Engaged in Death (A Wedding Planner Mystery) (2 page)

The world began to spin. It was too hot, too humid, and too muggy. It was all too much. I closed my eyes against a wave of vertigo and slid down the car door, kneeling unceremoniously in the dust-covered road.

The ride back to the city was tense. We rode in silence until we reached our apartment building.

“My mother can sell the lot in no time if you’re going to insist on being unhappy about her wedding gift. But let’s not be hasty. You might realize it’s a great idea and come around.”

“I’m not going to ‘come around’ to this idea, Keith. I’m upset you’d make a big decision without even mentioning it. We’re getting married in a few weeks, but sometimes it’s like I don’t even know you anymore.”

We stopped at the mailbox in the lobby, and Keith extracted our mail, averting his eyes. “It’s just pre-wedding jitters. Everything will be fine. I made a mistake. No, my mother made a mistake. You don’t want to live out in Port Quincy. I get it. It was a bad gesture.”

He handed me my portion of the mail, which contained the usual bills and advertisements and a large brown padded envelope. He reddened as he separated his mail, shoving a glossy brochure for Windsor Meadows behind a letter. We began the torturously slow ascent to our apartment in the old brass elevator.

I sat at the dining room table and put my head in my hands, rubbing my temples to ease out the headache that had been building since we left Windsor Meadows. Keith rubbed my shoulders and, after initially tensing up, I felt the stress and misgivings begin to melt away.

“I love you. I want nothing more than for you to be my wife. We’ll figure out where to live together. Everything will fall into place.” He nuzzled my neck, making me laugh.

“It was a big shock. I thought it was a practical joke.”

“Let me make you some tea.” He looked at me with tenderness and concern as he padded into the kitchen.

While he fixed up the kettle, I turned my attention to the map spread out before me: a miniature model of the Port Quincy Country Club ballroom. I’d toiled over the seating chart as the last few RSVPs trickled in, trying to get it just right, with a focus bordering on obsessive-compulsive. I usually enjoyed this kind of puzzle, but it was an especially complicated task, not helped by the fact I didn’t know many of the guests and their relationships to each other.

We had originally planned on thirty guests, just close friends and immediate family, but, thanks to Helene’s decree, we’d be entertaining three hundred people, most of whom I’d be meeting for the first time. Things had long ago spiraled out of control and crossed the line into spectacle. There wasn’t much of Keith’s immediate family left, just Helene, Sylvia, and a few cousins from out of town. The guests were Helene’s acquaintances from the upper echelon of Port Quincy society and distant relatives.

“Do you think Sylvia will make it to the wedding?” In addition to his father, Keith’s other three grandparents were deceased, but Sylvia was still going strong. She was determined to attend the wedding, oxygen tank and all.

Keith chuckled and set down a mug of ginger tea. “If Sylvia has any say in it, she’ll be there. She adores you.” He leaned over for a kiss. “Besides, you can ask her yourself tomorrow.” He returned to the galley kitchen.

I’d called Sylvia as soon as we were on the road and arranged to stop by to see her tomorrow to make up for missing our Sunday tea date. She’d been delighted and said she couldn’t wait to discuss what had happened at the wedding tasting.

Everything will be okay
. I examined the brown envelope. There was no return address, but the postmark was Port Quincy. Maybe it was an oversized wedding card. Gifts had already started to arrive, and a little village of boxes had colonized one corner of the apartment.

Keith’s cell phone rang as I took my first sip of tea. I winced. It might be someone from work reporting on a weekend project. Maybe even the worrisome Becca Cunningham.

Stop it, Mallory
.
You’re being irrational.

“Hello, Mother.”

I could tell the call wasn’t good.

“Oh, my God. When? Was she in pain? We’ll be there soon. I love you too.”

“What’s wrong?” I set the mug down too hard, sloshing pale brown liquid over the sides. Hot tea smeared the carefully written names on the seating chart as it spread out in a soppy circle.

“Sylvia. She passed away half an hour ago. It must have been pretty soon after you talked to her. A nurse found her”—his voice broke—“in her bed. She was gone.”

“Oh, Keith.” I jumped up and hugged him, hard.

“I knew this day was coming, but I was sure she’d be here to see us get married.” He crumpled into a chair, hunched over and deflated. Tears beaded in the corners of his dark blue eyes. “I should have listened to you and visited her today. Maybe we could have helped her.”

I leaned down and embraced him. “There might not have been anything we could have done.” I began to cry too, fat drops staining the brown envelope. “She said she had to get off the phone when I called because she had company. I’m sure they would have done something if they could have.”

