Ruffly Speaking

It’s possible that Alice imagined that ultrasound could repel not only dogs but their supposed germs, too. Maybe ultrasound really does scare away viruses. Matthew Benson might know. I don’t. The squirming and wiggling of microorganisms doesn’t interest me at all. Why settle for mere pseudopodia—false feet—when you can have real paws?
    “She bought those gadgets,” Rita said. “But that’s comparatively trivial. Years ago she could’ve sold that carriage house or fixed it up and rented it. She had plenty of options.”
    “That’s not how she felt. Like the carriage house. You know, Rita, if she’d lived to collect the insurance money for that, she wouldn’t have realized at all that what she’d done was tantamount to burning it down herself. I don’t know whether she was responsible, but she didn’t feel responsible.”
    “You certainly are determined to let her off the hook,” Rita observed.
    “Not really. No, I’m not. Alice Savery murdered Morris. She did it in a sneaky way so that she could tell herself that she wasn’t responsible, but she did murder him. And when she made Avon Hill warn the kids not to go into her carriage house to sneak cigarettes, she deliberately lured Ivan there. She set him up. She was the one who poured gas around in there, and when Ivan did what he was bound to do, she locked the door and trapped him inside. She opened the valve on Stephanie’s gas grill. No one made her do it, and she knew that Stephanie smoked out on the deck. But if you look at what Alice Savery did, then evading responsibility was the whole point, wasn’t it? If Stephanie didn’t smoke, if Ivan hadn’t—”
    “And Morris Lamb?”
    “If Morris hadn’t been the way he was, if he hadn’t been Morris, maybe, but... We’ve been over it and over it, but I’d still like to know exactly how she did it. You know, my best guess is that Morris didn’t just go around sort of randomly picking things. Morris was, uh, exuberant, but he wasn’t stupid. For what it’s worth, I think that he stayed strictly with the stuff in the raised bed, and I think that Alice Savery planted things there knowing that they’d at least make him sick. There’s no shortage of ordinary plants that’ll do it. In fact, I’m working on a new column about that, and it’s worse than I remembered. It’s practically enough to make you scared to take your dog outside. Lantana, foxgloves, lupine, aconite, laurel, rhododendrons, flowering tobacco, larkspur, and, of course, delphiniums, and Doug had already planted some fairly weird stuff that is safe—some special kind of marigolds and violas and a whole variety of greens for mesclun —so it isn’t as if she’d stuck one big hemlock plant in the middle of a bed of lettuce. The other thing is, even though the plants were in a plastic tunnel, it was still pretty early in the spring, so the plants must’ve been immature and not necessarily all that poisonous, except... except, of course, that she believed Morris had AIDS. I mean, when I heard he died, I stupidly thought he had AIDS, too, and so did everyone else. Of course, that was after the fact. But it’s still no excuse, really. Anyway, I think that Alice watched Morris pick the stuff from the raised bed, and I think that she saw the light stay on in his bathroom—it’s on her side of the house— and I think that she went out and did some selective weeding in his garden. And after that, I think it was like selling the lot next to her house; as soon as she’d done it, she talked herself into believing that she just was not responsible. Her land was stolen; Morris poisoned him-self; she’d never even told Doug that raised beds existed, never planted the idea to begin with. And I am positive that if she’d survived that fall, she’d have put the blame for it all on Rowdy. And on me, too.”
    “For the hundredth time, it really was not your fault.”
    “I shouldn’t have taken Rowdy with me. It’s just... I didn’t want to go in that house alone, and I had no idea that anyone could be that afraid of dogs.”
    “Loose dogs,” Rita said. “Unleashed. Unbridled impulse.”
    “Whatever. I still shouldn’t have—”
    “Holly, look. One of the tragedies of paranoia is that, so often, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sometimes these people behave in ways that really do force other people to conspire against them, in the sense of making secret plans to manage them. But it’s perfectly characteristic