by Laura Durham
I turned to Fern. “Can you handle the bridesmaids?”
“Are those tramps chewing gum?” Fern sucked in his breath. “Don’t you worry, Annabelle. I’m going to take them to the hall and get them shaped up.”
I smiled thinking about what Miss Bossy Boots Bridesmaid was in for.
I turned back to Margery. “Why don’t you tell the carolers to start singing and cue the processional music for the string quartet?”
“Should I go get the bride and the flower girls?” Lucille whispered to me once Margery had made a beeline for the carolers.
“That would be great, Lucille.”
“Well, it looks like you’ve got this under control,” Richard began, backing out of the room.
“Not so fast.” I grabbed him by the sleeve. “I need you to help me with the bride and flower girls. I can’t trust Lucille not to fall to pieces again.”
“Fine,” Richard said with a huff. “But I hope you know how much you owe me for today.”
“I know, I know.”
“This is giving the Martin wedding a run for its money.”
“For the hundredth time, Richard, I had nothing to do with the cat theme.”
“May I remind you that the invitation was issued by the couple’s cats? That may have been the only time in the history of the world that the words ‘Muffles’ and ‘Snuffy’ have been engraved on Crane’s paper.”
Richard held the door for me as we went out into the hallway to meet the bride. “What on earth?” I stopped short, and he nearly crashed into me.
About a dozen little girls in white flower girl dresses with green velvet sashes were gathered in the hallway around the bride. Some wore floral halos and others carried round pomanders of crimson roses on ribbon strings. The angelic-looking flower girls were currently using the pomanders to whack each other, and at least half of the girls were crying. Lucille had a vacant smile on her face as she stood behind the bride, holding the cathedral length train. The petite bride had dark hair and pale white skin and looked equally dazed and unaffected by the wailing children. I wanted some of whatever she and Lucille were on.
I snaked my way through the children to Lucille. “How many flower girls are there exactly?”
“Ten, I think.” Lucille glanced at the girls. “At least there were ten. We might have lost one on the way here.”
“Lost one?” My voice came out as barely a squeak.
“Annabelle.” Richard pushed his way around the flower girls like they were lepers. “You know how I feel about children.”
Richard wasn’t fond of children or animals. Both were too unpredictable and messy for his liking.
“I know, but you can’t leave me with them. Look how many there are.”
“Exactly my point. This is like herding kittens.”
Margery poked her head out of the ballroom door. “We’re seating the mothers, and then sending the groomsmen down. The bridesmaids are next.”
“Chests out, ladies.” Fern clapped his hands as he led his now orderly line of bridesmaids to the door. “If you’re going to wear a strapless gown, you might as well flaunt it a little. I saw a lot of single men in there. Work it, you two-bit hussies.”
Not exactly the pep talk I gave bridesmaids, but Fern could get away with things that would get me fired on the spot.
“Help me line up the flower girls in pairs,” I said to Richard as I pulled two girls by the hands and planted them behind the last bridesmaid. Richard guided two tiny girls into place with a fingertip on each of their backs.
“They won’t bite you,” I said.
He eyed the flower girls with suspicion. “You don’t know that for sure.”
We corralled the remaining girls into a semblance of a double line as the ballroom doors opened and Fern started sending the bridesmaids down the aisle. One of the smallest flower girls began to cry and threw her arms around Richard’s leg.
“Get it off! Get it off!” Richard shook his leg.
“Richard, calm down.” I bent down to the little girl’s level. “Don’t you want to let go of the nice man and walk down the aisle?”
She shook her head and tightened her grasp on Richard. I looked up at Richard and shrugged my shoulders.
“What?” Richard returned my shrug. “I’m supposed to walk around like this for the rest of my life?”
“Can you help me with her veil, Annabelle?” Lucille called from behind the bride.
Richard grabbed my arm. “If you think you’re going to leave me alone with this child, you’re out of your mind, Annabelle.”
“You can handle it, Richard. She can’t be more than three years old. Anyway, I’ll only be a few feet away from you.”
Richard looked down at the little girl wiping her running nose on his pants, and he tightened his grip on me. “I’m warning you, Annabelle. If you take one more step, I will hunt you down to the ends of the earth.”
Knowing Richard, even a witness relocation program wouldn’t do me any good if I abandoned him with a wailing child clinging to his now sticky Prada pants.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and saw the color drain from Richard’s face as a deep voice spoke from behind me. “I think you’d both better come with me.”
Chapter 5
I turned to find Detective Mike Reese, a dark-haired cop who had a knack for turning up when things weren’t going so great for me. I could never be sure whether the fear of being arrested or his good looks made my heart race. “Why am I not surprised you’re here?”
He managed a weak grin. “I was going to say the exactly same thing. We need to talk about the death of Carolyn Crabbe.”
“I swear I wasn’t anywhere near the victim—” I began my protest.
Reese held up his hands. “Whoa. I know you weren’t near the murder scene. We’ve already had several witnesses place you in the lobby before you found the body.”
Richard pushed me out of the way and held his arms straight out in front of him. “Arrest me. Lock me up. Let the justice system have its way with me. Just get this creature off my leg.”
