Bride & Groom

by Conant, Susan

  Where was I? Oh, so Sammy the Bulldozer, otherwise known as Jazzland’s As Time Goes By, was at this moment using his big front paws to fling dirt in Lady the pointer’s bewildered face and was thus distracting me from telling Steve that my book was selling better than the renowned Judith Esterhazys. I broke off. “Steve, please make Sammy stop. I’m going to build a digging box for all three malamutes, but in the meantime, I really don’t want him killing that peony.”

  Steve refilled his wineglass, took a sip, and said with maddening deliberation, “It’s unrealistic to expect a dog yard to look like a flower garden.”

  We were sitting on the wooden park bench that I’d bought with precisely that expectation. It was about ten o’clock and still stinking hot, but neither of us had wanted to endure another breath of inside air. Hank Williams was singing “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” The light mounted on the side of the house and the ambient city light let us keep our eyes on our dogs. All five were loose in the yard. When I was alone with them, I let them loose only in carefully selected combinations because I didn’t want to risk a dogfight. Steve trusted his ability to stop trouble before it led to bloodshed. Also, if the dogs tore one another to pieces, he’d be able to stitch them back together, whereas my profession left me with nothing more helpful to do than write about what had happened.

  “Couples who merge two sets of children have it easy,” I said.

  “Kids are just as likely to wreck yards and go for one another’s throats,” Steve pointed out.

  I got up and was heading toward the house when Steve read my intention of startling Sammy with a blast of cold water. “Sammy, leave it,” he said quietly.

  Sammy quit digging. If you live with golden retrievers, you may fail to grasp the astonishment I felt. If you live with malamutes, you will be stunned.

  “You should teach at Hogwart’s,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The school for wizards in Harry Potter. A teenage malamute just obeyed you. You’re magic with animals.”

  “You’re just magic.” Steve clinked his wineglass against mine.

  Before the potentially romantic interlude could develop, the heavily Boston-accented voice of Kevin Dennehy sounded at the gate. “Anyone want a beer?” That’s a translation. The original was Anyone wanna bee-uh?

  The one who did was Kevin, whose mother banned alcohol and meat from the house they shared. Beer and hamburger were the foundations of my friendship with Kevin. Soon after I’d moved in, he’d arranged for space in my refrigerator. Now, I unlocked the gate and welcomed Kevin, as did all five dogs, especially Rowdy and Kimi, who bumped against each other in their zeal to get close to him and sing their weirdly human-sounding woo-woo-woos. Coached by the elders of his tribe, Sammy picked up the song. Lady, eternally fearful, hung back. India, who’d been sensibly resting on the ground to avoid elevating her body temperature in the evening heat, remained exactly where she’d been.

  Kevin was carrying two cold six-packs. To make room for him, Steve and I moved from the bench to the steps, and Kevin joined us there. Steve and I stayed with the red wine we’d been drinking. When Kevin popped the top off his beer, however, Rowdy and Kimi dashed to him, their eyes gleaming, their tails practically beating out the rhythm of a beer commercial. “Tattle tales,” he told them.

  For fifteen or twenty minutes, the three of us and the five dogs hung out together. The youngest dog, the inexhaustible Sammy, roused the others to short bursts of running, but the four grown-up dogs succumbed to summer-night lethargy. Lady overcame her timidity enough to station herself next to Kevin, who was chronically guilty of violating my ban on wrestling with malamutes, but stroked the nervous little pointer as delicately as if she’d been a Chihuahua. Steve and I drank wine, Kevin drank beer, and the dogs drank a lot of water from their communal bucket. I updated Kevin on our wedding plans. Steve told him about the book we were writing together and asked about his progress in recovering from the gunshot wound in the chest he’d received the previous spring. Kevin said that his girlfriend, Jennifer, was teaching him Tai Chi and that he was hoping to be able to start running again in October. We discussed the murder of Dr. Laura Skipcliff. The three of us agreed that anyone could’ve entered the parking garage by taking the elevator in the hotel lobby; patrons of the hotel’s bars and restaurants used it all the time, as did people who didn’t want to bother searching for on-street parking in Harvard Square. No one, certainly not Kevin, said that the murder would go unsolved, but I somehow felt the presence of a comfortable boundary that relegated the murder to the past and kept it safely separate from the lazy, companionable present I was now enjoying. I slipped into a hypnotic haze induced by the combination of the semidarkness, the wine I’d drunk, the humid warmth of the evening, my love for Steve and our five dogs, my affection for Kevin, and the heartbreaking voice of Patsy Cline singing “Sweet Dreams.”

