Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  In my own immediate neighborhood or another like it, I’d have marched up to one of the nearby houses to ask whether anyone had seen my inexplicably absent host. Here, I hesitated, mainly, I guess, because I was afraid that any of the grand doors to these imposing arks might be opened by a uniformed maid. It’s not that I’m exactly phobic about maids. I’m just not used to them, and on the rare occasions when I encounter them, they make me nervous. There’s something about maids that seems so . . . judgmental. Before I open my mouth, I always feel as if I’d already said the wrong thing. But maybe I confuse them with nuns. All that black and white. Anyway, steeling myself against the fearsome prospect of encountering a maid, or maybe just a neighbor who’d make me feel small, I went to the house closest to Professor Foley’s—not, I might mention, Governor Weld’s—and boldly rang the bell. The person who promptly came to the door was a plump, apple-cheeked woman with thick brown hair piled in a loose knot on her head. She wore a brown wool skirt and what I thought was called a “twin set,” a cardigan over a pullover, in the medium brown of her skirt and hair. That’s a cardigan sweater, of course, not a Welsh corgi; there was no sign of the comforting presence of any kind of dog. Faltering only a little, I introduced myself and stated my dilemma. “The mail is in the mail slot,” I went on to explain. “The newspapers haven’t been taken in. I couldn’t help worrying. But maybe Professor Foley just forgot. I wondered whether anyone had seen him today. Or maybe he’s gone away?”

  The woman shook her head and frowned. “No, he’d have told me. I have a key. Let me get it and grab a jacket, and we’ll run over.”

  A few minutes later, after dutifully ringing the bell by the front door and waiting while no one answered, she inserted the key in the lock and opened the door. “He has an alarm system,” she informed me, flicking on the lights and stepping over the pile of mail that had fallen from the slot, “but it’s never turned on.” Even so, as I followed her, she opened the front-hall closet and examined the digital display on a little plastic box.

  “George!” she called out. “George? It’s Lydia! George? Are you all right?” Ignoring me, she swiftly moved to a huge dining room with a fireplace at one end, an immense sideboard laden with china platters and tureens, and a mahogany dinner table with twelve chairs neatly grouped around it, and not crowded in, either. At the head of the table, one place was set. A solitary lace place mat held a flower-painted plate, polished silverware, and a wineglass. In front of it stood a small book stand. I glanced at the book it held open: The Unredeemed Captive by John Demos, the story of Eunice Williams. As a young girl in Deerfield, Massachusetts, Eunice had been captured in a raid in 1704 and taken to a settlement near Montreal, probably the same one, I guessed, where Hannah had accepted her captivity. Eunice Williams had more than accepted hers: She’d horrified her family and, in fact, all colonial New England by refusing to cooperate in efforts to release her and, indeed, by marrying within what she must have considered her own tribe.

  “George! George!” the neighbor persisted. Swinging open a door that led to the kitchen, she came to an abrupt halt. Veering around, she accidentally slammed into me. Her apple cheeks were suddenly white. “Dear God,” she breathed. “Dear God.”

  I brushed past her. Sprawled facedown on the shiny, speckled linoleum of the kitchen floor was the body of a man I barely recognized as Professor Foley. Everything about the scene—the awkward twist of the legs, the strange angle of the neck, the hand outstretched toward the spilled coffee mug, the little puddle of liquid by the mug, the glare of the harsh lights—was a duplicate of what I’d seen in the police photo Claudia had given me of Jack Andrews’s dead body. Professor Foley’s most distinctive feature was hidden: His blue eyes had glinted with the charm and curiosity of a bright toddler’s. Now his head faced away from me. I approached slowly and tiptoed around the remains. The eyes were open. They were still, of course, blue. In all other respects, they were no longer George Foley’s. The stench was strong and vile, like the reek of a dirty nursing home that somehow housed a filthy dog kennel. I felt sickeningly relieved that I didn’t have to touch the corpse. Death was all too apparent; there was no need for me to verify it.

  “His heart, I suppose,” said the neighbor, Lydia. Suddenly losing control, she bent over, covered her mouth with her hand, and gagged.

  “Go outside,” I told her. “I’ll call for help.”

  The outdated kitchen had the kind of old gas stove that’s coming back in fashion as an antique. A few clean dishes rested in a rack by an empty soapstone sink. The new white refrigerator looked out of place. The walls were the ubiquitous lime green of the 1950s. I couldn’t find a phone. Even if there’d been one, the stench would have driven me out. I don’t know why we hadn’t smelled it the second we’d entered the house. We hadn’t been expecting it, I guess. And the walls were thick, the rooms immense. Obeying my instruction, Lydia headed back through the dining room and out through the front door. In the hallway near the door stood a small desk that served as a telephone table. Sucking air from the outdoors, I picked up an old beige Princess phone, called 911, gave Professor Foley’s address, and said that I was certain he was dead. Hanging up, I spotted among the scraps of paper by the phone one that bore my own name and number. Friday, Professor Foley had written on the slip of paper. Tea. Next to the telephone was a neatly trimmed newspaper clipping that I recognized as the Globe’s article about the Cambridge rat invasion. I wondered why the article was by the phone. Had Professor Foley placed a call about the rats?

