Bride & Groom Read online

  “Conant’s readers—with ears up and alert eyes— eagerly await her next.” —Kirkus Reviews

  Praise for

  The Dogfather

  “A hilarious parody of The Godfather... extremely funny.” —Midwest Book Review

  The Wicked Flea

  “Sheer bliss awaits the dedicated dog lover.” —Kirkus Reviews

  Fun, fast-paced... an independent, witty protagonist... faced with the most eccentric and quirky of characters.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Delightful and humorous.” —Midwest book Review

  ... and for Susan Conant’s other mysteries featuring dog trainer Holly Winter

  “Hilarious.” —Los Angeles Times

  “A real tail-wagger.” —The Washington Post

  “Amiability and wit enough to entertain even dog dilettantes. For canophiles, a must.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “An absolutely first-rate mystery... and a fascinating look at the world of dogs... I loved it!” —Diane Mott Davidson

  Don’t miss the first book in Susan Conant’s new Cat Lover’s Mystery Series:

  Scratch the Surface

  Dog Lover's Mysteries by Susan Conant

  A NEW LEASH ON DEATH

  DEAD AND DOGGONE

  A BITE OF DEATH

  PAWS BEFORE DYING

  GONE TO THE DOGS

  BLOODLINES

  RUFFLY SPEAKING

  BLACK RIBBON

  STUD RITES

  ANIMAL APPETITE

  THE BARKER STREET REGULARS

  EVIL BREEDING

  CREATURE DISCOMFORTS

  THE WICKED FLEA

  THE DOGFATHER

  BRIDE & GROOM

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  BRIDE & GROOM

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime hardcover edition / February 2004

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / January 2005

  Copyright © 2004 by Susan Conant.

  Cover design by Jill Boltin.

  Cover illustration by Jeff Walker.

  Text design by Kristin del Rosario.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 0-425-20074-4

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for the “stripped book.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For the appearance of Alaskan malamute BISS American International Ch. Quinault’s Northern Exposure, CGC, WLDX, WTD, WPD, the amazing North, I am grateful to Twila Baker, who accompanies North herein. Bruce South-worth, B.S.I., responded with expertise and enthusiasm to my plea for help with a Sherlockian wedding ceremony. Thank you! I also owe profuse thanks to the American International Champion of editors, Natalee Rosenstein, to her assistant, Esther Strauss, and to Deborah Schneider, all of whom deserve special awards for patience and support. For generous help with the manuscript and proofs, many thanks to Jean Berman, Roo Grubis, Cindy Klettke, Roseann Man-dell, Dru Milligan, Phyllis Stein, Geoff Stern, Jolie Stratton, Anya Wittenborg, and Corrine Zipps.

  My boundless gratitude goes also to my own Alaskan malamutes, Frostfield Perfect Crime, CD, CGC, ThD, WPD, my very own Rowdy, and her young companion, Django, formally, Jazzland’s Got That Swing. Like the malamute puppy in this book, Django is a son of Ch. Jazzland’s Embraceable You, the beautiful Emma, and was bred by Cindy Neely. Cindy, thank you for my new muse.

  To my dear friend Meredith Kantor,

  in loving memory of Abbey, the perfect mix.

  To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.

  Solemnization of Matrimony,

  THE BOOK OF COMMON PR A Y ER

  CHAPTER 1

  Between August 22 and September 2 7, as I was planning my wedding and promoting my new book, five women were bludgeoned to death in Greater Boston. The murders were premeditated. So, in a happy sense, was my forthcoming marriage to Steve Delaney, D.V.M. As for my book, its title invited the accusation of malevolent culinary premeditation. It was called 101 Ways to Cook Liver. I am, however, entirely innocent of evil intent toward my fellow human beings. I’m a dog writer. Indeed, I may never recover from the fumes I breathed while testing what are, in fact, more than 101 recipes for dog treats.

  My column runs in Dog’s Life magazine. Holly Winter? I do freelance articles as well, and I contributed the text for a book of photographs of the lavish Morris and Essex Kennel Club dogs shows of the 1930s. Contributed: gave in return for royalty payments insufficient to buy one of those coffee mugs you get for donating to public radio. Honest to doG Almighty, I’ve tried writing about people, but I lack the knack. Anyway, as dog books go, 101 Ways to Cook Liver had gotten me a decent advance, and as Mac McCloud kept reminding me, my book would sell and keep selling if—and only if—I promoted it even half as energetically as I trained, exercised, groomed, and showed my dogs. Mac’s first book, Dogs with Dr. Mac, had been holding a solid sit-stay on the canine best-seller lists since its publication two years earlier. Bruce McCloud, D.V.M., who’d just published his second book, Ask Dr. Mac, did more for me than merely hand out advice: He suggested that we cooperate in making our work known to the dog-loving public and generously arranged to have me included at signings, readings, and interviews to which he alone had initially been invited. Readings. Well, 101 Ways to Cook Liver didn’t exactly lend itself to public performance, but I was already getting pretty good at f
ollowing a principle that Mac had drilled into me, which was always to refer to my book as 101 Ways to Cook Liver and never as “my book.”

