Evil Breeding

large parrot perched on her shoulder. She was almost as famous as her father, Alfred North Whitehead, the great philosopher. Miss Whitehead was before my time. I wish I’d known her, but like everyone else here, I take civic pride in the contribution she made to our community and in the daily appearances of her spiritual descendants.
    Odd characters? My neighbors shook their heads. It had been a typical Cambridge evening: There hadn’t been an ordinary person in sight.
     

Chapter Seventeen
     
    PETER MOTHERWAV"S DEATH NOTICE appeared rather belatedly in Saturday morning’s paper. A graveside service would be held that same afternoon at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Burial, too, I assumed. Why hold a service by an open grave and then traipse off elsewhere to dispose of the body?
    When I’d finished reading the paper, I tidied the kitchen, made the bed, took a shower, put the dogs in the yard, and hurled myself into the nasty task of cleaning my study. After the police had left, I’d made the room decent for Tracker by sweeping up the spilled cat litter. Now I needed to vacuum thoroughly. Rebelling against the dirty sense that my home had been violated, I also resolved to sort through the files the intruder had tossed on the floor and to throw out everything I was never going to look at again anyway. Steve was scheduled to work all day. There was a dog show in Rhode Island, but I’d been too broke to enter, and in any case I didn’t trust my car to get us there and back. As an inducement to endure the boredom of housework and filing, I promised myself some time on the Web and a session of clicker-training the dogs.
    As I was getting the vacuum out of the kitchen closet, the phone rang. After I’d said hello, a patrician voice said, “Christopher Motherway here. You had made an appointment with my grandfather.”
    Had made an appointment? What was this had! The plu-perfect of death?
    “Has something happened to him?” I blurted out.
    “You seem to have forgotten that there have been two deaths in the family.”
    “Your grandfather,” I said firmly, “suggested another meeting, but we did not make an appointment. If you’ve called to cancel, there has been some miscommunication. There is nothing to cancel.”
    “A future meeting would be . . Christopher paused. “Further dates would be inappropriate.” From Christopher’s tone, you’d have assumed I was some floozy who’d been wiggling her hips at his elderly grandfather. I’d interviewed the senior Mr. Motherway in his own home, for heaven’s sake; I hadn’t lured him away on a spree of barhopping. The idea was ridiculous. Could the octogenarian Mr. Motherway be the victim of unrequited attraction? He had, after all, been eager to see me almost immediately after the death of his wife. He had subsequently suggested an additional interview for which I saw no need. Christopher knew his grandfather better than I did; maybe the elderly Mr. Motherway did, indeed, have designs on me. If so, Christopher should be speaking to his grandfather, not to me. I felt insulted. I was no adventuress!
    The conversation ended with curt good-byes. Twenty minutes later, as I was straightening the mess in my study, I finally remembered that I had neglected to offer condolences to Christopher on his father’s death. The son’s snottiness was no excuse. Neither was the emotional aftermath of the break-in. I made a mental note to write a sympathy letter to Peter’s widow, Jocelyn.
    By one o’clock, my study was clean. Tracker had vanished when I’d started the vacuum cleaner, but as I’d sorted, filed, and discarded paper, she’d reappeared and installed herself on the mouse pad to supervise me with the disdain of a wealthy employer who finds it utterly impossible to hire good help these days. With Tracker securely settled in her tidy abode, I treated myself and the dogs to clicker training. Having had less success than I’d hoped in encouraging Rowdy and Kimi to howl, I took the radical step of following the advice of clicker-training experts instead of relying on the wisdom of a certain know-it-all who’d decided that she and her brilliant dogs were the exceptions to the rules of operant conditioning. That is, I trained the dogs separately. Working on her own, Kimi rapidly began to vocalize. In subsequent sessions, I’d click and treat only when she emitted an approximation of a howl. Rowdy made stupendous progress, especially because a lire engine happened to