Authors: Susan Conant
“Good,” Steve said. “Keep it that way.”
CHAPTER 27
It’s one thing for a man to have other women, but quite another for him to kill them off. By the time Steve and I were halfway to Mac and Judith’s house in Lexington on Saturday evening, I wished that we’d excused ourselves by pleading illness. I almost wished that one of us would actually begin to throw up.
“We don’t
have
to do this,” said Steve, who was reluctantly at the wheel of what he considered to be my ill-gotten Blazer, which we’d chosen because it hadn’t yet acquired the full doggy miasma and ineradicable coating of dog hair so notable in Steve’s van. Dog vehicles are like pieces of meat: They take a while to ripen to gaminess.
“We do,” I said. “It’s too late to cancel, and each of us is a worse liar than the other.”
Our knowledge and suspicions about Mac’s infidelities might’ve made the occasion something of a minor social challenge. What made the prospect of the dinner almost intolerable wasn’t just the speculation we’d engaged in immediately after Elspeth’s murder, but new information yielded by the autopsy, which was that Elspeth had been injected with a drug familiar to all veterinarians and to many dog owners: acepromazine. An old-time and still popular veterinary sedative, ace was so widely used that dog breeders and show types shifted the word’s grammatical gears from noun to verb, and routinely spoke of “acing” dogs. In effect, its presence in Elspeth’s body proclaimed her death to be a dog murder.
I continued. “What do you want me to do? Call now and say, ‘Sorry to cancel at the last second, Judith, but we think that your husband’s been murdering his mistresses’? Steve, when I say it to
you,
it sounds preposterous. I’m not about to say it to
Judith,
and if I make up some excuse now, that one’s going to hang in the air. I am not a good liar!”
“We could’ve sent E-mail. We should’ve cancelled before.”
“But we didn’t. We’ve been over this! We don’t know anything! We just wonder. On the basis of freakish ideas we’re going to shun someone who’s been generous to me? Mac has done more to help me promote my book than everyone else combined, and Judith and Olivia have been perfectly nice to me.
And
Ian is doing the music for our wedding.
And
Olivia and Ian are going to be at dinner.
And
it’s your next left!”
Our spat was still going on two minutes later when Steve parked in a wide area at the end of Mac and Judith’s long driveway. Their house, which I’d visited before, sat in the middle of a large wooded lot. Like my house, this one had three stories. Alas for Steve and me, there ended the resemblance. This place had lots of floor-to-ceiling windows, exposed beams, cozy balconies, and spacious decks.
“Shit,” he said.
“We don’t want to live in Lexington, anyway, and if this place were in Cambridge, it would go for four million plus.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Steve, look. I wish we’d begged off, too. I’m sorry. We’ll get through it and leave early.”
As we were about to get out of the car, a silver Volvo station wagon pulled in next to us, and out of the passenger seat popped Claire Langceil, the skinny, wiry, wire-haired blond veterinarian who’d been at the launch party at The Wordsmythe. With relief, I said, “Claire’s here. You like her. And she never shuts up, so we won’t have to say anything at all.”
Before Steve had opened his door, Claire was rapping on the glass, smiling brightly, and saying, obviously to him, “Hey, you’re here!” Even after I was out of the car, Claire continued to address Steve. “Daniel and Gus are with me.” She nodded at a man and a boy who’d also emerged from the Volvo. “Daniel loves Judith’s cooking.” Claire somehow sounded as if she were revealing a character fault.
“Hi,” I said to the man and the boy. “I’m Holly Winter. And this is Steve Delaney.”
“Daniel Langceil.” The man shook hands with me and then with Steve. Daniel was short and round-faced, with curly brown hair, dark eyes, and an air of warmth and amiability.
“And Gus the Great!” Claire exclaimed.
Gus had curls, lighter than Daniel’s and darker than Claire’s. He had his father’s dark eyes and a shy manner that he hadn’t inherited from his mother.
“Gus the Great!” Claire repeated.
Although Claire’s grand epithet for her son was neither witty nor funny, Steve and I compliantly responded to Claire’s expectations by looking as if we found it clever and hilarious. Daniel’s expression was unreadable. Gus looked miserable.
