Bride & Groom

puppy! Uli would teach a puppy his special ways, his little quirks! He would pass himself along through a puppy! When Bruce made that threat, my heart broke. Those vicious women had had my husband, and now I was going to lose the strength that kept me going!”
    Softly, I said, “You must have thought about a divorce.”
    “And explain it to my children? Never! And what would I have done for a living? Writing is all I know how to do. I could teach writing, but teaching would pay nothing, and it would leave me no time for my own work. In essence, Bruce threatened to kill me! He killed me over and over with his women and his lies, and then he threatened to take my life’s blood away. I was on the verge of death.”
    “I can see that.”
    “And then a solution presented itself. You were there when it happened. At your launch party at The Wordsmythe, I learned that that filthy piece of trailer trash had died a natural death.”
    Reluctantly, I said, “Nina Kerkel.”
    Judith’s eyes lit up. “Dead! I was overjoyed! The nonexistence of that conniving little slut was utter bliss. It was better than that! It was repeatable bliss.”
    “These files,” I said. "These dossiers.”
    “Bruce can barely manage to send and receive E-mail. The World Wide Web is a truly marvelous resource, isn’t it? Aerial photographs! Plot plans. And people continue to imagine that privacy still exists. It’s an illusion. Like human fidelity. Human commitment. Human loyalty. Without dogs, there’d be no reality at all.”
    When Uli rose, I thought for a second that he was responding to the word dog. Then I heard the deep tones of Steve’s voice. “Holly?” he called out.
    “Here! In the kitchen.” I felt frozen in place.
    Steve entered and, with him, Mac, who looked pale and old.
    “Mac refused to be admitted,” Steve said.
    Ignoring me, Mac said, “Judith, it’s over. You and I need a few minutes alone together.”
    Judith merely nodded. Mac walked to her and held out his hand. She took it. He seemed to lift her to her feet. Then he rested an arm across her shoulders. Together, they made their way out of the kitchen. Uli, of course, followed them. It should, I suppose, have seemed strange to me that in their own house, they’d been the ones to leave when they could so easily have asked us to step outside. It simply didn’t occur to me, mainly because I felt so relieved to be free of the intense contact with Judith and so comforted to be with Steve. Although I heard soft sounds from the staircase, I didn’t wonder or even care where Mac, Judith, and Uli were going.
    I stood up and melted into Steve, who said, “Holly, I love you so much. I can’t begin to tell you how much I love you.”
    “I love to you, too. I have never loved you more than I do right now.”
    “It was Judith,” he said. “Maybe you know by now.”
    “When you left with Mac, I stayed here. I figured out where Judith was. I called her and told her to come home. I wasn’t frightened. I wasn’t one of Mac’s women, and I knew that she knew that. Steve, you were right about Nina Kerkel. All those articles in the papers? About serial murderers? We took those profiles much too literally. The resentful person, the isolated person, the person lost in daydreams, all of it—that was Judith. We knew that her books didn’t sell. We knew all about Mac’s attitude toward promoting sales. What we didn’t know was that Mac had told her that unless she started to earn her keep, she couldn’t get another dog after Uli died. Right after that, she heard about Nina Kerkel’s death. And that was the trigger the papers talked about. Judith said that Nina Kerkel’s death was bliss for her. She called it ‘repeatable bliss.’ What she didn’t say outright was that she set Mac up. At first, she wanted me to think that he was the murderer. When that didn’t work, I suggested that it might be Olivia or Ian. She couldn’t see her children accused. She told me the truth. But she never got around to admitting outright that she’d set Mac up.”
    “He wants to go with her when she turns herself in. He feels responsible.”
    “He is responsible.”
    “They both are.”
    “So are those women, really. They did to Judith what that horrible Francie did to Rita.”
    “Not by themselves.”
    “No, of course not. But—”
    Mac interrupted me by suddenly and calmly walking into the kitchen. To my surprise, Uli was with him. Mac was breathing audibly and looked