CHAPTER 36
Not all that long ago, Newton Police Officer Jennifer Pasquarelli had almost lost her job over a highly publicized dispute she’d had with the presumed perpetrator of the heinous crime of violating the leash law. Thereafter, Jennifer had completed some sort of social skills training course, whether graded or ungraded I didn’t know, although I suspected that if the course was indeed graded, Jennifer had squeaked by with D minus. Jennifer clogged the cogs of social machinery as effectively as Kevin made them spin. But she and her law-enforcement partner apparently got along well. The call she’d received hadn’t been a summons to rush to the murder scene and solve the crime. Jennifer wasn’t even a detective. Her partner had just wanted to keep her informed, or so she said.
If our behavior immediately following the announcement of Claire’s murder had been analyzed to determine aptitude for detective work, the person attaining the highest score wouldn’t have been Jennifer. Kevin himself would’ve scored lower than Steve, who heard the news and vanished into the house. When he came back a few minutes later, he drew me aside and said, “I tried to call Mac and Judith, but all I got was a message. I tried Mac’s cell phone. Same thing.”
I shrugged. “They’re both out? Not answering? His cell phone is off? But it was a good idea.”
“Not necessarily. Their house is right near Route 2 and 128. With no traffic, you could get back there from Newton in no time. Or from Cambridge. Brookline. Belmont. It’s maybe twenty minutes from Newton. Convenient location. If someone had answered, it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“Still, it was worth a try. Dear God, how awful! And here we are with all these people and this mess to clean up. And four strawberry shortcakes in Rita’s refrigerator. Steve, this is going to sound so horrible that I wouldn’t say it to anyone except you, but I have no intention of ever marrying anyone else. This is it.”
“That’s not so horrible, is it?”
“This is my only wedding! I don’t want it ruined. By anything. I wanted this whole weekend to be for us. I know it’s selfish. I should be thinking of Daniel and Gus and Claire and the other women. But I don’t have any other life to marry you in! I don’t want this weekend wrecked. I don’t even know what to do right now.”
“Gabrielle seems to have it in hand,” Steve said.
While browsing recently in a Harvard Square bookstore, I’d noticed a book called How To Make People Like You in Sixty Seconds. Or maybe it was... Ninety Seconds. Anyway, the title had made me think, as usual, of Alaskan malamutes, but also of Gabrielle. I hadn’t bought the book; I assumed that I knew what it said. When a new visitor appeared, Rowdy made repeated trips to the toy basket and presented our guest with carefully selected fleece dinosaurs and chewmen. Kimi specialized in gazing intently at her subject’s face. You fascinate me, she seemed to say. Sammy’s strategy consisted of fulfilling his mission in life, which was to be infectiously happy and thus to spread his happiness to everyone he met; he carried a benign virus of joy to which no one was immune. I, of course, was sick with love for him. Like Rowdy and Kimi, Gabrielle made people feel special. Like Sammy, she passed along happiness. But the crucial reason that people immediately liked Gabrielle was the same reason they immediately liked the dogs: Gabrielle’s contagiously happy fascination with people wasn’t some pretense she’d learned from a book; it was utterly genuine.
I should also mention that Gabrielle was a superb organizer. As Steve had noticed, she now had everyone busy depositing refuse in trash bags and carrying glasses and serving dishes to the kitchen.
“When Gabrielle gives orders,” Steve said, “people feel flattered.”
“Holly,” Gabrielle said, “we have more paper tablecloths somewhere. Could you find them? Pete is helping Rita with the shortcakes, and the cream will need to be whipped.”
“Thank you for taking charge, Gabrielle. I love you. Is Buck being impossible?”
With a confiding smile, she said, “He does do things, doesn’t he.”
“He’s planning something mortifying. Do you have any idea what it is?”
“It will sort itself out. We’ll think of something. We always do! The tablecloths?”
After I’d found the tablecloths in a kitchen drawer, I kept running back and forth between the house and yard. I set the tables for dessert, answered questions about the locations of household items, and caught scraps of conversation.
“SHOUTING?” my father bellowed. “I’M NOT SHOUTING!”
