Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  “It’s a whole dissertation about Hannah?”

  “That’s what it sounds like. It’s called . . . It’s on the list I brought.” She got up and fished through the stack of books and articles she’d left on the counter. “My reference list is here somewhere. Here it is. ‘An Analysis of Interpretations of a Unique Captivity Experience: A Contextually Based History of Evaluative Approaches to the Legend of Hannah Duston.’”

  Leah handed me the list. I scanned it. My eyes locked on to the title of the dissertation. And then on to the name of the doctoral candidate who’d written it.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. “How unlike him. He never told me he wrote his thesis on Hannah Duston. No wonder he knows all about her.”

  “Who?”

  “Randall Carey. The guy who wrote the chapter about Jack’s murder.”

  CHAPTER 29

  I rented my third-filoor apartment to its present tenants under the misapprehension that in installing the wife, Cecily, in my building, I’d pulled off a major coup in the world of dogs. Imagine my shock when I found out that Cecily wasn’t a real judge. In fact, she has no connection at all with the American Kennel Club; all she does is sit on some circuit court. She doesn’t even own a dog. She and her husband do, however, dote on their two immense smoke-colored Persian cats, Learned and Billings, who spend their lives sunning themselves on the carpeted window perches that enable them to peer safely and disdainfully down at the side yard.

  As befits a judge even of the non-AKC variety, Cecily is a person of tremendous poise and dignity. Today, although she was home with a ferocious sinus infection that blotched her cinnamon skin and painted dark shadows under her reddened eyes, her hair was still in its usual neat cornrows, and when I stopped in before running my errands to ask whether I could do anything for her, she was wearing her quilted red plaid housecoat with the authority of a judge’s robes. She didn’t need anything, she assured me, but thanks. Her husband was away for a week on business; she had no domestic or social obligations. She’d spend the day drinking ginger ale and catching up on her paperwork. She gestured to a chair that, like the cats’ perches, overlooked the side yard.

  My initial disappointment about Cecily’s true judicial position had quickly turned to the same irrational fear I had about Rita: that unless I kept the property up, my perfect tenants would move elsewhere. Today, mindful of Cecily’s presence, I was especially eager to maintain the tony tone appropriate to the rents I charge. Consequently, as soon as Leah left, I turned to the task of splitting and stacking the remaining wood. Besides, as I’ve suggested, although training dogs is my first-choice form of meditation, splitting wood runs a close second, and I wanted to let the matter of Randall Carey and his doctoral dissertation rattle around in my head more or less on its own. The temperature outside had warmed to the mid-thirties, but a warning breeze blew from the north, and the sky looked like one immense blue eye of a Siberian husky the size of the cosmos. Whenever a car approached on Appleton, I’d glance down the street to see whether Kevin was finally returning, but after an hour, only a single small birch log remained to be split, and Kevin still hadn’t shown up.

  Just as I was about to slam my ax through the last log, a male voice made me jump. Although my hand didn’t slip, the ax fell closer to my toes than I liked, and I was glad that I’d taken the precaution of wearing my heavy leather boots. Randall Carey, I thought, hadn’t meant to startle me. I felt annoyed at him nonetheless. Even a bookish city dweller, it seemed to me, should have had the sense to avoid suddenly distracting me as my sharp, heavy ax was about to pound down near my left foot. Gripping the ax in my right hand, I kicked the pieces of just-split wood toward the small pile I hadn’t stacked, and said a curt hello.

  Randall Carey was, as far as I could tell, as oblivious to my annoyance as he was to its cause. “Hello, there,” he said, rounding and prolonging the o in hello to achieve what I thought was supposed to be the tone of an Oxford don greeting a rival who has just made a laughingstock of himself by publishing an academic paper containing a misplaced comma in a quotation from Flaubert. Randall wore the same suede jacket the dogs had jumped on. On his head was a gray tweed hat suitable for a movie actor in the role of an elderly Scottish doctor who plays a lot of golf.

  Instead of stowing the ax on top of the woodpile under the stairs, I let it swing lightly from my hand. There was no need to invite Randall to visit, I reminded myself. I certainly wouldn’t invite him in for coffee.

  “The modern-day Hannah rests from her labors,” Randall said.

  “Indeed she does.” I reminded myself that I held the ax.

  In his usual supercilious fashion, he said, “I’ve brought you something.”

  For the first time, I noticed that slung over his shoulder was one of those green book bags that I remembered from trips to Harvard Square with my mother when I was a kid. Was it possible that The Coop still stocked them? Or maybe Dr. Randall Carey, the historian, had preserved this symbol of Cambridge from the days before green book bags were displaced by backpacks. I had, however, no doubt about the contents of his academic artifact. A book bag? Books. Articles. Maybe, belatedly, his own dissertation.

  I contemplated raising my eyebrows and looking down my nose. “Thank you,” I said flatly. “I hate to spoil the surprise, but if it’s a copy of Lewis Clark’s book, I already have one.”

