Bride & Groom

two years earlier. You won’t find my opinion of the workshop anywhere on the web. I’d intended to write about it in my Dog’s Life column, but I prefer to keep my column positive, and I always keep it truthful. In truth, Bonny Carr’s “healing touch” seemed to me identical to everything I already did in hugging, grooming, stroking, and otherwise making physical contact with my dogs. Furthermore, her supposed system was far less systematic than the well-known TTouch approach of Linda Tellington-Jones. But the real reason I couldn’t write about the workshop was Rowdy, who had always been a total hedonist about being held, brushed, massaged, or just plain patted. Here was a dog who adored everything from gentle little finger circles on his ears to vigorous thumps on the rib cage. And exactly what did the big boy do in public at Bonny Carr’s workshop on healing touch? Refused to rest on the floor. Sprang to his feet. Woo-wooed in an apparent effort to drown her out. Embarrassed the daylights out of me. Oh, and while he was at it? Wordlessly informed me that he’d spotted Bonny Carr for the phony that I, too, thought she was. My experience with her at the workshop was quite unpleasant. Instead of sensibly saying that my untraumatized Rowdy was an unsuitable test case for her “healing touch,” she announced that the method required time and patience with severely abused animals. Her implication, as was clear to everyone in the workshop, was that I, Holly Winter, was the perpetrator of the abuse. So, I wrote nothing about Bonny Carr. But I was tempted. Severely so.
    Next in the dossier came twenty or thirty web pages that documented, with tedious repetition, the seminars, workshops, and lectures Bonny Carr had given and was scheduled to give. Her older presentations had been like the one I’d attended; she’d focused on teaching pet owners, shelter workers, and veterinary professionals to use touch on dogs and cats in their care. In the recent past, she’d shifted to teaching people to teach her methods, what she called “training trainers.” It’s worth noting that this section of the dossier presented many pages that listed events of interest to veterinary professionals. On those pages, only a few lines were about a workshop, seminar, or lecture given by Bonny Carr. For example, on a web site about a veterinary conference held the previous winter in New Orleans, she’d been one of forty or fifty presenters; it was difficult for me even to find her name. It seemed to me that this portion of the dossier must represent an obsessive determination to record every reference to Bonny Carr on the entire World Wide Web.
    The final pages showed different versions of the same photograph of Bonny Carr. The first of those pages showed a small black-and-white photo next to a paragraph about a seminar she’d done on training trainers in treating animal trauma. On the following page, the same picture appeared alone. It could have been, and maybe was, a passport picture: accurate and unflattering. In it, Bonny Carr looked as I remembered her. She was coarse and exotic, with masses of dark Medusa curls. Her face was strikingly asymmetric, her eyebrows so thoroughly plucked that they almost looked as if they’d been burned off. She had full lips and a long neck with a peculiarly ribbed appearance, as if the skin were stretched over the bones of her throat with no tissue in between. Neither smiling nor frowning, she stared boldly at the camera, squarely meeting its eye. Next was an enlargement of the same picture that took up perhaps half the page. The photo was now blurred and grainy. Finally, there was a full-page blowup that broke Bonny Carr’s face, neck, and hair into tiny squares. Although Bonny Carr retained her brazen expression, the result was fractured and grotesque. She looked like a fiend. It was impossible to see the effect as anything but deliberate.
     

CHAPTER 17
     
    On Thursday evening, while Steve and I, together with the other members of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, peacefully worked with our dogs in the brightness and safety of the armory near the Fresh Pond rotary, Bonny Carr was bludgeoned to death in the parking lot behind her condo building in Brookline. She must have died shortly before Steve and I returned home with Sammy and Rowdy. The evening was mild, and we’d gone to dog training on foot and paw. We finished at about nine, helped to put away the equipment, spent a few minutes