In saying that she wanted a “quiet word” with Buck, Gabrielle had referred to her own part of the proposed conversation on the subject of mushing boot camp. She’d known him to be just about incapable of quiet words.
After she’d said something inaudible, he bellowed, “MISREPRESENTATION? Ask Twila! She’s been to Ginny Wilson’s boot camps, and she’ll be the first person to tell you that she’s had a wonderful time. You can hear the gusto in her voice.”
Gabrielle’s reply got lost in a lecture that my cousin Leah was delivering to Twila’s kennel helper. “The term kennel girl is sexist. You aren’t a girl, are you?” The silent kennel person must’ve whispered a reply. “Well, yes,” Leah conceded, “kennelwoman does admittedly sound ridiculous. But there’s no reason you can’t stand up for yourself and insist on kennel help, is there?”
“No,” my father boomed, “I did not imagine that you were the bivy type. We’re staying in our own private cabin.” After evidently listening for an unprecedented ten seconds, he said, “Because everyone else there will be the bivy type, that’s why. Everyone else will be in bivies or tents or out under the stars. Therefore, we’ll have the cabin to ourselves. And that’s about as private as you can get! And Twila didn’t think that you were joking about taking a bichon. If she had thought you were joking, there’d have been only one thing for you and Molly to do, and that’d be to get right out there and show her! Gabrielle, when life issues you a challenge, there’s only one way to respond, and that’s to get yourself right out there and show what you’re made of!”
At about that time, Pete and Rita came downstairs with shortcakes and strawberries. As I supplied Rita with cartons of heavy cream and a handheld electric mixer, Pete kept talking to her in a hushed, fervent tone... drunk,” he said. “And then she came on to me. It was the last thing I expected. And then she sent me this E-mail about the moon.”
“Embarrassing,” Rita said.
“Yes. And I’ll have to go to her funeral. I don’t know what I’m going to say to Daniel.”
“Anything,” advised Rita, “except the full truth.”
“Poor Claire,” Pete said. “I won’t mention the moon.” When all of us reassembled in the yard with strawberry shortcake and coffee, the gathering took on a superficial tone of returning to normal. Uncle Don and Uncle Dave acted in a way that Steve usually dismissed as "Minnesota nice.” At Buck’s request, Twila got North, who greeted everyone by flashing his eyes and wagging his tail, and displayed a rare quality in an Alaskan malamute: the ability to be in the presence of food without stealing it. Buck tried to persuade Gabrielle that in hearing a reference to an outhouse, she’d misheard an innocuous reference to an outbuilding. “At our age,” he said with hideous sympathy, “it’s easy to get confused.” Jennifer kept plucking at Kevin’s sleeve and muttering in his ear. He nobly resisted her efforts to break up the party. Now that a semblance of order had been restored, however, I wished that everyone would leave.
In fact, no one stayed late. The uncles left for their hotel. Kevin and Jennifer gave Leah an unofficial police escort back to Harvard. My father helped Twila and the kennel woman with North and the rest of the team. Pete insisted on accompanying Rita in walking Willie, who unaccountably displayed no desire to bite Pete’s ankles. While Steve and I were giving our own dogs a chance to run in the yard, I kept thinking of Mac and Judith. Maybe they hadn’t answered the phone because Mac had gone to the police to turn himself in. As I imagined the scenario, he’d made a full confession to Ju
dith, who was bravely accompanying him. Or maybe it was Ian or Olivia who had confessed, and both parents were loyally accompanying the murderous child.
CHAPTER 37
When I walked into my kitchen at seven-thirty on the morning of September 28, which is to say, on the day before my first and only wedding, Buck was standing at the stove burning things. The entire stove was covered in grease. Six slices of blackened bacon rested on a paper towel set directly on a countertop, not on a plate. The air was thick with droplets of hot fat. Eight revolting-looking brown objects sizzled in a pan. They appeared to be lumps of rubber and certainly smelled that way.
“Sunny side up!” my father proclaimed.
