Evil Breeding

trotted. It still seemed to take me forever to cover the ground. I felt a strange, senseless annoyance at the absence of lights in Mount Auburn. The place was closed to the public. Why waste electricity? The only living people who belonged there were guards, who certainly carried flashlights and knew their way around, and maybe a few of those topflight birders who were rumored to possess cemetery keys. What bothered me, I realized, was the contrast with the cozy, residential atmosphere of Mount Auburn by daylight. The cemetery had its Chestnut, Oak, Spruce, and Magnolia avenues, its Pond Road. The graves, too, bore familiar names. Julia Ward Howe, Winslow Homer, and their neighbors weren’t just buried at Mount Auburn; they lived there. Immortality was the point, wasn’t it? The nighttime darkness of the Cambridge Cemetery, on my right, felt normal. Mount Auburn, however, was a charming little town abnormally blackened by a massive power failure.
    Soon after I passed the Cambridge Cemetery, just before the access road to Shady Hill, I heard the approach of a car behind me. So what? A few others had passed in both directions. Those cars, however, had been speeding along. This one was moving slowly. Before its headlights reached me, I impulsively stepped to the right, flattened myself on the ground between a hedge and a fence, and peered. What I was seeing might, I thought, be known as a town car. Or was that Town Car, with capitals? Anyway, it was a big American car, not a limousine, but the kind of long, dark car from which a uniformed chauffeur could emerge without surprising anyone. As the car crept by, I read the license plate. The tiny bulbs mounted above it struck me as ridiculous: A license plate was not a work of art that deserved to be admired in good light. What really drew my dog-person’s eye, though, was the vanity plate. You can’t attend a dog show without seeing hundreds of vanity plates: DACHSLUV, MALS R AI, DAL-PROUD, and all kinds of others printed with breed brags and abbreviated kennel names.
    This vanity plate?HSM GSD.
    To a dog person, GSD means one thing: German shepherd dog. Having decoded the second part of the license plate, I understood the first. HSM: Haus Motherway. Haus Motherway German Shepherd Dogs. B. Robert Motherway’s kennel. Then I finally recognized the car as the limo-like one I’d seen in the Motherways’ barn. B. Robert Motherway’s vanity plate. B. Robert Motherway’s car. Was he in it? Was Christopher? Jocelyn? Two of the surviving Motherways? All three? Only a short distance ahead of me, the car came almost to a stop before turning right onto Shady Hill Road.
    Feeling foolish, I imitated war-movie G.I.’s by crawling flat on my belly to the end of the fence and the hedge. The big car halted. For a minute or two, it just waited there, its engine running, its headlights on. A soft glow came from the interior of the car, but I couldn’t see in. The windows were tinted, I realized. Also, my position on the ground made a wretched vantage point. Suddenly a dark figure crossed from the opposite side of Coolidge Avenue so quickly that it almost seemed to materialize at the front passenger door of the big car. I’d noticed the purposeful air of the tattooed man. His purpose, or part of it, was now clear: He was keeping an appointment. In response to his presence, the door opened. The interior lights went on. My view was now unimpeded. At the wheel was Jocelyn. In the passenger seat, holding a gun to her head, sat B. Robert Motherway. I understood his purpose, too. He was delivering Jocelyn to her executioner.
     

Chapter Twenty-seven
     
    HERE IN CAMBRIDGE, if you want to spend a pleasant, companionable afternoon in the outdoors, you and your friends stroll through Mount Auburn Cemetery. You chat, admire the trees, and walk on the remains of dead people. In Maine, where I grew up, you do more or less the same thing. You stroll through the woods chatting and admiring the trees, but instead of passively treading on corpses, you create them. Then you take them home and eat them for dinner. They aren’t human, of course. Still, the recreational similarities outweigh the differences: fresh air, camaraderie, nature, death.
    I am a decent shot. I own two guns. My twenty-two was at my father’s place in Maine. My Smith & Wesson revolver might as well have been. It was safely and uselessly stored in the bedroom closet in my house on Concord Avenue. Besides, I was a dog writer