Evil Breeding

by Susan Conant

  This vanity plate? HSM GSD.

  To a dog person, GSD means one thing: German shepherd dog. Having decoded the second part of the license plate, I understood the first. HSM: Haus Motherway. Haus Motherway German Shepherd Dogs. B. Robert Motherway’s kennel. Then I finally recognized the car as the limo-like one I’d seen in the Motherways’ barn. B. Robert Motherway’s vanity plate. B. Robert Motherway’s car. Was he in it? Was Christopher? Jocelyn? Two of the surviving Motherways? All three? Only a short distance ahead of me, the car came almost to a stop before turning right onto Shady Hill Road.

  Feeling foolish, I imitated war-movie G.I.’s by crawling flat on my belly to the end of the fence and the hedge. The big car halted. For a minute or two, it just waited there, its engine running, its headlights on. A soft glow came from the interior of the car, but I couldn’t see in. The windows were tinted, I realized. Also, my position on the ground made a wretched vantage point. Suddenly a dark figure crossed from the opposite side of Coolidge Avenue so quickly that it almost seemed to materialize at the front passenger door of the big car. I’d noticed the purposeful air of the tattooed man. His purpose, or part of it, was now clear: He was keeping an appointment. In response to his presence, the door opened. The interior lights went on. My view was now unimpeded. At the wheel was Jocelyn. In the passenger seat, holding a gun to her head, sat B. Robert Motherway. I understood his purpose, too. He was delivering Jocelyn to her executioner.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  HERE IN CAMBRIDGE, if you want to spend a pleasant, companionable afternoon in the outdoors, you and your friends stroll through Mount Auburn Cemetery. You chat, admire the trees, and walk on the remains of dead people. In Maine, where I grew up, you do more or less the same thing. You stroll through the woods chatting and admiring the trees, but instead of passively treading on corpses, you create them. Then you take them home and eat them for dinner. They aren’t human, of course. Still, the recreational similarities outweigh the differences: fresh air, camaraderie, nature, death.

  I am a decent shot. I own two guns. My twenty-two was at my father’s place in Maine. My Smith & Wesson revolver might as well have been. It was safely and uselessly stored in the bedroom closet in my house on Concord Avenue. Besides, I was a dog writer and a dog trainer. The cop was Kevin Dennehy. Jocelyn’s fears had been rational; her life was in jeopardy. It was time to call the police. Or it would be, as soon as I could get away. For the moment, I didn’t dare to move. I’d taken refuge on surprisingly cold and damp earth between the scratchy hedge and the wooden fence. Now that the man had appeared and the car door was open, I was afraid that any movement I made would set the shrubbery rustling. I’d stuck my head out far enough beyond the end of the fence and hedge to discover that they bordered a driveway. It offered no cover. If I leaped out and bolted, I’d be dead. For now, I could do nothing but listen and watch.

  There was little to hear. B. Robert spoke softly to Jocelyn. He must have ordered her to move the car beyond the driveway and then turn off the engine and the headlights. She did. The door reopened and the interior lights again came on. I could see that he was holding a silver flask, the kind of old-fashioned one I associate with flappers, Prohibition, and bathtub gin. The gun was in his left hand, the flask in his right. He put the flask down for a moment. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but he must have produced some pills from somewhere, because when he spoke, he said, “Swallow them. All of them.” Jocelyn must have complied. It was her habit. Without a gun at her head, she’d probably have obeyed. I couldn’t see her, but I heard gasping and sputtering. Maybe the flask really did contain gin.

  B. Robert was unsympathetic. “Pig! Look what you’ve done to my dashboard. Dirty pig!”

  I remembered reading somewhere that as an epithet, pig was far more insulting in German than in English.

  As B. Robert repeated it, the tattooed man moved around the car to the driver’s side and opened the front door. “The keys,” he told Jocelyn.

