Authors: Susan Conant
Glancing at Mac, I saw no indication that he recognized Elspeth. Knowing her as I did, I assumed that she was claiming acquaintance to ask Mac a favor. Mac’s blank look vanished in a second, we both thanked Elspeth, and then a stranger asked how we’d gotten published.
“Luck,” I blurted out.
Mac recommended web sites and books. He emphasized the need for persistence. He was terrific. No one would’ve guessed that he’d taken no initiative whatever about finding a publisher; on the contrary, he’d been approached by his publisher and asked to do his first book, and his second one was a follow-up to the first. After a few more questions, someone who liked my column asked where Rowdy was and then asked Mac about the Bernese mountain dog on the cover of his book. As Mac was answering, Sidney returned with Judith and Uli. After that, our little audience ignored us, fell all over the dogs, and even I, the author of
101 Ways to Cook Liver,
have to admit that we couldn’t have liver-bribed Uli and Kimi to act any sweeter than they did all on their own. The black, rust, and white of Bernese mountain dogs is striking, and to his breed’s beauty, Uli added the engaging habit of smiling. Do dogs really smile? Uli did. He also wagged his white-tipped tail over his big back and, with grace and nobility, accepted the petting of strangers. Uli was perfectly groomed and unmistakably ancient. My heart went out to Judith. In contrast to the sedate Uli, Kimi staged a Rowdy-worthy performance by singing Arctic carols, flinging herself onto the floor, rolling over, wiggling her legs in the air, and then tucking in her forepaws and directing big-brown-eyed pleas for tummy rubs at five potential book buyers, all of whom complied with her demands by administering thumps and scratches, and four of whom had me sign books.
As I was sitting at the table penning the final inscription (“To Frodo, Bilbo, Merry, Pippin, and Evelyn, and with special congratulations to AM/CAN CH Galadriel’s Entwife...”), Elspeth’s red glow shone in the comer of my eye, and I heard her address Mac, who sat next to me. “Hey, Mac, it’s been a long time,” she said.
As smoothly as usual, Mac said, “I guess it has.”
A quick peek showed me that Elspeth was presenting him with a copy of
Ask Dr. Mac.
“How’d you like this signed? Is it a Christmas present for someone?”
“Just make it to me,” Elspeth said. “ ‘For old times’ sake.’ ”
Mac shifted almost imperceptibly.
I took pity on him.
“Elspeth,”
I said with admirable clarity and a special emphasis on the
p,
“it was very nice of you to come tonight.”
“My pleasure. Actually, there’s something I want to talk to both of you about.”
I now saw that she held not one manila envelope but two. A smiling couple rescued Mac by asking him to sign a book. No one rescued me. “My editor,” Elspeth said, “was so happy when I told her that you and Mac might do blurbs for my book.” Thrusting one of the envelopes at me, she added, “I’ve brought you the first two chapters, and there’s a form for you to send an advance quote to my publisher.”
“My time is really short right now,” I said, carefully avoiding using my wedding plans as an excuse.
“You’re always so busy. That’s why I didn’t bring the whole book. Not that it’s very long.”
“What’s it about?” I hoped, of course, that the topic would be one I was unqualified to comment on.
“Kindness to animals. It’s for parents and teachers. It has a companion story for children. It’s about how to teach kindness to children.”
I could hardly object. “I’ll be glad to read it. But I’ll need to see the whole book.” I was, I might mention, going against Mac’s advice. He’d told me to write every cover quote I had the chance to do. But I was simply incapable of pretending to have read,,never mind liked, a book I hadn’t gone through in its entirety. Worse, I knew myself to be equally incapable of saying in print that I recommended a book that I’d hated.
“That’s great. I’ll get you the manuscript. Thank you!” Score: Elspeth, one. Holly, zero. Or so it seemed.
Elspeth turned to Mac and said, “Hey, Mac, how’d you like to blurb my book?”
“Delighted,” he said.
