Bride & Groom (28 page)

“One cabin?”

Unaware of the effect her revelation was creating, Twila added, “There are enough bunks for everyone, and after a day of hard work, you won’t have any trouble falling asleep. The day starts pretty early. You’ll need to begin getting the dogs ready at five for the morning run, so you’ll want to be up by four-thirty or so. It’s beautiful out then, and the dogs are all excited. It’s great. You’ll love it.”

“Four-thirty.” Gabrielle sounded dazed.

Twila laughed. “You can get up earlier. It depends on whether you want a big breakfast before the run.”

“Oh, that’s all taken care of,” Gabrielle said. “Buck tells me that the food is delicious.”

Twila laughed again. “Some people always like to cook communally, but you don’t have to. There’ll be a refrigerator in the cabin, so you can keep your own food there if you want. But you might want to just grab breakfast before or right after you hook up the dogs.”

A gleam of comprehension sparkled in Gabrielle’s eyes. “And the bathrooms?” Her throaty voice was strong and curious.

“I haven’t been to this site before,” Twila said, “but apparently there
are
a few. And the outhouse is supposed to be close to the cabin.”

“Outhouse,”
Gabrielle repeated.

The sled dog having been let out of the bivy sack, so to speak, I said, “Gabrielle, it’s possible that camp won’t be exactly the way Buck has described it.” Feeling guilty, I added, “But Ginny Wilson is supposed to be a wonderful instructor. The very best. And you’ll like all the people there.” That part was absolutely accurate. Gabrielle always liked everyone everywhere.

“Ginny is the best,” Twila said. “How many dogs are you taking?”

“One,” Gabrielle replied. “Molly. My bichon.”

Twila naturally assumed that she was kidding.

“And Holly’s malamutes. Rowdy and Kimi. And my husband’s golden, Mandy.”

I said, “Mandy will do anything.”

“Molly,” Gabrielle said softly to me, “will not do just anything. She can be quite fussy. As can I, of course. As can I.” My father chose that moment to show up with the pot of clams. Gabrielle waited until Buck had served seconds or thirds to those who wanted more clams. Then, in a dangerously sweet voice, she said, “Buck, I need a quiet word with you.”

“Any time!” he roared. “Any time except right now. More clams?”

“No. No, thank you.”

“Now, Gabrielle, this is no time to go off your food.”

“I am not off my food. But speaking of food, perhaps you might tell Twila about the sumptuous breakfasts served at mushing camp. Someone has apparently misrepresented the nature of the camp to her, and I am counting on you to enlighten her. At this very moment.”

I sprang to my feet, grabbed my glass, raised it, and said, “A toast! To my father and my beloved stepmother! Thank you for the lobster and clams! Thank you for everything!”

In groups of dogs, behavior is contagious. If one dog leaps up and starts running around in figure eights, other dogs are likely to do the same.

The next dog was Pete, Steve’s best man, who proposed a toast to Steve and me. Leah raised her glass to Rita. Steve and I drank to the joining of our canine families. Gabrielle had no opportunity to have a quiet word with my father, who saluted her. The uncles rose and wished health and happiness to the lucky couple. My father again stood up and had us drink to Sammy the pup for having brought Steve and me together. As Rita was lifting her glass and opening her mouth, Jennifer Pasquarelli’s cell phone rang. Jennifer dashed from her table and headed to a far corner of the little yard. Rita, ignoring the interruption, made a long and touching speech about her friendship with Steve and me. When she finished, everyone drank in our honor, and Jennifer finally returned to the group. She did not propose a toast. Rather, she whispered quietly in Kevin’s ear. His jovial expression vanished. I felt sorry for him. On his own, he’d never have ruined the happy mood. Jennifer, however, was making a silent fuss. Everyone, of course, responded by asking what was wrong. Unfortunately, Jennifer answered the question. There’d been another murder, she said. In Newton. This time, the victim was a veterinarian. Perhaps Steve had known her? Her name was Claire Langceil.

