Bride & Groom

Olivia even suggested it.”
    Mac’s wife and daughter had done us the favor of making a few phone calls to places they thought might still be available.
    I added, “Maybe neither of them has actually been here. It’s really quite gruesome.”
    “Don’t Mac and Judith live in Lexington?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “The roof is sagging. Probably leaks. You want to bother getting out?”
    “We’re desperate. Gabrielle can’t do the invitations until we find a place. We’d better take a look. For all we know, the front is unpromising but there’s a beautiful garden in the back with glass doors all along that side of the...”
    “…dump,” Steve finished.
    “At least it’s a big dump.”
    We pulled up the hoods of our rain gear and splashed our way to the building’s entrance. Peering through the dirty glass panes of the front door, we saw a nearly vacant room that wasn’t even all that spacious.
    “There’s supposed to be a ballroom,” I said. “Maybe this is just the front hall. Look, since we’re here, let’s take a look in back before we write it off.”
    “Write it off? I haven’t written it off. The next time I want to throw a funeral for my worst enemy, it’ll be my first choice.”
    Following a weedy flagstone path, we trudged to the rear of the building, which did, indeed, have glass doors and where there was, in fact, a garden—or the remains of one. The dominant plant was crabgrass, which flourished in flowerless flowerbeds and spread over the patio-block terrace that ran up to the back of the building. We could have looked through the doors, but did not because neatly laid out next to one of them was the dead body of a large rat.
    “You’re psychic,” I told Steve. “The funeral? Yuck! Dismal was bad enough, but this is disgusting. Not only is there this rat, but it hasn’t been removed.”
    “It’s been here awhile.”
    “No one asked for an autopsy.”
    Steve said, “There are flakes of paint on the body. From what’s peeling off the doors.”
    “Sherlock Holmes! Althea will be so pleased! We can tell her that we found the Giant Rat of Sumatra and that you made a genuine Holmesian deduction.”
    Althea Battlefield, the elder sister of Ceci Love, was a Holmes fanatic, a member of the elite Baker Street Irregulars and an Adventuress of Sherlock Holmes. If Althea alone had chosen the cake that my honorary aunts had provided for the launch party at The Wordsmythe, Althea would have made sure the decorations reflected what she’d have called “Canonical motifs.” The dog would have worn a deerstalker hat and carried a magnifying glass or a pipe. Somewhere on the cake would’ve been an obscure Holmesian object, a gasogene perhaps, and there’d have been portraits of Holmes, Watson, Moriarty, and Irene Adler. Anyway, the presence of the decomposing Giant Rat of Sumatra sent us directly back to the car. The rain was now falling in drops so big that they made expanding pools in the parking lot, as if the Wayside Wildlife Refuge were a fish hatchery with schools of minnows surfacing to feed. In a doomed attempt to preserve the newness of my car, I’d lined the back with frayed sheets, which lay under my dogs’ crates. Inside the crates were old blankets. In the household of a real dog person, linens do not make an ignoble exit from human-use existence by being turned into dust rags; rather, they are honorably reborn as valued dog linens. Thus it was that in addition to born-again sheets and blankets, my car contained a stack of clean, if threadbare, towels, one of which Steve spread on the passenger seat before he climbed in. I put another towel on the driver’s seat, and Steve used a third to mop our faces. By then, we were laughing at the horrors of the Wayside.
    It’s worth noting that during our brief visit there, we’d seen no sign of other human beings: no employees, no volunteers, no visitors. Driving out of the parking lot, we left it as we’d found it: empty.
    “Did you so much as hear a bird?” I asked.
    “The closest thing to life was the dead rat. The place must belong to some private society with no money. And that’s why they allow dogs at weddings.”
    “Going to the dogs would be a major improvement,” I said.
    A second later, we did, however, see a sign of life, namely, a black sedan parked under some trees in a little turnout. Even I, an automotive ignoramus, was able to identify the vehicle as Artie Spicer’s Citroën. Citroëns are, of course,