After slipping on a jacket, pocketing my keys, and grabbing a flashlight, I quietly entered the back hall and eased open the outer door. The floods, both old and new, showed my car and Rita’s BMW; everything looked normal. Moving slowly, I descended the stairs. With the flashlight in my left hand and the revolver in my right, I made a sudden sprint past the barrels and around the comer of the house. Almost to my disappointment, the narrow strip of land was empty. As if to justify my presence there, I aimed the flashlight at the wet ground and walked the length of the passageway. The beam showed wet leaves that I hadn’t bothered to rake. If it also showed footprints, I didn’t see them. Feeling foolish, I made my way back along the length of the house and had just stepped onto the brightly illuminated driveway when a human figure appeared on the sidewalk. The figure was female. Taking a look at me, she opened her mouth in a giant O that could have come right out of Munch’s famous painting titled “The Scream.” And scream Rita sure did.
CHAPTER 24
“Don’t give me this line of yours about Maine and guns,” Rita said. “The world is full of people who grew up in Maine and don’t go around brandishing deadly weapons.”
“Name one,” I challenged.
We were seated at my kitchen table. I’d explained about Steve’s feline emergency, invited Rita in, unloaded the Ladysmith, and returned it to its case, which I’d stowed safely in the bedroom closet. After locking the ammunition in the file drawer, I’d let Rowdy and Kimi loose. Then I’d opened a bottle of a red wine that Steve was considering for our reception. It was called Mad Fish. The name suited the present occasion. Rita was furious at me, and we were on a subject intimately related to fish and fishing, namely, the State of Maine. Then, too, there was the unmentionable matter of fishy Artie Spicer.
“The late Senator Margaret Chase Smith,” Rita said. “Stephen King. Your own mother.”
“As it happens, my mother was an excellent shot, and for all we know, so was Margaret Chase Smith, and I have no idea whether Stephen King owns a firearm of any kind, but since he lives in Bangor, it’s perfectly possible that he does, although he obviously doesn’t need one to scare people, does he? And I was not ‘brandishing a deadly weapon.’ You make it sound as if I’d been standing in the middle of Harvard Square taking potshots, and speaking of stupid behavior, exactly what were you doing wandering around outdoors alone at night with, I might add, no protection at all?”
“Spike heels are a very effective weapon.” Rita cracked a little smile. I refilled her wineglass. “And I wasn’t ‘wandering around.’ Artie and I went to dinner, and he has an early flight to catch tomorrow, so he dropped me off, and the only reason he didn’t walk me to the door is that thanks to my dutiful landlady, the driveway is brighter than the Sahara at noon, so I could hardly be said to have been outdoors after dark, could I?”
“You certainly could. In fact, you were. And the garage of The Charles, where Laura Skipcliff was killed, is anything but dark, and it’s indoors. And Bonny Carr was killed in the parking lot behind her building, which must’ve had lights. You should’ve made Artie walk you to the door.”
“I’m not in the habit of making Artie or anyone else do things. I’m a therapist. Remember? I don’t make people do things.”
“We’re not talking about your patients’ mental health. We’re talking about your physical safety.”
“I’m safe,” Rita said. “So, are you going to tell me what you were doing outdoors alone at night? With a gun?”
“I heard a noise.” My statement undoubtedly sounded as childish in Rita’s ears as it did in mine. “Really. And you’ve heard Kevin on the subject of people who call nine-one-one about a noise. And Kevin’s out with Jennifer, so I couldn’t just to have him come over. And I knew what I heard, Rita. I heard a footstep around the corner of the house.”
“You heard a footstep from indoors?”
“I was taking out the trash. Rowdy raided the trash under the sink, and he and Kimi got into a fight over it. They made a real mess. And I didn’t want the garbage bag sitting on the counter or in the hall.”
“You couldn’t wait for Steve to get home?”
“I didn’t know when he’d get here. I still don’t know. You know what Steve’s like. It’s perfectly possible that he’ll sleep on the floor next to the cat’s cage. Or with the cat in his arms. So I ran out.”
“Maybe stupidity is the true basis of our friendship.” Rita raised her glass.
I raised mine. “Friends,” I said.
“Forever.”
