Steps to the Altar

by Earlene Fowler

“Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy.” I could imagine her smile over the phone.

  “Of course, who else?” I said, laughing. Pride and Prejudice. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate story to describe Elvia and Emory’s relationship.

  “What about you and Gabe?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What? Don’t tell me you haven’t got a costume yet! It’s too late to get anything—”

  I interrupted her. “Don’t worry, mi amiga buena, I have a costume. Cathy picked one out for me. I just haven’t looked at it yet. I’ll be there in full costumed glory, I assure you. I trust Cathy, it’ll be a good one.”

  “Good. Have to go. One of my clerks is motioning at me in panic. Looks like Bill the pickpocket is back.”

  I laughed. Bill was a homeless man who had a bad habit of stealing pencils and paper from Elvia’s bookstore. Not a lot, just enough to continue his rambling diary. She’d explained to him many times she’d be happy to give him all the paper and pencils he needed, but he just enjoyed stealing them more. “Good luck and see you tomorrow.”

  I had just driven off Cal Poly’s campus and was on my way to the freeway, when my cell phone rang again. I was beginning to wonder if the convenience of this new technology was worth the loss of peace and quiet.

  “Hello?”

  “Black and white,” Dove said.

  “Huh?”

  “A black-and-white wedding. The wedding party wears white and everyone else wears black. Very elegant.”

  “And you could serve licorice and marshmallows for appetizers,” I said. “Blackened fish and white rice for the main dish. You could walk down the aisle to Paul McCartney and Micheal Jackson singing ‘Ebony and Ivory.’ ”

  “I’m serious,” she said, not laughing. “What do you really think?”

  I gave up trying to be impartial. “Let me rephrase and shorten my comments . . . yuck?”

  “Fine.” The phone went dead.

  Weddings and marriage and all the tumultuous feelings between men and women tangled in my mind on my drive over Rosita Pass to Paso Robles. I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I was only vaguely aware of the lush green hills and young calves butting their mamas’ sides, something I usually loved to watch. Early spring on the Central Coast is its most physically beautiful time, a season of renewal and hope. But in my life, early spring had become a mixture of upheaval and confusion, sorrow and joy. Jack and I were married in early spring. Fifteen years later, Jack died in early spring. Then a year after that, Gabe and I were married in early spring.

  Warner’s Sporting Goods was located on River Avenue, the main street that bisected the center of Paso Robles. It was in an old brick building catty-corner from the city park, a square of green lawn and mature trees that was a popular meeting place for Paso Roblans from birth to ninety. According to the MidState Bank’s electronic thermometer, the temperature was seventy degrees, ten degrees warmer than San Celina, so I pulled off my jacket and shoved it behind my seat. I parked across the street and waited ten minutes before the traffic slowed enough for me to cross. Paso Robles was going through an even more radical change than San Celina. More and more city people from the Bay area and Los Angeles were discovering this longtime ranching community. Housing developments and the inevitable chain stores and businesses that followed were turning this once small, traditional Western town into a sometimes uncomfortable mix of affluent retirees, new young families who worked at the mushrooming businesses, and oldtime ranching and Hispanic residents.

  A young man, about fifteen or sixteen, with a flat-top haircut was the only person behind the counter. He had what appeared to be a schoolbook open in his lap but he was talking on the phone. The guilty expression that flitted across his freckled face when I walked up told me it was probably his girlfriend.

  “Gotta go. I have a customer.” He hung up quickly and gave me a wide smile. His front tooth had a small chip out of it, giving him a mischievous look. He looked so much like Frankie, it had to be his son. “Can I help you?” he asked politely.

  “I was wondering if Frankie . . . uh, Frank Warner is around.”

  He held up one nail-bitten finger and picked up the phone. “Dad, some lady’s looking for you.” He listened for a moment. “I don’t know. She called you Frankie.” He looked over at me. “Uh . . . who are you?” Then I heard a voice over the phone snap his name. “Sorry,” he said to me, his expression twisted in chagrin. “May I tell him who’s asking?”

