Bride & Groom (32 page)

“Uli,” I said. “From the moment I read that E-mail this morning, I knew that this had something to do with Uli.”

“It had
everything
to do with Uli. Bruce said that unless I started earning money, Uli would be my last dog. He said that when Uli died, that would be it. No more dogs. Ever.” Judith’s composure deserted her. Her thin face was contorted with grief. Her tears fell on Uli. “Uli is old! I’m all that’s keeping him alive! How much longer can I keep him going? I cannot live without a dog! I cannot! Uli would love a puppy! Uli would teach a puppy his special ways, his little quirks! He would pass himself along through a puppy! When Bruce made that threat, my heart broke. Those vicious women had had my husband, and now I was going to lose the strength that kept me going!”

Softly, I said, “You must have thought about a divorce.”

“And explain it to my children? Never! And what would I have done for a living? Writing is all I know how to do. I could teach writing, but teaching would pay nothing, and it would leave me no time for my own work. In essence, Bruce threatened to kill me! He killed me over and over with his women and his lies, and then he threatened to take my life’s blood away. I was on the verge of death.”

“I can see that.”

“And then a solution presented itself. You were there when it happened. At your launch party at The Wordsmythe, I learned that that filthy piece of trailer trash had died a natural death.”

Reluctantly, I said, “Nina Kerkel.”

Judith’s eyes lit up. “Dead! I was overjoyed! The nonexistence of that conniving little slut was utter bliss. It was better than that! It was
repeatable
bliss.”

“These files,” I said. "These dossiers.”

“Bruce can barely manage to send and receive E-mail. The World Wide Web is a truly marvelous resource, isn’t it? Aerial photographs! Plot plans. And people continue to imagine that privacy still exists. It’s an illusion. Like human fidelity. Human commitment. Human loyalty. Without dogs, there’d be no reality at all.”

When Uli rose, I thought for a second that he was responding to the word
dog.
Then I heard the deep tones of Steve’s voice. “Holly?” he called out.

“Here! In the kitchen.” I felt frozen in place.

Steve entered and, with him, Mac, who looked pale and old.

“Mac refused to be admitted,” Steve said.

Ignoring me, Mac said, “Judith, it’s over. You and I need a few minutes alone together.”

Judith merely nodded. Mac walked to her and held out his hand. She took it. He seemed to lift her to her feet. Then he rested an arm across her shoulders. Together, they made their way out of the kitchen. Uli, of course, followed them. It should, I suppose, have seemed strange to me that in their own house, they’d been the ones to leave when they could so easily have asked us to step outside. It simply didn’t occur to me, mainly because I felt so relieved to be free of the intense contact with Judith and so comforted to be with Steve. Although I heard soft sounds from the staircase, I didn’t wonder or even care where Mac, Judith, and Uli were going.

I stood up and melted into Steve, who said, “Holly, I love you so much. I can’t begin to tell you how much I love you.”

“I love to you, too. I have never loved you more than I do right now.”

“It was Judith,” he said. “Maybe you know by now.”

“When you left with Mac, I stayed here. I figured out where Judith was. I called her and told her to come home. I wasn’t frightened. I wasn’t one of Mac’s women, and I knew that she knew that. Steve, you were right about Nina Kerkel. All those articles in the papers? About serial murderers? We took those profiles much too literally. The resentful person, the isolated person, the person lost in daydreams, all of it—that was Judith. We knew that her books didn’t sell. We knew all about Mac’s attitude toward promoting sales. What we didn’t know was that Mac had told her that unless she started to earn her keep, she couldn’t get another dog after Uli died. Right after that, she heard about Nina Kerkel’s death. And that was the trigger the papers talked about. Judith said that Nina Kerkel’s death was bliss for her. She called it ‘repeatable bliss.’ What she didn’t say outright was that she set Mac up. At first, she wanted me to think that he was the murderer. When that didn’t work, I suggested that it might be Olivia or Ian. She couldn’t see her children accused. She told me the truth. But she never got around to admitting outright that she’d set Mac up.”

“He wants to go with her when she turns herself in. He feels responsible.”

“He
is
responsible.”

“They both are.”

“So are those women, really. They did to Judith what that horrible Francie did to Rita.”

“Not by themselves.”

