by Leslie Caine
“There’s Audrey’s Mercedes,” I said, pointing with my chin.
“Good. I’m lucky she’s there for us. Despite my being such a blockhead.”
“You’re not a blockhead.”
“Sometimes I am.”
“Well, hardly ever,” I said, winking at him and knowing he got the Gilbert and Sullivan Pirates of Penzance reference. “Ready to do this thing?”
He watched his family emerge from his dad’s car. “I’m a bit shaky, but yeah.” He reached for my hand. “You’ll be my rock, if I have to lean on you tonight?”
“Of course. Just like you’re always my rock.”
He gave my hand a squeeze, and we got out of the car. Steve held the door for his parents and sisters, and I hung back beside him. The maître d ushered us to our private room, where our tables for thirty guests were arranged in three long rectangles of ten. Most of our guests were already seated. Someone—probably Audrey—led them in a round of applause, which made me smile.
Steve smiled, too, and held up his hand. “Thanks for coming, everyone, and for your patience. The rehearsal took a little longer than it should have. Unfortunately, I kept messing up,” he joked. “But the love of my life is still here by my side. Like always, she’s been lighting the way for me.”
And just like that, all felt right in the world. We took our seats in the center of the center table, and we were soon swept up in wonderful conversation and delicious Prosecco and appetizers.
While the servers were taking our orders from our special menu, I made a quick scan for empty seats. All of our guests were here; there wasn’t a single empty chair. Aunt Bea was seated between Eleanor and Audrey, and she gave my shoulder a quick squeeze and told both me and Steve that she was so very happy to be here. Steve mustered a gracious reply. A short while later, she excused herself, presumably to use the restroom.
A minute or two later, Mark Dunning entered the room, weaving a little. The conversation at our table stopped. He headed toward Aunt Bea’s currently vacant seat, and plopped down.
“Mark!” Michelle snarled. “What are you doing here?”
“I got an invitation and I accepted,” he said with venom in his voice. His eyes were a little out of focus and he had to struggle to stay balanced in his seat.
“Mark,” George said calmly, “things have only escalated in the last couple of hours. Please be a gentleman and leave.”
Audrey grabbed Mark’s arm and said, “I’m here without a date for this evening. Let’s ask if we can get a table for two in the main room, shall we?”
I couldn’t help but grimace. It was magnanimous of her to sacrifice her enjoyment of the evening, but I wanted her here with us.
“Thanks, Audrey,” Mark said, slurring his words, “but I want to stay put.”
Aunt Bea returned to the room just then. She grimaced at Mark for a moment, but then managed a smile. “Well,” she said. “We’ll need to squeeze in an extra seat.”
“Stay away from my family,” Eleanor implored to Mark. “You’ve done enough damage already.”
“Mom, Dad, he’s my husband,” Michelle said with a defeated sigh. “He’s still part of this family.” She turned her attention to Mark. “You have to sober up, Mark. Once and for all. Your children deserve a better father than this.”
“Yeah, they deserve a lot better than me—an out-of-work bum.” He glared at Bea. “Thanks to you.”
A server came with a chair and positioned it at the corner next to George. I could see that our guests at the two other tables flanking ours were trying not to stare at us; they averted their eyes when I looked their way.
“If you choose to stay at this wonderful family celebration,” Bea said, “show some respect to our companions.” She took the new seat. “It’s not about you and your situation at work.”
“Aunt Bea is spreading lies about me to my boss,” Mark exclaimed loudly. “I was the number one salesman! And now he expects me to believe that business is down. Well, let me tell you something. When times are hard for everyone else, the booze business booms!”
“I can see that you’re angry,” Aunt Bea said to him. “As well as highly intoxicated. This behavior makes you look guilty.”
“I don’t care how it makes me look. I know the truth. I didn’t kill anyone,” Mark stated. “I also know who did. But nobody wants to listen to me.”
“Who?” Aunt Bea asked.
