Bride & Groom (14 page)

As I was putting on the kettle, getting out a filter, and so on, Olivia talked nonstop about Ian, who, according to his sister, underrated himself. “Daddy belittles Ian’s accomplishments,” Olivia said. “Mommy and I try to compensate.” The childish terms for her parents suited her appearance. Her light brown hair was in pigtails, and her loose blue-checked dress could’ve been a giant version of a baby outfit. I had to remind myself that Olivia was a married woman in her late twenties, old enough to drink the coffee I was making. It would’ve felt natural to prepare a children’s drink for her— say, hot cocoa with miniature marshmallows.

“Mommy was happy that Ian showed up the other night,” Olivia said. “He and Daddy are both making an effort these days, and it’s good that Ian’s doing his part. Mostly, Ian just has the great original
thing
about his mother. Daddy just doesn’t appreciate... well, you’ll hear.” She patted the CDs. “There isn’t a stringed instrument that Ian can’t play better than everyone else who was ever born, and he has a pretty good voice, too, and he doesn’t even work at that.”

“Your mother said he was real versatile,” Steve said. “Does he actually do weddings?” I asked.

“Musicians have to take what they can get,” Olivia said. “Not that
your
wedding... really, he’d love to do it. He’s a gentle soul, and he could do anything you wanted if you just gave him a general idea, maybe early music before and during the service, and then bluegrass or Motown for the reception, if you want dancing. Or jazz?”

“All this by himself?” I poured coffee. In my eagerness to hasten Olivia’s visit, I’d filled the kettle with hot tap water.

“No, of course not, and his groups are almost as good as he is.” She tapped the CDs and sipped her coffee. I wished that she’d gulp it down and flee. Steve and I had dogs to take care of, and we wanted some time together. Alone! Olivia said again, “You’ll hear.” She took another sip of coffee and said, “So, Mommy says you’re making progress with your wedding.”

“Excellent progress.” I tried to make the statement definitive, as if the matter required no discussion.

“Mommy says you’re having it at someone’s house.”

Steve laughed.

I felt defensive. “It’s not just any old house. It’s on Norwood Hill in Newton. It belongs to two elderly sisters who are friends of ours. You must’ve met one of them, Ceci, at The Wordsmythe. Their house is beautiful, and it’s generous of them to open it to us. The caterer we want to use is a client of Steve’s, and some of the historic houses and so forth make you pick from a short list of approved caterers. And a lot of places don’t allow dogs. The Wayside Wildlife Refuge didn’t work out. Ceci’s house is big, and so is her yard, and we can use our caterer, and Ceci is crazy about dogs. It’s perfect.”

You’d have to have known Steve to spot the subtle signs of restlessness. His eyes were only slightly glazed. He swallowed a yawn.

“Thank you for the CDs,” I said. "We enjoyed meeting Ian.”

“He’s so modest,” Olivia said. “He doesn’t promote himself. Obviously, Daddy’s gene didn’t triumph there. Ian is so much like Mommy. He practically models himself on her, including her dog thing. Uli just worships Ian. Dogs do. But when it comes to people... But his music is incredible. You’ll love it.”

Having outstayed her welcome, Olivia finally left—and left us convinced that far from loving Ian McCloud’s music, we’d detest it. The main reason we decided to put on one of his homemade CDs right away was, as Steve remarked, “to get this over with.”

As Steve loaded the coffee mugs into the dishwasher, I shuffled through the discs. “Country and bluegrass? Or jazz? Or early music.”

“Country,” Steve said.

We shared the unspoken assumption that Ian’s music would serve as the background for the nightly routine of letting the dogs into the yard to relieve themselves. We also shared, I confess, the expectation that the music would be all too appropriate to the activity. I popped a CD into the boom box, and within seconds, Steve and I were wide-eyed. The tune was "Wabash Cannonball,” a standard I’d heard thousands of times in hundreds of versions, none of which, including Doc Watson’s, was better than this instrumental on guitar, banjo, mandolin, and bass. For the duration of the song, we stood there grinning and tapping our feet and feeling like fools to have judged Ian’s music by his faded appearance and his sister’s oversell. Poring over the CD cases, Steve said, “That’s Ian on guitar. He’s another Doc Watson. He’s another Norman Blake.”

