Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  Now that I’d started the fight, my goal was to move it out of the closet. Stretching my arms over the snarling tangle of dogs, I sent my hands flying down past the flashing teeth, got a grip on the bag, hauled it up and out of the closet, and upended it on the linoleum. As I’d hoped, when the twenty pounds of loose kibble hit the floor, the dogs switched into what malamute people call “survival mode.” Ignoring Randall Carey and his deadly meat, the dogs scrambled and snatched until the two-dog melee transformed itself into a single beastly, roaring swirl of flying fur, crashing bodies, fighting jaws, and gnashing teeth.

  Randall Carey, meat and poison in hand, took a step toward the battling dogs.

  I turned toward the hallway, toward the closet where I’d stowed the ax. Its blade was sharp and heavy. The muscles in my arms and shoulders swelled.

  “Hannah.” Carey’s voice caressed the name.

  That persistent, mocking Hannah stopped me. I felt suddenly sick to my stomach. I am not Hannah Duston! I thought violently.

  Brushing past the dangerous diversion I’d created, I grabbed a wooden kitchen chair, raised it, and, with its seat shielding me and its sharp legs projecting forward, gave a survival-mode snarl worthy of both my dogs, launched myself and my domestic makeshift weapon at Randall Carey, and drove that murderous son of a bitch away from my animals and across the kitchen until his back slammed into the refrigerator. With a quick yank, I jerked the chair toward me and aimed one of its legs directly at the center of his face.

  In a reflex effort to save his sight, Randall Carey dropped his shoulders, lowered his head, and flexed his arms inward at the elbows.

  “Listen to me, you bastard!” I growled. “No one hurts my dogs! NO ONE!”

  Like Jael, who put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman’s hammer, I drove the wooden legs of my weapon forward. As Randall Carey’s hands flew protectively toward his face, he still grasped the package of raw meat and the bottle of sodium fluoroacetate. As he cried out in terror, one leg of the chair, one spike, collided with the open bottle. Sisera asked for water. Jael brought him milk. Sisera drank willingly. Randall Carey swallowed his poison by accident.

  Sodium fluoroacetate: A few drops can kill a horse.

  But not within seconds.

  Like Sisera, at my feet, Randall Carey bowed, he fell, he lay down. “Hannah,” he murmured lovingly. “Hannah.” A smile crossed his face. “Hannah, I have been a very bad boy.”

  CHAPTER 33

  As a dust, sodium filuoroacetate is lethal to inhale. The liquid? I’m still not sure of the potency, if any, of the fumes. For what it’s worth, Kevin Dennehy informs me that the bottle contained a highly dilute solution. When Randall Carey fell at my feet, however, I knew only that I didn’t want to die with him. Also, I had a dog fight to break up, and, of course, I had to get Rowdy and Kimi safely away from Randall Carey before they decided to lick his face.

  Kibble crunching beneath my feet, I backslid into my old role of tough alpha leader. Grabbing Rowdy’s and Kimi’s collars, I ordered, “Cut it the hell out!” I have spent thousands of hours training these dogs. Still, I’m always astounded when they obey.

  Just as the dogs fell silent, the back door to the kitchen crashed open. In his beefy left hand, Kevin Dennehy held one of the big iron wood wedges I’d stashed by the stacked firewood. In his right, he brandished my sledgehammer. Naturally, he reminded me of Hannah Duston. By now, everyone and everything reminded me of Hannah Duston.

  I nodded my head toward Randall Carey. “Sodium fluoroacetate,” I said. “Be careful what you touch.”

  Thus it was that Randall Carey did not die alone. Jack Andrews hadn’t died alone, either. Neither had George Foley. Randall Carey had lingered to eat and drink their agony. Randall Carey, too, perished in torment. For all I know, he may yet endure it. I can’t help wondering whether he treated that copy of Dante’s Inferno on his coffee table as a sort of Damned Yankee guide to his own ultimate destination. I assume that he feels right at home.

  While I’m on the subject of home, let me report that, in a fashion disquietingly reminiscent of Gareth Andrews, I subsequently developed a sort of paranoia about my kitchen. Rita said I wasn’t really paranoid. Rather, I was suffering from a phobia caused by post-traumatic stress. “You’re bound to feel contaminated by the whole experience,” she explained.

  The symptom I exhibited was a terrified conviction that a lethal dose of sodium fluoroacetate had seeped into the linoleum or lurked elsewhere in the kitchen—under the refrigerator?—where, sooner or later, one of my dogs would accidentally ingest it. I explained precisely that to the insurance adjuster, a wonderfully sympathetic woman who disagreed with both Rita and me by deciding that I wasn’t crazy at all.

  “I know that the poison isn’t going to come flying out of the floor and leap into their mouths,” I told her. “But what if something spills on the linoleum? And they lap it up?”

  “They’re malamutes,” she agreed. “They’ll eat anything. I have bloodhounds myself. I’d be just as careful as you are.” She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a wallet-size photo album packed with pictures of her dogs—not snapshots, either, but professional portraits taken by none other than Violet Wish.