CHAPTER 36

Not all that long ago, Newton Police Officer Jennifer Pasquarelli had almost lost her job over a highly publicized dispute she’d had with the presumed perpetrator of the heinous crime of violating the leash law. Thereafter, Jennifer had completed some sort of social skills training course, whether graded or ungraded I didn’t know, although I suspected that if the course was indeed graded, Jennifer had squeaked by with D minus. Jennifer clogged the cogs of social machinery as effectively as Kevin made them spin. But she and her law-enforcement partner apparently got along well. The call she’d received hadn’t been a summons to rush to the murder scene and solve the crime. Jennifer wasn’t even a detective. Her partner had just wanted to keep her informed, or so she said.

If our behavior immediately following the announcement of Claire’s murder had been analyzed to determine aptitude for detective work, the person attaining the highest score wouldn’t have been Jennifer. Kevin himself would’ve scored lower than Steve, who heard the news and vanished into the house. When he came back a few minutes later, he drew me aside and said, “I tried to call Mac and Judith, but all I got was a message. I tried Mac’s cell phone. Same thing.”

I shrugged. “They’re both out? Not answering? His cell phone is off? But it was a good idea.”

“Not necessarily. Their house is right near Route 2 and 128. With no traffic, you could get back there from Newton in no time. Or from Cambridge. Brookline. Belmont. It’s maybe twenty minutes from Newton. Convenient location. If someone had answered, it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“Still, it was worth a try. Dear God, how awful! And here we are with all these people and this mess to clean up. And four strawberry shortcakes in Rita’s refrigerator. Steve, this is going to sound so horrible that I wouldn’t say it to anyone except you, but I have no intention of ever marrying anyone else. This is it.”

“That’s not so horrible, is it?”

“This is my only wedding! I don’t want it ruined. By anything. I wanted this whole weekend to be for us. I know it’s selfish. I should be thinking of Daniel and Gus and Claire and the other women. But I don’t have any other life to marry you in! I don’t want this weekend wrecked. I don’t even know what to do right now.”

“Gabrielle seems to have it in hand,” Steve said.

While browsing recently in a Harvard Square bookstore, I’d noticed a book called
How To Make People Like You in Sixty Seconds.
Or maybe it was...
Ninety Seconds.
Anyway, the title had made me think, as usual, of Alaskan malamutes, but also of Gabrielle. I hadn’t bought the book; I assumed that I knew what it said. When a new visitor appeared, Rowdy made repeated trips to the toy basket and presented our guest with carefully selected fleece dinosaurs and chewmen. Kimi specialized in gazing intently at her subject’s face.
You fascinate me,
she seemed to say. Sammy’s strategy consisted of fulfilling his mission in life, which was to be infectiously happy and thus to spread his happiness to everyone he met; he carried a benign virus of joy to which no one was immune. I, of course, was sick with love for him. Like Rowdy and Kimi, Gabrielle made people feel special. Like Sammy, she passed along happiness. But the crucial reason that people immediately liked Gabrielle was the same reason they immediately liked the dogs: Gabrielle’s contagiously happy fascination with people wasn’t some pretense she’d learned from a book; it was utterly genuine.

I should also mention that Gabrielle was a superb organizer. As Steve had noticed, she now had everyone busy depositing refuse in trash bags and carrying glasses and serving dishes to the kitchen.

“When Gabrielle gives orders,” Steve said, “people feel flattered.”

“Holly,” Gabrielle said, “we have more paper tablecloths somewhere. Could you find them? Pete is helping Rita with the shortcakes, and the cream will need to be whipped.”

“Thank you for taking charge, Gabrielle. I love you. Is Buck being impossible?”

With a confiding smile, she said, “He does
do
things, doesn’t he.”

“He’s planning something mortifying. Do you have any idea what it is?”

“It will sort itself out. We’ll think of something. We always do! The tablecloths?”

After I’d found the tablecloths in a kitchen drawer, I kept running back and forth between the house and yard. I set the tables for dessert, answered questions about the locations of household items, and caught scraps of conversation.

“SHOUTING?” my father bellowed. “I’M NOT SHOUTING!”

In saying that she wanted a “quiet word” with Buck, Gabrielle had referred to her own part of the proposed conversation on the subject of mushing boot camp. She’d known him to be just about incapable of quiet words.

