Weddings Are Murder

by Valerie Wolzien

  “That’s not why I’m here,” Susan said honestly, suddenly remembering the goal of her mission. “I mean, I did want to see how the decorating was coming. And it’s always fun to look at the caterer’s setup. But actually I have to go look for Chrissy’s wedding dress. It was supposed to have been delivered here. I think,” she added less certainly, remembering Chrissy’s call.

  “You had the store deliver her wedding dress to the Yacht Club?”

  “Not a store. It’s actually being flown in from Italy—”

  “Heavens. From Italy? At the last minute? Susan, you’ve been to Italy. It’s a beautiful country, but so disorganized. You must know about the strikes they’re always having. And the dress isn’t here yet? Don’t you think you’re cutting this a little close?”

  “Believe me … Oh, damn this thing,” Susan cursed as she fished around in her purse for the ringing phone.

  “Hello? Oh, Chrissy! I’m so glad you called back. Don’t hang up until you tell me about … What? Are you sure? That’s not possible! Yes, I know, but … Well, honey, I don’t think … Are you sure? Then … But … I … Chrissy! Don’t you dare hang up until I …” Susan looked down at the silent phone in her hand. “I don’t believe it.”

  “I gather she hung up.”

  “Yes. I don’t believe it,” Susan repeated, flipping the phone closed, putting it down on the zinc-topped table in the middle of the room and scrounging around in her purse once again.

  “Something’s wrong,” Kelly guessed.

  “Chrissy’s fiancé’s parents seem to have disappeared.”

  “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “No, they were supposed to be picked up at the airport and delivered to Hancock, but according to the limousine driver, they never appeared.”

  “Were they on the plane?” Kathleen stood in the open doorway, her arms full of silky white lilies.

  “Oh, Kathleen, I was wondering where you were. Chrissy called and—”

  “And said the Canfields have disappeared. I know, I heard you telling Kelly. Is there anything you want me to do?”

  “Chrissy wants me to call Brett and ask him to find out if they were on the flight. Do you think he could do that?”

  “He could try, but airlines usually don’t give out that information. They will tell you if someone bought a ticket, but not if they were actually on the plane.”

  “But the police—”

  “All Brett can do is try,” Kathleen repeated. “Why don’t you go upstairs and ask him?”

  “He’s here?”

  “Upstairs with Erika.”

  Susan headed for the wide stairway which connected all three floors of the Yacht Club.

  “Susan, be careful,” Kathleen called out. “There are piles of stuff on the landing at the top of the stairway! You don’t want to trip and get hurt right before the wedding …”

  Both Kelly and Kathleen were on their way to the stairway before the echo of the crash had vanished.

  Susan was sprawled in the middle of a pile of boxes. “I’m fine. I’m fine,” she insisted, before anyone asked any questions. “But I don’t know about these things.”

  “No problem. That stuff was all waiting to be loaded back into the vans,” Erika assured her. “Just empty flower cans, spare greens, frogs, and stuff like that.”

  “You’re damn lucky you didn’t break your neck,” Brett said dourly, joining the group that had gathered around Susan.

  “Brett, I was looking for you!” Susan cried out. “The Canfields are missing!”

  “Aren’t they the groom’s parents?” Erika asked.

  “Funny, I thought it was the groom who was supposed to be shy about appearing at his own wedding,” Brett said.

  Susan rolled her eyes. Why men she would have considered modern and somewhat liberated seemed to think it was perfectly acceptable to make sexist jokes about weddings … “The limo driver told Chrissy that they didn’t show up at the airport. I was wondering if you could find out if they missed their flight.”

  “Where are they coming in from?” Brett asked.

  “California. They live in the Santa Clara Valley.… I guess they were flying out of San Francisco. At least that’s where Chrissy flew to when she visited them.”

  “Hey, is Mrs. Henshaw still up there?” someone yelled up the stairway.

  “Yes, I’m here. Who wants me?”

  “Your daughter.”

  “Chrissy! Chrissy! I’m up here,” Susan yelled.

