Animal Appetite

by Susan Conant

  He stroked my hair.

  “The feelings are comparable,” I said. “We all have it in us, don’t we?”

  And then, naturally—it happens all the time—even before the dogs had had a chance to pounce on us, Steve got called away on an emergency caused, as usual, by yet another Cambridge intellectual who hadn’t been able to endure the prospect of depriving her dog of his so-called freedom to be a dog—his natural right to savor the ultimate canine experience of being crushed by a car—and now expected Steve to repair the damage that was her own damned fault. In cynical moments, I wonder why these dog-murdering romantics bother to let their dogs run loose. It would be altogether simpler and easier if these people would just get in their cars and run over their dogs themselves. The effect would be the same, really, only the owners would have slightly more control than they do now over which body parts get destroyed and whether the dogs live or die.

  After Steve departed, I called Brat Andrews. I did not confess that I’d passed myself off at Damned Yankee Press as her cousin. I told the truth: I said that I was very sorry about Professor Foley’s death. Brat’s response was terse, but the pitch of her voice was high and she sounded sincere. “Uncle George was a good friend of Daddy’s.”

  I said that I hated to bother her right now, but that I had a few questions. I’d be as brief as possible. “Your father grew up in Haverhill,” I said. “I know this may sound off the wall, but the local heroine there is a colonial woman named Hannah Duston, and—”

  “Daddy knew all about Hannah Duston. There’s a statue of her in the middle of Haverhill. Daddy did a report about her when he was . . . in high school, I think. Maybe when he was younger. I remember because he used to make fun of himself for what he called it: ‘Intrepid Heroine.’ He got an A on it. I don’t think the title is so stupid, but Daddy did.”

  “There’s no chance you still happen to have a copy of . . . ?”

  “Of Daddy’s paper? That probably got thrown out the day he brought it home from school. I’m sure he didn’t have it.”

  “One other thing. Brat, I’m really sorry to keep raising painful topics, but—”

  “You’d rather ask me than Claudia.”

  I cleared my throat. “Brat, you don’t happen to know who adopted Chip? You told me that right after your father died, Shaun McGrath took Chip. But I don’t know where Chip went after Shaun—”

  Brat’s voice was deep and angry: “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “Not at all. Your mother said she found him a good home. I wondered—”

  “Claudia is a goddamned liar. The night Daddy died, after he didn’t come home, she went over there, and she didn’t have a key, so she called Shaun McGrath, and she sent Chip home with him. And then that slimy little bastard killed Chip, too.”

  “He killed Chip?”

  Brat’s voice was high again. “He said Chip was stolen out of his car while he was at Daddy’s funeral. I always knew better. He wasn’t satisfied with murdering Daddy. He had to go and murder Chip, too.”

  CHAPTER 23

  It could be worse. When Elizabeth Emerson was eleven years old, her father, Michael Emerson—Hannah’s father, too, of course—was convicted of cruelly and excessively beating and kicking Elizabeth. Michael Emerson was fined and released. Fifteen years later, in 1691, when Elizabeth, already the mother of one out-of-wedlock child, was charged with murdering her newborn twins, the law presumed her guilty, and not a single witness stepped forward to defend her. During the nine and a half months that Elizabeth Emerson spent in prison before her execution, not a single person visited her. Not her sister Hannah. Not her mother. Not her father.

  So it could be much worse. Still, I sometimes long for the kind of father who calls and announces who he is. “This is Daddy,” maybe? Is that what normal fathers say? I wouldn’t know. Even when my father phones mere acquaintances, there’s no need for the preliminary statement that he is Buck Winter. Whether you hear Buck bellow long distance in your ear or see him close up, the only creature you could possibly mistake him for is a bull moose. Other people’s fathers, I believe, say things like “How are you, dear?” The vocalization of the bull moose, in contrast, is usually rendered as a deep ugghh. Not that my father is unsolicitous. For example, he almost always begins by asking about my dogs.

  Not long after I’d finished my conversation with Brat Andrews, the phone rang and the familiar paternal roar crashed into my left eardrum. The pad cut was healing, I replied. Leah had worked with Kimi this afternoon.

  My father then produced a weirdly smug-sounding version of ugghh while simultaneously speaking comprehensible English: “Tracy, uuugghhh, Littlefield!”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “Guess!” he challenged.

  “Surfing the Internet.” I wasn’t kidding. Buck was, in fact, the principal reason I was not yet on-line. Having him embarrass me at dog shows was bad enough. I had no desire to become his roadkill on the Information Superhighway.

  “No,” he ugghhed.

  This time, I got it. My late mother collected dog show catalogs. “Old show catalogs. I should have thought of it myself. You found Jack’s name—John Andrews’s name—and she was the agent for his dog.” In a catalog, agent means handler.

  As usual, Buck corrected me. “Dogs. Plural. Tracy Littlefield. They co-owned two goldens. Maybe more.”