  The insurance company bought me a new refrigerator and paid to have the entire kitchen floor and cabinets torn out and replaced. The cream-and-terra-cotta wallpaper had turned a depressing beige and rust, anyway, and I don’t miss the old flooring at all. The new colors are cherry-red and white, and I finally have real tile instead of a linoleum look-alike that never did.

  Once the work was complete, my fear of hidden poison completely vanished. Consequently, Rita finally quit nagging me to spend a week at that Eastern mystical stress-reduction and lifestyle-change ashram in the Berkshires.

  “Look what it did for Kevin!” she kept cajoling. Then she’d lower her voice and confide, “Kevin did some deep work there. He is making tremendous progress toward scripting his own life instead of accepting the roles assigned to him by others. His mother, for example. And male authority figures. Kevin has some major issues with authority.”

  “He’s a cop,” I reminded her. “He’s supposed to have authority issues.”

  I weaseled the truth out of Steve when I took the dogs to his clinic to update their kennel-cough immunizations and accidentally overheard a whispered conversation between the two young veterinarians he’d hired the previous summer.

  I confronted Steve. “They think it’s very peculiar,” I told him, “and somewhat repulsive. What I think is that it’s irreverent, disgusting, and highly unsanitary. So what the hell is it doing there?”

  At first, Steve tried to convince me that the carcass in his cold-storage area was the remains of a client’s beloved pet deer. Pot-bellied pigs, he maintained, were on their way out. The trendy new exotic pet was—

  I interrupted him. “Venison? Since when do you hang the body of a pet and let it ripen?”

  I got the whole story out of Steve. The only meditation Kevin had engaged in had been premeditation: He’d made sure that Rita hadn’t actually known any of the people at the retreat center in the Berkshires. Furthermore, just in case he returned with a deer, he’d made a secret arrangement with Steve to share the venison in exchange for storage space, and Steve, who was leaving for Minneapolis, had enlisted two of his vet techs in the conspiracy. Kevin’s mother, as I’ve said, won’t allow meat in her house. His plans in place, Kevin had taken off for a week with some police-academy buddies at a hunting camp in northern Maine.

  The part that astounded me was the deer. “Kevin? Steve, I’d’ve bet anything he couldn’t get through Bambi dry-eyed.”

  With a guilty look, Steve mumbled, “His friend Phil shot it. But don’t mention it.”

  “Of course not,” I promised. “Who am I to sever the bloodied knots of male bonding?”

  Bonding reminds me: Oscar Fisch? The recovery movement? Dogs? Survivors? The inner child? The canine inner child? W
ell, when I mailed that package to Oscar Fisch, I knew it was a long shot. I mean, when Oscar stopped in to order me to quit harassing Claudia, his irrational fear of Rowdy and Kimi was palpable. There was Oscar’s antidog wife, too. But who could be scared of a retired racing greyhound, for heaven’s sake? As for Claudia, the sanctuaries of dog worship teem with interfaith marriage, and it was even possible that if Oscar converted, she might eventually realize that if there’s one creature on earth that’s the true survivor of financial exploitation and abuse, it’s a greyhound that failed as a moneymaker on the track and would have been put to death if it weren’t for the greyhound rescue movement.

  Oscar read the book I sent: Adopting the Racing Greyhound. Instead of phoning me about it, he sent a note to say, as one says in the recovery movement, that he heard me. “I am convinced,” I wrote back, “that the best therapy for the child within is the dog without.” Although Francis Avenue is only a pleasant walk from my house, especially pleasant if your walking companion is a greyhound, Oscar also mailed me a snapshot of Melody, as his new greyhound is called, together with a long letter all about the letter he and Claudia had sent to Shaun McGrath’s family.

  Claudia, I reflected, made a habit of marrying men who put their sentiments in writing. I wished I’d asked Randall Carey how he’d gotten hold of the note that Jack Andrews had obviously intended for Tracy Littlefield, the supposed suicide note in which Jack had actually announced his decision not to pursue the “lost cause” of making a champion out of a dog that no judge cared for. My guess was that Jack had just finished writing his note to Tracy when Randall Carey arrived in his office. If so, the last words Jack ever wrote had been meant for her: “Your disappointment is my only regret. Love, Jack.” I reminded myself to make sure that Tracy saw Jack’s note.

  The second letter found with Jack’s body had, I was certain, been written to Randall Carey himself. Remember?

  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

  My hunch was that Jack had mailed it to Randall Carey just after their meeting on the Friday before the murder and that Randall had received it the day he killed Jack. Or maybe, mistrustful of the mail service, Jack had delivered it to Randall Carey’s house. Jack’s note to Tracy would move her deeply. His compassion for Randall Carey moved me.

  “I still don’t understand,” I told Rita, “why Randall Carey was stupid enough to write that chapter about Jack’s murder. The book, I sort of understand. It was meant as a potboiler. He needed money, so he wrote a piece of sensationalist trash. But why draw attention to Jack’s murder when everyone thought it was solved?”

  “Think about it,” Rita said.

