Bride & Groom

behavioral consultations these days. Counseling. Psychopharmacology. Dispenses advice about problem behavior. I’ve known him off and on for ages, but I got to know him better when my book was coming out. He’s been great to me. Really, he’s been my unpaid publicist. And I know his family. His wife is a famous literary novelist. Judith Esterhazy. She was at The Wordsmythe, too. You might’ve met their daughter, too. Olivia. Their son, Ian, is a musician. He’s doing the music for our wedding. We had dinner with them on Saturday.”
    Kevin waited for me to continue.
    “Mac knew all of the murder victims. Every one. And the reason I’m telling you is that a lot of people knew the women who lived around here. Victoria Trotter. Bonny Carr. Elspeth. I knew them. Other people must’ve known all of them, too. But Mac went to college with Laura Skipcliff. She was his college girlfriend. I heard this last night from a classmate of theirs. She didn’t make anything of it. Why would she? She had no way to know that Mac knew the other victims, too. But he did. He knew all of them.”
    “And?”
    “Laura Skipcliff dumped him.”
    “Thirty years ago?”
    “She was what? In her mid fifties? Mac’s age, obviously. So it would’ve been more than thirty years ago. I have no idea whether they stayed in touch. For all I know, they didn’t. Or maybe they did.” Reluctantly, I added, “Elspeth told me that she’d had a one-night stand with Mac. She called it an affair, but I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t, really.”
    “There money there?”
    “What?”
    “Mac. Does he have money? Or his wife?”
    “They have a house in Lexington. A lovely house. They’re not hard up. Mac had a successful veterinary practice that he sold to a big corporation. I don’t know what he made on the deal, but it must’ve been lucrative. He probably still earns a lot.”
    “The wife?”
    “Oh, she can’t earn much of anything. Her books get great reviews, but they’re very literary. They don’t sell well. She probably makes even less than I do. A lot less.”
    “Family money?”
    I shrugged. “I have no idea. Kevin, I have to say that I hate telling you this. These are not creepy people.” I paused. Ian? He was odd. But not creepy. Was he? “They’re friends of mine. Mac has been a good friend to me. In case you wondered, he’s never even hinted that he wanted to be more than that, not that I’d have been interested. He’s a nice guy. Friendly, sociable, all the rest. I’ve read all those profiles in the papers, and he’s nothing like that at all. There is no one more different from those profiles than Mac McCloud.”
    The phone rang. “I’m sorry,” I told Kevin, “but I have to get this. It’ll be about the wedding.”
    It was. Our photographer’s husband announced that his wife’s brother had died. She was leaving immediately for Memphis, wouldn’t return until Tuesday, and was terribly sorry to let us down. As I was struggling to utter expressions of sympathy, Kevin rose, mouthed good-bye, and left. For the rest of the day and, indeed, the rest of the week, I concentrated almost exclusively on our wedding and honeymoon. The new photographer I hired specialized in splendid portraits of show dogs. Since dogs were far more difficult to photograph than were mere human beings, and since there’d be five dogs in the bridal party, her qualifications were obviously superb. I confirmed our plane reservations, our wedding-night reservation at an airport hotel, our reservation at the hotel in Paris, the reservation for the tents, and the reservation for the rehearsal dinner. By the end of the week, I’d confirmed so many arrangements that I felt as if the forthcoming ceremony shouldn’t properly be called a wedding at all, but a confirmation. In between sending and receiving E-mail, and making and answering phone calls, I kept checking weather forecasts on the web. We had rain on Wednesday and Thursday, but Friday was clear, and the outlook for Saturday and Sunday was splendid.
    I devoted most of Friday to bathing and grooming all five dogs, a task I’d have hated to perform indoors. It would’ve been sensible to take the dogs to a groomer, but it felt important to me to do the work with my own hands. I wanted to perform a purification ritual with the two dogs who were already mine, Rowdy and Kimi, and with the three who were about to become mine. India, the ultimate one-man dog, would always be more Steve’s