Miz Scarlet and the Bewildered Bridegroom

by Barton, Sara M.

  It was amazing how quickly Karin rebounded. She haughtily straightened her tight pencil skirt over her bony derriere and shook her silk-draped shoulders, as if to brush me off. And then she had the audacity to point a finger at me. “I won’t stand for this kind of unethical behavior from a competitor. I want to press charges against her.”

  “You want to what?”

  “Relax, Ms. Wilson.” Detective Valboa leaned against the bathroom wall, watching Karin squirm as she was patted down by a female officer. While the plastic cuffs were being readied for her wrists, she made an outrageous move.

  “I demand that you arrest Scarlet Wilson this instant!” Karin’s voice grew so shrill that, for a moment, I thought she would completely lose what was left of her composure.

  “Yeah, that’s not happening. You’ve got a credibility problem,” the amused Cheswick cop replied. “By the way, your pals just cut a deal with the state’s attorney and rolled over on you.”

  “They’re lying! She’s the one that hired them!” Karin’s finger pointed in my direction.

  “Get her out of here,” was his reply.

  Officers Uglesich and Peters carted Karin Frenlind away just as Bur showed up, demanding to know why the cops were once again at the Four Acorns Inn.

  “We set a trap to catch Karin and unfortunately your sister got in the middle of it,” Max told him.

  “Typical,” said my brother. “She never did know how to butt out.”

  “What?” I glanced up at Kenny’s Mercer Security colleague. “Why didn’t you tell me, Max?”

  “I did.”

  “When?”

  “I sent you a text message when you were tearing up the stairs like a maniac! Why didn’t you read it?”

  “Because I heard a noise and I thought my mother had fallen in the bathroom!”

  “Oh,” Max winced. “That explains it.”

  “If it’s any consolation, we’ve got even more evidence now of her involvement in this plot to ruin your business, which means she’ll probably take a plea deal and skip the trial,” one of the uniformed cops told me. “That will save the taxpayers a big chunk of money.”

  “She’s got some nerve, claiming I’m the one that set this up! Why, I have a good mind to sue the crap out of her!”

  “That’s still an option,” Kenny informed me, his arm around my shoulder. “In the meantime, you’ve got guests coming in a short time and we’ve got some cleaning up to do. Hey, Max!”

  “Yes?” He was busy with his cell phone.

  “Let the Googins girls and Jenny know the coast is clear.”

  “I’m on it as we speak.”

  “You sent them away?” I was stunned.

  “Sure. We didn’t want them here when Karin showed up.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “Because I followed you into the woods and saw you take the back trail. It never occurred to me you’d make such good time up the mountain, honey. I underestimated your athletic prowess.”

  “Captain Peacock, are you trying to flatter me to get your fanny out of hot water?”

  “Ah, you know me too well.” He kissed my forehead. Wrapping his strong arms around me, he pulled me tight and nuzzled my neck. His embrace gave me strength, which I sadly needed. That wrestling match in the shower had knocked the stuffing out of me; my knees were still feeling a little weak at the moment.

  We all descended to the first floor and went out to the sun porch, where a contingent of cops were in the process of documenting the damage Karin had done to the premises, to supplement the videos made by security cameras Kenny and Max set up throughout the public rooms. I could see them writing in their notebooks as they passed the debris.

  “I guess I’ll go into the kitchen and let you folks work unimpeded,” I decided. I had less than three hours before the first of the wedding guests arrived. I might as well turn over the marinating chicken while I figured out what to do with the upended table on the sun porch, now that all those plates and glasses were destined for the dump.

  At first glance, everything looked exactly the way I had left it before the dogs and I went for that hike. I decided to make myself a quick sandwich on the fly. Grabbing the peanut butter from the upper cabinet, I spread a tablespoon’s worth on a slice of multigrain bread. Crossing to the refrigerator, I pulled out a jar of raspberry preserves and took it back to the kitchen island. I unscrewed the cap, stuck a knife into all that sweet berry goodness and covered a second slice of bread with a liberal coating. I got as far as putting the halves together and then it dawned on me.