  The first event that Mac and I did together was a launch party and signing on Saturday, August 17, at The Wordsmythe, a big, important bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts, that probably wouldn’t even have stocked my book (pardon the lapse) without Mac’s influence. From an author’s viewpoint, August isn’t the ideal publication date, but then neither is any other month that falls outside the Christmas-shopping Advent, when even poverty-stricken or skinflint library addicts—me, for example—actually spend money on what they purport to love, thus enabling those of us who labor in the fields of canine literary endeavor to feed our dogs and, if the harvest is bounteous, ourselves. But, as Mac emphasized, August wasn’t outright bad. Our books would still be on the shelves when doting nieces and nephews browsed for the perfect holiday gift for Auntie So-and-So who was so-and-so crazy about dogs. On the other hand—paw?—my second-floor tenant and first-best friend, Rita, had to miss the launch party because she was away on vacation, as were millions of other potentially book-buying and indubitably fortunate residents of Greater Boston, where the temperature was now, at quarter of five in the afternoon of August 17, a stinking ninety-five degrees.

  Steve and I had parked my new air-conditioned car in the shade cast by the back wall of a funky movie theater and were walking my sweltering dogs along the sidewalk toward The Wordsmythe. I had Rowdy’s leash, and Steve had Kimi’s. Of the four of us, the only one who looked cool in any sense of the term was Steve. He was tall and lean, with wavy brown hair and changeable blue-green eyes, and he wasn’t even sweating. I was cursing the weather, as were Rowdy and Kimi, who, being Alaskan malamutes, are congenitally predisposed to define climatological perfection as ten below zero Fahrenheit with a killer wind. World’s most incredible question about the Alaskan malamute: Where did the breed originate? It was a question I got asked all the time, as did Steve, the relatively new owner of his first malamute, Sammy—properly, Jazzland’s As Time Goes By, and just as properly, my Rowdy’s young son. Kimi and Rowdy weren’t swearing aloud, but didn’t need to. They are big, beautiful wolf-gray show dogs who typically stride boldly along with their glorious white tails soaring above their backs. Now, their heads drooped, and their tails sagged. Although I’d spent hours grooming them in preparation for their first appearance as my PR team, they were “blowing coat,” as it’s called, and my efforts had left me with dogs who seemed mysteriously to be shedding more hair than they’d had to begin with. Furthermore, instead of radiating the breed’s characteristic sunniness of temperament, Rowdy kept glaring at me as if summer were my fault, and Kimi was too wilted to mark utility poles and fire hydrants in the male-like fashion of self-confident female malamutes.

  “Ma femme n’aime pas la chaleur,” said Steve. Translation: My wife does not like the heat. He had supposedly been studying conversational French by listening to tapes. We were getting married on September 29 and honeymooning in Paris—and no, we did not choose our wedding day only because it was the date when we expected our dogs to have quit shedding. Anyway, instead of mastering common phrases and expressions that would be useful in ordering food and asking directions, Steve had learned to say exactly one thing in French, namely, the sentence he’d just uttered.

  “I’m not your femme yet,” I said sourly. “I’m your fiancée.”

  “When we get to France, you’ll be ma femme.”

  I’d be Steve’s second femme. More than a year earlier, after we’d been together for ages, I’d split us up. On the rebound, Steve had married the grossly misnamed Anita Fairley, fair being the last thing she was, unless you count her appearance. In fact, she was an embezzler-lawyer who hated dogs. But Anita really was beautiful, whereas I bear what always strikes me as an unwelcome resemblance to a golden retriever, the breed that raised me. Anita was as nasty to Steve’s dogs as she was to him. The marriage was brief. Sammy, Steve’s malamute puppy, had brought us back together.

  Steve’s divorce had become final on August 2. We’d celebrated by taking all five of our dogs to Acadia National Park. The location was admittedly somewhat weird, since Bar Harbor, Maine, was where Steve and Anita had gone immediately after their city-hall wedding and where I’d learned of their marriage and first met Anita. But damned if that bitch—a term I ordinarily use in its dog-technical sense— was going to ruin Acadia for me. Besides, my stepmother, Gabrielle, owned a big house on Mount Desert Island, and I was always welcome to use Gabrielle’s guest cottage. It wouldn’t have been easy to find » motel that would’ve accepted all those dogs, nor would it have been easy to share one room with the five of them, especially because my Kimi resented the perfection of Steve’s German shepherd bitch, India, and displayed her own imperfection by frightening Steve’s timid pointer bitch, Lady, the term bitch being used in its proper and inoffensive canine sense to mean nothing more than female. Also, we drove to Maine on July 31, and I might’ve shared a room, but wouldn’t share a bed, with Steve until August 2. I’m not all that moral, but I am proud: I couldn’t see myself as an adulteress.

