Bride & Groom

worst would be that he’d say something I can’t begin to guess and definitely do not want to hear. Wait! Yes, I can guess. He’d preach for hours about the fidelity of dogs and the infidelity of human beings. I can hear it now. At my wedding. Probably with examples. Bill Clinton and Buddy. Gabrielle, over my dead—”
    “Your dead body is your father’s other worry, of course.” Gabrielle had a warm, rich, throaty voice. Her typical tone, which she used now, was confiding. “It’s always difficult for parents to realize that their children are grown up.” She added, and not as a question, “Isn’t it.”
    “Gabrielle, that murder had nothing to do with me. Nothing. Crime happens in Cambridge just the way it does in every other city. And in the country! The woman who was murdered, Laura Skipcliff, was an anesthesiologist. For all we know, a patient of hers died, and some lunatic relative blamed Dr. Skipcliff. I don’t know, and the police don’t know. I saw Kevin Dennehy for a second this morning. He doesn’t even know what the murder weapon was. Probably a sledge hammer or something like that, but it hasn’t been found. No one at the garage or the hotel saw anything useful. Dr. Skipcliff lived in New York. She was here for a conference. It’s over. If her murderer was here for the conference, he’s gone home by now.”
    “Why would an anesthesiologist use a sledge hammer? Wouldn’t you think...?"
    “I don’t know. What I know is that I live right next door to a cop, the house has good locks, Steve and I have five dogs, and one of them is India. Would you remind Buck about her? And remind him that for most people, presumably including most murderers, one look at Rowdy and Kimi and even Sammy is a big deterrent. Most people don’t realize that malamutes are the world’s worst guard dogs. Remind Buck that if anyone actually attacked me, Rowdy and Kimi wouldn’t just stand there doing nothing.”
    Gabrielle responded by saying how much my father loved me. After that, we discussed wedding plans, of which Steve and I had, of course, made all too few. Then I refused her invitation to spend the next weekend in Maine. I offered excuses about Labor Day traffic and the need to work on the wedding. In reality, I didn’t want to subject Steve to more time with Buck than was absolutely necessary. Also, Steve and I both had heavy work weeks ahead and wanted the three-day weekend to ourselves.
    At the end of the conversation, Gabrielle said that since she wasn’t my biological mother, she had no difficulty in seeing me as an adult, but she still couldn’t help sharing a little of my father’s worry that I was living in a city where a woman had just been mysteriously murdered. I thanked her for her concern, told her how much I loved her, and said that I felt perfectly safe. I really did appreciate her concern and really did love her. It was also true that at the time, I still felt perfectly safe.
     

CHAPTER 9
     
    Six days later, on the evening- of Friday, August 30, a woman named Victoria Trotter was murdered as she lay in a hammock on the front porch of her house on Egremont Street in Cambridge. I knew Victoria Trotter, whom I’d interviewed for two articles I’d written, one about her famous mother, the late Mary Kidwell Trotter, a dog portrait artist, and the other about Victoria’s own canine version of the tarot. I owned a Victoria Trotter deck of the cards and consulted them every once in a while, strictly to get a reading on themes I might be overlooking in my life and the lives of my dogs, not to foresee what I trusted was the unforeseeable future. Still, because of Victoria’s tarot, it’s worth noting that I had no premonition of her violent death.
    In fact, between the Saturday when I talked with Gabrielle and the Friday when Victoria was bludgeoned to death I paid only routine attention to the security precautions that city dwellers take automatically. As always, I kept the doors to my car and house locked. As I’d always done everywhere and fully intend to do for the rest of my life on earth and for eternity in the beyond, I spent nearly every waking and sleeping moment, indoors and outside, surrounded by big dogs. But I did so solely for the pleasure of their company. Dr. Laura Skipcliff’s murder had had nothing to do with me; nothing about it had suggested a threat to my safety.
    Even if I’d been worried, I’d have had little time to dwell on my fear during the week before