The clinking alerted Rowdy and Kimi, who’d been dozing on the floor. They loved Rita, but considered her to be a rather uninteresting guest, mainly because she never gave them human food or drink, and certainly never wrestled with them.
Instead of discussing our friendship, I said, “We found a restaurant for the rehearsal dinner.” I went on to tell her about Nuages, a far easier topic than my strong suspicion that the man I’d seen in Artie Spicer’s car had, in fact, been Artie. Rita insisted on seeing the wedding presents that had been arriving daily. The latest was an electric quesadilla maker.
“Returnable?” Rita asked.
“No. It’s from my horrible cousin Janice. She probably got it at a yard sale.”
“Is she coming to the shower?”
“No. We didn’t invite her. Remember? Because if we had, she’d’ve turned up here two days early with all of her dogs and expect Steve to update all their shots for free and expect us to keep our dogs crated the entire time she was here. Inviting her to the wedding was a concession to Buck. Her dogs are very definitely not invited.” Janice had fox terriers, both smooth-coated and wirehaired, and more of both varieties than she could manage properly. The dogs weren’t the problem; they’d have been fine if they’d belonged to someone else. “Speaking of the shower, it’s a week from tomorrow, and you and Ceci still haven’t assigned me a task.”
“Ceci and I are giving it. Period. Leah is helping. And there won’t be all that much to do. Afternoon tea. Coffee, tea, pastries, little sandwiches with the crusts cut off.”
After we’d talked yet more about my wedding, I realized that I’d asked Rita nothing about herself. Ordinarily, I’d have asked about Artie, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I raised the subject of her psychotherapy practice. “Whatever happened to your truth woman?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The patient you told me about at the mall. At dinner. She dropped out of therapy, and you were wondering whether she’d come back. She thought her husband was cheating on her, and you thought she was telling you her truth.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I felt a ghastly conviction that Rita would correctly interpret my underlying meaning, and I wished to doG Almighty that I’d censored myself. I had the vivid fantasy, as Rita would say, that she’d suddenly rise to her feet and start singing a Patsy Cline classic: “Have You Got Cheating on Your Mind?” Rita did not break into song. Oddly enough, she didn’t even read my thoughts. “I haven’t seen her,” Rita said. “She terminated.” When therapists talk about the end of therapy, they always make it sound as if the patient has died. Rita went on. “She should’ve stayed in therapy, and I told her so. But there was nothing I could do except make sure she knew that I’m available.”
I was only half listening. If I’d been willing to share my sudden insight with Rita, she’d have appreciated it. The Patsy Cline song? Its real title was “If You’ve Got Leaving on Your Mind." I am a Patsy fan. I hadn’t just forgotten the correct name of the song; rather, I’d made what Rita would have called a “motivated slip.”
“Are you all right?” Rita asked.
“Yes. Just... sorry. I was drifting.” I almost added that I had something on my mind. The something was Artie Spicer. The something was cheating.
CHAPTER 25
The dossier on Elspeth Rosemary Jantzen began in the now-familiar fashion with page after repetitive page of results from AnyWho, InfoSpace, Yahoo! People Search, Whit
ePages.com, Switchboard.com, WhoWhere, Super-Pages.com, 411.com, the MSN White Pages, and other people finders that I didn’t even recognize. All agreed that she’d had a phone number with a Belmont prefix and that she’d lived where I knew she’d lived, on Payson Road in Belmont. Three maps showed that her address was near the intersection with Belmont Street. The people finders asked the usual questions about whether the searcher had gone to high school with Elspeth Jantzen or wanted to send flowers to her. They offered to find the names of her neighbors, friends, and colleagues, and to identify restaurants and hotels in her neighborhood. I’d driven along Belmont Street dozens of times. It had restaurants, no doubt. But hotels? My recollection was of tidy two-family houses. There was a golf course nearby and, I thought, a reservoir. At a guess, the closest hotel was in Cambridge.
According to a page printed from MissingMoney.com, Elspeth R. Jantzen, with a last known address in Allston, had unclaimed property at the National Bank of Jacksonville. Florida? The page didn’t say.
