that since she wasn’t my biological mother, she had no difficulty in seeing me as an adult, but she still couldn’t help sharing a little of my father’s worry that I was living in a city where a woman had just been mysteriously murdered. I thanked her for her concern, told her how much I loved her, and said that I felt perfectly safe. I really did appreciate her concern and really did love her. It was also true that at the time, I still felt perfectly safe.
CHAPTER 9
Six days later, on the evening- of Friday, August 30, a woman named Victoria Trotter was murdered as she lay in a hammock on the front porch of her house on Egremont Street in Cambridge. I knew Victoria Trotter, whom I’d interviewed for two articles I’d written, one about her famous mother, the late Mary Kidwell Trotter, a dog portrait artist, and the other about Victoria’s own canine version of the tarot. I owned a Victoria Trotter deck of the cards and consulted them every once in a while, strictly to get a reading on themes I might be overlooking in my life and the lives of my dogs, not to foresee what I trusted was the unforeseeable future. Still, because of Victoria’s tarot, it’s worth noting that I had no premonition of her violent death.
In fact, between the Saturday when I talked with Gabrielle and the Friday when Victoria was bludgeoned to death I paid only routine attention to the security precautions that city dwellers take automatically. As always, I kept the doors to my car and house locked. As I’d always done everywhere and fully intend to do for the rest of my life on earth and for eternity in the beyond, I spent nearly every waking and sleeping moment, indoors and outside, surrounded by big dogs. But I did so solely for the pleasure of their company. Dr. Laura Skipcliff’s murder had had nothing to do with me; nothing about it had suggested a threat to my safety.
Even if I’d been worried, I’d have had little time to dwell on my fear during the week before Victoria’s slaying. As I’d told Gabrielle, Steve and I both had full schedules. In addition to his practice and my column for Dog’s Life, we were working on our first cooperative venture, a diet book called No More Fat Dogs. On Monday, I had a long phone conversation with Judith Esterhazy, Mac’s wife, about wedding sites that she’d investigated when searching for a place for their daughter, Olivia, to get married. Equipped with a list of the names and phone numbers of historic houses, estates open to the public, and large country inns near Boston, I spent a lot of time on the phone learning that most spots were already booked or didn’t allow dogs. The only promising site was the Wayside Wildlife Refuge. It had the advantage of being conveniently nearby, in Lexington, and its main building was large enough for us to hold the ceremony and reception indoors in case of rain. Steve and I agreed to visit it over the Labor Day weekend. We drafted the guest list, which was alarmingly long. To our supposedly small wedding, we initially planned to invite more than a hundred people, and Steve and I kept adding names of others who simply couldn’t be excluded. To my horror, I found the web site about the Commonwealth’s willingness to grant one-day solemnization powers to people, presumably including my father, who wanted to officiate at weddings. More times than I care to report, I checked the big online bookstores to see how 101 Ways to Cook Liver was faring. It consistently ranked lower than Ask Dr. Mac, but only a little lower, so I felt satisfied. Out of curiosity, I also checked on Judith Esterhazy’s new book, Boudicca. The combination of painfully low sales and splendid reviews was depressing. It's a sad day for literature when a dog-treat cookbook does a zillion times better than a highly acclaimed novel. It’s a sad day even for the author of the dog-treat cookbook. On the other paw, of course, it’s a perfectly delightful day for big, hungry
CHAPTER 9
Six days later, on the evening- of Friday, August 30, a woman named Victoria Trotter was murdered as she lay in a hammock on the front porch of her house on Egremont Street in Cambridge. I knew Victoria Trotter, whom I’d interviewed for two articles I’d written, one about her famous mother, the late Mary Kidwell Trotter, a dog portrait artist, and the other about Victoria’s own canine version of the tarot. I owned a Victoria Trotter deck of the cards and consulted them every once in a while, strictly to get a reading on themes I might be overlooking in my life and the lives of my dogs, not to foresee what I trusted was the unforeseeable future. Still, because of Victoria’s tarot, it’s worth noting that I had no premonition of her violent death.
In fact, between the Saturday when I talked with Gabrielle and the Friday when Victoria was bludgeoned to death I paid only routine attention to the security precautions that city dwellers take automatically. As always, I kept the doors to my car and house locked. As I’d always done everywhere and fully intend to do for the rest of my life on earth and for eternity in the beyond, I spent nearly every waking and sleeping moment, indoors and outside, surrounded by big dogs. But I did so solely for the pleasure of their company. Dr. Laura Skipcliff’s murder had had nothing to do with me; nothing about it had suggested a threat to my safety.
Even if I’d been worried, I’d have had little time to dwell on my fear during the week before Victoria’s slaying. As I’d told Gabrielle, Steve and I both had full schedules. In addition to his practice and my column for Dog’s Life, we were working on our first cooperative venture, a diet book called No More Fat Dogs. On Monday, I had a long phone conversation with Judith Esterhazy, Mac’s wife, about wedding sites that she’d investigated when searching for a place for their daughter, Olivia, to get married. Equipped with a list of the names and phone numbers of historic houses, estates open to the public, and large country inns near Boston, I spent a lot of time on the phone learning that most spots were already booked or didn’t allow dogs. The only promising site was the Wayside Wildlife Refuge. It had the advantage of being conveniently nearby, in Lexington, and its main building was large enough for us to hold the ceremony and reception indoors in case of rain. Steve and I agreed to visit it over the Labor Day weekend. We drafted the guest list, which was alarmingly long. To our supposedly small wedding, we initially planned to invite more than a hundred people, and Steve and I kept adding names of others who simply couldn’t be excluded. To my horror, I found the web site about the Commonwealth’s willingness to grant one-day solemnization powers to people, presumably including my father, who wanted to officiate at weddings. More times than I care to report, I checked the big online bookstores to see how 101 Ways to Cook Liver was faring. It consistently ranked lower than Ask Dr. Mac, but only a little lower, so I felt satisfied. Out of curiosity, I also checked on Judith Esterhazy’s new book, Boudicca. The combination of painfully low sales and splendid reviews was depressing. It's a sad day for literature when a dog-treat cookbook does a zillion times better than a highly acclaimed novel. It’s a sad day even for the author of the dog-treat cookbook. On the other paw, of course, it’s a perfectly delightful day for big, hungry
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