“Better let the lieutenant explain,” said Mike hastily. “Just ask for him at the front desk.”
Aaron stared at each of us, then shrugged again and continued up the steps.
“Carnegie, be honest,” said Mike, once we were alone. “Are you sure you don’t need to postpone the wedding? You sound kind of ragged.”
“Of course I’m sure! I’m fine, and you’re getting married in the morning, mister.” A thought struck me. “Unless you think it’s not safe for Lily and the boys to be here, with a murderer loose?”
He shook his head with that world-weary look that sometimes made him seem older than his years.
“Do you think there aren’t criminals loose in Seattle? Nowhere is absolutely safe. We do the best we can and press on.”
“That’s the spirit.” I did kiss him now, just on the cheek but with enthusiasm. “Thanks so much for standing up for me, Mike. Am I released to your custody or something?”
“Not at all. My vouching for you might have helped a little, but basically there wasn’t enough evidence to justify holding you.” He dropped his voice. “The gun was a throwaway twenty-two with the number filed off, very professional. And you’re no professional. Now, go get cleaned up and try to forget all this. I need to talk with Orozco some more.”
“I thought you were on vacation?”
“I am, starting the minute Lily gets here. I’ll see you at the ferry dock.”
He patted my shoulder and went back inside the courthouse. Only when I reached the sidewalk did it occur to me, with an unpleasant little flinch of remorse, what a shock Aaron was in for when he heard the news about India’s death.
Oh, hell, I thought. At least he slept all night. He can handle it. Then I continued to the parking lot—where I ran smack into the opening minutes of Friday Harbor’s weekly farmers’ market.
The market was a festive little affair, a cluster of stalls and tables thronged by locals and visitors alike. Who would have guessed, I thought as I glanced around, that so many wonderful things could originate from one small island? Scented soaps and flavored vinegars, homespun hats and handmade vases, dahlia tubers and take ’n’ bake lasagnas.
The early-bird crowd buzzed with talk and laughter as they examined these wares, while excited children and inquisitive dogs wove in and out around their legs. The awnings flapped in the breeze, the blossoms showed gay in the sunshine, and someone was picking out a sprightly tune on a banjo. And there was even more to come: a flyer taped up everywhere announced the Art & Nature Fest tomorrow at the sculpture garden. No doubt about it, San Juan Island was tourist heaven.
Too bad I was a badly dressed jailbird instead of a tourist. I could see Scarlet straight across the parking lot, so I made a beeline for her, trying to will myself into invisibility. Time to get out of Dodge and into a hot shower. I might even manage a nap before it was time to meet Lily at the ferry dock.
“Hi, Carnegie!”
Peggy Nickles waved at me from a table where she was setting up a display of glass jars. She wore ultra-cool sunglasses and a bright pink skirt that started well below her hipbones and ended a few inches later. I tried a “Hi there, see you later” kind of gesture, but she called my name again and beckoned urgently. I sighed and went over, my feet slopping in the borrowed loafers.
The jars were barbecue sauce from ZZ’s kitchen, and by the time I reached the table Peggy already had her first sale.
“Would you like the Extra-Hot or the Super-Combustible?” she was saying brightly to a middle-aged couple. Then she glanced at me as she made change. “Carnegie, can I talk to you real quick?”
“What is it?”
“I had this idea for a frosting design—”
She was interrupted by the arrival of more customers, crowding around the table with money in hand. Barbecue sauce was a big seller this morning.
“I’ll call you later at the bakery,” I said, turning away.
“No, wait! I need your OK so I can get started. ZZ will be here soon, if you could just wait fifteen minutes or so?”
“Well—” I thought it over. If Peggy had “hooked up” with Guy Price, and Guy was dealing drugs, then maybe Peggy would knew something about Brenda Bronson. Something that might point the way to India’s killer. “All right. Fifteen minutes.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Killing time at a farmers’ market on a glorious September day, with the gulls wheeling overhead and the water sparkling in the harbor down below, should hardly have been a chore. But given my current preoccupations, and my need for a shower, I couldn’t fully appreciate this one.
