Down the Aisle with Murder

by Auralee Wallace

  “You two have no idea what you screwed up tonight.”

  Screwed up? I hated it when we screwed things up. I told Freddie we should have called her!

  “We left everything in the gazebo for a reason,” Sheriff Bigly said, still leaning on the desk. “We were there tonight. We’ve been waiting for Lyssa’s boyfriend to show himself. Waiting for days. That’s why he was rummaging about Candace’s shed. That told us we were on the right track. We knew he’d eventually figure out what he was looking for had to be at the gazebo, not Candace’s. Then he finally shows up and somebody shines a big ol’ light on him, and he takes off. Amos tried to catch him, but that boy is fast. Amazing, really, given what we know about him.”

  I suddenly felt like I would be sick. That was why she just so happened to be at the gazebo the other day. “I swear to God, Sheriff Bigly, if I had known—”

  “Known what? Are you honestly going to sit there and try to tell me that you wouldn’t have interfered?”

  “I wouldn’t have. We all want the same thing here.” I meant that too. In those other stories she was thinking of, I was either trying to prove someone I love innocent—like myself—or I was fighting for my life. “And what do you mean the condition he was in?”

  “Lyssa’s boyfriend Justin is a very unstable young man. That is all you need to know.”

  “But … if you were there, why didn’t you show yourself right away?”

  “She wanted to see what we’d do,” Freddie said. “Probably building a case for when she arrests us.”

  “No. No. Let’s back up a moment,” Bigly said. “Erica, you said we all want the same thing, and I want to know if that’s true. Do you really want this all settled for Candace? Or is this all about Otter Lake Security making the sheriff’s department look stupid once again?”

  “We really don’t want that,” I said whereas Freddie asked, “Do you know where the money came from? I’m assuming Lyssa. Am I r—”

  “Stop talking!” Sheriff Bigly said, hitting the desk. “What makes you think I would tell you anything about this case?”

  “Professional courtesy?” Freddie mumbled.

  “Professional … professional courtesy?” She chewed her lip. I think to stop herself from saying all the words that were really going through her mind. Most of them four-lettered. “I should put you in a cell for trying to make a sheriff insane. That’s what I should do.”

  “So … does this mean we can get the wedding stuff from the gazebo now?”

  I slapped his leg.

  “Take it. Justin’s not coming back there.” Sheriff Bigly’s jaw flexed. “But I need you two to hear me on something.”

  I nodded quickly and slapped Freddie’s leg some more until he was nodding too.

  “If you want to help your friend, you will tell no one what you saw at the gazebo.” She jabbed a finger on her desk. “Do you understand? The money is not public knowledge, and I would like it to stay that way.”

  We both nodded again.

  “Now get out of my office.”

  We popped up to our feet.

  As we were heading out, we spotted Amos with rubber gloves counting the money at his desk. His lips were moving. It looked like he was almost done.

  Freddie slowed down. “What’s that, Amos?”

  “Thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred,” he said, eyes still on the money.

  “Thirty-nine thousand?” Freddie asked.

  “Forty,” Amos said with a smile. “It’s all there.”

  “Dammit, Amos!” A shout came from Grady’s office.

  I pushed Freddie toward the door. “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  “Order. Order!” Freddie shouted. “I am calling this meeting to order.”

  “Stop banging that spoon on the table, Freddie.”

  The next morning, Freddie, me, and Rhonda were all gathered in the war room for a brainstorming session. Okay, yes, we had promised Sheriff Bigly we wouldn’t tell anyone about the money, but we knew Rhonda wouldn’t tell anyone. She was an ex-cop. She knew exactly how much trouble we could get in. And the war room was really just Freddie’s kitchen—although he did have a big whiteboard on wheels in it for brainstorming.

  “Well, we need to get started, and you two won’t stop talking.”

  I shot Rhonda a look. We were talking—whispering actually—about why she was still taking pictures of shirtless insurance guy. She was sticking by her whole “something isn’t right about this situation” excuse, but I could see the lovesick look in her eye.

