Evil Breeding

of Christina Motherway, and an informational brochure for a drug with the capacity to induce thyrotoxicosis.” She paused for a sip of tea. “Holly, you do know what a rebus is?”
    I’d taken a larger mouthful of shortcake than my mother would have liked. I chewed and swallowed. “A puzzle.”
    “A puzzle with pictures,” Althea informed me. “The pictures spell out syllables or words. A picture of an eye, for example”—she raised a hand to one of her own faded blue eyes—“conventionally represents the first-person-singular pronoun, nominative case, I, as in I myself."
    “Yes,” I agreed.
    “Consider the dog,” Althea said. Hearing herself, she burbled in glee. “As you so often do! But in this case, consider the photograph as a rebus.”
    “A shepherd?A German shepherd dog. German?”
    “But your time is short. I will stop playing games. Regardless of the breed, a black male dog. Black. Male.”
    It occurred to me that if Althea had been my English teacher, I might have understood Ulysses. Or at least finished reading it. “Blackmail,” I said.
    “Indeed. Blackmail. What has been missing, of course, in questions surrounding the murder of Peter Motherway, is a motive, other than the obvious and universal in such circumstances, which was, of course, that someone wanted him dead. Our correspondent supplies a more specific motive than that by means of a rebus. Blackmail. Shall I translate? Peter was blackmailing his murderer, who had used Soloxine to kill Peter’s mother, Christina Motherway. Or so it seems to me.”
    “If so,” I said, “Peter would have been blackmailing—”
    “A member of the household,” Althea finished. “A member of his own family, which is to say, someone with access to Christina, access to this dog medicine, and the opportunity to administer it to her. And a motive, too, of course.”
    “Mercy killing?” I suggested.
    “Hah! Mercy!” Althea was, well, merciless. “The object was to keep her out of an institution.”
    Ceci fussed nervously with the teapot. “Holly, may I offer you...?”
    “Ceci, hush,” Althea ordered. “All that is forgotten. And we are not discussing ourselves. Holly’s time and my energy are limited. We must press onward. So, why this apparently altruistic determination to spare a demented woman, a woman almost certainly lost in the past, oblivious to the present, the supposed horrors of a medical facility? Where, in my experience, far from enduring pain, the poor thing would have been doped to the gills with analgesics and antidepressants?”
    “Now, Althea,” Ceci began, “the Gateway was not, of course, a suitable home for you, but during the unfortunate period when you, uh, resided there, you were perfectly compos mentis, although the same cannot, alas, be said of your roommate, Helen What’s-her-name, who perhaps was doped to the gills, now that you mention it, and where on earth did you of all people ever pick up that vulgar phrase? I cannot—”
    “The point,” Althea continued firmly, “was to prevent the woman from talking to sympathetic strangers. To prevent her from speaking of the past.”
    “But—” I began.
    “Forgive me for interrupting. I have a bit more to cover, and we have little time. We need to turn to the matter of Geraldine R. Dodge. Please take what I am about to say in the spirit in which it is intended, Holly. Each of us is inevitably locked in her own perspective. I, in mine. Sherlock Holmes. Puzzles. Cryptic messages! A touch of the dramatic. You in yours. Dogs.”
    “Guilty,” I admitted. “But no more than Mrs. Dodge was guilty on the same count.”
    Althea folded her hands in her lap. “From an objective viewpoint,” she said, “the central fact of Mrs. Dodge’s life was not her passion for show dogs. Nor was it her apparently transitory membership in a eugenics society. Nor was it her acquaintance with dog experts who had the misfortune to live in Nazi Germany. Rather, it was her extraordinary wealth, the wealth that allowed her to pursue her passion for art.”
    “Art,” I said. “Well, yes, she did collect art. She was... Well, I like to think of her as the Isabella Stewart Gardner of dogs. Among other things, she commissioned, oh, I don’t know how many portraits of her dogs. Now, a lot of people don’t exactly think of dog art as art, but—”
    Althea shook her head. “Holly, when Elmira College tried to take advantage of this unfortunate woman’s mental failings, the