The Chesapeake Diaries Series 7-Book Bundle: Coming HOme, Home Again, Almost Home, Hometown Girl, Home for the Summer, The Long Way Home, At the River's Edge (105 page)

“Eem.” Austin’s word for ice cream.

“After your nap we’ll go for ice cream, ace,” Wade told him. “Right now, have a snack with Aunt Berry.” He turned to Berry. “Would you mind if I tried to make some room in the carriage house for the trailer? I hate to leave it anyplace off the property.”

“If you can do so by tomorrow, dear. The caterers—”

“Dallas told me they’d be here in the morning.” He frowned. “Why do we need tents for the party, anyway?
Why don’t we have the party in here, in the house?”

Berry burned him with The Look. “Seriously, Wade? Picture several hundred people—most of them strangers to me—running amok in this house.”

“I doubt if Dallas’s friends would be running a—”

“My house, my rules. No strangers in the house. Which is why I insisted on hiring security for the weekend.” She turned back to the task of preparing yogurt sundaes for herself and Austin.

“Security? As in guards?”

“Absolutely. You haven’t been in the business, dear, so I forgive your naïveté. With the guests will come the reporters—print and TV—and with them will come hordes of paparazzi and every form of gatecrasher you could possibly imagine. I won’t have those people trampsing all over my property.”

“Do you mean trampling?”

“No, I mean
trampsing
, as in ‘trampsing about.’ ”

Wade smiled. It must be a Berryism. “So how do you intend to keep the interlopers out?”

“Invitations must be shown at the door, and they will be scrutinized for authenticity and the names checked against the final list. No invitation? Name not on the list? No admittance.”

“How do you determine whether or not the invitations are authentic?”

Berry smiled. “Dallas personally numbered them in a most discreet manner. On the back of the invitations there’s an ink sketch of the Chesapeake with a boat heading toward the sunset. The side of the boat bears a number. That’s the number of the invitation.”

“What about the river?” he asked. “Have you
thought about people who might try to sneak in from that direction?”

“Yes, dear, but there will be security around the dock area.” Berry smiled. “Besides, if anyone tries to sneak in from the river, their wet clothes will give them away.”

“Seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to have a party.” Wade got a fork and stabbed a piece of pineapple. “I’d never have a party if I had to go to all that trouble.”

“When you’re world famous for making your beer, and people are clamoring for your attention, we’ll have this discussion again.”

“Don’t hold your breath.” He ate the pineapple and went out to the carriage house.

Once inside, he started taking a mental inventory of its contents. Old tractors, once used for cutting the grass, he supposed, before Berry hired a lawn-care service. A couple of canoes, a rowboat, garden implements, old sleds, and several pairs of old ice skates—men’s and women’s—that hung upon one of the vertical beams. Old furniture—chairs, tables, Victorian-era settees that had been stripped of their cushions and upholstery—sat in stacks throughout the large space. It was a stunning array of accumulated stuff that no one had used in at least a quarter century if not more.

“I don’t know what she’s keeping all this stuff for,” Wade muttered as he maneuvered around.

Toward the back wall he found some empty space, enough to contain a lot of the items closer to the door. He debated whether it would be easier to simply move the front items to the back or move everything back by ten feet. In the end, given the amount of time
he had to work with, he’d carry the canoes and roll some of the wheelbarrows—really, Berry? Five of them?—and hopefully, he’d have enough room to back the trailer into the carriage house.

He’d stood one of the canoes up against the wall and was returning for a second when his shirt was snagged by a skate blade hanging from one of the posts. As he carefully disengaged the fabric from the blade, he noticed the carving on the post:
A B C
. Funny, he thought. Was someone practicing writing the alphabet or practicing their skill with a knife?

It took him most of the afternoon, but he succeeded in clearing the way with room to spare. He was in the process of detaching the trailer from the back of the Jeep when Berry showed up with Austin at her side.

