”I don’t see what Missouri has to do with anything,” Pam said crossly.
”Missouri,” Leah told everyone, ”is where James Hunnewell’s sister lives. Her name is Gladys Thacker, and she lives in Missouri, and she runs a puppy mill.” Before anyone could interrogate Leah about these revelations, a hullabaloo broke out a few table-lengths away from us. Craning my neck, I saw that towering above the otherwise unexceptional collection of puddings, pies, and yet more fruit salads on the dessert buffet was an immense multitiered cake heavily frosted in pale apricot and richly decorated with ornate flowers, both real and confectionery. Jabbing a finger of outrage at the bird-of-paradise blossom perched atop this tropical masterpiece of the pastry-maker’s art was a woman I recognized as Crystal’s mother. Flanking his wife on the opposite side of the cake was Crystal’s father. Completing the tableau were the hotel manager and Freida Reilly. Freida wore a floor-length black skirt and a dressy black jersey top elaborately embroidered in gold with the immense head of guess what breed of dog. She and the manager held themselves formally upright and faced the festive cake from several yards back, as if determined to proclaim themselves attendants at this ceremony, the best man and the matron of honor, perhaps, and not its central figures. Freida and the manager must have been murmuring: Crystal’s parents leaned toward them. Then, as if on cue, the father began shouting at the manager, and the mother started yelling at Freida Reilly. I wished that they’d take turns so I could hear them both, but I caught enough to understand the cause of their rage.
”... screw up the entrees,” the father bellowed, ”and stick us with your goddamn cheesy London broil for the rehearsal...”
And the mother:...,”my Crystal’s beautiful, beautiful Hawaiian wedding cake for her... and it’s too late now, because one of your rotten dog people has gone and taken a slice right out of the middle!”
At the word ”dog,” the father whirled away from the manager, took a threatening step toward his wife, and, almost punching her with his upraised fist, shouted, ”Dog! Dog! Dog! You know, Mavis, anyone who listened in on this wedding would think that Crystal was going to marry one of the Christ damn things and present us with—”
Stamping a foot, the wife screamed: ”Harold-shut-up!”
”Jesus Christ Almighty, Mavis!” Blasphemy? To my ear, the poor man uttered a plea of genuine anguish.
But the only response Harold got came from his desperate wife, who had flushed a panicked shade of crimson. ”Now, Harold, you know as well as I do that—”
Without waiting for her to finish, Harold made a stupendous effort aimed, I think, at salvaging the situation.
Or at least at salvaging the Hawaiian cake. Barging into his wife, the manager, and Freida Reilly, and shoving past several hotel employees who’d gathered, I suppose, in the hope of offering some assistance, Harold stomped up to the cake, loomed over it, spread his arms, got a grip on whatever tray or giant platter supported it, and, with a massive show of muscle, succeeded in dragging the confection forward and raising it upward until it cleared the table. Maybe his fingers slipped on the icing. As the huge cake began to tremble and slide from his grasp, he lunged ahead and, like a desperate parent snatching for a plummeting child, wrapped his arms around the cake and attempted to hold the crumbling mass in a gigantic bear hug. Instead of mercifully dropping with one thud, the cake slowly peeled itself apart layer by layer and chunk by chunk. The icing, as I’ve said, was a pale apricot color intended, perhaps, to suggest orange blossoms. The interior, however, proved to be dark chocolate. Gobs of cake glued themselves to Harold’s suit. The icing must have been exceptionally adhesive. His sleeves bloomed with little sugar flowers. The bird of paradise tarried in the middle of his stomach before dropping pitifully to the floor.
The gasps and laughter were inevitable. Mavis, the mother of the bride, did not join in. In ringing tones, she demanded to know who the hell was responsible for this inexcusable screw-up.
Instead of answering directly, the manager apologized. ”An unfortunate miscommunication,” I heard him valiantly maintain.
With a look of scorn that would have set lesser men aflame, Mavis exercised the organizational skills that she must have developed in planning the wedding.
Rounding up various waiters and waitresses, she held a huddled conference. Then she announced the results to the entire Lagoon: ”In the kitchen, our beautiful cake was clearly labeled WEDDING. Then it was moved into the corridor, where it sat completely unattended! And while it did, our label was maliciously replaced with a card that read LAGOON!” Her voice quivered. She cleared her throat and glared at the manager. ”Maliciously replaced by a heavyset woman who was observed by one of your waitresses in the vicinity of our cake!” Turning to address us all, she continued, ”By a heavyset woman that this same waitress had previously observed on the grounds of this hotel walking a DOG!”