The next section was devoted to information from the web about Elspeth’s family. I skimmed an obituary of her mother, Eve, who had died two years earlier and been buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery in Watertown. Eve was survived by her husband, Edward Jantzen; two sons, Ron and Gregory; and a daughter, Elspeth. The bulk of the information in this section was about Elspeth’s father, Edward, and specifically about his financial dealings. Dealings seemed to be the right word—as in wheeling and dealing. A great many pages from the corporate search site of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts showed that Edward Jantzen of Milford, Massachusetts, had been the president, treasurer, and clerk of eight corporations, all of which were now in dissolution, two voluntarily, six involuntarily. The companies had had names like Jantzen Just Enterprises and Jan-Go Corporation; I couldn’t begin to guess what kinds of businesses they’d been. Next came UCC Public Search results, also provided by the web site of the Secretary of State. What I knew about UCC filings was that the letters stood for Uniform Commercial Code and that the filings had something to do with loans secured by borrowers’ property. In any case, Jantzen, Edward, of Milford MA, appeared four times as a debtor. Two of the “secured parties,” presumably the issuers of loans, were local banks. For the other two filings, the secured party was a loan company in Oklahoma. For all I knew, billionaires were always organizing and dissolving one-person corporations and practically lived to be listed as debtors to Oklahoma loan companies. Still, the impression I had was of small-time transactions and petty failure.
The final section consisted of copies of articles that Elspeth had published. Like me, she was a dog writer, and she’d published in some of the same magazines I had, including Dog’s Life. Disgusting though it may sound, fleas are the bread and butter of dog writing. Consequently, like the rest of us, Elspeth had written on that pestiferous topic. She’d also done the inevitable breed profiles (“Meet the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever!”), the articles about protecting dogs from summer heat, and the comparisons of popular brands of dog food. I’d seen her pieces before, but having written on the same topics, I’d never read her presentations of what was bound to be the same material.
I leafed through the copies in the dossier until I came upon a copy of an article that had appeared in a newsletter about dog health published by an obscure veterinary school about four years earlier. There are zillions of dog publications; no one reads all of them. I’d never heard of this one. Anyway, I began actually to read the article because the subject surprised me. Elspeth’s dogs were well-mannered pets, but she’d never shown them in obedience. Furthermore, I’d never heard her express any interest in obedience trials, formal obedience training, or, indeed, dog training in any form. Yet this article was about the dos and don’ts of using food in dog training. The topic was not one on which I held any sort of monopoly; it was a popular subject. Still, it was my subject and not Elspeth’s. So was the article, which had originally appeared in Dog’s Life magazine. With my byline. Elspeth had changed the first sentence. Every reference to malamutes had become a reference to Irish terriers. But I know my own writing, and this work was mine. Elspeth had stolen it from me.
CHAPTER 26
On the evening of Tuesday, September 17, Steve went out to dinner with two fishing buddies of his, fellow veterinarians who were on the staff of Angell Memorial Animal Hospital and who kept trying to persuade him to sell his practice and join them there. After feeding dinner to the dogs and then to myself, I decided to quit putting off the task of reading Elspeth’s manuscript, which had been sitting in my office for four days. By now, Mac had probably mailed his blurb to Elspeth’s editor. Of course, he had the advantage of not intending to read the book at all before generating a couple of quotable sentences of persuasive praise. Highly recommended! Essential for everyone who wants to raise kind children! His blurb would be followed by its truly essential components, namely, Mac’s full name and the titles of his books.
As an antidote to my cynicism, I went to the third floor and got Sammy the puppy, and turned him loose in my kitchen. To the general public and to many pet owners, puppy means a very young pup, a ball of fluff, but in the parlance of the Dog Fancy, puppies are puppies until they’re eighteen months old, long after they’ve grown to adult size. Sammy, who’d turn one year old this coming winter, wasn’t yet as big as Rowdy, but was nonetheless a big dog, albeit a big dog with a ball-of-fluff brain. To encourage Sammy to play with actual dog toys rather than with objects that he’d happily redefine as such, I confined him to the kitchen by shutting all its doors and got out a couple of big black Kong toys, a fleece dinosaur, and, his favorite plaything, an eerily naturalistic stuffed squirrel that looked realistically dead. Ignoring the toys, Sammy plunged his head into Rowdy and Kimi’s big water bowl, filled his mouth with water, and galloped across the floor while opening his jaws and shaking off the water that clung to his face. Having drenched the tile, he grabbed the squirrel, tossed it, and pounced. Cured of cynicism, I opened the manila envelope that Elspeth had left, extracted the two manuscripts it contained, and took a seat at the kitchen table.