“I hope you didn’t break anything,” she said as she peered inside the building. “Or bury things so that I can’t get to them if I need something.”

“Berry, when was the last time you needed something out of there?” he asked.

“Immaterial.” She dismissed the thought with a wave of her hand. “If I want something, I need to be able to get to it.”

“If you want something that you can’t get to, I’ll get it for you,” he promised.

“Easy for you to say, since you won’t be around.”

“When you need something from the carriage house that you can’t find, I’ll come back and find it for you.”

“Damn right you will.”

He was about to ask Berry if she’d learned her alphabet
by carving letters on the post, but Austin interrupted by reminding him of the promise of ice cream after his nap.

“Let me get cleaned up and I’ll take you,” Wade told him.

“I’ll come along, if you don’t mind,” Berry said. “I’d love to see what Steffie has this week. You know she’s making something special for Dallas’s party, and Grant says …”

Berry chatted all the way to the kitchen and all the way into town and while Wade parked the Jeep in the big lot behind Scoop. Something about all the upcoming social events must have loosened her tongue, Wade thought as they walked into the shop, because he couldn’t remember her ever talking so much.

“… and so I told Olivia that I thought the pumpkins were a lovely idea.” Berry tapped Wade on the arm. “Don’t you agree, dear?”

Wade nodded. “I do.”

“You fake. You haven’t heard a thing I’ve said since you locked up the carriage house.” Berry walked past him and went directly to the cooler. “Well, then, Austin, what shall it be today …?”

Wade held Austin up to the counter while trying to see into the back room when someone, abruptly, closed the door from the inside.

“What looks good to you, Ms. Townsend?” Tina asked.

“Everything looks good, Tina. It always does.” Berry scanned the contents of the case. “I think the young master here will have a small scoop of chocolate in a dish. I’ll have the maple pecan.” She turned to Wade. “And for you, dear?”

“I’ll go with the chocolate.”

After they’d been served and Wade was at the cash register, he asked, “Is Steffie around?”

“She’s tied up right now,” Tina replied without looking up from the register. “Did you need to speak with her?”

“Just wanted to say hi.”

“I’ll let her know.” Tina handed Wade his change with a smile.

“Thanks.”

Odd, he thought, when he stopped in the following afternoon, that she was still tied up. He made sure to include Olive Street on his nightly run, but there were no lights on in Stef’s house. Odder still, she was not available the following day when he took Cody and Austin for ice cream.

“Is Stef in?” he asked Claire.

“She’s in but she doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Claire told him.

“Could you just tell her that Wade was asking for her?”

“Sure.” Claire smiled.

She was busy again on Thursday when he called and left a message, and she wasn’t around Friday after dinner, either. Too busy to return a call? Too busy to stick her head out the door and just say hi? What the hell?

He almost caught up with her on Saturday. He was in the kitchen giving Austin lunch when he looked out the window and saw her talking to one of the caterers. He watched as several of the young guys on the crew helped her unload coolers from the back of her car and place them into one of the portable freezers
on two of their trucks. He wanted to run out to catch her before she left, but by the time Austin had finished eating, she was gone.

It wasn’t until he was getting dressed for the party that it occurred to him that she was avoiding him. He tried to dismiss the thought, but it wouldn’t leave. Why would she be annoyed with him? It wasn’t as if he …

He paused, thinking back to the previous Saturday night. Forgetting for a moment that he was acutely aware that he hadn’t seen Steffie since he’d closed the car door and watched her drive away that night, he went over the scene in the parking lot. The chitchat. The embrace. The kissing before his conscience got the best of him and reminded him not to start something he wasn’t going to be around to finish. What, he wondered as he looked out the window and saw the first of Dallas’s guests arrive, had been wrong with that?

Steffie could hear the band from the street, and it was really rocking. She wondered what the neighbors must be thinking. But of course most of the neighbors had known Dallas since she was a girl and were probably all partying just as she would be in another moment or two.

