“It’s too bad Mac wasn’t free to come, too. You weren’t nervous about driving alone?”
I smiled. “I’m not alone.”
“Some of those women had dogs. That woman in Brookline had her dog in her car.”
“Bonny Carr. Her dog was in a crate. She apparently got out of the car first. That’s what I’d normally do. But now I’ve arranged the crates so I can open Kimi’s from inside the car. She and I get out, and then we get Rowdy.”
In a startling demonstration of his fearsome nature, Rowdy responded to the sound of his name by dropping to the floor, rolling onto his back, and imitating a giant bunny rabbit.
Irene laughed and then bent down to stroke his tummy. “He is so cute! It’s funny that such a big dog can be so adorable.”
Kimi, who misses nothing, decided that Rowdy was getting more than his fair share of the attention. Worse, she’d evidently taken a liking to Irene, into whose lap she suddenly tried to leap. Kimi weighed exactly seventy-five pounds. At a guess, Irene weighed a hundred and five. My first—and horrifying—thought was that the tiny Irene was at high risk for osteoporosis: a thin, fine-boned Caucasian woman in late middle age. If Kimi had to hurl herself into people’s laps, couldn’t she pick hefty, heavy-boned African-American men of twenty? I gave Kimi a full body shove. “Sit! Irene, are you all right?”
Luckily, she was. What saved her from being crushed was, I think, her small lap; Kimi simply hadn’t had room for a solid landing. Still, I was mortified. I offered a heartfelt apology. I also put Kimi on a down-stay and put my foot on the section of her leash right near her collar in case she decided to break. Irene was lovely about Kimi’s misbehavior. She laughed it off and said, “It’s always the minister’s children, isn’t it! Please don’t worry about it.”
The incident, which could’ve broken Irene’s pelvis, broke the ice between us. Its absurdity somehow made one of us mention Barbara Pym, who turned out to be one of Irene’s favorite novelists as well as one of mine. We drifted into an enthusiastic discussion about Jane Austen and Penelope Lively. Kimi remained in a solid down-stay. Eventually, Irene asked me to sign the copies of my book that were stacked on the card table. I considered the signing a success. As I got ready to leave, Irene again raised the question of my safety.
“I’ll be fine. I’ll crate Rowdy. Then Kimi and I will get into the car together. Besides, I’m parked right outside. There’s plenty of light.”
“These women were murdered right near where they lived. Or were staying.”
“I’ve made an arrangement at home. When I get there, I’ll use the horn, and my fiancé will come out. I live in Cambridge. I’m used to being careful.”
“I’m sorry if I’m being pushy. It’s just that I knew the first victim. Victim! I can’t think of her that way. Laura Skipcliff. I hadn’t seen her for ages. Decades. But she and Mac and I went to college together. I always liked the two of them. Mac was crazy about her, but she left him for someone else. And then she went off to medical school. I haven’t seen Laura since we graduated. But I always liked her. What a terrible way for her life to end.”
I was too surprised to do anything except echo Irene. “Terrible,” I said inadequately. “Terrible.”
CHAPTER 33
“The rest was speculation,” Steve said. “What you’re doing now is withholding information.”
“What I’m doing? What we’re doing. But it's got to stop."
The second I’d arrived home from the bookstore, I’d told Steve about Mac McCloud and Laura Skipcliff. We were now in the yard sitting at our wedding-present picnic table sipping wine from wedding-present glasses. The wine bottle was on the table. Next to it, a fat candle burned in a glass-sided lantern cleverly designed to prevent breezes from blowing out the flame. Wedding present. Good one. It’s easy to see why some couples get married for the gifts.
“We’re victims of dog osmosis.” Steve gestured toward our five dogs, who were in the yard with us. “We’ve absorbed an attitude of unconditional loyalty. It’s like that thing you’ve got framed in your office. Senator Vest’s Eulogy on the Dog. ‘Faithful and true even to death.’ Only here, what’s at issue is the death of other people, these women. Mac has been helpful to you, and in some ways, he seems like a nice guy, but he doesn’t own you.” Having left a crucial point for last, he said, “Besides, we’re not dogs.”
