Nothing but Gossip

by Marne Davis Kellogg

  “Don’t worry, buddy, we’ll get you a good lawyer,” Jerry told him. “We’ll get you off. Hey,” he said, conveniently forgetting the four attempted homicides, “you said yourself, it was self-defense.”

  Jack closed the door slowly and started around the car. He stopped long enough to look at me over the tops of his dark glasses and whisper in my ear. “You’d better clean up if you’re going to get married,” he said. “You look like hell.”

  “You’re welcome.” I smiled.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Mr. and Mrs. Elias Caulfield Bennett III

  request the honour of your presence at the marriage of their daughter

  Lilly McLaughlin

  to

  Mr. Richard Welland Jerome, Jr.

  Saturday, the twelfth of September

  at five o’clock

  Circle B Ranch

  Bennett’s Fort, Wyoming

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  SATURDAY MORNING - SEPTEMBER 12—WEDDING DAY

  Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You really do?”

  “Yes.” Richard was sounding exasperated. “I really, really do.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was skeptical. “But this can be pretty tough going. I don’t want you going all hysterical on me or anything. Or fainting.”

  “Lilly.”

  But there was no going back.

  “Too late now. Here we are.” I pulled over behind the cemetery director’s gray jeep.

  It was a very quiet, late-summer morning at the Wind River Cemetery. Little breeze and full of bird-song. The lush green lawns unrolled peacefully around us, and the marble and cement monuments appeared to float on the light morning mist.

  “Glad you could make it,” Jack Lewis said. He held a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “We’ve been waiting to start till you arrived. Morning, Richard.” They shook hands. “Not too late for you to bail out.”

  “Believe me,” Richard said. “I’ve seen worse things than this.”

  “I mean getting married.”

  The Rutherford family did not have a private marble mausoleum with everyone tucked safely behind padlocked, cast-iron gates, but instead they were buried on a hilltop with spectacular vistas. Their grassy plots lay in the protective shadow of a statue I assumed to portray Bradford Rutherford’s father, the original oil baron who’d bought the handful of leases from the government after Teapot Dome and turned them into what was now the country’s most notorious independent. The larger-than-life-size bronze sculpture was of a roughneck leaning against what appeared to be the bottom of an oil derrick. His legs were crossed at the ankles, his arms folded over his chest. His head drooped, and his eyes were closed, his face shaded by a beaten-up cowboy hat. His jeans were baggy, shirt loose, and the bandanna around his neck looked flat with dirt and sweat. Remington’s unmistakable scrawl ran along the base like sharp blades of grass.

  Below, thin lines of yellow string ran out from plot markers and formed a grid across the grave sites where the sod had already been removed. The thick rolls were stacked like firewood against the statue’s four-foot-tall bronze base.

  After welcoming each one of us and saying that there was no shame in feeling uncomfortable or queasy and not to be embarrassed to return to our cars because exhumation was a grueling, and often unsettling, process, Mr. Hastings, the ageless cemetery director, gave an almost imperceptible nod to the head grounds-keeper. At once, the big yellow backhoe revved up and its custom-made, grave-width shovel tore into the hard earth as though it were flour.

  We remained a fairly solemn group as the backhoe dug. Mr. Hastings had loaded a large steel canister of hot coffee and a big box of glazed doughnuts into the back of his wagon, so we all—Hastings, Lewis, Richard, me, the medical examiner Kim Leavy, and two morticians—sipped the coffee, scarfed the doughnuts, and watched.

  “You eat many more of those,” Jack said, “and you’ll be getting married in a gunnysack.”

  Everyone laughed but me.

  “Why don’t you just shut up for a change?” I said.

  “She seems a little touchy, today, Richard.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I walked over to the far edge of the plot and looked out at the city. I was depressed. This was not how I wanted to begin my wedding day, exhuming the bodies of my parents’ friends and neighbors to see if they’d been murdered. This case had been so unsatisfying—so many people with so much money, more than any of them could ever need in ten lifetimes, and yet it had not been enough. The thought that Alma had murdered her parents, poisoned them to share in the control of Rutherford Oil, made me sick to my stomach.