“No, of course not. But—”

Mac interrupted me by suddenly and calmly walking into the kitchen. To my surprise, Uli was with him. Mac was breathing audibly and looked very ill.

“I carried Uli up the stairs,” he explained. “He said his good-bye. Judith said hers. More times than I can remember, I’ve helped in just this way. A dog should leave this world peacefully, cradled in his owner’s arms. It’s always sad, but it’s easier when the dog has bitten repeatedly, when everyone understands that the dog is a danger, a menace, and that all you can offer is that final act of caring. I always perform that act with love. As I did this time. A final act of caring.”

CHAPTER 41

I returned home filled with overwhelming love for everyone in my life. As I drove back to Cambridge, I didn’t even miss Steve, who was staying with Mac until the police arrived and Mac turned himself in. Steve’s love and kindness traveled with me. When I got home, Leah, Rita, and Gabrielle were in the midst of a crisis; they barely noticed that I was late for our trip to the salon. My family being my family, the crisis was a dog crisis: Sammy the puppy had somehow managed to eat the rolled leather collar right off his own neck. He’d rejected the buckle and his tags, but he’d treated the leather as what it was, namely, a length of dead animal. My cousin, my best friend, and my stepmother had Sammy in the kitchen and were hovering around him so closely that he was in immediate danger of suffocation. Still, his tail was wagging^ and he had a big, satisfied smile on his gorgeous face. I hugged Sammy, and then hugged Leah, Rita, and Gabrielle. I would, of course, tell them about the horror and sadness. But at the moment, I needed their fidelity, their commitment, their loyalty to me, which were not, as poor Judith had thought, illusory, but almost palpably real.

“The chances are good,” I said, “that the collar will either come up or pass right through him, probably in the middle of our wedding. But don’t worry about it. Steve won’t let anything bad happen to Sammy.”

Or to me, either,
I thought.

By the freakish coincidence known in my family as “God spelled backward,” Mac and Judith’s wedding present had been delivered during my absence. Leah, ever herself, had high-handedly opened the package. I’d ordinarily have scolded her. Now, I felt nothing but gratitude to her for being her bossy self. The gift was a set of five large hand-painted ceramic dog bowls, duplicates of Uli’s, but marked with the names of Steve’s and my dogs: Rowdy, Kimi, Sammy, India, and Lady. I was running my hands over them and crying when Rita announced, “Holly, what’s with the sentimentality? I know you! You’re looking for an excuse to get out of having your hair and nails done. Remember? This is your show, and you’re about to go Best of Breed. You’re not walking into the ring of marriage ungroomed! We need to leave now!”

“But what about Sammy?” I protested. “Someone needs to keep an eye on him.”

God spelled backward. Pete, Steve’s best man and fellow vet, arrived, having already delivered the champagne and other drinks to Ceci and Althea’s. Pete didn’t really need to come to our house. I strongly suspected that he was just hoping to see Rita. As it was, he ended up keeping a watch over Sammy.

I don’t have a clear memory of the salon. I know that on the drive there in Rita’s BMW, I told Rita, Leah, and Gabrielle about Judith and Mac. It distressed me to tell the story. When I’d been with Judith, my emotions had been under tight control. Safe with my bridal party in Rita’s posh car, I suffered from delayed shock. For some reason that I couldn’t explain to myself, however, I omitted all mention of the dossiers. Before I’d left Mac and Judith’s, Mac had said that Judith had wanted me to have the file folders on the kitchen table; she’d begged him to promise that I’d take them away. I’d complied. Last wishes and all that. Before leaving for the salon, I’d hustled them into my office, the abode of my cat, Tracker. Tracker had, as usual, hissed loudly and scratched me. Still, I felt such a surge of loyalty to her that I didn’t even mind being scratched.

For the rest of the afternoon and evening, I was in a daze. I returned from the salon to discover that Steve, the last person to abandon a dog, had brought Uli home with him. I didn’t mind. Far from it. In fact, rattled though I was, I made a quick phone call to Carla Guarini, our florist, to order yet one more floral collar. I know that the salon made us look beautiful, but only because I have the photos taken during the rehearsal and at the restaurant, Nuages. In entirely uncharacteristic fashion, I kept bursting into tears and didn’t notice what I ate. I remember that Pete and Rita sat together. My father and Twila, after a successful day of running dogs, concocted a plan. Instead of spending the week in Cambridge, Twila and her team were driving to Gabrielle’s house in Bar Harbor to enjoy the outdoors. Twila had never been to Maine before. She said that she wouldn’t need a bedroom; she and North would sleep under the stars. At one point, Steve and I decided that it was too late to arrange recorded music for our wedding; we reconciled ourselves to having no music at all.

