Evil Breeding

Peter’s wife. Widow.” There was no need to describe Jocelyn. She was the only woman there. The group was pitifully small: Peter’s father, his son, his widow, Kevin Dennehy, the minister, a few men who radiated the professionally glum dignity of undertakers. And one more man.
    “Rita, let me take another look.”
    Peering again, I rested the index finger of my right hand on the little wheel of the binoculars and forced the anomalous face in and out of focus. “The art student,” I said aloud.
    “What?”
    “I don’t know what he’s doing here,” I said more to myself than to Rita. “Steve and I saw him at the Gardner. First in the restaurant. Then upstairs. He was acting odd. He was in front of the John Singer Sargent portrait of Mrs. Gardner. He was on his knees in front of it. He seemed to be praying.”
    “How bizarre.” Rita, I remind you, is a clinical psychologist. When she says bizarre, that’s exactly what she means.
    “It was,” I agreed. “I also saw him here. At Mount Auburn. He was acting normal then, I guess. He was just walking along.” I paused. “He has a strange tattoo on his arm. We noticed it in the restaurant. I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be. Steve couldn’t either. It was very ornate.”
    Two days later, on Monday, I repeated the phrase. “It was very ornate,” I said to Kevin Dennehy. “With curlicues, I think. I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be.”
    “Heart with ‘Mother,’ ” Kevin ventured.
    “That’s exactly what it wasn’t,” I said.
     

Chapter Nineteen
     
    IT WASN’T AN ANCHOR, either,” I told Kevin. “Or a dolphin. It certainly wasn’t a portrait of a dog. I’m pretty sure there weren’t any letters or words. I think it was an object, a fancy object I couldn’t recognize. Or that’s what I thought at the time. Kevin, who is he? And what was he doing at Peter Motherway’s funeral?”
    “We weren’t introduced,” Kevin said rather resentfully. “I wasn’t invited back to the house.” He added, with a trace of smirk, “I wouldn’t make too much of that genuflecting. A lot of people are nuts on the subject, and the Globe and the Herald fan the flames. Sells papers. You see that crazy letter in the Globe ? Typical case in point.”
    “Today’s Globe ?” I always read the letters, but this morning, Monday, I’d made myself skip the paper entirely. I hadn’t done any housework, either, and I hadn’t trained the dogs, returned phone calls, or even checked my e-mail. Instead, I’d frittered away my time drafting and polishing my column. Question frequently asked of freelance writers: What do you do when you don’t feel inspired? Answer: Write anyway. The payment for my column wouldn’t buy me a third dog, but it would help to feed the two I already had. Hey, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote for money. The key issue for him, as I understand it, wasn’t feeling artistically inspired; no, no, it was feeling desperately broke. Of course, writing about new approaches to the ancient problem of flea control isn’t exactly a literary achievement on the order of The Great Gatsby. I do understand that. My goals are modest. But by comparison with F. Scott’s, so are my needs. By comparison, Rowdy and Kimi are a bargain. Which would you rather support? Yourself and two dogs? Or Scott and Zelda?
    Anyway, I'd spent Sunday and most of Monday at home with my column. By the time I’d finally finished the column and sent it as a file attached to e-mail to my editor at Dog’s Life, it was five o’clock. After taking a glance at my incoming e-mail—-just a quick hit, really, I swear, just enough to take the edge off the craving and stave off incipient delirium tremens—I fed Tracker and the dogs, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and remembered that, gee whiz, there was a whole World Wide World outside my computer, one that, among other things, smelled good to dogs and wouldn’t short-circuit if they lifted their legs on it. Yes, Kimi as well as Rowdy. Hey, Zelda was female, too. And right out in public, she did a lot worse.
    Returning home from walking my nondigital dogs in the highly nondigital streets of Cambridge, I noticed that some vandal had defaced my property by jamming a bundle of hard copy into the quaintly decorative object fastened next to the front door of my house. Having inadvertently wandered into a time warp, the dogs and I had been transported back to the paper-polluted days of snail mail. In addition to an