by Susan Conant
“Did you ever meet Jack’s children?”
“Not when he was alive.”
I was amazed. “Afterward?”
“At his funeral. I didn’t meet them. I just saw them. That was the only time I ever saw them. Her. Gareth. Brat.”
“Jack called her Brat?”
Tracy’s eyes flashed. “Not in a mean way. It was his pet name for her. When she was little, I guess, she had a hard time getting out ‘Bronwyn Andrews’—it was sort of a mouthful—and the way she said it, it sounded like ‘Brat.’”
“Tracy, how did you end up going to Jack’s funeral? It seems . . .”
She put down her fork and licked her lips. “I read about Jack’s death in the paper. No one told me. Who would’ve? And of course, I never called him. Not even at work. He’d call me now and then from there. And he wrote to me. It seems funny, but he did. Jack had a sort of old-fashioned streak. He’d send notes. Not love letters, nothing like that. Just about what he was doing, shows we’d been to, judges, dogs, where we’d meet, that kind of thing. He died—he was murdered—on a Monday night. Monday, November fourth. I didn’t find out until I read the obituary.” Her voice broke. She reached into her purse, fished around, found a tissue, and blew her nose.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to . . .”
“It’s okay. I’m all right. It’s just that . . . I never talk about him. My brother, Jim, knows, but he doesn’t want to hear about him.”
“What does Drew . . . ?”
Tracy’s narrow shoulders moved almost imperceptibly back. Instead of giving me an immediate, direct answer, she said, “I’m not the only single parent around.”
“Far from it. Besides, it’s none of my business.”
“Drew knows his father died. He knows I’ve never been married. But Jim had lost his wife only a few months before Jack died, so Drew more or less grew up thinking that, uh, parents died, I guess. That it was normal. Marguerite, my sister-in-law, died of leukemia, and Jim needed help raising their kids. So, right after the funeral, I quit my job and moved up here.”
“Tracy, where did you hear the suggestion that Jack might have killed himself? Unless I missed something, it wasn’t in the paper.” For some reason, I felt as if she wouldn’t want me to look at her while she answered. I fiddled around with what remained of my lobster meat, dunked a piece in the mayonnaise, and ate it.
Eventually, she said, “Like I told you, I went to Jack’s funeral. I was scared shitless. I don’t know what I expected. That someone would come up to me and . . . ? I don’t know. Anyway, no one did.”
“You went all alone?”
“I didn’t have anyone to go with,” she said. “Unless you count Drew. I was two months’ pregnant. As soon as I . . .” She broke off. “I must’ve read Jack’s obituary a hundred times. It was like, if I read it enough, it’d be someone else. I wasn’t in my right mind. So, the funeral was the next day. I didn’t have a lot of time to think it over. And I just went. Maybe it sounds crazy, but I couldn’t just let Jack die and do nothing. And I had this weird sense that he was . . . This is nuts, but I had this sensation that he was still alive, that the whole thing was made up. Or if it wasn’t, he’d want me to be there. Or maybe both: that if I didn’t go, he’d be hurt that I’d stayed away. It’s crazy, but that’s how I felt.”
“It doesn’t sound crazy to me. It sounds like grief.”
“Well, it sure was. You know, I never expected him to leave her. It wasn’t one of those deals. Jack never made any false promises.”
“I didn’t think he had.”
“Well, he didn’t. And I never pressured him. I was going to have an abortion. I wasn’t going to tell him. Jack was never going to know. Then . . . This is going to sound even crazier, but I guess what made me change my mind was finding Chip.”
“You’ve lost me.”
The smile was back again, mischievous and capricious.
“You found Chip?” I asked.
“Not exactly. Well, yes and no. I mean, I co-owned Chip, so you couldn’t really say I stole him.”
“Tracy, Brat Andrews told me that Shaun McGrath killed Chip. You know who Shaun was?”
“Jack’s partner. But he didn’t—”
“Tracy, it is widely assumed that Shaun murdered Jack.”
The news seemed to hit her as a total surprise. At Jack’s funeral, she said, everyone had been whispering about suicide, about how he’d poisoned himself. To the best of her knowledge, the suspicion of murder had been hers alone. She’d kept her eye on the newspapers for anything to do with Jack’s death. Newspapers had been her only source of information. She’d evidently never heard of Mass. Mayhem . I didn’t mention it.
“I saw that Shaun McGrath was killed,” she said. “He died in a car crash. Was that . . . ?”
