Bride & Groom

by Conant, Susan

  As it was, the results of free searches left no doubt that Dr. Skipcliff had been a wealthy woman. The web sites of four or five arts organizations listed her as a donor; she’d been especially supportive of dance. She’d served on the board of a well-known dance center in the Berkshires. InfoSpace and AnyWho had provided an address and phone number for her in that lovely region of Western Massachusetts. The town where she’d had what was presumably a summer house was one that posted its property assessments on the web. Laura Skipcliff had owned a house that sat on 2.4 acres. The assessed value of the land was high. The building was assessed at three times the value of the land.

  The remainder of the dossier documented Laura Skip-cliffs professional affiliations, achievements, and publications. The hospital web site that displayed the close-up of her face also gave her E-mail address: LFSkipcliff@aol.com. She’d attended medical school at Cornell. The papers she’d published had titles that were both impressive and, to me, incomprehensible.

  At the end of the dossier were pages about a meeting j sponsored by Harvard Medical School to be held in Boston from August 21 through August 25. According to the announcement, Laura Skipcliff was scheduled to present a paper on the morning of August 24 and to serve on a panel that afternoon. The dossier contained nothing about Laura Skipcliff’s murder.

  CHAPTER 6

  The central tenet of canine fundamentalism is the misleadingly simple-sounding principle that dogs are everywhere. Having embraced this delightful reality, we believers are never surprised to find that interspecies enlightenment lurks in seemingly improbable places. Had I been an agnostic, a skeptic, an outright atheist, a blasphemist, a heretic, or merely the sort of nonpracticing hypocrite who claims to worship dogs but doesn’t own one, I’d have been astonished to attain spiritual transcendence in so bourgeois and materialistic a spot as the Bloomingdale’s department store at the Chestnut Hill Mall. As it was, the epiphany felt perfectly natural. All this is to say that in entering my name and Steve’s in Bloomie’s bridal registry, I abruptly and joyously reached a mystical and highly desirable state that had previous eluded me: All of a sudden, I knew exactly what it feels like to be a dog.

  Not one to keep divine revelation to myself, I embarrassed Rita in front of the Bloomingdale’s salesperson by blurting out, “Rita, I finally get this wedding stuff! Everything just fell in place. Rita, the wedding is a dog show! I’m the bride. I'm going Best in Show!”

  It was Friday afternoon. I’d fought the commuter traffic to the Chestnut Hill Mall strictly out of loyalty to Rita, who was apparently convinced that if I failed to register at Bloomingdale’s, my marriage to Steve would be an unlawful sham; in Rita’s view, bigamy was vastly preferable to any marriage unblessed by Bloomie’s. To please Rita, I’d changed out of kennel clothes—old jeans and a stained T-shirt—and into a respectable pair of khakis and a white blouse. Rita wore a white linen suit. Her short, bouncy hair was streaked by the sun as well as by artifice, and she not only wore heels but knew how to walk in them. Until a few moments earlier, when the true nature of weddings had revealed itself to me, I’d shuffled reluctantly after her while muttering bitter complaints about china patterns and white gowns. Now that I grasped the project, I was thoroughly behind it.

  “You know, Holly,” Rita said, “I sometimes wonder whether you should be committed.” Rita was a clinical psychologist. By committed, she meant “locked up,” as opposed to “wholeheartedly pledged,” as in, I am committed to the wellbeing of my animals.

  “I’m committed to getting married,” I said. “I’m committed to Steve. And now that I understand weddings, I’m committed to doing this one right. You see, it all came to me while I was registering. I had a distinct sense of déjà vu. And then it came to me that every time I’d ever entered a dog in a show, I’d done exactly what I was doing now, and I knew that I was filling out an entry blank just the way I do for Rowdy and Kimi, only this time I was doing it for myself. Anyway, I’m done grumbling about wedding plans. Registering for presents is fine! What they are, you see, is trophies. And what we’re doing here today is putting together the premium list."

  Rita sighed. “Just as long as you don’t register for cheap stoneware and cheesy highball glasses, that’s just grand.”