  “Where’s the wedding cake?” I stood there stunned, knife in hand. Was it really gone? Maybe, after the last few days of mayhem, my mind was playing tricks on me. I’ve been under a strain, I reminded myself. Perhaps I just thought I didn’t see it. Could it be some weird kind of refrigerator mirage, a “now you see it, now you don’t” scenario? Maybe the temperature inside the giant insulated cooler hit the warmer air in the kitchen and poof! The cake appeared to disappear. Come on, Scarlet. Are you listening to yourself? “Damn! It’s really gone!”

  Rushing back to the refrigerator, I pulled the door open and stared at the shelf where I had placed the plastic cake container earlier in the day. My mind kept trying to spin this catastrophe in a positive direction. Had someone pulled it out to grab something behind it, forgetting to return it? It wasn’t on any of the counters. Had someone accidentally stuck it in the freezer compartment? I yanked at the door. A cloud of white vapor escaped and when it cleared, there was still no cake.

  “Maybe Kenny and Max hid the cake because Karin was on her way over here,” I told myself. That was a logical explanation, wasn’t it?

  “Boy, I missed all the fun!” Jenny appeared in the doorway. “I can’t believe they captured that wicked witch!”

  “Jen, have you seen the wedding cake?”

  “Sure, it’s nice.” She reached past me and grabbed a frozen yogurt bar from inside the freezer. “I like how you did the icing.”

  “I wasn’t asking if you thought it was presentable. I was asking because I can’t find it.” I slammed the door in frustration.

  “It’s in the fridge,” she insisted, watching me with more than a little concern. I shook my head. “Where else could it be?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out, Jen.”

  “What are you going to do? The bride and groom are expecting a cake. You can’t get married without a cake!”

  “We have to find it. Where do we even start to look?”

  “You don’t suppose Bur ate it, do you?”

  “Even my brother isn’t that stupid. No, this has to be Karin’s doing.” I thought about it for a moment. With the sun porch vandalized and the cake missing, she had struck a serious blow to our efforts on behalf of Annalee and Gunnar. What else had she done while I was out? And why didn’t anyone tell me about the missing confection?

  “I thought Kenny and Max were watching the house, Miz Scarlet.”

  “I did too. I think we need some answers from our Mercer Security team,” I decided. “Let’s go find out what really went on.”

  We tracked them down in the garden. When Max looked up and saw us coming their way, he whistled, doing his best impression of an enemy rocket about to land. “Incoming!”

  “Oh, Miz Scarlet! There you are! I was about to come and talk to you,” Kenny stood up to greet me, laying on the charm so thick I thought I was going to get a sugar high.

  “Nice try,” I cut him off brusquely. “Where’s that damn cake?”

  “Ah....”

  “Ah what?”

  “We needed bait to lure Karin out of her hidey hole, honey.”

  “So you used my cake?”

  “We knew that she wouldn’t be able to resist it, especially with the little birdies on top. And it worked perfectly. I followed her to the supermarket and parked next to her car, where I left the door unlocked and the cake on the front seat.” It was obvious that the man with a p
lan was more than a little proud of himself, even as the minutes tick-tick-ticked away and time grew shorter. Annalee and Gunnar would be here in just a few hours and we hadn’t sorted out the chaos and confusion.

  “Wait a minute. Why would Karin care if you had a wedding cake in your car?” I wanted to know. The minute I said that, the deer looked right into my headlights and froze in his tracks. “You took my car?”

  “We needed her to know the cake was destined for the wedding at the Four Acorns Inn,” Max broke in, trying to rescue his colleague. “Your car has the inn logo emblazoned on the side.”

  “Where...is...the...cake?” I uttered through clenched teeth. Kenny had the good sense to at least look sheepish.

  “Well, Karin removed it from your car and um, dumped it in the trash bin by the store entrance.”

  “My cake saver too?”

  “That plastic thing? Give me credit for some good sense. I retrieved it. It’s in my car.”

  “And the,” I took a breath before I said that final word, “birdies?”