Which waitress was now apparent. A woman in a sarong was slinking out of the Lagoon. On her face was a big smirk.
”Darlene!” the manager called. ”You will get back here this minute and help us straighten out this misunderstanding! Why in God’s name didn’t you stop this individual, whoever she was, from fiddling with the labels on the cake?”
”I didn’t see her touching the label,” Darlene answered so defiantly that I could hear, see, and smell the lie. ”I thought she was just looking at the cake.”
”And do you see this woman here? Is she here now?”
Darlene nodded. In response to a request from the manager, she pointed a finger straight at Sherri Ann Printz.
Sherri Ann bounded from her chair. ”I damned well went nowhere near that cake!”
”Oh, yes you did!” Freida charged. On her fleshy bosom, the gold malamute seemed to frown. ”And I don’t know how you did it, but you got the entrees mixed up, too! From the moment you arrived here, you have done nothing but cause trouble, trouble, trouble! You are a jealous, spiteful woman, Sherri Ann! And I have had all I intend to take from you!”
With that, Freida stooped, grabbed two huge fistfuls of the sugary glop at Harold Jenkinson’s feet, marched over to the Printzes’ table, and, with both hands, smeared Crystal’s dark chocolate wedding cake, apricot icing, and confectionery flowers all over Sherri Ann’s astonished face.
The silence in the Lagoon was absolute.
Excusing myself, I went to the bar, ordered a double Scotch, and drank alone. Downscale really is beneath me.
I AWOKE at three o’clock, stumbled in the darkness to the bathroom, and hunted through my two cosmetics bags. Reluctantly, I looked in Leah’s numerous makeup kits, searched through the beautifying debris strewn around the sink, and checked the travel cases Leah uses for her hair dryer and her rechargeable toothbrush. Inspired, I tiptoed back into the room, got my purse, returned to the bathroom, and, in its bright light, discovered that I’d used the last spare tampon I always carry. Suppressing a sigh, I padded back into the room and eased open the closet door. The dogs stirred. ”Shh!” I told them. On my knees, I located my big soft-sided suitcase and blindly ran my hands over its interior, including the side compartments. I hate to admit that I looked in Leah’s handbag, too. Nothing. I’ll skip the gory details and report only that the situation was dire.
After making do with the scanty supply of tissues in the bathroom dispenser, I threw on a sweatshirt, jeans, and shoes, and belatedly remembered to take the room key and every piece of change from my purse. I recalled that in addition to miles of mirror and counter, the fainting couch, and the dainty chairs, the big public ladies’ room had vending machines. I slipped out into the silent, empty corridor. As I was passing the alcove that housed the soft-drink and ice machines, a sudden liquid rattle sounded to me like the hacking, coughing ghost of a thirsty, cranky James Hunnewell. Before I even peered into the little room, I knew it would be empty of the quick and the dead alike. The only movement was invisible: the hidden motion of a cycle-shifting motor somewhere deep inside the ice machine.
&nbs
p; My pace quickened. At the end of the hallway, I descended a flight of twisting stairs. Instead of taking the familiar route through the maze that ultimately led to the lobby, I followed the series of arrows that read TO THE LAGOON. The arrows eventually led me to a door that opened to what I recognized as the grotto end of the dimly lighted Lagoon, a mock-tropical garden with split-leaf philodendrons, narrow flagstone pathways, and patches of fir-bark mulch planted with vines and impatiens. Avoiding the shadowy paths through this South Seas paradise, I followed a sort of sidewalk of artificial-grass carpet that ran along the perimeter, past the numbered doors of guest rooms and big, heavily curtained plate-glass windows intended, I suppose, to compensate for the airless undesirability of the interior rooms of the hotel by offering a bold vista of plastic foliage.