  “And you don’t remember . . .”

  The show catalogs had, indeed, reawakened old memories. Instead of supplying a detailed description of the tall Tracy Littlefield, Jack Andrews, or both, my father launched into a critique of their golden retrievers, which, as I’d assumed from Chip’s picture, hadn’t come from my mother’s lines and which, my father claimed, were sound but not typey. “Not typey” was not a compliment; in Buck’s opinion, the golden in question hadn’t represented the essence of the breed. My father seldom says anything negative about a dog. I concluded that on at least one occasion under one AKC judge, one of Jack and Tracy’s goldens had beaten one of ours.

  I was eventually driven to bellow back at him. “Tracy Littlefield’s address!”

  In an apparent non sequitur, Buck replied in tones of grief-stricken disappointment, “You know, Holly, your mother”—here he paused lugubriously—“was a woman who understood dogs.”

  I ignored the combined eulogy and lecture that followed. At the back of a show catalog, I should mention, is an index of exhibitors, together with their addresses. “Do you have the catalogs there? Would you please look up Tracy Littlefield’s address?”

  “Georgetown,” he growled, as if it, too, had let him down by failing to understand dogs.

  “Georgetown, Maine?”

  “Georgetown, Massachusetts,” he replied in disgust. “Never heard of the damn place.” My father is almost as loyal to the state of Maine as he is to dogs. He takes particular offense at innocent cities like Portland, Oregon, and Augusta, Georgia, which he evidently suspects of an attempt at geographic social climbing that consists of a futile effort to pass themselves off as their betters.

  “It’s near Haverhill,” I said, more to myself than to my father. “It’s right next to Bradford.” I can never shake the irrational impulse to try to please my father. “Bradford,” I reminded him, “is Rowdy’s birthplace.”

  When I finally got Buck off the phone, I called Information. There was no listing in Georgetown for Tracy Littlefield. Armed with Tracy’s last name, I called Janet Switzer, who said, “Oh, Tracy, Littlefield! The groomer! Whatever happened to her?”

  “I have no idea. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “I used to see her at shows. She lived in Georgetown. She worked at the library.”

  “I thought you said she was a groomer.”

  “She was. She had goldens.”

  “Sound,” I said. “But not typey:” It takes me a day or two to recover from a conversation with my father. “Ignore that. That’s what my father thinks. Actually, I saw a picture of one of her
dogs, a head study. Violet Wish did it. He had a very typey head.”

  Violet, as you know, is the Bachrach of show dogs. I didn’t have to explain who she was.

  “Violet did that head study of Denny,” Janet said. Denali: Rowdy’s late sire. Janet knew that I knew which head study she meant.

  “I know.”

  “You ought to have Violet do one of Rowdy.”

  “And Kimi,” I said. “If I ever have the money, I will.” Let me point out that it was neither my fault nor Janet’s that we’d strayed from the subject of Tracy Littlefield. Dogs possess a magnetic power over the conversation of dog people: No matter how hard we fight to stay on another topic, we get drawn back. Triumphing over the almost overwhelming impulse to discourse at length on the prospect of Violet Wish canine portraits, I said abruptly, before the dogs won out, “So Tracy Littlefield worked at the Georgetown Library?”

  “No—Haverhill. The Haverhill Public Library. I used to see her there all the time. She checked books in and out. I don’t think she was a professional librarian. When I needed help with interlibrary loans, I had to ask someone else.” Like a lot of other people with Northern breeds, Janet had undoubtedly been borrowing arcane books about polar expeditions and the native peoples of the Arctic. Corgi fanciers track down books about Wales. If you love your puli or your Kuvasz, you’re bound to get curious about Hungary. Virtually all dog fanciers feel this compulsion to learn about the breed’s origins, and even if we have the money to buy the rare books that we increasingly crave, we sometimes can’t find them. Consequently, we rely on interlibrary loans. “Tracy groomed on the side,” Janet continued.

  “She had a shop?”

  “No, she just used her own grooming area at home, in her laundry room. She rented a little house in Georgetown, not too far from here. The basement had one of those big old set tubs, and she had a grooming table and her own dryers. It was kind of makeshift, but she did a good job. I used her when I didn’t feel like grooming. I trusted her with the dogs.”

  So what’s not to trust about a dog groomer? Most of the time, nothing. Almost all groomers become groomers in the first place because they like dogs. When the owners aren’t around, however, a few groomers handle the dogs roughly.

  “The dogs were crazy about Tracy,” Janet added. “She really did love dogs.”

  “She was friends with a guy named Jack Andrews,” I said. “They co-owned some goldens. She handled his dogs. Did you ever meet him?”

  “Not that I know of. I might’ve seen him. Tracy wasn’t really a friend of mine. She was kind of quiet. Shy. I just used to see her around. But she was a very nice girl. I wonder whatever happened to her.”

  “If I find out,” I promised, “I’ll let you know.”

