Dolled Up to Die

by Lorena McCourtney

  Apparently no one had missed Cate yet. She didn’t hear her name being called into the night. Which was a little insulting, wasn’t it? Apparently she could be kidnapped by aliens and zapped off to some strange planet, and no one would even notice. But Rolf had said he was going to keep everyone too busy to look for her …

  She finally made the connection. Smoke—fire—Rolf!

  A frantic bite at the tape holding her wrists told her she wouldn’t be able to chew through it. But she managed to snag the end of the tape in her teeth and slowly, oh so slowly, unwound it. She took only a moment to rub her numb wrists and hands before freeing her ankles and feet.

  She used a hold on the window frame to lever herself to her feet. She had to hunch over, because the ridgepole above her wasn’t high enough to stand upright, but she stomped each foot a couple of times to bring back feeling.

  She’d broken out of that locked closet by making an escape line using clothes hanging in the closet, but here there were no convenient racks of cocktail dresses and sweatpants and Hermes scarves to tie together.

  But she could rip strips off the dress and make a line to lower herself to the ground!

  She’d just made the first tear when she heard the last noise she ever wanted to hear. The door downstairs closing. Rolf was back.

  No time to construct an escape rope. She peered out the window again, leaning over to look down this time. A bare wall dropped straight from the window to the ground, no foot-or handholds. Below, old lumber was stacked against the house on the left side, a pile of discarded motorcycle parts on the right. If she didn’t hit dead center between them—

  Dead center. She shivered. Poor choice of words.

  Shouts from Lodge Hill made her look that way again. Flame! But now she could hear something ominously closer. Rolf was working on that ceiling panel. She closed her eyes for a last moment of prayer—I need your help now, Lord!—used her fist wrapped in insulation to break out the remaining shards of glass, and climbed backward out of the window. The dress caught on something, and she ripped it free.

  Bits of glass clinging to the window bit into her arms and hands as she let herself over the edge. Her toes scrambled for footing, but there was nothing. Finally she was clinging only by her fingers, her bare feet dangling in nothingness.

  Where was a nice, boring day as a PI when you needed one?

  She remembered Mitch mentioning that voice-activated, wristband cell phone. He’d said it might come in handy if she were ever clinging by her fingertips somewhere. She also remembered her blithe response: she didn’t need one. She’d been there, done that, and she didn’t anticipate dangling by her fingertips anytime in the near future.

  Famous last words. Apparently window-hanging was her PI specialty.

  Except a moment later, she wasn’t hanging. One hand slipped, then the other, and she was falling. Bumping and thumping. Sliding, scraping, and scratching. Her fingers clutched for handholds that weren’t there. Her toes grasped for footholds that didn’t exist. But her dress, billowing and tangling like a deflating parachute, snagged on everything, jerking her this way and that. One foot banged into the pile of motorcycle parts, and she heard the crash of metal as her own body crashed into the ground.

  The impact rattled her from toes to teeth, and she just lay there, shooting stars crisscrossing her eyes and her ears ringing. But a moment later she realized the stars were inside her head, and she couldn’t see. She couldn’t see! No sky, no moon or stars. The impact had done something to her eyes—

  She flailed frantically, and suddenly her vision came back. No, she hadn’t been blinded. She’d just been tangled like a bridesmaid mummy in the dress.

  Thank you, Lord.

  But what she could see was Rolf leaning out the window and looking down at her. For a moment she thought he might jump right down on top of her, but he disappeared, and she heard him crashing across the rafters.

  How fast could he get down here? Faster than a speeding bullet?

  She scrambled to her feet, snatched up the gown hanging in tattered ribbons around her, and careened toward the line of trees, unmindful of her bare feet. Rolf had to go around front to get out of the house. She had a head start on him. She’d tried out for track when she was in high school. If she could just beat him through the trees—

  A frantic twist of head showed that even with a late start he was no more than thirty or forty feet behind her. And gaining. Oh yeah, she remembered now. She hadn’t been fast enough to qualify for the track team.

  She tried to scream, but she was running so hard that she had no breath left for yelling. She burst through the trees, and the flames flared into full view, eating like some blazing demon into the back side of the Reception Room. Sirens wailed in the distance.

