Bride & Groom

than mine, but her acute intelligence would enable her to understand that Steve had a wife—and this time, a wife worthy of him and of India’s allegiance. Lady the pointer was so touchingly dependent on Steve that she’d never be fully mine, either. Sammy, however, had a malamutes exquisite sensitivity to even the slightest shift in any relationship. Of Steve’s three dogs, Sammy was the one who’d somehow know that Steve and I were married. When Althea pronounced us man and wife, Sammy the pup, my Rowdy’s beautiful son, would understand that he had become my dog, too.
     

CHAPTER 34
     
    The dossier on Claire Langceil, D.V.M., opened with the usual pages from the major online directories: AnyWho, InfoSpace, and so forth. All agreed that Claire G. and Daniel T. Langceil lived at 37 Windcrest Drive in Newton. MapQuest showed that Windcrest Drive was south of Route 9-1 couldn’t remember ever having been in the immediate neighborhood, which was somewhere near the Chestnut Hill Mall and a few miles from Norwood Hill, where Ceci and Althea lived. I didn’t need to have seen the Langceils’ house to get a detailed view of it: The results of a property search of the City of Newton’s web site included an aerial photograph of the lot. Additional pages from the Newton Assessor’s site provided copious, if tedious, information about the property. The lot size was 12,390 square feet, the frontage was 80 feet, and the house style was Victorian. The house had gas heat, central air conditioning, three fireplaces, two above-average baths, one half-bath, four bedrooms, a deck, a porch, and an in-ground swimming pool. Some of the codes and numbers on the assessment pages meant nothing to me: The land use was 101, and the zoning was SRI. A page devoted to the property’s assessment history was, however, easy to interpret: the past ten years, the assessed value had risen dramatically In that respect, the Langceils’ property was like everyone else’s.
    I had to wonder whether Ceci knew that the equivalent information about her Newton property was available online to anyone who cared to search for it. At a guess, Ceci had no idea. Had she known, she’d have felt outraged at what she’d have seen as an infuriating invasion of her privacy. She’d have babbled on and on about the matter, especially, I thought, because her old-fashioned kitchen and baths would’ve been rated as below average. She’d have taken the rating as a personal insult. Knowing Ceci as I did I suspected that she’d immediately have renovated the offending rooms, not because she actually wanted to update them, but because she couldn’t bear the humiliation of poor ratings.
    To return to Claire Langceil, the next item in the dossier showed that her birthday was August 9- Next came the result of a search of the Commonwealth’s Division of Professional Licensure site. Claire Gail Langceil, Newton, MA, was, indeed, a licensed veterinarian. The status of her license was given as “Fee Paid.” The page also gave her license number, the issue date, and the expiration date. At the bottom was the statement that the site displayed disciplinary actions dating back to ten years earlier and that this license had had no such actions taken during that time.
    Next were copies of two articles from a local newspaper. One was about a rabid fox that had bitten a child. Claire Langceil, D.V.M., was quoted as saying that pet owners should remember to keep cats as well as dogs up to date on rabies vaccinations. She was described as an adjunct faculty member in the veterinary technology program at Saint Mary’s Junior College in Boston. The second article had nothing to do with veterinary medicine. It was about a fall harvest festival in Newton. Local residents who’d attended the festival had included Daniel and Claire Langceil, and their son, Gus. Daniel had said that the event was “a lot of fun for our whole family.”
    The dossier then focused on a second person. According to Martindale.com’s Lawyer Locator, Daniel T. Langceil was a member of the Boston law firm of Seed and Trout, which was so famous and prestigious that even I had heard of it. Daniel had gone to Harvard College and Harvard Law School. His practice area was listed as “General Civil.” Find-Law.com presented a listing from the West Legal Directory. This one simply gave Daniel’s name, his firm, its address and phone number, and his area of practice, general civil law.
    There ended the