  Just outside the door, Lydia was sobbing and retching. Although I didn’t know her at all, I put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “They’ll be here soon,” I added, without specifying who they were. “I’ll wait. Do you want to go home?”

  Pulling herself upright, she said, “No, no. I’ll stay here.”

  “He was a close friend?” I asked.

  Before she could reply, something moved in a nearby flower bed. Although it was dark out, the light mounted over the front door illuminated a wide area. A clump of salt-marsh hay rose and fell. A dark shape appeared and vanished.

  “A rat!” Lydia cried. “Damn, damn those things!”

  “I’m not sure it was—”

  “Oh yes it was! That hay is attracting them! I’ve told George—” Breaking off, she took a rattling breath that suggested asthma. She reached into a jacket pocket, groped, and removed an inhaler. “Pardon me,” she said. As she dosed herself, I asked whether she needed a doctor.

  “No, I’m used to it. This does the trick. What doesn’t help is all that hay.”

  “It’s what serious gardeners always use,” I said. “I suppose it provides an ideal nesting spot for—”

  “Rats! And the foolish thing is that George was as upset about them as anyone else! He called the city. I did, too! But the little man I talked to was far less responsive than one might have wished. It really is ridiculous! We’re asked to believe what is patently false! If you listen to the city, these rats are barely the size of a mouse. And George himself saw one that he swore was the size of a full-grown woodchuck!”

  “He didn’t try to poison them, did he?”

  Still laboring for breath, Lydia said, “Well, the truth is, we did discuss it, but—”

  The sirens drowned out the rest of her sentence. The first official vehicle to arrive was a cruiser. Almost as soon as the uniformed officer reached the front door, a big emergency medical van pulled up, and a second cruiser followed.

  “In the kitchen,” I said to the first officer, a handsome blond guy with blue eyes and pale New England skin. I gestured to the open front door. “Through the dining room, then through the swinging door.”

  Tearing past Lydia and me, the cops and the EMTs rushed to save a life far beyond earthly salvation. In almost no time, the first officer returned. “Relatives?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I’m a neighbor,” Lydia said, “and a friend.”

  “I
was supposed to have tea with Professor Foley,” I reported, forgetting that we hadn’t even said who the dead man was. “When I got here, the newspapers were lying here”—I pointed to them—“and the mail was in the mail slot. I kept ringing the bell, and I didn’t get an answer. Then I tried the back door. Finally, I got worried, and I went next door and asked—”

  “Lydia Berenson,” the woman said. “I had George’s key. We went in and found him.”

  Pulling out a notebook, the young cop took down information: Professor Foley’s name, mine, Lydia’s, our addresses. Professor Foley’s next of kin, Lydia reported, was a son who taught economics at Berkeley. “I have his number,” she said. “Shall I call him?”

  “We’ll take care of that, ma’am,” the cop replied. “We’d appreciate the number.”

  It is not in my nature to keep my mouth shut. “Kevin Dennehy is my next-door neighbor,” I announced. “Is he going to be . . . ?”

  “I don’t have that information at this time, ma’am.” The cop sounded as if he were reciting a line he’d memorized at the police academy, where, I have concluded, students are drilled in uttering the phrase “at this time” and flunk out if a simple “now” passes their lips.

  “Are you assuming that this is a natural death?” I asked.

  “Ma’am, at this time we’re not assuming anything.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Lieutenant Kevin Dennehy’s name carried less clout than I’d imagined. Or maybe his colleagues suspected me of exaggerating the extent of our friendship. “Kevin keeps his beer in my refrigerator!” I testified. That’s true. His mother is a Seventh-Day Adventist. She won’t allow alcohol in her house. Meat, either. I was about to say so, but censored myself. Kevin might be ever so slightly irked at me if I tattled in detail to his brothers and sisters on the force about all the things Mommy wouldn’t allow. Anyway, I got stuck hanging around George Foley’s house, first in the cold outdoors, then in a warm cruiser that stank of stale fast food and fresh bodily fluids.

