Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
In which Worried is asked to bury two bodies and the animal-rights contingent gets riled up.
Jul 9, 2001 | As has been my custom for decades now, I walked to work through Thornton Arboretum at a pace brisk enough to do my heart and lungs some good. Or so I like to think. It takes nearly half an hour. Descending Bridge Street, I turn left through the Oakdale section, formerly a patchy area of run-down red brick housing that has undergone a dramatic revival. Gentrified, I believe, is the appropriate term of opprobrium for such improvements. Then, after crossing at the lights on Merchants Row, I ascend through an area of large-lawned affluence to the granite gates of the arboretum.
I have never cared much for the gaudy death bloom of our northeast autumns. I prefer the aftermath, the subtleties of yellows, golds, and browns, the baring branches, the crunch underfoot, the rustle of wind, the smell of sweet decay. The world was thus this morning, with the sky a forbidding gray rendering the agitated waters of Kettle Pond a dull pewter.
A like agitation stirred my own heart as I walked along, as though more in haste than with the purposeful stride of the health- conscious. The geese paddled the cold water, the crows flew against the palled sky, and the jays called, sounding like augurs of disaster. The very trees, my old friends, might have been watching me, mute, as though in warning. My pulse quickened as I crossed the Lagoon Bridge and saw the Museum, its five stories of elegant brick with neo-Gothic and neo-Grecian flourishes, rising into view behind the browning sycamores that line Belmont Avenue. Was that beautiful structure, designed by Hannibal Richards, "the Bernini of Seaboard," harboring another clutch of murderers?
Of course, if there is a criminal conspiracy, it's no doubt festering in the Genetics Lab, housed in the bastardized wing added later, which squats to the left.
The Love Potion Murders (in the Museum of Man) appears in People every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Read The Love Potion Murders from the beginning.
All of this foreboding, of course, is nothing next and no doubt related to the dread that now shadows my life. I am worried sick about poor Elsbeth. We will have the results of her tests the day after tomorrow, and I fear the worst. She has all but stopped eating. Her face is drawn and pale. Her eyes still shine, but it is only her essential goodness showing through. Today, at the first meeting of the Curatorial Ball planning committee, I had an awful premonition that she would not be with me there. I shook the notion immediately, of course. She may simply have one of those pernicious viruses that abound these days. Dr. Berns will probably give her a shot or a prescription, and I will have my Elsbeth back in glowing health again.
I have, for all my presentiments, little to report on the Ossmann-Woodley case. I forwarded the two e-mails I have gotten from Worried to Lieutenant Tracy. He dropped by this morning, and we went over the contents of the Worried missives and what they could import. He agreed with me that it might be very useful to learn the identities of the three individuals who were involved in what he termed "the threesome." But more than that, he said he would really like to talk to the person who had asked Worried to bury those rabbits.
I said I had already asked Worried to help us on both of those accounts. I also related to him the essence of my interview with Dr. Penrood, but kept to myself the tincture of suspicion that meeting occasioned in me. I did tell him, however, that I thought it entirely possible that something out of the ordinary might be going on in the Genetics Lab.
The lieutenant sympathized when I told him I was to meet with the University's Oversight Committee. In the wake of the Ossmann-Woodley matter, the Committee, has, through the University administration, come under pressure from a local group calling itself "The Coalition Against the Unnatural." He nodded ruefully at the mention of the name. The same group has been lobbying the mayor's office to have the research in the Genetics Lab opened to general public scrutiny. We live in interesting times, as the Chinese curse has it.
Get Salon in your mailbox!