“You!” He scanned our faces, looking each of us seated at the center table in the eye. “She’s behind all the killings and all the infighting between us. Can’t you see that? It’s as obvious as the nose on my face!”
“That’s a ridiculous, baseless lie!” Aunt Bea declared.
“She’s the one who got me into this mess with her false accusations. She tricked me into getting loaded and behaving like an ass. Thanks to her, I got fired for nothing.”
“Thanks to you,” Michelle said to Mark with a haughty voice, “the entire neighborhood was in lockdown for three hours! You fired a shot into the air! You were drunk as a skunk with the police trying to talk to you! You call that nothing?”
He spread his arms. “It had nothing to do with my job! I wasn’t on the clock!”
“You’re not fired,” Bea said. “You’re on probation. For thirty days. At least get one of your facts straight.”
“Um, maybe I should make a toast,” Carly said. “This is our dearest friend, Erin, who is getting married tomorrow, to the wonderful love of her life. It’s time we put our differences aside.”
“Hear, hear,” Aunt Bea said.
“Yeah, right,” Mark grumbled.
“You’re drunk, Mark.” Michelle rose. “I’m going to drive us home. I ruined the rehearsal, and now we’re both ruining the meal along with my darling brother’s and Erin’s celebration. Let’s leave now while there’s still plenty of time for everyone else to salvage their party.”
Mark scanned our faces and, apparently, realized he needed to cede to his wife’s wishes. He rose and followed Michelle through the doorway without another word.
A few moments later, I spotted Amelia sneaking out of the room. I excused myself and followed. She headed into the women’s room. Her shoulders were shaking with sobs once again. I trotted in after her.
“Amelia? Can I get you anything? Club soda? Tonic water?”
She shook her head, took a couple of deep breaths and said, “Oh, Erin. You have no idea what you’re getting into by marrying a Sullivan.”
“I do know, Amelia. I love Steve. I also love you, and your family.”
“Maybe you love injured souls, then, Erin.”
I handed her a pair of tissues from the box on the counter behind me.
Amelia took a deep breath. Staring at the ceramic tile floor, she said, “I thought I was guilty. But now I don’t think that’s what happened. It was Michelle.”
Chapter 33
My nerves were turning the butterflies in my stomach into humming birds as Steve drove me back to Audrey’s from the restaurant. Much as I wanted to pretend nothing unusual had gone wrong at our dinner, Amelia’s statement had pushed my hand. I hadn’t planned on driving with me instead of my squeezing into Audrey’s car with our bridal-party houseguests, but I’d been too alarmed by Amelia’s statement about Michelle to wait until tomorrow—the day before our wedding—to discuss the subject with him.
“Aunt Bea seems to be aging really quickly,” I said, intentionally starting us on a relatively gentle subject. “I think all of the deaths and the stress surrounding our wedding has been getting to her.”
Steve let my statements hang in the air for a while, before saying quietly, “I think so, too. She looks ill. But that strengthens Mark’s theory.”
“You think Aunt Bea actually murdered Fitz and Drew?” I asked, skeptical.
Steve gave no response, but his furrowed brow indicated that the answer was yes.
“I can at least conceive of her poisoning Fitz’s coffee…setting aside the fact that she had n
o motive. But there’s no way I can begin to picture her getting out of her car, walking up to Drew on Michelle’s porch, searching Drew’s pockets to find his liquefied drug stash, and then giving him a second injection...assuming he was out of it after giving himself a first injection. How would she know how to do that?”
Steve’s jaw muscles tightened. After what felt like a lengthy pause, he said, “She could have managed. If anyone could ever figure out how to get her own way, Bea’s the one.”
“But…that’s a long time to be standing on someone’s porch in the middle of the day never once being seen by a neighbor or a passerby.”
“Yeah. Maybe it was Mark, after all. Or the police could be wrong about Lucas’s whereabouts that day. Maybe Lucas gave him some higher grade cocaine than typical, and he accidentally overdosed.”