And Ian could sing. He sang one of the best versions of “You Win Again” that I’d ever heard, different from the Ray Charles classic, but extraordinary and heartbreaking. Steve made a quick phone call to Ian, who was free on the twenty-ninth and agreed to play. We were so elated that we took the boom box and all five dogs out to the yard, where we just about couldn’t stop listening and exclaiming about what a genius Ian was and how incredible his groups were and how lucky we were that he’d do the music for our wedding. Rowdy, the most melodious of our five dogs, contributed accompaniments, and Kimi danced around with Sammy, whom she liked, instead of provoking India or bullying poor Lady.

Except for the mild tediousness of Olivia’s visit—I’d now forgiven her—the evening was perfect: harmony in our pack and music that somehow made the wedding real for us as nothing else had done. With Steve’s dogs in the third-floor apartment and my two crated in my guest room, Steve and I had the bedroom to ourselves and took long, satisfying advantage of our privacy.

As I often do as I fall asleep, I silently counted my blessings. I took nothing for granted, or so I imagined. I was grateful to be well fed and healthy. Nearby, in and around Harvard Square, homeless people slept in doorways and parks; I was in my own house. Millions of daughters were cursed with hostile, unloving, or boring stepmothers; in marrying Gabrielle, my father had blessed me. Judith Esterhazys literary fiction sold poorly, and Ian’s talent hadn’t yet brought him the success he deserved; by comparison, my career was thriving. Judith had only one dog, Uli, a wonderful old dog, but a dog horribly close to the end of his life; I had Rowdy and Kimi as well as Steve’s Lady, India, and Sammy. Sammy! Rowdy’s son! God receives odd thanks from fonciers of purebred dogs: All three malamutes had dark brown, almond-shaped eyes, warm expressions, blocky muzzles, heavy bone, and correct coats. As to my cat, Tracker, I was fortunate to have the resources and, yes, damn it, the moral fiber to give a good home to an animal no one else would want. I had dozens of friends. My cousin Leah went to college right down the street. Upstairs slept Rita, the best of friends, who was almost certainly being deceived and betrayed; next to me slept Steve, my love, my husband-to-be.

Oh, yes, I was alive. It was a blessing I neglected to count.

CHAPTER 18

“Amitriptyline,” Steve informed Ceci. “Elavil. It’s a tricyclic antidepressant.”

"That,"
Ceci said, “explains everything!”

Althea said, “My sister is flirtatiously requesting explication.”

It was Friday evening. Ceci and Althea had invited us to dinner to plan the wedding. Amitriptyline was not scheduled to play a role in the festivities, nor did it appear on the table around which we now sat. The food prepared and served by Ceci’s new maid, Ellen, was conventional: green beans, mashed potatoes, a salad, Yorkshire pudding, and prime rib, which Steve was carving with surgical care. So far, Ceci had allowed little opportunity to discuss the wedding at all. Rather, like many other people in Greater Boston, she was obsessed with the murder of Bonny Carr, who, I should explain, had been bludgeoned to death and then injected with amitriptyline, hence Ceci’s interest in the drug and her interrogation of Steve, which began over drinks in the living room and now continued over dinner. In general, Ceci suffered from a tendency to latch onto topics that she blathered on about at great length; or maybe it’s more accurate to say that she herself enjoyed the tendency, thereby inflicting conversational suffering on others, especially Althea. By the way, when I refer to the big gabled white house on Norwood Hill as Ceci and Althea’s, I do so out of deference to Althea, who was, in reality, a permanent guest. Although I never knew Ceci’s late husband, Ellis Love, I always regarded him with tenderness, mainly because the principal feature of Ceci’s spacious living room was a monumental oil painting of a Newfoundland dog of hers that hung over the fireplace, whereas the only visible tribute to Love was a small framed photograph that sat on a side table among six or eight crystal and china knickknacks. For all I knew, Ceci hadn’t even displayed the little photo until after the tolerant Mr. Love’s death. Like Althea, he had been a Sherlock Holmes fanatic rather than a dog zealot. Of course, for all I knew, when he’d been alive, the place of honor had been occupied by a monumental oil painting of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Anyway, Althea was right about Ceci’s flirtatiousness. In contrast to her petite sister, Althea was immensely tall, with large hands and feet, and she made no effort to disguise her keen intellect. Ceci was, as Althea said, “the pretty one,” but by modern standards, Althea had a peculiar beauty. Age had given her skin and her blue eyes an otherworldly translu-cence, and her short, thin, curly hair hovered over her scalp like a white halo.