  “No, she’s not here. She’s on the line. I think you left your phone on the table downstairs.…” A young man dressed in the unmistakable uniform of a chef jogged up the steps, Susan’s cell phone in his hand.

  “Oh …” Susan reached for the phone. “Chrissy, don’t you dare hang up until … Oh, thank goodness! Where were they? What? They … What? Chrissy, they were going to come for cocktails before the reception, so what … ? Chrissy!”

  “She hung up on you again?”

  “She hung up on me again.”

  “But it sounds like the Canfields have arrived,” Kathleen said.

  “Yes. They came in on an earlier flight and rented a car at the airport. Chrissy said something about a convertible.… But that doesn’t matter. Apparently they’ve been in town for a few hours.”

  “Well, it sounds like everything is just fine,” Erika offered.

  “No, it isn’t!” Susan protested. “Chrissy is with her future father-in-law and they’re going to be heading for some art gallery in Greenwich …”

  “Where is Stephen’s mother?” Kathleen asked.

  “I don’t know, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Mr. Canfield is supposed to be coming over to the house for drinks before the rehearsal and Chrissy didn’t even give me a chance to tell her the time …”

  “She knows the time,” Erika said. “She even has a little printed schedule of the entire weekend tucked in her wallet.”

  “Wow! You are more organized than I thought!” Kathleen cried.

  “I didn’t print out a schedule,” Susan protested, wishing, in fact, that she had done just that.

  “Her fiancé did,” Erika explained. “Chrissy showed it to me. She seemed to be very proud of it, in fact.”

  “Chrissy? Likes being on a schedule?” This didn’t sound like the harum-scarum daughter Susan had been nagging to and fro for years.

  “She’s growing up,” Kathleen suggested, knowing what Susan was thinking.

  “Sure. I guess so, but—”

  “Did she mention the dress?” Kathleen asked.

  “No. And I didn’t see it downstairs. Maybe …” Susan looked around the large room as though hoping to spy a mannequin dressed in white silk materialize out of the ozone.

  “I didn’t see it on this floor,” Kathleen added.

  “No one has delivered a dress since I’ve been here,” Erika said. “You can ask the kids I’ve got helping me, but they’re pretty responsible. I think they would have mentioned a delivery to me right away.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “But, on the other hand, we’ve all been pretty busy. A deliveryman might have dropped it off and no one would have noticed.”

  Susan closed her eyes. “It was the best man who dropped it off. And it could be anywhere.”

  “Look, let’s go through this place systematically,” Kathleen suggested. “Then, if we don’t find it, at least we’ll know one place it isn’t.”

  “Yeah, because if it isn’t here, it could be almost any place in the world,” Susan said. “You don’t think the best man decided to try to take it to my house, do you?”

  “We don’t even know it isn’t here,” Kathleen pointed out.

  “And we don’t have that much time to look,” Susan said. “I have to get to the hairdresser and you—”

  “I’m going to go find the best appetizers in the state and buy them all for you,” Kathleen said. “Don’t worry. But first, let’s go look for that dress.”

  �
��Fine. I’ll check out the third floor and you—”

  “I’ll go down and we’ll meet back here,” Kathleen said.

  “And I’ll search this floor,” Erika added, as the other two women hurried off to the stairs.

  Susan scurried up the wide wooden stairway to the third floor of the Yacht Club. Three distinct areas had been planned for Chrissy’s reception. The main floor was covered with tables, and dinner would be served there. The ground floor was for drinks and dancing. And the third floor was where dessert and coffee would be served (after the cake was cut by the bride and groom below). Like the other floors, this large room opened onto a balcony which hung over the water of Long Island Sound. (Erika and Chrissy hoped the metallic balloons that lined the three balcony ceilings would send the doves, pigeons, and seagulls who called the place home on a short vacation.) There were restrooms on one side of the room and a stone fireplace set in an inglenook on the other. The shiny oak floor was covered with an antique Samarkand. The carpet was covered with lots of comfortable upholstered couches, grouped into seating areas.