“Hi, Gus,” Steve said quietly. “You want to go into the house now?” Accustomed to soothing nervous animals, Steve was wonderfully casual. The boy’s face brightened. He silently moved to Steve’s left and walked toward the entryway in such perfect heel position that Steve would have been justified in popping a treat into the child’s mouth and saying, “Good Gus!” Steve did no such thing, of course; his kindness consisted of allowing Gus to meld with the group instead of find-! ing himself singled out.
The rest of us tagged along. The house had a lovely front entrance. Glass panels framed a door made of teak and adorned with a brass knocker and a brass handle, both pol^ ished with Gilbertian care. Claire rang the bell, rapped the knocker, and then pressed her face against one of the glass panels and tapped eagerly. Dog person that I am, I assumed that she was in a desperate hurry to empty her bladder. When Mac opened the door, however, she didn’t rush past him, but stayed with the rest of us. As we entered, Ian returned from walking Uli. The sweet old Bernese gave a soft woof and wagged his tail.
The foyer was a long, wide landing with a flight of stairs: on the left that led down to the ground floor, where, as I knew from previous visits, Mac had his office. Four or five years earlier, he’d sold his prosperous veterinary clinic to a national corporation. By agreement, after the sale, Mad had continued to see a few old dogs and cats that he’d treated throughout their lives, but his one-man, home-based practice otherwise focused exclusively on behavioral consultations. Also, of course, he wrote articles and books. Anyway we didn’t go down to Mac’s office, but ascended the flight of stairs on the right, which led to the main floor of the house! Judith appeared and began to welcome everyone. As always, Mac radiated vigor. Judith was infinitely elegant and slimmer than ever in a loose black top over close-fitting black pants. Hearing Ian’s voice behind me, I turned to see that he was murmuring to Uli as he gently supported the dog’s hindquarters to help the old fellow climb the stairs. Claire, obviously watching, too, announced, “Time for a puppy, Judith!”
Judith’s back was turned, not, I should add, in reaction to Claire’s remark. Rather, our hostess was leading the way to the living room, which had more than enough square footage to accommodate a couple of showrings. There was a fireplace at one end. At the other, next to a wall of glass, was the dinner table. The furniture was all shiny wood and Scandinavian fabric. Oil paintings depicted bright, life-size poppies, peonies, and nasturtiums. Nothing in the room even began to hint at animals. There wasn’t a cat or a birdcage or a fish tank anywhere. I couldn’t even see a single strand of pet hair.
Seated on one of the two couches that flanked the fireplace was a man of thirty or thirty-five who locked so amazingly like Judith that I assumed he must be a close relative of hers. A nephew? Unless Mac was Judith’s second husband and this was a son from her first marriage? To my surprise, however, when Olivia appeared with a tray of appetizers, she introduced the man as her husband, John. To avoid mystification, let me state that John Berkowitz did not turn out to be some love child of Judith’s whom Olivia had married without knowing that he was her half brother. Although John was entirely unrelated to Judith, he nonetheless had his mother-in-law’s prominent cheekbones, blue eyes, and full lips. His individual features were Judith’s, as was his overall look. He even had a manly version of Judith’s lean elegance.
Seeing my startled expression, Olivia laughed and said, “It’s okay! Everyone has the same reaction. It’s how we met. We were at a party, and I saw John, and I said, ‘Wow! You look so much like my mother!’ But we checked it out. We’re not even distant relatives.”
I’d have felt comparatively relieved to learn that they were. In the world of purebred dogs, “line breeding,” as it’s called, is so common that breeders need a special term,
outcross,
for the mating of
unrelated
animals. By comparison with close line breedings—father to daughter, son to mother, brother to sister—a cousin-to-cousin mating of human beings would’ve struck me as unremarkable. But show dogs don’t usually choose their own mates. And if they did, the females wouldn’t knowingly, deliberately, and perversely go around picking studs who looked uncannily like their own mothers!