I tried, though. Keeping one eye on Peggy, I wandered among the awnings and the big umbrellas, from the ruby pyramids of local tomatoes to the golden blocks of local honeycombs to the bursting bouquets of local flowers. And after a while I got into the spirit of things. No one seemed to care about my hygiene, and everyone I met wore a smile. Besides, I was hungry, and there was food everywhere.
“Have a taste?” asked a bearded young fellow selling sausage, as he cooked up his first batch of samples on a sizzling hot plate. “It’s all homemade.”
I nibbled the smoky, anise-scented morsel he presented to me on a toothpick, and after that a teenage girl at a bakery stall offered me a slice of crusty, fine-crumbed bread with fresh cool butter. I munched it while admiring some lovely handwoven items being laid out on a trestle table by a fair-haired woman with merry blue eyes.
“I spin the yarn myself,” she said, nodding at a scrapbook that lay open beside her. The photos showed a group of women in matching T-shirts clustered around a small wooden loom. “Last year my team won the Sheep-to-Shawl competition at the county fair.”
And here all I do is plan weddings and find corpses. I complimented the weaver on her work and pressed on with my circuit. When I looped back to the barbecue display again, ZZ had arrived at last. I waited while he and Peggy conferred about the cash box, then she drew me over to a bench away from the crowd.
“So,” I asked her as we sat down, “what’s your design idea?”
“Lace,” said Peggy. She pulled a scrap of paper from her purse and handed it to me. “You know that Norwegian lace they sell at the lavender farm? What if I tinted the frosting a pale, pale purple, like lavender, then piped on white frosting in a design like Norwegian lace?”
“That’s a good thought,” I said, looking over the sketch she had made. With some brides I wouldn’t dare change the appearance of the cake at the last minute, but Lily trusted my judgment. “Peggy, this is very good. Let’s do it.”
“Terrific!”
She began to get up, but I detained her with a hand on her arm.
“Now I have a question for you. What do you know about Brenda Bronson?”
Peggy went very still. The sun was growing warm this morning, and her musky perfume was stronger than ever. She took a long, slow breath, and then she looked me straight in the eye and said, “I never heard of her.”
It was a flat-out lie, I could tell, and that in itself was interesting.
“Are you sure?” I pressed her. “Because you seem to have known Guy Price pretty well, and I hear that Guy used to do business with Brenda. Drug business.”
“That’s not true!” she said, her pretty mouth curling in defiance. “Who told you that?”
“India Doyle did, and now India is dead.” I shook her arm gently. “Come on, Peggy, get real. There’s something dangerous going on here, and I’m trying to find out what it is. What was the connection between Guy and Brenda, if it wasn’t drugs? Were they lovers?”
That hit a nerve, and the violence of Peggy’s reaction was startling.
“You shut up!” she snapped, springing to her feet and wrenching her arm away. Pain and jealousy were naked in her face. “Guy wanted me and nobody else. Nobody. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” I said, standing up as well. “But—”
“If you want to know about Brenda, why don’t you ask your friend Jeff Austin? The two of them used t
o be real tight.”
Then she stalked away, leaving me staring after her. Jeff? Could he possibly be the crooked cop that India had heard about? If he was, and if he had learned that India was close to exposing him. . . . It occurred to me to wonder, with an uneasy shiver, how Jeff just happened to show up at the mausoleum right after Guy was killed. Had I been eating pizza with a double murderer last night?
No, that was impossible. I simply refused to believe it. I closed my eyes, queasy with fatigue and disgusted by my grubby state and, most of all, sick of this tangle of lies and suspicion. Mike was right, I told myself, I should try to forget all this. I should concentrate on Lily’s wedding, on innocent people and normal events and—
Suddenly a bundle of innocence and normality grabbed me around the knees and hung on tight.
“Aunt Carrie!” shrieked my little savior, turning a beaming brown face up to me. “I found Aunt Carrie!”