  “In the old days,” I said with my newfound enthusiasm, “trophies used to be sterling silver. But it’s awfully expensive. Besides, my mother left me the sterling that her dogs won. And I have some crystal, too. You still see crystal at shows, and it’s really beautiful. Of course, the trophies I own are mainly bowls and stuff. But we don’t need anything to drink out of. Steve and I discussed that. We own a million mugs and glasses.”

  “That don’t match,” said Rita, “and have dogs on them.”

  “Not exclusively. The obedience ones have high jumps. And some of them have names of kennel clubs. But I do get the point. If we’re giving a show, we want to give it with style.” Although Rita was professionally alarmed by the reason for my change in attitude, she seized on my new eagerness and led me through the areas of Bloomingdale’s that displayed china, crystal, and silver. Just as some fortunate people are said to possess “an eye for dogs,” Rita evidently possessed an eye for expensive household objects. The prices horrified me. The cost of one place setting in the china pattern Rita favored was what I’d have expected to pay for an entire set of dishes.

  “It’s china,” she corrected me. “Not just dishes. And when people buy wedding gifts, they don’t want to buy junk.”

  “My friends can’t afford this stuff. And what if I drop it?”

  “You won’t use it very often,” she said.

  “Then why am I asking for it?”

  “Every culture has its rites and rituals for marking important life transitions. Marriage is a major life event. In our culture, doing what we’re doing now is one of the rites of passage that mark it. Besides which, Steve’s first marriage was a disaster. He deserves to have everything right this time.”

  “When you get married,” I said, “you can register for the same pattern. At these prices, we’ll be lucky to own two place settings each, so we’ll share. When we get together for dinner, we’ll pool resources, and maybe there’ll be enough plates for all four of us.”

  "Who said anything about me?” Rita asked.

  “No one needed to. You and Artie—”

  “Well, we’re admittedly heading in that direction, I guess,” she conceded.

  Rita led me through the selection of a china pattern, white with a blue rim. Steve, who’d refused to accompany us, had said that I was welcome to pick out anything that wasn’t covered with flowers.

  “If you ask whether the pattern is available in dog bowls,” Rita warned, “I will kill you here and now.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it until you mentioned it,” I said. We then selected a silver pattern and, over my mild protest, crystal wineglasses. A Bloomie’s salesperson then helped us to choose a variety of affordable objects, including salad forks. Well, she intended to be helpful. Some of her suggestions struck me as ridiculous. Steve wasn’t the kind of person who’d don the chefs hat and apron that were supposedly popular, and he and I both thought of pizza as something to order at a pizzeria, not as something to whip up at home using a pizza set. An object known as a “tart pan” hit me as a wildly inappropriate wedding present. Brides weren’t necessarily virginal these days, but tart was going a bit far. A Wüsthof cutlery set—knives stuck into a wooden storage block—seemed like a practical choice for couples who looked forward to years of marital discord and wanted to be sure to have sharp weapons handy when they moved beyond harsh words.

  When we’d finished completing my nuptial entry blank at the Bloomingdale’s Kennel Club, I thought we were done. Rita thought otherwise. Rowdy and Kimi, I realized, must have the same sensation when forced to return to the show ring for further judging: We just did that! Rita did not, however, lead me into another store with a registry for wedding presents. Rather, she caught sight of a
display of black undies and exclaimed, “Victoria’s Secret!”

  “Don’t be foolish,” I said.

  "Do you intend to get married in the old underwear you have on when you wash the dogs? There’s nothing foolish about a trousseau.”

  “A trousseau. Isn’t that something men wear for hernias?”

  “This is going to be my treat,” Rita said. “A romantic negligee.”

  "Everything in the window is black,” I said.

  So was most of the lingerie in the shop itself. Furthermore, most items were more suggestive of a brothel than of an altar, which is to say, very suggestive. As if to confirm my opinion that this wasn’t exactly a bridal shop, Rita informed me that an especially provocative style of undergarment was known as a “merry widow.”