  My first hint that something was amiss came when Randall failed to take the book bag off his shoulder, open it, and pull out whatever he’d brought. From the way he kept looking around at the woodpile, Kevin’s house, mine, the driveway, and the two cars parked in it, Cecily’s Volvo and my Bronco, I had the sense that he found the surroundings unacceptable for some kind of big-deal presentation. Mildly paranoid as I’d become about the rat invasion, I’d stopped leaving the dogs unsupervised in the side yard. They were in the house, and the wooden gate stood open. Uninvited, Randall Carey headed toward the yard. I again noticed that roly-poly, little-boy walk. As if the property were his rather than mine, he gestured to me to follow. Still carrying the ax, I did. I was armed. What risk was I taking? Hannah Duston had killed women and children. With the same hatchet, however, she’d also killed grown men.

  As Randall Carey pulled the gate closed behind us, my eyes darted to the third floor of the house. From behind the window with the cat perch, Billings and Learned peered comfortingly down at me, and I caught sight of Cecily, who was enjoying the company of her cats and probably taking advantage of the natural light to study a law journal or a brief or whatever it was that judges perused. In the person of Cecily, Law and Justice were at hand.

  When Randall Carey turned to me, his face looked weirdly happy and smug, as if he were about to spring some wonderful surprise. I found his silence disquieting.

  “What’s all this about?” I asked bluntly.

  “You’ll see.” By now, he was smiling. He took a seat on my park bench. I remained standing. Finally removing the green book bag from his shoulder, he rested it next to him, eased it open, and reached inside. “Close your eyes,” he said.

  “You must be joking.”

  “Indulge me,” he said. “Close your eyes.”

  I cheated, probably not convincingly, but Randall was busy with the book bag and seemed not to notice. In fact, there wasn’t anything for me to see except Randall’s wide back. The cloth of the bag rustled lightly. Paranoia! With sudden, irrational terror, I listened for the slosh of liquid. An apparently benign surprise? Cappuccino? A thermos of latte? A milky, sweet surprise. The special of the day: half Vienna roast, half espresso, with just the merest colorless, odorless, flavorless soupçon of sodium fluoroacetate. Randall Carey, who held a Harvard Ph.D. in history, had earned his doctorate eighteen years ago, the year Jack Andrews died. Jack was from Haverhill, the city of Hannah Duston. As a boy, Jack had written a report about the local heroine. As a man, a student in Professor Foley’s own department, Randall Carey had written a dissertation. His topic had been Hannah Duston. L
ater, he’d written a book about murder in Massachusetts, a book with a chapter about the killing of Jack Andrews. And like Claudia, like Oscar Fisch—like Gareth?—Randall Carey didn’t like dogs. My right hand squeezed the ax handle. Until a few minutes ago, I’d been splitting wood. Now, in my panic, I was struggling to reassemble a pile of ragged, splintery pieces that fit together only here and there. The whole, however, eluded me. I couldn’t begin to see its shape.

  Squinting, I watched Randall turn. When he spoke, the depth of his voice jarred and frightened me. “You can look now,” he said.

  Opening my eyes, I must simultaneously have opened my mouth in a giant O. The limp book bag lay on the bench. Positioned directly in front of me, about a yard away, Randall proffered the last two objects I expected to see: a collar and a leash. I must have gasped. Perhaps he assumed that I was pleased with his gift. The matched pair were of heavy leather. The collar was a flat band about a half-inch thick and a good two inches wide. How could anyone imagine that I would want or need such a thing? The correct collar for an Alaskan malamute is the kind that Randall had seen on my dogs, a rolled-leather collar that won’t flatten the coat around the neck. The leash was equally inappropriate. A good leather training lead is strong but not bulky; it’s narrow and thin enough to let you fold or crumple it in the palm of your hand. This leash was as thick and wide as the collar. Randall Carey had been in my kitchen, where he’d seen the leads that hung on the inside of the back door: show leads, retractable leads, leather leashes in four-foot and six-foot lengths, nylon leashes in bright colors, and not one that looked even remotely like this.

  “I’ve been a very bad boy,” Randall said meekly. His voice was odd: soft, husky, and childish.

  I didn’t catch on. Tactfully ignoring what seemed to me his peculiarly ill-chosen presents, I clutched for meaning. A very bad boy? His dissertation on Hannah Duston? He really should have told me about it.

  “You certainly have,” I informed him.

  In my own defense, let me say outright what must be obvious: that the world of purebred dogs and dog training is a remarkably wholesome place and that Holly Winter is one of its most wholesome denizens.

  To my amazement, Randall Carey dropped to his knees before me. In remarkably doglike fashion, he was actually panting. Extending the heavy leather objects upward in his hands, he caught his breath and growled softly. “Dominate me!” he pleaded. “Dominate me just the way you do those big, bad dogs!”

  Raising my eyes in what I suppose would’ve been a plea to that giant blue Siberian eye overhead, I caught sight of Cecily, who happened to be glancing out the window. My perfect tenant! I should never have filled the deep pits that Kimi had dug in the yard. In her wisdom, Kimi had tried to provide me with a choice of holes to crawl into.

  “Randall, for God’s sake,” I ordered in my best alpha-leader voice, “get the hell up!”

  Mistake!