  Official vehicles arrived in great number, as did neighbors, joggers, fitness walkers, dog walkers, and ghouls attracted by a hullabaloo. The crowd on foot and on wheels grew so dense that the police blocked the street and tried to disperse the onlookers. The barricades, of course, aroused new curiosity and attracted yet more passersby. Waiting around, I learned frustratingly little about Professor Foley’s death. He’d been seen alive late yesterday afternoon; Lydia Berenson had exchanged a few words with him. He’d seemed in his usual good health and excellent spirits. Since Lydia had said something about his heart, I asked her whether he’d had a history of cardiac problems. On the contrary, she replied. He’d had a physical a month earlier and had been elated to find himself suffering from nothing worse than minor arthritis.

  If I’d felt useful, I wouldn’t have minded waiting around. My uselessness was, however, my own fault. When questioned, I limited myself to factual replies and reserved for Kevin my speculations about the correspondence between this fatality and the murder of Jack Andrews. It must have been almost seven o’clock when I was finally free to leave. A cop gave me a ride home.

  Steve and I were supposed to be going out to dinner at Rialto, which is in the Charles Hotel and is by far the fanciest and best restaurant in Cambridge. The decor is what I guess would be called a warm version of Art Deco, voguish enough to please the celebrities and the rich out-of-towners who stay at the hotel, but stopping short of the New York trendiness that would scare away the Cambridge clientele. The food is so good that it always makes me wish I were the kind of person who can send compliments to the chef while keeping a straight face. In brief, a romantic dinner at Rialto is my idea of the perfect cure for the emotional wounds that fester when, for example, he refuses to spend Thanksgiving with her father, and she refuses to spend it with his mother.

  Until I found Steve at my kitchen table studying an issue of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association and idly stroking the heads of my dogs, I’d forgotten that we were supposed to go out. Instead of greeting either him or the dogs, I stood rigid and silent. As Steve rose, I said, “He died.”

  Steve wrapped his arms around me. “Your professor?”

  “My professor.”

  Without permission, the dogs leaped up to nuzzle our faces. I didn’t correct them.

  “You’re shaking,” Steve said.

  “Have the dogs eaten?” I asked.

  “No. I thought you’d fed them before you left.”

  “No. Could you feed them? And take them out?”

  Steve is not the kind of insensitive clod who, in these circumstances, says something dense like “Never mind about the damn dogs! What about you?”

  “Tie them up before you feed them,” I said stupidly.

  Instead of saying “I know,” he spoke quietly to the dogs as he hitched them at opposite ends of the kitchen, measured correct portions of defrosted Bil Jac, sprinkled on dry kibble from the bag in the closet, and added water. As always, Rowdy and Kimi yelped, shrieked, bounced, and whirled in circles until their dishes hit the floor.

  “I love to listen to them eat,” I said. “Before Rita got her hearing aids, she thought that dogs ate silently. Did you know that? And she couldn’t hear them when they drank water.”

  “She told me.” He went to the cabinet where I keep my small supply of liquor and poured me a glass of cognac. When he handed me the drink, he kissed the top of my head.

  I took two big sips and swallowed. “I need to call Kevin.” My voice sounded loud. I lowered it. “I think Professor Foley was murdered. I need to talk, but the dogs have to go out. Steve, I don’t want them loose in the yard. I keep worrying that they’ll kill a rat that’s been poisoned. Could you just take them for a little walk?”

  While Steve walked Rowdy and Kimi, I took a hot shower. When he and the dogs returned, Rita was with them. I was in the kitchen wearing wool socks, flannel-lined jeans, a turtleneck, and a heavy fleece pullover, not exactly an outfit meant for Rialto.

  “So what’s this about murder?” Rita demanded.

  “I need to call Kevin,” I said.

  “Have you eaten?” Rita asked.

  “We’re going to Rialto,” Steve told her.

  “We’re not,” I said. “I can’t. And I need to talk to Kevin.”

  “He’s away for a week,” Rita said. “He left today.”

  “Kevin? He’s never away. He never goes anywhere. Where is he?”

  “I’m sworn to secrecy.” Rita was serious.

  “Where is he?”

  She didn’t really reply, but asked, “Do you have any food in the house? And I don’t mean dog food.” She can be very bossy.

  “Eggs,” Steve said. “Potatoes. And beer.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Holly! You wouldn’t treat an animal like this. If Steve didn’t feed you, you’d die of malnutrition.”

  “I’m not hungry. Steve, you’d better cancel the reservation.”

  Instead of using the phone in the kitchen, he headed in the direction of my study.

  The second he left, Rita said, “You listen to blues, Holly. Haven’t you heard? A good man is hard to find.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Didn’t you see his face?”

  “Rita, the face on my mind right now is Professor Foley’s.”

  “There you have it. You think that he doesn’t notice that he always comes last?”

  “Steve? He does not come last.”

  “When have you ever put his needs before your dogs, your work, or your interests? You praise your dogs every time they look at you, and you take him for granted. You aren’t hungry, so he doesn’t need to eat. He’s waiting to take you to Rialto, and—”

  “This is none of your business,” I said coldly.