  “Seriously, ladies, we need to keep in mind the reason why we’re doing this.”

  “For Lyssa,” Rhonda said.

  “For Lyssa,” I repeated. “And for Candace.”

  “Of course for Candace and—”

  “That’s enough. Gold star for you both. Let’s start with what we know,” he said, still in pajama pants and a Hooters T-shirt. He was holding a wooden spoon in one hand and an erasable marker in the other. “Lyssa hid a bag with forty thousand dollars in the wedding’s money box.”

  Freddie wrote Lyssa on the board, drew an arrow from her name to a box, then put a dollar sign above the arrow.

  “We also know that her boyfriend slash ex-boyfriend, it’s complicated”—he put air quotes around that—“knew about the money.” He wrote the name Justin on the board then underlined it. “Now, we need to focus on what we don’t know.”

  “Why did she hide the money in the first place?” Rhonda asked.

  Freddie began scribbling Rhonda’s question on the board in point form.

  “Where did she get it?” Rhonda went on. “Why didn’t she put it in the bank? Was it ill-gotten gains? How did her boyfriend, ex-boyfriend know about the money? Was he—”

  “Rhonda!” Freddie snapped.

  “What?”

  “I can’t write that fast.” He looked at me and held out the marker. “You do it. You’re the court reporter.”

  “My skills don’t translate to whiteboards.”

  Freddie glared at me.

  “Besides, you don’t have to write it all down yet,” I said. “Let’s just talk.” These types of arguments happened every time we tried to have a meeting. “I think we have to assume there is something shady about how Lyssa got the money, or, yeah, she wouldn’t have had that much in cash,” I said. “As for why she hid it … well, the only person we know for sure who knows about it is Justin, so maybe she was hiding it from him?”

  “He obviously feels he has some sort of claim to it,” Rhonda said, “and he’s hiding from the police, so…”

  “So Lyssa’s boyfriend knows about the money, and he wants it bad,” Freddie said, tapping his chin with the marker. Suddenly he threw his hands in the air. “So then we have our trap.” He beamed at us.

  “Freddie,” Rhonda said, “did you buy new aftershave?”

  “That is your response? No Great plan, Freddie? No Go Team!” He gave the air a little punch.

  “It’s just I’m really sensitive to smells.” She backslapped me lightly on the arm. “You’re HR. I think we should adopt a no-scents policy.”

  “Why? We already have one,” Freddie snapped.

  I cleared my throat. “She said scents not sense, Freddie.”

  “Tomayto, tomahto.”

  Okay, someone needed to take control here. “Rhonda, your motion is seconded and passed. Freddie, let’s hear more about your plan.”

  “What? That is so unfair. What am I supposed to put on my face after I shave?”

  “Motion passed,” I repeated. “Now back to your plan. I don’t see how it would work. We don’t have the money,” I said. “Sheriff Bigly has—”

  “Erica. Erica. Erica,” Freddie said with a sigh. “Please try to keep up.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m having some trouble thinking this morning. Maybe if someone had made the cappuccino.” My eyes slid over to Rhonda. It was so her turn.

  “Turnabout is fair play, Mi
ss ‘I’m sorry I forgot your lunch.’”

  “I made up for that with the gummies,” I said, shooting her a look. “Oh, I get it,” I said, suddenly turning back to Freddie and wagging a finger at him. “You want us to pretend to have the money.”

  He put a hand over his face and nodded.

  “See? I just needed a minute.”

  “He’s taken so many crazy risks to get to that money and Sheriff Bigly said he was unstable. I’m willing to bet he’s hoping the police haven’t found the money,” Freddie said. “I don’t think he’s going to stop now. We can’t all be great thinkers.”

  “But how are we going to trick him into thinking we have the money?” Rhonda asked.