“Holly is not offended,” Ceci said. “Are you? She knows I’m only joking, except that I have no idea what this amitriptyline is beyond being an antidepressant, but as a matter of feet, I have heard of Elavil because I knew someone whose dog was supposed to be taking Prozac because it shook all the time and hid under the bed, and Prozac was terribly expensive, so she tried Elavil instead, and it worked just fine, but now Prozac is generic, so why would someone take whatever it is instead?”

Inadvertently echoing Ceci, Steve said, "As a matter of fact, I wondered about amitriptyline, too.” With his usual deliberation, he paused to serve the beef he’d been carving. Then he resumed. “I was curious. I looked it up. It turns out that there’s an injectable version of amitriptyline available for veterinary use. Not widely used, as far as I know. So, it was an odd choice. Th^ injection itself was odd, too, of course.”

“Singular,” said Althea. “ ‘The most distinctive and suggestive point in the case.’ ” In quoting the Canon, she was quizzing me.

Before I could take a guess about the Sherlock Holmes story in which the phrase appeared, Ceci said, “Suggestive? What on earth is suggestive about it? It’s weird and senseless to go around beating people to death and then drugging them when it’s too late to do any good, so to speak—any bad, really—but there’s nothing in the least bit off-color about it that I can see, but maybe I’m terribly naive. Am I missing something? These women were not... assaulted, unless they
were,
and the police are keeping it a secret, possibly for their own good reasons, I assume. Holly, has Lieutenant Dennehy said anything to you about whether they were...?”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean, yes, I’ve talked to Kevin, and no, the women weren’t, uh, assaulted. Althea, ‘The Crooked Man’?”

“That’s one of
their
stories,” Ceci told Steve. By now, she’d somehow managed to surround his plate with the salad bowl and the serving dishes of green beans, Yorkshire pudding, and mashed potatoes. The carving board was still within his reach.

“Indeed,” said Althea.

“It’s impossible to follow what they’re saying,” Ceci said. “They make no effort to make any sense, crooked men, I ask you! As if Lieutenant Dennehy were crooked, when he’s perfectly upright, I’m sure, although how does he know about this latest horror when it happened in Brookline, which is, as I was going to say, alarmingly close to Newton, and when I got out of my car this afternoon, well, before I opened the door, I checked carefully all around even though Quest was with me, but in the back, which is where Bonny Carr’s dog was, in her car and helpless to come to her rescue, but perhaps a small dog, the paper didn’t say.”

“Big. Bonny Carr had a big dog,” I said. “An Airedale mix, I guess. That’s what he looked like.”

Ceci was elated. “You knew her?”

“Not really. I went to a workshop of hers. But I didn’t really know her.” And didn’t want to.

“And you knew that tarot woman, too.”

Steve laughed. "I’m Holly’s alibi. She was with me.”

“Ceci, you may relax,” Althea said. “Dr. Skipcliff was fifty-seven. Victoria Trotter was fifty-six. Bonny Carr was only forty-five. And you are—”

“A dog owner!” Ceci hastened to exclaim. "A woman! A woman known to Holly. Who was returning home.”

“You were returning home in daylight,” Althea pointed out. Both sisters followed the television news closely. Althea’s eyesight didn’t allow her to read, but her Sherlockian admirers, Hugh and Robert, read newspapers to her. “Holly, you didn’t know Laura Skipcliff, did you?”

My mouth was full. I shook my head, swallowed, and said, “No, I didn’t. She seems to have been a nice woman.” If my Kimi had been next to the table with a clear shot at the prime rib, she wouldn’t have pounced any more swiftly than Ceci did. “And the others weren’t! You’re just too nice to say so.”

“I barely knew Bonny Carr. And I didn’t know Victoria Trotter well, either; I interviewed her for a couple of articles. That’s all. We weren’t friends.”

“If either of you uses the word
nice
again—” Althea began to threaten.