CHAPTER 16
The first item in the dossier on Bonny Carr came from the web site of a Girl Scout camp in Vermont. The page listed the names of Camp Tecumseh alumnae whose last names began with C. Carr, Bonny appeared near the top, together with an address: 89 Glenn Street, Nashua* NH. I felt oddly relieved and weirdly grateful to my parents, whose need for unpaid kennel help had made me ineligible for any such online list. I’d spent my childhood summers at Buck and Marissa Winter’s Show-Dog Boot Camp, where I’d scooped and disinfected kennels, and trimmed the nails of our golden retrievers. But the field trips had been frequent and fabulous; all had, of course, been to dog shows. If, like Bonny Carr, I’d gone to an ordinary camp, my name, too, might appear on a camp web site, together with my childhood address.
The second page gave the results of an online reverse search of 89 Glenn Street in Nashua. According to result 1—1 of 1, as the page actually read, the current resident was Lafayette, G.; Bonny Carr’s family had evidently moved since she’d attended Camp Tecumseh. They’d had plenty of time; AnyBirthday.com gave her age as forty-five. The next page of the dossier showed where Mr. and Mrs. Carr had gone. It was not principally about them, but about a man named Charles H. McDonough, who had lived and, more to the point, died three years earlier in Manchester, New Hampshire. This item in the dossier was a copy of his obituary as it had been printed in the
Manchester Union-Leader.
He had left, among many other survivors, a daughter, Helen Carr, and her husband, John Carr, of Sarasota, Florida. Among McDonough’s grandchildren was Bonny Carr, of Brookline, Massachusetts.
Next came detailed material about exactly where in Brookline, Massachusetts, Bonny Carr lived. The Brookline Assessors Property Database had supplied four pages of facts about a condominium on Kent Street. -Owner: Carr, Bonny G. Residential Exemption: Y. Usage: 102-RESDNL CONDOMINIUM. Land Area: 0. Unit Number: 4. Building Style: LOW-RISE. The facts went on and on. Bonny Carr had bought her condo two years earlier. The building was three stories high and had been built in 1930. Her unit had a living area of 625 square feet. Its four rooms included two bedrooms. There was one full bath. Bath Quality was TYPICAL. So was Kitchen Quality. The building had hot-water heating, no elevator, no central air conditioning, and no fireplaces. The basement was unfinished. The parking was “open” rather than “covered.” Just in case all the numbers about Parcel-ID, Deed Book, sale price, residential values, beneficial interest, and so on failed to give a complete picture, the database had also provided a photograph of an unprepossessing three-story brick apartment building. One of these years, I suppose, web surfers will easily find interior photographs of every room in everyone’s house. For all I know, some databases already offer shots of people’s “typical”-quality kitchens, their living rooms with or without fireplaces, and their bedrooms, presumably with beds rated “made” or “unmade.”
Next were pages from the database of Massachusetts corporations maintained by the Secretary of the Commonwealth. Bonny Carr was president, treasurer, and everything else of a domestic profit corporation with the “exact name” of HealADog; if she’d incorporated using an inexact, vague, or perhaps even fishy name, it wasn’t listed. In any case, although I’d never before heard or seen the name
HealADog,
Bonny Carr’s career as a practitioner of healing touch was how I’d known her. She’d published a book about using touch to relieve anxiety and pain in physically and emotionally traumatized animals, especially dogs. The web sites of the United States Copyright Office, the Library of Congress, and two major online booksellers agreed that the book had been published the previous year and that its title was
Magical Fingers: Ideas Immediately Applicable to Using Human Touch to Treat Traumatized Animals.
Bonny Carr also gave seminars, workshops, and lectures on the topic. Rowdy and I had attended one of her workshops about two years earlier. You won’t find my opinion of the workshop anywhere on the web. I’d intended to write about it in my
Dog’s Life
column, but I prefer to keep my column positive, and I always keep it truthful. In truth, Bonny Carr’s “healing touch” seemed to me identical to everything I already did in hugging, grooming, stroking, and otherwise making physical contact with my dogs. Furthermore, her supposed system was far less systematic than the well-known TTouch approach of Linda Tellington-Jones. But the real reason I couldn’t write about the workshop was Rowdy, who had always been a total hedonist about being held, brushed, massaged, or just plain patted. Here was a dog who adored everything from gentle little finger circles on his ears to vigorous thumps on the rib cage. And exactly what did the big boy do in public at Bonny Carr’s workshop on healing touch? Refused to rest on the floor. Sprang to his feet.
