Evil Breeding

perfectly sound. There’s ample precedent. From the beginning, Mount Auburn has been more than a place to bury the dead. Since 1831, it’s been an arboretum, a nature preserve, a sculpture garden, and a bird sanctuary as well as a cemetery. Precedent! Precedent for its reincarnation as the world’s largest and most beautiful training facility and off-leash dog park. The transformation wouldn’t cost a thing. You’d just have to persuade visitors to close the gates.
    Gates.The fence. That’s where we were. As I was starting to say, in contrast to Harvard Yard, which has high, solid, uniformly expensive-looking brick walls on all sides, Mount Auburn Cemetery has a stretch of handsome, obviously costly wrought-iron fencing on either side of the main gate, which is a towering gray stone, Egyptian-looking affair that somehow fits the popular conception of the gates of hell, but with a different inscription and radically different intentions, of course. The point of a garden cemetery cum bird sanctuary and dog park and so forth is to urge people to reclaim hope, right? Not to abandon it. Anyway, the wrought-iron section wouldn’t have disgraced Giralda, but having sensibly put their money up front, where it shows, the Mount Auburn people have economized around the rest of the cemetery’s perimeter, most of which is bounded by chain-link, good chain-link, mind you, quality stuff, but not in a class with wrought iron. Not that I’m complaining! The Committee for the Canine Reclamation of Mount Auburn is perfectly satisfied with the existing dog-containment system. The chain-link is heavy and sturdy, and it’s high enough all the way around to prevent dogs from leaping over. People, too.
    The cemetery had closed for the day. The main gate was shut, as the back gate undoubtedly was, too. If the tattooed Mercedes man intended to enter, he’d need to force a gate, scale the fence, or cut a hole in it. On the night of Peter Motherway’s murder, someone had apparently climbed over. The gates hadn’t been tampered with. The chain-link hadn’t been cut. Rather, someone had hauled the body over the fence before transporting it to the Gardner vault.
    Whatever the man’s intentions, he wouldn’t carry them out here on Mount Auburn Street. Now, even after the rush hour had ended, cars and trucks passed, their headlights on. The Star Market was busy. Streetlights shone on pedestrians. I’d had practice in sneaking a dog into Mount Auburn when it was open to the public. Now, stopped at a red light, I quickly tried to plan what I’d do if I wanted to enter unobserved after dark. If I walked along the fence in the direction the man was taking, I’d come to Coolidge Avenue, where I’d turn right and continue to make my way along the boundary of Mount Auburn. The inhabitants of the big, handsome houses on the opposite side of Coolidge Avenue would be arriving home late from work, leaving for evening activities, walking dogs, and otherwise coming and going. After a quarter mile or maybe a half mile, the houses would give way to the grounds of the Cambridge Cemetery, which has a magnificent view of the Charles River, but is otherwise an ordinary cemetery, lacking as it does Mount Auburn’s magnificent monuments, impressive vegetation, imaginative landscaping, and famous remains. Ah, the eternal town and gown! Still, there’s a fairness about death. Residents on both sides slept the same six feet under. Even along that stretch, Coolidge Avenue wouldn’t be deserted; it served as a convenient shortcut from Cambridge proper to several large condominium buildings, a tennis and fitness club, and a big shopping mall. But tall trees grew inside and, in some places, outside Mount Auburn’s fence. Furthermore, somewhere along Coolidge was a gate I’d seen in daylight when the dogs and I took this route to the river. I vaguely remembered the gate as small. I’d never paid much attention to it because it was always closed and secured with a length of chain; a permanently locked, evidently unused entrance was no place to sneak in a dog.
    When the traffic light turned green, I drove past the turn at Brattle that would have taken me home and past the man, who was now moving swiftly. At Coolidge, I made a right and cruised by the big, illuminated houses. Somewhere to my right, not far beyond the fence, was the fine old Mount Auburn neighborhood that included the Mary Baker Eddy Monument and the Gardner family vault. The tattooed man