Veiled Threats

by Deborah Donnelly

  “Kharrnegie! You rruined my bouquet! For what?”

  Boris Nevsky was not really mad, not entirely, but my pal Lily had nicknamed him and the name stuck. He was huge and loud and brilliant with flowers, and the fact that I'd dated him a couple of times apparently gave him license to harass me at wedding receptions. The dates had stopped when I went to his family's place for a lamb barbecue, and the lamb was still alive when I got there. He thought I was prissy and squeamish, and I thought he was a barbarian. Besides, any more of his embraces and I'd have had broken ribs.

  No one exactly invited Boris to their weddings, but once he delivered his flowers and arranged them with ferocious precision, he just never left. Yo u don't ask a force of nature to go home. I explained about Susie's bouquet, quickly and quietly. Boris stared at me, his thick black eyebrows parting and rising like the Fremont drawbridge. His face seemed to contract, like a fist, when he was angry, and then expand like the full moon when he smiled. Just now he was expanding, and erupting in laughter.

  “Sneezing? Sneezing! Yo u should have put her in string quartet, for percussion! Kharnegie, you look beautiful tonight.”

  “Well thanks, Boris, but—”

  But he was at it again, embracing me in a grizzly bear hug, then planting a big wet kiss. It was like being hit in the mouth by an affectionate truck. I pushed him away, and caught a glimpse of the green-eyed man, who was now heading for the bar. And there by the cake table was dear Dorothy Fenner. Bloody hell. She looked at me in a pained but sympathetic way, as you would at a four-year-old who's knocked over the orange juice again. Sighing, I headed for the ladies’ room to regroup.

  The Sercombe House cloakroom was sweet enough to induce diabetic coma: gilt cupids, blossom-and-ribbon wallpaper, and tiny china bowls of potpourri. But at least it was empty, giving me a chance to collect my straying wits while redoing my hair and lipstick. There. Lipstick on straight, eyeliner unsmudged. On the other hand, nose still beaky, eyes still an undecided hazel, and freckles still on parade despite foundation and powder. Ah, well. As I dabbed at my soggy dress—Boris must have been out in the rain—Nickie came in.

  “Carnegie, can I talk to you?”

  “Sure. What's wrong?”

  Nickie was a pretty, curvy girl, full lips and full hips, with heavy waves of dark hair and fine olive skin. Just now she was close to tears, biting her lip and picking nervously at the spectacular double strand of baroque pearls at her throat.

  “It's Grace. She's back from Chicago. But I haven't told her about the dress yet. I'm … I'm kind of scared to.”

  I was a little worried about the dress myself. Nickie's original wedding gown had recently arrived, two weeks late and two sizes too small. The couturier couldn't produce a replacement in time, and Nickie's stepmother Grace was out of town, so Nickie and I had gone shopping. A chance detour into my favorite vintage clothing store turned up an Edwardian gown, a timeworn but lovely concoction of cream-colored lace. We both loved it, so I bought it, dispensing a hefty sum from the household checking account, which Douglas Parry had put at my disposal. But perhaps we'd been a wee bit impulsive. I hadn't met Grace yet, but I hoped to hell she was open-minded.

  “And besides,” Nickie rushed on, the tears overflowing, “Ray's family is all upset because of this new publicity about Daddy and King County Savings. They're so conservative and proper, and I never know what to say to them anyway—I keep thinking they don't like me because I'm not Japanese. But Ray thought I was criticizing them, and I thought he was criticizing Daddy, and now there are these anonymous letters, and then we had a fight on the t-telephone. That's why he's not here tonight, so I drove myself and brought Michelle and Sean.”

  “That must have been a pleasure,” I said dryly.

  She laughed, damply. “It was awful! She kept wanting to drive the Mustang, but I don't let anybody drive it, not even Ray.” The tears overflowed again. “And now he's mad at me. Why does everything get so complicated? I just love Ray and I want everybody to l-leave us alone!”

  Juliet, at bay between the Montagues and Capulets, might have been more eloquent, but no more sincere. I hugged her to me, letting her cry for as long as she needed, and hiding my own rueful smile. Youngsters keep falling in love and wanting the world to go away, and the world never does.