  I smiled, remembering when Frankie had been as awkward as his son. “Tell him it’s Benni and that he’d better get his two left feet out here now.” I said it loud enough that his son didn’t have to repeat it.

  The young man grinned at me. “He said he’d be right out.”

  Minutes later, Frankie Warner came out of a door in the back of the store. “Benni Harper!” he called across the barbells and bicycle helmets. “It’s been a million years since I’ve seen you, old girl. When was that anyway?” When he reached the front of the store, he caught me up in a spine-crushing hug. For a moment, my feet actually left solid earth.

  Laughing, I hugged him back. “Now put me down, you big ole bull. It has been almost three years. At Jack’s funeral. You look great.”

  He let me down gently, but still kept hold of one hand, his face sad for a moment. He and Jack had played high school football together. Jack was a quarterback; Frankie a defensive tackle. He turned to his son. “Hey, Bryan, this is an old, old friend of mine. Benni Harper. We go way back.”

  “Let’s delete one of those olds, okay?” I said, patting his hand. I let go and held a hand out to his son. “Nice to meet you. Your dad and I went to school together from the first grade on.”

  “Cool,” he said, shaking my hand. He glanced back over at the phone. Old school friends of his father’s weren’t nearly as interesting as the girl he’d had to hang up on so unceremoniously.

  I turned back to Frank. “Do you have an office where we can talk in private? I’ve got a couple of questions for you.”

  “Sure,” he said, taking my elbow and guiding me toward the door in the back. “Watch the store, Bryan.”

  “Sure thing, Dad.” When I glanced back, he was already dialing the phone.

  After settling down in Frank’s spacious office and asking the requisite “Have you seen” and “Whatever happened to” questions, Frank settled his still linebacker-size body into his chair, linked his fingers behind his head, and said, “So, what questions do you have for me?”

  I shifted in the padded office chair, feeling a bit embarrassed now by my investigation. “This may sound silly to you, but hear me out, okay?”

  “Fire away.”

  It took me about twenty minutes to tell the condensed version of who and what I was investigating and why. During my explanation, he’d unlocked his hands and sat forward in his chair, resting his thick blond forearms on his desk.

  “So, what I was wondering was this,” I said. “What do you know about your great-uncle Mitch and do you think your grandpa would talk to me about it?”

  He patted the side of his blond crew cut. “When I was growing up, things were whispered about Uncle Mitch. We kids knew he’d done something awful, that he’d brought disgrace to the family, but it was never talked about openly.”

  “I know how that goes,” I said, nodding.

  “So I never pursued it. You know me, if it didn’t have something to do with sports, it didn’t interest me. Now Rosie was different.” Rosie was his only sister, older than us by ten years. “She inhaled all those Nancy Drew books when she was a kid. Thought herself quite the detective. Decided to find out the real story.” He leaned back in his chair and chuckled.

  “So, did she?”

  “I guess. Though all I know is what you already know. That Great-Uncle Mitch ran off with this Maple Sullivan after she killed her husband.”

  “Why does everyone assume she did it?” I asked. “I mean, no offense, but couldn’t your uncle have just as e
asily pulled the trigger?”

  He shrugged and leaned forward, reaching for a Roledex on the corner of his desk. “I agree with you. Frankly, I have no idea why he wasn’t suspected. There must have been some evidence that pointed to her.” He started flipping through the Roledex. “I’ll give you Rosie’s number and you can call her. After her divorce, she built a new place up here outside Paso. Gramps is living with her now in a guest house out back of her stables. She breeds Arabians.”

  “Do you think he’d talk to me?”

  The corners of his lips moved downward and he shook his head. “Doubt it. He’s of that age, you know. Past best left in the past, yadda, yadda.” He dialed Rosie’s number and, after a quick explanation, handed the phone to me.

  “Hi, Rosie,” I said. “Benni Harper.”

  “Nice talking to you again. Congratulations on your marriage even if I’m a tad late.” Her voice was a rich alto with a slight roughness that overtakes some women’s vocal cords when they reach middle age.

  “Thanks,” I said abruptly. “I’m sorry to interrupt your day . . .”

