The Kingdom of Dog Read Free Page B

Birmingham, England. The clayey soil of the Delaware Valley was perfect for the manufacture of porcelain and tile, and down the river in Trenton, artists like Walter Scott Lenox were making fancy china to rival the best Europeans, but Fields chose to concentrate on items like toilet fixtures and floor tiles, which flowed out of his factories, along the canals that paralleled the shallow Delaware all the way to Philadelphia.
    Rather than create a foundation to do charitable works and revere his portrait, Fields left Eastern the bulk of his estate, several million dollars’ worth of steel and coal stocks, and within a year, Eastern left its single red brick building and moved to this gray marble mansion.
    The campus was unusually quiet, as we were in the middle of Eastern’s winter break, when the students go home and the professors retire to their libraries. Rochester sniffed his way around a couple of pine trees and peed at the base of the marble sundial, and we walked back into my office through the French doors.
    As soon as I’d unhooked him and sent him to his bed, my cell phone rang, and I struggled to hear a crackling call from Pascal Montrouge, a reporter from the Bucks County Courier-Times , who had gotten lost on the way to the college.
    It wasn’t like the place was hard to find. Eastern straddled a hill overlooking the Delaware, between Yardley and New Hope. Any reporter who covered the county had to know where the place was. But I reined in my impatience and gave Montrouge the directions. Then I walked out to the reception table, where each guest had to pass by Barbara and Jeremy, a pair of fresh-faced undergrads from the Booster Club, who helped out at campus events.
    Barbara had dressed for the occasion, in a scooped-neck black taffeta dress and high heels, with her straight blonde hair piled up on her hair. But Jeremy looked like he was going to class, in a preppy button-down shirt and khakis.
    â€œHow’s it going, guys?” I asked, scanning the ranks of name tags still to be picked up, and the empty spaces between. “Looks like about what, twenty percent are here so far?”
    â€œTwenty-three point five,” Jeremy said.
    Barbara beamed. “Jeremy is majoring in math. He’s so smart.”
    Jeremy blushed. “Do you remember me, Mr. Levitan? I was in your freshman comp class last year.”
    â€œOf course,” I said, though that was a tough class, ending in multiple murders, and I’d tried to forget about it.
    â€œReally wild what happened to Menno and Melissa, huh?”
    â€œAnd sad,” I said.
    â€œYeah.” I was trying to figure out how to avoid talking more about that class when a tall, balding man in a camel-hair coat walked up, and I stepped aside.
    Barbara jumped up. “Daddy! You came!”
    â€œTold you I would, Princess,” he said.
    â€œRichard Seville,” the girl said to Jeremy. “He’s my father.”
    â€œI guessed.” Jeremy handed the man a name tag. “There’s a coat check right behind you, sir.”
    â€œI need to stay here for a while and then I’ll come find you,” Barbara said. She turned back to me. “Sorry, Mr. Levitan. Is there anything else we can do for you?”
    â€œJust keep on being friendly and welcoming the guests. I’ll come back and check in with you later.”
    I walked past the tables groaning with paté, fried mozzarella squares, cheese, fruits, stuffed mushrooms, and other hors d’oeuvres, and made a pit stop at the bar. As I was turning away with a glass of white wine, Joe Dagorian came up to me.
    â€œI can’t believe this terrible waste of money,” he said, shaking his head. “Think of the scholarships we could have given for the cost of this event.”
    â€œHaven’t you and Mike been over this a hundred times, Joe? We need to spend a little money to make more money. I’m sure this party is going to bring in ten or