  And the next morning, Tuesday, I began to trace the heretofore untraceable Tracy. Even with my extensive network of dog people to tap, even with a last name, the search took a while. Tracy Littlefield did not belong to any of the local dog clubs. When I supplied the name Littlefield, people said, “Oh, yeah! Littlefield! Tracy Littlefield!”

  “Tall,” I’d add. “Quiet. Shy. But nice.”

  And the person would say, “Yeah! That’s her!”

  But Tracy Littlefield did belong to one dog organization. She was a current member of Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue. To avoid any misunderstanding, let me spell it out: The disaster area in breed rescue isn’t an earthquake in some distant city, but a local highway where someone’s stopped briefly to throw out the family pet or a pound where the owner has turned in the dog with all the regret I’d feel in tossing an empty bottle in a bin for someone else to recycle. Anyway, Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue was (and still is) one of the oldest and most efficient breed-rescue organizations in the country. Tracy Littlefield belonged. According to a friend of mine who had the membership list, Tracy lived in Ellsworth, Maine. I also got her phone number.

  A woman answered. “Tracy’s Doggone Salon!”

  Instead of blurting out questions about Jack Andrews, I calmly asked whether I was speaking to Tracy. When the woman said yes, I made a quick decision. I also made an appointment. Tracy could fit Kimi in the next afternoon. Ellsworth, Maine, is where Down East really begins. It’s the coastal town where you turn off Route 1 to get to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. Ellsworth is about 250 miles from Cambridge. That’s a long way to go to get a dog groomed. The distance seemed like nothing. I had the creepy sense that in meeting Tracy, I’d find myself at long last face to face with Jack Andrews.

  CHAPTER 24

  Owls Head, Maine, boasts two principal tourist attractions—the Owls Head lighthouse and the Museum of Transportation—and, in the person of my father, a one-man tourist repellent. When my mother was alive, summer visitors used to pull to the side of the road to take snapshots of her perennial garden. Every once in a while, an out-of-stater would march up to our freshly painted front door, rap the polished brass knocker, and issue a brazen offer to buy the place. My father always responded by making a prompt counteroffer on the bidder’s spouse or children. These days when the cars slow down, my father misinterprets the dropped jaws, and when a bargain-hunter condescends to inquire about taking the place off his hands, he continues to propose the kinds of wife-for-barn and child-for-house swaps that weren’t funny to begin with and now, I fear, strike the tourists as serious and scary. My own visits home have gradually become less and less frequent. Steve, the most mellow of men, balks at accompanying me.

  After I dropped Steve at the airport early on Wednesday morning to catch a flight to Minneapolis for a belated Thanksgiving with his mother, I reminded myself of the many reasons I’d refused to go with him. Let me just report that on my last visit, Steve’s mother served green slime with miniature marshmallows and fake mayonnaise at every meal except breakfast for three days in a row. On individual plates. No cheating. At lunch on the fourth day—this is the truth—she left the room and, in desperation, I fed The Blob to her cocker, who waited until his mistress came back to return my gift, which had turned to a slimy semiliquid that looked like pond scum swarming with monster-size maggots and obviously hadn’t been safe to ingest to begin with. The rug was white. Originally. Mine was the only clean plate on the table. When a dog betrays me, I know I’m someplace I don’t belong.

  I headed north, picked up 95, and, staying far west of Owls Head, took the highway to Bangor before cutting over to the coast. In case your image of Maine comes from television and the movies, I should mention that Ellsworth possesses a downtown with small shops, a little river, a bridge, an old-fashioned movie theater, and the mandatory historic house. The de facto center of Ellsworth, however, is a wide strip of heavily mall-lined road that ends where Route 1 makes a sharp left and sprints north toward Washington County and away from the tourists instead of continuing straight ahead on Route 3, which leads through Trenton to Mount Desert Island, and thus to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. Acadia, I might mention, in a transparent effort to drum up tourist business for my poverty-stricken home state, not only offers all those justly famous mountains-meet-the-sea vistas best enjoyed while consuming incredible quantities of Maine lobster, but is one national park that really does welcome dogs.

  The only scenery visible from the parking lot of the motel where I’d made a reservation consisted of a drive-through fast-drink gourmet-coffee stand, two gigantic supermarkets, dozens of storefronts that glared competitively at one another across Route 1, and, in the distance, the alluring view of the L.L. Bean outlet. Like the park, however, the motel welcomed dogs. When I checked in, the young woman behind the desk merely glanced at Rowdy and Kimi, smiled blandly, and said, “Oh, and you have pets.” As applied to my obsession, the word pet always strikes me as ludicrous. Then she asked the routine Maine question about malamutes: “What percent?”

  I told the truth. “None. They’re Alaskan malamutes.”

  Her brother-in-law, she replied, had one just like that, only bigger. His was eighty-eight percent. “There’s a guy in
Owls Head who breeds them,” she added.