“So you did, Ethan. Good job!” I held out my arms to Lily’s four-year-old son and hoisted him gratefully into the air. Then I toted him in the direction that his chubby finger was pointing, to find Lily herself.
She was standing by my SUV, tending a pile of luggage and frantically scanning the crowd. At her side was her older boy, Marcus, who wore a T-shirt with front and rear views of a Tyrannosaurus rex on his narrow little chest and back. Lily wore a purple sundress and an expression of motherly rage.
“Ethan James,” she flared, “how many times today have I told you to stay right by me? I swear, I’m going to put you on a leash like a puppy dog. Hi, Carnegie.”
“Puppy!” Ethan cried. “I’m a puppy!”
Giggling delightedly, he launched into high-pitched barking just inches from my ear. I set him down hastily to preserve my hearing and had a friendly little tussle of greeting with Marcus. Ethan’s features were still bland and plump, but Marcus had matured into a distinctive little rogue with a pugnacious chin and his mother’s eyes.
“You ready to carry your ring?” I asked him, and he straightened up and saluted.
“Ready!”
“Good man.” Then I hugged Lily, hoping I smelled all right, and asked, “Did I have the time wrong for your ferry? I wasn’t expecting you yet. Have you talked to Mike?”
“He’s around here somewhere,” she said, “searching for this little escape artist. Ethan never goes far, but he goes, and if he’s squatting down looking at a bug or something he’s hard to spot. Anyway, we caught an earlier ferry, and when I called Mike he said your car was still parked out here, so we came to find you.”
“I’m glad you did. It’s so good to see you, Lily.”
She gave me an anxious look. “Mike told me about the . . . the recent events, but he says we shouldn’t change our plans.”
“I agree, one hundred percent. So what would you like to do with your extra time this morning?”
“Well, Mike offered to take the boys off my hands for a while so you and I can go over the details one last time.”
“I bet he didn’t phrase it that way,” I said, trying to tease a smile out of her. “I bet it was something like ‘So you two can obsess about the wedding some more.’ ”
That got more than a smile. Lily let out her wonderful throaty laugh and retorted, “No, he said so we could get right down to playing bride!”
We were both still laughing when Mike appeared to claim his soon-to-be stepsons, both of whom adored him. And why not, when he offered them ice cream so soon after breakfast?
All three gentlemen helped Lily load the luggage, including the garment bags holding our gowns. Then they set off in search of their treat, with Ethan perched on Mike’s shoulders and Marcus hanging on one hand, regaling him with the wonders of boat rides. We watched them go until they disappeared around the corner.
“Looks like a family to me,” I murmured.
Lily sighed. “I can hardly believe this is happening. I’ve been catastrophizing about ferry schedules and which shoes to wear and a million other things, and then Mike smiles at me and I’m so happy I feel like I’ve got light shining out of my pores. You know that feeling?”
Not lately, I wanted to say, and not consistently. But of course I didn’t. I just rocked my shoulder against hers—we’re both women of height, my best friend and me—and said, “You deserve him, Lily. And he deserves you, and the boys deserve to be spoiled rotten. But what do you mean, which shoes? The lace flats are perfect.”
She said, “But the heels are sexier, don’t you think?” and we settled into playing bride with a vengeance, right there beside the SUV.
“Sure they’re sexier, but I’m sticking with my satin slippers. We’re walking on gravel and grass, remember. I don’t want to teeter right into the pond. . . .”
Lily had just decided in favor of the flats, the ones that matched her diaphanous shoulder wrap, when a familiar truck drew up across the street and the Nyquists got out. Sigrid wore the same dress as when I’d met her, and the same circlet of braids, but also a starched white pinafore edged with lace and a charming little corsage of lavender flowers. Erik, though dressed more somberly, had a spray of lavender in his alpine-style hat.
“How nice to see you,” I greeted them, cringing a little at the thought of my own ensemble. “I didn’t realize you had a table at the market. But it’s perfect timing. Sigrid and Erik Nyquist, this is Lily James, Michael’s bride.”
