Bride & Groom

the Square the other day. She and her husband are going to be at dinner at Mac and Judith’s this Saturday. They’re friends of Mac and Judith’s.” Steve said, “I wish we weren’t going.”
    “We could get struck down by the flu. But you were starting to say—”
    “Mac knew Victoria Trotter. Elspeth. And maybe Bonny Carr.”
    “So did I.”
    “You know him, too.”
    “Not the way they knew him! Or may have?”
    “Good,” Steve said. “Keep it that way.”
     

CHAPTER 27
     
    It’s one thing for a man to have other women, but quite another for him to kill them off. By the time Steve and I were halfway to Mac and Judith’s house in Lexington on Saturday evening, I wished that we’d excused ourselves by pleading illness. I almost wished that one of us would actually begin to throw up.
    “We don’t have to do this,” said Steve, who was reluctantly at the wheel of what he considered to be my ill-gotten Blazer, which we’d chosen because it hadn’t yet acquired the full doggy miasma and ineradicable coating of dog hair so notable in Steve’s van. Dog vehicles are like pieces of meat: They take a while to ripen to gaminess.
    “We do,” I said. “It’s too late to cancel, and each of us is a worse liar than the other.”
    Our knowledge and suspicions about Mac’s infidelities might’ve made the occasion something of a minor social challenge. What made the prospect of the dinner almost intolerable wasn’t just the speculation we’d engaged in immediately after Elspeth’s murder, but new information yielded by the autopsy, which was that Elspeth had been injected with a drug familiar to all veterinarians and to many dog owners: acepromazine. An old-time and still popular veterinary sedative, ace was so widely used that dog breeders and show types shifted the word’s grammatical gears from noun to verb, and routinely spoke of “acing” dogs. In effect, its presence in Elspeth’s body proclaimed her death to be a dog murder.
    I continued. “What do you want me to do? Call now and say, ‘Sorry to cancel at the last second, Judith, but we think that your husband’s been murdering his mistresses’? Steve, when I say it to you, it sounds preposterous. I’m not about to say it to Judith, and if I make up some excuse now, that one’s going to hang in the air. I am not a good liar!”
    “We could’ve sent E-mail. We should’ve cancelled before.”
    “But we didn’t. We’ve been over this! We don’t know anything! We just wonder. On the basis of freakish ideas we’re going to shun someone who’s been generous to me? Mac has done more to help me promote my book than everyone else combined, and Judith and Olivia have been perfectly nice to me. And Ian is doing the music for our wedding. And Olivia and Ian are going to be at dinner. And it’s your next left!”
    Our spat was still going on two minutes later when Steve parked in a wide area at the end of Mac and Judith’s long driveway. Their house, which I’d visited before, sat in the middle of a large wooded lot. Like my house, this one had three stories. Alas for Steve and me, there ended the resemblance. This place had lots of floor-to-ceiling windows, exposed beams, cozy balconies, and spacious decks.
    “Shit,” he said.
    “We don’t want to live in Lexington, anyway, and if this place were in Cambridge, it would go for four million plus.”
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    “Steve, look. I wish we’d begged off, too. I’m sorry. We’ll get through it and leave early.”
    As we were about to get out of the car, a silver Volvo station wagon pulled in next to us, and out of the passenger seat popped Claire Langceil, the skinny, wiry, wire-haired blond veterinarian who’d been at the launch party at The Wordsmythe. With relief, I said, “Claire’s here. You like her. And she never shuts up, so we won’t have to say anything at all.”
    Before Steve had opened his door, Claire was rapping on the glass, smiling brightly, and saying, obviously to him, “Hey, you’re here!” Even after I was out of the car, Claire continued to address Steve. “Daniel and Gus are with me.” She nodded at a man and a boy who’d also emerged from the Volvo. “Daniel loves Judith’s cooking.” Claire somehow sounded as if she were revealing a character fault.
    “Hi,” I said to the man and the boy. “I’m Holly Winter. And this is Steve Delaney.”
    “Daniel Langceil.” The man shook hands with me and then with Steve. Daniel