Authors: Susan Conant
I shortened his leash, gave him a light, bracing pat on the shoulder, then slipped through the barely open gate, Rowdy on my heels. With almost unbearable impatience, I inched the gate shut and replaced the chain as best I could. Now that Rowdy and I were actually on the grounds of Mount Auburn, I understood the folly of my plan for round-the-clock visits. By daylight, Mount Auburn was a visitor’s delight. But in the dark, what lay beneath the sod were not the deep, thick roots of old trees, but the decomposed and decomposing bodies of dead people. The monuments that rose around me, no matter how fanciful, moving, or even amusing by day, were stripped by darkness of their brave effort to make light of death. Simple, grand, angular, reverent, picturesque, all were now tombstones, nothing more.
Again, there was a soft, muffled cry. It came from somewhere to my right. At what distance? Not close. Not far. A paved road crossed in front of the gate. Another stretched in front of us. Rowdy and I moved straight ahead. In seconds, we reached an intersection, where Rowdy made a quick, eager move away from my left side. I assumed he wanted to take the lead. In a way, he did. It was Rowdy who came upon the uniformed body, Rowdy who sniffed it, Rowdy who raised his great head to me in confident expectation. Rowdy trusted me. He suffered from the humbling illusion that I would know what to do.
I
’D FINALLY FOUND
a Mount Auburn guard. I fumbled at his wrist for a pulse. Finding none, I forced myself to put my fingers on his throat. Although I knew that Peter Motherway had been garroted, I’d avoided dwelling on the details of how he must have died. Consequently, it took me a second to interpret the thin, sickeningly unnatural indentation in the bristly flesh. When I did, my hand sprang away all of its own accord, as if my fingers had brushed a hot iron. The reaction was instantaneous and involuntary. This, I told myself, was an unconditioned reflex, a primitive reaction from deep in the brain. Stimulus: sudden and unexpected physical contact with a dead body. Response: a startle of revulsion. Once my hand had fled, I felt pity. There was something pitiful about the stubble on the man’s neck, about dying while needing a shave. Still, I found myself compulsively rubbing my hand on my sleeve before I reached out to hold Rowdy.
I knew I had to touch the body again. Were the Mount Auburn guards armed? If this one had carried a weapon, it would be foolish not to take it. But all I found was a walkie-talkie of some sort, a little box clipped to his belt. It felt like a small radio with a series of buttons and a square of plastic mesh that must have covered the speaker. I had no idea how to operate the gadget. Tinkering blindly, I could set off the
kind of brassy squawk you hear in police cruisers and taxis; in trying to rouse help, I’d broadcast my presence. In case the guard had dropped a weapon when he’d been attacked, I searched the ground around the body. All I found was a little plastic bottle with the distinctive shape of a nasal-spray dispenser. The poor man had apparently been killed while defending himself against a stuffy nose.
If the attacker approached, Rowdy would warn me, wouldn’t he? Not deliberately, I thought. On the contrary, Rowdy would prepare himself to extend his usual happy greeting. On the other hand, he wouldn’t just sit there and let someone garrote me. He stands twenty-five inches at the withers and weighs close to ninety pounds. The power of his breed is even greater than the size would suggest. I comforted myself with the memory that in his youth, Tazs, my friend Delores’s somersaulting malamute, had often pulled forty times his own weight. Forty times! Tazs, the famous Pulling Machine, had a Working Weight Pull Dog Excellent title and a history of weight-pull triumphs that Rowdy lacked. But the two dogs weighed the same! And Rowdy loved me as devotedly as Tazs loved Delores, which is to say with a concentrated adoration equal to a million times his own weight. I felt certain that Rowdy would bring a physical attack to an immediate, violent halt. I didn’t want to see Superdog in action, though. In particular, I didn’t want to see bullets penetrate his chest instead of bouncing off.