  All of a sudden, I was jarred into vigilant consciousness. Kevin’s beeper sounded, the cell phone on his belt rang, and the blare of a siren sounded as a police cruiser tore down Appleton Street. Car doors opened. Kevin was on his feet. Simultaneously, it seemed to me, he shouted into the phone, bolted to the gate, wrenched it open, hollered an order to kill the siren, and yelled at me to watch the dogs. Steve was already keeping them away from the open gate. In response to Kevin’s bellowing, a uniformed cop, a kid who looked like a Boy Scout, appeared and said, “Lieutenant, there’s another one.”

  “Who trained you? I didn’t. I don’t want to hear ‘another one.’ I want to hear what and where, I want to hear it fast, and I don’t want to have to ask.”

  “A woman. Egremont Street. Massive head trauma. No weapon, no witnesses, no perp. The sergeant said to get you.”

  “Name?” Kevin demanded.

  “O’Flaherty.”

  “Not the sergeant’s name! The woman’s name.”

  “Victoria Trotter.”

  Suddenly, I was cool and sober. “Dear God,” I said to Steve, who was closing the gate behind the departing Kevin. "Steve, I know Victoria Trotter. I wrote two articles about her. One, really. One about her, one about her mother. Mary Kidwell Trotter. The artist. She painted dog portraits. Victoria did that dog version of the tarot I own. I wrote about it. Victoria has dogs. Two whippets.”

  “Where’s Egremont Street?” he asked.

  “North Cambridge. Off Mass. Ave. on the Somerville side. In the direction of Davis Square. Not all that far from here.”

  Steve wrapped his arms around me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sounds like you lost a friend.”

  “No,” I blurted out. Feeling ashamed, I added, “The truth is, I didn’t like Victoria Trotter. I didn’t like her at all.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The dossier on Victoria Trotter opened with five pages from web directories. All gave the same information. Victoria’s phone number had the same area code and prefix as mine. Her address was 37 Egremont Street, Cambridge, MA 02140. A page printed from MapQuest showed that Egremont was a little L-shaped street and that number 37 occupied the inner corner of the L.

  Next were two pages from the City of Cambridge Assessor’s Database. The first of those two pages was a plot plan with the property lines of 37 Egremont Street shown in solid black. The house appeared as a shaded area. Dotted lines showed the location of the driveway. On the next page was a table of information about who owned 37 Egremont Street—Trotter, Victoria—together with the block and lot numbers, the square footage of the lot, the assessed value, and so forth. The assessed value was high. The sale date of the property was four years earlier. The assessed value was now a hundred thousand dollars more than Victoria Trotter had paid. In Cambridge, a termite-ridden doghouse that would cramp a Chihuahua has a high assessed value, and correctly so because it also has a high market value that reliably ascends. Ridiculous! I mean, we mere human beings are of frail character, but any dog should have the moral fortitude to resist the lure of that institution with the crimson logo emblazoned with the famous m
otto and slogan. The motto: the word Veritas. The slogan: If you don’t have a Harvard education, you don’t have an education at all.

  According to AnyBirthday.com, Victoria Trotter would have turned fifty-six on October 27. The online version of the Social Security Death Index had provided the Social Security number of Victoria’s late mother, the famous Mary Kidwell Trotter, who had died twenty-two years ago.

