Evil Breeding

friends had spoken, their names hadn’t made it into print. I somehow had the feeling that B. Robert Motherway and his grandson, Christopher, had dressed unobtrusively in dark suits, whereas Peter had shown up for his mother’s funeral in an ill-fitting sport coat, tawdry trousers, | shoes of the wrong color, and an unmatched pair of socks.
    Did I miss the point? No. It was neither the Soloxine leaflet nor the funeral program, but the conjunction of the two: thyroid medication and the death of Christina Motherway. The most intriguing item from the brown envelope was, how- >! ever, a third piece of paper, a recent-looking photocopy of an old birth certificate issued by the town of Westford, Massa- 1 chusetts, for a female infant born in 1912. The baby’s name? Christina Heinck. The implication was murder: thyrotoxicosis, poisoning, death by thyroid storm. The unnatural death of a woman who had assumed the name of a long-dead child? I avoid funerals. Still, if I hurried, I could get to Mount Auburn Cemetery in time for Peter Motherway’s.
     

Chapter Eighteen
     
    I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST eulogies, prayers, hymns, memories, or tears. What bothers me about funerals is the presence of a dead body. Consequently, I didn’t exactly attend the service for Peter Motherway. Instead, I observed it through Rita’s binoculars while pretending to scan for migrating warblers. Rita made me borrow a tan hat that she considered fashionable for birding. On me, it looked stupid. She also insisted on accompanying me. “Birding is a companionable activity,” she informed me. “Birds of a feather! You’ll be more credible if there are two of us.”
    “I’ll be credible if I go alone. Plenty of novice birders go to Mount Auburn,” I countered. “You, for example. I just don’t want the Motherways to notice me. I don’t want to look as if I’m spying on the funeral.”
    It was Rita’s fault that we arrived ten minutes late. She had to change into one of her khaki outfits. In case the Motherways recognized my car, we took hers. After we drove through the main gate, I took a guess about the location of the grave. I directed Rita to the right, then the left until we were on the hill that overlooks the new part of the cemetery. In the few minutes since we’d left home, the sky had darkened. Pausing by a tree with a gnarled trunk, I trained the binoculars up into its leafy canopy and then downhill to the small group of people assembled for Peter Motherway’s service and burial.
    “Kevin’s there,” I reported to Rita. “He looks exactly like what you see in movies when cops go to a funeral. He’s even wearing a trench coat.”
    “We should have, too. It’s probably going to rain,” Rita said. “If it does, that’s it. I don’t want my binoculars getting mined.”
    Like everything else Rita owned, the binoculars were not only expensive but worth the money they’d cost. If a bird had landed on the shoulder of a mourner or a mortician, it would have appeared before my eyes in sharp focus. The only plumage in sight, however, consisted of the dark suits worn by the father and the son of the deceased; B. Robert and Christopher Motherway were disconcertingly dressed exactly as I’d envisioned in imagining Christina Motherway’s funeral. Peter Motherway’s widow looked, as usual, more like an employee than like a member of the family. Jocelyn’s navy blue suit and white blouse would have done so nicely as a nanny’s uniform that I had to quell the impulse to check for a toddler at her side. Her face was as expressionless as if the body in the shiny casket had been a stranger’s. A remarkably young man with white-blond hair read from a small black book. He seemed too young to be a minister, but his reversed collar and his obviously central role in the ceremony said otherwise.
    “Let me look,” Rita demanded.
    I handed over the binoculars, which were, after all, hers. “Kevin does look like a cop in a movie,” she conceded after a few seconds. “Maybe he’s seen The Thomas Crown Affair too many times.”
    Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway? But the real star was Mount Auburn Cemetery. I hadn’t seen the movie for years.
    It wasn’t possible, was it, that half of it had been filmed at Mount Auburn? But that’s how I remembered it.
    “The tall men who look so much alike are Peter’s father and son,” I informed Rita. “B. Robert Motherway and Christopher.”
    “Distinguished,” Rita commented.
    “The woman is