Wall-To-Wall Dead

by Jennie Bentley

  I took it, but shook my head. “I’m not going to cry.”

  “You cried at Irina’s wedding.” His voice was low and tickled the hair at my ear.

  “I didn’t cry at Kate and Wayne’s. Irina’s wedding was special.”

  “This is special, too,” Derek said. “Every wedding’s special to the people involved.”

  True. But I wasn’t involved in this one, and knew the people involved only peripherally. So although I might have gotten a mite glassy-eyed when they said their vows and the priest declared them husband and wife, nothing overflowed.

  “You OK?” Derek turned to me when the bride and groom had passed by on their way out of the church.

  I nodded and handed him the handkerchief back. “Fine. Nice ceremony.”

  “Too stuffy,” Derek said.

  “You and Melissa eloped, right?”

  “If you want to call it that. We got married at City Hall. Spur of the moment. I guess we thought it was romantic.” He shrugged.

  It probably had been romantic. They’d been quite young and crazy about each other. It happened more than ten years ago. Eleven or maybe even twelve. They’d been in their early twenties, both of them.

  “Let’s go see if the steeple is open,” Derek said, cutting into my reverie. I shook off the thoughts to give him a smile.

  “Let’s.”

  The steeple was open, and the view was just as nice as he’d promised, once I’d made the climb to the top. There was the harbor and Casco Bay on one side, with the Atlantic and the small islands dotting the blue expanse beyond, and on the other there was land as far as the eye could see—all the way to the New Hampshire mountains. The green trees were starting to give way to some yellow and orange, and the city, with its red brick buildings and mansard roofs, was spread out below us. Derek put his arm around my shoulders, and I snuggled into his side and pulled my shawl a little tighter around myself. It was colder up here, two hundred and four feet above the ground, and it wasn’t really warm down below today, either. I should probably have worn a dress with sleeves, or at least a proper jacket.

  “Cold?” Derek said.

  “Just a little.”

  “Want to go up to the hotel room while we wait for the reception to start? I’ll help you warm up.” He wiggled his eyebrows.

  I smiled. “Maybe later. This is pretty.”

  “Yes,” Derek said, looking around, “it is.”

  “I like living in Maine.”

  He smiled. “No plans to change your mind and run back to Manhattan?”

  I shook my head. “None at all.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Derek said. “You didn’t finish telling me what happened last night. You were on the balcony and you heard Candy talking on the phone…”

  “About the meeting and how Wayne didn’t know anything about this guy. I wanted to know who she was talking to, so when she said she’d meet him in ten minutes, I followed her.”

  “To Guido’s?”

  I nodded. “She sat there a couple of minutes, in a corner of the parking lot, and then that guy came out and got into her car. They talked, and then he went back into the restaurant and she drove away. Both of them looked angry.”

  “Let me guess,” Derek said, sounding resigned, “you sat in the parking lot and waited for him to leave, and then you followed him.”

  “There didn’t seem to be any sense in following Candy. I figured she was just going home.”

  “Of course. And what happened when you followed him? He led you on a cat-and-mouse high-speed car chase through Waterfield?”

  Hardly. We hadn’t proceeded above 45 mph the whole time. A real waste of a BMW convertible, if you ask me.

  “He drove to Wellhaven and disappeared inside. It’s a gated community, so I couldn’t follow.”

  “And you didn’t park the car and climb over the gate and slink through people’s yards peering through their windows until you figured out where he lived? I’m surprised.” He turned toward the door to the stairs, pulling me along.

  “There’s no need to be snarky,” I said, going.

  “Who’s being snarky? If it hadn’t been a gated community, isn’t that exactly what you would have done?”

  Since it was, I didn’t answer, just pretended to be busy navigating the treacherous stone steps on my four-inch heels. It wasn’t all pretend, to be honest. I’d been used to wearing heels in New York, but in the past year, I’d spent most of my time in sneakers, boots, Wellies, and flip-flops, and I had gotten out of practice. I appreciated having Derek’s steadying arm under my elbow, and not just because his hand was warm and rough and hard and felt nice. There was a time or two I would have pitched forward if he hadn’t held on.