It was so odd, she thought as she passed through security, to see so many people standing around outside Berry’s fence on River Road, many with cameras trying to catch a glimpse of this actor or that actress. A well-known entertainment-show hostess interviewing the arrivals apparently thought that Steffie was “somebody,” as she’d momentarily attempted to interview her before realizing the mistake. The crowd of locals had booed when the microphone was turned from Stef to a famous director who was just alighting from his limo.

Times like this served as a reminder that, as much as Dallas fit into St. Dennis, she was one of them only because she chose to be.

The first person Stef recognized when she walked down to the tent was Grace.

“Hi, Miss Grace.” Steffie waved. “Are you here as a friend of the family or as a reporter for your paper?”

“Both.” She leaned toward Steffie and confided, “Dallas left word at the door that I was to be allowed to bring in my camera. I don’t believe anyone else is being permitted.”

“I think you may be right. Dallas didn’t want a lot of candid shots popping up on the Internet. I know Grant has his camera because he’s asked me to take a picture when he asks Dallas to—” Steffie tried to stop herself from letting the cat out of the bag, but it was already too late. She tried to cover by adding, “When he surprises Dallas with a special gift.”

But Grace was having none of it.

“Oh, my, is Grant thinking about proposing tonight?”

“I could just shoot myself,” Steffie mumbled.

“No, no, dear. Not to worry. I won’t say anything.” Grace laughed.

“Thank you, Miss Grace. Grant would just kill me if he got word of this.” Steffie gave Grace’s arm an affectionate squeeze.

“Oh, I’ve kept more secrets for more people in this town than anyone could ever imagine,” Grace said.

“Well, then, we just added one more.” Steffie took two glasses of champagne from a passing tray and handed one to Grace. “Here’s to the keeper of the secrets.”

“I’ll have just a sip to accept the honor.” Grace barely touched her lips to the rim of the glass. “I need to stay sharp to get lots of good shots tonight.”

“I’m sure you will.” Steffie glanced around the crowd that milled about the lawn and under the one
big tent that the caterer opted for instead of the several smaller tents they’d originally planned on having. At the last minute, a tent they felt would be large enough to hold the entire group was found to be available from another caterer in Annapolis and was borrowed for the occasion.

“It certainly is festive, isn’t it?” Grace nodded to the scene under the tent, where the band was playing, a few couples were dancing, and dozens of round tables for ten were draped in brown cloths and decked with flowers in shades of purple and orange and touches of red. “It’s just beautiful. I think Olivia has outdone herself with the flowers. I’ll have to seek her out and compliment her on her work.”

“She always does beautiful work. I love to walk past her shop and just look in the windows and at the displays out front. It always picks up my spirits.”

“Oh, look, there are Vanessa and Grady. Don’t they make a stunning couple?” Grace pointed them out in the crowd.

“They do,” Steffie agreed.

“I must say, though, that you look quite stunning, too, dear. That shade of green is so lovely with your coloring.”

“Thank you.” Steffie pushed back the shrug she was wearing to show off the thin straps of the dress. “I bought this from Vanessa’s shop, but I wasn’t thinking about how cool it would be tonight, so I had to add the shrug. I hate to cover up the top of the dress because it’s so pretty, but I hated the thought of shivering all night even more.” Steffie continued to scan the crowd from her vantage point near the house. “There’s Barbara.” She noticed the bookseller
in the crowd. “I know she was looking forward to this. She said she came to a lot of garden parties here when Berry was younger.”

“Oh, yes, I remember. Berry was quite the social butterfly back then.” Grace nodded. “She was every bit the hostess. Back in the day, it wasn’t at all unusual to have Hollywood types about. Speaking of which, isn’t that Cindy Sims, the actress?”

“Where?” Stef squinted. “Oh, over there near the tent. Yes, that’s her. Everyone says she’s the next big thing.”