The chefs aren’t cooking tonight. They don’t have time, Luke said when I called. I’d hung up before I wondered what was keeping them so busy. Then I decided I’d better go home.
Cape Wok is decorated with tiny green lights and red tinsel garlands. The owners are happy to see me, as always, and they should be. I’ve put one of their daughters through college already. And there’s little doubt that I’ll educate the other one before my son reaches adulthood.
Our dinner is ready, small white boxes with tin handles packed in two brown paper bags, each one carefully stapled closed. The owners wave as I leave, wishing me a Merry Christmas and saying they hope to see me again soon. None of us has any real doubt that they will.
The spicy aromas of Szechuan shrimp, orange chicken, and fried rice fill the Thunderbird, then merge with the smell of burning wood when I pull into our driveway. Luke is at the kitchen counter when I come through the door, piling mounds of whipped cream on two mugs of steaming hot chocolate. He puts his nose in the air and sniffs, then closes his eyes as a satisfied smile spreads across his face.
“All right! Cape Wok!”
My stomach knots a little-a guilt spasm. In our house, Chinese takeout is comfort food.
There’s another smell, I realize, competing with the spices, the wood, and the chocolate. Again, it’s familiar, but it’s not Ragú. It’s something sweet. I can’t name it.
I park the bags on the table and then notice that it’s clean. In fact, the whole room is clean. Last night’s dishes have been washed and put away. The pots and pans are spotless, shiny even, hanging from their hooks over the gas range, and the counters have been wiped down. It’s nice to have a girl around the house.
The living room, though, is another story. The furniture’s been moved and the relocated couch holds two cardboard boxes, tissue paper and tree ornaments spilling over their sides. A wide red ribbon decorates the staircase banister, tiny white lights dancing around it. Bing Crosby croons in the corner.
The crèche sits on the coffee table, the nativity scene characters scattered around in no particular order. A cow stands alone in the center of the barn. The baby in his manger is somewhere out in the field, his mother unaccounted for. A handsaw is on the table too, three unshepherded lambs meandering across its blade.
And there’s a tree. That’s the other smell. In the middle of our living room, in front of the picture window, stands a tall, scrawny pitch pine, a Cape Cod native not normally selected for Christmas duty. Not even by Cape Cod natives.
I turn to face Luke, who followed me in from the kitchen. He’s beaming. He points one of the dripping mugs at the saw, the other at the scarecrow tree. “We chopped it down today,” he says, “just before dark. It’s a beauty, huh?”
Beauty’s a stretch.
Luke hands one mug up to Maggie, who’s seated on the top rung of a ladder, crooning with Bing about a white Christmas and stringing unlit bulbs around the highest branches. He holds the other one out toward me, but I shake my head. Hot chocolate is not my drink of choice with Szechuan shrimp. Luke shrugs and inhales half of it in one swallow.
Maggie stops crooning long enough to take a gulp from her mug. She comes up with a whipped-cream mustache. “Check out your bedroom,” she says. “We’ve got a surprise for you.”
These days, surprises make me nervous. I head for the bedroom door with Luke on my heels, Maggie scrambling down the ladder to follow. There’s a faint glow in the darkened room, the kind thrown by the last embers burning in a fireplace.
My stomach knots again. I don’t have a fireplace.
Danny Boy’s bed, normally in Luke’s room, is here instead. A wicker oval lined with an old pad and worn blankets, it’s pressed against the wall beside my bed. And a night-light-one I haven’t seen since Luke was a toddler-is plugged in above it. A yellow, giddy dish dashes over the outlet with an equally enthusiastic spoon.
Danny Boy isn’t in his bed, though. He’s curled on the braided rug beside it, his eyes alert and focused on a small, dark-brown bundle inside. His tail thumps to greet us, but his steady gaze doesn’t move. The bundle lifts its head and opens moist, chocolate-colored eyes. A puppy.
Maggie bends and scoops up the small dog. “We found him in the woods,” she says. “Someone must have dropped him off at the edge of the highway, and he wandered into the woods, away from the traffic. He was scampering around from tree to tree, all alone, whimpering.”
“We couldn’t just leave him there,” Luke adds. “He’d have frozen.”
More likely he’d have been a coyote’s dinner. Better keep that thought to myself.
“We named him Charles,” Maggie says, scratching the puppy’s floppy ears.
Charles? A mental picture of the Prince of Wales pops into my head, uninvited.
“He looks like a Charles, don’t you think?” Maggie hands the prince’s namesake to me.
Charles looks up, as if awaiting my opinion of his christening. He drops his lower jaw, and his long tongue falls over one side of it. He looks like he’s smiling. And he’s far more charming than the prince.
“He does,” I agree. “He looks like a Charles.”
“Danny Boy has been taking care of him since we got home,” Maggie says, bending again to pat the old dog. “Like a mother hen.”
This news is somewhat surprising. “Maggie, Danny Boy is-well-he’s a boy.”
“I don’t care,” she says. “He’s been acting like a mother hen.”
Charles raises his face toward mine, his smile widening, confirming Maggie’s account of Danny Boy’s maternal attentions.
“Watch out,” Luke warns. “He’s got a wicked case of dog breath.”
“He’s a dog,” I tell him. “He’s supposed to have dog breath.”
“Anyway,” Maggie says, “we thought Charles should sleep with Danny Boy, but not upstairs. Charles can’t handle the steps yet.”
I examine the warm bundle in my arms. He has sizable paws. He’ll handle the steps in no time.
“So we moved them in here,” Maggie continues. “But it’s temporary. When I go home, Charles can live with Mom and me.”
Charles smiles again. He approves.
Maggie’s face brightens and her eyebrows arch, an idea dawning. “And Luke and Danny Boy can visit.”
Danny Boy’s ears perk up and his tail thumps the floor again at the mention of his name. He doesn’t realize he’s a mere pawn in this plan.
“I was never allowed to have a pet before,” Maggie says. “Howard hates animals. But now”-she shrugs, reaching over to scratch Charles’s ears-“I can.”
Howard Davis for Charles. A good trade if ever there was one. I bite my tongue.
Maggie and Luke head back to their tree trimming, and Danny Boy follows, leaving Charles and me to get acquainted. I sink into the old rocker at my bedside and nestle Charles, still smiling, in my lap. In the space of three days, we’ve added a teenager and a dog to the household. Maybe it’s time to build an addition.
By the time Buck’s trial was a week away, I had almost convinced myself that my own misgivings about the temporary insanity plea were irrelevant. The only meaningful thoughts on the matter, I told myself, are those of the experts: members of the medical and psychiatric community. Surely, I thought, Mr. Justice Paxson would agree.
He didn’t.
Physicians, especially those having charge of the insane, generally, it would seem, have come to the conclusion that all wicked men are mad, and many of the judges have so far fallen into the same error as to render it possible for any man to escape the penalty which the law affixes to crime.
We do not intend to be understood as expressing the opinion that in some instances human beings are not afflicted with a homicidal mania, but we do intend to say that a defense consisting exclusively of this species of insanity has frequently been made the means by which a notorious offender has escaped punishment.
One thing seemed certain the night I read those words. Harry should handle the experts.