  Reaching toward the ignition, B. Robert said, “I’ll take them. You get her. Gently! Not a mark on her! Suicide, suicide, suicide! The dirty little pig will soon be all nice and clean. Off we go!” With that, he stepped out of the car, waited until Jocelyn had done the same, and then threw a switch on the door, an automatic lock, I assumed. I heard a click. Then both doors closed. Motherway didn’t suffer from my sense of vehicular social inferiority. With Jocelyn between them, the men crossed Coolidge Avenue and disappeared into the darkness by the fence. Was the locked gate here? It seemed to me that it wasn’t across from the houses, but across from the Cambridge Cemetery, in other words, between me and my car.

  I forced myself to count to sixty. Then I did it again four more times before wiggling from under the hedge and emerging on Shady Hill Road. Trying to adopt the unobservant, inner-directed manner of a fitness walker on her regular route, I made no effort to conceal myself, but strode boldly to the corner, turned left, and headed toward my car. The impulse to sprint was almost overwhelming. I restrained it. As I’d done on the way from the car, I avoided the Mount Auburn side of the street. Casting my eyes in that direction, listening hard, I neither saw nor heard a thing; Jocelyn and her captors must already have entered the cemetery. Even after I passed the entrance to the Cambridge Cemetery and found myself squeezed into the road by the guardrail, I persisted in my superstitious resistance to crossing Coolidge Avenue. Instead, keeping an eye out for cars, I broke into a run at the edge of the blacktop. Pounding along, I managed not to worry about Rowdy. Instead, I focused on a mental map of the area and searched it for the location of the nearest pay phone. At the Mount Auburn Star Market? Or in the opposite direction, at the shopping mall on Arsenal Street? The two spots were about the same distance from my car, weren’t they? So the direction didn’t really matter. Whichever way I went, I’d be talking to the police in no time. And if Christopher Motherway were lurking around somewhere? If he were part of the plan? If he were meeting his fellow conspirators inside Mount Auburn? Or keeping a lookout? Well, the chances were negligible that he’d noticed the Bronco in the parking lot by the condo building. If he had? Why would he break into my car and steal Rowdy, for heaven’s sake? Not that Rowdy would have put up a fuss. On the contrary, Rowdy’d have happily gone with Christopher Motherway or anyone else. In the short time it took me to reach the parking lot, my heart shifted to the middle of my chest, where it kicked hard in an alarming effort to escape captivity. I leaned my weight on the Bronco and peered through the windows. Rowdy’s crate was there. It looked empty.

  Then his tags jingled. I gave myself a second to recover before I opened the door. Flopping into the driver’s seat and jamming the key in the ignition, I said, “Rowdy, I am always glad to see you. The mall it is. I think it’s a minute or two closer than Mount Auburn Street.”

  In response, he stirred. Again, I heard his tags. I heard them clearly. Why? Because the damned Bronco made not a sound. The engine didn’t even try to start. The battery didn’t whine. It didn’t whir. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from turning the key. I removed it from the ignition, reinserted it, and tried again. Nothing. I held my foot on the gas pedal and again turned the key. Nothing. I waited thirty seconds. Then I turned the key ten times in a row. At a minimum, the battery was dead. Possibly, the whole car was.

  Damn, damn, damn! Should I go to the lobby of the condo building and plead with someone to call the police? But I’d need to talk to the police myself. Among other things, I’d need to make it clear that sirens were taboo. If wailing cruisers zoomed into Mount Auburn, Mr. Motherway would abandon the plan to fake a suicide. Instead of holding the silent gun to Jocelyn’s head, he’d shoot her, wouldn’t he? Could I convince someone in the condo complex to let me use a phone? I was covered with dirt I’d picked up crawling on the ground. My face was stinging where the hedge’s branches had scratched me. Did I look persuasively desperate? Or just disreputable?

  Damn it! Mount Auburn Cemetery simply had to be patrolled at night. I
t was a sculpture garden! Every museum had security guards. Mount Auburn was an outdoor museum. There had to be security guards who prevented theft and vandalism. As soon as Peter Motherway’s body had been found at the Gardner vault, the security precautions had probably been doubled. At no distance from me, just over the Mount Auburn fence, were trained professionals whose principal task was to protect the cemetery from intruders. I’d seen no sign of them because I’d stuck to the wrong side of Coolidge Avenue. Did the guards carry guns? I hoped so. But they certainly had walkie-talkies of some kind. Who’d hire guards without providing a means for them to summon help? And that rumor about the keys given to top birders? The idea was pure Cambridge; it had to be true.

