Weddings Are Murder

by Valerie Wolzien

  WEDDINGS

  ARE MURDER

  Valerie Wolzien

  © Valerie Wolzien 1998

  Valerie Wolzien has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1998 by The Ballantine Publishing Group.

  This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For Elisa Wares,

  a kind and thoughtful editor

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  PROLOGUE

  It was a nightmare.

  The aisle of the church seemed to grow longer with each step. It was darker than usual, almost gloomy. The bouquets of spring flowers decorating the ends of the pews were skimpy and wilted—and the greenery looked remarkably similar to the poison ivy that lined the country lanes in Connecticut—but maybe none of the guests was allergic.

  Susan was beginning to think it had been a mistake to include Clue in the wedding party. The golden retriever seemed to be more interested in sniffing the carpet than in leading the bridal party down the aisle carrying a basket of flowers in her mouth. Maybe that accounted for their slow progress.

  She glanced at her son. Chad was escorting her on his arm, a scowl on his usually cheerful face. Susan nervously tripped on the edge of the taffeta runner and glanced down at the floor. Red Converse high-tops! Why was Chad wearing red Converse high-tops with his tuxedo? Red was not part of the color scheme she and Chrissy had been sweating over for the past few months. What would their guests think?

  She looked around. The pews were overflowing and she didn’t recognize a single face. Her grip on her son’s arm tightened. “Chad,” she whispered urgently. “Who are these people? Your father and I didn’t invite these people!”

  “That’s the groom’s side of the church, Mom. They’re his friends and his family.”

  Susan stared. These people were the invited guests of the man her only daughter was going to marry? They didn’t seem to know how to dress for a formal afternoon wedding. They were … well, they were casual, she told herself—hell, they were downright sloppy, she decided, becoming more than a little upset. And look at that! The groom’s mother was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket with the words born to be bad painted across the back and a skull and crossbones underneath. That certainly did not blend with her delicate color scheme. Had any of her friends noticed? What were Jed’s mother and her parents thinking? What would Kathleen and her family say? She glanced to the right.

  The right half of the church was empty!

  “Chad!” She didn’t bother to whisper this time. “Where is everyone? Where’s our family? Where are the neighbors? Where’s your father’s boss?”

  Her son shrugged. “Guess you finally flipped this time, Mom. Looks like you forgot to mail half of the invitations to Chrissy’s wedding.”

  It was a nightmare. The only thing she could do was wake up.

  ONE

  Susan wandered into her kitchen looking for a cup of coffee and found a roomful of relatives.

  “It doesn’t look like your nap did you much good,” her husband remarked, getting up from the kitchen table and offering her his seat.

  “I had a bad dream,” she muttered, running her hand through her hair as she accepted the steaming mug.

  “Only twenty-six hours until the wedding. Once you start to walk down that aisle, you’ll be able to relax and have fun,” Jed’s mother, Claire, promised, slathering a piece of semolina bread with a thick layer of duck and truffle pâté before popping it in her mouth.

  “I guess you’re right,” Susan said. “Where did all this come from?” she asked her husband, staring at the lavish spread covering her English pine table.

  “Just stuff I found in the refrigerator. Everyone was hungry so I just looked around,” he explained proudly, and looked down at the plate in front of him. “This paste is interesting. I don’t think we’ve had it before, but you really should buy it again. It’s great.” He followed his mother’s example and ate a huge chunk of pâté.

  “Jed, may I speak to you for a minute?” Susan smiled at her mother-in-law and the good-looking gentleman sitting by her side as she spoke. Claire’s companion was enjoying a huge container of caviar.

  “I don’t know how people can stand that stuff,” Susan’s mother commented smugly. “It’s dreadfully fishy and probably costs a fortune. I always think a nice smoked salmon from my fish man would do equally well, and it would be much cheaper.” She gave her daughter a pointed look.

  “We all love caviar, Mother,” Susan said. Although the way Claire’s date was digging into the tin, no one else would be enjoying any today. She tried to make her voice sweeter. “Jed, I really do need to talk to you.”

  “Sure, honey, but …” He had his head in the refrigerator.

  She gave up on sweetness. “Right now, Jed!” She stalked from the room, waiting until they were alone in the hall to continue. “Jed, that pâté should be good,” she insisted as the door swung closed behind them. “It costs almost forty dollars a pound.”

  “You paid forty dollars for that stuff …” he began, in the same half-incredulous, half-angry voice he had been using for the past few months.

  “Jed, your daughter only gets married once. You know I want everything to be perfect!” She offered her standard answer before he finished his standard complaint. “Besides, that’s not what I want to talk with you about. You shouldn’t be serving that food now. It’s supposed to be waiting in the refrigerator until this evening. You’re eating up all the appetizers I was planning to serve to Stephen’s parents before we go to the rehearsal dinner tonight!”