“I guess that’s possible,” I said honestly. “That would be a load off everyone’s mind.” I paused, wishing Steve would launch into a lengthy conversation so I wouldn’t have to voice my next statement. He said nothing, though, and we were nearing Audrey’s street. He had a right to know what was happening with his own sisters. “Amelia thinks Michelle is guilty of both murders.”
“She told you that?” Steve asked, his voice heartbreakingly sad.
“When we were in the women’s room together. Michelle had a motive for killing Fitz. He was blackmailing her. She could have been there when Drew arrived, and they could have argued. He’d proved to be a ladies man right when she was looking for a safe exit from her marriage. Drew was flirting with my friend at our shower and took her on at least one date. Michelle loses her temper easily, and, like you said, she can hold a grudge like nobody else.”
“Michelle would never do that, Erin. She’s hot-tempered and self-absorbed, but she’s not a killer.”
“She’s family. It would be terrible to discover that your sister is capable of taking another person’s life. But…I can’t help but think that most killers have siblings. Lots of them probably didn’t want to believe their siblings were capable of murder. Meanwhile, Steve…I need to ask you this question. And I want you to give me an honest answer. Okay? This is important.”
“Of course, Erin,” he said. “Let me pull over.” A red light turned green, and he stopped the car alongside the curb and faced me.
“What’s going to happen to us if the unthinkable turns out to be true? What if Michelle’s guilty? Or if it’s Amelia? Or one of your parents, as ridiculous a suggestion as that is.”
Steve grimaced, but continued to hold my gaze. “It will break my heart. But at some point, I’m one-hundred percent certain that I’ll remember that I’m married to the love of my life. Then I’ll do what comes next. I’ll face up to whatever it takes to accept that a family member of mine was guilty of killing my friend.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Even if I wind up testifying against your family member, you won’t hate me forever?”
He managed a small smile. “No, Gilbert. I’ll love you forever, no matter what. But it’s a moot question. Nobody in my family is guilty of murder.”
I awoke early after a terrible string of violent nightmares. The dreams were set in Aunt Bea’s wine cellar, although the space had warped into cavernous dimensions. Sometimes I was the killer. Once I was the victim, not dead but unable to communicate that I was alive. Michelle had choked me, but then she morphed into Amelia. Even then, I had the pervasive sense that I was responsible for the violence, and that Steve was there on the periphery, waiting for me to join him, unaware of my predicament. This was an inauspicious beginning to the eve of my wedding, if ever there was one.
A thought that lodged itself into my head like a burr was that I had missed a major clue having to do with the wine cellar. I still had a key to the basement door in Aunt Bea’s house. She’d given me the key shortly after signing my contract. I’d never needed to get inside her house when she wasn’t home, and we’d forgotten all about it. In four years of private clients, this was the first time I’d ever forgotten to return a key during my final walkthrough. Maybe that alone had caused me to fret about the wine cellar; my unconscious was merely trying to remind me of my oversight.
And yet, I couldn’t let go of Steve’s remark last night as he drove me to Audrey’s. He believed that Aunt Bea was highly capable of manipulating a situation and could have gotten Drew to allow her to inject him with a drug. I could only think of one outlandish reason that Drew could have allowed Aunt Bea to inject him with a drug: if Aunt Bea was Drew’s cocaine supplier.
In my sleep-deprived stupor, I became fixated on that possibility. Bea could have brought drugs into the country more easily than most people. She operated primarily in South America and India, two places with considerable drug trafficking. Maybe the reason Bea wouldn’t allow anyone to touch her wine bottles was that they might not have held wine, but rather were filled with illegal drugs, perhaps in powder form.