After she’d said something inaudible, he bellowed, “MISREPRESENTATION? Ask Twila! She’s been to Ginny Wilson’s boot camps, and she’ll be the first person to tell you that she’s had a wonderful time. You can hear the gusto in her voice.”

Gabrielle’s reply got lost in a lecture that my cousin Leah was delivering to Twila’s kennel helper. “The term
kennel girl
is sexist. You aren’t a girl, are you?” The silent kennel person must’ve whispered a reply. “Well, yes,” Leah conceded,
“kennelwoman
does admittedly sound ridiculous. But there’s no reason you can’t stand up for yourself and insist on
kennel help,
is there?”

“No,” my father boomed, “I did not imagine that you were the bivy type. We’re staying in our own private cabin.” After evidently listening for an unprecedented ten seconds, he said, “Because everyone else there
will
be the bivy type, that’s why. Everyone else will be in bivies or tents or out under the stars. Therefore, we’ll have the cabin to ourselves. And that’s about as private as you can get! And Twila didn’t think that you were joking about taking a bichon. If she had thought you were joking, there’d have been only one thing for you and Molly to do, and that’d be to get right out there and show her! Gabrielle, when life issues you a challenge, there’s only one way to respond, and that’s to get yourself right out there and show what you’re made of!”

At about that time, Pete and Rita came downstairs with shortcakes and strawberries. As I supplied Rita with cartons of heavy cream and a handheld electric mixer, Pete kept talking to her in a hushed, fervent tone... drunk,” he said. “And then she came on to me. It was the last thing I expected. And then she sent me this E-mail about the moon.”

“Embarrassing,” Rita said.

“Yes. And I’ll have to go to her funeral. I don’t know what I’m going to say to Daniel.”

“Anything,” advised Rita, “except the full truth.”

“Poor Claire,” Pete said. “I won’t mention the moon.” When all of us reassembled in the yard with strawberry shortcake and coffee, the gathering took on a superficial tone of returning to normal. Uncle Don and Uncle Dave acted in a way that Steve usually dismissed as "Minnesota nice.” At Buck’s request, Twila got North, who greeted everyone by flashing his eyes and wagging his tail, and displayed a rare quality in an Alaskan malamute: the ability to be in the presence of food without stealing it. Buck tried to persuade Gabrielle that in hearing a reference to an outhouse, she’d misheard an innocuous reference to an outbuilding. “At our age,” he said with hideous sympathy, “it’s easy to get confused.” Jennifer kept plucking at Kevin’s sleeve and muttering in his ear. He nobly resisted her efforts to break up the party. Now that a semblance of order had been restored, however, I wished that everyone would leave.

In fact, no one stayed late. The uncles left for their hotel. Kevin and Jennifer gave Leah an unofficial police escort back to Harvard. My father helped Twila and the kennel woman with North and the rest of the team. Pete insisted on accompanying Rita in walking Willie, who unaccountably displayed no desire to bite Pete’s ankles. While Steve and I were giving our own dogs a chance to run in the yard, I kept thinking of Mac and Judith. Maybe they hadn’t answered the phone because Mac had gone to the police to turn himself in. As I imagined the scenario, he’d made a full confession to Judith, who was bravely accompanying him. Or maybe it was Ian or Olivia who had confessed, and both parents were loyally accompanying the murderous child.

CHAPTER 37

When I walked into my kitchen at seven-thirty on the morning of September 28, which is to say, on the day before my first and only wedding, Buck was standing at the stove burning things. The entire stove was covered in grease. Six slices of blackened bacon rested on a paper towel set directly on a countertop, not on a plate. The air was thick with droplets of hot fat. Eight revolting-looking brown objects sizzled in a pan. They appeared to be lumps of rubber and certainly smelled that way.

“Sunny side up!” my father proclaimed.

He was not alone in the kitchen. Sammy the puppy lay at his feet. On the counter next to the burned bacon and the battery from the smoke detector rested my directory of the membership of the Alaskan Malamute Club of America. The thick booklet was held open by a grease-covered sugar bowl. Jabbing an elbow toward the directory, my father said, "You see that? The centerfold! That’s how proud Twila is of North. Two full pages, thirteen photographs, smack in the center of the directory, everything from a puppy picture to show photos to shots of North working in harness. Now that’s what I call pride!”