Reese dropped his eyes to the tiny blond flower girl who now sat sucking her thumb on Richard’s shoe with one arm wrapped around his leg. The edges of his mouth quivered as he obviously strained to keep his composure. “We might need the jaws of life,” he said, his eyes flashing with merriment.
Richard didn’t smile, and I knew that I would be risking bodily harm if I laughed.
“We need to entice her with something,” I said, glancing around me. Where had I left my emergency kit? I saw Fern shoo the last flower girl through the doors, and I mouthed a silent Thank you to him as I rushed around to help Lucille with the bride. I heard a loud fanfare as the bride started her walk down the aisle, Lucille following her into the ballroom, fluffing her train the whole way.
Richard pulled his wallet out of his inside jacket pocket and produced a stack of bills. “How about a twenty?”
Reese raised an eyebrow at him. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, I’m not giving her a fifty. That’s extortion.”
“I didn’t mean to entice her with cash,” I said. “She’s a child, for crying out loud. We need to find some candy or something.”
Richard replaced his wallet with a sniff. “Would have worked when I was a child.”
“You were a child?” Fern asked as he joined us and gave Richard the once-over. “Hard to imagine.”
Richard folded his arms in front of him. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
“How about a stick of gum?” Reese produced a slightly weathered piece from the pocket of his black wool blazer.
“It’s worth a shot.” I took the gum and bent down to the flower girl’s level. “If you let go of the nice man, you can have this piece of gum.”
She seemed to weigh her options for a moment, then nodded and simultaneously let go of Richard’s leg and snatched the gum out of my fingers.
“Thank God,” Richard sighed as the girl
toddled off down the aisle after the bride.
“And she even made it down the aisle.” I pointed as the errant flower girl reached the end of the aisle behind the bride, took a seat on the bride’s train, and proceeded to unwrap her gum. The audience began to laugh. “Sort of.”
Fern put an arm around my shoulders. “With ten flower girls, anything short of a citywide riot is a victory.”
Kate slipped out of the ballroom and pulled the door closed behind her. “Not bad if I do say so myself.” She caught sight of Reese and rolled her shoulders back. “Well, hello again.”
Reese made a point to avert his eyes from her cleavage. An admirable feat considering Kate’s dramatically low-cut dress.
“I’m glad you’re all here,” he said. “I need to ask you a few questions about Carolyn Crabbe.”
“This won’t take too long, will it?” I glanced nervously around the lobby. “Our bride still doesn’t know that her wedding won’t be happening and she’s around here somewhere taking pictures.”
“Don’t worry.” Kate pointed to her wedding schedule. “She left to do photos at the monuments with Maxwell, remember? She won’t be back for another thirty minutes at least.”
I let out a long breath. It had slipped my mind in all the frenzy that the bride wanted photos with her bridesmaids in front of the Jefferson Memorial. Usually the Jefferson was a hot spot for photos in the spring when the cherry blossoms were in season, but this bride had insisted on photos there even though the trees were bare and it was close to freezing. More proof that brides could not be thwarted by logic or sanity.
“Let’s go in the ballroom.” Reese motioned for us to follow him across the hall, where the police had already put up swags of yellow crime scene tape. “I need for you to explain how things were before the crime scene was tampered with.”
I swallowed hard as we entered the ballroom again and averted my eyes from the stage where officers now gathered around Carolyn’s body. “She hung above the stage.”
Reese nodded. “We figured that from where she landed.”
“I told that banquet captain not to mess with the body, Detective,” Richard said. “But he refused to listen to me.”
Reese shook his head and frowned. “We have some officers questioning him right now. When we arrived we found him trying to drag the body off the stage. He may be facing some charges.”
Kate shuddered. “He touched the corpse? Isn’t it hard to move bodies once they’ve gone into rigor mortis?”
I looked at Kate in amazement and wondered if she’d been watching CSI marathons again.
Reese looked impressed, too. “It might be hard to move the body if she’d been dead for very long, but the time of death was probably only minutes before you saw her.”
I felt a chill go through my body. “You mean she’d just died when we walked in?”
Reese gave a curt nod of his head. “She was barely blue when we got here.”
“Pretty,” Richard muttered.
Reese rested his gaze on me. “Can you tell me anything else about what the victim looked like when you saw her?”
“It looked like she’d been hung by a bride’s veil or at least the fabric used to make them,” I said. “I didn’t get a good look at her because she faced the other way most of the time.”
“Until Richard and Giancarlo started fighting over the body and then she started spinning,” Kate added, leaning in close to Reese and putting her hand on his arm. “So we only got glimpses of her face as it went around and around.”
Richard glared at Kate, but she seemed totally oblivious. I started to kick her and then stopped myself. I suppose I couldn’t be upset if she made a play for Reese. It wasn’t like I’d ever dated him. Anyway, I’d started seeing someone. Well, I don’t know if I could actually call it dating yet. But Ian, the Scottish bandleader I’d met at a wedding a couple of months ago, and I were definitely more than friends. At least I thought so.
“And that’s it?” Reese asked, snapping me out of my introspection.
