"Oh, likely. I suspect she might've grumbled some about the pigs. I've had Ruby going on nine years now. The name was meant as an insult. Thought I'd fatten her up and eat her by fall. Make a feast of it. A Bronx cheer—a middle finger, if you will—to the old gray mare herself. But she grew on me, much as I tried not to let her."

"I feel the same about my mother," Martin said.

The doctor laughed amiably. "She's a brood sow, if there ever was one. My Ruby, not yours. It would have been profane to eat her. And I learned a funny thing after she had her first litter the following spring." He paused to bend and place the empty plate on coffee table. "A sow will eat her own brood," he said, still hunched over the table, looking up at them over his glasses. "Did you know that?"

"Will eat—?" Sheila began. The thought of it sickened her, though in her many years on the court circuit she'd heard of worse behavior from humans. "Her own babies?"

Dr. Mulligan nodded with the look of a man who'd imparted a long-cherished secret and leaned back in the tatty armchair. "That's right. My Ruby gobbled up the sickest little male piglet I've ever seen. Nothing left but bones when I went to clean her pen the next morning."

"This little piggy went cannibal," Martin said.

The doctor laughed. "Indeed. And do you happen to know what it's called when a sow eats her own young? Martin, I know you'll get a kick out of this one."

"No idea," he said. Sheila shook her head.

"They call it savaging." The doctor gave them a sly grin. "My sweet Ruby savaged one of her sons. Now doesn't that beat all?"

Dr. Mulligan took down a spiral book with a laminated cover from the bookshelf, like a cheaply produced school yearbook. The pages photocopied rather than printed. The cover made from light blue Bristol board, laminated.

"I published this book in two-thousand and four. It's the only history on Barrows Bay that I know of."

He eased himself back into the armchair with a groan and settled the bifocals back up on the bridge of his nose.

"The year Barbara passed on, I took a deep dive into three things: working this farm, local color, and Narragansett Light. For that first year, I would have considered myself more a professional drinker than an amateur historian or hobby farmer. But the more I learned, the more I worked the farm, the less I found the need to rely on the beer to escort me through my time of grief."

He smiled briefly, his gaze falling over the photos of his wife in a small collage frame very near his armchair.

"Anyhow, long story short, I discovered a lot about this little island of ours that very few people know about. Things I didn't even feel comfortable putting in the book. Things that might have gotten me committed, had I included them. Or worse. More in common with your material, Martin, than anything the blue-hairs on the Historical Society would like to read about in their history books."