Evil Breeding

by Susan Conant

  “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.

  Chapter Seventeen

  PETER 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 underneath. 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.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST eulogies, prayers, hymns, memories, or tears. What bothers me about funerals is the presence of a dead body. Consequently, I didn’t exactly attend the service for Peter Motherway. Instead, I observed it through Rita’s binoculars while pretending to scan for migrating warblers. Rita made me borrow a tan hat that she considered fashionable for birding. On me, it looked stupid. She also insisted on accompanying me. “Birding is a companionable activity,” she informed me. “Birds of a feather! You’ll be more credible if there are two of us.”

  “I’ll be credible if I go alone. Plenty of novice birders go to Mount Auburn,” I countered. “You, for example. I just don’t want the Motherways to notice me. I don’t want to look as if I’m spying on the funeral.”

  It was Rita’s fault that we arrived ten minutes late. She had to change into one of her khaki outfits. In case the Motherways recognized my car, we took hers. After we drove through the main gate, I took a guess about the location of the grave. I directed Rita to the right, then the left until we were on the hill that overlooks the new part of the cemetery. In the few minutes since we’d left home, the sky had darkened. Pausing by a tree with a gnarled trunk, I trained the binoculars up into its leafy canopy and then downhill to the small group of people assembled for Peter Motherway’s service and burial.

  “Kevin’s there,” I reported to Rita. “He looks exactly like what you see in movies when cops go to a funeral. He’s even wearing a trench coat.”

  “We should have, too. It’s probably going to rain,” Rita said. “If it does, that’s it. I don’t want my binoculars getting ruined.”

  Like everything else Rita owned, the binoculars were not only expensive but worth the money they’d cost. If a bird had landed on the shoulder of a mourner or a mortician, it would have appeared before my eyes in sharp focus. The only plumage in sight, however, consisted of the dark suits worn by the father and the son of the deceased; B. Robert and Christopher Motherway were disconcertingly dressed exactly as I’d envisioned in imagining Christina Motherway’s funeral. Peter Motherway’s widow looked, as usual, more like an employee than like a member of the family. Jocelyn’s navy blue suit and white blouse would have done so nicely as a nanny’s uniform that I had to quell the impulse to check for a toddler at her side. Her face was as expressionless as if the body in the shiny casket had been a stranger’s. A remarkably young man with white-blond hair read from a small black book. He seemed too young to be a minister, but his reversed collar and his obviously central role in the ceremony said otherwise.

  “Let me look,” Rita demanded.

  I handed over the binoculars, which were, after all, hers. “Kevin does look like a cop in a movie,” she conceded after a few seconds. “Maybe he’s seen The Thomas Crown Affair too many times.”

  Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway? But the real star was Mount Auburn Cemetery. I hadn’t seen the movie for years. It wasn’t possible, was it, that half of it had been filmed at Mount Auburn? But that’s how I remembered it.

  “The tall men who look so much alike are Peter’s father and son,” I informed Rita. “B. Robert Motherway and Christopher.”

  “Distinguished,” Rita commented.

  “The woman is Peter’s wife. Widow.” There was no need to describe Jocelyn. She was the only woman there. The group was pitifully small: Peter’s father, his son, his widow, Kevin Dennehy, the minister, a few men who radiated the professionally glum dignity of undertakers. And one more man.

  “Rita, let me take another look.”

  Peering again, I rested the index finger of my right hand on the little wheel of the binoculars and forced the anomalous face in and out of focus. “The art student,” I said aloud.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know what he’s doing here,” I said more to myself than to Rita. “Steve and I saw him at the Gardner. First in the restaurant. Then upstairs. He was acting odd. He was in front of the John Singer Sargent portrait of Mrs. Gardner. He was on his knees in front of it. He seemed to be praying.”

  “How bizarre.” Rita, I remind you, is a clinical psychologist. When she says bizarre, that’s exactly what she means.

  “It was,” I agreed. “I also saw him here. At Mount Auburn. He was acting normal then, I guess. He was just walking along.” I paused. “He has a strange tattoo on his arm. We noticed it in the restaurant. I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be. Steve couldn’t either. It was very o
rnate.”

  Two days later, on Monday, I repeated the phrase. “It was very ornate,” I said to Kevin Dennehy. “With curlicues, I think. I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be.”

  “Heart with ‘Mother,’” Kevin ventured.

  “That’s exactly what it wasn’t,” I said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “IT WASN’T AN ANCHOR, either,” I told Kevin. “Or a dolphin. It certainly wasn’t a portrait of a dog. I’m pretty sure there weren’t any letters or words. I think it was an object, a fancy object I couldn’t recognize. Or that’s what I thought at the time. Kevin, who is he? And what was he doing at Peter Motherway’s funeral?”

  “We weren’t introduced,” Kevin said rather resentfully. “I wasn’t invited back to the house.” He added, with a trace of smirk, “I wouldn’t make too much of that genuflecting. A lot of people are nuts on the subject, and the Globe and the Herald fan the flames. Sells papers. You see that crazy letter in the Globe? Typical case in point.”

  “Today’s Globe?” I always read the letters, but this morning, Monday, I’d made myself skip the paper entirely. I hadn’t done any housework, either, and I hadn’t trained the dogs, returned phone calls, or even checked my e-mail. Instead, I’d frittered away my time drafting and polishing my column. Question frequently asked of freelance writers: What do you do when you don’t feel inspired? Answer: Write anyway. The payment for my column wouldn’t buy me a third dog, but it would help to feed the two I already had. Hey, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote for money. The key issue for him, as I understand it, wasn’t feeling artistically inspired; no, no, it was feeling desperately broke. Of course, writing about new approaches to the ancient problem of flea control isn’t exactly a literary achievement on the order of The Great Gatsby. I do understand that. My goals are modest. But by comparison with F. Scott’s, so are my needs. By comparison, Rowdy and Kimi are a bargain. Which would you rather support? Yourself and two dogs? Or Scott and Zelda?