Animal Appetite (8 page)

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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

BOOK: Animal Appetite
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“Polarized,” Rita commented. “Really, it all sounds like an effort to preserve the moment just before this traumatic loss. What a shame that she never had a chance to work herself free of this extreme idealization of the father! Every child deserves the opportunity for disenchantment. Speaking of idealized figures, how is Hannah coming along?”
“Hannah! Well, damn, it’s—”
“No, don’t tell me! She owned a darling little lapdog, and—”
“No, she did not. That’s why I picked her to begin with. The New England colonists had dogs—some of them did—but not as real pets. They were superstitious about dogs. They thought they were creatures of Satan.
God
spelled backward.”
“Is that true?”
“Yes. I mean, I should’ve known there’d turn out to be something radically wrong with her! Rita, those so called Indians she killed? Six of them were children. Hannah Duston murdered six children. I am really disgusted.”
Folding up the
Times
and rising, Rita said, “Well, if you set out to do research, Holly, you’ve got to be prepared to suspend judgment.”
“Not,” I insisted, “if your previous research has consisted almost exclusively of documenting the perfection of dogs.”
As Rita departed, my phone rang, and I dashed inside. I was hoping for a call from a professional portrait photographer named Violet Wish, who had long ago abandoned a successful career immortalizing children. She got fed up with mothers and switched to show dogs instead. With dogs, Violet claimed, she got very few complaints that there was something wrong with the mouth. When I’d dialed Violet’s number, I’d heard only the recording: “Violet Wish Studio! Dogs only!
No
, repeat,
no
children! Leave a message!” Before the beep sounded, a pack of little dogs sang out a cheerful chorus of yaps. Violet has papillons. I’d left word for her to call, but on a Saturday afternoon, she and the dogs were probably at a show. There was one in Fitchburg, a conformation show with no obedience. I hadn’t entered. Kimi wasn’t the judge’s type. Rowdy wasn’t, either, and in any case, he was still lame from his pad cut.
In fact, the caller was a woman who wanted information about adopting a malamute. Alaskan Malamute Rescue is my unpaid job. I help to find adopters for homeless dogs. This woman’s wonderful-sounding golden retriever had died recently. After I explained that malamutes are big and powerful, shed plentifully, clown around in the obedience ring, steal food, and exhibit a pronounced wild streak, she asked whether I happened to have the number of Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue. I did. Gee, and I hadn’t even mentioned songbirds.
For most of the afternoon, in between sprinting to answer the phone, I worked on the unsplit wood I’d hauled home from my father’s. My part of the house, the first floor, is an updated version of Cambridge student housing, but I renovated the second- and third-floor apartments when I bought the building, and Rita and the couple on the third floor expect the outside of the house to look decent. To my prosperous urban tenants, the pile of logs dumped at the far end of the driveway would suggest the imminent arrival of a rusted, doorless refrigerator and a flock of mite-infested geese. Splitting wood, like training dogs, is a meditative activity. On most of the logs, which were already cut to fireplace length, I used a big, sharp metal wedge that I drove in with a short-handled sledgehammer. The small pieces of birch just needed to be split with an ax. From time to time, I’d stop to stack the split wood under the flight of wooden stairs that leads up to the back door. I knew almost nothing about city rats. I hoped that, unlike chipmunks, they weren’t attracted to woodpiles.
At four-thirty, Violet Wish returned my call. As I’d guessed, she’d been at the show in Fitchburg. One of her papillons had finished his championship. After offering congratulations, I asked Violet whether she remembered a guy named Jack Andrews. “Eighteen years ago, maybe more. He had a golden named Chip. Chipper. You did a portrait of the dog.” Violet’s name stamped on the back of Chipper’s photograph was the reason I’d called her. I’d been surprised. Violet had always specialized in show dogs. I’d wondered how a pet owner like Jack Andrews had known of her existence.
“Oh, yeah. I sort of remember him. You used to see him at shows with that tall girl. What was her name?”
“I have no idea. I don’t remember him at all. I didn’t even know he showed.” Showed
dogs
, naturally. What else?
