Creature Discomforts

Fairley’s nasty behavior to Steve’s pointer, Lady; and on and on. I even dug out the steno pad and showed Buck my shorthand hieroglyphics that seemed to equate the Pine Tree Foundation with a kite.
    He whacked the steno pad against the table. “And you don’t remember a damned thing about this?”
    “Nothing. I’m sorry.”
    “You never could draw,” he said. “Or sing,” he added unnecessarily.
    “I’ve discovered that. Could we get to the point?”
    “Which one?”
    “Any. It isn’t just that I can’t remember things. I also can’t make sense of what I know. I can’t put things together.”
    “Look,” he said, “you got dragged into this because that goddamned Norman Axelrod wrote a letter to Dog’s Life, and Bonnie—that’s your editor—didn’t want to publish it. What’d happened was that Axelrod had been using Horace Livermore, and he fired him. You know that. Axelrod said he had proof. About the arsenic. Maybe he’d had some samples analyzed. Bonnie had the sense not to go and publish the letter because, first of all, she knew Axelrod was a crank, and second of all, she didn’t want Livermore suing for slander.”
    “Libel,” I corrected.
    “Jesus. You may have lost your memory, Holly, but you haven’t lost your personality.”
    “Thank you,” I said.
    “So Bonnie handed everything over to you. You were supposed to be working on an article about dosing dogs with arsenic. She told you to start with Axelrod. You talked to him on the phone, and you decided there was something in it, because you wanted to meet him. That’s how I heard about it. Truth is, you wanted to get out of Cambridge. And you wanted to know if I knew a place you could stay near Bar Harbor.”
    “So you asked Gabrielle.”
    “Yeah.”
    “And I decided to work on some other articles, too. I have notes about that. Backpacking with dogs. That kind of thing. Okay. I write about dogs. I’ve figured that much out. Is that it? That’s what I write about?”
    Buck looked mystified. “What more do you want?”
    “Malcolm Fairley seemed to have the idea that I was a, uh, journalist.”
    “You are!” Buck proudly informed me.
    “Well, what do I write about besides dogs?”
    “Shows,” Buck answered promptly. “Judges. Breeders. Training. You wrote a book about Morris and Essex.”
    I shrugged my shoulders.
    “Mrs. Dodge,” he prompted. “Geraldine R. Dodge.” He waited.
    “Foundation,” I said. “The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. I just heard that on the radio.”
    “America’s First Lady of Dogs. Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge.”
    “It’s not ringing any bells,” I confessed. “I know who the Rockefellers are. But I don’t remember writing a book. I don’t yet.“
    “That’s my girl.” He might have been praising a puppy for a nice straight sit.
    “Malcolm Fairley seems to think... I got the impression from him that... I’m trying to remember. It was last night, at Gabrielle’s clambake. You know about that. She had this clambake for the Pine Tree Foundation. And for some reason, she invited me. I went. I was pretty disoriented. I’m trying to remember. Okay. Malcolm Fairley or someone else was talking about the benefactors. The Pine Tree Foundation has these benefactors, philanthropists, who just donate to it, I guess, to support conservation. They’re not investors. They’re donors who give money, and that’s what makes it possible for the investors to get such high returns. Anyway, the point is that the benefactors want to remain anonymous, but they’re obviously from the old families that have been giving money to preserve land on Mount Desert for years and years. And even for me, it wasn’t too hard to guess... I mean, the book is here in the cottage. Mr. Rockefeller’s Roads. It’s your copy. It has your name in it. But I do remember, uh, background information, I guess you’d call it. It’s the foreground that’s all gone.”
    “And?”
    “And? Oh, someone was about to say a name, Rockefeller, probably, and Malcolm Fairley started half joking about not naming names of the foundation’s benefactors because I might publish them, and the benefactors had to be kept anonymous. It was the same thing he said to whoever was with him on Dorr. One of his benefactors, probably. But at the clambake, he made it sound as if I was in a position to—”
    “Axelrod was a jackass,” my father said. “Did anything to feel important. Built himself up. He probably told Fairley