  Cate’s frantic gaze took in guys in tuxedos with a hose, Jo-Jo’s waving arms directing them where to fasten it. Rolf was so close now she could almost feel his breath.

  But if she could just get a few feet closer, he wouldn’t dare attack her in full view …

  She let go of the gown and raised her arms to wave for attention. The tattered gown fluttered and trailed around her. Her feet tangled in a torn strip, and down she went. She screamed as a weight fell on her back. A hand covered her mouth to silence her scream.

  But this time she reacted before it could clamp down. Bite! She bit, clamping down on a finger. Not a great experience, she realized, but she forced herself to hold on. Rolf shrieked in what she irrelevantly thought was a rather unmanly way.

  But Rolf had a new technique too. He whacked her alongside the head with his other hand, and she let go. Before he could grab her again, she scrambled away, digging in with fingers and elbows and toes. She chanced a frantic glance backward, then blinked and sat up.

  Strips of bridesmaid gown tangled like celadon tentacles around a male figure rolling on the ground trying to escape them.

  Cate struggled to her feet, yelling now, waving her arms. “Help! Help!”

  A tuxedoed figure spotted her. He ran toward her. She pointed to Rolf, still draped in bridesmaid gown remnants but now rising from the ground.

  Mitch didn’t ask questions. He took one look at Cate’s bedraggled condition and leaped on Rolf. They both went down in a tangle of flailing arms and legs, jeans on top one moment, tuxedo the next.

  Another tuxedoed figure ran up and stared for a moment, and then Lance leaped into the fray too. Three thrashing and twisting bodies and arms and legs.

  A fire truck roared around the far end of Lodge Hill. A police car followed, then another fire truck. The trio on the ground rose like some six-legged monster draped in tangled strips of celadon. Cate stood there in her own knee-length tatters of what was once a bridesmaid’s gown.

  The tuxedos hadn’t fared too well either. One of Mitch’s sleeves dangled by threads from his shoulder. Lance’s dirt-stained knees showed through rips. Rolf glowered between them, Mitch twisting one arm behind him, Lance doing the same with the other arm.

  Jo-Jo and groomsmen ran up. Behind them the fire truck started pumping water on the flames. Robyn and the bridesmaids tore around the end of the hedged enclosure like a flying wedge of celery-colored birds in high heels.

  Cate thought Robyn would start wailing about her ruined rehearsal, asking what happened to Cate’s gown and wig, but she took one look at fiancé Lance, with dirt on his face and exposed knees, gave a little shriek, and ran to him. He didn’t let go of Rolf, but he put his other arm around Robyn.

  Two policemen raced up. They stopped short at the sight of the odd tableau of a wedding party with various wardrobe malfunctions. Rolf spoke first.

  “Get these idiots off me! They attacked me, and I was trying to get to the fire and help—”

  “He wasn’t helping! He was chasing me! He tied me up in his attic. My wig is still up there! I had to jump out a window to get away. He killed Celeste and Mr. Kieferson, and he was going to kill me too! Because I saw his arm, and it has a tattoo with an eye in it and
that was the arm and tattoo I saw when Celeste was murdered!”

  “She’s crazy!” Rolf yelled.

  “Okay, everyone calm down now,” an officer said. “Let’s get away from the fire and we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  “He started the fire too!” Cate yelled.

  “She’s lying! Let me loose!”

  The officer moved over to where Mitch and Lance weren’t loosening their holds on Rolf. For a moment Cate thought he was going to order them to release Rolf, but he spotted something at Rolf’s feet.

  A knife! Rolf had been chasing her with a knife!

  The officer reached out and rubbed Rolf’s dirt-stained shirt between his fingers. He held his fingers to his nose.

  “I was working on a motorcycle. I spilled gas on my shirt,” Rolf muttered. After a moment’s hesitation, he added belligerently, “I’m not answering any questions. I want a lawyer.”

  “I think that can be arranged,” the officer said.

  A man in a dark blue suit came around the hedged enclosure.

  “Pastor Dietrichson,” Robyn said.