  “If I tried to breathe in that thing,” I said, “Steve would be a widower. I’m not wearing something that squishes my rib cage. And one thing’s settled about my wedding gown, and that’s that it won’t require a strapless bra. I’m not getting married with some damned choke collar around my midriff.”

  “Your dress.” Rita sighed. “Mine. Leah’s. There’s so much to do!”

  Rita had agreed to be my maid of honor. My cousin Leah would be the only bridesmaid, unless you counted Kimi, India, and Lady, as I certainly did.

  I said, “Not to mention a place to get married and someone to marry us and—”

  I was interrupted by a woman who came up to Rita, hugged her, and kissed her cheek. Although in certain ways the newcomer was quite attractive, with fine, delicate, pale skin and silky shoulder-length dark hair, something about the combination of that dark hair and her full cheeks reminded me of a character called Little Lulu who had starred in a series of old comic books that my mother had once bought for me at a used book store. Little Lulu, however, had had a round face. This woman’s was elongated. Furthermore, it seemed to me that Little Lulu’s hair had been parted in the middle, while the woman’s was parted on the left. What the woman shared with Little Lulu, I suppose, was frumpiness. In any case, both she and Little Lulu seemed equally unlikely candidates for black lace merry widows, one of which the woman clutched in her hand.

  “Holly,” Rita said, “this is Francie Julong. Holly Winter. Francie is a birder.”

  Rita’s participation in birding had destroyed my stereotype of birdwatchers as weird creatures who skulked in shrubbery and emerged only to aim binoculars at feathered creatures with stupid names. Artie Spicer, Rita’s birding mentor, was a good-looking and normal-acting guy. When the four of us got together, Artie and Steve talked about birds, among other things, but there was nothing in the least bit laughable or freakish about Artie. If there had been, he’d never have gotten so much as a first date with Rita. Although I no longer clung to the stereotype of birders, I was nonetheless surprised to hear that Francie Julong and Rita knew each other from the avian world; from the gushy way she’d greeted Rita, I’d assumed that she, too, was a Cambridge psychotherapist.

  “Rita is a much better birder than I am,” Francie said. “I just plod along misidentifying everything.”

  “Not so. We’re both out of our league with some of those people at Mount Auburn.”

  The birding group where Rita had met Artie Spicer flocked together in Cambridge at Mount Auburn Cemetery, a spot as famous for attracting dedicated and knowledgeable observers of birds as for attracting the birds themselves.

  Francie said, “Oh, well, we have fun. But I haven’t seen you at Mount Auburn lately. I’ve missed you.”

  As Rita was explaining that she’d been away, I couldn’t help eyeing the drab Francie and wondering whether her conservative, even dowdy, printed dress concealed lascivious undies like the black merry widow she held in her hand. For all I knew, she was wearing a lacy thong instead of ordinary panties. Maybe she even wore real stockings suspended by garters.

  “I’m so glad you’re back,” Francie told Rita. “I’m really excited about the fall migration, and I’d hate to have to face all those confusing fall warblers without you. Holly, it was nice to meet you.”

  I told Francie that it had been nice to meet her, too. As she headed toward the cash register, I happened to glance toward the rear of the shop. Emerging from the entrance to the dressing rooms was Steve’s fiendish ex-wife, Anita, who was tall and stylish. Her hair was long and blond, her expression sour. Dangling from her hand was a garter belt. She held it with disdain, as if it were a dead rat she intended to whirl around and fling out of sight.

  I turned my back to her and whispered to Rita, “Anita Fairley is just coming out of the dressing rooms, and we are leaving this second.”

  “Coward,” Rita said. Still, she followed me out of the shop. Once we’d escaped, I said, “I am not afraid of Anita.”

  “I know, I know,” Rita said. “You live with two Alaskan malamutes, and—”

  “Anita is a very nasty person. And she hates me. Besides, she was brandishing a lethal weapon.”

  “If one of you ever decides to strangle the other,” Rita said, “my money’s on you.”

