Animal Appetite (27 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
Squinting, I watched Randall turn. When he spoke, the depth of his voice jarred and frightened me. “You can look now,” he said.
Opening my eyes, I must simultaneously have opened my mouth in a giant
O
. The limp book bag lay on the bench. Positioned directly in front of me, about a yard away, Randall proffered the last two objects I expected to see: a collar and a leash. I must have gasped. Perhaps he assumed that I was pleased with his gift. The matched pair were of heavy leather. The collar was a flat band about a half-inch thick and a good two inches wide. How could anyone imagine that I would want or need such a thing? The correct collar for an Alaskan malamute is the kind that Randall had seen on my dogs, a rolled-leather collar that won’t flatten the coat around the neck. The leash was equally inappropriate. A good leather training lead is strong but not bulky; it’s narrow and thin enough to let you fold or crumple it in the palm of your hand. This leash was as thick and wide as the collar. Randall Carey had been in my kitchen, where he’d seen the leads that hung on the inside of the back door: show leads, retractable leads, leather leashes in four-foot and six-foot lengths, nylon leashes in bright colors, and not one that looked even remotely like this.
O
. The limp book bag lay on the bench. Positioned directly in front of me, about a yard away, Randall proffered the last two objects I expected to see: a collar and a leash. I must have gasped. Perhaps he assumed that I was pleased with his gift. The matched pair were of heavy leather. The collar was a flat band about a half-inch thick and a good two inches wide. How could anyone imagine that I would want or need such a thing? The correct collar for an Alaskan malamute is the kind that Randall had seen on my dogs, a rolled-leather collar that won’t flatten the coat around the neck. The leash was equally inappropriate. A good leather training lead is strong but not bulky; it’s narrow and thin enough to let you fold or crumple it in the palm of your hand. This leash was as thick and wide as the collar. Randall Carey had been in my kitchen, where he’d seen the leads that hung on the inside of the back door: show leads, retractable leads, leather leashes in four-foot and six-foot lengths, nylon leashes in bright colors, and not one that looked even remotely like this.
“I’ve been a very bad boy,” Randall said meekly. His voice was odd: soft, husky, and childish.
I didn’t catch on. Tactfully ignoring what seemed to me his peculiarly ill-chosen presents, I clutched for meaning.
A very bad boy?
His dissertation on Hannah Duston? He really should have told me about it.
A very bad boy?
His dissertation on Hannah Duston? He really should have told me about it.
“You certainly have,” I informed him.
In my own defense, let me say outright what must be obvious: that the world of purebred dogs and dog training is a remarkably wholesome place and that Holly Winter is one of its most wholesome denizens.
To my amazement, Randall Carey dropped to his knees before me. In remarkably doglike fashion, he was actually panting. Extending the heavy leather objects upward in his hands, he caught his breath and growled softly. “Dominate me!” he pleaded. “Dominate me just the way you do those big, bad dogs!”
Raising my eyes in what I suppose would’ve been a plea to that giant blue Siberian eye overhead, I caught sight of Cecily, who happened to be glancing out the window. My perfect tenant! I should never have filled the deep pits that Kimi had dug in the yard. In her wisdom, Kimi had tried to provide me with a choice of holes to crawl into.
“Randall, for God’s sake,” I ordered in my best alpha-leader voice, “get the hell up!”
Mistake!
Falsely encouraged, Randall moaned, “I love it! I love it! I love your boots, I love your ax, I love your—”
“Stop!” I commanded.
His head wobbling, his mouth hanging open, his breath coming faster and faster, he groaned, “You are Hannah! I prostrate myself at your feet! I am your first victim. It is dark midnight. We are in the wigwam. The fire burns low. I lie helpless. Asleep. Above me, you raise your hatchet! I—”
Words came to me from the Bible, words about Jael and Sisera:
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down
. With the little dignity I could muster, I said in what I hoped were sexless tones, “Dr. Carey, you are suffering from a profound misunderstanding.”
At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down
. With the little dignity I could muster, I said in what I hoped were sexless tones, “Dr. Carey, you are suffering from a profound misunderstanding.”
Still on his knees, he groaned, “More!”
“You are making a fool of yourself,” I said gently.
“Yes!” he sighed.
I spoke very calmly. “There has been a profound misunderstanding here. I have been very naive. I thought you meant your dissertation on Hannah Duston.” Almost whispering, I told him that the best thing would be if he’d stand up and leave. “And take these, uh, things with you,” I added. “They are of no interest to me at all.”
I turned my back on him. Still carrying the ax, I walked to the gate, opened it, and left him alone in the yard. Then I went into the house. Peering through the blinds of my study, I watched him make his dejected roly-poly way down the drive.
