Bride & Groom

meaning, and I wished to doG Almighty that I’d censored myself. I had the vivid fantasy, as Rita would say, that she’d suddenly rise to her feet and start singing a Patsy Cline classic: “Have You Got Cheating on Your Mind?” Rita did not break into song. Oddly enough, she didn’t even read my thoughts. “I haven’t seen her,” Rita said. “She terminated.” When therapists talk about the end of therapy, they always make it sound as if the patient has died. Rita went on. “She should’ve stayed in therapy, and I told her so. But there was nothing I could do except make sure she knew that I’m available.”
    I was only half listening. If I’d been willing to share my sudden insight with Rita, she’d have appreciated it. The Patsy Cline song? Its real title was “If You’ve Got Leaving on Your Mind." I am a Patsy fan. I hadn’t just forgotten the correct name of the song; rather, I’d made what Rita would have called a “motivated slip.”
    “Are you all right?” Rita asked.
    “Yes. Just... sorry. I was drifting.” I almost added that I had something on my mind. The something was Artie Spicer. The something was cheating.
     

CHAPTER 25
     
    The dossier on Elspeth Rosemary Jantzen began in the now-familiar fashion with page after repetitive page of results from AnyWho, InfoSpace, Yahoo! People Search, WhitePages.com, Switchboard.com, WhoWhere, Super-Pages.com, 411.com, the MSN White Pages, and other people finders that I didn’t even recognize. All agreed that she’d had a phone number with a Belmont prefix and that she’d lived where I knew she’d lived, on Payson Road in Belmont. Three maps showed that her address was near the intersection with Belmont Street. The people finders asked the usual questions about whether the searcher had gone to high school with Elspeth Jantzen or wanted to send flowers to her. They offered to find the names of her neighbors, friends, and colleagues, and to identify restaurants and hotels in her neighborhood. I’d driven along Belmont Street dozens of times. It had restaurants, no doubt. But hotels? My recollection was of tidy two-family houses. There was a golf course nearby and, I thought, a reservoir. At a guess, the closest hotel was in Cambridge.
    According to a page printed from MissingMoney.com, Elspeth R. Jantzen, with a last known address in Allston, had unclaimed property at the National Bank of Jacksonville. Florida? The page didn’t say.
    The next section was devoted to information from the web about Elspeth’s family. I skimmed an obituary of her mother, Eve, who had died two years earlier and been buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery in Watertown. Eve was survived by her husband, Edward Jantzen; two sons, Ron and Gregory; and a daughter, Elspeth. The bulk of the information in this section was about Elspeth’s father, Edward, and specifically about his financial dealings. Dealings seemed to be the right word—as in wheeling and dealing. A great many pages from the corporate search site of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts showed that Edward Jantzen of Milford, Massachusetts, had been the president, treasurer, and clerk of eight corporations, all of which were now in dissolution, two voluntarily, six involuntarily. The companies had had names like Jantzen Just Enterprises and Jan-Go Corporation; I couldn’t begin to guess what kinds of businesses they’d been. Next came UCC Public Search results, also provided by the web site of the Secretary of State. What I knew about UCC filings was that the letters stood for Uniform Commercial Code and that the filings had something to do with loans secured by borrowers’ property. In any case, Jantzen, Edward, of Milford MA, appeared four times as a debtor. Two of the “secured parties,” presumably the issuers of loans, were local banks. For the other two filings, the secured party was a loan company in Oklahoma. For all I knew, billionaires were always organizing and dissolving one-person corporations and practically lived to be listed as debtors to Oklahoma loan companies. Still, the impression I had was of small-time transactions and petty failure.
    The final section consisted of copies of articles that Elspeth had published. Like me, she was a dog writer, and she’d published in some of the same magazines I had, including Dog’s Life. Disgusting though it may sound, fleas are the bread and butter of dog writing. Consequently, like the rest of us, Elspeth had written on that pestiferous