“You’re right. When you’ve spent as much time with dogs as we have, it’s easy to get the idea that the only kind of loyalty worth having is unconditional loyalty. Perfect fidelity.”
“This is a friendship,” Steve said. “And not even all that close a friendship. Okay, you don’t want to be a lousy friend. Who does? And that’s not what’s required. All you have to do is tell Kevin one thing, and that’s that Mac knew all the victims.”
“I’m the one who has to?”
“We have to. Faithful and true, Holly. I’m on your side.”
“I know you are.”
“All the rest of what we talked about is guesswork. We’re not getting involved in spreading rumors. Or gossip.”
“Certainly not. Sammy, stop that! Steve, he’s chewing the leg of our new table. Make him stop!”
More than with any other dog I’d ever owned... let me start over. The problem I encountered in disciplining Sammy was the difficulty of avoiding the most common pitfall in dog training, which was, is, and ever shall be the tendency to give unintended positive reinforcement for undesirable behaviors. Sammy was so damned cute that it was almost impossible to tell him to quit doing something without simultaneously letting him know how damned cute I thought he was. With his adult-size jaws wrapped around the leg of the table, he wore an expression of winsome innocence.
“Sammy,” Steve said, “has taken a cost survey of available wedding presents, and he’s picked the table because it’s the most expensive one in reach. Sammy, leave it.”
In part to avoid catching Sammy’s eye, I stood up. “I’ll go call Kevin.”
“To arrest Sammy?”
I laughed. “Steve, you’re starting to sound like me! We’ll end up being one of those identical-twin couples. I’ll get taller. You’ll get shorter. My hair will turn darker. Yours will turn lighter. I'll suddenly discover that I know how to remove foreign objects from dogs’ intestines, and—”
“Call Kevin.”
To our shared relief, Kevin wasn’t home. I left messages for him here and there asking him to call me. In fact, instead of calling me, Kevin showed up at my door at nine o’clock the next morning, that is, the morning of Wednesday, September 25, four days before the wedding.
The house was in chaos. I’d started the day by preparing the third-floor apartment for the guests who’d be staying there, my friend Twila Baker, with her malamute, North, and my father and Gabrielle, with Buck’s golden retriever, Mandy, and Gabrielle’s bichon, Molly. I put fresh sheets on the beds, set up crates for the dogs, and carried up a supply of towels. I also dealt with calls from two people who’d lost the directions to Ceci’s house and needed me to explain how to get there. While I was on the phone with the second caller, Sammy somehow managed to get into my own first-floor guest room, where he amused himself by opening four packages that had been delivered the previous day. When I came upon him, he’d raided all four shipping cartons. Sodden strips of cardboard were everywhere, and the floor was thick with wrapping paper and Styrofoam peanuts. What’s more, he’d apparently eaten the gift receipt for a fondue set that we’d intended to return. Sammy lay happily in the midst of the wreckage with a miraculously unbroken bottle of special French brandy grasped between his beautiful big white paws. The brandy, together with a set of glasses, was a present from one of Steve’s vet school friends. The glasses and the bottle had been on a table. Evidently intending to swig the stuff down, Sammy hadn’t touched the glasses, but he’d used his paws or his mouth to steal the bottle and at the moment, with astonishing delicacy, was applying his teeth to the task of removing the cork. Considering th
e destruction he’d caused cold sober, I hated to imagine what he’d have done drunk.
When Kevin Dennehy rapped on the back door, I staggered to it with one hand grasping the collar of the unrepentant Sammy and the other hand wrapped around the neck of the rescued brandy bottle. Sammy was delighted with himself, with me, and with the sight of Kevin, who eyed the smiling dog, the bottle, and me, and said, “The thought of marriage is driving you to drink, huh?”
Sammy wagged his tail faster than ever. His eyes glittered.
One slow word at a time, I said, “I just found Sammy uncorking this bottle. He somehow moved it from a table to the floor. Without breaking it.”
“Hey, Sammy, gotta watch out for drinking alone. Or did you know I was coming over? Well, I’ll tell you, kid, it’s early in the day for me. But I could use a cup of coffee.”