  And Wade. Poor Wade. That’s how I’d begun to think of him as Elias improved and my headache lessened. An abused husband. Completely trapped, or at least imagining he was, desperate to protect himself. Why didn’t you just go to the police? I’d asked him. Because he couldn’t afford the publicity. And no doctor could find anything wrong with him—just kept telling him he had the flu.

  Had there been a conspiracy between Wade and Mercedes and Duke? They all said no. I wasn’t so sure. Did it matter? Yes, but nothing would come of it. Paul Decker would get Wade off on an insanity plea and installed in a suite at St. Mary’s Psychiatric Hospital before the fall roundup was over.

  Jack materialized next to me.

  “How’s Gilhooly?” I asked, interested in discussing something other than the size of my hips in front of a bunch of strangers.

  “Okay, I guess. They’ve got him over at Christ and St. Luke’s under observation, waiting for the test results on the toxins. Jim Dixon refuses to press charges, and Decker will probably have Wade at St. Mary’s by the end of the day. I wonder if it’ll turn out to be true? That that babe murdered her parents.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call Alma a ‘babe.’ But I think it’ll turn out to be true.” I kicked the dirt with the pointed toe of my boot. “I guess Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford should consider themselves lucky she didn’t shoot ’em, and stuff ’em, and hang ’em over her fireplace.”

  The backhoe’s forked bucket hit something solid, and the sound made chills run up my spine. We all watched in silence as the grave diggers jumped down into the open grave and went to work, clearing away the dirt and digging around the edges of the vault so the heavy chains could be fitted into the notches. Their shovels grated deafeningly on the cement, and it seemed impossible for me to believe that, just hours before at our rehearsal dinner, Richard, lean and elegant in his black tie, had sung “You’re the Top” to me as his toast. I looked over at him leaning against the car, and I could tell he was thinking the same thing. Or would have been if he hadn’t been talking on the phone.

  The men tossed their shovels up onto the piles of dirt and heaved themselves out of the grave. The backhoe’s engine screamed again as it jerked the chains taut and wrenched the heavy vault from the earth where it had lain for two years, not long, but long enough to insinuate itself, take up a strong position. It did not come willingly, but after a couple of minutes the large gray box swung through the air and settled gently on the grass. The men, now sweating, went to work with their sledgehammers.

  “The Rutherfords went top of the line,” Mr. Hastings said wryly. “Sealed vaults. Most you can pop the top with a crowbar. These things use the kind of glue the Navy uses to glue its ships back together. So we’ve got to bust them apart.”

  Watching the process of exhumation, not the first I’d seen, reconfirmed for me that cremation was the only way to go. This was hot, hard, big-muscle work. Nothing spiritual about it.

  After a while, the big box took on the abused, pitted appearance of cement bridge supports on interstate highways in New England—the kinds of bridges I’m always sure are about to collapse on top of, or underneath, me—and finally it surrendered to the blows, crumbling and cracking, splitting to reveal the dull bronze casket.

  The morticians stepped forward.

  “These guys give
me the willies,” Hastings said behind his hand, as one of the gray-suited gentlemen crouched down and unscrewed the glass identification tube in the casket’s lower-right-hand side. “Talk about a whole different breed of human being. I don’t know how they do it. You wouldn’t believe how much money they make. Practically mint the stuff.”

  The man stood up and ceremoniously unrolled the tiny paper scroll. “Bradford Rutherford the Third,” he announced in a loud, formal voice, as though he were presenting him for dinner and dancing at the Court of St. James. He then returned the paper to the tube and the tube to its spot, secured a face mask over his nose, tugged on a pair of industrial-weight yellow rubber gloves, fitted a crank handle into a small opening in the lower-left-hand side, and went to work. The top gave way with a sticky hiss. I didn’t look as they removed Mr. Rutherford’s remains to a body bag and placed him gently in the back of the Cadillac hearse.

  The process was repeated for his wife, Mrs. Rutherford, the great big Dane. Again, I didn’t look to see if she was still big or not.