He was not alone in the kitchen. Sammy the puppy lay at his feet. On the counter next to the burned bacon and the battery from the smoke detector rested my directory of the membership of the Alaskan Malamute Club of America. The thick booklet was held open by a grease-covered sugar bowl. Jabbing an elbow toward the directory, my father said, "You see that? The centerfold! That’s how proud Twila is of North. Two full pages, thirteen photographs, smack in the center of the directory, everything from a puppy picture to show photos to shots of North working in harness. Now that’s what I call pride!”
“Good morning,” I said. “Yes, since you asked, I slept well.”
Reading from the centerfold, Buck said, “ ‘North, as we travel the path together, you enrich every moment of the journey. Thank you.’ And you know what that represents, Holly? It represents appropriate gratitude to a deserving dog.”
“Yes, it does,” I agreed.
Turning from the stove to look me in the eye, Buck said, “And where, I ask you, is your public expression of gratitude to your Alaskan malamutes?”
“May I remind you that I am getting married tomorrow afternoon? And that this is probably not the best time to criticize me?” With an expression of transparently fake abashment, Buck made a show of shifting his gaze to Sammy, who continued to hold his down-stay while whipping the floor with his happy tail. “I’m in the doghouse, kid,” Buck said. “With my daughter and my wife.”
I was tempted to go to the third floor to make my own breakfast. With the intention of keeping Buck two floors away from us, we’d stocked the refrigerator with milk, eggs, butter, yogurt, juice, and fruit, and the cupboards with coffee, sugar, cereal, and English muffins.
“With Gabrielle, you deserve to be,” I said. “Has Sammy had his breakfast?”
“Steve fed all the dogs an hour ago.”
“Where is he?”
“Taking a shower. And in his absence, let me tell you that you’ve got my approval for this marriage.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
Smiling at Sammy, he said, “Nothing to be ashamed of! Quality dog! Best reason on God’s green earth!”
“If you ever so much as hint at any such idea, if you ever so much as think it—”
The phone rang. The first of many calls, this one was from Ceci, who apologized for the early hour, but needed a consultation about the tents. Would we really need them? The forecast sounded perfect, but New England was, after all, New England, and... I’d no sooner promised to check the National Weather Service web site and hung up than the phone rang again. Uncle Don needed a reminder about directions to my house. I supplied them, and then made coffee and toast. Buck leaped to the conclusion that my polite refusal of his bacon and eggs indicated morning sickness. This new explanation for my marriage delighted him. I didn’t have the heart to disappoint him. Or the stomach to digest his cooking. Not long after Steve emerged from the bathroom, the uncles arrived, and Buck inflicted breakfast on them. I escaped into the shower. When I’d finished bathing and dressing, the uncles and Gabrielle were leaving to pick up Leah, who was accompanying Uncle Don, Uncle Dave, and my stepmother to Ceci’s house to assist in preparing for the wedding. To my relief, Twila had consulted my father about the possibility of finding a place to run her dog team, and Buck had not only suggested a state forest south of Boston, but had inveigled an invitation to go along. Before our guests departed, I reminded Gabrielle that she, Leah, Rita, and I had a one o’clock appointment to get our hair and nails done, and I reminded everyone that the rehearsal was at five o’clock at Ceci’s. We’d go directly from there to Nuages for the rehearsal dinner.
My father and I had a little tiff. He wanted to take Rowdy and Kimi with him. Having groomed them for the wedding, I refused. On September 28, there was obviously no snow, and Twila’s team would be pulling a cart, not a sled, along trails and dirt roads. Buck and I were still arguing when Twila’s car and her immense dog-box trailer were in the street and she was ready to leave. Buck was in the passenger seat.
“No, you will not have time to groom them when you get back,” I insisted, “and I want them clean for the wedding. Twila is skipping the rehearsal, and she’s going to groom North then, but you need to be at the rehearsal! Rowdy and Kimi are going to camp with you. They’ll get plenty of time in harness there. It will not hurt them to miss today’s run.”
Twila ended the spat by smiling at me from the driver’s seat, giving a conspiratorial wave, and driving off.
As I was standing on the sidewalk loudly thanking Twila and heaven, Kevin Dennehy’s back door opened. He was on his way out, but stopped for a minute to give me a few pieces of information about Claire’s murder. To my shame, I realized that I’d been so preoccupied with my own plans and with my impossible father that I’d almost forgotten about Claire.