No one voiced any additional remarks about John’s appearance, in part because we were busy taking seats, accepting Mac’s offer of drinks, and devoting ourselves to the appetizers that Olivia had placed on the low table between the couches. The hors d’oeuvres weren’t the usual raw vegetables and dips or selections of cheese and crackers, but slices of smoked salmon rolled around arugula and cream cheese, long strips of peeled cucumber wrapped around seafood, miniature crispy brown potato pancakes, and other such delicacies.
“Incredible!” I said to Judith.
“Thank you,” said Judith, “but Olivia deserves half the credit. We’ve always cooked together.”
“I’m just the prep cook,” Olivia said. “Mom is the head chef.”
Claire said, “I have yet to discover anything that Judith doesn’t do perfectly.”
Judith laughed. “It’s so seldom that anyone asks me to sing.” To Steve and me she said, “Ian did not inherit his talent from me. I’m tuneless.”
So far, except for the small matter of Olivia’s having more or less married her mother, the evening was far less awkward than I’d feared. Indeed, if viewed by a stranger, the scene could have been designed to illustrate hospitality and domesticity. A fire burned in the fireplace. Seated on the floor by the hearth, Ian tossed in a fresh log and then returned to * stroking Uli, who dozed next to him. On one couch were I Mac, Claire, Steve, and I, with little Gus between us; on the , other couch were John, Olivia, Judith, and Claire’s husband, I Daniel. With the possible exception of Ian, we’d have seemed an attractive, appealing group. Mac had poured liberal drinks for everyone except Gus, of course, and me— I’d lost the coin toss for designated driver. Still, a stranger might have assumed that my mineral water was gin or vodka. An old-fashioned observer might have noted that the numbers were uneven: Ian was not part of a couple. What’s more, in contrast to everyone else, Ian looked vaguely unhealthy. His skin was pale, and, as I’d noticed at the bookstore when Mac and I had given our talks, his pale blue eyes seemed somehow to make him look watery, even gelatinous. I had a ludicrous vision of him as a poached egg in aspic.
CHAPTER 28
I kept the unflattering image of Ian to myself. In fact, I remained unusually quiet over drinks. Judith and Olivia kept excusing themselves to check on dinner. At Judith’s request, Ian brought in an armful of logs for the fire. John Berkowitz talked with Ian about a Bach concert they’d both attended. John shyly admitted that he played the piano a little. The three veterinarians, Steve, Mac, and Claire, I discussed animals only as ordinary pet owners might have done. Mac asked Steve about Sammy, and Claire again advised Judith to get a puppy. “If Uli’s mind starts to go,” Claire said, “it’s going to be impossible. You need to get one soon. It doesn’t have to be another Bernese. You could get anything.”
Neither Mac nor Judith responded. Miraculously, I didn’t, either. Real dog person that I am, I tend to hand out unsolicited advice about all things dog on all possible occasions, but Judith didn’t need my advice. The main reason that I kept silent, though, was my certainty that if a veterinarian husband and his dog-person wife had one old dog, no other animals, and no plans to acquire any, there was bound to be a reason, and that reason was bound to be none of my business.
An awkward lull followed Claire’s remarks, but lasted for only a few seconds. Judith restored animation to the party by announcing that dinner was ready. As all of us rose, it became apparent that Claire, Daniel, and Gus were regular guests of Mac and Judith’s and that the usual routine was for Gus to watch a video while the adults ate. Over Gus’s objection that he wanted to stay with Steve and Judith’s offer to set a place for him, Claire led him off. When she returned, the rest of us had taken our seats at the table near the big windows. Mac sat at the head of the table, with Judith at the other end. I was on Mac’s right, and Ian was on my right, with John Berkowitz between Ian and Judith. To Mac’s left was Olivia, then an empty seat for Claire, and then, to Judith’s right, Steve. The table was set with bright place mats and napkins. Rita had educated me to recognize the good china and silver as such. The centerpiece combined flowers with candles. There were no place cards; rather, Judith had directed us to our places.
Mac, with typical warmth and conviviality, opened two bottles of wine and had just finished pouring it when Claire appeared, glanced around, and said playfully, “Olivia, you’re in my seat!”
Olivia matched the teasing tone. “Next to Daddy is
my
seat. You’re stuck with me, but you get to sit next to Steve.”