Slay it with Flowers (17 page)

Sensing my irritation she lapsed into baby talk. “I’m sowwy, Abs. I still wub you.”

Wub
wasn’t exactly what I was feeling for her at that moment.
Stwess
was more like it.

Around two thirty that afternoon, as I was pouring refills of vanilla-flavored coffee for a table of chattering ladies, I happened to glance out the bay window and see a slender boy standing beside my Vette. He appeared to be in his early teens and was dressed in gray sweatpants and hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled up, an odd choice for a hot summer day.

I watched closely as he leaned in for a closer look, as if he were checking out the dash. It was something people often did when they saw a snazzy convertible. I’d done it myself. It was one of the drawbacks of leaving the top down. But when I saw him reach inside, I put down the coffeepot, slipped out of the parlor, and dashed for the door. Looking is fine, but no one touches my Vette.

“Hey!” I called from the sidewalk. “Get away from my car!”

I figured he’d jump back and look around in guilty surprise. Instead, he calmly put his hand down by his side and walked quickly toward the courthouse, keeping his back toward me. I hurried across the street to check out my yellow baby, but there was no apparent damage.

Because I’d once had my fuel line cut by a deranged male, I got down on my bare knees, placed my palms on the paved street, and peered underneath the car. Fortunately, nothing appeared to be cut or leaking. Maybe I was just being paranoid.

I got back to the shop just as two rush orders came in. One was particularly challenging, a floor arrangement in a seaside theme. Lottie and I brainstormed that one and finally came up with an idea. We filled an aquarium with sand and seashells, then I drove up to the lake and cut a selection of ornamental dune grasses that grew along the roads, added blue bachelor’s buttons to represent the sky, bright anemone for the sea, and tufts of goldenrod and wild yellow daisies for the sun, and voilà! Our masterpiece was finished.

By four o’clock business had slowed to a crawl and the square looked like a ghost town, probably due to the soaring temperature and high humidity. New Chapel residents didn’t cope well with extreme temperatures. If tumbleweed grew in our area, even it would stay home.

At four forty-five I called it quits, sent the ladies home, and was just about to lock up when I again had that odd sensation of being watched. Instantly I turned, scanning the cars in the street and the people around the square, but didn’t see anyone paying particular attention to me.

Suddenly, someone called, “Wait! Oh, please, wait!”

I glanced to my left and saw a well-dressed, thirtysomething woman hurrying up the sidewalk carrying a child-sized, green wooden wheelbarrow. “I’m having a dinner party tonight on my deck and I need an outdoorsy decoration,” she said, wiping her damp forehead with the back of her hand. “Would you whip up something for me and put it in this?”

It was a great antique barrow and I could imagine all kinds of fun things to do with it, but I didn’t dare walk into the country club late, not with Pryce and family there to cluck their tongues at me. “I’m really sorry, but I have a dinner date.”

“I’ll pay you twice what it’s worth. Just please help me.”

Double payment. Sweet. It would pay for a pair of sexy heels to offset the horrid bridesmaid dress.

I invited her back to the workroom to get her opinion on what I had in mind—wild daisies, pink dianthus, and blue forget-me-nots, with sprigs of mountain grass drooping like a waterfall and green ivy spiraling down the sides. She thought it sounded perfect, so I set to work.

Her name was Elizabeth Bentley, I soon discovered. She and her husband had moved to town a year ago to teach at the university. She was throwing the dinner for other profs and their wives, which was a great opportunity for me to promote my work. And because I was being accommodating, she decided on the spot to permanently switch her business to Bloomers.

“It’s marvelous!” Elizabeth gushed when I’d finished. “I can’t thank you enough. How much do I owe you?”

If there were any exclamations better than those three, I didn’t know about them. I did a quick calculation and named my price. She paid in cash and didn’t even flinch as she counted out the bills. I wrapped floral paper around the barrow and carried it to the door for her.

“Thanks again, Abby,” she said. “I’ll tell everyone I know to come here.”

Okay, there was an exclamation better than the first three, and it was music to my ears. But now I had only one hour to drive home, make myself presentable, and get to the club.

Quickly, I cleaned the mess on the worktable, grabbed my purse, set the alarm, and locked the door. As I turned to go to my car, I caught a sudden movement in my peripheral vision. I turned my head and scanned the sidewalk to my right, but all I saw was a piece of newspaper being carried along by a hot breeze. I crossed the street and was about to open my car door when my cell phone rang. I dug in my purse and flipped open the phone.

“Abby, this is Bill Bretton. Just wanted to let you know I took a look at the Emperor’s Spa this afternoon, and I have to agree with you. It doesn’t look legitimate.”

I leaned against the Vette and put one finger in my ear to block out a particularly noisy truck rumbling past. “What do you think about doing an exposé?” I asked loud enough for him to hear me.

“I’ll have to check with my boss first, but I’d sure love to poke around a bit and see what’s going on there. You say you have photos? Can I stop by the shop on Monday and have a look at them?”

“Absolutely. If I’m not there, ask for Lottie—only Lottie. The photos are in my top desk drawer.”

I called the salon’s number and gave Carrie the news.

“That’s terrific, Abby. I really appreciate your help. But please be careful. I get really bad vibes from next door.”

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “They don’t know where I live.”

I glanced at my shop across the street and saw the hooded youth I had seen earlier staring into one of Bloomer’s bay windows. Just before another truck rumbled by he turned to gaze straight at me, as if he knew I was watching. But it wasn’t a boy’s face. It was a wrinkled old man’s face, the same one I had seen peering at me from the window of the Emperor’s Spa. As before, under the intensity of his hostile glare, a chill slithered up my spine.

