Bride & Groom (20 page)

“Even so!” I said aloud. “Outrageous! How could anyone be so stupid?”

What on earth kind of blurb did Elspeth expect me to write?
A must-read for fans of intellectual property theft!
I could go on to say that I eagerly awaited Elspeth’s next work,
Zinnie the Boo.
But Elspeth had a publisher. What kind of publishing house had accepted stolen goods? In search of an answer, I shook the manila envelope, and out fell a note of thanks from Elspeth that contained the name of her editor and her publisher, together with an E-mail address and a mailing address in North Dakota. Neither the publisher nor the town in North Dakota was familiar to me. Still, the lowliest clerk at the smallest of small presses should have recognized one of the most famous characters in children’s literature. Aha! Maybe the North Dakota outfit was a vanity press, a company that authors paid to get their books in print. Maybe the editor in North Dakota had cashed Elspeth’s check without bothering to read about Zazar.

“But what about me?” I asked Sammy. “What about
me?
Did she think I was going to put
my
name on the cover of this ridiculous piece of damned larceny? I am insulted!”

Sammy sank his teeth into his squirrel and shook it vigorously.

On the off chance that Mac hadn’t yet mailed or E-mailed his quotable injunction to buy Elspeth’s book, I tried to call him, but got his and Judith’s answering machine. Feeling uneasy about leaving a voice message about Elspeth’s having stolen Babar, I went to my computer and E-mailed Mac a brief and remarkably tactful warning. I said that the elephant in her book bore what I at least found to be a disconcerting resemblance to Babar. I then E-mailed Elspeth a diplomatic and constructive message in which I pointed out that Zazar was likely to remind readers of Babar and suggested that she consider changing the character’s name and species.

Elspeth Jantzen never received my E-mail. As I subsequently worked it out, she must have been killed at about the same time I sent the message, which is to say, at around nine-thirty on Tuesday night. The police were never able to discover exactly what Elspeth was doing out of doors when the assailant struck. Like every other woman in Greater Boston, she’d certainly heard and read countless warnings not to go outside alone after dark. I suspect that she felt safe in her low-crime neighborhood, a section of Belmont just off one of the main drags, not a pricey locality like Belmont Hill, but a pleasant, middle-class area that I remembered from once having dropped off a book she’d let me borrow. Police speculated that she’d been dashing out to her car for a library book that she’d checked out earlier that day and left on the front seat. At any rate, when her landlord found Elspeth’s body on Wednesday morning, her purse was still in her apartment, she wasn’t wearing a jacket, and the library book was in her car. The cause of her death was blunt trauma to the head.

But I didn’t even learn of Elspeth’s murder until late on Wednesday afternoon. By the time her landlord found her body, the morning papers were being delivered, so there was nothing in the newspaper or on NPR’s
Morning Edition,
and after Steve left for his clinic, I followed my daily routine of dog chores, housework, and writing. At about three in the afternoon, a terrific and totally unexpected wedding present was delivered: a beautiful picnic table from L.L. Bean sent to us by Steve’s uncle Leon. Once I’d opened the package and seen its contents, I dragged the box out the side door and down the steps to the fenced yard, where the table would go, and like a kid with a new toy, unpacked and assembled the table. The weather was clear and warm. Feeling wifely, I planned a meal of pasta and salad to be eaten at the new table, ran out for ingredients, and thus didn’t check my E-mail for a practically unprecedented length of time.

The news of Elspeth’s murder reached me on Dogwriters-L. Elspeth had been planning to attend the annual conference of the Cat Writers Association, not only because she occasionally wrote about cats, but because the Dog Writers Association of America cosponsors the event with the CWA. This year’s conference was to be held in Houston, Texas, in November, and one of the organizers had placed a call to Elspeth to ask her to fill in for a scheduled panelist who’d just cancelled. Anyway, the cat-writing conference organizer had spoken to a brother of Elspeth’s, who’d answered her phone. After that, the news had spread to Dogwriters-L. The post announcing Elspeth’s murder contained no details— it said only that she had been killed—and the responses to the original post were expressions of shock and horror, together with requests for the names and addresses of relatives who should receive condolences. Although I still thought that Elspeth had been wrong to do a book about an elephant named Zazar, I felt guilty about the E-mail I’d sent to Mac and hastily sent him a message saying only that Elspeth had been murdered.