  Then I frowned at myself for this remarkably middle-aged sentiment. Who was I, Juliet's old hag of a nurse while still in my thirties? Always a bridal consultant, never a bride. I had a sudden image of those sea-green eyes, and a sudden desire to star in my own romance. I set it firmly aside and pressed on to more serious matters.

  “Nickie, I'm sure you and Ray will sort this out. Just give it time. But what's all this about your father? What letters?”

  More tears. “Someone's sending him threats in the mail, and I think they're calling him, too! He didn't want me and Grace to know about it, but I saw one of the letters by accident. It called him a—it called him names, and said he stole people's life savings. It said if he didn't confess to the grand jury, that he'd be sorry for the rest of his life! Carnegie, he wouldn't do anything wrong, ever.”

  “Of course he wouldn't,” I told her, thinking just the opposite. Douglas Parry didn't look like a crook to me, but then again I'd once been stiffed for nine hundred dollars by a baker who looked like Mother Teresa with a rolling pin. And the whole savings-and-loan debacle seemed so Machiavellian, so many deals within deals. How many of those wealthy, well-connected bankers were completely above reproach?

  I knew only the outlines of this case. Douglas Parry had chaired the board of King County Savings, which went into receivership after heavy losses and allegations of securities fraud. During a seemingly endless federal investigation, the CEO, Keith Guthridge, had tried to shift the blame to Parry, but Parry claimed that Guthridge had misled him every step of the way. What made it really ugly was that the two men had once been close friends. Keith Guthridge was Nickie's godfather.

  “The grand jury will sort it all out,” I said, trying to sound brisk and knowledgeable. “After all, your father's just a witness. It's Guthridge who's the defendant, right? The letters are from some poor investor who got his facts wrong. Lots of prominent people get hate mail. Let's just concentrate on the wedding, OK? Grace is going to love your dress, I know she—”

  “FUCK YOU!!”

  Nickie and I stared at each other. The voice had come from the dining room, but it was more than loud enough to reach us here. A slurred, screechy voice. Michelle. As we rushed out of the cloakroom, Nickie's tears forgotten, we heard the smashing of glass, and more shouting. The string quartet faltered to a halt, then started up again, providing a lovely Strauss counterpoint to the appalling brawl now going on between Michelle and Sean, her leather-clad boyfriend.

  “You bastard! I saw you looking down her dress, you bastard, don't lie to me!” Michelle was standing, or rather swaying, with her back to the cake table, while Sean backed away from her, muttering halfhearted denials and dark threats. A champagne flute lay in shining splinters at his feet, and another one was still clutched dangerously in Michelle's gesticulating hand. Both of them had the foolish, defiant look of misbehaving children who suddenly realize there are adults in the room.

  Most of the adults tonight were looking shocked and uncomfortable, though I noticed the waiters grinning broadly. Jeffrey had his arm around his bride, as if to sweep her away to safety, or perhaps to keep her from murdering her cousin. And dear, dear Dorothy had one hand pressed to her proper bosom and was shaking her head in regret at this deplorable scene. This stuff never happened at her weddings, of course. I groaned and stepped forward.

  “Look, Michelle, let's go talk about this somewhere private, OK?”

  “There's nothing to talk about!” she hollered. The music had stopped again, and her words were piercingly clear. “I'm so fucking sick of all you people talking!”

  With the last word she flung her arms wide. The glass flute went flying from one hand, but it was her other h
and that did the real damage, smacking deep into the middle tier of the wedding cake and sending the top tier to the floor with a weighty, chocolatey splat. The bride shrieked, Sean snorted with laughter, and Michelle pulled her hand free and fled down the hall toward the bridesmaids’ dressing room. Sean made to follow her, but I caught his arm.

  “Leave her alone. I'll go talk to her. You go cool off.” I pushed him into the custody of the blessedly sober best man, motioned the quartet to play on, and helped the waiters begin to mop up. I needed a minute to cool off myself, I was so furious. Then I headed down the hall, through the exclamations and the nervous laughter of the wedding guests. Poor Diane. Poor me! Poor Michelle, once I got my hands on her.

  The dressing room was empty, and I heard the back door slam. Idiot girl, running around in the rain. I cut through the kitchen and stopped on the porch to let my eyes adjust. Headlights flashed past, blinding me with their glare. Michelle wasn't running; she was driving. She'd taken the keys to Nickie's Mustang and gone roaring down the steep, narrow drive toward the sharp bend down below.