  “We move all the wedding supplies from the gazebo and Candace’s house to a location of our choosing,” Freddie said, moving his hands that were paralleling each other from left to right. “We wait for this Justin character to show up. Then pow! We nab him.”

  “It sounds so straightforward. I wonder what could possibly go wrong?” I reached for my cappuccino only to realize, That’s right, I don’t have one. I shot Rhonda another filthy look.

  “What did I do this time?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  Rhonda looked back to Freddie. “So what’s the location of our choosing?”

  “My garage of course,” Freddie said.

  “Your garage?” I asked. “Why would we—”

  “Rhonda,” Freddie said. “For the sake of the business, you really need to make the cappuccino when it’s your turn. Erica’s killing me here.”

  “Oh, never mind, I got it,” I said. Freddie had his entire house wired up with surveillance equipment like a museum filled with priceless artifacts. He had contacted a number of surveillance companies saying that he was in the security business and wanted to try their products before he recommended them to anyone else. A few businesses were quite accommodating—even though we had yet to recommend a single security system to anyone. But Freddie was quite the salesman. So, yeah, some he got for free … and some he asked for as birthday and Christmas presents from his family.

  “It’s perfect,” Freddie said. “I’m the wedding planner, so it makes sense I would store supplies at my house.”

  “Well, co-wedding planner,” I said.

  “I can’t even…” Freddie said with a shake of his head.

  “But say this works and we do get Lyssa’s boyfriend to break into your garage,” I said. “What do we do then? Throw a blanket on him and wait for the police to arrive?”

  Freddie blinked at me like I was an idiot—which was not fair because that was a totally legitimate question … unlike some of my earlier questions.

  “I’m serious. What if he has a weapon?”

  “I wouldn’t break into somebody’s home without a weapon,” Rhonda said once again, folding her arms across her chest.

  “We are not going to throw a blanket over him. That’s ridiculous,” Freddie said.

  “Then what are we going to do? Call Sheriff Bigly and hope the guy waits around long enough for her to arrive?” I was saying it like it was the stupidest idea ever, but I did kind of like the thought of delivering Bigly a suspect all wrapped up with a bow. I don’t know what it was about the woman, but deep down I kind of wanted her to respect me … or at least not think I was a complete idiot.

  “You two have no imagination,” Freddie said. “No vision. No—”

  “We’re not going to physically restrain him with, like, our bodies, are we?” Rhonda asked. “Because there’s some legalities that might be involved in that.”

  “No, we’re not going to restrain him with our … bodies,” Freddie said. “That sounds weird.”

  “Then what are we going to do?” I asked.

  He double-popped his eyebrows. “Well, let’s just say we’re not calling it a trap for nothing.”

  Rhonda and I waited for more information.

  “All right,” Freddie said. “Good meeting. Superefficient.” He drew a happy face on the board and left.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  “It’s been three, no, four days,” I moaned.

  “I know.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to happen. Not before the wedding. Probably not at all.”

  Freddie sighed.

  One of us—Freddie, Rhonda, and me—had been watching Freddie’s computer screen nonstop now for three days. That on top of the wedding planning was making life really unpleasant.

  At first Freddie had terrified me with his whole “they don’t call it a trap for nothing” declaration. I was imagining him rigging up one of those rope traps where the person steps on the trigger, then before they even realize what was happening, they’re swinging in the air upside down by their ankle. I really didn’t think Freddie’s garage had the clearance for that kind of thing. But it turned out that wasn’t what he had in mind at all. It was much more simple than that. And actually kind of clever. We had set up the door leading into the garage from the outside with a dead-bolt lock that you could control with an app. But the brilliant part was we had installed it backwards. That way, Justin would walk into the garage, the door would close, we’d trigger the dead bolt then bam! Trapped.

  But before we moved the stuff to Freddie’s, we double-checked all the cameras outside, so we could see someone coming from pretty much any direction, and we set up a video baby monitor in the garage, so we could talk to the guy, you know, once he was trapped, and before the police arrived.