  “I thought the refrigerator was unusually well stocked,” he admitted. “But don’t worry …”

  “Don’t worry? Jed, what am I going to offer Stephen’s parents? I invited them to meet here an hour before we all go over to the church. Jed, we talked about this—it’s on the schedule and everything!” she added, referring to the printed sheets of paper that, for the past month, had been hanging beside the medicine cabinet in the bathroom they shared. Of course, the plans had changed many times, and crossed-out phrases had begun to blend with more recently written words, making them difficult to decipher—but that wasn’t the point now. “Jed, what are we going to do? Everyone’s going to be here and we won’t have anything to serve them. Stephen’s parents will think we’re rude—at the very least.”

  “Maybe Kathleen can help out. She’s in the living room and …”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish. Susan dashed into the living room, barely missing four large boxes stacked in the hallway. “Kathleen! Thank goodness! You’ll never believe what Jed has done! Could you possibly do me a favor?”

  Kathleen Gordon put the object she had been examining back on the mantel. “That’s why I’m here. I figured you might need someone to do last
-minute errands today so I asked Jerry to take the kids to the zoo for the afternoon—he’s been promising to take them for months—and I came on over. What do you need?”

  Susan’s relief was so great that she collapsed on the couch—and leapt up immediately as a sharp pain informed her something was amiss. “What the … ?” She pulled a heavy brass pipe, about a foot long with a ceramic ball on one end, out from underneath her.

  “What is that?” Kathleen asked, sitting down.

  “Mystery Wedding Gift Number Three,” Susan muttered, scowling at it. “One of my great-aunts sent it. The card said she has had one for years and has no idea how she could live without it. But she didn’t mention what she uses it for.”

  “And you have three of them?” Kathleen asked, amazed.

  “No. It’s just one of the three gifts that we can’t identify. There’s this thing, of course.” She waved it in a circle in the air. “Also a set of cast-iron flat pans with quarter-inch high circles set into them. Chad thinks they’re to make identical pancakes, but I can’t imagine anyone being quite so anal retentive. That was Mystery Gift Number Two, and then yesterday a very odd package arrived, marked, ‘Number three of four.’ It contained a bag of large bolts.”

  “And packages one, two, and four weren’t delivered?”

  Susan sighed. “I hope not. Because if they were, they’re lost for sure. And I’d much rather the delivery service made a mistake than someone in this house. Especially since …”

  “Especially since what?”

  “Since the package came from Stephen’s parents. Mr. and Mrs. Canfield.”

  “They do have first names, don’t they?” Kathleen asked.

  “Of course they do. Barbara and Robert. Barbie and Robbie. Barb and Rob. Something along those lines. Do you believe I don’t even know what to call them?”

  Kathleen chuckled. “Is that the only reason you have trouble saying their names?”

  “I know. I’m being silly, aren’t I? I haven’t even met these people and I don’t like them.”

  “But you said Chrissy was so happy when she visited them.”

  “Chrissy had a wonderful time. She loved them. She loved their house. She loved their swimming pool. She loved their weather. I think she would have been happy to stay in California for the rest of her life.”

  “So what does she call them?”

  Susan grimaced. “Mom and Dad.” She noticed the grin on her friend’s face. “Okay,” she said, her lips crinkling into a smile, “I admit it. I’m jealous. I never thought of my only daughter as being part of another family—of calling anyone else Mom.” She leaned against the back of the couch and closed her eyes. “I think I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.”

  “You’ve been saying that for the past three months and you look fine to me. And you only have to hang in there awhile longer. This time tomorrow …” Kathleen glanced at her watch. “What will be happening this time tomorrow?”

  Susan looked at her watch and frowned. “Chrissy’s bridesmaids should be here. They’re supposed to be putting on their makeup and getting into their gowns around now.”

  “Around now? Are you telling me that you didn’t give them their minute-by-minute itinerary?”

  “I’m not that compulsive.” Susan insisted.

  “Not usually, but …”

  “But what? I think I’m being wonderful. Everything I’ve spent months planning is going wrong and I haven’t started screaming yet. I have a house full of guests, more coming for cocktails, and the refrigerator is almost empty.”

  “What happened to all the food the Hancock Gourmet delivered yesterday afternoon?”

  “It’s vanishing as we speak.”

  “All that expensive caviar …”

  “Yes. Jed passed it out in the kitchen as an impromptu lunch while I was napping. His mother is gobbling down the pâté as though it were going out of style, and my mother is complaining about the caviar tasting fishy.” She sighed loudly. “Mothers!”

  Kathleen laughed. “You say that just the way Chrissy does—” Then she added quickly, not wanting to offend her friend, “—and the way my daughter will probably say it when she gets older.”

  “Chrissy’s been complaining about me?”

  “Chrissy is wonderful,” Kathleen insisted. “She knows how hard you’ve worked to make this wedding perfect. She not only knows it—she appreciates it. And that’s not true of many twenty-one-year-olds.”

