Bride & Groom

equally incapable of saying in print that I recommended a book that I’d hated.
    “That’s great. I’ll get you the manuscript. Thank you!” Score: Elspeth, one. Holly, zero. Or so it seemed.
    Elspeth turned to Mac and said, “Hey, Mac, how’d you like to blurb my book?”
    “Delighted,” he said.
     

CHAPTER 16
     
    The first item in the dossier on Bonny Carr came from the web site of a Girl Scout camp in Vermont. The page listed the names of Camp Tecumseh alumnae whose last names began with C. Carr, Bonny appeared near the top, together with an address: 89 Glenn Street, Nashua* NH. I felt oddly relieved and weirdly grateful to my parents, whose need for unpaid kennel help had made me ineligible for any such online list. I’d spent my childhood summers at Buck and Marissa Winter’s Show-Dog Boot Camp, where I’d scooped and disinfected kennels, and trimmed the nails of our golden retrievers. But the field trips had been frequent and fabulous; all had, of course, been to dog shows. If, like Bonny Carr, I’d gone to an ordinary camp, my name, too, might appear on a camp web site, together with my childhood address.
    The second page gave the results of an online reverse search of 89 Glenn Street in Nashua. According to result 1—1 of 1, as the page actually read, the current resident was Lafayette, G.; Bonny Carr’s family had evidently moved since she’d attended Camp Tecumseh. They’d had plenty of time; AnyBirthday.com gave her age as forty-five. The next page of the dossier showed where Mr. and Mrs. Carr had gone. It was not principally about them, but about a man named Charles H. McDonough, who had lived and, more to the point, died three years earlier in Manchester, New Hampshire. This item in the dossier was a copy of his obituary as it had been printed in the Manchester Union-Leader. He had left, among many other survivors, a daughter, Helen Carr, and her husband, John Carr, of Sarasota, Florida. Among McDonough’s grandchildren was Bonny Carr, of Brookline, Massachusetts.
    Next came detailed material about exactly where in Brookline, Massachusetts, Bonny Carr lived. The Brookline Assessors Property Database had supplied four pages of facts about a condominium on Kent Street. -Owner: Carr, Bonny G. Residential Exemption: Y. Usage: 102-RESDNL CONDOMINIUM. Land Area: 0. Unit Number: 4. Building Style: LOW-RISE. The facts went on and on. Bonny Carr had bought her condo two years earlier. The building was three stories high and had been built in 1930. Her unit had a living area of 625 square feet. Its four rooms included two bedrooms. There was one full bath. Bath Quality was TYPICAL. So was Kitchen Quality. The building had hot-water heating, no elevator, no central air conditioning, and no fireplaces. The basement was unfinished. The parking was “open” rather than “covered.” Just in case all the numbers about Parcel-ID, Deed Book, sale price, residential values, beneficial interest, and so on failed to give a complete picture, the database had also provided a photograph of an unprepossessing three-story brick apartment building. One of these years, I suppose, web surfers will easily find interior photographs of every room in everyone’s house. For all I know, some databases already offer shots of people’s “typical”-quality kitchens, their living rooms with or without fireplaces, and their bedrooms, presumably with beds rated “made” or “unmade.”
    Next were pages from the database of Massachusetts corporations maintained by the Secretary of the Commonwealth. Bonny Carr was president, treasurer, and everything else of a domestic profit corporation with the “exact name” of HealADog; if she’d incorporated using an inexact, vague, or perhaps even fishy name, it wasn’t listed. In any case, although I’d never before heard or seen the name HealADog, Bonny Carr’s career as a practitioner of healing touch was how I’d known her. She’d published a book about using touch to relieve anxiety and pain in physically and emotionally traumatized animals, especially dogs. The web sites of the United States Copyright Office, the Library of Congress, and two major online booksellers agreed that the book had been published the previous year and that its title was Magical Fingers: Ideas Immediately Applicable to Using Human Touch to Treat Traumatized Animals.
    Bonny Carr also gave seminars, workshops, and lectures on the topic. Rowdy and I had attended one of her workshops about