“Here.” Keith handed me a box of tissues, knocking the big brown envelope to the floor. “What is that?” He began to pick it up, but I beat him to it.

“I’m not sure. There’s no return address. Probably something wedding-related.”

Keith handed me a silver letter opener as he answered his phone again.

“Yes, Mother. Of course I’ll help you with the arrangements. We just need a few minutes to process.”

Just like Helene
. I sniffled back more tears.
She probably can’t wait to put Sylvia into the ground.

Shaking my head, I returned to the contents of the envelope. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. There were pictures, a whole stack of glossy five-by-sevens. The shots were grainy and dark. It appeared to be a person—no, make that two—in a car. My heart caught then accelerated. The car looked an awful lot like Keith’s navy BMW. And one of the people looked an awful lot like Keith. I shuffled through the pictures, and the quality improved, as if the photographer had zoomed in and sharpened the focus. A blond, shining curtain of hair hid the woman’s face. Her dark roots stood out in a severe line against her luminous hair. My throat started to constrict, and I flipped faster through the pile of photos.

“Babe, what’s wrong?” Keith abandoned his phone and made his way across the room in slow motion.

The last photo was crystal clear. It showed Keith in the waning winter sunlight, the hood of his car encrusted in snow. In flagrante, with his mentee Becca Cunningham.

Two days later, I still felt as if I were breathing under water. I was devastated by Keith’s betrayal, but after sleeping for twelve hours, I slogged through the necessary tasks, starting with calling my mother, Carole, to tell her my engagement was over.

“But you’ll end up a spinster.” Her annoyance overrode concern. “You’ll have no one left but divorced men.”

I took in a sharp breath.

“And you’ll run out of time to make me a grandma!” I pictured her leaping out of her chair in her cheery apple-green kitchen in Florida, wringing her dish towels and pacing a well-worn track in the linoleum. I put down the phone, hit my fist into my pillow, and then gingerly placed the phone back next to my ear. She was still going on, gathering steam.

“Just so you know,” I interrupted, “I’m fine.” This silenced her.

“Well, yes. How are
you
taking this, dear?” Her concern for me, once prompted, almost made me crack a smile.

“About time you asked her how she’s coping,” my stepfather said in the background. “Cut her some slack, Carole.”

I enlisted my mom and my best friend, Olivia, to call all three hundred guests and tell them the wedding was off. Imagine my surprise when the Port Quincy Country Club informed me otherwise.

“Mrs. Helene Pierce said the reception is still booked,” the manager said in a timid voice.

“Fat chance. You’ll need the bride, and she won’t be there.”

I shut my cell phone off after the tenth call from Keith, the twentieth from Helene and the fifth from a man claiming to be Sylvia’s lawyer. I refused to talk to any of them. No matter, since my mom and Olivia had the number at the grubby motel I was now hiding in. I’d told my secretary and the three partners I worked for I had a highly contagious disease and couldn’t come to work. They were polite, but I could tell they’d already heard I’d cancelled the wedding. After those humiliating conversations, I sunk into a catatonic state, unable to get out of bed. I hadn’t showered since I’d run off, and I’d been eating from the vending machine at the end of the hallway, watching reruns of
Married With Children
on TBS in the dark.

But today was Sylvia’s funeral, according to the obituary in the Port Quincy
Eagle Herald
. If I could muster up the courage to get out of bed, I should show up and pay my final respects. Even if it meant facing Keith.

I thought back to the moment two days ago when I had realized what the photographs in my hand revealed. After Keith crossed the room, he made a grab for them. I spilled the pile in a glossy fan at his feet. He picked up the photos, then recoiled and dropped them as if they’d burned him when he got a closer look.

“Mallory, it’s not true. I don’t know who sent these, but—”

“Save it, you jerk!” I pushed him away and ran to the bedroom closet, stuffing as much of my life as I could into the large suitcases that had been purchased for our honeymoon in Paris. My hands trembled so hard it was a wonder I packed anything. My wedding dress hung on the closet door, a giant, poufy confection of a ball gown, bulging against the garment bag encasing it. I wanted to tear it to pieces as if I were starring in a slasher film.

Keith stood open-mouthed in the doorway. “You can’t go. You just can’t. We have the wedding. It has to go on. We’ll work things out. Just listen to reason!”

I charged toward him with the two suitcases, and he jumped out of the bedroom doorway when it was clear I was going to run him over.

“Don’t talk to me. Don’t touch me. I don’t ever want to see you as long as I live,” I hissed out in a single breath.

I bent to retrieve the photos. They might be useful someday. I crammed them into the brown envelope, bending some in the process.