“Of course. Kevin, come in. I’m sorry. He made an incredible mess. It was my fault. I should’ve kept an eye on him. Or crated him. At least he gave me the bottle with no argument. He isn’t possessive with his treasures. But come in. I’ll make coffee.”
Kevin and I had radically different taste in coffee. When I was writing against a deadline, I self-medicated with Café Bustelo. Otherwise, I drank French, Italian, or Vienna roast. Kevin’s cop loyalty to all food and drink purveyed by Dunkin’ Donuts was so marked that I kept a bag of Dunkin’ Donuts ground coffee in the freezer for him. As I made his coffee for him and mine for me, he fooled around with Sammy, but when we settled at the table, I managed to get his attention and said, “Kevin, thank you for coming over. I really need to talk to you. This is serious.”
“Hey, marriage is.”
“This isn’t about marriage. It’s about murder.”
“Same difference.”
“Kevin, please! I really am serious. It’s possible that what I’m going to tell you means nothing. That’s for you to judge. But I need you to quit fooling around and listen.” He did.
“You remember Mac McCloud. You met him at The Wordsmythe at my launch party. Which was also his. He was signing his new book.”
Kevin nodded.
“He’s a vet. He mostly does behavioral consultations these days. Counseling. Psychopharmacology. Dispenses advice about problem behavior. I’ve known him off and on for ages, but I got to know him better when my book was coming out. He’s been great to me. Really, he’s been my unpaid publicist. And I know his family. His wife is a famous literary novelist. Judith Esterhazy. She was at The Wordsmythe, too. You might’ve met their daughter, too. Olivia. Their son, Ian, is a musician. He’s doing the music for our wedding. We had dinner with them on Saturday.”
Kevin waited for me to continue.
“Mac knew all of the murder victims. Every one. And the reason I’m telling you is that a lot of people knew the women who lived around here. Victoria Trotter. Bonny Carr. Elspeth. I knew them. Other people must’ve known all of them, too. But Mac went to college with Laura Skipcliff. She was his college girlfriend. I heard this last night from a classmate of theirs. She didn’t make anything of it. Why would she? She had no way to know that Mac knew the other victims, too. But he did. He knew all of them.”
“And?”
“Laura Skipcliff dumped him.”
“Thirty years ago?”
“She was what? In her mid fifties? Mac’s age, obviously. So it would’ve been more than thirty years ago. I have no idea whether they stayed in touch. For all I know, they didn’t. Or maybe they did.” Reluctantly, I added, “Elspeth told me that she’d had a one-night stand with Mac. She called it an affair, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t, really.”
“There money there?”
“What?”
“Mac. Does he have money? Or his wife?”
“They have a house in Lexington. A lovely house. They’re not hard up. Mac had a successful veterinary practice that he sold to a big corporation. I don’t know what he made on the deal, but it must’ve been lucrative. He probably still earns a lot.”
“The wife?”
“Oh, she can’t earn much of anything. Her books get great reviews, but they’re very literary. They don’t sell well. She probably makes even less than I do. A lot less.”
“Family money?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. Kevin, I have to say that I hate telling you this. These are not creepy people.” I paused. Ian? He was odd. But not creepy. Was he? “They’re friends of mine. Mac has been a good friend to me. In case you wondered, he’s never even hinted that he wanted to be more than that, not that I’d have been interested. He’s a nice guy. Friendly, sociable, all the rest. I’ve read all those profiles in the papers, and he’s nothing like that at all. There is no one more different from those profiles than Mac McCloud.”
The phone rang. “I’m sorry,” I told Kevin, “but I have to get this. It’ll be about the wedding.”
It was. Our photographer’s husband announced that his wife’s brother had died. She was leaving immediately for Memphis, wouldn’t return until Tuesday, and was terribly sorry to let us down. As I was struggling to utter expressions of sympathy, Kevin rose, mouthed good-bye, and left. For the rest of the day and, indeed, the rest of the week, I concentrated almost exclusively on our wedding and honeymoon. The new photographer I hired specialized in splendid portraits of show dogs. Since dogs were far more difficult to photograph than were mere human beings, and since there’d be five dogs in the bridal party, her qualifications were obviously superb. I confirmed our plane reservations, our wedding-night reservation at an airport hotel, our reservation at the hotel in Paris, the reservation for the tents, and the reservation for the rehearsal dinner. By the end of the week, I’d confirmed so many arrangements that I felt as if the forthcoming ceremony shouldn’t properly be called a wedding at all, but a confirmation. In between sending and receiving E-mail, and making and answering phone calls, I kept checking weather forecasts on the web. We had rain on Wednesday and Thursday, but Friday was clear, and the outlook for Saturday and Sunday was splendid.