  “Not a problem,” she said, laughing. “I take care of ten horses, two dogs, a tortoise, three ducks, my new grandson and Gramps. Any distraction from the real world is welcome.” There was a slight pause. “Sorry, putting out my cigarette.” That explained her husky voice. “Look, why don’t you come on out. I’m only about fifteen minutes from the store. This would be easier to talk about in person. I mean, if you have time.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That would be great.”

  Frank drew me a map to her place on a piece of Warner’s Sporting Goods stationery. After shooting the breeze with him a few more minutes, I drove out of town on a highway going east. Twenty minutes and many twists and turns later, after passing too many twenty-acre ranchettes with homes that looked like something out of Architectural Digest, I found Appleman Way. I turned down the narrow road marked by a plain black mailbox with WARNER ARABIANS painted in neat red letters. Frank had told me that she’d taken back her maiden name after the divorce. The road was lined with leafy, full-grown shade trees that must have cost a small fortune to plant. The concrete circle driveway was surrounded by thick hedges five feet tall. I parked directly in front of the house.

  Rosie was waiting for me on the wraparound porch of a new two-story farm-style house. She sat in a wicker rocker that matched the navy blue trimming on the white clapboard house. A cigarette dangled from her lips, which she stubbed out in a large ashtray on the floor next to her.

  “Good seeing you again, Benni,” she said, reaching out a dry, weather-worn hand that had obviously picked more than a few horses’ hooves in its lifetime. She was longlegged and strong-looking with shoulder-length, reddish hair streaked with white. Beneath her pale-lashed gray eyes there were bluish half circles. She was dressed in a clean gray T-shirt and faded, dirt-stained Wranglers.

  “Likewise,” I said, shaking her hand.

  “Join me.” She nodded over at a matching chair. “Gramps and my grandson, Trace, are both taking naps and nothing else on the spread needs my attention right this moment, so I’m yours. Would you like something to drink?” She nodded at a small wicker table that held the makings of gin and tonics.

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  “Mind if I do?”

  I shook my head. “Not at all.” Actually, it could work in my favor. A little liquor always did loosen people’s tongues, a sad but true fact that I suspected all investigators knew and took advantage of when they could.

  As she mixed a drink, obviously not her first, she talked to me over her shoulder. “So, you’re looking into Great-Uncle Mitch’s little indiscretion. Well, good luck to you, girl. Hope you find out more than I did.”

  My heart sank a little. Great, she probably didn’t know any more than I did and just wanted some company. I sighed inwardly and settled deeper into the wicker chair, prepared to listen to the rambling of a bored, semidrunk woman. The next hour would be wasted, but then, what else did I have to do?

  She sat down next to me, held up her pack of Winstons with a question on her face.

  “No, thanks, but go right ahead,” I said.

  She lit up another cigarette, thoughtfully holding it to the side away from me, and took a sip of her drink. “Okay, now,” she finally said. “Great-Uncle Mitch. He worked with Maple Sullivan on the paper. He was their sports reporter, of course.” She gave a small wet cough. “He and Maple had an affair and then Maple killed her husband, Garvey, whose family was as prominent as ours, then they both headed for Mexico to live out their lives drinking margaritas and writing love sonnets to each other.”

  “They went to Mexico?” I said, sitting forward. “How did you find that out?”

  She brought her cigarette to her pale, unpainted lips and inhaled deeply, blowing a crooked smoke ring. “Sorry, that’s just my facetious little story. Actually, I have no idea where they went. To be honest, I don’t know much more than you, and after doing some research back in the eighties when I was really into genealogy, I even hired a private detective to try and find any trace of them. Nothing. Nada. He was the one who told me they most likely went to a foreign country, which would make them almost impossible to find. Especially after such a long time and especially if they changed their names, which they most likely did.”

  “What about your grampa? Would he ever talk to you about the incident?”

