Evil Breeding

Althea, of all people, the fanatical Holmesian whose greatest delight came from following, or in this case from concocting, a sinister plot!
    Just beyond the Star Market, Belmont Street forks to the right. Jocelyn bore left, staying on Mount Auburn Street, with the Mercedes and my Bronco trailing after her truck. For a second, I saw the three vehicles as a mockery of a funeral cortege. As an empty hearse trailed by mourners, the old black pickup was a bad joke. There were no flowers, no tears. And far from driving toward a cemetery, we were crawling away from one. Caught in rush-hour traffic, we moved from Cambridge to Watertown with funeral slowness. Jocelyn got stuck at a red light. When it turned green, our procession moved through an intersection, but was soon brought almost to a standstill near Kay’s Market, an Armenian greengrocery that also sells tenderly fresh Syrian bread, exotic spices, pistachio nuts, taramosalata, Greek olives, and other specialty foods so literally attractive that hordes of customers are forced to double-park.
    When one of the double-parked cars pulled out between my Bronco and the Mercedes, I thought about taking its spot. For all I knew, the unfortunate Jocelyn suffered from delusions of persecution so severe that the Motherway family hired someone to keep an eye on her whenever she left home. Maybe the family’s determination to keep Christina out of an institution had been innocent and kindly. If so, family feeling might extend to an equally strong determination to keep Jocelyn out of a mental hospital. Her terror was unquestionably genuine. Its source? I’d seen her as the potential victim of violence. Was she in reality its source? Tormented by guilt, criminals sometimes surrendered to satisfy an underlying need for punishment. True? On television and in movies, anyway. Jocelyn was strong enough to have garroted her husband and strong enough to have carried or dragged his body a great distance. She had no alibi. Maybe Kevin Dennehy’s view of marriage as murder was justified after all. If so, there was no reason for me to follow the Mercedes that tailed her truck. Its tattooed driver might be an odd sort of bodyguard, an eccentric, of course, a man with a bizarre crush on Isabella Stewart Gardner, but a guard nonetheless, a hireling whose task was to prevent Jocelyn from committing new acts of violence. B. Robert Motherway had shown no affection for Peter. But would he shield the woman who had murdered his son? As I’d heard myself, Christopher had quarreled bitterly with his father. And as Jocelyn’s son, Christopher might protect her. All along, what I’d seen as Jocelyn’s oppression, her relegation to the status of household help, might represent the family’s weird effort to contain her violence. On the other hand, genuflecting before the John Singer Sargent portrait of Mrs. Gardner wasn’t exactly what Rita always calls “appropriate behavior.” Jocelyn’s inner demons might not be the only threat she faced; now and then, paranoia coincided with reality. If the man in the Mercedes planned to waylay her, my presence as a witness should deter him.
    In the heavily congested approach to Watertown Square, a feat of Boston-driver maneuvering landed me in the right-hand lane, still with only one car between mine and the Mercedes. By now, the driver of the Mercedes had a teal minivan between his car and his quarry’s truck. Jocelyn’s right turn onto Main Street supported my assumption that she was heading home. Main Street in Watertown would lead her to Main Street in Waltham. A half mile or so past the center of Waltham, she could take Route 117 or veer left staying on Route 20. Either road would take her home.
    By obeying what is evidently a Massachusetts traffic law, I interpreted the yellow light as an injunction to pick up speed, and thus managed to jam the Bronco among the other cars clogging Watertown Square. After that, the traffic eased a bit. The teal minivan remained between Jocelyn’s truck and the Mercedes, which made no effort to pass. I deliberately let a second car slip between mine and the Mercedes. After what seemed like hours, we crossed a railroad bridge and descended to the part of Main Street in Waltham that’s thick with pizzerias, storefront offices, and discount this-and-thats. A working-class town and proud of it, Waltham is also home to lots of high-tech companies, but the impressive new office and industrial buildings cluster along Route