What Elspeth had called her “book” was a children’s book with a companion volume for parents and teachers. Until I examined the manuscripts, I knew nothing about the material except its theme: kindness. I began with the children’s book. Centered in the middle of the first page was the title: The Story of Zazar. With a sense of disbelief, I turned to the first page of text, where I discovered that the eponymous Zazar was, indeed, a juvenile elephant. The following pages explained that little Zazar lived in a city of animals, where he was friends with a monkey and with a little old lady. The city wasn’t called Celesteville, and the monkey wasn’t named Zephir.
“Even so!” I said aloud. “Outrageous! How could anyone be so stupid?”
What on earth kind of blurb did Elspeth expect me to write? A must-read for fans of intellectual property theft! I could go on to say that I eagerly awaited Elspeth’s next work, Zinnie the Boo. But Elspeth had a publisher. What kind of publishing house had accepted stolen goods? In search of an answer, I shook the manila envelope, and out fell a note of thanks from Elspeth that contained the name of her editor and her publisher, together with an E-mail address and a mailing address in North Dakota. Neither the publisher nor the town in North Dakota was familiar to me. Still, the lowliest clerk at the smallest of small presses should have recognized one of the most famous characters in children’s literature. Aha! Maybe the North Dakota outfit was a vanity press, a company that authors paid to get their books in print. Maybe the editor in North Dakota had cashed Elspeth’s check without bothering to read about Zazar.
“But what about me?” I asked Sammy. “What about me? Did she think I was going to put my name on the cover of this ridiculous piece of damned larceny? I am insulted!”
Sammy sank his teeth into his squirrel and shook it vigorously.
On the off chance that Mac hadn’t yet mailed or E-mailed his quotable injunction to buy Elsp
eth’s book, I tried to call him, but got his and Judith’s answering machine. Feeling uneasy about leaving a voice message about Elspeth’s having stolen Babar, I went to my computer and E-mailed Mac a brief and remarkably tactful warning. I said that the elephant in her book bore what I at least found to be a disconcerting resemblance to Babar. I then E-mailed Elspeth a diplomatic and constructive message in which I pointed out that Zazar was likely to remind readers of Babar and suggested that she consider changing the character’s name and species.
Elspeth Jantzen never received my E-mail. As I subsequently worked it out, she must have been killed at about the same time I sent the message, which is to say, at around nine-thirty on Tuesday night. The police were never able to discover exactly what Elspeth was doing out of doors when the assailant struck. Like every other woman in Greater Boston, she’d certainly heard and read countless warnings not to go outside alone after dark. I suspect that she felt safe in her low-crime neighborhood, a section of Belmont just off one of the main drags, not a pricey locality like Belmont Hill, but a pleasant, middle-class area that I remembered from once having dropped off a book she’d let me borrow. Police speculated that she’d been dashing out to her car for a library book that she’d checked out earlier that day and left on the front seat. At any rate, when her landlord found Elspeth’s body on Wednesday morning, her purse was still in her apartment, she wasn’t wearing a jacket, and the library book was in her car. The cause of her death was blunt trauma to the head.
But I didn’t even learn of Elspeth’s murder until late on Wednesday afternoon. By the time her landlord found her body, the morning papers were being delivered, so there was nothing in the newspaper or on NPR’s Morning Edition, and after Steve left for his clinic, I followed my daily routine of dog chores, housework, and writing. At about three in the afternoon, a terrific and totally unexpected wedding present was delivered: a beautiful picnic table from L.L. Bean sent to us by Steve’s uncle Leon. Once I’d opened the package and seen its contents, I dragged the box out the side door and down the steps to the fenced yard, where the table would go, and like a kid with a new toy, unpacked and assembled the table. The weather was clear and warm. Feeling wifely, I planned a meal of pasta and salad to be eaten at the new table, ran out for ingredients, and thus didn’t check my E-mail for a practically unprecedented length of time.
Bride & Groom Page 14
