Evil Breeding (15 page)

Rita, followed by Artie, came rushing into the study. I pointed to the screen, which hung from the open window. “Damn it!” I kept yelling. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!” Then I came to my senses. “Oh, God. Rita, maybe there’s more. We’d better check the rest of the building. You have things worth stealing, and so does Cecily.” Cecily and her husband rent my third-floor apartment. “Oh my God! Is she home? We better make sure—”

“They’re on the Cape for the weekend,” Rita said.

“My kitchen door was locked,” I said. “So was the outside back door. But we better check your place anyway.”

Artie shook his head. “He could still be up there. Would you like me to call the police? Or do you want to do it?”

“Willie isn’t barking,” I said. “Rita’s Scottie,” I added for Artie’s benefit. A tough, scrappy character, Willie will yap over nothing. He flies at the ankles of people he knows. He always goes after mine. He has eyes of fire.

Rita panicked. “He’s dead! If he’s quiet, he’s dead!” She bolted out of my study, dashed through the hall and kitchen, flung open the door, and vanished up the stairs. Artie ran after her.

Still in shock, I wandered into the kitchen, where Steve was placidly holding Tracker in his arms and stroking her.

“No wounds that I can find,” he reported. “Where do you want me to put her?”

“Anywhere. Uh, just hold her. Someone’s been here. Someone broke in. Everything’s a mess. I need to go up to Rita’s, and I need to call the—”

A cacophony of terrier barking bit its way down through the ceiling. That’s Willie’s standard greeting. I hoped Artie had on thick socks and sturdy hiking boots, the kind meant to protect the ankles. Steve and I exchanged smiles. I felt suddenly better. “I guess Willie’s all right,” I said.

“Yes,” agreed Steve, “but is Artie?”

“He wasn’t supposed to meet Willie. That’s why we had drinks here instead of at Rita’s.”

“He was all right with your dogs.”

“They didn’t bite him,” I pointed out. On the contrary, they’d knocked themselves out to charm Artie. Kimi had dropped to the floor at his feet and wiggled her legs in the air in delight. Rowdy had presented Artie with a toy, a stuffed dinosaur lightly coated with dog saliva. The dogs had probably treated the burglar to an identical welcome.

“There is that,” Steve said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. I really am now. The worst was just realizing that someone had broken in.” I took a deep breath. “The animals are all right. Nothing else really matters. But the window’s open in my office. The burglar cut the screen. Tracker could have gotten out. I can’t believe that the dogs didn’t kill her. She went to the top of the refrigerator. I’ve been trying to teach her that it’s her place.”

“Your new computer?” Steve asked.

“Still here. Nothing’s missing that I can see. It’s just a total mess. I really do need to call the police.”

By the time the cruiser arrived, I’d verified that my TV and VCR were still in the living room. My camera sat in plain sight on a bookshelf, and my handgun, a present from my father, remained in its case in the bedroom closet. There’d been no cash in the house and no jewelry worth more than about five dollars. A sheaf of notes by the kitchen telephone looked somehow different from the way I’d left it. That slight rearrangement was the only indication that the intruder had
gone anywhere except my office. I reluctantly used my landlady key to enter the third-floor apartment. It showed no sign of forced entry, and nothing seemed to be missing. Rita reported that her possessions were where they belonged.

The police were diligent, but breaking and entering with no harm done was a dull crime; my house isn’t exactly the Gardner Museum, and scattered papers sprinkled with cat litter weren’t exactly stolen masterpieces. Playing the beam of her flashlight over the ground in the side yard, one of the officers, a young African-American woman, discovered shallow ruts left by the legs of my park bench, which had been hauled beneath the window of my study and subsequently dragged back to its original position. She seemed a little annoyed that I couldn’t remember whether the gate between the yard and the driveway had been locked or unlocked. When I told her that I kept the study window open for ventilation, she shook her head ruefully and told me to buy an air purifier.

Neighbors stopped by to ask what the trouble was. The female officer asked whether anyone had seen any odd characters hanging around. Cambridge being the diverse community of eccentrics that it is, my neighbors understood the question perfectly. Some of them remembered Miss Whitehead, a Cambridge legend who habitually strolled through Harvard Square with a large parrot perched on her shoulder. She was almost as famous as her father, Alfred North Whitehead, the great philosopher. Miss Whitehead was before my time. I wish I’d known her, but like everyone else here, I take civic pride in the contribution she made to our community and in the daily appearances of her spiritual descendants.