As if to shield Rowdy, I shortened his leash and forced my way ahead of him. The guard’s corpse lay near an intersection of roads. At a guess, it wouldn’t have been left where Motherway and the tattooed man would cross it on their return route. From where I stood, with my back toward Coolidge Avenue, the body was on the left. Therefore, I should head to the right. And at another guess, the men had taken Jocelyn to the Gardner vault, which I was quite sure was somewhere to my right. Mary Baker Eddy’s monument, readily visible in the daytime from Coolidge Avenue, was definitely to my right. It was the size of a building and was made of pale stone; even at night, it would be impossible to miss. If I reached it, I’d know I’d gone too far. The Gardner
vault was deeper into the cemetery than the Eddy Memorial. I’d need to bear right and cut toward the interior of Mount Auburn. I’d also need to leave the paved roads. The Gardner vault, the family crypt, sat on the shores of a little artificial lake in what might have been a natural valley. Some sort of path ran near the lakeshore, but I was positive that I’d looked down on the vault and its neighbors from a trail on the high ground above. Unfortunately, it also seemed to me that even for one of the old sections of Mount Auburn, the area was an exceptionally tortuous maze of streets, paths, ponds, monuments, and crypts. Worse, it wasn’t a section I knew well because there was only one dog monument nearby, and Dr. Stanton, Rowdy’s former owner, was buried elsewhere.
If the sounds hadn’t led me there, I might never have found it. The voice I heard now was different from the one that had cried out. There were words. I couldn’t understand them. The sex was male. The tone was belligerent. Rowdy crowded against me. I could feel his muscles tighten. He has a nose for trouble. On his own, hearing it and smelling it, he’d head directly for its source. With misgivings, I loosened his leash to give him free run within its six-foot length. With a questioning glance at me—
This is what you want, isn’t it?
—he confidently hit the end of the leash and justified the view of all the dumb people who’d ever said, “Hey, lady, who’s taking who for a walk?” Rowdy plainly knew where he was going. More than that! I knew as well as I knew my dog that he was, indeed, gleefully pulling toward trouble. The hitch was Rowdy’s varied conception of trouble. Rowdy might be making for human conflict. Alternatively, he could be in ardent pursuit of a meal of plump raccoon.
We suddenly came to a place I remembered, a passageway between walls of polished stone. I couldn’t read the names on the walls now, couldn’t even remember whether they were cut into the rock or engraved on brass plaques, but I knew they were there. If we followed the passageway and turned sharply right, there’d be a little body of water on our left and, on our right, happily situated on the shore like a row of summer cottages, the quaint buildings that were, in fact, family crypts. The Gardner vault was in the row.
But we didn’t follow the passageway. I tugged on Rowdy’s leash and managed to persuade him to reverse direction. I didn’t need to see his face to read his disgusted expression. I could almost hear him silently groan. My stupid ideas are a great trial to him. By patting my thigh and stepping enthusiastically forward, I convinced him to indulge me. Now that I finally had my bearings, I quickly found the little footpath that ran parallel to the shore of the tiny lake on the miniature hillside above the family vaults. The passing of clouds brightened the sky a shade or two, so I didn’t need to grope my way, but moved swiftly until the roofs of the squat crypts were below me and, below them, the water. I could hear movement. There was a soft splash. Someone was mumbling. Jocelyn? Yes. She repeated a series of syllables. The pills had thickened her voice. She seemed to be saying the same thing over and over, but I couldn’t make out what it was. I heard whispers. One had a tone of impatience. I was too far away to understand the words.
In frustration, I dropped to my hands and knees and began to creep slowly downhill. I shortened Rowdy’s leash and gripped it tightly in my hand. I must not raise my hindquarters and lower my shoulders, I reminded myself; in the universal body language of dogs, the “play bow” is an invitation to start leaping and tearing around. To my relief, Rowdy seemed content to join me in a game of silent stealth. The short distance we covered put me close enough to hear the phrase that Jocelyn was now uttering again and again in a drugged, yet weirdly insistent, voice.
“Brother and sister, brother and sister, brother and sister,” she mumbled. Her tone changed to one of surprise. “Brother and sister! Brother and sister! Christina, my Christina!”
“Gerhard, for Christ’s sake,” B. Robert grumbled, “hurry up! Your orders are clear! Get her head underwater and hold it there! Is that too complicated? First, get her head underwater. Then hold it there! And no marks!”
I could now see B. Robert Motherway’s tall figure pace back and forth on what seemed to be a gravel path in front of the Gardner vault. Between the path and the water was a large, low, rectangular object I couldn’t identify, a tomb, perhaps,
or dignified housing for equipment that pumped water to the artificial lake. Or aired out the crypts? Anyway, Jocelyn was stretched out on it. Facing the lake, Gerhard sat on it in the pose of
The Thinker.
Suddenly, he exclaimed at almost normal volume, “It’s concrete! I could smash her head against it!”
“Brother and sister,” Jocelyn muttered compulsively, “brother and sister.”