“Sodium pentobarbital,” Kevin said. “They rushed it through.” He meant the autopsy, I assumed. “You know what that is.”
“Of course.” Sodium pentobarbital is the drug that veterinarians use for euthanasia. The brand names for it are a bit grotesque: Euthasol and, worse, Beauthanasia. “Was that the cause of death?”
“No. Same as the others. Head trauma. Blunt instrument.”
“That talk we had. I know you must’ve passed along what I told you. Has anyone followed up on it?”
He rolled his eyes and shrugged his shoulders.
“The world would be a safer place if you ran it,” I said.
“I gotta go.”
“Claire Langceil was a friend of Mac McCloud’s. She and her husband and son were at Mac and Judith’s when we had dinner there last Saturday night. Mac and Judith’s son and daughter were there, too. Ian and Olivia. And Olivia’s husband, John Berkowitz. Someone needs—”
He interrupted me by pounding his right fist into his left hand.
“You’re a Cambridge cop,” I said. “I know.”
“Hey, you got beautiful weather for your wedding.”
We did, too. But Kevin’s remark and the warm sunshine reminded me of my promise to Ceci to check the forecast and make a decision about tents. I scurried inside to my office, dislodged Tracker the cat from my mouse pad, and visited three weather sites, all of which predicted that Sunday and Monday would be clear and mild. Finding itself on the mouse, my right hand automatically performed the familiar act of checking for E-mail. As usual, I had dozens of new messages from my dog lists. Scanning for personal E-mail, I saw that I had a message from Mac McCloud. The subject read: Urgent.
Holly,
I need a great and unpleasant favor that I cannot ask of my family. Please meet me at my house as soon as possible.
Best,
Mac
The message had been sent only ten minutes earlier. The time was now nine forty-five. It struck me as more than odd that Mac had E-mailed instead of calling, but the phone had been busy off and on all morning, and he knew that I read my E-mail all the time. Still, I tried to call him, but got no answer. On the off chance that Kevin hadn’t actually left, I checked his driveway, but his car was gone. I made no effort to track him down, mainly because I somehow had the sense that Mac’s urgent message had to do with dogs rather than with murder. I found Steve in the yard with Sammy. After quoting Mac’s E-mail and saying that I’d tried to call him, I said, “Steve, Mac knows th
at we’re getting married tomorrow. I have a bad feeling that this is about Uli. I need to go there. I need to go there right now.”
CHAPTER 38
Steve refused to let me go alone. I argued that when we exchanged wedding vows, I wasn’t going to promise to obey him and that I had no intention of accepting orders from him now, either. He countered by saying that if he were setting out for some destination that I considered risky, I’d refuse to let him go alone. I reminded him that all the murders had taken place in the evening near the victims’ houses or, in Laura Skipcliffs case, at her hotel. He said, “So what?”
I called Ceci, told her to cancel the tents, and managed to end the conversation. Then Steve and I left. We took separate cars. I had no idea how long the urgent favor would take. Steve and Pete were meeting at one o’clock to pick up the champagne and the rest of the wine, hard liquor, and mixers. I, of course, was getting my hair and nails done. It made sense for each of us to be mobile. Still, as Steve’s van followed behind my Blazer out Route 2, I missed his company and kept glancing in the rearview mirror to make sure he was with me.
As Steve had remarked, Mac and Judith’s house was conveniently close to Cambridge as well as to Belmont, Brookline, and Newton. For once, there was no traffic by the Fresh Pond Mall or on Route 2. Only twenty minutes or so after we’d left home, I turned into the long wooded driveway that led to Mac and Judith’s house. One car was parked in the rounded area at the end of the drive. I couldn’t tell whether it was Mac’s or Judith’s, but Steve said it was Mac’s. Almost everything about the house looked just as it had on Saturday when we’d arrived for dinner. In the morning light, I couldn’t tell whether any lights were on. As Steve and I walked to the front entrance, I noticed that two big pots of blue asters now sat on either side of the door. The glass panels were clean, and the hardware still shone. No sound came from the house. Steve rang the bell. We waited silently.
Bride & Groom Page 21