Odd characters? My neighbors shook their heads. It had been a typical Cambridge evening: There hadn’t been an ordinary person in sight.

P
ETER MOTHERWAY’S DEATH NOTICE
appeared rather belatedly in Saturday morning’s paper. A graveside service would be held that same afternoon at Mount Auburn Cemetery. Burial, too, I assumed. Why hold a service by an open grave and then traipse off elsewhere to dispose of the body?

When I’d finished reading the paper, I tidied the kitchen, made the bed, took a shower, put the dogs in the yard, and hurled myself into the nasty task of cleaning my study. After the police had left, I’d made the room decent for Tracker by sweeping up the spilled cat litter. Now I needed to vacuum thoroughly. Rebelling against the dirty sense that my home had been violated, I also resolved to sort through the files the intruder had tossed on the floor and to throw out everything I was never going to look at again anyway. Steve was scheduled to work all day. There was a dog show in Rhode Island, but I’d been too broke to enter, and in any case I didn’t trust my car to get us there and back. As an inducement to endure the boredom of housework and filing, I promised myself some time on the Web and a session of clicker-training the dogs.

As I was getting the vacuum out of the kitchen closet, the phone rang. After I’d said hello, a patrician voice said,
“Christopher Motherway here. You had made an appointment with my grandfather.”

Had
made an appointment? What was this
had?
The pluperfect of death?

“Has something happened to him?” I blurted out.

“You seem to have forgotten that there have been two deaths in the family.”

“Your grandfather,” I said firmly, “suggested another meeting, but we did not make an appointment. If you’ve called to cancel, there has been some miscommunication. There is nothing to cancel.”

“A future meeting would be …” Christopher paused. “Further
dates
would be inappropriate.” From Christopher’s tone, you’d have assumed I was some floozy who’d been wiggling her hips at his elderly grandfather. I’d interviewed the senior Mr. Motherway in his own home, for heaven’s sake; I hadn’t lured him away on a spree of barhopping. The idea was ridiculous. Could the octogenarian Mr. Motherway be the victim of unrequited attraction? He had, after all, been eager to see me almost immediately after the death of his wife. He had subsequently suggested an additional interview for which I saw no need. Christopher knew his grandfather better than I did; maybe the elderly Mr. Motherway did, indeed, have
designs
on me. If so, Christopher should be speaking to his grandfather, not to me. I felt insulted. I was no adventuress!

The conversation ended with curt good-byes. Twenty minutes later, as I was straightening the mess in my study, I finally remembered that I had neglected to offer condolences to Christopher on his father’s death. The son’s snottiness was no excuse. Neither was the emotional aftermath of the break-in. I made a mental note to write a sympathy letter to Peter’s widow, Jocelyn.

By one o’clock, my study was clean. Tracker had vanished when I’d started the vacuum cleaner, but as I’d sorted, filed, and discarded paper, she’d reappeared and installed herself on the mouse pad to supervise me with the disdain of a wealthy employer who finds it utterly impossible to hire good help these days. With Tracker securely settled in her tidy
abode, I treated myself and the dogs to clicker training. Having had less success than I’
d
hoped in encouraging Rowdy and Kimi to howl, I took the radical step of following the advice of clicker-training experts instead of relying on the wisdom of a certain know-it-all who’d decided that she and her brilliant dogs were the exceptions to the rules of operant conditioning. That is, I trained the dogs separately. Working on her own, Kimi rapidly began to vocalize. In subsequent sessions, I’d click and treat only when she emitted an approximation of a howl. Rowdy made stupendous progress, especially because a fire engine happened to pass during his session.

With satisfaction and self-confidence, I planted myself in my orderly study in front of my computer and made a list of the names of people connected to Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, the Morris and Essex shows, and the Motherway family. If I could tame the wild howl of the malamute, what couldn’t I bring to heel? Short answer: It’s dogs that heel, not Microsoft mice and certainly not the spiders that spin the World Wide Web. The number of Web sites about the Dodge Foundation and the Dodge Poetry Festival had exploded in the short time since I’d last checked. Unless I was careful,
Dodge
swamped me with information about used cars and dealerships. A woman named Roberta Motherway-Simpson was an evidently successful jazz singer from Calgary. Visiting the anagram Web page, I found that the letters in
B. Robert Motherway
could be scrambled to spell
Robber-worthy team.
Gee, whiz.
Peter Motherway
yielded the rather touching
Empty heart wore.