“Shut up!” Motherway quietly ordered her. “Oh, for Christ’s sake! Why is it impossible to get people to obey orders! It is a terrible thing,” he added, obviously to himself, “to lose the strength of manhood. It is a terrible thing to grow old.” Again issuing orders, he strutted toward the two figures, pointed a menacing hand, and said, “We have planned all this in detail and at length! Hold her head underwater! Do it now, you moron! Overcome with guilt and remorse, she washes off the stain of murder! Hurry! This should have been over in minutes! You had her in the water! Take her there again! Take her there now!”
“Here lie the remains,” Gerhard announced in the tone of a museum guide, “of a public benefactress, a beautiful woman who suffered the slings and arrowroots of outraged—” His voice broke off. My mouth must have been hanging open.
Arrowroots?
Wasn’t arrowroot a thickener used in cooking? A type of bland cookie?
In any case, the outraged one was Motherway. “Enough crazy talk! Enough!”
“Mama!” Gerhard cried. “Mama! Your little Jackie is here! Your little Jackie has come back! He has come with presents! You like pretty things, don’t you, Mama? All the pretty swastikas on your little house? Your pretty little boy? Your beautiful pictures? Mama, your little Jackie has come back to make sacrifices for you. Mama? Mama?”
Jackie? Isabella Stewart Gardner was Mrs. Jack Gardner. For short, she was Mrs. Jack. Jackie: her only child, the son who died in infancy. Gardner! Gerhard! This Gerhard had not the slightest trace of a German accent; in fact, from his vowels, I’d have guessed that he grew up in one of the suburbs south of Boston or on the South Shore. I felt suddenly certain
that he’d taken the name himself, picked it because it reminded him of Gardner.
As I watched, Jocelyn unexpectedly sat up. “Brother and sister,” she repeated.
Motherway abruptly lost patience. I saw him reach into his pocket and produce what must have been the handgun he’d had in the car. He stepped stiffly to Gerhard. “Pick her up, take her to the water, submerge her! Do it now!” The one he pointed the gun at, though, was Jocelyn. If Gerhard didn’t drown her, Motherway would shoot her. Did it matter which way she died?
If it hadn’t been for Rowdy, I’d have lacked inspiration to act. As I struggled to think of almost anything to do, a great many sirens wailed faintly somewhere far away. But not too far for Rowdy’s sharp ears. Clicker training, I remind you, increases the frequency, intensity, and duration of target behavior. Does it ever! Raising his mighty head, Rowdy howled back.
Ahhhhh-wooooo! Ahhhhh-wooooo!
Unmuffled by walls, his operatic voice rang through the night air.
I leaped to my feet. A few steps put me on the turf-covered roof of the Gardner family vault. In what I hoped would pass with Gerhard as the elegant turn-of-the-century cadences of Isabella Stewart Gardner, I took advantage of Rowdy’s bloodcurdling accompaniment to declaim, “I am Mrs. Jack Gardner! I sleep here in peace! Why do you desecrate my memory?”
My desperate, loony act apparently took in Gerhard. He fell to his knees facing the vault. Motherway’s head jerked around to where Jocelyn sat, then jerked back. Could he see me? Could he see Rowdy? Even if he could, he’d have to be a first-rate marksman to hit either of us using a handgun at this distance at night.
Boldly, I added in my Isabella voice, “Do not kill the woman!” Mrs. Gardner, I reminded myself, had owned dogs. I allowed a hint of my dog-trainer assertiveness to slip in. “Save her! Save her life! Do it for roe!”
Preoccupied with my role and with the weapon in Motherway’s hand, I failed to keep an eye in other directions. Motherway still faced the vault. He was just starting uphill
toward me when a weirdly identical figure came running at full speed along the path by the lake.
“What the hell is going on here?” Christopher Motherway’s voice was a young man’s version of his grandfather’s. “Mother left me a note. She must’ve been desperate.”
“Christopher, go home!” Motherway commanded.
Far from being roused by her son’s arrival, Jocelyn slid back down. “Brother and sister,” she mumbled. “Brother and sister. Christina, I am so sorry! I didn’t know! I didn’t know! I didn’t think he’d do it! I didn’t know!”
In ludicrous understatement, Christopher exclaimed, “This situation is unacceptable!”
“Get off your high horse!” his grandfather snapped. “You had no qualms about Peter, did you? And if you had obeyed orders then instead of hiring this crazy Gerhard, this would be unnecessary. But you had to get greedy, didn’t you? You couldn’t go and pay full price for a professional, could you, Christopher? You had to keep half the fee for yourself. You always were a greedy little boy.”