  She frowned, picking a piece of tobacco off her lip and wiping it on the edge of her gray T-shirt. “Like Frankie probably told you, that was the one big black blot on the Warner family history book. Gramps wouldn’t even allow Mitch’s name to be spoken. Though when my grammy was alive, she used to tell us that Mitch was not a killer, nor would he help someone who had killed, to not believe everything that was whispered about Uncle Mitch. She told us that we should never talk about it to anyone, but that we shouldn’t believe what was said or written. She said Mitch was a fine, decent man. A good Catholic. And Grammy didn’t bestow that kind of praise lightly. She was a six-day-a-week Catholic. She believed in her brother-in-law in a way that his own brother never did. I always wondered about that, why she defended him to us kids. I thought at the time that maybe she was in love with him or something. I was twenty at the time and thought love—that is, sexual love—was behind every motivation. Thinking about it later, I realized that Uncle Mitch was only ten when Gramps and Grammy got married, and Grammy being an only child, she probably really thought of him as her little brother.”

  “So your grandpa didn’t agree with her. About Mitch’s innocence, I mean.”

  She took another drag from her cigarette. A red-and-white corgi with one blind eye bounded up the three steps to the porch and, after a quick sniff at my legs, settled down in front of Rosie. She stretched out a bare foot and stroked his back. “I didn’t say that. I think that maybe he did agree with her. He never said his brother did it. He just wouldn’t talk about it. I think there’s more to the story than he’s telling and Grammy knew it.”

  “That’s exactly how I feel,” I said eagerly. “That there’s more to the story.”

  “Well,” she said in a lazy voice. “If you find out anything, clue me in. I hit nothing but brick walls.” She gave a sly smile. “But then again, I didn’t have your official police connections or expertise in winnowing out the truth.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read,” I said, giving an uncomfortable laugh. My few stumblings into crime had, unfortunately, been reported in the same paper Maple and Mitch had worked for.

  “I think it’s a hoot,” she said. “And I appreciate your interest. I’d honestly love to see Uncle Mitch’s name cleared.”

  “And Maple’s,” I reminded her.

  “Right.” Rosie’s unconcern for Maple and her reputation made me feel even more protective toward her. It wasn’t fair that, even after all these years, it was the prominent local boy who had people caring about whether his name was cleared and not the young Kentucky farm
girl who had come to San Celina armed only with her starryeyed love and one meager trunkful of possesions.

  Inside the house, a small child started crying. The corgi jumped up and barked twice.

  “Okay, okay,” Rosie said, slowly putting out her cigarette in the half-filled ashtray. “I’m coming. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  A louder wail caused her to roll her eyes. “Thought I was through this part of my life.” She gave me a wave goodbye, then opened the screen door. “I’m coming, baby boy. Just hold on.” The corgi dashed through the open door in front of her.

  I was opening the door to my truck when a grizzled, old man’s voice said behind me, “She’s full of crap, you know.”

  Startled, I jerked around to face the man. He seemed to have appeared from nowhere, but I realized after a moment, that he had probably been lurking behind the hedges listening to every word we said. He appeared to be in his eighties and was dressed in new blue Levi’s rolled up with large cuffs and a pale blue Western shirt. His face was red and peeling, as if he’d just had a bad sunburn, though most of it was hidden under his expensive white Stetson cowboy hat. I assumed him to be Frank and Rosie’s grampa Micah.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Crap,” he repeated. “Full of it. You and her both. There ain’t no more story to Mitch and that Sullivan woman and you’d best be leaving it at that. Hear me now.” He poked a ragged-nailed finger at me, punctuating each word. “Hear me?”

  “You must be Micah Warner,” I said, unnerved by his aggressiveness, but wanting to keep him talking as long as I could. Maybe some vital piece of information would slip. “I’m Benni Harper. I’m just doing a little research for the historical society.”

  He didn’t acknowledge my statement. “Mitch was my baby brother,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of people dragging him through the mud.”

  “That’s not my intention, Mr. Warner. I just want to know the truth.”

  He grabbed my forearm with an iron grip that spoke of a man who’d spent many years roping cattle. I could feel his horn-sharp calluses through my shirtsleeve. “Young woman, I know about you and I don’t want you nosing about my family’s business. I’m telling you to leave Mitch alone. Let his soul rest in peace.”