“It wasn’t murder. It really was an accident.” I outlined as briefly and neutrally as possible what I’d learned about Jack’s death, the police investigation, and the assumption that Shaun McGrath had committed the murder. Tracy’s portrayal of the relationship between Jack and Shaun was different from the others I’d heard. According to Tracy, there hadn’t been any real bitterness or enmity. Jack’s complaints about Shaun had focused on trouble between Shaun and the other employees. Tracy seemed to have no idea that Jack had ever had any serious financial troubles at home or at work. (“In case you wondered,” she said, “I always paid my own way.”) No, the police had never questioned her. No one had. Dog people might have asked about Jack, she guessed, but she hadn’t been to a show since Jack died. Every once in a while, she ran into someone who remembered her, but she’d been shy back then, and no one was ever surprised when she said almost nothing. She’d never considered going to the police. What would she have told them?
The truth, I thought. “Tracy, about Chip?” I asked.
Again, the elfin smile. “Did I steal Chip?”
“Jack’s wife didn’t want him.”
“Well, we did co-own him, but I’ve never been sure of the legalities. I wasn’t showing anymore, and I didn’t want to breed, so it didn’t really matter. You want to know what happened?”
“Yes.”
“Like I told you, I went to Jack’s funeral. You know that she never cried? I watched. I was curious. I was probably staring at her. I sat up near the front, toward the side. I was so shy then, I don’t know how I had the guts. But I did. I watched her. She didn’t shed a tear. There were a lot of people there, a lot more than I expected, which was good, because no one asked who I was or what I was doing there. Jack had a lot of friends. So, from the obituary, all I knew was that he was dead. It was only there, at the funeral, that I overheard all this talk about suicide. And of course, I’d never seen her or the kids before. And the whole thing really threw me. I left the second the service was over.”
“Of course.”
“And then the weirdest thing happened. I was walking to where I’d left my car, in a parking garage, and I passed this convertible parked on the street. The top was up. One window was half down. And there was Chip. Sticking his head out. I didn’t think about what I was doing. It didn’t occur to me to do anything else. I reached in and unlocked the door, just like it was my car. I got Chip, and I walked off with him.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Chip lived to thirteen. End of story.”
I left for Cambridge early the next morning. When Rita stopped in during a free hour in the afternoon, I told her all about my long conversation with Tracy. “I understand perfectly,” Rita said. “The woman groomed Rowdy’s ancestors and uses the same esoteric brand of dog shampoo you do. Consequently, it makes complete sense for you to suspend your critical faculties and unconditionally accept every word she said. Do I have that right?”
“Yes,” I told Rita. “You do.”
CHAPTER 26
“This Tracy person was pregnant,” Rita said. “Her lover was married. At a minimum, she might’ve expected some financial support from
him. Do you have any decaf?”
“Would you not call her ‘this Tracy person’?” I said. “And, no, all I have is the real thing. You want tea? You want a drink?”
“No. I still have clients. Tea would be nice.” As I filled the kettle and dug out tea bags, Rita exercised her imagination. “For all you know, this Tracy expected him to leave his wife and marry her, and when he refused—”
“I told you. Jack never made any false promises.”
“This story she’s told you is unverified,” Rita pointed out.
“There’s no reason to assume she’s lying. Presumed innocent?”
“Let’s set aside guilt and innocence for the moment and simply consider a rather different scenario.”
“Fine. Claudia isn’t so oblivious to Jack’s secret life after all. She knows about Tracy. Maybe she even knows Tracy is pregnant. Anyway, from Claudia’s point of view, Jack is a terrible husband. He throws money away. She hates him. She hates his dog. Chip would definitely have been tied up if Claudia had been in Jack’s office that night. And look at the consequences. Where would Claudia be now if Jack had lived? She’s far better off with him dead! Jack’s life insurance is what got the family through. Oscar Fisch told me that. Shaun wasn’t the only one due to benefit. Because of that insurance, Claudia has her doctorate, she lives on Francis Avenue, and she’s an associate professor at Harvard.”
Rita dresses like Manhattan, but her attitude is pure Cambridge. “Still doesn’t have tenure,” she remarked snootily.
Unjust, isn’t it? Only the full professors have tenure, and hardly any of them are women. And exactly what song is sung at commencement each year? “Fair Harvard.” The nerve!
“Just the same, Rita, Claudia is a lot better off than she’d be if Jack had lived. Furthermore, Claudia knew Professor Foley very well. Tracy Littlefield doesn’t even know he existed.”
“Did you ask her?”
“No. Why would I?”
“Jack Andrews never mentioned Professor Foley to her?”
“Why would he?”
“Because Foley was an old, dear friend of his, my friend. Foley was the kind of person she could subsequently have gone to for help in rearing Jack’s second son.”
“She raised Drew herself.”
“College tuition? She shows up on Professor Foley’s doorstep with pictures of a boy who looks, according to you, exactly like Foley’s esteemed late friend? And Professor Foley puts the pieces together: the boy’s age, Jack’s murder, her need for money, any doubts he might have harbored about Shaun McGrath’s guilt.”
