Animal Appetite (19 page)
Authors: Susan Conant
Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women dog owners, #Women Sleuths, #Winter; Holly (Fictitious character), #Dog trainers, #Dogs, #Maine, #Massachusetts, #Indian captivities, #Women journalists
In the midafternoon on Monday, my cousin Leah’s arrival offered a temporary solution. Although Kimi is definitely mine and although I work with her, it’s mainly Leah who trains and shows her. Unfortunately, in the past few weeks, Leah’s studies at the ivy-infested place down the street had been interfering with Kimi’s education. The time-grabber was chemistry. Leah wants to become a vet. Anyway, on Monday afternoon while Leah was working with Kimi, I removed Rowdy from the audible evidence that Kimi was having fun while he wasn’t by taking him for the kind of long walk he needed. Purely by coincidence, our route on that sunny, chilly day just so happened to take us onto Cambridge Street and down a little side street where we just so happened to pass Damned Yankee Press.
In truth, I’d noticed the address in one of the Damned Yankee guides. I’d borrowed the book from Rita, who relishes what I consider to be the gross discomforts of B&Bs and country inns—afterthought bathrooms, no privacy—and who, on arrival in heaven, will pose polite questions about local museums and historic buildings, and will expect to rent a tape recorder with a headset to wear while she takes a self-guided tour. Even to my critical Maine-bred eye,
The Damned Yankee in Maine
was surprisingly accurate. Portland
does
have a lot of good microbreweries. The Union Fair
is
well worth a visit. Helen’s Restaurant in Machias
does
serve the best fresh strawberry (or, better yet, raspberry) pie in the state. There really
are
snowy egrets in the wildlife refuge in back of the cement plant on Route 1 in Rockland. The listings had been updated since Jack Andrews’s murder. Eighteen years ago, there’d been no microbreweries, and Helen’s had been in the center of Machias, not on the way out of town. Still, I felt convinced that it was Jack Andrews who’d shared my love for the taste of Helen’s pie and my fondness for the long-legged, golden-slippered birds that improbably inhabit a marsh in back of a factory in Rockland, a community that happens to be right near my own hometown.
The Damned Yankee in Maine
was surprisingly accurate. Portland
does
have a lot of good microbreweries. The Union Fair
is
well worth a visit. Helen’s Restaurant in Machias
does
serve the best fresh strawberry (or, better yet, raspberry) pie in the state. There really
are
snowy egrets in the wildlife refuge in back of the cement plant on Route 1 in Rockland. The listings had been updated since Jack Andrews’s murder. Eighteen years ago, there’d been no microbreweries, and Helen’s had been in the center of Machias, not on the way out of town. Still, I felt convinced that it was Jack Andrews who’d shared my love for the taste of Helen’s pie and my fondness for the long-legged, golden-slippered birds that improbably inhabit a marsh in back of a factory in Rockland, a community that happens to be right near my own hometown.
I intended only to stroll by the press. Well, naturally, if Rowdy was seized by the impulse to mark a tree, fire hydrant, or utility pole, I might glance up at the third-floor windows and imagine the face of Jack Andrews on the other side of the panes. But I never meant to go inside. What impelled me to mount the steps was my startled realization that, after eighteen years, the doorbell still consisted of wires protruding from a small hole next to the front door. The press, I should mention, occupied a wood-frame building—once someone’s house, I suspected—with a small porch. Wide stairs ran almost to the sidewalk. The front lawn, such as it was, consisted of two little patches of dirt on either side of the steps. Dying dandelions poked through matted leaves. On the sign fastened by the door, the central letters had faded almost completely. Or maybe a disgruntled employee or neighborhood kid had scraped the paint. For whatever reason, the business now proclaimed itself:
DAMN PRESS
Because I do most of the maintenance and repair on my own house, I knew that the loose doorbell wires didn’t carry enough current to hurt anyone, but instead of making the contact, I tried the door, found it unlocked, and walked in. Piled in a tiny foyer were two pairs of old-fashioned galoshes, a broken ski pole, three unmatched cross-country skis, and a stack of telephone directories still in the plastic bags in which they’d been delivered. Grasping the knob on the inner door, I scratched my hand on a loose screw. When I pushed the door open, escorted Rowdy in, and glanced around, it hit me that a loose screw was, indeed, the perfect introduction to the place.
