Bride & Groom (10 page)

In fact, you and North could do me a big favor. My father is very devoted to me and very generous, and he's wonderful with dogs, but he's far from the easiest person with other people, especially, alas, Steve. North would be the perfect father-sitter. With North around, my father might totally forget about the wedding!

Holly

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Subj: Promotion

Dear Holly,

In the spirit of taking an assertive approach to promotion.

I have given your name to a shameless number of people who will ask you to donate autographed copies of your book to Sundry Good Causes—Yankee Golden Retriever Rescue's auction, a couple of literacy groups, and an AIDS charity. All are excellent opportunities for you.

With warm regards,

Mac

CHAPTER 13

Public fear of the so-called Cambridge Killer arose not on Saturday, immediately after the murder of Victoria Trotter, but on Sunday, September 1, a day that Steve and I spent hiking with our dogs in an area of Gloucester known as Dogtown. As we hiked, we made some decisions about our marriage and our wedding. In the manner of a purebred registered dog, I was keeping the kennel name I’d started with. Anita the Fiend had hyphenated her name, by which I mean, of course, that she’d been Fairley-Delaney and not that she’d asked people to call her Anita-the-Fiend. I had no desire to copy her. Cambridge being Cambridge, substituting
Delaney
for
Winter
was out. If you think that the breakfast-food consumption ordinance is fierce, you should see the penalties for female nomenclatural submission to the patriarchy!

We also debriefed the previous evening, which we’d spent at a South End bistro with Rita and Artie.

“Artie seems crazy about Rita,” I said. “Did you notice what he said when she was on her way back from the ladies’ room? He said, ‘Isn’t Rita wonderful! I just adore her!’ ”

Steve was silent.

“It evidently didn’t make a big impression on you,” I finally said.

“Actually, it did. I didn’t like it.”

“Because you wouldn’t say something like that? Even if you thought it? You wouldn’t. I agree. But I think it’s just a difference of style.”

He shrugged. We dropped the topic.

We returned home from the hike to find that the Boston papers had compensated for the dullness of other people’s Labor Day weekends by playing up the similarities between the murders of Laura Skipcliff and Victoria Trotter. The papers couldn’t be expected to present as fresh and exciting the information that authorities were still investigating two homicides that might well turn out to be entirely unconnected. In contrast, warnings about a serial killer were newsworthy.

It was true that both Laura Skipcliff and Victoria Trotter had been bludgeoned to death in Cambridge. Both murders had occurred in the evening, the first in the garage of the victim’s hotel, the second on the porch of the victim’s house. Both victims were, of course, women in their mid-fifties. The only truly new information in the Sunday papers was a weird feature of Victoria Trotter’s killing. In addition to showing a high blood-alcohol level, postmortem examination had revealed that immediately after death, she had been injected with a large dose of insulin.

Steve and I ate pizza and watched the evening news in the living room. According to the television report, a search of Victoria’s house had uncovered neither insulin nor syringes nor glucose-monitoring supplies. Victoria had not been diabetic. Furthermore, neither of her dogs was diabetic. The segment closed with a few seconds of footage showing Victoria’s whippets with their breeder, who had reclaimed them. The dogs looked clean and happy. I’d have bet that the breeder was anything but happy about the condition they’d been in when the police had taken charge of them.

After swallowing a bite of pizza, Steve the Rational said, “Insulin. That’s irrational. She was already dead.”

“The murderer didn’t necessarily know that. Maybe he was making sure. Or maybe he intended to knock her out so he could inject her.”

Steve shrugged. Although the television story had ended, Steve stayed with it. “Those warnings in the papers didn’t seem to get to you.”

“I didn’t do more than skim them. They say the same things that Kevin is always preaching. But it did occur to me that we could use a few extra outside lights. Not that I believe that there’s necessarily a ‘Cambridge Killer.’ And Rita’s no more likely than I am to loll around on the front porch drinking gin. But she does sometimes drive home alone after dark, and she runs Willie out for a minute before she goes to bed. A few more outside lights might make her feel secure.”

“She should call you from her car when she gets near home. And come through here with Willie and let him use the yard.”

“Steve, this idea of a serial killer is almost certainly a media invention. Like the Boston Strangler. According to just about everything I’ve read, there was no Boston Strangler. Those were not serial murders. And that’s what Kevin says, too. But I’ll get more lights just as a general precaution. I’ll call an electrician.”

“I’ll do it. We’ve got light fixtures at work,” Steve said. "They’ve been sitting on a shelf for years.”

The next afternoon, Labor Day, he made a trip to the clinic and returned with six outdoor lights that he spent hours installing. Although I do a lot of home repair and maintenance, I won’t risk electrocution. I kept reminding Steve that the forecast was for rain and that I had no intention of watching him handle electrical wires in a downpour. Furthermore, I said, the Wayside Wildlife Refuge was open to visitors only until five o’clock. We absolutely had to find a place for our wedding, and if we didn’t hurry up, we’d have to rush through our visit to the refuge and would see the place only in dismal weather.

Steve wouldn’t be hurried. Although the Wayside Wildlife Refuge was fairly nearby, in Lexington, it was four o’clock when we pulled into its deserted parking lot. By then, the promised rain was pelting down. The maples and oaks that lined the narrow, rutted access road and surrounded the parking lot had suffered in the August heat. In the rain, their leaves were simultaneously desiccated and drenched. Not a single light shone in the big, shabby brown-shingled building next to the flooded parking lot.

“On a nice day—” Steve began. He didn’t bother to finish.

“No wonder it’s available at this late date,” I said. “And no wonder it’s not an Audubon sanctuary. I’m surprised that Judith and Olivia even suggested it.”