  “So tell me about this strip club you went to yesterday,” I said when we were in the Beetle and on our way back to the hotel. (We had decided that the Beetle was more appropriate for the occasion—and my outfit—than the truck was.)

  Derek was driving, even though it was my car, and he slanted a look my way. “Why?”

  “I’m curious.”

  “Uh-huh.” I could tell he didn’t believe me. “No way. If I tell you the name of it, you’ll sneak out of the reception and go there, to see if you can find Jamie.”

  “I won’t. I promise.” I crossed my fingers in the folds of my dress, where I thought he might not notice.

  “Uh-huh.” I could tell he didn’t believe me. “No way.”

  “Come on!”

  “Nope.” He shook his head. “But if you’re a good girl, I might tell you tomorrow morning, before we check out. You can drive by on your way out of town.”

  “It won’t be open then.”

  “Exactly,” Derek said.

  —10—

  The hotel where Derek had spent the night—and where the reception would also be held—was the Tremont, just a few short blocks from the Cathedral.

  It was a lovely old place, a boutique hotel located in one of the old red brick buildings from the late 1800s. Five floors, thirty rooms, plus a restaurant and bar and a ballroom on the first floor. The reception was to be held there, where sparkling chandeliers cast prisms of light over white-draped tables with centerpieces of baby’s breath and pale pink roses.

  We were among the last guests to arrive, since we’d taken that break upstairs in our room that Derek had suggested. I was relaxed and warm and rested, even if my fancy hairdo was a thing of the past. I’d given up on the chignon and simply let my hair down the way I normally do. The formal part of the occasion was probably over with anyway, I figured, and now it was time to celebrate.

  We ended up at a table with some of the other participants in last night’s outing to the strip club, along with their wives, girlfriends, and significant others, and they turned out to be a nice group of people. A few of them I had met before, like the Reverend Bartholomew Norton from Waterfield, who would be officiating at Derek’s and my wedding in October. He had been friends with both Derek and Ryan in school, and I was a little bit shocked to learn that he’d been among the celebrants the night before.

  “I can’t believe you guys dragged a priest to a strip club!” I whispered to Derek in a quiet moment.

  He whispered back, “He wasn’t born with a collar and cassock, Avery. The man’s seen naked women before. Besides, he’s married!”

  He was, to a very nice woman named Judy, who was a couple of years older, as well as a couple of inches taller than him. Barry is barely taller than me, with a compact and muscular upper body and extremely short legs. I’ve seen him preach before, and he stands on a box behind the pulpit. At this moment I was willing to wager money that his feet were dangling above the floor.

  I smiled, and Barry, sitting on the other side of the table, smiled back. “Having a good time, Avery?” He also has a beautiful, resonant voice, very fitting to his chosen profession. Listening to Barry reading from the Psalms is a thing of beauty. I could hardly wait for him to say, I now pronounce you husband and wife.

&nbs
p; I nodded. “Lovely, thank you. You have a nice group of friends.”

  Barry and Derek both looked around the table. “We don’t see each other much anymore,” Derek said. “Ryan’s in Portland, Alex is in Bar Harbor, and Zach drove in from New Hampshire.”

  Alex, a big burly guy with a beard, nodded. So did Zach, who was a tall and skinny redhead with a job in the technology industry. Unlike Alex, who was loud and boisterous, he hardly spoke at all.

  Derek continued, “Some of the others live even farther away. Of the seven of us, it’s only Barry and me left in Waterfield. And Jill.”

  Alex grinned. “How is Jill? I thought for sure the two of you would end up together. Until you showed up with that other girl, the blonde…”

  “Melissa,” Derek said. “That didn’t work out. But by then, Peter Cortino had moved to Waterfield and Jill married him instead. And then I met Avery.” He winked at me.

  “Sorry, Avery,” Alex said.