  “You’d better get home and put your face in a bowl of ice,” Jack said. “I don’t want to drive all the way the hell out to your damn ranch to watch some bride with a potato for a face stagger down the aisle.”

  “How’d it go?” Richard said when I climbed into the car. “Sorry I missed it. I got tied up on a call.”

  “Great, I guess.” I slumped down in my seat and rubbed my eyes. I was completely exhausted.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Better give this girl a drink,” Richard told Buck as we slid into the booth at about eleven-thirty. I laid my head on the table.

  “Hey, Ec,” Buck yelled. “Bring us three triples of Irish and some of those cold meat-loaf sandwiches you made up this morning.” He turned back to me, a smug look on his face. “So, what have we got here? Just what I predicted? Prewedding jitters? Premarital troubles? You all going to back out?”

  Ecstasy placed ten shot glasses and a huge pile of sandwiches on the table. “I brought an extra shot,” she said. “Even numbers are easier to keep track of.”

  “Thanks, honey.” Buck drank the first one so fast I wasn’t sure he’d even touched the glass. Like that old joke: See this? Want to see it again? “That was one hell of a damn party last night. Your mother almost danced me into the ground, Richard. All right, now let me get this straight. You’re here because you need some counseling. Okay, so I’ll tell you what to do: Read my lips: Don’t do it.”

  I started laughing. Richard and I clinked our glasses. “No, Buck, we don’t need any counseling, and we are going to do it.”

  “We’ve been at the cemetery,” Richard explained as he swallowed. “Watching the Rutherfords be disinterred.”

  “Oh, shit. No wonder you’re depressed. Here, honey.” He slid a full glass across to me. “Have another. I’ll join you.”

  “You sure looked handsome last night, Buck,” I said. “I loved your toast.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty good, wasn’t it? Redford wrote it.”

  “Who?” Richard asked.

  “Robert Redford,” Buck said.

  “Robert Redford wrote your toast?”

  “Yup,” Buck said. “He’s got a thing for Lilly.”

  Richard closed his eyes and pinched his forehead. “This family,” he said tiredly. “You’re all nuts.”

  “And you thought fat twin sopranos from Düsseldorf could be a problem,” I told him. “Come on, we’ve got to get going.”

  “You going to Christian and Mimi’s luncheon at the country club?” Buck asked through a mouthful of meat loaf and mayonnaise.

  I shook my head.

  “I know it’s just for the out-of-towners,” Buck said. “But Christian said I could come. Have you met Mimi’s sister from Chicago? Wow. She’s as pretty as Mimi. And that Principessa Pagliacci or whatever her name is from Rome? Talk about a looker.”

  “We’re going home to get some sleep,” Richard said.

  “Give everyone our love. We’ll see you at five o’clock. Don’t be late.”

  Buck stood up and put his hands on my shoulders. His blue eyes twinkled merrily. “I’m really happy for you, Lilly.”

  “I know, Buck. Thanks.” I kissed his cheek above the beard.

  He shook Richard’s hand, and I could tell he wanted to wish him good luck, but by then Buck was too choked up to speak. So he gave him a bear hug instead and then punched him hard in the shoulder.

  The day was so clear and beautiful—the weatherman said it was going to get up to seventy, a heat wave for September—we didn’t go directly home. We stopped at the wedding pavilion first.

  Manuel, my parents’ butler, had gotten his crew up and out early, and now everything was almost ready for our two hundred special guests.

  “I can’t believe what your mother has done,” Richard said as we climbed the steps into the pavilion.

  The place was crawling with waiters setting the tables and the florist and his assistants putting the finishing touches on the centerpieces and trimming the brass hurricane lamps that hung from the thick pine-log posts.

  “Did you know what she had in mind, or is this what you told her you wanted?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t even answer. The fact is, we hadn’t communicated much about it at all, except I’d said she should do whatever she wanted because I was her only daughter and she’d been thinking about my wedding since the day I was born. Besides, she had exquisite taste. Much better than mine. Neither one of us likes geegaws and glop, so I hadn’t worried that I’d end up with frilly white wicker flower baskets and burgundy lace overcloths on the tables and a bunch of caged turtledoves dangling from the rafters.