  So, on the Great Divorce Day, we celebrated by hiking up Sargent Mountain. The four adult dogs, Rowdy, Kimi, India, and Lady, wore dogpacks filled with bottled water, liver treats (what else?), first-aid kits, and two fat lobster rolls crammed between cold packs. When we reached the top of Sargent, Steve amazed me by producing four items he’d snuck into India’s pack. Steve was not a sneaky person. Anything but. Furthermore, although he was rigidly law-abiding and knew that alcohol was illegal in the park, his secret stash included a split of champagne and two wineglasses. Crystal. Not plastic. The fourth item was an engagement ring. In defiance of his undramatic, even self-effacing, character, he tried to drop to his knees to propose, but Sammy assumed that he was initiating play, as, in a sense, he was, and Steve ended up asking me to marry him while I was extricating him from beneath the large and joyful puppy. It was not the first time Steve had asked me to marry him. But it was the first time I’d said yes.

  As to the words Steve spoke, what he said was, “As husband material, I’m nothing special, but I’m a damned good veterinarian. And I love you. I love your dogs. I even love your ugly cat. Marry me. You’ll never pay vet bills again.”

  CHAPTER 2

  A big double-sided chalkboard on the sidewalk in front of The Wordsmythe invited passersby to a launch party with Dr. Mac McCloud and Holly Winter. I am not petty enough to report that Mac’s name was printed in far larger letters than mine. Prominently displayed in the shop window were five copies of 101 Ways to Cook Liver, at least fifty copies of Ask Dr. Mac, and a poster-size glossy color photograph of a smiling Mac hugging a Bernese mountain dog. My book was what’s called a “trade paperback,” meaning that it was oversized and overpriced. Ask Dr. Mac was a hardcover.

  “That’s not even Mac’s dog,” I muttered to Steve. “The real dog person in the family is his wife, Judith. Uli is very definitely Judith’s dog.”

  Steve just laughed.

  “I know ten thousand times more about dog training than Mac does,” I said. “And that’s a conservative estimate.”

  “It’s an underestimate,” Steve said loyally.

  “But if I’m jealous, think how his wife feels. Judith has a new book out, too, and it isn’t even in the window.”

  Judith Esterhazy, Mac’s wife, was what I’m tempted to call a “real writer”; her characters stood on two feet—and not because the other two had been amputated. Judith Esterhazy wrote serious literary fiction. She’d originally been known, albeit not very widely, for her perfectly crafted short stories. Her first novel, published about three years earlier, had received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Kirkus had called it “mesmerizing” and “sparkling.” It was now out of print. I’m reluctant to talk about the novel she’d just published because I’m not sure that I know how to pronounce its title correctly. It was called Boudicca, pronounced, I think, Boo-d
ick-uh, possibly with the stress on the second syllable, and was about Boadicea, the first syllable of which is bow as in “bow and arrow,” not as in “bow wow wow,” and the remainder of which is uh-diss-ee-uh, with the stress on the ee. Anyway, I’d looked up Boudicca or Boadicea on the web and discovered that she was a Celtic queen who led a rebellion against the Romans in 60 A.D. The information failed to convince me that an unpronounceable title had been a wise choice. But I went on to buy and read the book, which was, indeed, about the Celtic queen, a fearsome creature, strikingly, if bipedally, reminiscent of my own Kimi. I did not tell Judith that I thought that her book was really about one of my dogs. On the contrary, having read the Kirkus quotation about her previous novel on the back of this one, I said that I’d found Boudicca hypnotizing. In truth, Judith Esterhazy wrote beautiful prose.

  When Steve and the dogs and I entered the frigid bliss of the bookstore, Judith Esterhazy was the first person I saw. She stood next to a table with a sign that read NEW AND NOTEWORTHY HARDCOVERS, and was signing a copy of Boudicca for a studious-looking young woman who worked in the bookstore. Judith was so thin that it would’ve been easy to imagine that, like Zola, she subsisted on sparrows. In no other respect did she match my image of the literary novelist, a phrase that connotes, at least to me, rapt concentration on vivid turns of phrase and a concomitant obliviousness to personal appearance. Judith showed no sign of bohemian dishevelment. She must’ve been in her early fifties, but there wasn’t a white strand in her short, straight, glossy brown hair, which could only have been done at one of the fancy salons on Boston’s famous Newbury Street. The style was geometrically blunt cut at the back. Her part began at the crown of her head and ended radically to the left, just above the outer corner of her left eyebrow. Her eyes were large and blue. She had prominent cheekbones, full lips, and white teeth. Her makeup was almost invisible. She was dressed, but not overdressed, in a pale gray linen jacket, shell, and pants. As Judith handed the autographed book to the young woman, her face was angular and forbidding, but when she caught sight of the dogs and me, her expression softened, and suddenly she looked warm and lovely. It struck me as demeaning to observe that Judith was pretty when she smiled, as if I somehow thought that she should mask her severity and, with it, her sadness and intelligence, by habitually putting on a happy face and gushing, “Have a nice day!” Still, my observation was accurate.