Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  Then came the killer, so to speak: Until now, I’d imagined Hannah’s captors as tall, strong men. As it turned out, of the twelve Indians, two escaped. One was a woman, who was badly wounded. The other was a boy Hannah and her companions had meant to spare. Of the ten remaining “savages,” only four were adults. Hannah Duston had killed and scalped six children.

  And that’s not my idea of heroism.

  The more I read, the worse it got. The band of twelve people was a family consisting of two men, three women, and seven children. The group had presumably been headed for a large settlement near Montreal. Roman Catholic converts, the Indians prayed three times a day. In between murdering infants and taking prisoners, I guess. I learned the name of the six-day-old baby: Martha Duston. Taking captives did at least turn out to be a practical, comprehensible activity: Indians held their captives for ransom. If Hannah had stuck it out, she’d probably have been exchanged either for guns or for French prisoners held by the English. The other thing Indians did with captives was adopt them into their families. The boy, Samuel Lenorson? Had the Indian family felt him to be one of their own?

  The scalping, I gathered, was not part of Hannah Duston’s original plan. Rather, it was a grisly afterthought with a mercenary motive. It’s midnight. The Indians are asleep in the tent that everyone shares. The Haverhill monument and some old engravings showed everyone in the cold outdoors, with the wigwam in the background. In New Hampshire in March? I think not. So, inside the crowded wigwam, Hannah, Mary, and Samuel, armed with stolen hatchets, strike as one. The attack begins, I believe, with the men. Hannah certainly assigns herself one. Mary or the boy, Samuel, kills the other. (Samuel’s age? I did not yet know.) Simultaneously, someone crushes the head of one of the sleeping women. Another Indian woman is wounded, but escapes, as does the boy, who would have been spared. Who kills the third woman? The remaining children? According to the books, Hannah is the leader.

  I can imagine the blood. I once saw my father’s ax slip as he was chopping wood. The blade he was slamming into a log sliced through his boot. I’d never heard him scream like that before. I’d never have believed that my father would cry for help. And his ax dug only into his foot. And only once. But the gash was deep and ugly. The wound bled and bled. Miraculously, he didn’t lose even a toe. Miraculously, one Indian boy survived, as did one wounded woman.

  Their slaughter ended, Hannah Duston, Mary Neff, and Samuel Lenorson set off in a canoe. But they turn back. There actually had been rewards for Indians, not dead or alive, either. Just dead. Proof had been required. Scalping was primarily an English practice. The rewards have been canceled. Maybe Hannah doesn’t know that. It is she who returns, she who wields the scalping knife. Soon after she reaches Haverhill, she and her husband take the scalps to Boston to petition for “publick Bounty.” It is granted. On behalf of his wife, Thomas Duston receives twenty-five pounds. The same amount is divided between Hannah’s companions in captivity “as a reward for their service in slaying divers of those barbarous salvages.” Question: What did Thomas Duston do to deserve the money? Answer: Possess a Y chromosome.

  In the midafternoon, I set aside my scholarly research on a colonial heroine to work on an article for a women’s magazine about how to get your dog to come when called. Make yourself a good target, I advised. Open your arms to your dog. Your voice is important: Make it welcome your dog. And when your dog runs to you, don’t grab him, don’t run at him, don’t invite opposition! Back up! Help him learn to move to the one who loves him. And when he gets there? Feed him. The way to a dog’s heart is through freeze-dried liver.

  I’m a convert to positive training, you see. I used to give a lot of corrections. That’s a nice way of saying that I used to inflict pain. I now use gentle methods. I get results. But I am a captive only of dogs. I am a prisoner of love. My civilized advice had nothing to do with Hannah Duston.

  CHAPTER 6

  Two purported suicide notes lay on Jack Andrews’s desk the night his body was found. One, handwritten in what reminded me of my own illegible scrawl, read as follows:

  I have slowly and reluctantly been driven to conclude that it takes more than the absence of faults to make a winner. Consequently, I am determined no longer to pursue what is obviously a lost cause. Your disappointment is my only regret.

  Love,

  Jack

  The second note had been typed on what I guessed was an IBM Selectric. Like the first, it had no salutation.

  It is unfortunate that society judges some weaknesses more harshly than it does others. Far from desiring to create an embarrassing public furor, I am eager that what must now transpire do so as privately as possible.

  With regret,

  John W. Andrews

  Above the typed name was a scribble that I deciphered as “Jack.”

  I didn’t know what to make of the second note and was unwilling to share with Kevin Dennehy what even I recognized as an eccentric interpretation of the first. I’ll admit to you, though, that from my admittedly dog-obsessed perspective, it seemed to convey the decision to quit trying to finish a championship on a dog that no judge had looked at twice.

