Evil Breeding

lady.” He paused. “Home alone.”
     

Chapter Twelve
     
    LET ME INTRODUCE Althea Battlefield, BSI, as she likes to be presented. Instead of boldly stating that Althea was born in the year before Marcellus Hartley Dodge and Ethel Geraldine Rockefeller became man and wife, I’ll explain that the letters after Althea’s name proclaim her membership in the Baker Street Irregulars. I can best explain the organization in terms of my own native language and subculture: The Baker Street Irregulars is the elite, by-invitation-only kennel club for fanciers of Sherlock Holmes.
    Just as the American Kennel Club long refused to allow women to serve as delegates, so the BSI long persisted in barring women from membership. The AKC was established in 1884. One of its founders was William Rockefeller, father of you know who. Not until 1973 did the AKC make the dramatic announcement that it would permit women to serve as delegates. Geraldine R. Dodge died the same year—not of surprise. So far as I know, the events were unconnected. Founded in 1934, the BSI waited until 1991 to admit women. Before that, Althea was stuck in the ladies’ auxiliary, known, incredibly, as the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes.
    Althea?An adventuress '? The word has licentious connotations. The other Adventuresses may, I suppose, have sashayed around madly contracting scandalous liaisons. Althea, however, is in all respects a thoroughly upright person. She uses a wheelchair, but she sits up straight in it with her extremely long legs stretched ahead of her and her large feet resting on the floor. Everything about her is lengthy: her arms, her hands, her torso. She has a large, bony head. Althea’s memory, too, is immense. She remembers everything about the many years she has lived through. That’s why I consulted her about the eugenics movement in the twenties and thirties. I was counting on her to exonerate Mrs. Dodge.
    I’d met Althea the previous January, when she lived at the Gateway, a nursing home where Rowdy and I still do therapy-dog visits. Most people in nursing homes move only to the same final destination, but almost everyone dreams of leaving as Althea did, which is to say, alive. Not that the Gateway is a terrible place; on the contrary, it is cheerful, busy, and attentive. Even so, Althea was far happier sharing a house with her sister, Ceci, than she’d been at the Gateway. There, Althea’s living space had consisted of half a shared room. Although she’d tried to surround herself with Sherlockian artifacts, she’d had space on her nightstand and windowsill for only a few treasured volumes and a handful of carefully chosen objects. Meanwhile, her sister, Ceci, a wealthy widow, had lived all by herself in a big, beautiful house on Norwood Hill in the suburb of Newton.
    Althea’s room in the house on Norwood Hill had originally been the library. It was a large, sunny room with a fireplace. The built-in shelves that lined the walls held hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books about Sherlock Holmes, and displayed pipes, Persian slippers, deerstalker hats, statuettes, and zillions of other Holmesian icons. The collection was especially large because Ceci’s late husband, Ellis, another Sherlockian, had maintained the library as a shrine to Baker Street. The addition of the items Althea had had at the Gateway and those she’d kept in storage had turned the room into a little museum. The only non-Holmesian object was Althea’s bed, although it, too, may have slyly alluded to the Canon in a way that escaped me. One of the advantages of Althea’s new Sherlockian quarters was, I thought, that she wasn’t confined to them. The library-bedroom was right next to the living room, which was where Rowdy and I often found her on what were no longer therapy-dog visits, but calls of friendship.
    On Thursday morning at ten, I rang the bell of the big white house on Norwood Hill. One of Althea’s nurses, Ginny, answered the door and led Rowdy and me to the far end of the living room, where a plant-filled alcove formed a miniature conservatory. The French doors of the alcove gave a view of the terrace and the spacious backyard. The alcove had a tile floor and was crowded with potted palms and rattan a furniture. Althea’s wheelchair had been positioned to bake her in the sort of solar oven that people in their nineties often enjoy. The skin on her face had passed beyond wrinkles to translucent purity. Her white hair was so thin that it