Evil Breeding

opening the file for the first chapter of the book, and otherwise clicking and treating the computer instead of letting it act like an untrained dog that dragged me around and dropped me where it pleased.
    A scant thirty minutes later, I was revisiting the Web site devoted to the alumni of the Princeton, New Jersey, high school attended by B. Robert Motherway. As I’d previously discovered, Mr. Motherway had failed to stay in touch with the class of 1926. I didn’t wonder a lot about whether he’d been more loyal to Princeton than to his public high school. Which diploma hung on his wall? Anyway, the same high school’s class of 1930,1 now saw, was searching for a member, Eva Kappe, who did not graduate, but left at the end of her sophomore year.
    Chronology of the life of Eva Kappe: Due to graduate from high school in 1930? At age eighteen? So, she is born in about 1912. In 1928, she lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is a high school sophomore. At the end of the year, she leaves the school. By the thirties, she is working as a maid in Germany; she receives letters of reference from her employers. Rita had translated the letters for me; the recommendations were strong. In 1939, Eva Kappe is back in New Jersey. This time, she is in Madison, at Giralda, where she works as a housemaid for Geraldine R. Dodge. From Giralda, she writes a short note to Bro, whoever he is. She poses for a group photograph of Mrs. Dodge’s household help. She leaves with a recommendation from Mrs. Dodge.
    From New Jersey in the late twenties to Germany in the thirties.In the late thirties, back to New Jersey. She speaks enough English to attend an American high school, enough German to work in Germany. Back and forth. A go-between? Yes, my mysterious mailings were about the death of Christina Motherway and, as of yesterday, about the murder of her son, Peter. But the odd collection of items included the photograph of servants at Giralda, the note written from there, and Eva Kappe’s recommendations from German employers and from Mrs. Dodge. Could my cryptic messages have a double or triple meaning? Christina’s death. Her murder? Peter’s murder. And treasonous activity at Mrs. Dodge’s estate.
    Ah yes, Mrs. Dodge, Giralda, the Morris and Essex shows. My book. Our book. Elizabeth’s justified ire. My unpaid bills. Web: silky net spun by predatory arachnids to trap prey. My love of animals, I reminded myself, did not extend to spiders. As a useful high-tech aid to the professional writer, the computer ranked somewhere below the stylus.
    Fresh out of styluses, I settled for a pen, yellow legal pad, and the manila folders containing copies of articles culled from old microfilmed issues of the New York Times. Sitting at the kitchen table instead of at the computer, I would go through the reports on the Morris and Essex shows, and I’d study stories about the Dodges. Today, now, damn it, I would go through these folders for the last time, taking notes on articles that were gratifyingly unavailable in cyberspace. My notes, I resolved, would consist exclusively of information directly relevant to the book.
    And so it went. For two scribbled pages. Then I happened on a little three-paragraph, three-sentence article published in the financial section of the New York Times on July 5, 1928. It read, in its entirety:
     
H. DODGE JR. RIDES STEER
John D. Rockefeller’s Nephew Wins
Applause at Montana Rodeo
 
LIVINGSTON, Mont., July 4 (AP)—Hartley Dodge Jr. of New York, a nephew of John D. Rockefeller, has won his spurs in range fashion.
The youth of 19 thrilled spectators at a rodeo here yesterday when he rode a wild steer “to a finish.”
Dodge is visiting here with a party from New York, including his father, head of the Remington Arms Company, and his mother.
     
    Hold it! I’d heard this story before, and certainly not from the lips of M. Hartley Dodge, Jr., who had died in France only two years after riding that wild steer to a finish. The storyteller had been B. Robert Motherway. A teller of tales he’d been! In his version, who was the youth who had won the applause at that Montana rodeo? Who had won his spurs by riding a wild steer to the finish?
    It was remotely possible that B. Robert Motherway had been among the party that accompanied Mr. and Mrs. M. H. Dodge and their son to Montana that summer. If the nephew of John D. Rockefeller, the son of the head of Remington Arms, rode a wild steer, the feat deserved mention