Bride & Groom

eagerly awaited Elspeth’s next work, Zinnie the Boo. But Elspeth had a publisher. What kind of publishing house had accepted stolen goods? In search of an answer, I shook the manila envelope, and out fell a note of thanks from Elspeth that contained the name of her editor and her publisher, together with an E-mail address and a mailing address in North Dakota. Neither the publisher nor the town in North Dakota was familiar to me. Still, the lowliest clerk at the smallest of small presses should have recognized one of the most famous characters in children’s literature. Aha! Maybe the North Dakota outfit was a vanity press, a company that authors paid to get their books in print. Maybe the editor in North Dakota had cashed Elspeth’s check without bothering to read about Zazar.
    “But what about me?” I asked Sammy. “What about me? Did she think I was going to put my name on the cover of this ridiculous piece of damned larceny? I am insulted!”
    Sammy sank his teeth into his squirrel and shook it vigorously.
    On the off chance that Mac hadn’t yet mailed or E-mailed his quotable injunction to buy Elspeth’s book, I tried to call him, but got his and Judith’s answering machine. Feeling uneasy about leaving a voice message about Elspeth’s having stolen Babar, I went to my computer and E-mailed Mac a brief and remarkably tactful warning. I said that the elephant in her book bore what I at least found to be a disconcerting resemblance to Babar. I then E-mailed Elspeth a diplomatic and constructive message in which I pointed out that Zazar was likely to remind readers of Babar and suggested that she consider changing the character’s name and species.
    Elspeth Jantzen never received my E-mail. As I subsequently worked it out, she must have been killed at about the same time I sent the message, which is to say, at around nine-thirty on Tuesday night. The police were never able to discover exactly what Elspeth was doing out of doors when the assailant struck. Like every other woman in Greater Boston, she’d certainly heard and read countless warnings not to go outside alone after dark. I suspect that she felt safe in her low-crime neighborhood, a section of Belmont just off one of the main drags, not a pricey locality like Belmont Hill, but a pleasant, middle-class area that I remembered from once having dropped off a book she’d let me borrow. Police speculated that she’d been dashing out to her car for a library book that she’d checked out earlier that day and left on the front seat. At any rate, when her landlord found Elspeth’s body on Wednesday morning, her purse was still in her apartment, she wasn’t wearing a jacket, and the library book was in her car. The cause of her death was blunt trauma to the head.
    But I didn’t even learn of Elspeth’s murder until late on Wednesday afternoon. By the time her landlord found her body, the morning papers were being delivered, so there was nothing in the newspaper or on NPR’s Morning Edition, and after Steve left for his clinic, I followed my daily routine of dog chores, housework, and writing. At about three in the afternoon, a terrific and totally unexpected wedding present was delivered: a beautiful picnic table from L.L. Bean sent to us by Steve’s uncle Leon. Once I’d opened the package and seen its contents, I dragged the box out the side door and down the steps to the fenced yard, where the table would go, and like a kid with a new toy, unpacked and assembled the table. The weather was clear and warm. Feeling wifely, I planned a meal of pasta and salad to be eaten at the new table, ran out for ingredients, and thus didn’t check my E-mail for a practically unprecedented length of time.
    The news of Elspeth’s murder reached me on Dogwriters-L. Elspeth had been planning to attend the annual conference of the Cat Writers Association, not only because she occasionally wrote about cats, but because the Dog Writers Association of America cosponsors the event with the CWA. This year’s conference was to be held in Houston, Texas, in November, and one of the organizers had placed a call to Elspeth to ask her to fill in for a scheduled panelist who’d just cancelled. Anyway, the cat-writing conference organizer had spoken to a brother of Elspeth’s, who’d answered her phone. After that, the news had spread to Dogwriters-L. The post announcing Elspeth’s murder contained no details— it said only that she had been killed—and the