If I could sneak into her wine cellar, I could examine her stock more closely. Even if the bottles were made with dark green glass, I’d be able to tell by shaking them if the contents were liquid or powder. I could abscond with one or two of her wine bottles and bring them to the police to examine. Then after my hope had fizzled, and we were forced to face the horrid reality that one of the Sullivans was a murderer, I’d replace Aunt Bea’s bottles and apologize on bended knee. Worst case, I’d get caught in the act of snooping, and once again, I’d fess up and apologize.
I left a note in the kitchen for Audrey and my bridesmaids that I was “looking into some last-minute wedding preparations” and that I’d be back before noon. Halfway to Bea’s house, I got hold of my senses. I couldn’t simply park my van in her driveway and think that she’d fail to see it, or to hear me creeping around in her basement. Not to mention the slim possibility that she’d installed a security alarm in the last week or so.
I decided instead to knock on her front door and make an excuse for examining her wine bottles. I could tell her that I wanted her to educate myself on wine purchasing in advance of our honeymoon in Paris, then I’d insist on examining some bottles to look for residue. Or for leaky corks, even. If my excuses fell short, I’d tell her the truth about my nightmare and my theory that not all of her bottles contained wine.
I rang Bea’s doorbell repeatedly and also knocked. No answer. I promptly reverted to my original plan. After rounding the house, I let myself into her basement, thinking all the while that I would apologize for my terrible behavior upon my return from Europe. The chances of my search turning up anything seemed ridiculously remote, yet little was at stake by my airheaded actions; people tended to expect brides to get a bit crazed.
I went straight for the most expensive bottles she possessed. With just a passing thought that this was perhaps the lowest behavior I’d ever sunk to—entering an elderly client’s home uninvited and shaking her bottles of wine—I got to work.
Right away, I found something puzzling. Some of the bottles seemed heavier than others, and they truly didn’t feel the same way when shaken. Some of the reds had almost no sensation of having liquid in them. There seemed to be no space for air—as if they’d been filled to the tippy top and then corked. I gathered six bottles to compare. I was inspecting them closely when the door creaked open.
I gasped and turned. Aunt Bea stood at the door, staring at me.
“What are you doing, Erin?”
“I rang the doorbell, but you didn’t answer. So I let myself in with your key. I’ve been looking at your wine bottles.”
She glared at me. “You know I don’t like anyone to touch them.”
“I know. I’m sorry. This was inexcusably presumptuous of me. I’ve been under so much stress, I can barely control my own behavior lately.”
She glowered at the half dozen bottles that I’d set on the end cap of one of the wine shelves. I’d designed this flat space for just this purpose—to set out a few bottles that had been culled from the many racks.
“You scared me,
Erin. When I heard someone rattling around down here, I thought it had to be Mark, trying to round out his litany of crimes by adding the theft of my wine collection.”
“You really think he might be the killer?”
“I’m certain he’s guilty. Aren’t you? He had both the motive and the opportunity.”
“Not the evidence, though. That’s why he hasn’t been formally charged with murder.”
“He still hasn’t? Even after his boorishness last night, and the police questioning Michelle?” Bea asked with obvious alarm.
“No. My friend, Linda, is an officer—soon to be named a detective—and she’d have told me right away.”
Aunt Bea looked deeply worried. Her whole body was trembling, and she looked even more frail than she had last night. “The police will gather the evidence they need. I hope.”
“Are you okay, Aunt Bea? You seem to have lost quite a bit of weight. And you look as exhausted as I am.”
“I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said.
“Neither could I. Wedding night jitters, I suppose.”
“So you jittered yourself into my wine cellar?”
“Yes. I…wanted to see if I could find any physical differences in wine bottles themselves that can indicate that a particular wine is a really outstanding vintage.” Even as I said it, I realized how lame it sounded.
“There isn’t,” she replied, impassive, considering our bizarre circumstances. “Unless you count how steep their price tags are.”
“I really think there’s something wrong with this bottle. There’s a circle on the bottom of the insides that looks almost like a cork.”
“You shouldn’t be turning the bottle over to look at its bottom,” she scolded. “It’s not good for the wine.”