A wide hallway lay ahead of me. To my left, an archway opened into a big front office that must have combined the original living room and parlor of the house. Everywhere, and I mean
everywhere,
were the greatest number and variety of objects I’d seen piled, heaped, stacked, and just plain dumped since my last visit to my hometown sanitary landfill. Antique IBM PC system units with gaps in place of floppy drives supported ancient dot-matrix printers on which teetered fat old monitors with dirty screens. A gooseneck lamp with a broken neck perched lifelessly on a radiator that was shedding dandrufflike chips of aluminum paint. What else? Rolled-up carpets; snakelike lengths of cable; overstuffed trash bags; a framed print displaying Notre Dame Cathedral through cracked glass; six or eight four-drawer file cabinets in different colors—green, brown, tan—with what looked like twenty years of unfiled letters, invoices, and folders mounded on top; scarred oak school-teacher’s desks covered with thick manuscripts and loose sheets of paper; unplugged answering machines wrapped in their own cords; and cartons stamped with book titles, for instance,
The Damned Yankee in Vermont, The Damned Yankee in Connecticut, The Damned Yankee on Nantucket, What She Had Done: The Legend of Lizzie Borden, Perennials for the Maine Seacoast Garden, Viking Visitors to Precolonial Cape Cod
. Dozens of copies of Damned Yankee books in every condition from mint to battered squatted atop one another as if engaged in prolonged efforts to breed yet more Damned Yankee books; Estelle Grant’s transformation of the small press to a brothel finally made sense. Here and there, fast-submerging islets of order testified to doomed efforts to conquer the chaos. A column of neatly aligned boxes bore labels in block capitals. Above a dusty rectangle on a wall hung a plastic-covered sheet of instructions for a photocopier that wasn’t there.
everywhere,
were the greatest number and variety of objects I’d seen piled, heaped, stacked, and just plain dumped since my last visit to my hometown sanitary landfill. Antique IBM PC system units with gaps in place of floppy drives supported ancient dot-matrix printers on which teetered fat old monitors with dirty screens. A gooseneck lamp with a broken neck perched lifelessly on a radiator that was shedding dandrufflike chips of aluminum paint. What else? Rolled-up carpets; snakelike lengths of cable; overstuffed trash bags; a framed print displaying Notre Dame Cathedral through cracked glass; six or eight four-drawer file cabinets in different colors—green, brown, tan—with what looked like twenty years of unfiled letters, invoices, and folders mounded on top; scarred oak school-teacher’s desks covered with thick manuscripts and loose sheets of paper; unplugged answering machines wrapped in their own cords; and cartons stamped with book titles, for instance,
The Damned Yankee in Vermont, The Damned Yankee in Connecticut, The Damned Yankee on Nantucket, What She Had Done: The Legend of Lizzie Borden, Perennials for the Maine Seacoast Garden, Viking Visitors to Precolonial Cape Cod
. Dozens of copies of Damned Yankee books in every condition from mint to battered squatted atop one another as if engaged in prolonged efforts to breed yet more Damned Yankee books; Estelle Grant’s transformation of the small press to a brothel finally made sense. Here and there, fast-submerging islets of order testified to doomed efforts to conquer the chaos. A column of neatly aligned boxes bore labels in block capitals. Above a dusty rectangle on a wall hung a plastic-covered sheet of instructions for a photocopier that wasn’t there.
From somewhere behind the folders, books, mailing envelopes, telephones, and “While You Were Out” slips clustered around a modern computer on what I supposed was a desk, a melodious feminine voice with a trace of an accent announced, “I don’t work here! I’m just a temp! It’s only my third day! But may I help you?” Before I could respond, a phone rang. “Damned Yankee Press!” the voice said pleasantly. After a pause, I heard, “I’m so terribly sorry. The check is definitely in the mail. It was sent yesterday.” Arising from behind the barricade, a pretty young Asian woman with fine bones and immense glasses smiled at me and said, “Sorry about that! I really don’t know what’s going on here.”