My talk about myself as the alpha leader. My ax, my leather boots, my prominent display of leashes. My big, tough dogs. Combined with my interest in Hannah Duston? Carey had seen me as the modern-day Hannah: the ultimate dominatrix.
CHAPTER 30
I tried to extend to Randall Carey my firagile view ofi Hannah Duston, Mary Neff, Samuel Leonardson, and their Indian captors as desperate people in circumstances too desperate for me to understand. I had never had a child, never mind stood helplessly by as armed men grabbed my six-day-old baby girl and crushed her head against a tree. Hannah and her companions had not had the benefit of the books I’d consulted. Hannah hadn’t even known how to read. When she’d finally acted on what she’d called “a great Desire to come to the Ordinance of the Lords Supper,” she’d dictated those words and her entire “Confession of Faith” to her minister.
I
knew that Thomas had rescued the Duston children left behind. Until her return, Hannah did not. If I, too, had believed that the bondage would culminate when, still recuperating from childbirth, I was stripped naked and forced to run the gauntlet, what would I have done?
I
knew that Thomas had rescued the Duston children left behind. Until her return, Hannah did not. If I, too, had believed that the bondage would culminate when, still recuperating from childbirth, I was stripped naked and forced to run the gauntlet, what would I have done?
Of the circumstances of her captors, I knew so little that I had only an educated guess about their tribe: Abenaki. I knew who Hannah’s captors were not: the original inhabitants of the area that became Haverhill, whose stone axes were displayed at Buttonwoods, where, in my pursuit of the Duston artifacts, I’d barely glanced at the drawings of dugout canoes that had carried men, women, and children soon exterminated by a “great plague,” as it was called, a European disease, smallpox, perhaps, or the plague itself. Three hundred years after Hannah’s violent escape, the rage of today’s Native Americans was scrawled in new graffiti on her statue in Haverhill. Yet Hannah’s captors, survivors themselves, had adopted the young Samuel Leonardson; they had not held his fair skin against him, but had eagerly sought human beings, regardless of origin, to replenish their own vastly diminished numbers.
In trying to imagine myself the hostage of impulses like Randall Carey’s, I failed completely. His urge felt as distant as the three centuries that separated me from Hannah and her captors alike, as deeply beyond me as the murder of a newborn infant or the slaying and scalping of child victims, as outlandish as the Native Americans and the English colonists had seemed to one another. For the grisly acts committed by both sides, I could recite explanations I’d read: In immediately killing their captives, Indians had dispatched the young, the old, and the infirm, those who wouldn’t survive the trek to French territory. The prisoners had had practical value as replacements in families destroyed by dislocation, starvation, and disease; monetary value as goods to be traded for the necessities of survival; political value as barter for French hostages held by the English colonials; and psychological value in a war of fear. In returning to the bloodied wigwam to scalp her victims, Hannah, too, had had practical motives. She’d been convinced that in the absence of irrefutable proof, no one would believe what she and Mary and Samuel had done. She’d hoped for money. She’d received it.
Randall Carey, in contrast, had attempted nothing grisly. The ax had remained in my hand. He had humiliated me; I’d felt like a fool. Dear God! What, if anything, was I going to say to Cecily? The whole scene, however, had been utterly unlike my silly fantasy of poisoned latte.
Feeling sullied by the episode, I took a long hot shower. Letting the water run through my hair, I reminded myself that I was blameless. It wasn’t as if I’d paraded around half-naked in a garter belt. I wore heavy boots to split wood because I’d once seen my father drive the blade of an ax through his foot. Rita, I remembered, had once worked herself into a frenzy trying to track down the source of a quotation she’d heard attributed to Freud. “Sometimes,” Freud was supposed to have said, “a cigar is just a cigar.” I couldn’t remember whether Rita had succeeded in her quest, but I knew that in my case an ax was just an ax, and boots were just boots, no matter how Randall Carey might view them. Excluding a couple of sets of lace underwear, the only thing I owned that could possibly be construed as sexual paraphernalia was a cream-colored silk bed jacket that Steve had bought for me at Victoria’s Secret.
As for Hannah Duston, almost from the moment she returned to Haverhill, she had become a symbol of everything from Motherhood Revenged to the triumph of Puritan Christianity over popish heathenism to the European devastation of Native Americans. But a
sexual
symbol? The prospect of running the gauntlet naked had obviously been a sexual threat. In 1821, Timothy Dwight had described Hannah Duston as “threatened with torture and indecency more painful than torture.” The Boscawen statue—both the original and the gaudy reproduction on the Jim Beam bottle—had, I realized for the first time, a weirdly erotic element. The clinging drapery revealed Hannah’s buxom body and drooped low over her right breast. But the drapery was a convention of the times, wasn’t it? And the breast an allusion to motherhood?
sexual
symbol? The prospect of running the gauntlet naked had obviously been a sexual threat. In 1821, Timothy Dwight had described Hannah Duston as “threatened with torture and indecency more painful than torture.” The Boscawen statue—both the original and the gaudy reproduction on the Jim Beam bottle—had, I realized for the first time, a weirdly erotic element. The clinging drapery revealed Hannah’s buxom body and drooped low over her right breast. But the drapery was a convention of the times, wasn’t it? And the breast an allusion to motherhood?
