Bride & Groom

system. She calls me when she leaves her office, and I watch for her to get home. She’s carrying a personal alarm device. I don’t go out without a dog. Even if I’m just getting something from my car, I take a dog with me, and not Lady or Sammy, either. I take Rowdy or Kimi or India.”
    “These last two women were in professions similar to yours.”
    “Every woman who works with animals is worried. Steve had a meeting with all his staff yesterday afternoon. No woman leaves there without an escort. He’s checking on security services and off-duty cops. And I’m concerned for Leah the way you’re concerned for me. She isn’t a dog professional, but she trains and handles Kimi, and for all we know, maybe that’s close enough. That is, if dogs really have anything to do with the motivation. Maybe they don’t. Harvard has set up extra shuttle buses and taken all kinds of precautions. Leah has sworn to me that she won’t go out alone after dark.”
    “You are very dear to me,” Althea said.
    “I’ll be careful,” I said. “I promise. After all, I’m fairly dear to myself, too.”
     

CHAPTER 19
     
    At four o’clock on Sunday mornin?, Steve, Lady, India, and Sammy left for a little town west of Worcester. In an act of noble self-sacrifice, Steve had volunteered to play the role known as “subject” in the crucial forty-acre test that a prospective Search and Rescue dog had to pass to achieve certification for daytime searches. This Search and Rescue group shunned the all-too-accurate term victim for the person who, in the aforementioned act of noble self-sacrifice, agreed to get up before dawn, drive a long distance, hide in a forty-acre wilderness, and sit on the cold ground with nothing to do except wait to be discovered by the dog taking the test. I’d refused Steve’s invitation to accompany him to the test and on the hike he intended to take with his dogs once he’d been found. Rita, Leah, and I were scheduled to shop for wedding apparel at two o’clock, and if the canine searcher dallied, there’d be insufficient time after the test to hike and get back to Cambridge on time.
    I slept until what was for me the luxuriously late hour of eight. I fed Rowdy and Kimi, let them into the yard, had breakfast, and, over coffee, checked my E-mail. Instead of leaving a note on my door, Rita had E-mailed me to say that she and Artie were leaving at 5:30 A.M. to go to Plum Island, where someone had spotted a rare bird. They were taking Willie with them—why, I couldn’t imagine, since Willie would scare off birds, rare or otherwise. Rita promised to be back in time for our dress-shopping trip. My stepmother, Gabrielle, had sent a brief message to say that she and Buck had mailed the wedding invitations on Friday. My father had made a spectacle of himself at the post office by bragging about me. She’d call soon. I scanned the messages on Dogwriters-L, Malamute-L, and the other lists to which I subscribed. Then I visited one of the online booksellers, where I was irked to see that one reader’s sour review had lowered the rating of 101 Ways to Cook Liver from five stars to four and a half. The sourpuss who’d given my book a rotten rating had written, incredibly, “This book is about cooking for dogs! What a waste of time! Why would anyone bother?”
    In an effort to scrub off my resentment at the unfair treatment of my work, I took a shower. As I was toweling off, it finally occurred to me that the same mean-spirited reader had probably written almost the same thing about The Joy of Cooking: “This book is about cooking! What a waste of time! Why would anyone bother?” The realization brought me only a little consolation. To battle my sense of mistreatment, I dug two liver brownies out of the depths of the freezer and fed them to Rowdy and Kimi, who gobbled them with gusto. Yet one more reason to worship the Sacred Animal! No dog has ever given me anything but a rave review.
    I made a fresh pot of coffee and settled in with the Sunday paper, which had two articles and a long sidebar about the serial murders. The first article recapped old news about the slayings of Dr. Laura Skipcliff, Victoria Trotter, and Bonny Carr. It pointed out that the three victims were dark-haired women in their forties or fifties. The murders had taken place in the evening. All three victims had been bludgeoned to death. The weapon or weapons had not been identified. Victoria Trotter had been injected with insulin,