  “Someone around front, your aunt I believe, said everyone was around back here.” The pastor looked questioningly at Robyn, and she nodded. “I’m sorry I’m late. I take it I missed the rehearsal?”

  The minister’s gaze took in the bedraggled wedding party, officers, burning hole in the wall, fire trucks, and Rolf with the officer now snapping handcuffs around his wrists. Mitch came over and wrapped an arm around Cate’s shoulders. She realized she was shivering now, both from the chilly night and nerves. His warmth and strength felt good.

  “Maybe this would be a good time to ask if you’d like to come work for Computer Solutions Dudes?” he whispered.

  As good a time as any, Cate realized. At the moment, being a PI in a bedraggled bridesmaid’s gown, with a fixation on window escapes, didn’t really seem like the right answer to that age-old question, What do I want to be when I grow up?

  Hey, but there was something—

  “Not today. I just captured a killer!”

  “You captured a killer?” Mitch yanked his tuxedo sleeve free of its few remaining threads and handed it to her.

  “Okay, we captured a killer. And Lance too.”

  “Will there be a wedding?” the minister inquired politely.

  Everyone looked at Robyn. Cate mentally tallied up the damages.

  Her bridesmaid’s gown in tatters, her wig gone. There went the color scheme.

  Two tuxedos ruined.

  “The van that was supposed to deliver the buffet never showed up,” Jo-Jo offered. “Someone called and said the restaurant has just closed down.”

  The master of ceremonies/deejay had laryngitis.

  “I don’t think Lodge Hill will be usable,” Jo-Jo added. She glanced back at the burning area. The firemen had the blaze knocked down, but a smoking hole yawned in the wall.

  “Perhaps the wedding should be postponed,” the minister suggested.

  Cate expected tears of anguish and despair from Robyn, maybe even a genteel faint on this disastrous occasion. Yes, postponement was the only solution. Robyn’s perfect wedding was in ruins.

  Instead Robyn wrapped an arm around her fiancé’s waist. “Lance could have been killed! This guy had a knife. But he’s here. I’m here. We love each other. There will be a wedding.”

  Robyn looked around defiantly, as if she expected objections, but everyone, including Cate, simply looked at her in astonishment. Robyn had finally gotten her priorities right.

  “That’s an excellent attitude,” Jo-Jo said. “I can make punch.”

  “I know a deejay,” Cate offered. Thoughtfully, remembering Destiny Dustinhoff’s posthypnotic tendency toward impromptu Lady Gaga imitations, she added, “Just don’t ask her what time it is.”

  28

  It was a beautiful wedding.

  Cate and the bridemaids spent most of the day on the phone, notifying guests of the new arrangements, and that evening Aunt Carly’s house overflowed with people and the flowers originally intended for Lodge Hill.

  The minister showed up on time.

  Bride Robyn dazzled in her wedding gown. The groom and best man wore spotless blue suits. All the groomsmen showed up, but there wasn’t room for all the bridesmaids and groomsmen in the ceremony, so the entire entourage was scrapped. Cate came in her natural flyaway red hair and a blue dress that Mitch especially liked, with Band-Aids on her various cuts and scratches. Other bridesmaids went creative with everything from sequins to a flowered muumuu.

  The minister asked if anyone had any objections to this union, and no one did. He pronounced Lance and Robyn husband and wife, the groom kissed his new bride, and in his enthusiasm stepped on her floor-length veil. The veil ripped. The tiara crashed to the floor.

  There was a moment of dead silence among the guests as Robyn stared down at the fallen ornament. Cate expected her to burst into tears. But then the new and improved Robyn picked up both tiara and veil and waved them like trophies overhead, and everyone applauded.

  The pizza parlor delivered five different kinds of pizza, plus platters of spicy Buffalo wings. Jo-Jo’s punch, with plenty of ginger ale, was a big hit.

  Destiny Dustinhoff emceed the introductions at the reception, and deejayed the music with no lapses into Lady Gaga solos.

  Robyn threw her bouquet. Cate wasn’t trying to catch it, but it smacked her in the head and fell into her hands. The bride and groom dashed out to their car to speed off to their honeymoon on the coast, everyone throwing birdseed.

  The car wouldn’t start.

