Ruffly Speaking

into a poker game with a card shark and—”
    Rita nearly tripped. “ Savery ? Holly, Savery was not—
    “I don’t trust people with no first names. Hitler. Mussolini.”
    “Adolph. And... Benito, wasn’t it?”
    “You see?”
    “Well, Savery’s was Alfred, and according to the biography I just finished, he was a perfectly decent person. The poor man died of pancreatic cancer when he was only in his midforties. In fact, I’ve wondered. This is pure speculation, but I’ve wondered if the events surrounding his death weren’t what triggered her paranoia. To all appearances, she was completely devoted to him, but at the same time there must’ve been a certain amount of envy there, too. Savery really was important; he was at the center of things. Alice was peripheral. She went to Radcliffe; she probably started out with as much potential as he did, for all we know. She must’ve felt shortchanged. Then he gets sick. She nurses him. He dies anyway. Major loss. And guilt? Normal anger that he’d deserted her. Anger when she discovered her financial position? Anger that he was Savery and she was just Alice? I don’t know.”
    “Maybe Alice blamed that on a virus, too,” I said. “Maybe she thought that’s what caused the cancer.”
    “Maybe she blamed it on herself. Unconsciously, of course. There’s no way we can know what her feelings were. What we do know is that she had them—everyone does—and that she couldn’t acknowledge them.”
    I said, “What Alice Savery really couldn’t acknowledge was her own responsibility. I still can’t believe that she was the one who sold that lot. I mean, she had to sell it. It was either that or sell the whole place, the house, the garden, everything, and move somewhere else. If she wanted to keep living on Highland Street, it was a perfectly sensible thing to do. And one of the amazing things is that she actually went around telling people this story about how it had been stolen, and everyone just thought that what she meant was that it had appreciated. And if you look at what it’s worth today and what she probably got for it, and if you ignore everything else, well, it was a steal. You know, Rita, in a sort of simple way, what really killed her was that she honestly didn’t have enough money to keep up that house.”
    “Bullshit,” Rita said bluntly. “Well, not total bullshit. But, look, nothing could be more characteristic of paranoid people than this bizarre portioning out of the resources that are available. Alice was existing on cornflakes, and at the same time she was buying all those electronic gadgets, and they couldn’t have been cheap.” I’d been correct in supposing that the ultrasound device used to torment Ruffly had come from a mail order house. I’d just been wrong about what kind. As it turns out, just as dog fancy has its catalogs, so does paranoia. Phobia? Whichever. The police found the catalogs in Alice Savery’s house, and Kevin Dennehy told me about them. The catalogs had sad, misleading names that sounded like brands of over-the-counter sleeping pills and lines of feminine hygiene products: Rest Assured. Security Plus. They had been the source of the test kits and monitoring devices I’d seen, and of the emergency escape ladder as well. They’d also supplied Alice Savery with three ultrasound devices, one for each floor of the house. Weirdly enough, some of the protective gadgetry was useless to someone with a major hearing loss and no assistance dog. The front door alarm Ivan had triggered was meant for travelers to hang on the inside knobs of hotel room doors. Alice Savery probably couldn’t have heard it unless she was standing next to it. Besides, she never went anywhere. Instead, she stayed home and watched. Here and there throughout the house were little observation posts, chairs positioned to face windows.
    The post in the kitchen was where the police found the most powerful of Alice Savery’s ultrasound devices. The Bark Quell emitted 140-decibel bursts pitched above the range of human hearing. Although the Bark Quell-had an automatic, yap-activated mode, Alice Savery had evidently preferred to operate it manually. My hunch about why she pushed the button herself is that she wasn’t trying to quell barking at all. Why silence a dog she couldn’t hear? I suspect that she was trying to drive Ruffly and especially his viruses away from the open windows of Morris’s house that faced the open windows of her own.