Bride & Groom

evening. Ceci and Althea had invited us to dinner to plan the wedding. Amitriptyline was not scheduled to play a role in the festivities, nor did it appear on the table around which we now sat. The food prepared and served by Ceci’s new maid, Ellen, was conventional: green beans, mashed potatoes, a salad, Yorkshire pudding, and prime rib, which Steve was carving with surgical care. So far, Ceci had allowed little opportunity to discuss the wedding at all. Rather, like many other people in Greater Boston, she was obsessed with the murder of Bonny Carr, who, I should explain, had been bludgeoned to death and then injected with amitriptyline, hence Ceci’s interest in the drug and her interrogation of Steve, which began over drinks in the living room and now continued over dinner. In general, Ceci suffered from a tendency to latch onto topics that she blathered on about at great length; or maybe it’s more accurate to say that she herself enjoyed the tendency, thereby inflicting conversational suffering on others, especially Althea. By the way, when I refer to the big gabled white house on Norwood Hill as Ceci and Althea’s, I do so out of deference to Althea, who was, in reality, a permanent guest. Although I never knew Ceci’s late husband, Ellis Love, I always regarded him with tenderness, mainly because the principal feature of Ceci’s spacious living room was a monumental oil painting of a Newfoundland dog of hers that hung over the fireplace, whereas the only visible tribute to Love was a small framed photograph that sat on a side table among six or eight crystal and china knickknacks. For all I knew, Ceci hadn’t even displayed the little photo until after the tolerant Mr. Love’s death. Like Althea, he had been a Sherlock Holmes fanatic rather than a dog zealot. Of course, for all I knew, when he’d been alive, the place of honor had been occupied by a monumental oil painting of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
    Anyway, Althea was right about Ceci’s flirtatiousness. In contrast to her petite sister, Althea was immensely tall, with large hands and feet, and she made no effort to disguise her keen intellect. Ceci was, as Althea said, “the pretty one,” but by modern standards, Althea had a peculiar beauty. Age had given her skin and her blue eyes an otherworldly translu-cence, and her short, thin, curly hair hovered over her scalp like a white halo.
    “Holly is not offended,” Ceci said. “Are you? She knows I’m only joking, except that I have no idea what this amitriptyline is beyond being an antidepressant, but as a matter of feet, I have heard of Elavil because I knew someone whose dog was supposed to be taking Prozac because it shook all the time and hid under the bed, and Prozac was terribly expensive, so she tried Elavil instead, and it worked just fine, but now Prozac is generic, so why would someone take whatever it is instead?”
    Inadvertently echoing Ceci, Steve said, "As a matter of fact, I wondered about amitriptyline, too.” With his usual deliberation, he paused to serve the beef he’d been carving. Then he resumed. “I was curious. I looked it up. It turns out that there’s an injectable version of amitriptyline available for veterinary use. Not widely used, as far as I know. So, it was an odd choice. Th^ injection itself was odd, too, of course.”
    “Singular,” said Althea. “ ‘The most distinctive and suggestive point in the case.’ ” In quoting the Canon, she was quizzing me.
    Before I could take a guess about the Sherlock Holmes story in which the phrase appeared, Ceci said, “Suggestive? What on earth is suggestive about it? It’s weird and senseless to go around beating people to death and then drugging them when it’s too late to do any good, so to speak—any bad, really—but there’s nothing in the least bit off-color about it that I can see, but maybe I’m terribly naive. Am I missing something? These women were not... assaulted, unless they were, and the police are keeping it a secret, possibly for their own good reasons, I assume. Holly, has Lieutenant Dennehy said anything to you about whether they were...?”
    “Yes,” I said. “I mean, yes, I’ve talked to Kevin, and no, the women weren’t, uh, assaulted. Althea, ‘The Crooked Man’?”
    “That’s one of their stories,” Ceci told Steve. By now, she’d somehow managed to surround his plate with the salad bowl and the serving dishes of green beans, Yorkshire pudding, and mashed potatoes. The