“We don’t know that he had any doubts. We don’t even know that he’d ever heard of Tracy’s existence, let alone Drew’s. What do you think Jack did? Went to Professor Foley and said, ‘Oh, by the way, George, I’m leading a double life’?”
“Why not? And even if Foley learned the story last week from this Tracy person, he might have worked it out then and there, and simply confronted her and accused her of murdering Jack.”
“Damn! I’ll tell you something, Rita. George Foley really could have answered a lot of questions. I don’t understand much else, but I really am sure that the reason to get rid of him was to shut him up. When I talked to him on the phone, all I asked him about was Hannah Duston. I should’ve asked him about Jack Andrews.”
“Holly, it’s also possible, you know, that your professor died a natural death.”
The kettle whistled. I made tea-bag tea, which Rita doesn’t really like, in mugs that Rita frowns on because they’re not tea cups and also because they’re decorated with pictures of Alaskan malamutes and not covered with hand-painted roses, violets, and stupid gilt squiggles. I missed Kevin. He’ll happily drink any beer out of anything. I resentfully handed Rita her cup.
“What are you saying, Rita? Purely by coincidence, Professor Foley picked that time to die of a heart attack? The police didn’t assume that. I don’t know why you should. Speaking of which, if Kevin would only get back here, I could find out what’s going on in the Foley investigation. I never thought he’d stick it out this long.”
“He isn’t due back until tomorrow.”
“In theory. In fact, I’ve been expecting him to show up since Saturday morning. I don’t know why he didn’t at least leave me the phone number.”
Rita examined her mug with distaste. “So you couldn’t call him.”
I took a big sip. “He’d probably love a call. He’d be a lot happier at a homicide investigation than he is out there in the Berkshires chewing seaweed and burning his feet on—”
“Your capacity for stereotyping astounds me.”
“I am not stereotyping Kevin. He’s a Cambridge cop, he eats meat, he drinks beer, he’s obsessed with his job, and I have never once heard him do anything but make fun of any of this ‘Eastern alternative body-mind holistic fitness crap.’ That’s a direct quote.”
“As it happens, I was referring more to—”
My doorbell interrupted her. The dogs, as usual, leaped to the defense of their pet biped by flying silently to the front door, where they stood wagging their tails ready to welcome whatever robber, rapist, or Jehovah’s Witness was trying to spring an attack on me. Mail-order dog-supply companies unwittingly reward this malamute version of guard-dog behavior by including free bonus dog biscuits with every order. The positive-reinforcement history is so strong that Rowdy and Kimi are convinced that the sound of a van outside followed by the presence of a person at the door signals a UPS driver bearing an edible treat.
As usual, the dogs were right. Except this time the UPS package wasn’t from Cherrybrook and didn’t contain anything to eat, unless you count paper, which Rowdy and Kimi prefer when it’s spiced with a condiment such as the glue in the spines of books and on the flaps of envelopes. In extremis, the dogs will, however, devour paper unseasoned, especially if it bears the scent of other people’s dogs, as does almost all my mail, of course, including the large padded mailing envelope that had just arrived. It came from Janet Switzer and contained a photocopy of the privately printed book about Hannah Duston. Janet had promised to look for it. She’d come through.
“And One Fought Back!” I exclaimed. “Really, Rita, you know that old saying—‘If you want something done, ask a busy person’? What it really ought to be is, ‘If you want something done, ask a dog person.’”
Muttering about violations of copyright law, Rita emptied her mug in the sink and left for her office. After brewing a cup of strong coffee, I settled myself at the kitchen table and eagerly prepared to learn the full, true story of Hannah Duston, including what I hoped would be a wealth of detail about the parents who had produced Hannah and her baby-murdering sister, Elizabeth Emerson.
According to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s book, Good Wives, contemporaries of Hannah and Elizabeth had had no interest in exactly what grabbed me: the streak of violence the two sisters shared. Rather, Elizabeth had been a condemned murderer, a sinner, whereas Hannah had been a shining symbol of God’s sustenance in the wilderness, a heroine. What accounted for Hannah’s guts—my word, of course, not the scholar’s—applied to hundreds of men and women who’d passively endured Indian captivity until they were “redeemed”—ransomed for goods or traded for hostages—or who, like Eunice Williams, had become permanent members of Indian communities through adoption or marriage. Hannah Duston wasn’t the only woman who’d slaughtered pigs; virtually everyone had. Other women had stood up to their neighbors and served as what Ulrich called “deputy husbands.” Furthermore, plenty of unmarried women undoubtedly had had babies without promptly committing infanticide. Elizabeth Emerson herself had already been an unmarried mother when she’d given birth to the twins she killed. According to Ulrich, the colonists hadn’t seen any connection between the two acts of violence, hadn’t even viewed them as such, hadn’t sought a pattern handed down from parents to children in the Emerson family, hadn’t suspected the lurking presence of a sinister family secret.