  Two young men from Fabulous Food were busy tinkering with a large Italian espresso maker in one corner of the room when Susan arrived. They were surrounded by cardboard boxes, none of them the size or shape to hold a full-length gown. The young men turned toward her and Susan smiled weakly.

  “Have either of you seen … ? Oh, thank heavens, it’s here!” Susan was so glad to see the large plastic dress bag that she swooped down and almost embraced its crinkly surface.

  Then she realized what a mistake she was making. The plastic was old and ripped. And it was too short and skimpy to hold a wedding dress.

  “Uh, that’s my tux, lady.”

  She looked up at a young man whose embarrassed face seemed vaguely familiar.

  “I know you,” he cried. “You’re Chad’s mother, aren’t you? Your husband coached my soccer team when I was in junior high. That’s my tuxedo you’re hugging, Mrs. Henshaw.”

  Susan looked down at the bundle in her arms. “I … uh, I thought it was something else.”

  “I’m working here for Chrissy’s wedding,” he explained. “This is an internship for me. I’m studying at the French Culinary Institute in the city. I brought my tux to change into tomorrow afternoon. The tux you have in your hands,” he explained.

  Susan dropped the garment bag onto the couch. “You haven’t happened to see another bag like this around anywhere, have you? Well, not exactly like this. Big enough to hold a gown.” And, hopefully, in a lot better shape, she added to herself.

  “No, but there’s a huge box in the ladies’ room. I suppose it might have a dress in it. But it’s probably not what you’re looking for. It was air-freighted from somewhere in Italy.…”

  The door of the ladies’ room was closing behind Susan before his final words were out of his mouth.

  FOUR

  “So it isn’t there either,” Erika said, looking up as Susan walked slowly down the stairway a few minutes later. “Don’t worry. I’m sure it will turn up.”

  “Yeah,” Susan agreed almost absentmindedly. “I suppose it will.”

  “You took so long I was ready to come up and see if you needed help,” Erika added.

  “I was … just talking with the young men up there. One of them used to be on a soccer team Jed coached,” Susan explained.

  “You stopped to chat?” Kathleen had a puzzled expression on her face.

  “He’s a nice young man,” Susan muttered.

  “Yeah, I was up there with them earlier this morning. Good kids.” Brett Fortesque had rejoined them.

  “Brett, I don’t suppose you saw anyone carrying a large box or bag earlier?” Kathleen asked. “Chrissy’s wedding dress is missing.”

  “No, but I could ask around.”

  “Kathleen, there’s no reason to bother Brett about something like this,” Susan interrupted. “I think we can handle it ourselves. In fact,” she added, perking up a bit, “we should get going right now.”

  “Whatever you say,” Kathleen agreed, starting for the door. She still wore a puzzled expression.

  Susan muttered a good-bye or two and followed her friend, almost running into Kathleen when the other woman stopped abruptly once they were alone together.

  “So what was that all about?”

  Susan looked blank. “What do you mean?”

  “Look, you leave the room in a panic about the wedding dress and you come back in some sort of trance, almost uninterested in the dress. What is going on?”

  Susan glanced back over her shoulder at the closed door and then pulled Kathleen farther away from it. “You won’t believe what I found,” she whispered.

  Kathleen looked at her friend intently. “Tell me.”

  “There’s a body. A dead body,” she added, when Kathleen didn’t respond.

  Kathleen was silent for a moment before asking the next logical question. “Whose body?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen her before.” Susan frowned. “I’m sure about that. I may forget names, but I recognize faces. She’s a complete stranger.”

  “Where did you find this woman’s body? What did those kids upstairs say? Why didn’t you tell Brett, or call an ambulance, or … Susan, let go! You’re hurting me!”

  Susan loosened her grip on Kathleen’s wrist. “Kathleen! No one must know about this! No one!”

  “Susan, are you nuts? You find a dead woman and you don’t tell anyone …”

  “No one else must know. She’s hidden—”

  “You hid the body?”