I devoted most of Friday to bathing and grooming all five dogs, a task I’d have hated to perform indoors. It would’ve been sensible to take the dogs to a groomer, but it felt important to me to do the work with my own hands. I wanted to perform a purification ritual with the two dogs who were already mine, Rowdy and Kimi, and with the three who were about to become mine. India, the ultimate one-man dog, would always be more Steve’s than mine, but her acute intelligence would enable her to understand that Steve had a wife—and this time, a wife worthy of him and of India’s allegiance. Lady the pointer was so touchingly dependent on Steve that she’d never be fully mine, either. Sammy, however, had a malamutes exquisite sensitivity to even the slightest shift in any relationship. Of Steve’s three dogs, Sammy was the one who’d somehow know that Steve and I were married. When Althea pronounced us man and wife, Sammy the pup, my Rowdy’s beautiful son, would understand that he had become my dog, too.
CHAPTER 34
The dossier on Claire Langceil, D.V.M., opened with the usual pages from the major online directories: AnyWho, InfoSpace, and so forth. All agreed that Claire G. and Daniel T. Langceil lived at 37 Windcrest Drive in Newton. MapQuest showed that Windcrest Drive was south of Route 9-1 couldn’t remember ever having been in the immediate neighborhood, which was somewhere near the Chestnut Hill Mall and a few miles from Norwood Hill, where Ceci and Althea lived. I didn’t need to have seen the Langceils’ house to get a detailed view of it: The results of a property search of the City of Newton’s web site included an aerial photograph of the lot. Additional pages from the Newton Assessor’s site provided copious, if tedious, information about the property. The lot size was 12,390 square feet, the frontage was 80 feet, and the house style was Victorian. The house had gas heat, central air conditioning, three fireplaces, two above-average baths, one half-bath, four bedrooms, a deck, a porch, and an in-ground swimming pool. Some of the codes and numbers on the assessment pages meant nothing to me: The land use was 101, an
d the zoning was SRI. A page devoted to the property’s assessment history was, however, easy to interpret: the past ten years, the assessed value had risen dramatically In that respect, the Langceils’ property was like everyone else’s.
I had to wonder whether Ceci knew that the equivalent information about her Newton property was available online to anyone who cared to search for it. At a guess, Ceci had no idea. Had she known, she’d have felt outraged at what she’d have seen as an infuriating invasion of her privacy. She’d have babbled on and on about the matter, especially, I thought, because her old-fashioned kitchen and baths would’ve been rated as below average. She’d have taken the rating as a personal insult. Knowing Ceci as I did I suspected that she’d immediately have renovated the offending rooms, not because she actually wanted to update them, but because she couldn’t bear the humiliation of poor ratings.
To return to Claire Langceil, the next item in the dossier showed that her birthday was August 9- Next came the result of a search of the Commonwealth’s Division of Professional Licensure site. Claire Gail Langceil, Newton, MA, was, indeed, a licensed veterinarian. The status of her license was given as “Fee Paid.” The page also gave her license number, the issue date, and the expiration date. At the bottom was the statement that the site displayed disciplinary actions dating back to ten years earlier and that this license had had no such actions taken during that time.
Next were copies of two articles from a local newspaper. One was about a rabid fox that had bitten a child. Claire Langceil, D.V.M., was quoted as saying that pet owners should remember to keep cats as well as dogs up to date on rabies vaccinations. She was described as an adjunct faculty member in the veterinary technology program at Saint Mary’s Junior College in Boston. The second article had nothing to do with veterinary medicine. It was about a fall harvest festival in Newton. Local residents who’d attended the festival had included Daniel and Claire Langceil, and their son, Gus. Daniel had said that the event was “a lot of fun for our whole family.”
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