As I’d said to Judith, however, Ian wasn’t like other people. I am, of course, a real dog person, which is to say that I’m an expert on human oddity, and even by my standards, Ian was very odd. It’s more than a little peculiar, isn’t it, to provide the music for a wedding the day after your father has euthanized your serial-killer mother? As Olivia had promised, Ian dressed formally, as did the other musicians. Olivia and John Berkowitz did not attend. Mac, of course, was also absent. Everyone else we expected was there. As Rita, Leah, and I got dressed in Ceci’s bedroom, I kept peering out the window to see who was arriving. Twila’s dog-box trailer was parked on the street in front of the house; she intended to leave for Bar Harbor immediately after the reception. I saw Kevin escort his mother along the sidewalk. Behind them were Hugh and Robert, Althea’s Sherlockian friends, and from the other direction I saw—

Ceci interrupted me and rattled my nerves by popping into the bedroom to free-associate. “Althea is being pigheaded!” Ceci exclaimed. “I have rehearsed my lovely poem about love and the moon for her, and I’ve offered over and over to help her with what she intends to say, but she refuses to let me so much as look at it, and I’m convinced that she’s going to make a fool of herself and humiliate you by reading from the Canon of Sherlock Holmes instead of from
The Book of Common Prayer,
a foolish title if I’ve ever heard one, what on earth is common about it, for heaven’s sake? My nerves are all on edge, I can’t help thinking that it was a dreadful mistake for you to ask Althea to marry you, well, not marry you, you’re marrying Steve, but it’s too late now, Althea, of course, not Steve, and speaking of veterinarians, has Sammy produced his collar yet?”

“We think he’s waiting for the service,” Leah said. “And it’s not Althea we’re worried about, it’s Buck. We think he’s going to mortify Holly by saying that she’s marrying Steve because—”

Ceci interrupted her. “What is that horrible noise? It sounds for all the world like a moose! Wild animals do wander into the suburbs these days, you know, deer, foxes, possums, not to mention rabbits and skunks, it couldn’t be a skunk, could it?”

Returning to the window, I saw my dear stepmother, Gabrielle, standing next to Twila’s dog-box trailer, which was all too obviously the source of the moose calls. Gabrielle looked beautiful, as did her bichon, Molly, who was, for once, on the ground instead of in Gabrielle’s arms. Gabrielle’s hair had new highlights, and she wore a tiny hat that would’ve looked outlandish on anyone else, but somehow became her perfectly. She faced one of the dog boxes and was evidently addressing its occupant. I opened the window, but even then, I caught only a little of what she was saying. Her hat was bobbing up and down, and her arms were folded across her ample bosom. My father, however, was clearly audible.

“NOT A WORD!” Buck hollered. “NOW LET ME OUT OF HERE! I SWEAR TO GOD, GABRIELLE, I WON’T SAY A WORD ABOUT SAMMY!”

When Gabrielle unfolded her arms, I saw that in one hand she held a key. She went on to insert it in the padlock of the paternal dog box. She turned the key and opened the door. My father climbed out feet first.

By then, Rita, Leah, and Ceci had joined me in watching the performance.

“How did Gabrielle get him in there?” I wondered aloud.

Leah answered. “She told him that part of Molly’s training for mushing camp was being in a dog-box trailer. Then she said that one of Molly’s tags was missing and that it had to be in that dog box. That was her plan, anyway. I guess it worked.”

Fifteen minutes later, Buck took my arm and led me to the terrace at the back of the house, and down the steps to the lawn, where the people and dogs I loved most were assembled to bear witness to my marriage. The human guests sat in folding chairs to the left and right. Those with dogs had aisle seats. North looked especially handsome wearing his collar of white flowers. Twila had an arm resting on his head. Ahead of me, at the end of the grassy aisle, Althea sat in her wheelchair, which was festooned with white ribbons and pink rosebuds. To one side, Ian McCloud and three other musicians played a solemn version of the song Ian had suggested and that Steve and I had chosen: “I Only Have Eyes for You.”