Bride & Groom

and he hung heavy in Steve’s arms.
    Steve shook his head. “Ace can be lethal. Suicides use it. But Mac had lots of other options that would’ve been quick and sure. Mac didn’t do this.”
    “Then someone set it up. Someone staged it.” I thought for a moment. “To spare him a trial. And a jail sentence. Someone who loves him. Judith.”
    “Unless it’s someone’s idea of justice. Maybe both at once. Execute him. And spare him.”
    Another possibility came to me. Indeed, what came to me was the likely possibility, the one that would account for the presence of the empty bottle of acepromazine in a prominent place on the nightstand. I was about to say so when sirens interrupted me. The taxes in wealthy suburbs get spent, in part, on extraordinarily rapid emergency services. In what seemed like two seconds after the first scream of the first siren, I heard people in the entryway. Although I’d given directions about going down the stairs, I stepped out of the bedroom and pointed to its door. The first two EMTs descended and entered the room, and two others followed almost immediately with great quantities of medical paraphernalia. A uniformed police officer told me to get out of the way. At first, I lingered in the hallway outside the bedroom. I heard Steve say something about injection sites and about finding none. Then someone asked me to move. Still feeling weirdly like an intruder in the house, I went outdoors. In the driveway were an emergency medical van, a second emergency vehicle the size of a truck, and a police cruiser. The cops, Steve, and the EMTs, with Mac on a stretcher, all emerged from the house. Steve was walking right next to the stretcher, near Mac’s head, and speaking quietly to him, as he did with sick animals. Steve left Mac for only a moment to come to me and say, “I’m going along with Mac. He’s conscious. Go ahead and go to the beauty shop.”
    “But what about Judith?”
    “Let the police handle it. I’ve got to go.” He wrapped his arms around me and squeezed for just a second. “I love you, Holly. I’ll see you at Ceci and Althea’s. At five.” With that, he ran to his van and jumped in. Both medical vehicles drove off, the siren of the one transporting Mac already wailing. Steve followed.
    I was left in the driveway with two cops, a young woman and a sad-looking man with salt-and-pepper hair and a lined face. “It’s worse when they shoot themselves,” he said to me.
    "What?”
    “It makes an awful mess. It’s hard on the families. This way’s ugly, but it’s easier. More considerate. But this one’s going to be all right. Lucky he lost his lunch, I guess.” He paused. “He got a wife? Kids?”
    “A wife. The children are grown. They don’t live here.”
    “You got any idea where the wife is?”
    “No. I’m sorry. I have no idea.”
    I expected the cops to return to the house. It was my understanding from Kevin Dennehy that the first officer on the scene had the obligation to decide whether a crime had occurred and to act accordingly. In this case, it seemed to me that the house should be declared a crime scene and appropriately sealed off. It also seemed to me that I should be questioned. Nothing of the kind occurred. All the officer asked me was whether he should close the front door or whether I’d do it. I said that I would. The cops got into the cruiser and drove off.
    As promised, I went back to the entrance to Mac and Judith’s house. As promised, I closed the front door. I pulled it shut. From the inside.
     

CHAPTER 39
     
    In scanning- the kitchen in search of a note from Mac, I had, as I’ve mentioned, seen a wall calendar with a photo of a Bernese mountain dog. My dog-loving eyes had centered on the handsome animal, who’d looked wonderfully like a young, healthy Uli. Only one other feature of the calendar had caught my eye, namely, a heart-shaped red sticker on the square for September 1; the little handwritten notes on other dates had barely registered on me. My own calendar had the same red hearts, reminders to give my dogs their monthly doses of Heartgard, a medication to prevent heart -worm disease, the packages of which contained sheets of red hearts to affix to calendars.
    Now, alone in the house, I returned to the kitchen to reexamine the calendar. This time, I read the handwritten notations, all in the same writing: 4:00 dentist, 10:30 cut & color, and so forth. Color had to mean Judith; she used this calendar. In the