Taking another look at the multitudes—ah, yes, multitudes! —of boxes, trash bags, and assorted rubbish, I asked, reasonably enough: “Is the press moving? Or maybe . . . ?” I left unspoken the thought that it was going out of business.
“I wondered the same thing!” the woman replied. Her articulation was precise. Raising a hand above the pile of stuff that separated us, she made a gesture that I took as an invitation to approach. I got within a yard. Rowdy did his agile best to follow. The woman smiled puckishly and whispered, as if eager to share a heretofore secret delight, “Don’t ask me! I’m only a temp!”
Returning her smile, I asked whether anyone else was around.
“Heaven knows!” she exclaimed gleefully. “I feel like Alice in Wonderland: ‘People come and go so quickly here.’”
What inspired Rowdy to push past me was perhaps the happy tone of the word
here
. Or maybe he mistook the various obstacles in his path as a novel sort of agility course for dogs. For whatever reason, he wove and squeezed by me to present himself to the woman, who gave his head a tentative pat and announced as if conveying great news to both Rowdy and me, “In my country, dog meat is a very popular food!” To my mixed relief, she added, “Among the poorer classes. Savages! Barbarians! Here, everything is much better: Burger King, McDonald’s. At night, I go to school, and in the daytime, I answer telephones and—”
here
. Or maybe he mistook the various obstacles in his path as a novel sort of agility course for dogs. For whatever reason, he wove and squeezed by me to present himself to the woman, who gave his head a tentative pat and announced as if conveying great news to both Rowdy and me, “In my country, dog meat is a very popular food!” To my mixed relief, she added, “Among the poorer classes. Savages! Barbarians! Here, everything is much better: Burger King, McDonald’s. At night, I go to school, and in the daytime, I answer telephones and—”
“Jack Andrews!” I blurted out. “On the list on the wall!” In the same block capitals I’d noticed on the cartons, some unknown calligrapher had long ago printed a list of names and telephone extensions. Like the instructions for the vanished photocopier, the list was covered in protective plastic. Shaun McGrath’s name was there, too.
“An old list!” the woman pronounced. “At Harvard Extension School, I take courses in philosophy. Here, I ponder archaeology! Dig, dig, and who knows? At the bottom perhaps are artifacts of prehistoric cultures.”
“Jack Andrews,” I said, “died eighteen years ago.”
Lowering her voice, tilting her head downward, and peering rather ominously over her huge glasses, she said in weirdly dire tones, “In the cellar is a box with his name: ‘Jack Andrews. Contents of desk.’”
So thoroughly unaccustomed am I to uttering even the most innocent and innocuous of white lies that on the rare occasions when I deviate from the truth, I veer wildly from veracity by venting all my pent-up mendacity at once. Bursting into what I am chagrined to admit were real, or at least wet, tears, I let out a cry of ecstasy: “Uncle Jack’s desk! The picture of Aunt Claudia! The special pen set! Oh, my cousins will be thrilled!” Regaining genuine control, I asked timidly and solemnly whether it might be possible for me to take a peek at the box that bore the name of my beloved Uncle Jack.
In response to my inquiry, the young woman disclosed yet another respect in which Damned Yankee Press had, in the eighteen years since Jack Andrews’s murder, retained what I took to be its original character: The cellar, she informed me, had rats! On her first day here, the coffee machine had broken. Instead of following the admirable American course of sending her to buy a new one, someone called Leo—her employer, I gathered—had insisted that there was a perfectly good percolator on a shelf in the basement and, with no warning about the rats, had dispatched her in search of it. The dirty, dented percolator and its frayed electric cord had rested on the box labeled with Jack Andrews’s name.
“Did you actually
see
a rat?” I asked.
see
a rat?” I asked.
