Free Bride & Groom by Susan Conant Page A

The suits were identical to the orthodox ones of the Rider-Waite: wands, cups, swords, and pentacles. The drawings were appealing, and they’d certainly appealed to many people. The artwork was expertly executed; the artist was an accomplished technician. What’s more, the dogs were rendered realistically, and the impact of the cards was entirely unsentimental. Realism devoid of sentimentality was a hallmark of the work of Victoria’s mother, Mary Kidwell Trotter. So was technical mastery. So were the bright but subtle colors that made the Trotter Tarot so attractive. Neither before nor after producing the Trotter Tarot and the companion book had Victoria Trotter ever published any other illustrations of any kind. In my article about her tarot, I’d kept my suspicion to myself because I’d had no evidence and hadn’t wanted to risk a lawsuit. But I can’t have been the only person to wonder whether the gifted Mary Kid-well Trotter had redone the Rider-Waite deck for her own pleasure and refrained from publishing it because it was close to the original. At a guess, her daughter, Victoria, had had no such scruples and no hesitation about putting her own name on her mother’s work. I remembered the dedication of the book: “Most special thanks and love to my late mother, Mary Kidwell Trotter.”
    The final pages of the dossier consisted of announcements of Victoria’s Trotter Tarot workshops, lectures, and courses. She’d served on panels and participated in “interactive plenaries,” whatever they were. The freshness, skill, and subtlety of the Trotter Tarot illustrations were nowhere evident >n the titles and descriptions of Victoria’s presentations. In October of the previous year, at a spiritual retreat center in the Berkshires, Victoria had offered a course called “Useful Helping Skills in Readings of the Trotter Tarot.” In May, at a tarot conference in New York City, she’d given a lecture titled “The Case Example of Emma the Shih Tzu as a Guide to Smoothing Out Kinks in Interpreting the Cards.” At an event billed as an Intensive Tarot Studies Program scheduled to take place in December in Bern, Switzerland, she’d been due to offer the following course:
     
Turning the Tide:
Lessons Learned in Hearing the Soul Voices of Dogs
Instructor: Victoria Trotter
 
This innovative course examines the dynamic relevance of utilizing tarot-theory-based models of principles of trans-species intervention with behavior-affected dogs and their human guardians. Topics to be developed include:
 
• Effect of Trotter Tarot education about canine psycho-emotional concerns on human attitudes and spiritual beliefs.
 
• Effect of tarot-enhanced communication in elevating canine self-esteem and human resilience in behavior-conflicted relationships.
 
• Use of Trotter Tarot readings to promote interspecies communication and trans-species unity and global peace.
     
    A short biography followed: “Victoria Trotter has worked with human-canine dyads throughout the Americas and Europe. Illustrator of the beloved Trotter Tarot and author of Interpreting the Trotter Tarot, Victoria Trotter is Senior Training Advisor to the International Tarot Foundation.”
    There ended this dossier.
     

CHAPTER 11
     
    “Victoria Trotter was a nasty woman,” I told Kevin Dennehy.
    So much for saying nothing but good about the dead.
    It was nine o’clock on the morning of Saturday, August 31, and Kevin was sitting at my kitchen table drinking coffee, eating his third English muffin, and sneaking bits of it to Kimi and Sammy. I didn’t take Kevin to task for breaking the house rule. He'd been up all night. Steve, too, was laboring on Labor Day weekend, although for only a short time, or so I hoped. His clinic had called a half hour earlier about a Belgian Tervuren suffering from an apparent intestinal obstruction. The X ray showed what the young vet at the clinic thought might be a corn cob. But could Steve take a quick look? Oh,