  “Michelle! Michelle, stop, don't—!”

  I could no longer see the car, just the yellow cones of light from the headlights marking its crazy flight down the hill. I was still shouting when the Mustang tore straight across the bend and rammed full speed into the brick wall at the bottom. A crumpling, splintering crash, then the headlights died, and there was only darkness and the sound of rain.

  IT WAS WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT BEFORE I LEFT SERCOMBE House, moving in a slow-motion trance of weariness and guilt. There had been plenty of guilt to go around as the police cars came, and then the fire truck, and then the ambulance that acted as a hearse, because Michelle had died instantly. Young Sean felt guilty about the fight, of course, to the extent that he could feel anything at all beyond his shock. Diane felt guilty for letting Michelle guzzle champagne while they got dressed. Nickie felt guilty for leaving her car keys lying around.

  “If I'd just put them away,” she said for the fourth time, as we all stumbled out to our cars at last.

  “Nickie, please, try not to think about it. Listen, shall I drive you home?”

  “Oh. I guess I won't be driving, will I?” Her eyes were glassy, and she giggled, then laughed, on a rising, quavering note. “But Michelle won't be driving ever, will she? And I won't be driving the Mustang. God, I loved that car!”

  She stopped herself, appalled. Jeffrey and Diane, their wedding night in ruins, stared at her. “I'm so sorry! I didn't mean that! I didn't—”

  “Nickie, honey.” I shook her gently. “You're in shock. It's OK.” Thinking about her car at a time like this might seem callous, but then I'd been thinking about my business. This could be a disaster for Made in Heaven.

  “I'll take her home.” Dorothy Fenner was, for once, a welcome sight as she came down the porch steps. “I know the way.”

  I handed Nickie over and trudged down the graveled drive, grateful to be left alone. But then my own guilt rose up. Worrying about my business was a trivial sin. What if I could have prevented the accident altogether? I replayed it over and over on my mind's movie screen: the brief, crucial time between Michelle's leaving the room, drunk and rude and alive, and her turning the ignition key, doomed. If only I'd cared less about the broken glass and spilled champagne and more about talking to her. If only I hadn't been so angry at my spoiled reception, and had gone after her right away. If I'd run across the grass instead of hesitating on the porch. If, if, if.

  I reached my van, one of the few cars remaining beside the emergency vehicles clustered down at the bend. The driver's door was sticking again, and as I circled around to the other side the revolving light from a police car flickered on something shiny just under the front bumper. Mechanically, I picked it up: a business card case, dropped by a departing guest. I always ran a little lost-and-found service after a wedding. I wiped off the mud and tossed the case into my tote bag, where it joined the disposable camera, the dangly silver earring, and the plastic sandwich bag of what I hoped was not dope. The odds were good that nobody would call me about the bag, but the card case looked expensive.

  I'd sort it out tomorrow. Tonight it was all I could do to navigate the empty streets of Seattle. I drove slowly to the east shore of Lake Union and parked in the narrow lot reserved for houseboat owners, and for houseboat renters like me. I had lived alone since college, over ten years ago. Living alone suited me, but how many weddings can you watch without wanting to come home to someone? I'd had dates, I'd had lovers, I'd had six months of let's-live-together-and-see-what-happens. I hadn't had the nerve to marry someone, and most of the time I hadn't had the someone. Tonight I really could have used a someone.

  I decided to leave all my stuff in the van until morning, and headed down the dock, my solitary footsteps echoing on the worn wood planks. I loved my houseboat dearly, and I hoped someday to buy it from my landlady. It was a shabby old place, with no closet space and a miniature kitchen and no heat in the bathroom, but it had two great virtues: a two-room second story that was now Made in Heaven's office, and a priceless location at the very end of a dock.

  You passed a dozen or so houseboats to get from the street to my door, but on the lake side my only neighbors were ducks. I could sit on my narrow, splintery front deck, or retreat to the glassed-in porch when it rained, and see the whole lake, from the high-rises of downtown at the south end to the green slopes of Gas Works Park at the north. Speedboats and sailboats shared the waterways with flotillas of Canada geese, and sunsets flared across the lake above Queen Anne Hill and the Fremont drawbridge. When rain squalls burst and then faded, the water's surface changed from silver moiré to ruffled pewter to mother-of-pearl. Sometimes I spent whole evenings just watching the lake and breathing.