She nodded.
“It couldn’t have been a mouse?”
Playfully wagging a finger at Rowdy, who wagged his tail in return, she shook her head and replied with the confidence of true expertise, “In my country, you too could be food.” As before, she amended the statement: “Among the poorer classes.”
“Well,” I said, suppressing a shudder of nausea, “family pictures are priceless, and what’s the worst thing a rat can do?”
“Bite you,” she informed me promptly. “Transmit diseases.”
What drove me into that cellar was not really, I think, the hope of finding anything relevant either to Jack’s murder or to Professor Foley’s. Rita subsequently made much of the nature of my lies about “Uncle” Jack: In claiming kinship with Jack, she insisted, I had told the psychological truth. At the time, I felt only the impulse to touch objects that had been Jack’s: pens, pencils, paper clips, the debris of the life he’d lived in the office where he’d been poisoned.
After extracting herself from behind the computer and the other components of the barricade, the smiling young woman led me to a door, unlatched and opened it, reached in to flick on bright fluorescent lights, and provided clear, detailed directions to the shelf where she’d found the percolator. I was embarrassed to speak my mind to Rowdy in a stranger’s presence. I therefore fell back on an effort at thought transmission: “You go first, pal, because I’m sc-sc-sc-scared!” After he’d compliantly barged ahead and gone halfway down the steep flight of dirty stairs, I had second thoughts, not about my cherished position as the alpha figure in his life, but about the possibility that where there were rats, there might also be poison.
“Rowdy, wait!” Gathering his leash in my hands, I hurried down after him. To make mortally certain that I had full control and could prevent him from gobbling up whatever deadly snacks he might encounter, I grabbed his collar, raised his head, and kept him tucked next to me.
The basement turned out to be a damp, musty-smelling version of the upstairs, but with dozens of free-standing, or in some cases free-falling, shelf units. Following the precise directions I’d been given, I turned right at a Xerox machine that had probably started to acquire value as an antique. Making my way down a sort of alleyway between shelves, I passed several eye-level landmarks the young woman had mentioned: a greasy-looking toaster oven and a box that had once contained Gordon’s Gin. A few steps past the Gordon’s, I came to a set of shelves with boxes boldly labeled with red marker. As I’d been told, on my left I found one about twice the size of a shoe box that read:
JACK ANDREWS
CONTENTS OF DESK
It was sealed with heavy brown tape. Scattered on the strip of tape across the top of the box were what I hoped were coffee grounds deposited by the old percolator. After checking for anything that could possibly be rat poison, I released my grip on Rowdy’s collar, looped his leash around my left wrist, and reached for the box with both hands.
Just as I was getting the filthy box settled on my right hipbone, where I could support it with my arm, Rowdy, with no warning whatsoever, hit the end of his leash. With the reflexes of a real dog person, instead of sensibly letting him bolt, I did exactly what I’d been schooled from birth to do. As I tightened my grip on the leash, tripped, and got dragged across that grimy, gritty concrete floor, I could practically hear my mother’s injunction:
Never, under any circumstances whatsoever, Holly, do you ever let go of the dog’s lead! Never, never! Is that crystal clear? Never!
Never, under any circumstances whatsoever, Holly, do you ever let go of the dog’s lead! Never, never! Is that crystal clear? Never!
The warning had been a standard feature of her lecture on my behavior at dog shows. What’s more, she’d been talking about golden retrievers, not Alaskan mala-mutes. She was, however, an obedience trainer of the old school—dentists drill with less fervor than hers—and it never even crossed my mind to obey common sense. Ahead of me, Rowdy had his head lowered in the classic, correct pose of a sledge dog hauling weight, but the force that drove him was far deeper than the urge to pull. Not a yard beyond Rowdy’s jaws, a rat scuttled across the floor. Like a separate animal, its tail slithered behind it. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that rats are creatures of God. This one was fat with evil, and greasy-coated and nasty-looking, as if it had just come from filthy places where it had committed vile acts of repugnant ratness.
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