“As far as I can remember,” I said. “Does it look like suicide or foul play?”
“Suicide?” Reese almost laughed. “Not likely.”
“I told you, Annabelle,” Richard said. “Carolyn wouldn’t kill herself in the middle of a wedding.”
“We found evidence that she didn’t go down without a fight,” Reese said.
“You’re kidding.” I shivered as I imagined Carolyn struggling with a killer.
“You’re sure it isn’t from Richard’s fight with Giancarlo?” Kate asked, and got another dirty look from Richard.
“I’m afraid not.” Reese closed his notebook and dropped it in his jacket pocket. “We found wood under her fingernails from the balcony railing and marks from where she tried to keep from being pushed over the edge.”
The hairs on the back of my neck prickled. Someone had hated Carolyn Crabbe enough to drag her over the edge of the balcony, and we’d only missed walking in on it by minutes.
Chapter 6
“Well, I know what I’m getting,” Kate said as we settled into a banquette at Bistro Français.
Even though it was late at night, the French bistro buzzed with activity. Waiters wearing long white aprons scuttled around the two-level mahogany and brass dining room that was almost filled to capacity. Lately it had become a habit for Kate to drag me here after we finished our Saturday wedding. She had a thing for their quiche.
“I’ve never been here.” Fern looked around him at the stylishly dressed twenty-somethings taking a break from their late night revelry in Georgetown. “What’s good?”
I picked up the menu and flipped it open. “Kate always gets the quiche Lorraine, but their fries are to die for.”
“And you must try their hot chocolate,” Kate added, pushing her closed menu away from her.
I let my hair down and shook it out. It had been pinned up for so long that it actually hurt.
Fern pressed a hand to his chest and sighed. “I love it when you let your hair down. You really should wear it that way more often.”
“Thanks, Fern.” I managed a weary smile. “I’m afraid I can’t stand it getting in my face when I work, though.”
Fern reached over and squeezed my hand. “But ponytails are not sexy, doll. Not the way you wear them, at least.”
It would be pointless to explain to Fern that I wasn’t trying to be sexy when I coordinated weddings. He and Kate came from the same school of thought: that you should always be ready to meet the man of your dreams. I found the whole concept exhausting.
Richard slumped down in the leather bench next to me. “I can’t believe it’s finally over. I thought we’d never get out of there.”
“I still say it was awfully nice of the hotel to clear out the restaurant for us to use for the wedding.” Kate slipped off her suit jacket and leaned back in her chair. “They never close down the restaurant for a private event.”
I rubbed my arms to warm up and wondered how Kate didn’t freeze without her jacket on. Especially considering the sleeveless dress she had on underneath. “Well, they’ve never had a murder in their hotel and a banquet captain who got hauled away for obstruction of justice.”
Fern winked at me. “Touché.”
“The bride seemed to take it all pretty well,” Kate said. “She didn’t even seem to notice that the bowl of honey ended up being a lot smaller than it should have been.”
“It was practically a thimble,” Fern said.
“She should be grateful that we emptied five hundred individual honey packets from the room service pantry for her,” Richard grumbled. “It felt like I was stuck in a bad episode of I Love Lucy.”
Fern shook his head. “Who would have guessed how many of those little packs it takes to fill a bowl?”
“The bride will never know that we had to replace the first bowl of honey because a dead woman landed in it, will she, Richard?” I said with a hint of warning in my voice.
“You wound m
e, Annabelle. You know I wouldn’t repeat something like that,” he said. “A good magician never reveals his tricks.”
A waiter filled our water glasses and dropped a basket of warm bread in the center of the table. My stomach growled. I hadn’t eaten a bite since I’d wolfed down half of a cinnamon scone early that morning. Luckily, I’d been too busy dealing with one wedding catastrophe after another to notice, but suddenly I was starving.
I ripped off a hot, crusty piece of bread and popped it in my mouth. “I hope the word doesn’t get out about what happened. You know how these things are for business.”
“I think it’s safe to say everyone in town will know about it by morning,” Richard said.
I put my head in my hands. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Listen, Annie.” Kate reached across the table and patted my shoulder. “You need to relax. Have you used those five weirdos that Richard gave you?”
I looked up at her. “Excuse me?”
“You know. The Guatemalan weirdos that Richard got you to help you with stress.”
I almost laughed. “Do you mean the worry dolls?” Richard had gotten me a set of tiny worry dolls from Guatemala to place under my pillow and supposedly rid me of stress. He swore by the power of voodoo dolls, but I found them too creepy to have lying around, so he said that the worry dolls were the next best thing.
“That’s what they are? I thought you guys called them weirdos.” Kate reached for a piece of bread. “You have to admit, they kind of look like weirdos.”
“What did I do to deserve this?” Richard muttered under his breath.
“We could call ourselves the Five Weirdos if we had one more person,” Fern said.
“Leatrice would definitely qualify,” Kate said, suggesting my elderly neighbor who had a fondness for off-beat clothing that made noise, covert surveillance of other neighbors in the building that bordered on stalking, and meddling in my personal life.
Fern bobbed his head. “She would make a great weirdo.”