  Kevin didn’t bring me the original notes, of course. What lay on my kitchen table at five o’clock on Friday afternoon were photocopies. Kevin had just finished eating a lobster salad sandwich made from yesterday’s leftovers. To try to brighten what had been shaping up as a gloomy Thanksgiving, Steve and I had decided on lobster in lieu of turkey. He bought double portions for each of us: four lobsters. When we got them out of the bag, I noticed that two were dead. If you, like Steve, happen to be from Minneapolis, I should inform you that the regional specialty here is boiled live lobster, okay? Not boiled dead lobster. And a veterinarian, of all people, should be able to see the difference. Unfortunately, I said so. We ended up overcooking all four lobsters. Steve pretended that his tasted fine. I accused him of lying. Mine, I insisted, was tough and flavorless. While we were arguing, Kimi filched one of the two remaining lobsters and dashed into my bedroom to devour her catch of the day in the long, narrow, inaccessible recess under the headboard of my platform bed. Naturally, I took it for granted that while I was luring Kimi from her den, Steve would have the sense to restrain Rowdy. But just as I’d almost wrested Kimi’s prey from her jaws, Rowdy zoomed into the room, and still in possession of the lobster, Kimi zipped back under the bed. By the time I’d locked Rowdy in the guest room, once again enticed Kimi out of her hidey-hole, and successfully traded a half stick of butter for the lobster, my Thanksgiving dinner was cold, and Steve had finished eating. We exchanged words about obedience training, malamutes, and food. Then the inevitable happened. The phone rang. One of Steve’s clients was on his way to the clinic with a beagle who’d been allowed to eat two turkey legs, splintery bones and all, and was suffering from what might turn out to be a perforated intestine. I hadn’t seen Steve since.

  So Kevin had enjoyed the salad I’d made from the fourth lobster and was now drinking Bud out of the can. I’d drafted my Dog’s Life column on Wednesday. Today, in an effort to finish it and get it in the mail, as I’d done an hour earlier, I’d consumed so much coffee that my system was suffering from what may have been genuine caffeine poisoning. Now I was drinking milk. Although Kevin had finished eating, Rowdy and Kimi, who had studied his habits, were still stationed eagerly at his elbows. The dogs are wolf gray and white, with almond-shaped brown eyes and beautiful stand-off coats. Kimi has the dark facial markings that constitute what’s called a “full mask.” Rowdy has an “open face,” meaning that it’s white and very definitely not meaning that it in any way resembles a Scandinavian sandwich. Kevin’s hair is red. His eyes are blue. His face, like Rowdy’s, is white, but covered with freckles, and his tongue wasn’t hanging out of his mouth. Rowdy is a bit over the twenty-five inches at the withers and eighty-five pounds that the American Kennel Club standard calls for—let me just report flatly that he’s gorgeous—and Kimi is almost precisely twenty-three inche
s and seventy-five pounds. Kevin, in contrast, is far beefier than what’s probably called for in the official standard of the Cambridge Police Department. For as long as I’d known him, he’d dealt with the stress of being a cop by near-daily long-distance running, but instead of becoming gazellelike, he increasingly reminded me of some impossible cross between a gorilla and a mastiff.

  “Kevin, do not even think about giving them beer,” I warned. “And do not tell me that you haven’t been doing it, because the other day when Steve opened a can of beer, they both came flying, and Rowdy opened his mouth and practically begged to guzzle.”

  “Hey, hey,” Kevin said to Rowdy, “didn’t the three of us swear it was going to be our little secret?”

  “Steve did not give them any,” I said emphatically. “He knows better. So do you.” Gesturing to the photocopied notes, I asked, “Any idea what kind of paper these were written on?”

  “Yeah. The one about the faults, ‘Love, Jack,’ was on plain white paper. Torn across the top. The other was on business letterhead. Same paper the company used. Also with the top torn off. Typed on the machine in his office. That one’d been folded, to go in an envelope. The other one hadn’t. The writing’s his. No question.”

  “Neither one had been crumpled up?”

  “Nope. He didn’t do that. Just threw things in the trash. Didn’t ball them up first.”

  “He didn’t have a secretary?”

  “Yeah, but he typed his letters himself.”

  “So anyone at the press could’ve kept going through his wastebasket for a letter that could pass as a suicide note.”

  “And the guy wrote a lot of letters, most of them telling people he wasn’t going to publish their books.”

  “Most publishers just use a form letter. He must have been a nice guy if he bothered to write personal rejections. These aren’t rejection letters, though. I guess the first one could be about a book he hoped would be a bestseller that didn’t make it and that he wasn’t going to promote anymore. But I don’t think so. Damned Yankee Press doesn’t exactly do bestsellers. Maybe he really did think about suicide. Hey, Kevin, Shaun McGrath was brought in to computerize the business. How come Jack was still using a typewriter?”

  “Computers cost big bucks in those days. Or maybe he liked to type. I wasn’t there.”

  “So tell me about this poison.” I repeated the words Kevin had said earlier. “Sodium fluoroacetate.”