  The dock was silent at this hour, the row of houseboats dark and sleeping. The few dim lampposts along the walkway cast tilted shadows of the flower boxes and hanging baskets and driftwood sculpture with which my neighbors decorated their porches. I picked up a fallen honeysuckle blossom from beneath one basket and twirled it between my fingers. The evening's showers had left the dock gleaming in the lamplight, looking not quite real, a stage set waiting for the hero's entrance.

  But this was a tragedy, not a romance, and the heroine had to play the scene alone. I could hear the slow, hollow slapping of waves under the logs and foam floats that supported each house. Over the edge of the dock, heavy guy-wires and seaweedy ropes disappeared into the black water. Unlike most of my neighbors, I was no swimmer, and the cold depths under my little street of boats looked eerily opaque. I leaned over the water and dropped the honeysuckle. It touched lightly on the black mirrored surface and floated away, slowly rotating, to disappear into the swaying shadows. Michelle's life had just disappeared. I shivered in the night breeze and hurried to my door.

  Once inside, I left a phone message for Eddie to hear in the morning. Then I crawled into bed and tried to hold off the gloom by thinking about the handsome green-eyed man. But that all seemed so long ago, and anyway I was soon drifting into exhausted sleep. The man in the sweater, coming in from the rain … the other man in the rain … the heavyset man walking down the private drive in the rain. But it was a private drive; it didn't lead anywhere but Sercombe House.

  I opened my eyes in the darkness. Where had the heavy-set man been coming from as he headed down the hill? He wasn't a wedding guest, or I would have noticed him leaving. Had he been—crazy thought—had he been somewhere near Nickie's car? Speaking of crazy … Crazy Mary said she'd seen someone “breaking things and stealing things.” Maybe that was who she meant. He'd been shoving something in a pocket: a tool? Was Michelle so terribly drunk that she couldn't even hit the brakes, or was there something wrong with the brakes? I saw again the headlights slashing down the hill, and I wondered. The man in the rain, headlights in the rain, the car nobody drove but Nickie … I lay back, mind whirling, and surrendered to sleep.

  I LOVE TO SLEEP. I LOVE IT THE WAY
SOME PEOPLE—INCLUDING melove food or sex. I am a passionate sleeper, and I guard my mornings like a lioness guarding a dead zebra, so that I can gorge on sleep. The normal mornings, that is. The mornings when no one has died the night before. The Monday morning after Diane's wedding I slept in, but only by force of will, trying to stay unconscious because reality was so sad and messy and guilty.

  I'd forgotten to switch my personal phone line over to the answering machine, and at ten-fifteen the one in the kitchen rang like a fire bell. I jammed a pillow over my head, waiting for it to stop, but it didn't. Ten rings, twenty rings, thirtyit had to be Eddie. No one else would be so rude, and Eddie was too prim to come downstairs and hammer on my door when he knew I wasn't properly dressed. In fact he never came downstairs, stubbornly behaving as if my residence were miles away from my workplace instead of separated by a dozen wooden steps. I'd given him my one spare house key, in case he wanted a snack from my kitchen sometime when I wasn't around, but he never used it.

  After thirty rings I decided to fire him, and after forty I decided to face the day. As I crossed the kitchen the linoleum was chilly underfoot, but the faded yellow walls were neon-lit with sunshine. I perched on a stool by the phone. It had stopped ringing, but I knew it would start again, so I just sat there rubbing my eyes and trying to think. What was it that had seemed so urgent last night? That's right, the man in the rain. Pure fantasy, late-night paranoia.

  On the counter before me was an antique toy I'd just bought: a miniature wood stove from the 1890's, five inches high and made of cast iron, right down to the nickel-sized skillet that sat on one burner. I swung the curlicued oven door open and shut, open and shut. I had planned on a leisurely breakfast while I cleaned off the rust and went over it with stove polish. What a silly, trivial little plan, made back when Michelle was alive. The phone clamored again. Time for a new plan.