  Plus, Mother had made it clear that she fully appreciated the constraints of her challenge: I was a grown woman, not the dewy-eyed bride I would have been twenty-five or so years ago, and a ranch wedding could not, and should not, look like a city wedding. But it should also be formal, not casual. She had gone the plain-and-simple route, and the result was breathtaking.

  “This is possibly the most elegant setup I’ve ever seen—even better than our Traviata set,” Richard marveled. “When the sun goes down, it will be like dancing in a diamond.”

  The tables had all been lacquered in deep, glowing forest green, so shiny you could put your lipstick on in them, and in the center of each table, sterling-silver spittoons the size of basketballs overflowed with golden aspen leaves. Miniature silver hurricane lanterns surrounded each centerpiece, and every place setting included four gleaming crystal glasses—red wine, white wine, champagne, and water—and a full complement of glittering sterling flatware. The straight, ladder-backed kitchen chairs were lacquered in the same velvet green as the tables, and the floor looked like glass. Coronas of aspen leaves surrounded the brass sconces. Everything had been designed to glow and twinkle.

  “Manuel,” I caught up with him in the kitchen. “Congratulations. This is magnificent.”

  He smiled and nodded. “We’re getting close.”

  “How many Valiums so far today?”

  “None yet. Your mother is on her best behavior. I think maybe she’s taking them today instead of me.”

  Mother had flown in Daniel Proust from Manhattan to do the cooking, and he was busy tying sprigs of fresh tarragon to long tenderloins of Circle B Angus. Each one looked like a work of art.

  “Look at this.” Manuel opened the door to the walk-in cooler, where cases and cases of 1995 Puligny-Montrachet Les Courcelles and 1985 Dom Perignon were stacked against the back wall. Six one-kilo tins of Petrossian beluga and fillets of smoked Scottish salmon sat on one shelf. Our wedding cake, a three-tiered concoction topped with a cascade of creamy roses, luscious devil’s food invisible behind thick white fondant icing, sat on another.

  I squeezed Richard’s hand. “Can you believe it?” I said.

  “Yes.” He squeezed back. “And I like it.”

  The awful morning was banished. My wedding day had begun anew.

 
“Check this out,” Richard said once we were back in the pantry. He ripped open the top of a case of Domaine Drouhin Oregon Pinot Noir and held a bottle up to admire. “This is fine. This is going to be an excellent affair.”

  “Go down by the river,” Manuel said. “I think you’re going to like it. Very simple. Then you’d better go home. There’s not much time.”

  It was true. It was one o’clock. We had to be back at the barn by four.

  Richard and I walked quickly down to where the wedding ceremony itself would take place, where my cousin, the Very Reverend Henry “Hank” Caulfield Bennett, Bishop of the Wind River Diocese, would officiate. The altar, actually one of the green tables with a big gold cross, held a bed of pine boughs and two large sterling vases of aspen leaves. There were rows of plain pine chairs with green cushions on the mowed ground. It was all just as it should be. Beautiful. Solemn. Intimate.

  We sat down on the riverbank. The water was at its lowest point, ready to call it a summer and freeze up for a few months. It skimmed along the rocky bed like molten glass.

  “I’m glad we came down here,” I said. “It’s helped things start over.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “I’m sorry I fouled up our week so much,” I told him. “I had no idea.”

  “We’ve all survived. You and I weren’t designed to lead boring lives.”

  FORTY

  You’re pretty much what I would consider useless as a best man,” Richard said to Elias as he followed him slowly up the stairs to our bedroom, where we were dressing. “You’re supposed to be tying my tie, not the other way around.”

  In spite of the fact that Elias had the constitution of a bull, he had had most of his blood replaced three days earlier and was still a little weak and pale. His arm was in a sling, the wound hidden behind thick packing and bandages.

  “I may be useless, but I’m happy.” He settled himself onto the chaise in my bedroom and poured himself a glass of whiskey. “I know I should be drinking champagne,” he said defensively to my matron of honor Sparky Kendall, who was frowning at him, “but this works better as a painkiller.”