Evil Breeding

pass during his session.
    With satisfaction and self-confidence, I planted myself in my orderly study in front of my computer and made a list of the names of people connected to Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, the Morris and Essex shows, and the Motherway family. If I could tame the wild howl of the malamute, what couldn’t I bring to heel? Short answer: It’s dogs that heel, not Microsoft mice and certainly not the spiders that spin the World Wide Web. The number of Web sites about the Dodge Foundation and the Dodge Poetry Festival had exploded in the short time since I’d last checked. Unless I was careful, Dodge swamped me with information about used cars and dealerships. A woman named Roberta Motherway-Simpson was an evidently successful jazz singer from Calgary. Visiting the anagram Web page, I found that the letters in B. Robert Motherway could be scrambled to spell Robberworthy team. Gee, whiz. Peter Motherway yielded the rather touching Empty heart wore.
    As usual, searches for names yielded zillions of bothersome genealogy pages and the Web sites of alumni associations planning reunions and seeking lost members of classes. According to Christina Motherway’s death notice, her maiden name was Heinck. A genealogy page showed a girl named Christina Heinck who’d died in Westford, Massachusetts, in 1914 at the age of two. A relative? Or no connection? B. Robert Motherway had failed to stay in touch with his Princeton, New Jersey, high school. I didn’t snitch on him. If anything, it was his public high school that snitched; the aristocratic Mr. Motherway wasn’t quite so blue-blooded as he presented himself. The presumed buddy of M. Hartley Dodge, Jr., B. Robert Motherway had graduated from Princeton University; I’d seen his framed diploma. He’d gone to high school, however, in the other Princeton, the New Jersey town; at the university, the young Motherway had been a local boy. If the young Dodge, the heir to two fortunes, had befriended a townie, he’d been far more egalitarian than I’d ever have supposed. Turning from my list of names to a topic I hoped to research, I looked for information about Nazi activities in the United States in the years preceding World War II. Again I was deluged, this time with a zillion sites about neo-Nazis in the present day.
    Having imposed chaos on order, I signed off. As if to continue the Web’s job of flooding me with information, my snail mail brought another mysterious packet from my anonymous friend. Enemy? By now, the block capitals were familiar. Depositing the big brown envelope unopened on the kitchen table, I spoke aloud. No one heard me but the dogs. “Déjà vu all over again,” I said. As I didn’t bother explaining to the dogs, what I had in mind was a wish-you-were-here postcard from Acapulco that I’d received a few months earlier. On one side was a photo of turquoise ocean bordered by a gorgeous beach. The other side bore Mexican stamps as well as my name and address, and a friendly message that actually did include the phrase “wish you were here.” The card was signed by someone named Linda. The handwriting was as legible as it was unfamiliar. Besides wishing I were there, Linda was having a wonderful time, or so she wrote. I had no idea who she was. I have never found out.
    So, déjà vu all over again. I opened the brown envelope and slid its contents onto the table. One item was a repeat: the same old Soloxine leaflet. “Someone uses a lot of this stuff,” I informed the dogs. “Or works for a vet?”
    This time, however, the leaflet about the thyroid supplement was stapled to another document. The attachment was, of all things, the program from Christina Motherway’s funeral. Program? Is that the right word? Handout?Flier? Circular? I hope not. Even brochure strikes me as an unsuitably commercial term for the folded piece of expensive-looking cream-colored paper headed IN MEMORIAM, with Christina Motherway’s name engraved underneath. En graved underneath. A pun? No, a morbid turn of thought. A minister had conducted the service, which seemed to have been arranged by someone with all the imagination of Linda from Acapulco, who’d been having a wonderful time and wished I were there. Funerals, though, like men’s suits, were probably places where imagination was in bad taste. Mrs. Motherway’s funeral had opened with an opening prayer and closed with a closing prayer. The minister had delivered the eulogy. If family members or