  “Not many twenty-one-year-olds would become engaged on St. Patrick’s Day and then expect to be married—complete with a large, formal wedding—less than three months later.”

  “What’s so special about St. Patrick’s Day?”

  Susan shrugged. “Green beer?”

  “Somehow Chrissy doesn’t strike me as the green-beer type.”

  “Chrissy doesn’t seem quite as consistent as she used to be,” Susan mused, a worried expression on her face.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, take this wedding for example. Some things about it haven’t surprised me at all. I mean, it’s just like Chrissy to ask a friend from one of her design classes to make her a gown instead of going to Saks and buying one off the rack. It’s creative and original and makes things just a bit more difficult than going the conventional route. It was also her idea to hold the reception at the old Yacht Club—she’s loved that building since she was a child. She used to talk about how she’d like to live there when she grew up. I just hope it isn’t dreary. It’s an awfully dark building.…”

  “There were an amazing number of florists’ vans out front when I passed by. I didn’t know there were that many in Hancock.”

  “I think Erika brought in every truck from every single one of her stores. She and Chrissy have been poring over plans to decorate that place and the church for weeks and weeks. You know, Erika’s been absolutely wonderful. Do you think she and Brett are planning on getting married sometime soon?” Susan asked, momentarily distracted.

  “I have no idea. They do seem pretty inseparable these days. I ran into them at the Inn the other night and they were planning a vacation together.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  “Maybe they were talking about Bermuda like Stephen and Chrissy,” Kathleen suggested. “I love it that they’re going there! Such a traditional place for a honeymoon.”

  “That’s one of the things that bothers me,” Susan burst out. “Chrissy isn’t the type to want to go to Bermuda for her honeymoon. She should be walking the hills of Tuscany or Umbria. Or maybe a romantic little inn in Scotland. Or …”

  “Did Stephen insist on Bermuda?” Kathleen asked gently.

  Susan sighed. “Yes. And having his fraternity brothers as ushers—because they’re all the same height.”

  “None of that sounds so terribly awful to me.”

  “It’s not awful. It’s just not like Chrissy.”

  “She loves him. He’s different from her. She’ll adjust. He’ll adjust. In fact, you could see this marriage as a successful blend of Chrissy’s imaginative, artistic lifestyle and Stephen’s more traditional leanings. Think of it this way, Susan. You’d be more worried if she were marrying a free-spirit potter from RISD than a young man starting work on his MBA at Wharton, wouldn’t you?”

  “I suppose so,” Susan said doubtfully. “I like Stephen, and Jed is nuts about him. It’s just that I worry. I’m not even sure what I worry about.”

  Kathleen patted her friend on the shoulder. “You’re allowed to worry. Your only daughter is getting married tomorrow. You wouldn’t be human if you weren’t at least a little worried.

  “You know what I’d like to do?” Kathleen continued.

  “Go out and buy lots of expensive munchies so Chrissy’s future in-laws will have something to go with the champagne Jed is serving this evening?”

  “In fact, I’d be happy to do that. But could I just get a peek at the wedding gown first? Chrissy’s been talking about it for months and …”
r />   “It’s not here.”

  “Susan, the wedding is tomorrow. Where is it?”

  “I don’t know.” Susan sighed loudly. “That’s just one of the smaller problems. You see, the young woman who agreed to design and make the dress has been studying in Europe her spring semester, so she made the dress over there. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it has been to plan all this—Chrissy and this girl have been airmailing fabric swatches back and forth across the ocean on an almost weekly basis. I thought everything was settled—the drawings were wonderful—and then this young woman just happened to meet a young man who just happened to take her to meet his family in Milan—where she just happened to see this fabric in a store window, fell in love with it, and was inspired to design a different dress. And since then the packets have been FedExed back and forth across the Atlantic like nobody’s business. Chrissy has described this dress endlessly, but I haven’t seen a sketch and I really have very little idea of what it is going to look like and I’m just hoping it’s …” She stopped and glanced down at her watch. “That it’s going through customs at Kennedy Airport right about now, in fact.”

  “How is it going to get here?”

  “The last I heard, Stephen’s best man is supposed to be picking it up and driving like a bat out of hell to Connecticut. I keep thinking of things that might go wrong. The dress getting lost. The plane being delayed. The flight canceled. Hijackers. A bomb. I’m getting a little carried away, aren’t I?”

  “I think so. But knowing you, I’m sure you have an emergency plan ready to go into action.”

  “A rotten one. I pulled my own wedding dress out of the attic.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Bad idea. Chrissy would hate the dress. Remember, I was married in the Sixties. My dress is white cotton with an Empire waist and—would you believe this—little cotton sprigs of daisies sewn around the hem. I carried daisies, too. I felt young and charming. My mother hated the whole look. I think we fought about that right up until I walked down the aisle.” She smiled.