  The thought that crossed my mind was so vicious that I didn’t speak it aloud even to Rita, to whom I can say almost anything. The thought was this: Anita Fairley, recently Anita Fairley-Delaney, had met Steve at Rialto. She probably still went there. When she did, she probably parked in the garage under The Charles Hotel. If a woman had to have been bludgeoned to death in the garage, why on earth had it been the innocent Dr. Laura Skipcliff? Why couldn’t it have been that damned Anita Fairley?

  CHAPTER 7

  “I’ll have the Caesar salad,” Rita told our waiter at the mall restaurant. “And a glass of Chardonnay with that. And since I’m not driving, I’ll have another margarita while we wait.”

  I ordered the Caesar salad, too, but also the broiled salmon and a baked potato. Rita was not, by the way, the kind of gustatory hypocrite who eats nothing but salad in public and then goes home to binge on tortilla chips and ice cream at midnight; salad was what she ate, and she stayed slim. In contrast, my leanness was attributable strictly to metabolic luck.

  “We did very well,” Rita said with satisfaction. “You’ve registered for gifts, and we got a good start on clothes for you. I know you paid more than you’re used to, but you can’t go to Paris dressed for a dog show, and the nightie and robe don’t count because they’re my present.”

  “I dress very carefully for shows,” I said. “Appearance does count in the ring.”

  “Where doesn’t it?”

  “In the eyes of your dogs,” I said. “That’s one of the ten trillion ways in which dogs are morally superior to human beings. The Parisian dogs would’ve loved me in ratty jeans.” "And Steve?”

  “That’s a touchy subject, Rita. When it comes to looks, I’m in no position to compete with Anita. You saw her. She wins. That's it.”

  “Anita made Steve miserable. She cheated on him. She kicked his dog. She whined and criticized, and she tried to make him into someone he didn’t want to be.”

  “And she is undeniably beautiful.”

  Rita’s second margarita arrived. I could’ve used a drink, but since I was driving, I took a sip of water and returned to the topic of Anita, who was, as Rita knew, a criminal who’d gotten away with her crime. “The story on Anita is that the wicked flourish like the green bay tree. Could we please discuss another subject?” I introduced one. “Francie seems like a nice person.”

  “She really is very sweet.”

  “The way she hugged you, I thought she must be a mental-health type.”

  “She is, more or less. But she’s a researcher, not a clinician. Talk about depressing subjects, though. Her field is the psychology of grief. Mourning. Loss. Parents who’ve had children die. I can’t imagine a more depressing subject. But important, obviously. Still, I don’t know how she does it. My work is stressful enough.”

  “Have you got patients next week? Or are you taking the whole month off?”

  “No, I’m seeing people next
week. Actually, I have an interesting case. Difficult. I really like this woman, but I’m having a hard time sorting out what’s going on with her. She’s dropped out. I’m hoping she’ll come back.”

  After the waiter had delivered our Caesar salads, my hearty meal, and Rita’s wine, she resumed. “This is a woman sent by her husband because he says she’s paranoid. Or so ' she tells me. I haven’t spoken to him. She says he’s been repeatedly unfaithful to her. He denies it. He says she’s imagining things. It’s possible that she’s never confronted him as strongly as she needed to. But that’s beside the point. What’s interesting is that the whole situation highlights what’s usually a more muted issue in therapy, which is the question of, um, truth versus accuracy, let’s say. There is absolutely no question in my mind—well, very little question—that my patient is telling me the truth in the sense that she really believes that he’s had these affairs. She’d pass a polygraph test. In that sense, what she’s telling me is her truth. But what’s the correspondence between her truth and external reality? If there is such a thing?”

  “Of course there’s such a thing.”

  “In the literal sense, there is, except that how am I supposed to know what it is?”

  “Ask the husband?”

  “He refuses to see me.”

  “That doesn’t bode well, does it?”

  “Well, I may yet lure him in. And no matter what, there is some kind of personal truth for her in her perception that he’s unfaithful. That’s what I was offered. It’s what I had to work with.”