  The next few web pages came from the alumni newsletter of a school of veterinary medicine. The lead story was about alumni participation in the dedication of a new administration building. Victoria Trotter had donated one of her mother’s paintings, which hung in the lobby. In one of the photographs that accompanied the story, a young Victoria Trotter stood on one side of a large oil painting of three golden retrievers. On the other side, beaming gratefully at Victoria, was the president of the alumni association, Dr. Mac McCloud. Victoria looked much better than she had when I’d interviewed her. She had a thin face with a prominent, aristocratic nose that should have seemed disproportionately large but somehow did not. Her hair was straight and dark. Her skin was light, her eyes almost black. In the photo, her smile looked proud. In person, she’d been arrogant and disdainful, or so I’d thought. She’d had a brittle laugh that she’d produced with grating frequency.

  Copies of my articles and pages about Victoria’s tarot formed the bulk of the dossier. Some were from the big online booksellers, others from comparatively obscure web sites about dog-oriented spiritualism, mysticism, and extrasensory communication. The Trotter Tarot, as it was called, differed from the traditional Rider-Waite deck mainly in substituting dogs for the usual people on the cards. The suits were identical to the orthodox ones of the Rider-Waite: wands, cups, swords, and pentacles. The drawings were appealing, and they’d certainly appealed to many people. The artwork was expertly executed; the artist was an accomplished technician. What’s more, the dogs were rendered realistically, and the impact of the cards was entirely unsentimental. Realism devoid of sentimentality was a hallmark of the work of Victoria’s mother, Mary Kidwell Trotter. So was technical mastery. So were the bright but subtle colors that made the Trotter Tarot so attractive. Neither before nor after producing the Trotter Tarot and the companion book had Victoria Trotter ever published any other illustrations of any kind. In my article about her tarot, I’d kept my suspicion to myself because I’d had no evidence and hadn’t wanted to risk a lawsuit. But I can’t have been the only person to wonder whether the gifted Mary Kid-well Trotter had redone the Rider-Waite deck for her own pleasure and refrained from publishing it because it was close to the original. At a guess, her daughter, Victoria, had had no such scruples and no hesitation about putting her own name on her mother’s work. I remembered the dedication of the book: “Most special thanks and love to my late mother, Mary Kidwell Trotter.”

  The final pages of the dossier consisted of announcements of Victoria’s Trotter Tarot workshops, lectures, and courses. She’d served on panels and participated in “interactive plenaries,” whatever they were. The freshness, skill, and subtlety of the Trotter Tarot illustrations were nowhere evident >n the titles and descriptions of Victoria’s presentations. In October of the previous year, at a spiritual retreat center in the Berkshires, Victoria had offered a course called “Useful Helping Skills in Readings of the Trotter Tarot.” In May, at a tarot conference in New York City, she’d given a lecture titled “The Case Example of Emma the Shih Tzu as a Guide to Smoothing Out Kinks in Interpreting the Cards.” At an event billed as an Intensive Tarot Studies Program scheduled to take place in December in Bern, Switzerland, she’d been due to offer the following course:

  Turning the Tide:

  Lessons Learned in Hearing the Soul Voices of Dogs

  Instructor: Victoria Trotter

  This innovative course examines the dynamic relevance of utilizing tarot-theory-based models of principles of trans-species intervention with behavior-affected dogs and their human guardians. Topics to be developed include:

  • Effect of Trotter Tarot education about canine psycho-emotional concerns on human attitudes and spiritual beliefs.

  • Effect of tarot-enhanced communication in elevating canine self-esteem and human resilience in behavior-conflicted relationships.

  • Use of Trotter Tarot readings to promote interspecies communication and trans-species unity and global peace.

  A short biography followed: “Victoria Trotter has worked with human-canine dyads throughout the Americas and Europe. Illustrator of the beloved Trotter Tarot and author of Interpreting the Trotter Tarot, Victoria Trotter is Senior Training Advisor to the International Tarot Foundation.”