  “No problem. I know both of them. Jill and Melissa. We’re…” I hesitated, because the word got stuck in my throat when it came to describing Melissa. “Friends.”

  “Good for you. But I meant sorry for hooking up with this guy.” Alex gave Derek a punch in the shoulder, which the latter returned.

  “Don’t give her a reason to rethink, Alex. We’ve got a good thing going. I don’t want you to screw it up.”

  “Sure, Derek,” Alex said, “I won’t say a word about the time we went on the senior trip to Boston and you met that girl, what was her name?”

  I laughed, and so did everyone else, and the conversation evolved into the men reminiscing about their high school years and the hijinks they got up to. Judy Norton turned to me.

  “How are the plans for the wedding coming, Avery?”

  “Good,” I said. “Things are coming together. The invitations have gone out.”

  Judy nodded. “We got ours, thank you for thinking of us.”

  I grinned. “Not like we could exclude the minister, is it? And besides, he and Derek have been friends since high school. Of course we want you both there.”

  “Do you have your dress yet?”

  I shook my head. “I’m thinking of wearing the same dress I wore to Kate and Wayne Rasmussen’s wedding. With a veil and without the black fishnet stockings and the fifteen necklaces.” It had had a slight Gothic edge at the time. With color. A sort of throwback to Cyndi Lauper. Back when I was a little girl, I’d wanted to be Cyndi when I grew up.

  “Yes,” Judy said with grin, “it might be best to omit those.”

  “There’s a lot to do, so I’m trying to make things easy. No tuxedos or long gowns. A simple afternoon wedding. Reception in the church hall. And I just can’t imagine buying my wedding gown off the rack, you know?”

  Judy nodded.

  “I’m a designer. I always figured I’d make my own. But we just took on another renovation project, and I don’t have the time. So I thought if Derek could wear what he’s wearing now, with the same blue shirt, then the blue dress would match, and there were little blue flowers on the wedding invitations, too…” Or in the wedding invitations, more accurately.

  “It’ll be OK,” Judy said, her voice warm and comforting. “Derek won’t care what you wear.”

  I nodded. “He liked the blue dress. He said he did.”

  “It was a lovely dress,” Judy said. “If you add a veil to it, and maybe an overskirt or trail of some kind…”

  “That’s a good idea. I’ll have to look at it when I get home. Tomorrow.”

  I glanced over at Derek, who was laughing about something that had happened in high school, twenty years before I met him.

  “Marrying you will be good for him,” Judy said. “He needs to get up on the horse again. He was a pretty sorry sight for a while after the divorce from Melissa.”

  “I’m sure.” By the time I entered the picture, it was five years later—plenty of time for him to have gotten over the experience. Except he hadn’t, totally. “I think he’s been a little gun-shy, you know? I mean, how do you guarantee that you won’t fail again? You can’t.”

  “You can decide that you’ll do whatever it takes to hold it together,” Judy said. “To do the work you need to do to keep things going. Too many people don’t.”

  True.

  “I didn’t know him then,” Judy continued, “but from what Barry has told me, Derek and Melissa’s marriage was rocky almost from the beginning, and there was nothing that could be done to save it. Lord knows Barry tried, but he said it was one of those marriages that shouldn’t have happened, because they were too young to know what they were doing. In the end, he just had to admit that the best thing they could do was cut their losses and go their separate ways.”

  “I didn’t know they’d gone to marriage counseling,” I said. Derek had never mentioned it to me.

  “I don’t know how formal it was,” Judy answered. “Barry does do marriage counseling for the parishioners, but I think this was more in the way of a favor to a friend.”

  She shrugged. “Things will be different now. You’re both mature enough to know that it’s going to take work, and that it won’t always be easy.”

  I nodded. And then I leaned a little closer and lowered my voice. “So this strip club they went to last night…”

  Judy rolled her eyes. “Boys will be boys.”

  “Would you happen to know the name of it?”

  She looked surprised. So surprised, in fact, that her eyebrows disappeared beneath her bangs. “Why?”

