Creature Discomforts

and ancient rule of civilized conduct. You... You lout!”
    “You see?” Effie said quietly to Quint. “They are investors, just the way we thought. This is disgusting! Greed is everywhere.”
    Wally ignored Effie. “Wrong!” he fired at Gabrielle. “The fundamental rule isn’t some crap about etiquette, for Christ’s sake, it’s Thou shalt not kill, and you knew damned well, Gabbi, and Quint, and Effie, that Norm Axelrod was systematically keeping track of what went on at your precious Beamon Reservation after hours. He was building a case against you, which was that your tax dodge was operating in violation of every legal agreement you ever made about it, and that it wasn’t a nature preserve at all. If Norm had lived, you know, he’d have put an end to this horseshit, so what I want to know is, where were the three of you when he supposedly fell? Gabbi? And you, Quint, and you, Effie, you lazy lumps of snotty granola! Where were you?”
    “Wally, shame on you!” Gabrielle’s low, husky voice was as seductive as ever even when she was furious. “You made that up. Norman was doing no such thing. He was just a tease, that’s all. He didn’t really mean it.” She gently stroked Molly’s throat.
    “He wasn’t a tease. He was a troublemaker,” Quint said.
    “Why would Norman have wanted to make trouble for me?” Gabrielle was incredulous. “We were friends! Quint, let me finish! Now, I know he could be a very difficult person, but he was like a difficult relative. A cranky uncle. The trick was just not to take him too seriously.”
    Quint’s preppie WASP vocabulary left him without the response he really needed: Oy vey! Lacking it, he said with infinite patience, “Gabbi, I’m not the first person to point out the possibility that someone took Norm Axelrod seriously enough to push him to his death. You didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it, and Effie certainly didn’t, but someone did. What you have to appreciate, Gabbi, is that Norman Axelrod had a mean streak. He actively wished people ill.”
    “Some people, I grant you,” Gabrielle replied. “Horace Livermore, for instance. Norm really did have a grudge against Horace. How can you blame Norm for that? Now, I have no complaints about Horace in terms of Molly. Horace is a wonderful handler. But Norm paid Horace a great deal of money to campaign Isaac and presumably to take the best possible care of Isaac, and Norm was just as sick as I’d have been in the circumstances when he realized what had been going on.” She lowered her voice. “Horace had been giving arsenic to Isaac, you know. To make Isaac’s coat pretty. Professional handlers do that sometimes. Not all of them, of course. And it really isn’t as dangerous as you might imagine, but when Norman found out, he was livid. He wasn’t content with just firing Horace. He really did want to make more trouble for him. He intended to! He wanted revenge. That’s what Holly’s doing here.”
    Effie looked frantic. “Gabbi, stop talking about dogs!”
    Rowdy and Kimi perked up at the word dogs. For once, I ignored them. “Gabrielle,” I asked quietly, “what does Horace Livermore look like?”
    “Oh, Horace is—” Gabrielle started to say.
    Effie had had enough. “Gabbi, this has nothing to do with dogs! Nothing, nothing, nothing! Why do you always have to relate everything to dogs?” Quint tried to hush her. She barreled on. “It has nothing, nothing, nothing to do with dogs!”
    My mind silently collided with yet another solid object. This one was a personal axiom: a self-evident truth. Everything, I thought, has something to do with dogs. Everything!
    Self-evidence is, however, more a matter of self than of evidence. “Norman Axelrod,” Effie raged at Gabrielle, “wished you ill, and he wished a lot of other people ill, and one of his grudges, which is a gross understatement, was against the Beamon Reservation and against everything else that had anything to do with protecting the environment in general and Maine in particular. In case you’ve forgotten, Gabbi, he went out of his way to buy Idaho potatoes! He made a big point of it!”
    In Maine, that’s a heretical act.
    “You know,” Wally commented, “one thing I noticed about Norm was that he was a pretentious, name-dropping, celebrity-seeking blowhard, and he was a troublemaker, but if you kept your eye on him, you’d notice that often enough, he was right. Take Idaho potatoes. I prefer them