  Falsely encouraged, Randall moaned, “I love it! I love it! I love your boots, I love your ax, I love your—”

  “Stop!” I commanded.

  His head wobbling, his mouth hanging open, his breath coming faster and faster, he groaned, “You are Hannah! I prostrate myself at your feet! I am your first victim. It is dark midnight. We are in the wigwam. The fire burns low. I lie helpless. Asleep. Above me, you raise your hatchet! I—”

  Words came to me from the Bible, words about Jael and Sisera: At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down. With the little dignity I could muster, I said in what I hoped were sexless tones, “Dr. Carey, you are suffering from a profound misunderstanding.”

  Still on his knees, he groaned, “More!”

  “You are making a fool of yourself,” I said gently.

  “Yes!” he sighed.

  I spoke very calmly. “There has been a profound misunderstanding here. I have been very naive. I thought you meant your dissertation on Hannah Duston.” Almost whispering, I told him that the best thing would be if he’d stand up and leave. “And take these, uh, things with you,” I added. “They are of no interest to me at all.”

  I turned my back on him. Still carrying the ax, I walked to the gate, opened it, and left him alone in the yard. Then I went into the house. Peering through the blinds of my study, I watched him make his dejected roly-poly way down the drive.

  My talk about myself as the alpha leader. My ax, my leather boots, my prominent display of leashes. My big, tough dogs. Combined with my interest in Hannah Duston? Carey had seen me as the modern-day Hannah: the ultimate dominatrix.

  CHAPTER 30

  I tried to extend to Randall Carey my firagile view ofi Hannah Duston, Mary Neff, Samuel Leonardson, and their Indian captors as desperate people in circumstances too desperate for me to understand. I had never had a child, never mind stood helplessly by as armed men grabbed my six-day-old baby girl and crushed her head against a tree. Hannah and her companions had not had the benefit of the books I’d consulted. Hannah hadn’t even known how to read. When she’d finally acted on what she’d called “a great Desire to come to the Ordinance of the Lords Supper,” she’d dictated those words and her entire “Confession of Faith” to her minister. I knew that Thomas had rescued the Duston children left behind. Until her return, Hannah did not. If I, too, had believed that the bondage would culminate when, still recuperating from childbirth, I was stripped naked and forced to run the gauntlet, what would I have done?

  Of the circumstances of her captors, I knew so little that I had only an educated guess about their tribe: Abenaki. I knew who Hannah’s captors were not: the original inhabitants of the area that became Haverhill, whose stone axes were displayed at Buttonwoods, where, in my pursuit of the Duston artifacts, I’d barely glanced at the drawings of dugout canoes that had carried men, women, and children soon exterminated by a “great plague,” as it was called, a European disease, smallpox, perhaps, or the plague itself. Three hundred years after Hannah’s violent escape, the rage of today’s Native Americans was scrawled in new graffiti on her statue in Haverhill. Yet Hannah’s captors, survivors themselves, had adopted the young Samuel Leonardson; they had not held his fair skin against him, but had eagerly sought human beings, regardless of origin, to replenish their own vastly diminished numbers.

  In trying to imagine myself the hostage of impulses like Randall Carey’s, I failed completely. His urge felt as distant as the three centuries that separated me from Hannah and her captors alike, as deeply beyond me as the murder of a newborn infant or the slaying and scalping of child victims, as outlandish as the Native Americans and the English colonists had seemed to one another. For the grisly acts committed by both sides, I could recite explanations I’d read: In immediately killing their captives, Indians had dispatched the young, the old, and the infirm, those who wouldn’t survive the trek to French territory. The prisoners had had practical value as replacements in families destroyed by dislocation, starvation, and disease; monetary value as goods to be traded for the necessities of survival; political value as barter for French hostages held by the English colonials; and psychological value in a war of fear. In returning to the bloodied wigwam to scalp her victims, Hannah, too, had had practical motives. She’d been convinced that in the absence of irrefutable proof, no one would believe what she and Mary and Samuel had done. She’d hoped for money. She’d received it.

  Randall Carey, in contrast, had attempted nothing grisly. The ax had remained in my hand. He had humiliated me; I’d felt like a fool. Dear God! What, if anything, was I going to say to Cecily? The whole scene, however, had been utterly unlike my silly fantasy of poisoned latte.

  Feeling sullied by the episode, I took a long hot shower. Letting the water run through my hair, I reminded myself that I was blameless. It wasn’t as if I’d paraded around half-naked in a garter belt. I wore heavy boots to split wood because I’d once seen my father drive the blade of an ax through his foot. Rita, I remembered, had once worked herself into a frenzy trying to track down the source of a quotation she’d heard attr
ibuted to Freud. “Sometimes,” Freud was supposed to have said, “a cigar is just a cigar.” I couldn’t remember whether Rita had succeeded in her quest, but I knew that in my case an ax was just an ax, and boots were just boots, no matter how Randall Carey might view them. Excluding a couple of sets of lace underwear, the only thing I owned that could possibly be construed as sexual paraphernalia was a cream-colored silk bed jacket that Steve had bought for me at Victoria’s Secret.