  “I have! What hits me is that the chapter was the one place I came across the idea that Jack’s signature on the insurance policy was a forgery. No one else so much as hinted that Shaun McGrath had forged Jack’s signature. I wondered about that. I even asked Randall Carey who’d told him, but he said he didn’t remember. If there’d been some question about who’d committed the murder, then maybe it would’ve made sense for Carey to strengthen the case against Shaun McGrath. But no one doubted Shaun’s guilt.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Rita said, “because Randall Carey’s whole psychology is so foreign to you. Let’s step back. Why plagiarize a dissertation he could easily have written himself?”

  “He didn’t have time. He had to hand it in so he wouldn’t have to pay another semester’s tuition.”

  “He could’ve cited the book, he could’ve used it, he could’ve acknowledged his indebtedness to it, he could’ve applied for a new student loan, he could’ve gotten a job to support himself while he finished his dissertation. He had dozens of options, and he would’ve known what they were. He did not have to plagiarize. If he lifted whole sentences and paragraphs, he did the same thing he subsequently did with the chapter on the murder.”

  “Which was?”

  “He flirted with getting caught.”

  “Punishment,” I said. “The leather, uh, fetish.”

  “It ain’t called bondage and discipline for nothing. Remember what he said to you? When he gave you that collar and leash? When he—”

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “He said, ‘I’ve been a very bad boy.’ He said it to you, he said it in his plagiarism, he said it in the chapter about Jack Andrews’s murder.”

  “But, Rita, when he really did get caught, when Jack found out about his dissertation, when Professor Foley found out, when I did, he wasn’t exactly gratified. He murdered them, and he tried to murder me.”

  “Holly, he didn’t want the product, the actual outcome in reality. What he was driven to repeat was the process, the seeking, the emotional brinkmanship, if you will. Where the excitement lay, for him, was in creating and recreating a perpetual tension between fantasy and reality. Reality would have spoiled the fantasy. As I said, he flirted with getting caught.”

  “Or, as Kevin said, the guy was a real nut case.”

  “I can’t say that I’d disagree,” Rita conceded.

  Speaking of disagreement! If I may quote Estelle Grant, chacun à son goût and all that, but I really never thought that Multitudes in the Valley of Decision would suit even a minuscule press that catered to readers with specialized tastes, never mind the two gigantic New York publishing houses that got into a major bidding war over the manuscript and drove the price up so high that Estelle received an advance that would support me and my dogs for the next century.

  Estelle has, of course, quit temping. She now devotes herself full-time to her new book, which is about monks and morticians. According to Estelle, it’s really about liberation from psychic bondage. She got the idea at Randall Carey’s memorial service. We went together. Ordinarily, I will do anything to avoid funeral rites of all kinds. I made an exception in the case of Randall Carey’s service because it seemed to me that if ever a departed soul needed prayers, it was his, and that even my insincere muttering about forgiveness would be better than nothing. Also, since it was a memorial service, not a funeral, his dead body wouldn’t be there. What was there was his mother. Alive. Until I saw her, I couldn’t imagine what sort of person would hold a memorial service for a double murderer. She was a huge woman with a fierce, hawklike face. She wore a black leather coat with gloves to match. Boots, too. Black leather boots.

  Still on the topic of souls, women, and all black, let me update you on Brat Andrews. After considerable soul-searching and a consultation with Rita, I asked Tracy Littlefield’s permission to tell Brat about her unknown half-brother, Drew. Tracy granted it. Brat was, naturally, more than slightly shaken by the news. She has since seen pictures of Drew and has insisted on helping Tracy with his college tuition, but she hasn’t yet met Drew face to face. I don’t know whether he knows about her. Or about Gareth, either. Although Gareth is now taking his medication and is reported to be doing as well as he ever does, I can’t imagine that he’ll ever be ready to meet Drew. I’m not supposed to tell you anything else about Brat. Actually, I don’t know any more. Rita really does respect the confidentiality of her clients.

  Finally, Rita’s bet. And a few words about Hannah Duston. Treat this as therapy, okay? Privileged communication. And so far I know, there really is no proof that Hannah’s captors were Abenaki. That was just Professor Foley’s best guess. From what I’ve read, it was a good one, though. The western branch of the Abenaki inhabited what are now the states of Vermont and New Hampshire. In the seventeenth century, epidemics reduced their population from about ten thousand to five hundred. The English razed Abenaki villages and paid bounties for Abenaki scalps. The survivors, Jesuit converts who sided with the French Catholics against the English Protestants, traveled in family bands that took captives. The roving bands often used birc
hbark canoes. They eventually returned to longhouses, in Canada, for example, but when on the move, they stayed in wig-wams. So it computes. Hannah’s captors. Abenaki. But here’s the kicker: According to the Abenaki belief system, the Abenaki are descended from animals and retain so strong a continuing spiritual relationship that animals and people are, in essence, two forms of the same being. Every band was linked not just to animals in general but to a particular species, a totemic animal. Sound familiar? A book I read showed a present-day Abenaki woman sitting in front of her house in Vermont. Just guess what she was patting.