As I chopped tomatoes, fresh basil, and mozzarella, and washed salad greens, I kept switching the radio back and forth between WBZ, an AM news station, and WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station. I first caught the story about Elspeth’s murder on one of WBUR’s news summaries. The announcer reported that the killer responsible for the deaths of two women in Cambridge and one woman in Brookline had struck for the fourth time. The victim, Elspeth Jantzen, had been killed outside her home in Belmont the previous evening. On WBZ, a reporter interviewed a gravel-voiced Belmont police spokesperson who gave brief answers. The police were cooperating fully with all authorities and agencies charged with investigating the serial homicides. Yes, the perpetrator had again used a blunt instrument to deliver a crushing blow to the head. Yes, the medical examiner had identified an injection site on the body, but the results of the autopsy were not yet available.

In between feeding my dogs and Steve’s, and giving all five their turns in the yard, I finished dinner preparations and spent a little time searching the web. While the dogs were outdoors, I kept watch over the new picnic table, which I was determined that Steve and I would get to enjoy this one time before it got marked by dogs and had to be washed. Far more than the previous murders and more than my own Saturday-night scare, Elspeth’s murder frightened me in a personal way. I had known her; on Friday, she’d sat at my kitchen table. We’d been members of the same profession. We’d had acquaintances in common. Ordinarily, it would never have occurred to me to lock the wooden gate in the fence that led to the driveway. Now, while I scooped up after the dogs and carried out a tablecloth, plates, and silverware, I not only kept that gate locked but kept India at my side as I went in and out. Although the German shepherd dog is a popular choice for protection work, India’s education had consisted of training for the American Kennel Club obedience ring, where anything even remotely like protective or aggressive behavior would have been highly unwelcome. Good girl that India was, she excelled in obedience. In daily life, she showed her breed’s normal desire to watch out for her owner and his belongings, but she’d never been taught or even encouraged to protect Steve, never mind me. Still, I trusted India to inform me if a stranger approached the gate, and her strong, intelligent presence gave me the welcome sense of having a powerful ally. Also, unlike my own malamutes and Sammy the pup, India could be relied on to keep her jaws and her bodily fluids off the new table, and she wasn’t a food thief. If anything, she did her job too well to suit me. Sensing my need, she glued herself to my side, gazed at my face, and cocked her head to listen for sounds of threat. I was used to Rowdy and Kimi, who never worried about anything because they assumed that if trouble arose, a fight would ensue, and they’d win. Period. They made the same flattering assumption about the inevitability of my own victory in all possible situations.

When Steve got home, I was putting candles in wedding-present candleholders. He’d never looked better, and I’d never been happier to see him. My love for him really had been of the at-first-sight variety and was as wholehearted as my love for my dogs. I’d often told him just that. How many men would have been pleased to hear such a sentiment? Damn few. A man like that was worth marrying. Anyway, I threw my arms around him, clung to him, and felt myself tremble.

“I heard about Elspeth Jantzen,” he said softly. “You should’ve called me.”

“I’m okay.”

“Ms. Malamute.” Steve understood the limitations of words and the power of touch; he was, after all, a vet. He held me as if he held a dog in pain, as if he had the rest of his life to keep me in his arms, as, in a sense, he did.

Finally, I said, “I’ve made dinner. Your uncle Leon sent us a picnic table from L.L. Bean. It’s in the yard. I thought we’d eat out there. I need to keep doing normal things. We can eat whenever you want. No rush. I’ve fed all the dogs, and they’ve all been out.”