Mac’s wife and daughter had done us the favor of making a few phone calls to places they thought might still be available.

I added, “Maybe neither of them has actually been here. It’s really quite gruesome.”

“Don’t Mac and Judith live in Lexington?”

“Yes,” I said.

“The roof is sagging. Probably leaks. You want to bother getting out?”

“We’re desperate. Gabrielle can’t do the invitations until we find a place. We’d better take a look. For all we know, the front is unpromising but there’s a beautiful garden in the back with glass doors all along that side of the...”

“…dump,” Steve finished.

“At least it’s a big dump.”

We pulled up the hoods of our rain gear and splashed our way to the building’s entrance. Peering through the dirty glass panes of the front door, we saw a nearly vacant room that wasn’t even all that spacious.

“There’s supposed to be a ballroom,” I said. “Maybe this is just the front hall. Look, since we’re here, let’s take a look in back before we write it off.”

“Write it off? I haven’t written it off. The next time I want to throw a funeral for my worst enemy, it’ll be my first choice.”

Following a weedy flagstone path, we trudged to the rear of the building, which did, indeed, have glass doors and where there was, in fact, a garden—or the remains of one. The dominant plant was crabgrass, which flourished in flowerless flowerbeds and spread over the patio-block terrace that ran up to the back of the building. We could have looked through the doors, but did not because neatly laid out next to one of them was the dead body of a large rat.

“You’re psychic,” I told Steve. “The funeral? Yuck! Dismal was bad enough, but this is disgusting. Not only is there this rat, but it hasn’t been removed.”

“It’s been here awhile.”

“No one asked for an autopsy.”

Steve said, “There are flakes of paint on the body. From what’s peeling off the doors.”

“Sherlock Holmes! Althea will be so pleased! We can tell her that we found the Giant Rat of Sumatra and that you made a genuine Holmesian deduction.”

Althea Battlefield, the elder sister of Ceci Love, was a Holmes fanatic, a member of the elite Baker Street Irregulars and an Adventuress of Sherlock Holmes. If Althea alone had chosen the cake that my honorary aunts had provided for the launch party at The Wordsmythe, Althea would have made sure the decorations reflected what she’d have called “Canonical motifs.” The dog would have worn a deerstalker hat and carried a magnifying glass or a pipe. Somewhere on the cake would’ve been an obscure Holmesian object, a gasogene perhaps, and there’d have been portraits of Holmes, Watson, Moriarty, and Irene Adler. Anyway, the presence of the decomposing Giant Rat of Sumatra sent us directly back to the car. The rain was now falling in drops so big that they made expanding pools in the parking lot, as if the Wayside Wildlife Refuge were a fish hatchery with schools of minnows surfacing to feed. In a doomed attempt to preserve the newness of my car, I’d lined the back with frayed sheets, which lay under my dogs’ crates. Inside the crates were old blankets. In the household of a real dog person, linens do not make an ignoble exit from human-use existence by being turned into dust rags; rather, they are honorably reborn as valued dog linens. Thus it was that in addition to born-again sheets and blankets, my car contained a stack of clean, if threadbare, towels, one of which Steve spread on the passenger seat before he climbed in. I put another towel on the driver’s seat, and Steve used a third to mop our faces. By then, we were laughing at the horrors of the Wayside.

It’s worth noting that during our brief visit there, we’d seen no sign of other human beings: no employees, no volunteers, no visitors. Driving out of the parking lot, we left it as we’d found it: empty.

“Did you so much as hear a bird?” I asked.

“The closest thing to life was the dead rat. The place must belong to some private society with no money. And that’s why they allow dogs at weddings.”

“Going to the dogs would be a major improvement,” I said.

A second later, we did, however, see a sign of life, namely, a black sedan parked under some trees in a little turnout. Even I, an automotive ignoramus, was able to identify the vehicle as Artie Spicer’s Citroën. Citroëns are, of course, distinctive, and who but an ornithological zealot like Artie would go birding at this bleak sanctuary during a deluge? Steve said the obvious: “That’s Artie’s car.”

I slowed down and pulled to the side of the lane. “He must’ve dragged Rita here to add some rain-loving migrant to her life list. We’d better try to rescue her. We can all go and get sushi somewhere.”

Steve tried to stop me. As I opened my door, he said, “The motor’s running.”

“Rita’s probably making Artie wait for the rain to let up.”

“Holly—”

What failed to register on me was that although the motor was, indeed, running, and although the windows were defogged, no one was sitting in the car. Did I imagine that Artie and Rita had left the engine going as they wandered nearby in search of a rara avis? No, I did not. I imagined nothing whatever. Fool that I was, I pulled up my hood and ran through the downpour to Artie’s car.

Fate was smarter than I was and more effective than Steve had been. Fate and nothing else prevented me from rapping on the glass before I looked in the car. Stretched out on the rear seat, wearing a black merry widow I’d last seen in her hand, was Francie Julong, the dowdy birding buddy of Rita’s we’d met at the mall. Francie didn’t see me; her eyes were closed, and her attention was elsewhere. Specifically, it was on the man whose face I couldn’t see.

Rara avis
was the wrong Latin phrase. The right one was
in flagrante delicto.

CHAPTER 14

My first word was dog. I spoke it at the age of nine months and—yes—haven’t shut up since. Now, for once, I was not only silent on the subject of dogs, but shocked into utter speechlessness.
Utter.
Sorry. Victim that I am of anxiety-driven punning, I could serve as a case study in the verbal psychopathology of everyday life. The Viennese Dog Man would have understood. Now, he’d have been quick to remark that the source of my tension was sex. While I’m on the subject of Freud, let me digress briefly by guessing that little Sigmund’s first word was almost certainly
Hund.