Bride & Groom

modern dance company, was a group shot of three donors attending a fund-raising dinner. Laura Skipcliff was on the right. She’d dressed up for the occasion. She wore a short-sleeved dress in what I guessed was black. Her hair was a bit bouncier than in the previous picture, and she wore earrings, bracelets, and an ornate necklace. It was now easy to see that she’d once been pretty.
    Next in the dossier came information that naive people are shocked to discover is readily available online. A page printed from AnyBirthday.com revealed that Laura Skipcliffs birthday was October 27. She had been fifty-seven at the time of her death. The site offered the unintentionally gruesome opportunity to receive an E-mail reminder when her next birthday approached. The USSearch site confirmed that Laura Skipcliff had lived in Manhattan and that her age had been fifty-seven. For a fee, the site would’ve gone on to look for judgments, liens, bankruptcies, and a great deal more. Indeed, the people finders and the other free sites all abounded in low-cost opportunities to find out almost anything about anyone: to search Social Security records, court records, and property records. Searchers were also exhorted to click on hyperlinks that would presumably benefit themselves: Get a home loan, Rent a truck, Refinance now, Save on lodging, Find contractors, Enjoy hassle-free shopping, and Meet Mr. Right.
    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: [email protected] . 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