  Mitch loaned them his SUV.

  Later, Cate drove him home to his condo in her car.

  “I had my doubts before, but I think they’re going to make it,” Mitch said in a satisfied way. He glanced over at Cate. “You okay?” They hadn’t really had a chance to talk before now.

  “A little stiff and sore.” She’d fallen, been trussed up like a rodeo calf, jumped out a window, and been tackled by a killer. She had a right to be stiff and sore.

  Mitch reached over and touched her cheek. “A few cuts and bruises too.”

  “Just another day in the life of a private investigator,” Cate said.

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  Then she remembered something. The camera. It was still in the backseat of the car. At the condo, they took it inside, where Mitch quickly figured out that the problem wasn’t a highly technical one.

  “It needs new batteries.”

  He supplied the two AA batteries, and then they were looking at a series of photos. Ed Kieferson’s Jaguar parked at Jo-Jo’s house. Ed digging his fingers into the flowerpot on the back steps for the key. Ed leaning inside the half-open door of the house. A motorcycle and rider, apparently just arrived, behind Ed’s car. Cate couldn’t tell who was under the helmet.

  “I wonder how she was getting these photos?” Mitch said. “Couldn’t they see her?”

  “She could have parked behind those big blackberry bushes around the deserted house across the road and come over on foot. That’s what I’d have done.”

  Mitch nodded. “And used a zoom.”

  The figure from the motorcycle was at the door in the next photo. He’d half turned, helmet off, as if looking around to be sure no one was watching him.

  “Rolf,” Cate breathed.

  Rolf was coming out the door in the next shot. Even in a still photo, he was obviously running. He was holding something close to his body.

  A gun.

  “So now Rolf takes off on his bike, but Kieferson’s car is still there,” Mitch mused. “But it was gone when you got there. What happened to it?”

  Good question. “So do these photos prove anything?” Cate asked.

  “I don’t know. But I think the police will be interested.”

  They were.

  During the next month, repairs at Lodge Hill were under way with insurance money. Jo-Jo and Kim had an agreement that Jo-Jo
would manage the wedding business until Kim was ready to take over. Jo-Jo had decided not to move to Arizona. She’d found a free companion donkey for Maude, and, now that she had a friend, Maude had abandoned her watchdog brays.

  Kim wouldn’t be taking over Lodge Hill for some time, however, because she was starting classes in business management at the University of Oregon in the spring. Her arm was healing nicely. The Ice Cube had been foreclosed on, so Kim was now living in the one room Ed had completed at Lodge Hill in his grand plan of making it into an actual lodge. She had come to church with Cate and Mitch a couple of times.

  A neighboring grape grower was dealing with the bank to take over purchase of the vineyard.

  The chef at Mr. K’s had returned, and a group of employees were getting together to buy out and reopen the restaurant as Chef Dior’s. Kim included much of the contents of the house in a wildly successful closing-down sale at the Mystic Mirage. Cate bought several items for her new house.

  Cate hadn’t intended to ask Mitch for help when she chose furniture for the house, but she spotted a great leather sofa in a furniture store window near where they had lunch one day. Once inside, he pointed out a beautiful dining room table, and before long almost the entire house was furnished.

  Was it a little scary that they had such similar tastes?

  Cate wrote up her final report for the files. Belmont Investigations. Cate Kinkaid, assistant private investigator, Case File 36-M. (She’d tacked on the M to indicate it was a murder case.) The report included both solid facts and some of what Uncle Joe called “informed deductions.”

  Cate had been called in to identify the wig and an empty briefcase the police found in a search of Rolf’s cottage. The officer handling the search turned out to be the same one she’d met when Celeste’s apartment was trashed. On a you-didn’t-hear-this-from-me basis, he suggested Rolf had been searching for the camera there, that Celeste must have threatened him in some way with what she had on it. Cate also learned that the search of his cottage had turned up the handgun from which the bullet that had killed Ed Kieferson had been fired. Fingerprints had been wiped off the handle of the sword that killed Celeste, but Rolf had missed an incriminating print on the blade. Why had Celeste been considering hiring a private investigator? Cate could only speculate that it had to do with Rolf or Travis.