Dogs were obviously a symbol, too, but, for me, a symbol of the redeeming power of simple love in a world of violent complexity. All dogs and especially all malamutes were like Attla: strength and honesty made manifest. My own dogs were my dispellers of demons and my shelter from the maelstrom of human enigma: In times of overwhelming pain and chaos, there is no greater comfort than the rediscovery that sometimes a dog is just a dog.
Scrubbing my feet with a loofah, I told myself that flowing down the drain with the soap and the water and the sweat I’d worked up splitting wood was whatever irrational sense of responsibility I’d felt for Randall Carey’s aberrant misreading of me and everything about me. Only then did I let myself feel deep relief that I’d been foolishly and wonderfully wrong about Randall Carey’s surprise gift.
When I’d finished drying my hair and getting dressed, I took Rowdy and Kimi for a quick walk, during which, I might add, we encountered neither rats nor madmen—nor anything or anyone else to upset or worry me. When we returned home, Kevin Dennehy’s car was still missing from his driveway. Where was he? He’d left for the stress-reduction and lifestyle-change workshop, or whatever it was, last Friday, a week ago today. In my experience, which admittedly was limited to obedience-training seminars, summer camp for dogs and owners, and other such canine-centered events, a week meant that you arrived on the first day and left on the seventh. Even if Kevin’s week at this retreat in the Berkshires ran from Friday to Friday, shouldn’t it have ended early this morning? Didn’t its organizers need to prepare for the next week’s group? The trip from the Berkshires to Cambridge should have taken Kevin two or three hours. If, as I suspected, he’d broken the journey home from this rice-and-tofu haven by stopping for a roast beef sandwich or ham and eggs with home fries. English muffins, and a side of caffeine, he should still have been here by now. Was it possible that the soles of Kevin’s feet were too charred and sore to let him drive? Worse yet, had he done a beer-to-Buddha about-face in his outlook on life, donned a turban, quit the force, and decided to stay?
The blinking light on my answering machine signaled what proved not to be a message from Kevin proclaiming his permanent retreat from the Cambridge PD. Rather, the message was from Leah. She announced that she had Randall Carey’s dissertation on Hannah Duston. She was calling from a pay phone in the library and would call back in a few minutes.
As I waited, a connection came to me, one I’d missed in my panicked effort to piece together a meaningful whole from pieces that had fit together here and there, but refused to lock in place. The material Leah had brought still lay on the counter. I quickly double-checked her list of references. As I’d remembered, Randall. Carey’s dissertation was dated eighteen years ago. The connection: As my scabbed hands and knees reminded me, among the odds and ends found in and on Jack Andrews’s desk eighteen years ago, after his murder, had been that tantalizing slip of paper that bore the title
And One Fought Back
. A privately printed book. A dissertation. Both about Hannah Duston. Jack’s interest in her. Randall’s.
And One Fought Back
. A privately printed book. A dissertation. Both about Hannah Duston. Jack’s interest in her. Randall’s.
With photographic recall, I could see the heading of Jack’s obituary: JOHN W. ANDREWS, PUBLISHER. His profession: publisher. In pursuing his lives, public and private, open and secret, I’d viewed Damned Yankee Press mainly as the scene of his murder. In tracking down his wife, his lover, his dog, and his children, legitimate and otherwise, I’d treated the Damned Yankee guides as Jack’s excuse to make business-as-pleasure trips to bookstores in towns and cities where and when there just so happened to be dog shows. Jack’s profession, however, had been more than a cover for his hidden life in dogs. John W. Andrews, publisher, had also published books: the guides, of course, and books of regional interest, books like the ones still stacked everywhere at the press, including, for instance, a book about Lizzie Borden. It had even briefly crossed my mind that Jack might have thought about reissuing
And One Fought Back
.
And One Fought Back
.
The phone rang. Before Leah had a chance to say more than a few words, I said, “Hang on!” Returning with the photocopy of the privately printed book, I asked, “Leah, do you have that dissertation right there with you?”
“Yes. You want me to copy it?”
“Yes. No. I want you to read me parts of it. Do you have a lot of change with you? Never mind. Give me the number, and I’ll call you right back.” I hung up and dialed. When Leah answered, I said, “First, would you open to the beginning? Does it say who his thesis advisor was? Or the members of his committee?”
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