Evil Breeding

rearview mirror of the Mercedes. I managed to catch sight of the driver without locking eyes. His head was turned to the left. In fact, he seemed to be admiring the tattoo, or maybe just the muscles of his arm. I was too far away to see the tattoo in detail, but even at the Gardner, when I’d taken a close look, I hadn’t been able to tell what it was supposed to represent. But I recognized the man, the art student, as I persisted in thinking of him. I’d seen him at Mount Auburn before. Once, he’d been alone. The second time, he’d been at Peter Motherway’s funeral. Now, his car was directly behind Jocelyn’s truck. Like Jocelyn, he was signaling for a left turn. I rapidly switched my turn signal from right to left. Jocelyn finally pulled into Mount Auburn Street, with the Mercedes on her tail and my Bronco close behind.
    Maybe Jocelyn’s terror was justified. As Rita, the psychologist, always says, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean you’re not being followed.
     

Chapter Twenty-five
     
    ON THE LAST DAY of his life, Peter Motherway drove to the cargo area of Logan Airport, where he shipped three puppies. Peter never made it home. The terminally ill Christina Motherway also perished during what was, in another sense, a journey home. A third member of the Motherway family, Jocelyn, was now heading home. Or so I assumed.
    After failing to persuade Jocelyn to accept whatever sanctuary Rita and I could find for her, I’d resolved to enlist Kevin Dennehy’s help. Jocelyn was, it seemed to me, too acutely terrified and too chronically cowed to act in her own interest. If she wouldn’t voluntarily seek refuge from the violence she obviously feared, then she belonged, I decided, in protective custody. I had no idea how protective custody worked or what it meant for the person in its grips, but it couldn’t be worse than what Jocelyn faced alone. If she were taken to a police station for questioning, or even arrested and locked in a jail cell, she’d be in the care of people whose job it was to make sure she didn’t share her late husband’s fate. Just how rational or irrational was Jocelyn’s panic? Indeed, how rational or irrational was the woman herself? Her husband had in fact been brutally murdered; his body had been propped against the Gardner vault at Mount Auburn.
    There was, however, no comparable evidence that Christina Motherway’s death had been unnatural; the notion might be Jocelyn’s delusion, a symptom of her need for psychiatric help. In mailing a series of mysterious packets to a near stranger, Jocelyn had acted senselessly. A person of sound mind seeks help by enlisting the aid of someone qualified to provide it; Jocelyn, instead of cogently relating her suspicions to a police officer, a private detective, or a psychotherapist, had sent cryptic messages to a dog trainer! The choice was crazy. What was I supposed to do about the whole mess? Housebreak it? Peter’s widow had not imagined his murder. Still, the true meaning of everything she’d sent me might not be murder, after all, but her own madness. Yes, the Motherway family evidently had secrets that its members wanted kept as just that, family secrets. So did every other family! Wasn’t it characteristic of the mad to fabricate sinister connections between unrelated events? To quake at inner demons projected outward?
    In Harvard Square was a wild-acting man who alerted passersby to evil schemes concocted by professors, including his stepfather and his own mother. The man’s demeanor undermined his credibility. If he’d been hell-bent on convincing people that the sun rose in the east, he’d have turned all eyes westward at dawn. When he was in an agitated mood, he planted himself in the middle of the street to bellow warnings about electrical currents and laboratory rats. At other times, he lingered in doorways to stage-whisper bits of his secret knowledge. The man was blatantly deranged.
    As I followed the Mercedes that tailed the old Ford truck, I had to wonder whether I was now being taken in by a subtle madness that I’d failed to see for what it was. Jocelyn Motherway’s appearance was unremarkable; she was a tall, dowdy woman with poor posture. She didn’t block traffic or accost strangers. Or did she? To me, a near stranger, she’d mailed what were, in effect, tangible bits of secret knowledge. It was I who had fought to discover sinister connections, I who had enlisted Althea in my efforts.