As usual, searches for names yielded zillions of bothersome genealogy pages and the Web sites of alumni associations planning reunions and seeking lost members of classes. According to Christina Motherway’s death notice, her maiden name was Heinck. A genealogy page showed a girl named Christina Heinck who’d died in Westford, Massachusetts, in 1914 at the age of two. A relative? Or no connection? B. Robert Motherway had failed to stay in touch with his Princeton, New Jersey, high school. I didn’t snitch on him. If anything, it was his public high school that snitched; the
aristocratic Mr. Motherway wasn’t quite so blue-blooded as he presented himself. The presumed buddy of M. Hartley Dodge, Jr., B. Robert Motherway had graduated from Princeton University; I’d seen his framed diploma. He’d gone to high school, however, in the other Princeton, the New Jersey town; at the university, the young Motherway had been a local boy. If the young Dodge, the heir to two fortunes, had befriended a townie, he’d been far more egalitarian than I’d ever have supposed. Turning from my list of names to a topic I hoped to research, I looked for information about Nazi activities in the United States in the years preceding World War II. Again I was deluged, this time with a zillion sites about neo-Nazis in the present day.

Having imposed chaos on order, I signed off. As if to continue the Web’s job of flooding me with information, my snail mail brought another mysterious packet from my anonymous friend. Enemy? By now, the block capitals were familiar. Depositing the big brown envelope unopened on the kitchen table, I spoke aloud. No one heard me but the dogs. “Déjà vu all over again,” I said. As I didn’t bother explaining to the dogs, what I had in mind was a wish-you-were-here postcard from Acapulco that I’d received a few months earlier. On one side was a photo of turquoise ocean bordered by a gorgeous beach. The other side bore Mexican stamps as well as my name and address, and a friendly message that actually did include the phrase “wish you were here.” The card was signed by someone named Linda. The handwriting was as legible as it was unfamiliar. Besides wishing I were there, Linda was having a wonderful time, or so she wrote. I had no idea who she was. I have never found out.

So, déjà vu all over again. I opened the brown envelope and slid its contents onto the table. One item was a repeat: the same old Soloxine leaflet. “Someone uses a lot of this stuff,” I informed the dogs. “Or works for a vet?”

This time, however, the leaflet about the thyroid supplement was stapled to another document. The attachment was, of all things, the program from Christina Motherway’s funeral.
Program?
Is that the right word?
Handout? Flier? Circular?
I hope not. Even
brochure
strikes me as an unsuitably
commercial term for the folded piece of expensive-looking cream-colored paper headed
IN MEMORIAM
, with Christina Motherway’s name engraved underneath.
Engraved under
neath. A pun? No, a morbid turn of thought. A minister had conducted the service, which seemed to have been arranged by someone with all the imagination of Linda from Acapulco, who’d been having a wonderful time and wished I were there. Funerals, though, like men’s suits, were probably places where imagination was in bad taste. Mrs. Motherway’s funeral had opened with an opening prayer and closed with a closing prayer. The minister had delivered the eulogy. If family members or friends had spoken, their names hadn’t made it into print. I somehow had the feeling that B. Robert Motherway and his grandson, Christopher, had dressed unobtrusively in dark suits, whereas Peter had shown up for his mother’s funeral in an ill-fitting sport coat, tawdry trousers, shoes of the wrong color, and an unmatched pair of socks.

Did I miss the point? No. It was neither the Soloxine leaflet nor the funeral program, but the conjunction of the two: thyroid medication
and
the death of Christina Motherway. The most intriguing item from the brown envelope was, however, a third piece of paper, a recent-looking photocopy of an old birth certificate issued by the town of Westford, Massachusetts, for a female infant born in 1912. The baby’s name? Christina Heinck. The implication was murder: thyrotoxicosis, poisoning, death by thyroid storm. The unnatural death of a woman who had assumed the name of a long-dead child? I avoid funerals. Still, if I hurried, I could get to Mount Auburn Cemetery in time for Peter Motherway’s.