“He was a nice guy, but he kind of stayed in the background. I only knew him, really, because I did those portraits. That was a long time ago. The girl was the one who handled. She finished Chip for him.” (Translation: handled the dog to his championship.) “That’s when he had the portrait done. What was her name? Tall girl with short brown hair. If you want to know about Jack, she’s the one you ought to ask.”
“Do you know how I’d get hold of her?”
“I haven’t seen her for ages. Geez, Holly, it might even
be
eighteen years. Maybe more.”
When we hung up, I made myself a cup of coffee and took it, together with Violet’s portrait of Chip and Jack’s graduation picture, out to the fenced side yard, where the dogs had been safely confined while I split wood. My goldens would’ve kept me company as I worked. When Vinnie was on a down-stay, nothing but the sound of my voice would persuade her to budge. Rowdy and Kimi might have held their stays, too. They might also have torn off after a squirrel, rounded the corner of Appleton, and ended up in the traffic on Concord Avenue. As obedience dogs, malamutes have many strengths: They’re highly motivated, especially by food. They learn quickly. They have a long attention span. They work hard. They’re lively and fun. In fact, the only thing wrong with them as obedience dogs is that they’re, well . . . disobedient. They are, however, incredibly intelligent. I was hoping to absorb some of Rowdy’s and Kimi’s brain power by osmosis. But if they had any brilliant insights about Jack Andrews and Chip, they kept their thoughts to themselves. When I went back inside, the dogs followed me.
“Not quite yet,” I said, meaning dinnertime. Then, armed with the knowledge that Chip had been a show dog, I started to tap my extensive network for information about Jack Winter Andrews. To my annoyance, an infuriating number of people, including my father, had only vague memories of Jack. He’d owned two or three dogs, they thought. Yes, all goldens. The person I should be talking to, I was told over and over, was that tall girl. She dropped out of dogs a long time ago. What was her name? Tracy something, I finally learned. No one came up with a last name. Jack’s family hadn’t known about his dogs, a few people told me. No one—no one in dogs—was supposed to call him. His family had thought Chip was just a pet.
The handwritten note found on Jack’s desk?
It takes more than the absence of faults to make a winner
. I hadn’t read an idiosyncratic meaning into that sentence after all; Jack Andrews hadn’t been writing about himself—he’d really been writing about a dog.
Jack Andrews, I concluded, had led a double life. His family had known nothing about his existence in the world of dog shows and show dogs, which is to say, in my own world. John
Winter
Andrews had had
golden retrievers
. The life he had kept secret felt weirdly like my own.
CHAPTER 9
On Sunday afiternoon, Steve and I and our fifour dogs piled into his van for what proved to be a dismal trip to the island in the Merrimack where Hannah Duston had been held captive three centuries ago. Saturday’s blue sky had turned ashen, and the temperature had dropped thirty degrees. The heavy rain that slicked the highway seeped into the interior of the van to reawaken the odor of every dog Steve had ever transported in it. By the time we reached Concord, New Hampshire, we’d had to stop twice to clean up after Lady, Steve’s pointer, who sometimes gets carsick.
As the miles and minutes passed, my relationship with Steve smelled more and more like a sick, wet dog. Neither of us said anything about my father, his mother, Thanksgiving, or his impending post-Thanksgiving trip home to Minneapolis.
“If you’d fed her gingersnaps the way I told you,” I said, “she wouldn’t have thrown up.”
He didn’t reply.
“You should’ve given her Bonine. We should’ve stopped in Nashua or Manchester and found a drugstore.”
“If I want a consult, I’ll hire a consultant.” He peered at the highway and leaned forward to wipe the fogged-up windshield. “With a degree in veterinary medicine.”
“As a matter of fact, I wrote an article about car sickness, and obviously, I know more about it than you do.
My
dogs aren’t throwing up.” Neither was India, Steve’s other dog. Furthermore, I hadn’t fed Rowdy and Kimi gingersnaps, dosed them with Bonine, or done anything else to prevent a malady from which neither had ever suffered. Steve nobly refrained from saying so.
“Which exit is it?” he asked.