“Mallory—”

“I can’t believe I almost married you. Someone”—I waved the envelope—“just saved me from making the biggest mistake of my life. And if I knew who they were, I’d personally thank them.”

With that, I flounced out, Keith hot on my heels. I pushed the elevator button, and he got in, cornering me.

“Just come to your senses and let me explain.”

I grabbed the suitcases and whipped out of the elevator, leaving him trapped as the brass doors clanged shut. It was just the head start I needed. I banged down four flights of stairs to the basement, twisting my ankle in the process, and hopped out the back exit of the apartment building to crouch behind the Dumpster.

I was feeling pretty triumphant, with my adrenaline pumping, like a scorned Charlie’s Angel. Then I realized I didn’t have a getaway car. Keith and I rode downtown together each morning in his car. Until now, I hadn’t needed a vehicle. I funneled every extra dime I made into paying off my law school loans, and I’d barely made a dent.

Swearing, I called a cab service and directed them to pick me up by the Dumpster.

“Just take me to a motel, any motel, out by the airport,” I begged my cabby when he arrived half an hour later. I didn’t want to run into Keith downtown or give him any clues as to my whereabouts.

So, here I was, two days later, licking my wounds in the cocoon of my rented room. The partners I worked for at the firm weren’t happy I’d taken off Monday and today, fake contagious disease or not. News traveled fast around the legal world. I was sure Keith had gone in to work at his firm and his colleagues had ferreted out the news. Not to mention all of my coworkers whom my mother and Olivia had called, performing the grim task of disinviting them from the wedding.

The phone by the bed rang, and I sat up too quickly, hitting my forehead on the bedside lampshade. It was 11
AM
.

“Pull it together, Mallory,” I muttered as I picked up the receiver.

“I’m downstairs. Come help me bring up my stuff.”

Sweet baby Jesus.
It was my little sister.

“Rachel? What are you doing here?” My voice came out as a squeak.

“Mom told me everything. I was going to come to Pittsburgh and help you out before the wedding anyway. . . .”

My heart contracted at the W word.

“. . . and the plane ticket was nonrefundable, so here I am. Come downstairs.” She hung up, and I sank back into the pillows, stunned.

My quiet little refuge was over.
Thanks, Rachel.

Two minutes later, I was awkwardly hugging my sister in the lobby. I hadn’t made any special effort, so she and the desk clerk got to see me in my crusty, going-on-three-days jammies, the flannel magenta ones with the penguin-and-Christmas-tree pattern. My eyes were red and rheumy, my frizzy hair a rat’s nest.

“It’s July. Why are you wearing these?” Rachel held me out at arm’s length, assessing me with her keen green eyes, her treacly fruit perfume nearly knocking me out. “You look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”

“I didn’t have time to pack season-appropriate clothing.” I pulled back and gazed at my sister, aided by the mirror behind the front desk. Like she had any right to critique my outfit.

Rachel was seven years younger and nine inches taller. For her flight from Florida, she’d worn pink velour sweats with
PUSSY CAT
written across her shapely rear in cursive and a silver tank top that showed a healthy amount of midriff below and her round breasts above. A microscopic hoody tied around her narrow waist completed the outfit.

If you squinted hard enough, you could discern we were sisters, but we were very different. Rachel was tall and I was five-one. Rachel got the pretty almond-shaped green eyes; mine were big and brown. Rachel had wavy, honey-kissed hair, and mine was a nondescript sandy brown and impossibly curly when I didn’t flat-iron it into submission. I alternated between slight and chubby, but Rachel had had the physique of a Victoria’s Secret model since she’d turned fourteen.

We had the same raucous laugh and the same freckles, but that was about it. I was a people pleaser, having become an attorney to fulfill my mom’s edict that one of us be a doctor or lawyer. I’d graduated from Carnegie Mellon a year early and gone straight through to law school at Georgetown. Rachel was a rabble-rouser, failing out of school and sporadically returning, doing whatever she pleased, showing up wherever the wind blew her, living her life with the greatest amount of chaos and consternation for our mother and stepdad as possible.

“Keith is a rat, but you’re better off. Mom and Doug send their love.” Rachel appeared genuinely concerned.

I’d managed to convince my parents not to fly up by promising I’d come to Pensacola in a few weeks to heal. I’d asked my mom to tell Rachel not to come either, but she must not have gotten the memo.

“It’s okay. Well, it’s not okay, but someday it will be. Let’s go to my room.”

The desk clerk, a pimply kid of about twenty, was staring open-mouthed at my sister. In a minute, strings of saliva would be hanging down his chin.

