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consumption.”
    “Well, at Chrissie’s wedding, anything to consume was so inconspicuous you could’ve starved to death. And she didn’t even invite you. Talk about people who make you feel excluded. I mean, these are people who don’t just make you feel excluded. They actually leave you out.”
     

Chapter 5

     
     
    “UGLY,” pronounced Kevin Dennehy, who had planted himself squarely on one of my kitchen chairs with his feet apart on the floor. His thighs are so massive that if he sits down with his feet together, he has to spread his knees like a frog in mid-kick. His arms were crossed on his chest, and the muscles in his cheeks and jaws looked as if he’d figured out how to bulk up his face with free weights. He repeated the word and glowered: “Ugly.”
    “It is ugly,” I said. “Didn’t something like this happen a while ago in Weston?”
    “Yeah. And in Newton before, too. One of the high schools.” He was talking to me, not to Leah.
    “So what did it say exactly?” she asked him. Dressed in hot-pink running shorts over a black leotard and footless tights, she was perched on a stool drinking a glass of a diet drink called Crystal Light, the one food—if you can call it that—she’d asked me to buy for her. It tasted so impotable that even Kimi refused to steal it. “When they called, they just asked if I’d seen anything. They didn’t say much.”
    “Swastikas,” Kevin said. “And anti-, uh, Semitic words. Spray-painted. In red.” His eyes rested briefly on Leah as if she might not understand the symbolism of a swastika, the meaning of anti-Semitic, or the significance of the color red.
    “All of that is fascist, you know,” she informed us. “It’s from Nazi Germany, including the color.”
    “Actually, we do know.” I tried to sound as if Kevin and I happened to be unusually well informed.
    The graffiti had been discovered early that morning by a runner taking a shortcut through Eliot Park. He called the police, who talked to the neighbors and discovered either from them or from Parks and Recreation that Nonantum had been using the park the previous night. The Newton police had called me and everyone else from the club to ask if we’d noticed anything. Leah and I hadn’t seen anything to make us suspicious. The Newton police hadn’t told us any details of the incident, and Kevin knew the few he did only because John Saporski, his colleague and buddy, grew up in Newton.
    “So,” I went on, “all we know is that it happened sometime after we left and before this jogger ran through there, so sometime in the night. Did any of the neighbors see anything?”
    “Not unless they got X-ray vision.” Kevin shifted in his seat. “The wall. Right.” I nodded. That’s where the graffiti were painted, on the inside of the concrete and stone wall that surrounds the park entrance. I’d assumed it was a WPA project. It had that carefully designed, perfectly constructed, labor-intensive look. “Anyway, someone could’ve noticed someone going in or coming out. Or maybe a car was parked there or something.”
    “Could be,” said Kevin unenthusiastically.
    “Maybe someone will remember something, someone who isn’t home from work, someone they haven’t talked to yet.”
    “Maybe,” said Kevin.
     
    Steve and I finally got some time alone that evening because Leah had a date to go into Harvard Square with a kid she’d met at dog training. His name was Jeff Cohen. He was tall and gangly, with curly dark blond hair destined to turn brown by the time he reached eighteen, and he turned out to be the handler of the snazzy black and white border collie I’d noticed in Bess’s class. Unfortunately, he didn’t bring the dog when he came to pick up Leah, but otherwise, he seemed pleasant and trustworthy enough. He shook hands with Steve and me, admired the picture of Larry Bird, and apologized to my disappointed dogs for leaving them home. Steve and I decided that there can’t be too