“Next one. Seventeen. When we get off, we follow the sign for Penacook, but we go only a half mile or so. The island’s actually in a town called Boscawen. The parking area’s supposed to be on the left.”
And it was. When we turned in, the rain was pouring down, and I wanted Steve to stop so that I could take a picture of the green historic marker from inside the van, but he kept going. “You can get one on the way back,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”
“I didn’t make you come! You volunteered. I could have driven here by myself. In case you’ve forgotten, we decided it would be a chance for us to spend some time together.”
Steve parked next to a path that led down a hill toward the river. Rowdy, who hates to get wet, balked at leaving his crate. Once we were all out of the van, Kimi directed an unprovoked growl at India, who looked to Steve for guidance.
“You ought to get that under control,” he said to me. “There’s no need for it.”
“If I want a consult, I’ll hire a consultant,” I snapped. “Preferably an expert in animal behavior, by which I don’t mean a vet.” Veterinarians don’t necessarily know anything about dog behavior, but Steve is as good a dog trainer as I am. In some ways he’s better because he’s more patient than I am. India had her U.D.—Utility Dog title—and was working on her U.D.X. The X is for excellent, and excellent is just what she is. The title Perfect Bitch obviously belonged to someone other than India. In the eyes of Steve and all four dogs, I read the message that we should have stayed home.
Fortunately, as we started down the path, the rain stopped, the sky brightened, and our foul moods began to evaporate. When I’d called the New Hampshire Historical Society for directions, I’d envisioned the scene of Hannah’s massacre as a small and perhaps inaccessible island in the middle of the Merrimack, which I imagined as wide, rocky, and turbulent, bubbling with the confluent waters of the Contoocook River. To my surprise, I’d been told that there was a footbridge. I pictured a narrow, rustic suspension bridge with footing that might prove treacherous to the dogs. By now, the entire episode of Hannah’s captivity had acquired such significance in my mind that it never occurred to me that anyone would have marred the site by running railroad tracks straight through the island. In all my reading, I might mention, I’d come across only one other person, a man, Leslie Fiedler, who found Hannah as consequential as I did. According to Fiedler, Hannah’s story represented the characteristically American and feminist recasting of the European myth of the damsel in distress. What weakened a lot of the points he made, however, was his failure to get the facts right. According to Fiedler, the Haverhill Hannah was a stone monument of a woman in a sunbonnet who held a tomahawk in a “delicate” hand. Bronze, no hat, a hatchet, not a tomahawk, and a hand toughened by rough work. A hand, in fact, like mine. Furthermore, central to Fiedler’s argument was the image of offended motherhood’s defense of a male child. The murdered child, however, was a baby girl.
But back to the island, which was barely that: a few acres separated from the riverbank by marshy water and nowhere near the center of the confluence. The Merrimack and the Contoocook were dark, flat, and not half the width I’d imagined. The old iron railroad bridge didn’t even have to stretch hard to link land to island. As we followed the tracks across, Steve said, “The river would’ve been higher in March.”
“Yes, but not all
that
much. In a pinch, you could swim across.”
“Maybe not at that time of year. And they probably didn’t know how to swim.”
“True. The river was in flood, I think. And if they’d gotten wet, they might’ve frozen to death.”
I hadn’t known or maybe had forgotten that there was a monument on the island. I suppose I’d harbored some crazy expectation of crawling around in the moldy remains of a skin-covered tent or unearthing the skeleton of one of the birch-bark canoes that Hannah had scuttled before she fled. After three hundred years, needless to say, no trace remained. The abandoned tracks and a dirt path took us through a wooded area of bare-limbed maples and low evergreens to a big clearing.
In the center of the clearing, near the river, rose a monument much taller than the one in Haverhill and far more funereal in appearance, a massive pillar of gray granite topped with a gray granite Hannah. She leaned forward in a way that reminded me of a figurehead on a ship. The bodice of her dress dipped low, and her arms were bare. Her left hand didn’t point in accusation, but rested at her hip. In it she clutched what could have been an upside-down bouquet of wilted flowers with round, flat blossoms.

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