  Then we made a really big show of moving the stuff from the gazebo and Candace’s shed to Freddie’s house. A hot, irritating show. Taking lots of trips. We also got Candace to post pictures of the entire ordeal on her social media just in case we weren’t being watched.

  So all in all we thought it was a pretty good plan, and we had put a lot of work into it.

  The only problem was nobody was trying to break into Freddie’s garage.

  Nope, aside from getting the heads-up that pizza had arrived on the computer monitor, so far, the entire operation had been a failure.

  Tonight, it was just Freddie and me on watch. Once again, Rhonda wanted to get a few more photos of our insurance target first thing in the morning, so she needed her rest. I was going to have to stage an intervention for her soon.

  “I really think maybe we just have to let it go,” I said from Freddie’s couch. “We need to get some sleep. Candace’s parents are flying in tomorrow, and we have to make sure everything is ready for the rehearsal dinner.”

  “You go to sleep,” Freddie said, face aglow from the light of the computer screen. “I’m going to keep watch for a couple more hours.”

  I pulled a blanket over me then scratched Stanley’s head. The little bulldog was sleeping at my feet. “Okay, wake me if anything happens.”

  We were quiet for a few minutes before I said, “Freddie?”

  Stanley groaned.

  “What?”

  “You know when you were at Grady’s the other night?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What did you guys talk about?”

  I never did make it over to Grady’s after the whole thing at the gazebo. I had been telling myself it was because I needed to help watch the trap, but I knew that wasn’t entirely it. When I had heard Mary’s story, the way forward had all seemed so clear, but as time passed, I lost my nerve. I didn’t know what was going on with Grady. What if I said the wrong thing? What if I made things even worse? I was still planning on talking to him. I just needed to do a bit more intel gathering first.

  “You mean you want to know if we talked about you?” Freddie asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “No, I want to know if you discussed the weather.” I chucked a pillow at him. “Of course I want to know if you talked about me.”

  “Hey, watch where you’re throwing those things,” Freddie said, petting his computer. “And the truth is … I can’t answer that question.”

  “What?”

  “Grady and I are finall
y buds,” he said, peeking at me around his screen. “I can’t go telling you his secrets.”

  “Grady has secrets? What secrets?”

  “Okay, that was a poor choice of words. It’s more like—”

  “So you did talk about me.”

  “Well, yeah, but—”

  “Did you talk about this crazy vacation of his?” I propped myself up on my elbow, making Stanley raise his head. He was unimpressed by my lack of sleep.

  “We did. And it’s really not so crazy once you understand…” Freddie shook his head. “I’ve said too much.”

  “You haven’t said anything!”

  “Look, after this whole thing happened with Sean … well, it made me think that maybe I have perhaps”—he tapped the desk with a pencil—“in the past … caused some trouble for you and Grady by being too involved. And I don’t want to do that anymore. I’m staying out of it. Weren’t you the one who said we needed healthy boundaries?”

  “I don’t remember,” I said. “But so … wait, are you saying that this vacation has something to do with me?”

  “I’m saying nothing,” Freddie said. “Don’t you want us to be happy? You know, with separate people … while still having a relationship that is all our own?”

  I slumped back into the sofa and Stanley lowered his head. He still had his eye on me though. “I guess so.” A moment later I added, “I can’t believe you’ve chosen this very moment to establish healthy boundaries.” I sighed. “But you’re right. If Grady has something to say to me, he should say it to me. Not you. In fact,” I said, snuggling deeper into the blanket. “I don’t want to know.”

  “You’re serious? You don’t want to know?”

  I closed my eyes. “Nope. Healthy boundaries.”

  “Well, now I kind of want to tell you.”

  My eyes shot open. “So tell me.”

  Freddie looked me up and down. “Never mind, the feeling’s passed.”

  “But you just said you wanted to tell me.”

  Freddie sighed. “That was when you didn’t want to know, but now that I know you were lying … it just doesn’t have the same appeal.”

  “You’re evil.”