  There ended this dossier.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Victoria Trotter was a nasty woman,” I told Kevin Dennehy.

  So much for saying nothing but good about the dead.

  It was nine o’clock on the morning of Saturday, August 31, and Kevin was sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee, eating his third English muffin, and sneaking bits of it to Kimi and Sammy. I didn’t take Kevin to task for breaking the house rule. He'd been up all night. Steve, too, was laboring on Labor Day weekend, although for only a short time, or so I hoped. His clinic had called a half hour earlier about a Belgian Tervuren suffering from an apparent intestinal obstruction. The X ray showed what the young vet at the clinic thought might be a corn cob. But could Steve take a quick look? Oh, my. Never in his life had Steve taken a less-than-thorough look at an animal. Even so, a corn cob was a likely bet, and if Steve saw one on the radiograph, he’d call Angell Memorial Hospital and have the owner rush the dog there for surgery. By the way, should you care to promote veterinary prosperity at great monetary cost to yourself and possibly fatal risk to your dog, let your dog eat com cobs, or give him a chance to filch them. Those rough suckers are never happier than when they’re lodging in a canine gut.

  “I interviewed Victoria two times,” I continued. “Her mother was a famous dog artist, Mary Kidwell Trotter. I wrote an article about her. And I also interviewed Victoria about herself, about a dog tarot deck she published. I can show it to you if you want.”

  “Didn’t do her much good,” Kevin said. “If she’d seen the future, she’d’ve stayed indoors last night.”

  “We didn’t stay indoors,” I pointed out. Kevin had already told me that Victoria Trotter had been bludgeoned to death as she lay in a hammock on the front porch of her house. She’d apparently spent the hot summer evening lazing around outside, more or less as we’d done. Steve and I had sipped wine. Kevin had had beer. Victoria, however, had, in Kevin’s words, been slugging down Bombay gin on the rocks. Steve and I had taken our dogs outside with us. Victoria had left her two whippets in their crates indoors.

  The murder scene was easy to envision. I remembered the porch and the hammock from the visits I’d made to interview Victoria. Her house had interested me because it had reminded me a little of my own. Both were red, mine a barn red, hers a darker shade that had struck me as unwholesome, perhaps because it was the color of dried blood or perhaps because my dislike of Victoria had tainted my vision. Her house was somewhat older than mine and obviously Victorian, with yellow-cream trim in a pattern that suggested flowers without actually depicting them. I remember wondering whether my house, too, might once have had pretty trim and a front porch and whether I might someday install a third-floor skylight like the one on Victoria’s roof. I’d also been struck by the contrast between the front and the rear of her house, its public and private faces, so to speak. Her house sat on a small corner lot. The front of the house and the side facing the street were neat and well kept. The hammock was attractive, and potted plants decorated the steps to the porch. An evergreen tree near the porch was overgrown, but the foundation shrubs had been trimmed, and tidy hostas formed a thick border along the sidewalk. When I’d parked in the driveway at the rear, I’d been startled. An old radiator had been leaning against the back steps, and other pieces of junk had been strewn here and th
ere.

  “Besides, her tarot is mainly for readings about dogs,” I said, “not people. And it’s not meant for fortune telling. It’s supposed to help you understand your dog’s past and present. She didn’t claim that it was some magical way to predict the future."

  “I got no use for all that mumbo jumbo,” Kevin said. “So, what was it you didn’t like about her? She say something bad about malamutes?”

  “She said that they conned law-abiding people into feeding them at the table,” I said. “Actually, I said that, and please stop it, all of you. Anyway, one thing I know about Victoria goes back... it must be twenty years, long before I had malamutes. I was a teenager. This happened at a show. I was with my mother and some of our goldens. My father wasn’t there, which was probably a good thing, because Buck would’ve been so furious that he’d’ve done God knows what and gotten himself in trouble. Anyway, Victoria Trotter had a greyhound she was showing in obedience. And she must’ve known that that isn’t the world’s easiest obedience breed. Everyone knows that.”