I told her. “But what if something spills on the linoleum? And they lap it up?”
    “They’re malamutes,” she agreed. “They’ll eat anything. I have bloodhounds myself. I’d be just as careful as you are.” She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a wallet-size photo album packed with pictures of her dogs—not snapshots, either, but professional portraits taken by none other than Violet Wish.
    The insurance company bought me a new refrigerator and paid to have the entire kitchen floor and cabinets torn out and replaced. The cream-and-terra-cotta wallpaper had turned a depressing beige and rust, anyway, and I don’t miss the old flooring at all. The new colors are cherry-red and white, and I finally have real tile instead of a linoleum look-alike that never did.
    Once the work was complete, my fear of hidden poison completely vanished. Consequently, Rita finally quit nagging me to spend a week at that Eastern mystical stress-reduction and lifestyle-change ashram in the Berkshires.
    “Look what it did for Kevin!” she kept cajoling. Then she’d lower her voice and confide, “Kevin did some deep work there. He is making tremendous progress toward scripting his own life instead of accepting the roles assigned to him by others. His mother, for example. And male authority figures. Kevin has