  “I didn’t hide her body. Someone else hid her body. I just found her!” Susan looked back over her shoulder again. “Look, let’s just get away from here and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Kathleen frowned and thought for a moment. “No, I’m not leaving. It will be too difficult to explain to Brett why we did that. We can talk in my car for a bit—it’s private, and Brett might understand that you were so overcome with shock that you needed a few minutes to calm down before you reported this to him—I hope.”

  Susan had other plans, but she hurried back to the Jaguar with Kathleen.

  “So where did you find this woman?” Kathleen asked, when they were seated in her car.

  “In the ladies’ room on the third floor. She was lying in Chrissy’s dress box. On the couch. That is, the box is on the couch and the woman is in the box. You see,” she added, realizing she wasn’t explaining anything very clearly, “I went into the ladies’ room looking for Chrissy’s dress. And I was thrilled when I saw a huge cardboard box on the chaise longue in there. It was big enough for a dress—for two or three dresses, in fact—was addressed to Chrissy, and had been air-freighted from Milan, Italy. I assumed it was the dress, of course.”

  “Of course. Was it sealed?”

  “Well, it had been taped shut, but someone had already cut the tape. There was twine tied around it in two places. I untied it.” She stopped.

  “So you untied the twine and opened the box.”

  “Yes. And found this woman lying inside.”

  “I gather she didn’t die of natural causes.”

  Susan thought for a moment. “I can’t imagine that she did. I didn’t look all that carefully—I didn’t touch her or anything. I just assumed someone killed her here and then put her in the box.…”

  “Now wait a second. How do you know that this poor woman didn’t die in Italy? And then her body, which was to be shipped back here to her family, was misdirected here?”

  “The box is addressed to Chrissy in care of the FedEx office at Kennedy Airport. Kathleen, do you think it could have been accidentally mislabeled or something?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “But if she was killed in Italy, wouldn’t she have been …” Susan paused. “What’s the word … preserved before she was shipped?”

  “You mean embalmed. I would assume so.”

  “She doesn’t look like a body ready for a funeral. She
’s pretty pale and all.”

  “Believe me, embalming has nothing to do with making the body pretty. A makeup person would have done that here—if there was to be an open casket at the poor woman’s funeral.”

  “I suppose it’s possible.… Maybe you’d better take a look.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you have to promise not to say anything to anyone. Okay?”

  “But …”

  “Kathleen, tomorrow is Chrissy’s wedding day. She doesn’t have her gown, but she does seem to have a dead body. If this is handled wrong, it could ruin everything. Please.”

  “Look, just let me see this body and—”

  “Great. If anyone asks why we’re back, we’ll say I left something upstairs.”

  “Fine.”

  But no excuse was needed, as everyone seemed to be too busy to notice their return. Susan and Kathleen hurried through the Yacht Club and up the stairs to the ladies’ room. The young men, still setting up, didn’t even glance in their direction. “There it is,” Susan said needlessly, pointing at the box as the bathroom door swung closed behind them.

  The ladies’ room was large, but not so large that anyone in it could possibly not notice the big brown box lying on the chintz couch in one corner of the room. Kathleen hurried over to it, and using a handkerchief from her purse, she opened the top and peered inside.

  Susan looked around Kathleen and down at the dead woman. “I’m sure I don’t recognize her,” she repeated.

  Kathleen studied the body. “There hasn’t been time to embalm the body. I’ll bet she’s been dead for less than a day. Maybe a lot less. Strangled.”

  “Really? Strangled?” Susan, looking closer, saw the line of bruising under the blue and white batik scarf around the woman’s neck. “Yes, I see what you mean. I didn’t see that before. She was murdered, wasn’t she?”

  “Definitely. We’d better get Brett before he leaves. He needs to know about this right away.”

  Susan grabbed her friend’s arm before she could leave. “Kathleen, you can’t do that!”

  “Susan, don’t you dare say what I know you’re going to say!”

  “Kathleen, we can’t tell Brett about this. It will ruin Chrissy’s wedding day. Her only wedding day. You know how important that is to a young girl.”