Woo-wooed
in an apparent effort to drown her out. Embarrassed the daylights out of me. Oh, and while he was at it? Wordlessly informed me that he’d spotted Bonny Carr for the phony that I, too, thought she was. My experience with her at the workshop was quite unpleasant. Instead of sensibly saying that my untraumatized Rowdy was an unsuitable test case for her “healing touch,” she announced that the method required time and patience with severely abused animals. Her implication, as was clear to everyone in the workshop, was that I, Holly Winter, was the perpetrator of the abuse. So, I wrote nothing about Bonny Carr. But I was tempted. Severely so.
Next in the dossier came twenty or thirty web pages that documented, with tedious repetition, the seminars, workshops, and lectures Bonny Carr had given and was scheduled to give. Her older presentations had been like the one I’d attended; she’d focused on teaching pet owners, shelter workers, and veterinary professionals to use touch on dogs and cats in their care. In the recent past, she’d shifted to teaching people to teach her methods, what she called “training trainers.” It’s worth noting that this section of the dossier presented many pages that listed events of interest to veterinary professionals. On those pages, only a few lines were about a workshop, seminar, or lecture given by Bonny Carr. For example, on a web site about a veterinary conference held the previous winter in New Orleans, she’d been one of forty or fifty presenters; it was difficult for me even to find her name. It seemed to me that this portion of the dossier must represent an obsessive determination to record every reference to Bonny Carr on the entire World Wide Web.
The final pages showed different versions of the same photograph of Bonny Carr. The first of those pages showed a small black-and-white photo next to a paragraph about a seminar she’d done on training trainers in treating animal trauma. On the following page, the same picture appeared alone. It could have been, and maybe was, a passport picture: accurate and unflattering. In it, Bonny Carr looked as I remembered her. She was coarse and exotic, with masses of dark Medusa curls. Her face was strikingly asymmetric, her eyebrows so thoroughly plucked that they almost looked as if they’d been burned off. She had full lips and a long neck with a peculiarly ribbed appearance, as if the skin were stretched over the bones of her throat with no tissue in between. Neither smiling nor frowning, she stared boldly at the camera, squarely meeting its eye. Next was an enlargement of the same picture that took up perhaps half the page. The photo was now blurred and grainy. Finally, there was a full-page blowup that broke Bonny Carr’s face, neck, and hair into tiny squares. Although Bonny Carr retained her brazen expression, the result was fractured and grotesque. She looked like a fiend. It was impossible to see the effect as anything but deliberate.
CHAPTER 17
On Thursday evening, while Steve and I, together with the other members of the Cambridge Dog Training Club, peacefully worked with our dogs in the brightness and safety of the armory near the Fresh Pond rotary, Bonny Carr was bludgeoned to death in the parking lot behind her condo building in Brookline. She must have died shortly before Steve and I returned home with Sammy and Rowdy. The evening was mild, and we’d gone to dog training on foot and paw. We finished at about nine, helped to put away the equipment, spent a few minutes talking with friends, escorted two women with small dogs to their cars, and walked back up Concord Avenue. On the way home, neither of us mentioned the murders of Laura Skipcliff and Victoria Trotter. It never occurred to me to feel afraid; I took security for granted.
As we were about to turn the corner from Concord Avenue to Appleton Street, a car pulled to the curb in front of my house. The driver emerged and called out, “Holly? Steve? Olivia Berkowitz. I’m glad I caught you. I was going to drop off these CDs of Ian’s so you’d have a chance to listen to them.”
“Mac and Judith’s daughter,” I whispered to Steve, who’d met Olivia at the launch party at The Wordsmythe, where he’d also met dozens of other new people. At normal volume, I greeted Olivia, and then Steve did, too. On our own, neither Steve nor I would’ve invited Olivia in, but Rowdy and Sammy teamed up to stage a performance of effusive malamute hospitality, and because of the newly installed lights on the outside of the house, Olivia got a fine look at the father-and-son big-brown-eyes routine and ended up exclaiming about how beautiful the dogs were and how much they looked alike. Since she was awkwardly clutching the CDs in one hand, patting the dogs with other, trying to keep her shoulder bag from tumbling down her arm, and asking questions about Rowdy and Sammy, it seemed discourteous just to grab the music and vanish indoors. Consequently, we ended up in the kitchen, where Olivia accepted my offer of a drink by requesting decaf coffee.