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the one thing they’ll fight over, food and anything that resembles it. Rawhide. Dead squirrels. Rats, too, I suspected. I hoped that none of my neighbors was putting out poison. As soon as I opened the closet door to dish out the kibble, the dogs started yelping and screaming. As I added fresh Bil Jac from the bag in the refrigerator, both dogs were lunging and plunging and bawling. The bedroom door opened. Steve emerged and remarked at the top of his lungs, “Still starving them, huh?”
    After breakfast, he checked what I was relieved to hear him pronounce a nicely healing wound on one of Rowdy’s front paws. See? Steve really does make normal house calls. Then, without kissing me good-bye, he left for his clinic, and when I’d tidied up, taken a shower, and walked the dogs, I called the police. I call the police
    all the time, not because I’m one of those nuts who are always hearing imaginary burglars, but because my next-door neighbor and friend, Kevin Dennehy, is a Cambridge police lieutenant. Sometimes I need to reach him at work.
    Even at home, Kevin refuses to answer the phone with a cordial hello. Instead, he barks out his last name as if he were responding to a military roll call that grated on his nerves: “Dennehy!”
    “Kevin, it’s Holly,” I said.
    He softened. “Hey, how ya doing?”
    “Fine. Listen, could I ask you a favor? I’m writing a story about a guy who was murdered in Cambridge eighteen years ago.”
    “Girl reporter. You get sick of dogs?”
    “Never. When the guy’s body was found, he was in his office, and his dog was tied to his desk. It was supposed to look like suicide, but the dog gave it away. When the guy was alone there, the dog was always loose. His business partner murdered him for some insurance money. The partner died in a car accident before your boys could arrest him. Officially,” I added, “I suppose it’s still unsolved.”
    Kevin lapsed into a mock-Irish accent. “Eighteen years ago, I was but a slip of a lad meself.”
    “Yes, Kevin, but miracle of miracles, records were presumably kept even before you joined the force.”
    “Of sorts,” he conceded.
    I gave Kevin names—-John Winter Andrews, Shaun McGrath—and the date of Jack’s murder.
    “Relative of yours?” he asked.
    “Not that I know of,” I answered.
    After that, I made a trip to the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library and returned home with a pile of photocopies and a stack of scholarly books that had nothing whatsoever to do with dogs. After dumping the Xeroxes and the tomes on the kitchen table, I made a pot of coffee and spent a few minutes savoring the sense that after all these years in Cambridge, I finally fit in. Until now, while other Cantabrigian writers were spinning dizzying theories about the causes of social revolutions, interpreting statistical factors related to contextually based aspects of psycholinguistic variation, and revealing latent feminist themes in the rediscovered works of nineteenth-century women novelists, I’d been scribbling about flea infestations and explaining, for the millionth time, how to get your dog to come when called. (Short answer: Use food.) Ah, but now? Fledgling Cambridge intellectual that I was, I preened with the pride of the newly hatched. Elizabeth Coleman: New England Captives Carried to Canada. June Namias: White Captives. John Putnam Demos: The Unredeemed Captive. And A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers! Henry David Thoreau! Dog writer no more, I settled down to transform myself into an esteemed authority on Hannah Duston.
    Disillusionment set in as soon as I opened the Coleman volume to the section about Haverhill. Indian attacks, it seemed, were part of what she called Philip’s War. Wasn’t it King Philip’s? But I didn’t even know who Philip (king or no king) was, who’d fought his war, or what it had been about. Beginning the section about Hannah Duston, I was pleased to discover the name of the boy-captive who’d