After I turned a corner, guest rooms finally gave way to function rooms. The deserted restaurant appeared. I hurried past it and dashed into the big, brilliantly illuminated ladies’ room, where I poured large amounts of small change into the vending machines and supplied myself with enough sanitary protection to last through the next week. Feeling shy about passing through the lobby clutching a bouquet of feminine hygiene products, I decided to retrace my route around the grotto. Despite all the talk about random violence engendered by the recent slaying of Elsa Van Dine, I was only slightly more wary than I’d ordinarily have been in making my way alone through a sleeping hotel. Although I assumed that Hunnewell’s murderer must be someone at the show, probably someone staying at the hotel, my vigilance was the taken-for-granted alertness that prudent women develop. In fact, my mind had drifted to memories of a seventh-grade girls-only minicourse called, of all things, ”Growing Up and Liking It,” which, despite the name, said nothing about orgasm and everything about cramps and self-adhesive pads.
I had just passed the dark, empty restaurant and entered the tropical-garden area when a series of muted noises emanated from what sounded like the far end of the cavernous Lagoon. A door opening? A soft voice? Someone taking a dog out, I thought. Or maybe another woman in my little plight. If so, I’d generously spare her the trip to the ladies’ room. Then a voice again, a deep voice, a man’s, I assumed: ”Hello?” And only seconds later, a gut-wrenching scream, ungodly loud, that rang through the huge, ridiculous Lagoon, reverberated off the high glass ceiling, and sent me pounding down the carpeted walk toward the source of that ungodly scream. As I rounded the corner at the far end of the Lagoon, the only movement I noticed was the slow, automatic closing of the door through which I’d first entered, but when the door had finished closing itself and had sealed off the bright light of the corridor beyond, on the dark carpet ahead of me a figure moved.
Foolishly rushing on, I slammed my foot into what turned out to be one of the decorative paddles from the Lagoon walls, and in a frantic effort to keep my balance, stretched a hand toward one of the plate-glass windows of a guest room and found myself teetering amid a pile of tampons and carefully packaged sanitary pads as guest-room doors opened and voice after voice demanded to know what was going on. It took me a second to identify the angry, distraught face of the figure sprawled motionless on the carpet at my feet: Harriet Lunt, the lawyer who specialized in dogs, the hypocrite who’d joined Victor Printz in belittling our rescue dogs and who’d suddenly become an ardent supporter of breed rescue when I’d pretended to represent the Gazette.
Ignoring the stuff I’d dropped, I hurried to her, helped her to her feet, and asked the inevitable: ”Are you all right?”
By then, eight or ten people had emerged from nearby rooms.
”Just my shoulder,” Harriet Lunt reported. ”My left shoulder.” With the fingers of her right hand, she explored the injury. Then she raised her left arm, moved her elbow around, and said, ”Probably nothing worse than a bad bruise.” She wore the kinds of gigantic foam hair curlers that are banned in Cambridge (they’re a symbol of female oppression) and an old-fashioned pink mesh hair net dotted with miniature bows. Her quilted cotton bathrobe was identical to one I’d given my grandmother last Christmas.
As people crowded around to ask what had happened and how Mrs. Lunt was doing, she kept saying that she was shaken up, that was all, and that there was nothing wrong with her shoulder that an ice pack wouldn’t fix. Before long, someone appeared with a plastic bag of ice cubes, and a woman I didn’t know introduced herself as a doctor and tried to persuade Mrs. Lunt to let her look at the injury. Mrs. Lunt, however, was exclusively interested in finding out whether anyone had seen her assailant. ”You were the first one here, weren’t you?” she asked me.
I had the sense that she didn’t remember me. ”Yes, but all I saw was that door over there closing. What happened?”
”I really have no idea,” she said. ”I was asleep. I heard a tap on the door. That’s what woke me up. And I assumed it was Sherri Ann or Victor, because Bear’s been having a little trouble with the change in the water, and I told them I had some Lomotil, if they wanted it. They said no, but when I heard that tapping on the door, I thought maybe Bear had gotten worse, and they’d changed their minds.” She paused. ”Should’ve,” she commented. ”Nothing like Lomotil.”
”Very effective,” I agreed.
”So I threw on my robe and went to the door. But when I opened it, there was no one there. And then I heard... I thought I heard someone say my name. So I took a step out and I said ’Hello?’ But there was no answer, so I thought I’d imagined it. Or maybe I’d heard somebody’s dog. So I turned around to go back in my room, when all of sudden! Out of the blue! Something came crashing down! And I must have spied something out the corner of my eye, because I managed to duck my head and raise up my arm. And that’s where he got me: right here. Knocked me to the ground.” She wrapped her right hand around the injured shoulder. ”What did he get me with?”