  At the back of my mind lurked memories of the Gardner heist. The thieves had succeeded for one reason: Contrary to explicit orders never to admit anyone to Fenway Court, the museum guards had opened the door to robbers who’d masqueraded as members of the Boston police. Then there was the matter of Peter Motherway’s body. The night he’d been garroted, the night his corpse had been taken to Mount Auburn and transported to the Gardner vault, there’d been guards on duty, hadn’t there? Fewer than there must be now, I told myself. Now there’d be plenty of guards. Now they’d be hypervigilant. For all I knew, B. Robert Motherway and his lackey were already in custody. For all I knew, Jocelyn had already been saved by a courageous key-carrying birder. Still, purely as a matter of form, I assured myself, as little more than a courtesy, I had to make sure, didn’t I? And whatever I did, wherever I went, I had to go on foot. But not alone.

  “Come on, buddy!” I said inspiringly to Rowdy, who, of course, would’ve been perfectly comfortable walking alone through the middle of a cemetery crowded with the newly risen ghosts of everyone ever interred there. “We’re going for a nice little stroll by the graveyard at night. And we’re not going to be afraid, are we? Not us! And you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to whistle past that graveyard! We’re going to whistle a song that says you never walk alone. Because you don’t, do you, chum? Not when I’m around.”

  Thus did the bold alpha leader of our two-creature pack boost the confidence of her trembling subordinate. So successful was her pep talk that within half a minute, she was trotting along behind him, his leather leash clutched in her sweaty palm. “The bit about whistling,” I confessed in a whisper, “was strictly metaphorical. I’m not actually going to whistle aloud, okay? Especially after we cross the street and get to the cemetery fence. No cars coming! Rowdy, this way!” Across the street we went and onto the grass that carpeted the area between the pavement and the chain-link. Now that we were practically inside the cemetery, I directed my attention to looking and listening for a sign of a guard on night patrol. Birders would be silent, wouldn’t they? Or did they night-visit in chattering flocks?

  Rowdy expressed his anxiety about murderers, graveyards, and assorted other petrifying threats both real and imaginary by casually lifting his leg on the fence and then on a utility pole. The streetlight mounted atop the pole cast none of its light into Mount Auburn. Its principal effect was to dim my night vision. Through the chain-link, I saw nothing in the cemetery and, indeed, nothing of the cemetery. It might have been a black hole in outer space. Not five minutes earlier, I’d assured myself that Mount Auburn would be thick with armed guards. If so, they were on stealthy patrol. The call notes of birds or birders? There were none. I strained to hear footfalls. Ah, but would the guards necessarily be on foot? Mount Auburn had more than ten miles of roads and paths. In the daytime, maintenance crews used trucks and golf carts. If Rowdy and I just kept heading along the fence toward that never-used gate, I was sure to see the lights of a patrol car and to hear the comforting sound of its engine. For all I knew, the guards kept watch from outside the cemetery as well as from within! At any moment, Mount Auburn guards or maybe even uniformed members of the Cambridge police force might cruise along Coolidge Avenue. Moving quickly behind Rowdy, I shifted my eyes hopefully back and forth between Mount Auburn, a few inches to my left, and the Cambridge Cemetery across the street. Maybe it, too, had guards! To my annoyance, however, Coolidge Avenue remained almost as deserted as the burial grounds that bordered it. I began to feel an irrational anger at the families and loved ones of the people buried for acres and acres around me. Why did cemetery visits have to be daytime events? Foolish custom! Why not floodlight the monuments and turf, throw open the gates to flower-bearing nocturnal mourners? Wasn’t it on lonely nights that the departed were most acutely missed? If fair were fair, these forsaken grounds would be open twenty-four hours a day! Supermarkets were. Why not cemeteries? Which was more likely to strike at three A.M.—grief or hunger?