Erik was in front, so Lily turned to him with her high-wattage smile and held out her hand. But the smile froze at the sight of his reaction. He stopped so abruptly that his sister almost bumped into him, and he offered Lily nothing but an affronted glare.
Lily’s hand remained suspended for what seemed like a very long time. Finally Erik took it stiffly and then dropped it immediately, as if the touch of her skin was physically painful. Behind him Sigrid stood rooted, her lips pinched together in a stiff, tight, unmistakable expression of distaste.
For one baffled moment, I honestly didn’t know what was wrong. There was a hideous little silence, and then Lily broke it.
“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you both and seeing the farm,” she said warmly, as if she hadn’t noticed a thing. “You just missed Mike, but we’ll both come out there after lunch, if that’s all right?”
Sigrid nodded, then found her voice. “We will be there all the afternoon today. Just now we are late, we must set up our table. . . .”
I filled in with some hasty remarks about not keeping them from their business, and then they were gone. Erik hadn’t said one single word.
“Damn them!” I said, as Lily and I climbed into Scarlet. I slammed my door. “Damn them both. Of all the—”
“Let it go, Carnegie.” Lily drew a deep, uneven breath. “Mike does that sometimes.”
“Does what?”
She bit her lower lip, blinking fast, and then made herself smile. “He forgets to tell people that I’m black.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“I’ll find you somewhere else for the ceremony,” I repeated obstinately. My outrage at Sigrid and Erik had congealed into a stubborn determination to move the wedding. “This island is swarming with romantic venues. Just say the word.”
“The word is no.”
As she said it, Lily dropped a pebble into the glass-clear water lapping softly against the dock in front of the Owl’s Roost. We were seated side by side with our feet dangling over, the way we’d sat on the deck of my houseboat just a week ago, and the afternoon sun was drying my blissfully clean hair.
I’d taken my longed-for shower the minute we reached my room—after taking a minute to try and reach Aaron at his hotel. I wanted to apologize for pouncing on him back on the courthouse steps, but just like last night there was no answer. He might as well be three thousand miles away again, not answering his e-mail.
I’d also called Mom to see how she and Owen were taking the news about India. They were distressed, of course, so to spare her feelings I revised my night in the pokey into “I spent some t
ime talking it over with the police.” She accepted that, so now I was feeling better about her, a little uneasy about Aaron, and a lot pissed off about Sigrid and Erik.
“Listen, Lily—”
“You listen, please. We took the Nyquists by surprise, that’s all. Maybe they’ll get used to . . . to the situation.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Then they don’t.” She shrugged angrily. “Pick your battles, I learned that a long time ago. I refuse to let these people diminish my wedding.”
I tossed a pebble myself, chucking it as far as I could in the general direction of Canada. I have a lousy pitching arm.
“Mike’s going to be furious about how they acted,” I said.
“Not if we don’t tell him.” Lily caught my look and said, “I mean it! I will not allow this business to cause Mike any grief. I know they’re old friends of his, but after tomorrow I never have to see them again. I’m sure we can all be civil for one afternoon. Back me up on this, girl.”
“Well, all right. If that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want. And right now I want to show you the negligee I bought for tomorrow night. Come on.”
As we went back inside the A-frame and down the hall to my room, I shook my head in admiration for Lily. Not at the way she was handling the Nyquists, because I would rather have fought it out with them somehow. But then I was safely Caucasian, and what did I know about these kinds of battles?
No, I was marveling at Lily’s plans for her nuptial weekend. We’d been revising them out on the dock, now that I had private quarters for us to play in instead of a guest room at Owen’s house.
They were excellent plans. Lily was a woman who understood her own needs and took care to meet them. Tonight, she had decreed, she would be a mom first and a bride second. Her own parents had passed away years ago, and this was essential to her.
So tonight’s shindig at ZZ’s would be a family affair, with Marcus and Ethan sharing the guest-of-honor role with herself and Mike. Afterward she would take them back to the Hotel de Haro, where we’d already gotten her registered and left her mom-type luggage, and tuck them in bed as she had every night of their lives.
You May Now Kill the Bride Page 17