“Could you help us?” Rachel cooed, gesturing to a pile of zebra-patterned luggage waiting by the entrance.

“I don’t think he’s a bellhop, Rach. Besides, how much stuff do you have?” I glanced back over to the automatic door for a closer look and did a double take.

“That’s all yours?”

Rachel shrugged as the poor clerk snapped to attention. He loaded her gear onto a flimsy metal luggage cart, where it wavered and threatened to topple over, laden as it was with garish garment bags and suitcases. There was even a hatbox. A hatbox?

With a flick of her purple fingernail, he followed us to the elevator and on to my room.

“Do you have any cash for a tip?” I don’t know why I bothered to ask her.

She gazed at me, batting her eyelashes in contrition.

“Hold on.” I fished a crumpled fiver out of my PJ pocket. “Here you go.”

The clerk was still staring at Rachel as I shoved the cart into the hall and shut the door.

“He wasn’t very helpful when I arrived here, as I recall.”

Rachel slipped off her bejeweled platform flip-flops and plopped down onto the middle of the bed, stretching luxuriously like a cat.

“I’ve been calling your cell, but you didn’t pick up. Now I know why.” She leaned over and turned on my phone, which lit up with dozens of unheard messages.

“Give me that!” I quickly deleted the new messages from Keith and Helene.

Rachel grabbed the phone back and hit play.

“Ms. Shepard? This is Garrett Davies. I’m the executor of Sylvia Pierce’s estate. I need to get in touch with you as soon as possible. Please call me back. This is the sixth message I’ve left.”

“Sounds sexy.” Rachel wiggled her eyebrows.

“I’m done with men. Forever.” I reached for the phone and deleted the message. I didn’t need it, since I had five others just like it.

“I know you feel that way now, but you’ll be all right. These things just take time. Now, what do you have to eat?”

My eyes strayed to the trash can, overflowing with wrappers from the Snickers bars foraged from the vending machine down the hall, undoing the miles of runs I’d put in the last three months to prepare for that damn, cursed wedding.

“Umm . . .” A hot blush warmed my cheeks.

“Let’s get you a shower, then go out to eat. You need real food, and frankly, this isn’t healthy.”

I smiled at my sister. The first genuine one to cross my face in a few days. Back when we were latchkey kids, I had been practically my sister’s only caretaker, as our mom worked double time to get her decorating and staging business off the ground. While Mom was launching her career, I’d sat with Rachel after school, fixing her snacks and asking about her day. It felt odd but sweet to be fussed over by my little sister for a change.

“Actually, I need to get to a funeral. How’d you get here? Do you have a car?”

“I rented one for the next three weeks.”

My eyes narrowed, the warm fuzzy feeling gone. “You rented one, or Mom and Doug did?”

It was my sister’s turn to blush, and I had my answer. There was no way Rachel could afford to rent a car for three weeks on her hodgepodge of part-time jobs. Mom and my stepdad, Doug, had a soft spot for Rachel, funding her misadventures and paying to get her out of scrapes, though they didn’t have a penny to spare now they were retired.

“Fine. Mind if I borrow it?”

“You can’t. Only the person renting can drive it, but I can go to the funeral with you. Who died?” She said this with her characteristic bluntness as she reached for the remote.

“Sylvia. Ke—his grandmother.” I couldn’t even bear to say Keith’s name. I feared I’d break out in hives.

“The really old one? Aw, she was the one you liked.” Rachel got up to paw through one of her suitcases. “That sucks, Mall. Are you sure you’re up for this? Keith and his mom are going to be there.”

“I know. I’m going to hide in the back and wear my Jackie O sunglasses. We can sneak in after it starts. Helene cares too much about appearances to make a scene during a funeral. And he does whatever she wants, so he’ll behave. With any luck, we’ll just have to look at the backs of their heads.” I shuddered at the thought of even that minimal contact.

Rachel applied some red lipstick as if suiting up for battle. “We can pull this off. If you’re really set on going.”

“I owe it to Sylvia.”

“I think I have something to wear to a funeral.”

“Let’s see if it’s appropriate,” I mumbled under my breath.

“What was that?” Rachel continued to dig through her suitcase.

“Nothing. Let’s get ready.”

* * *

We arrived at the Port Quincy First Presbyterian Church five minutes after the funeral began but, for us, right on schedule. My hair was sticking out in a corona around my head, thanks to the ride in Rachel’s rented convertible Mini Cooper.

“I don’t know why we had to leave the top down.” I tried to flatten the hair I’d carefully straightened at the motel.