When the big vehicle had passed, the old man was gone, not a trace of him anywhere.

“Don’t worry,” I assured myself again as I climbed into the Vette. “He doesn’t know where I live.”

D
inner at the country club was at seven o’clock, as usual, but instead of it being just my family—a group that normally included my two brothers Jonathan and Jordan, their wives Portia and Kathy, occasionally my niece Tara, my parents, and me—I also had the Osbornes to contend with, a number that now included Jillian, who already considered herself an Osborne. She had even gone so far as to have her Ralph Lauren towels monogrammed with big satin
O
’s. In fact, Jillian had had so many towels personalized over the last five years that she was on a first-name basis with the ladies at the Bloomingdale’s monogram counter.

Because I was not up to any more questions about my legs, I had put on the lightest pair of slacks I owned, a beige linen that I rarely wore only because I looked crumpled enough without purposely trying. I had lucked out to find a clean, short-sleeved navy sweater in my closet, and after hastily applying a lip and cheek stain—there was no covering those freckles anyway, so why bother trying?—and running a comb through my hair, I was off in my Vette, top down, radio tuned to light jazz because I was in that kind of mood.

I arrived at the last minute, hoping to avoid seeing Pryce and his family for as long as possible. I had armed myself with antihistamines so I wouldn’t scratch, anti-itch lotion in case the antihistamines failed, and the knowledge that no matter how bad things got, being married to Pryce would have been worse.

As I walked across the parking lot I saw my mother pull her van into a handicapped spot near the front door, so I veered left to greet my parents. My father opened his door and a platform automatically slid forward to lower his wheelchair to the pavement.

“Here’s my baby,” he said cheerily. I bent to hug him, inhaling that familiar Old Spice scent that always made me feel safe. I got a peck on the cheek and an outfit inspection from my mother. She didn’t remark on it, which meant I had passed. But she couldn’t resist straightening the charm dangling from a skinny silver chain around my neck. At least she hadn’t licked her palm to smooth my hair.

“Have your brothers arrived?” she asked.

I pointed out their Jags and then spotted Pryce’s BMW just pulling into the lot. “Hey, let’s get inside,” I said, starting toward the door. “There’s a storm coming.”

My parents tilted their heads upward, searching the crystal blue sky for that dark cloud, when it was actually stepping out of the Beemer that very moment.

“Coming?” I called, waving them toward me like a policeman directing traffic.

Too late. They spotted him.

“Oh, look, here comes Pryce!” my mother said excitedly, forming a reception line.

Gritting my teeth, I walked back to stand dutifully beside my father as Pryce played the role of gentleman-of-the-year. He was dressed in his usual preppy mode: brown tasseled loafers, gray flannel slacks, white shirt with button-down collar, and despite the heat, a marine blue sweater draped with studied casualness over his shoulders. It was a dated look. Or maybe it was Pryce who was dated. I hung on to that thought.

“Good to see you both,” he said, putting on a smarmy smile. “You’re looking well, Mr. Knight. Mrs. Knight, you’re as beautiful as ever. What about those Cubs? Think they’ll take the division this year?”

He nodded in my direction once, but other than that, politely ignored me. When his parents pulled in, he went to meet them, and I hustled my parents inside before I had to endure more of the same from them.

“You’re always rushing me,” my mother complained.

My father reached back to pat my hand as I pushed his wheelchair into the restaurant. “Maureen, it’s painful for Abby to be around Pryce. Imagine how you would have felt if I had dropped
you
two months before we were married.”

“If you had dropped me,” my mother said, an impish twinkle in her eye, “
you
would be the one feeling the pain.”

As we crossed to the window side of the room, I was surprised to see Onora there, since this was a family-only event. She was sitting across from Jillian at the long table listening to my cousin rattle on nonstop. Like Jillian, she wore a chic black outfit and, to look at her, one would think she was her normal, bored self. But her left hand was doubled into a fist on the table and her right hand was wrapped around her knife so tightly that her knuckles were white. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a trickle of blood run down her wrist. If anyone was in pain
that
night, it was Onora. But was it from grief, or guilt?

I managed to snag a chair on Jillian’s left, not that I had a burning desire to sit beside my cousin, but so that I could quietly question her about Onora’s behavior since Wednesday night. I was relieved to see Pryce take the chair on the other side of Claymore, on Jillian’s right, and his parents sit at the far end. My brothers and their wives filled the opposite side of the table, with pale Portia ending up next to the bloodless Onora. It was a good match.

My niece Tara had a babysitting job, lucky her, and had escaped the weekly ordeal. My mother sat on my left, with my father at the end of the table to accommodate his wheelchair.

The meal started with a toast to the soon-to-be-wed couple, made, of course, by Pryce, who thought himself a witty orator and proved to everyone that he was wrong. It was the highlight of my evening.

“To my brother and his lovely fiancée,” he began, holding his wineglass high, “two people about to embark on the high seas of life, captain and first mate—”

I assumed he knew that Jillian would be captaining that ship.

“—sailing through troughs and tempests, births and deaths—”

At the word
death
Onora paled and several others sucked in their breaths hard enough to cause the tablecloth to shudder. But did that stop Pryce?

“—cruising starboard to port to that final sunset on the distant horizon . . .”

He stopped, his words hanging in midair, apparently having run out of sailing references. It took a moment for people to realize he was done—or for them to wake up—then everyone took a sip and sat back with sighs of relief. Onora tilted her head back and drained her glass. At that rate, she wouldn’t be in pain for long.

As the bread baskets were passed, I whispered to Jill, “How is Onora?”

“Quiet.”

“She’s always quiet.”