“I’ll open a bottle of wine,” he said as he belatedly greeted the faithful India.

A half hour later we were where I’d envisioned us, seated across from each other at the new picnic table eating linguine with fresh tomatoes, basil, olive oil, and mozzarella, the pasta accompanied by a green salad and French bread. The wholesomeness of the food felt defiantly at odds with the murders of people I’d known. India had settled herself under the table. In her own dignified way, she was affectionate, but she wasn’t cuddly. With some hesitation, I’d slipped my toes under her, and she was tolerating my need to draw on her warmth and strength. To avoid having the new floodlights transform the evening into an Alaskan summer, we’d turned off the lights in the side yard and were dining, as planned, by candlelight.

“You want to talk?” Steve’s question was genuine. Still, I could hear Rita’s influence in it. She’d been a good friend to Steve throughout his divorce and during the early stages of our reunion. “You don’t have to,” he added.

Mindful of talks I’d had with Rita, instead of pouring out everything on my mind the second he walked into the house, I’d given him a chance to make the transition from work to home. Now, we’d each had a glass of wine, and I did need to talk and to hear what Steve had to say. “When Elspeth was here on Friday,” I began, “she told me she’d had an affair with Mac.”

“You told me. A one-night stand.”

“It really couldn’t have been more than that. It was at some conference a long time ago. At that bookstore where Mac and I did our talks, he didn’t remember her at all. I was right next to him, and I could tell. I’m sure that Elspeth didn’t look even vaguely familiar to him.”

“They kept the lights out. Or he was drunk, and they kept the lights out.” His face a bit stiff, he added, “You sure Mac’s never come on to you?”

“Never. With me, he’s brotherly. Collegial.”

“Any chance Elspeth was lying? Or imagining things?”

“She imagined that a one-night stand was something more than that. And she imagined that Mac would remember her. And naturally, she was insulted that he obviously had no idea that he’d ever seen her before. She was furious. Anyway, in a sort of half-joking way, or what I assumed was a joking way, she said that Mac knew Victoria Trotter and maybe the other victims, too.
Knew
in the Biblical sense. And that maybe he’d murdered them all.”

“You’re sure she wasn’t serious?”

“I didn’t take her seriously. And Mac? I know Mac. We both do. Steve, you’ve read those profiles of serial killers. Mac doesn’t even begin to fit the picture. He’s anything but some isolated, frustrated daydreamer. He’s not depressed. He has a good opinion of himself, admittedly, but he’s not grandiose in the psychiatric sense. His books are successful.
He’s
successful. He has a very successful wife and two grown children. Even if he knew all the victims and slept with all of them, it’s impossible to see Mac as some sort of deranged human male insect who devours his sex partners. And years afterward?” I turned my hands palms up and gave a little laugh. “Mac as a homicidal sex fiend? The whole idea is a bad joke.” I paused. “But before you got home, I did check on the web for a minute, and this is freaking me out. Bonny Carr had a web site, and Mac is quoted on it. Some kind of endorsement of her methods. I forget exactly. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he’d ever met Bonny. He’s not discriminating about what he endorses. Maybe she E-mailed him, he visited her web site, and he E-mailed back what’s there. Now
that
sounds like Mac.”

Steve refilled our glasses. “Kevin said that Victoria Trotter had a lot of men in her life. Mac could’ve been one of them.”

“Victoria? With Judith at home?”

“It doesn’t have to work that way.” He didn’t mention his ex-wife, Anita, one of whose lovers had looked like a toad, or so Steve had once confided to Rita. “There was Elspeth. And what we know is that this is a guy who knew a lot of women who’ve died.”

“Who’ve been murdered.”

“At The Wordsmythe. At your launch party. Mac was talking to Claire, and... you remember Claire? She’s a veterinarian. Claire Langceil. Skinny blond.”

“Actually, I ran into her in 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?”