  “Colorless, odorless, tasteless.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Banned for years. Licensed exterminators used to be able to get it. Your friend Mr. Andrews had an uncle in the pest-control business.”

  “In Haverhill?”

  “Yeah. How’d you—?”

  “That’s where he grew up,” I said. “You’d think the uncle would’ve just come and poisoned the rats himself.”

  Kevin tapped a sausage like finger against his mammoth head. “Early stages of Alzheimer’s. He’d quit the business. He just happened to have this stuff back on a shelf somewhere.”

  “I hope that no one around here gets any stupid ideas like that.”

  “You seen any of them around here yet?” Kevin didn’t say “rats.”

  Neither did I. “No. Thank God.”

  “Saw one last night. Big as Rowdy’s head.” Kevin sounded as proud and happy as if he’d spotted a purple gallinule among the house sparrows at his mother’s feeder.

  “It wasn’t,” I countered “The Globe says that they’re sewer rats and that they practically never get bigger than a pound and a half.”

  “Five pounds if it weighed an ounce. Maybe ten. Big sucker.” He grinned. Civic pride certainly takes some peculiar forms.

  “Where?”

  “Corner of Appleton and Huron. Ran under a car parked right there.”

  My house is at the corner of Appleton and Concord. Kevin’s is on Appleton, right next to mine. Huron is the next major cross street.

  “Dear God,” I said.

  “Don’t hurt them, and they won’t hurt you,” Kevin proclaimed.

  “Kevin, please!”

  “You can catch a lot worse from a raccoon.”

  Rabies or no rabies, raccoons are cute. But rats? And somehow the knowledge that ours were mere sewer rats (as opposed to what?) was no comfort.

  “So tell me exactly why Shaun McGrath killed Jack,” I said.

  “No proof he did. Ever heard of the presumption of innocence?”

  “The people I talked to said that everyone knew McGrath did it. His family. His friends. They said the police knew. And apparently there’s a book with a chapter about Jack’s murder, and it says that Shaun McGrath killed him. I just haven’t been able to track it down yet.”

  Kevin shrugged.

  “So, Kevin, if Shaun McGrath did it, what went on? I heard it was for insurance money—that Shaun was the beneficiary on a policy for Jack’s life.”

  “Thirty thousand dollars,” Kevin said.

  “So that was true.”

  “They tell you it was vice versa?”

  “What was?”

  “Two policies. These guys were business partners. Bought all this computer stuff. Took out policies on each other. Guy at the station who knows about this stuff says it’s common practice.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, strictly between us, neither did the asshole, pardon my French, who ran this investigation.”

  “Was that all there was to it? The insurance money—was that the only motive?”

  “Naw, there were personal disputes. About business, but the thing turned personal. Jack was the good guy. Nice to everyone who worked there. Friendly. Gave everyone time off. Let ’em bring their kids to work. Brought his own. Brought his dog. Casual with the money. Transferred funds between 6the business account and his own, back and forth. Easygoing kind of a guy. Harvard grad: not safe out alone. McGrath was the bad guy. Wanted the business run like a business. Tightassed nerd. Obvious suspect.”

  “But McGrath’s death really was an accident?”

  “No question. Happened right on Memorial Drive.”

  “I know. He swerved to avoid something and ran his car into a tree.”

  “Convertible. Dead on impact. They tell you what he swerved to avoid?” Kevin’s tone was infinitely smug.

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Siberian husky,” Kevin informed me. “Ran into a tree so’s he wouldn’t hit a loose dog.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Just west ofi Boston proper, downtown, sprawls Allston-Brighton, which is actually two separate sections of the city, Allston and Brighton. No one except the U.S. Postal Service knows where one ends and the other begins, and it won’t tell. Brighton Avenue is evidently an urban no-man’s-land claimed neither by Allston nor by Brighton, nor by the City of Boston, or so I assume. What I know for sure is that no one assumes responsibility for filling the potholes. Even at twenty miles an hour, my old Bronco jounced and rattled so violently that the empty metal dog crates in the back were compelled to take up the cries of the shocks and springs, and I almost wished I’d brought Rowdy and Kimi along for ballast. For obvious reasons, auto body shops thrive in the area, but there are also lots of Irish bars, student nightspots, Vietnamese restaurants, Asian shops, and extraordinary Russian grocery stores where you can buy big glass bottles of sour cherries, whole dried fish in every size from minnow to the-one-that-got-away, and plastic containers of a sweet-cream version of sour cream so scrumptious that I wish I knew its name, but I don’t, because my Russian vocabulary consists of three words—sputnik, babushka, and borzoi—and the grocers don’t speak English.

  Bronwyn Andrews’s piano-moving business was located at the end of an alley off Brighton Avenue that must have been wide enough to allow the two big black moving vans parked outside to clear with maybe an inch to spare on each side. On the sides of the vans and on a black panel truck, gigantic old letters spelled out: