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sat on 2.4 acres. The assessed value of the land was high. The building was assessed at three times the value of the land.
    The remainder of the dossier documented Laura Skip-cliffs professional affiliations, achievements, and publications. The hospital web site that displayed the close-up of her face also gave her E-mail address: [email protected] . She’d attended medical school at Cornell. The papers she’d published had titles that were both impressive and, to me, incomprehensible.
    At the end of the dossier were pages about a meeting j sponsored by Harvard Medical School to be held in Boston from August 21 through August 25. According to the announcement, Laura Skipcliff was scheduled to present a paper on the morning of August 24 and to serve on a panel that afternoon. The dossier contained nothing about Laura Skipcliff’s murder.
     

CHAPTER 6
     
    The central tenet of canine fundamentalism is the misleadingly simple-sounding principle that dogs are everywhere. Having embraced this delightful reality, we believers are never surprised to find that interspecies enlightenment lurks in seemingly improbable places. Had I been an agnostic, a skeptic, an outright atheist, a blasphemist, a heretic, or merely the sort of nonpracticing hypocrite who claims to worship dogs but doesn’t own one, I’d have been astonished to attain spiritual transcendence in so bourgeois and materialistic a spot as the Bloomingdale’s department store at the Chestnut Hill Mall. As it was, the epiphany felt perfectly natural. All this is to say that in entering my name and Steve’s in Bloomie’s bridal registry, I abruptly and joyously reached a mystical and highly desirable state that had previous eluded me: All of a sudden, I knew exactly what it feels like to be a dog.
    Not one to keep divine revelation to myself, I embarrassed Rita in front of the Bloomingdale’s salesperson by blurting out, “Rita, I finally get this wedding stuff! Everything just fell in place. Rita, the wedding is a dog show! I’m the bride. I'm going Best in Show!”
    It was Friday afternoon. I’d fought the commuter traffic to the Chestnut Hill Mall strictly out of loyalty to Rita, who was apparently convinced that if I failed to register at Bloomingdale’s, my marriage to Steve would be an unlawful sham; in Rita’s view, bigamy was vastly preferable to any marriage unblessed by Bloomie’s. To please Rita, I’d changed out of kennel clothes—old jeans and a stained T-shirt—and into a respectable pair of khakis and a white blouse. Rita wore a white linen suit. Her short, bouncy hair was streaked by the sun as well as by artifice, and she not only wore heels but knew how to walk in them. Until a few moments earlier, when the true nature of weddings had revealed itself to me, I’d shuffled reluctantly after her while muttering bitter complaints about china patterns and white gowns. Now that I grasped the project, I was thoroughly behind it.
    “You know, Holly,” Rita said, “I sometimes wonder whether you should be committed.” Rita was a clinical psychologist. By committed, she meant “locked up,” as opposed to “wholeheartedly pledged,” as in, I am committed to the wellbeing of my animals.
    “I’m committed to getting married,” I said. “I’m committed to Steve. And now that I understand weddings, I’m committed to doing this one right. You see, it all came to me while I was registering. I had a distinct sense of déjà vu. And then it came to me that every time I’d ever entered a dog in a show, I’d done exactly what I was doing now, and I knew that I was filling out an entry blank just the way I do for Rowdy and Kimi, only this time I was doing it for myself. Anyway, I’m done grumbling about wedding plans. Registering for presents is fine! What they are, you see, is trophies. And what we’re doing here today is putting together the premium list."
    Rita sighed. “Just as long as you don’t register for cheap stoneware and