  “I’ve got them right here.” Any other time, I would have thawed out a bit, but the tension that permeated every muscle in my body made me rigid. I waited impatiently as he put his hand into his left pocket and pulled out the frosting-encrusted porcelain figurine with the two birds. He grabbed my hand and made a big show of placing it in my palm.

  “Here they are, and as you can see, the birdies are still in one piece.”

  “You are so lucky,” I hissed. “So, so, so, so, so very lucky!”

  My teenage assistant had the good sense to follow me silently back to the house, even as I carried on a running conversation with myself. Part of me was trying to figure out how I was going to get everything done before Annalee and Gunnar arrived with their families in tow, but another part of me was having a delayed meltdown, still shaken by the attack in the shower. It was one thing to survive it and another to let go of the terror I felt.

  “Who am I kidding, thinking I could host weddings at the Four Acorns Inn? Perhaps I should call the bride and groom and offer to take them to another hotel or inn. I could refund their deposit and help them make arrangements for the wedding and reception elsewhere. Sure it’s short notice, but wouldn’t that be better than dropping them in the middle of this ongoing nightmare?” My heart was heavy as I climbed the steps to the sun porch.

  Lacey and Laurel were inside, already busy. Fighting back the tears, I steeled myself to look at what remained of the latest disaster.

  All the chairs had been pulled off to the side, out of the way, and the kitchen wastebasket was at the ready. Lacey had swept the broken bits of treasured plates and glasses into piles and was now scooping them up in the dustpan, one by one. I stood there, watching, as she deposited a load in the trash. Every tinkle of broken glass was a painful reminder of the loss. I heaved a forlorn sigh. The china and glassware had belonged to my late paternal grandmother, the woman who taught me to cook. In a single day, it was all gone, smashed to smithereens.

  “Scarlet, I hope you don’t mind that we took the liberty of resetting the table,” my mother said kindly. She sat at the head of the table in her wheelchair, her hands moving deftly through the pile of rescued blossoms. She was already repairing Jenny’s flower arrangement. I leaned over and gave her a silent peck on the cheek. I didn’t trust myself to speak. “We thought it best to get started, given that there’s not much time before the guests arrive.”

  The blue damask tablecloth had been replaced with a pink one. My mother had neatly folded the matching napkins and stacked them in a pile.

  “We were thinking that it might be nice to use the everyday china and water goblets tonight, to give the dinner a casual, intimate feel.”

  “Mmm....” I managed to mutter, still choking on my disappointment.

  “By the way, Scarlet, I happen to know a great little store that sells replacement china,” Lacey announced. “We were able to save five of the plates, so you’ll just have to buy seven if you want service for twelve.”

  “It’s not the same,” I sniffed, still hurting. I wasn’t ready to put on a happy face yet. That didn’t stop Lacey from pushing my buttons.

  “Let me tell you an important lesson I learned a long time ago,” she said, placing the broom against the wall and putting an arm around my shoulder. “You remember my rat of an ex-husband? The night I found out that he was keeping a mistress, we had a royal battle. I threw six of my favorite Spode plates at his head. The next day I was furious with myself for breaking them.”

  “Great story,” I muttered, plastering a half-hearted smile on my face.

  “You don’t understand, dear. At first, I hated those replacements I bought. They just reminded me of what a fool I had been to marry the jerk in the first place. But then one day your mother said something that changed everything.”

  “What did she say?” Jenny’s curiosity got the better of her. She glanced over at my mother, who gave us a knowing smile.

  “I told her she was looking at the situation all wrong.”

  “I don’t understand,” said the girl beside me. I had to admit I didn’t either. Then again, I wasn’t sure I cared.

  “Breaking those plates represented the end of Lacey’s patience with her philandering husband, the last straw,” my mother patiently explained. “Maybe if she hadn’t smashed so many of them, she wouldn’t have had the guts to walk away from a marriage that wasn’t working.”

  “So? What does that have to do with me?”

  “Think about the woman your grandmother was, Scarlet. If she were here now, what do you think she’d say to you?”