  A few cars passed. Not one looked even remotely like a cruiser. As Rowdy and I drew opposite the gate to the Cambridge Cemetery, the grass verge on our side of Coolidge Avenue widened, and trees appeared between the pavement and the Mount Auburn fence. Almost clinging to the fence, I felt sheltered by the trees and took advantage of the sense of concealment to halt briefly and once again focus on the far side of the chain-link. As before, all was as dark and silent as the proverbial you-know-what. We’d covered the distance from the car in what felt like an unnaturally short time. The unused gate to Mount Auburn must be along here somewhere. I cursed myself for failing to study the terrain by daylight when the dogs and I had taken this route to the river. I’d driven by here many times. Why hadn’t I noted the mileage from landmark to landmark? From Shady Hill Road to the border of Cambridge Cemetery? Why hadn’t I memorized the precise location of the unused gate? Because it hadn’t mattered, that’s why. Landmarks hadn’t been landmarks. Until now.

  The gate was even closer than I expected. My memory had distorted its size. Perhaps because the double doors were always closed, I’d remembered the gate as a single, narrow panel. But I’d been right in recalling a length of heavy chain. As usual, the gate was closed. My hands found the chain, which was deceptively looped around the panels of the double gate as if to lock them together. I found one end of the chain, then the other, and ran my fingers slowly along the links. The gate was indeed shut and chained. But it wasn’t actually locked. Despite the mildness of the night, a shiver of cold ran down my arms. This had to be where B. Robert Motherway and the tattooed man had led Jocelyn into Mount Auburn. When? At a guess, twenty minutes ago. Was Jocelyn dead now? Murdered? This gate was the men’s bolt-hole, wasn’t it? Any second now, it could open. When it did, I’d collide with Jocelyn’s killers face to face. No guard dog, Rowdy would nonetheless do his best to protect me if he understood that I was under threat. But he wouldn’t understand a gun. And he’d be as vulnerable to bullets as I was.

  From inside the cemetery, I heard a muffled, distant cry. The voice was a woman’s. Was she weeping? Calling out? Pleading for help? All that reached me was a single high-pitched note, all the more heartrending for its brevity. Without hesitation, I reached into my pocket, found a nylon slip collar, and slid it over Rowdy’s head. Transferring the leash to the slip collar, I removed Rowdy’s buckle collar with its jingling tags. After cramming the leather collar into my pocket, I unlooped the chain and eased open the gate as slowly and cautiously as if I’d been afraid of waking the dead. When I’d created an opening just wide enough for Rowdy and me to slip through, I paused for a second. The cry did not repeat itself. I heard no footsteps. Rowdy was silent. I heard no change in his breathing. His white tail was waving lazily over his back. Otherwise, he was almost motionless. Although I could see him only dimly, I felt his eyes on me. Nothing escapes a dog’s keen nose and acute ears. If Rowdy perceived the presence of anyone but me, he showed no sign of it.

  I shortened his leash, gave him a light, bracing pat on the shoulder, then slipped through the barely open gate, Rowdy on my heels. With almost unbearable impatience, I inched the gate shut and replaced the chain as best I could. Now that Rowdy and I were actually on the grounds of Mount Auburn, I understood the folly of my plan for round-the-clock visits. By d
aylight, Mount Auburn was a visitor’s delight. But in the dark, what lay beneath the sod were not the deep, thick roots of old trees, but the decomposed and decomposing bodies of dead people. The monuments that rose around me, no matter how fanciful, moving, or even amusing by day, were stripped by darkness of their brave effort to make light of death. Simple, grand, angular, reverent, picturesque, all were now tombstones, nothing more.

  Again, there was a soft, muffled cry. It came from somewhere to my right. At what distance? Not close. Not far. A paved road crossed in front of the gate. Another stretched in front of us. Rowdy and I moved straight ahead. In seconds, we reached an intersection, where Rowdy made a quick, eager move away from my left side. I assumed he wanted to take the lead. In a way, he did. It was Rowdy who came upon the uniformed body, Rowdy who sniffed it, Rowdy who raised his great head to me in confident expectation. Rowdy trusted me. He suffered from the humbling illusion that I would know what to do.