  I thought about lying and telling her that I wanted to hire a stripper for my fiancé’s bachelor party. And then I reconsidered lying to the minister’s wife and told her the truth instead. “Derek said he saw a girl there he thought he recognized. I wanted to see if he was right.”

  “You want to go to a strip club?”

  Not really. I mean, that’d be kind of weird, me walking into a place where women were taking their clothes off to loud music. But I didn’t know how else to find out whether it really was Jamie that Derek had seen. I mean, I could ask her…but how would I know that she told me the truth?

  “I guess I thought I’d go and just ask someone if she works there. Or see if maybe they have pictures of the…um…attractions.”

  “I see,” Judy said, her lips twitching. “I don’t think Derek would be too happy about the idea, Avery. No offense.”

  “You could come with me.”

  “I think Barry would be even less happy.”

  Probably so.

  “I just want to know if it was her,” I said plaintively.

  Judy tilted her head. “If she wanted you to know, don’t you think she’d tell you? If she hasn’t, don’t you think that’s reason enough not to snoop?”

  Interesting reasoning. But no, the fact that it wasn’t common knowledge was exactly the reason I wanted to find out. Something was going on at the condo building, and I wanted to know what. The more I found out about all the neighbors, the more likely it was that I’d stumble onto something.

  But it probably wouldn’t do any good to keep talking to Judy about it. She obviously wasn’t going to tell me the name of the place, or agree to go there with me. She might not even know what it was called. If Derek hadn’t told me, Barry might not have told Judy. So I put Jamie and Candy and Miss Shaw and the whole business out of my head and concentrated on taking part in the conversation and enjoying the rest of the reception. And it worked wonderfully—for about ten minutes, until the food service started.

  The Tremont had lovely food service, very upscale and snazzy. All male waiters, all in pinstriped pants and starched white shirts, with pale pink cummerbunds and bow ties for the occasion, to match the wedding party. All were young, handsome, and clean-shaven, with hair that was either short-cropped or slicked back. It seemed the Tremont Hotel had the same policy on personal appearance as did the New York Yankees.

  Our waiter even came with a sexy accent. “Perdon, señorita,” he murmured when h
e leaned over my shoulder to place the first course—soup—in front of me.

  Derek turned, of course. So did I. And there was a moment of mutual—and uncomfortable—silence while all three of us looked at one another.

  After a moment, my eyes dropped from the man’s face—familiar—to the name tag on his chest. It was also familiar, but wasn’t the name I had expected to see. The face belonged to Mariano, our upstairs neighbor at the condo. The name tag…well, it identified him as Gregory.

  Neither of us spoke, but I didn’t doubt that Derek had noticed the same thing I had. And Mariano knew we had noticed. He had big, brown eyes with long, curving lashes—Bambi eyes—and for a second, they scanned the room as if he were looking for the nearest exit. Then he pulled it together.

  “Perdon,” he muttered again, and picked up the next bowl of soup, which he put in front of Derek.

  My boyfriend and I exchanged a look, but waited until Mariano—perdon: Gregory—had wheeled his cart to the next table before saying anything.

  “Am I crazy?” Derek muttered.

  “If you are, then I am, too,” I answered, keeping my voice low so the others wouldn’t hear.

  “Mariano, right?”

  “It looks like him.” And Josh had said Mariano worked in the hotel business in Portland.

  “Huh,” Derek said.

  I nodded. “My thought exactly. But now’s probably not the time. Or the place.”

  Derek picked up his spoon. “You’re right. Let’s focus on the important things. I’m starving.”

  “You’re always starving.”

  “I need to build up my strength for later,” Derek said.

  “Dancing?”

  “That, too. But I was thinking of tonight.”

  “What happens tonight?”

  He didn’t answer. But he smiled.

  “Oh,” I said. And blushed.

  We did dance, though. A lot. Derek’s a good dancer, and I’m not too bad myself. And we danced with other people as well as each other. Which was how, at one point, Derek found himself dancing—and laughing—with the woman I’d noticed walking past us in the cathedral earlier.