  I shrugged, thinking back to those treasured afternoons in Grandma Wilson’s kitchen, when it was just the two of us talking as we prepared dinner. “She’d tell me there were far worse things that could have happened to me. She’d say I can always replace china, but I can’t always replace the people in my life.”

  “Exactly,” Laurel nodded approvingly. “You’ll still think of your grandma every time you look at the new plates, but you’ll also think about how Karin Frenlind didn’t break your resolve with all the terrible things she did to you. In the meantime, you’d better get to work on that wedding and make it a big success, because there’s life and love to be celebrated tonight in this house, darling daughter. Now, go!”

  “Go!” Lacey and Jenny both said at the same time, echoing Laurel’s sentiments as they waved me off in the direction of the butler’s pantry. What choice did I have? I dragged myself off to the kitchen and got to work.

  I started another batch of chocolate mousse, feeling like a puppy that’s been kicked. It wasn’t fair that Karin got away with doing so much damage. As I watched bittersweet and semi-sweet chocolates melting in the double-boiler for the second time, I had to admit I wasn’t totally caught off-guard. How else could you explain the fact that I made an extra set of cake layers and bought enough chocolate to make a second cake? Somehow I must have known things weren’t going to go well. Call it intuition or call it recognizing evil when I saw it, but I had had the good sense to protect myself. Maybe that made me smarter than Karin. After all, she was off to jail and I was in the kitchen. She didn’t stop us. The wedding was still on.

  I’m going about this all wrong. Instead of wasting time feeling sorry for myself and trying to make up for the losses, I need to forge ahead and get beyond all that. Otherwise, Karin wins. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let that happen!

  “Ha!” I said aloud. Maybe I wasn’t yet vindicated and I certainly couldn’t call this a triumph, but at least I was still standing. That thought motivated me to get on with the preparations.

  I decided I could wait until after the guests ate their welcoming dinner to decorate the new cake. We could serve dessert and coffee in the living room. That would keep them occupied and out of my kitchen, giving me a solid hour to decorate the new masterpiece.

  While the melted chocolate cooled, I washed off the little white porcelain birds and
carefully set them on the window sill. I thought about sturdy, stouthearted Grandma Wilson. After Laurel’s terrible accident, she had moved in and taken over many of the household duties for her daughter-in-law. Those few years she lived with us passed too quickly. She had been a godsend. Barely five feet tall, with a silver bun at the nape of her neck, she looked like the quintessential granny, complete with black laced shoes and what she used to call her “house dress”. I adored her.

  “There’s no better revenge than success,” she had told me the day I came home from school despondent after losing a spot on the junior varsity tennis team to Lola Jeffers. She had a rolling pin in hand as she prepared a pie crust. “Forget about the other girl and concentrate on improving your game. That’s the thing that will catch the coach’s attention.”

  She was right about that. I practiced my shots every day after school, hitting balls against the wall for an hour or two. I did footwork drills and served hundreds of balls to a non-existent opponent on an empty tennis court. A month later, I was named as an alternate, when Pammy Smith had to leave the team because of a torn Achilles tendon. My persistence paid off, and by the end of the season, I was moved up on the team’s roster.

  “Jenny,” I said to my assistant as she hovered near me, “I need you to go to the store for a few things.”

  “Like what?” she wanted to know.

  “We need more flowers...lots more flowers. I want flowers in every room! Fill every vase we have with color. Make sure you put a big bouquet in the living room. That’s where we’re serving dessert and coffee tonight. Ask Bur to set up a folding table in the corner. We’ll cover it with a fancy tablecloth. And we’ll need a few extra chairs for guest seating. Annalee and Gunnar don’t know it yet, but they’re having a special party tonight!”

  “But....”

  “But nothing! Get some of those wonderful truffles at Munson’s.”

  “The ones with the melt-in-your-mouth centers?”

  “Yes. Here’s some money for everything,” I announced, pulling a wad of twenties from my secret stash in the spice cabinet. “Don’t come home until you spend it all on party goodies!”