”A paddle,” I said. ”One of those Hawaiian paddles that are hanging on the walls.”
”Poor Elsa,” sighed Harriet Lunt. ”And then James. And now me.”
EPITHALAMIUM: a marriage song.
The gray, wet day of Crystal and Greg’s wedding dawned with the music I’d have chosen myself. One voice rose, then another and another joined the first, caught the tune, and lifted the melody to the rainy sky. How many dogs? Fifty? A hundred? But how many voices? Countless. A full choir of choristers, each singing multiple simultaneous songs, each canine voice soaring in dissonant harmony with itself and all the others. Crescendo! The climax reached, one by one— diminuendo—the voices fell almost to silence until a lone note sounded, then another and another, and the song rose again in this weirdly circumpolar Ode to Joy. For all that happened in those days in Danville, my most vivid memory is of that early-morning howling.
Unloading cardboard boxes of paper products from the back of a delivery van in the parking lot, a guy nodded in my direction and said, ”Jesus, don’t those damned things ever shut up?”
To my ear, the damned things that never shut up weren’t the dogs, but the forced-air dryers already blasting like horrid mini-hurricanes in the grooming tent where I’d just delivered Rowdy, Kimi, and Leah to Faith Barlow. Over the roar, I’d shouted to Faith about the predawn attack on Harriet Lunt, and Faith had bellowed back that she’d already heard.
After surrendering my dogs and my cousin to Faith, I left the grooming tent. I was heading across the parking lot in search of breakfast when a drenched and dripping Z-Rocks splashed through a puddle, shot to the end of Timmy Oliver’s lead, wiggled, shook hard all over, and gave me my second before-breakfast shower of the day. I didn’t mind. The old issues of the Malamute Quarterly that I’d brought with me to leaf through while I ate were safely stowed in my newest malamute-decorated tote bag. After breakfast, I intended to change into real clothes and spiff myself up. In the meantime, I was wearing my old yellow slicker over jeans and the new national specialty sweatshirt that already sprouted fur. My hair was damp from the light rain, and the dogs had licked off the moisturizer I’d patted on. It’s hopeless. Why I
bother, I don’t know. I should just get out of bed, throw on the clothes that Rowdy and Kimi slept on, reach into my pockets and dust myself with the powdery residue of dried liver, let the dogs cover my face with saliva, and then go outside and roll around in mud. No one but me would know the difference.
So, when Z-Rocks spattered me, I said good morning to her and asked Timmy Oliver whether he’d heard about Harriet Lunt. Harriet herself had told him about the attack, he said. He’d seen her only a minute ago at the hotel entrance. The manager had been trying to talk her into having her shoulder x-rayed, but Harriet had absolutely refused.
”He’s probably terrified she’ll sue the hotel,” I commented. ”I wonder if he knows she’s a lawyer.”
Then Timmy changed the subject to Z-Rocks. Instead of waiting for me to say something flattering about her, Timmy took advantage of her plastered-down coat to deliver himself of so enthusiastic a disquisition about her good bone, broad skull, admirable angulation, and so forth that I was tempted to ask whether he intended to show her to Mikki Muldoon in her present soaked and thus anatomically revealing condition.
As Timmy went on and on, dwelling on Z-Rock’s ideal this and excellent that, I’m sorry to say I tuned him out until he triumphantly burst forth with a single word: ”Comet!”
As dense as ever, I said casually, ”Oh, Z-Rocks goes back to Comet?”
So did thousands of other malamutes: show dogs, pets, puppy-mill dogs. The presence of an illustrious ancestor in a family tree is always interesting, but that’s about it. Just because you’re the direct descendant of Helen of Troy, it doesn’t mean you’ve got a face to launch a thousand ships. But in Timmy Oliver’s eyes and, according to him, in James Hunnewell’s, Z-Rocks was what Timmy called ”a living legacy,” the female reincarnation of the fabulous Northpole’s Comet. Z-Rocks, I should say, was not utterly unlike Comet. Instead of looking like a female replica, though, a sort of sex-changed Xerox copy—hence her name, I guess— she was as good as Comet had been outstanding, as decent as he had been superlative, and she totally lacked Comet’s innocent arrogance, the all-eyes-on-me attitude that had kept my gaze fixed on a grainy black-and-white image of a long-dead dog whose radiant glory burned across decades.
Stud Rites Page 13
