by Ally Gray
“How would the contracts already be signed when I’m just now bringing them for your signature?” she said slowly, enunciating each word as if she was speaking to a village idiot. She waited as recognition slowly dawned on his face. Mr. D’Argenzio slowly lowered himself back into his chair and waited, measuring his response.
“Who do you work for, girl?” he finally stammered, wiping at the sweat on his forehead with a silk handkerchief he’d pulled from his breast pocket. Stacy was dying to tell him that no one dressed like that at this time of year, but thought better of it.
“My name, as I said, is Anastacia Prudell. Of Events By Design? My firm is planning your daughters’ double wedding, and I have the contracts for you to sign.” She stared him down, both savvy business people watching the other to see who would make the first move. The father of the brides had no choice but to cave.
His boisterous laughter filled the office, its sound waves reverberating off the exposed beams that made up the rafters high above their heads. He looked around at his team of hands and they quickly joined in on the laughter.
“My apologies, Mrs. Prudell, I had you mistaken for someone else, someone who’s bringing over a different set of important papers. But hey, when it comes to my two girls, there’s no more important papers than these,” he said good-naturedly, holding out his hand and gesturing with a flick of his fingers for her to hand them over.
Stacy passed him the leather folder she carried and sat in the chair that one of his men brought over for her. She couldn’t help but check the upholstery for any signs of blood before perching on its edge, crossing her legs at the ankles and tucking her feet to the side the way her former employer had taught her.
“Donnie,” the father said after flipping through each marked page without reading it and scrawling his looping signature across the bottom, initialing in the places Stacy had marked with little flags, “take Mrs. Prudell to the dining room and see to it that she gets a nice lunch. Put it on my bill.” He turned to Stacy and stood up, coming around the desk and holding out both hands to her before helping her to her feet. He kissed the knuckles on both hands and smiled broadly.
“I’ll join you in a little while, we’ll go over the big plans my daughters have cooked up with their mama!” Mr. D’Argenzio proceeded to kiss both of her cheeks before gesturing for her to follow his assistant. She had no choice but to comply.
Chapter 8
“I’m telling you, Stacy, I don’t like it. I want you to skip this one, please. For me,” Nathan pleaded from the bedroom as she finished getting ready for bed. She’d already washed her face and applied a night cream, brushed her teeth, and combed out her thick shoulder-length hair. All that stood between her and what she hoped wasn’t a night full of horrible dreams about gun shots and mobsters was the thorough nagging her husband had waiting for her.
“I’ve already told you, we can’t afford to skip this one. You’re right, something’s weird about this one and it’s bugging me that I can’t put my finger on it. I’m telling you, the bride’s father didn’t even read the contracts before signing them! But we can’t afford to just toss this one aside. First of all, we now have contracts and the guy can sue you. And that’s assuming there’s no fallout from irritating a man with possible connections to the mob.”
“But Stace—”
“No buts! We need this contract. Besides, if one dead guy is all it takes to get the man with the checkbook to sign off on his wife’s grand plans at every single wedding we do, I’ll start rounding up potential victims, I swear! This is going to be a piece of cake, I know it. He’s too busy to fuss with the details, he’s just there to write the checks for his two princesses.”
“Well then, if it’s gonna be so easy make Tori handle this one. She covered everything for you just fine while we were in Barbados. She’d be great at it. She just has this way of speaking to thugs that makes them somehow understand. It’s like they get her, or something.”
“Cute. But I’m not throwing one of my best friends under the bus… or to the sharks, as Jeremiah would say. Although I do still have to get her back for staging my wedding without permission, and even more for not letting on what was going on with her and Rod… No, never mind. It would be wrong. And two wrongs don’t make a right!” she argued brightly.
Stacy climbed under the covers and nestled closely against Nathan’s chest. He hesitated for only a moment before wrapping a protective arm around her and pulling her closer. He kissed the top of her head, then made his way down her cheek until his lips met hers.
“Just promise you’ll run at the first sign of trouble,” he said quietly. “Make that the third sign, since the first sign was a dead body floating in a water hazard and the second sign was you being mistaken for the bearer of some important contracts after some guy got shot!”
“You’re just being paranoid. We don’t know for sure that anybody was shot.”
“And we don’t know that anybody wasn’t shot, but we do know that it sounded like someone was shot!”
“That’s the last time I tell Jeremiah anything. I didn’t know he was gonna come running to you about it,” Stacy grumbled. “Fine, I promise. I’ll drop this wedding like third period French if anything else goes wrong. I’ll even wear my running shoes to work, not that I’ll need them, of course. It’s going to be fine, you’ll see.”
“Are you telling me that to convince me, or to convince yourself?” Nathan asked mysteriously before switching off his bedside lamp and rolling over to go to sleep.
* * *
By morning, Stacy wasn’t as confident as she’d been the night before when she was safely tucked in her husband’s arms. After a fitful night’s sleep in which she was aware she’d had vivid nightmares even though she couldn’t remember what they were about, Nathan went off to do whatever he did all day while she got ready for work. Whether it was his urging or the combination of strange events surrounding this wedding, she couldn’t be sure, but she was certain she was getting a bad feeling about this one.
“Oh, there you are,” Mandy said somberly when Stacy finally made it to the office. Stacy checked her watch instinctively; it was too early in the day for everyone to have beaten her to the office and for there to have been a crisis already.
“What’s up?” she asked, reaching for the newspaper Mandy held out and looking at the front page photo.
“Your floater, that’s what. Turns out he was close to the D’Argenzios.”
“Well, close to one of them, you mean,” Tori said snidely, coming up behind Stacy and joining in the fun of informing the boss. “And by close, I mean on top of, underneath, around… you know.”
“Wait, what? You mean the groom’s dead?” Stacy shrieked, clutching the paper and scanning the article desperately. “Which groom? TELL ME! Which one?”
“No, unfortunately, as it turns out the dead guy isn’t one of the grooms. He just might have wished he was. It seems he was intimately connected to one of the brides, either AnaMaria or Caterina.” Mandy and Tori exchanged a secretive look, but Stacy noticed it.
“What? What do you two know that you’re not telling me?”
They hesitated, but Tori finally answered. “They’re saying it was a mob hit.”
“They?” Stacy demanded with a mocking laugh. “Who is they? Who do you know who is literally named ‘they’?”
“Oh come on, Stace, you know what I mean. ‘They,’ as in, ‘everybody’.”
“I see, so now this famous ‘they’ has a cousin named ‘everybody.’ This just gets better and better.” Stacy folded the paper in half and creased it sharply before holding it out for Mandy to take. “This doesn’t concern us. Our job is AnaMaria D’Argenzio, Caterina D’Argenzio, and their respective grooms. And rumors being spread by ‘everybody’ and ‘they’ can be put to rest now, and never spoken of again within these offices. Got it? Good.”
Stacy turned on her heel and walked into her office, shutting the door firmly behind her. She stalked over
to her desk and collapsed into her chair, fighting to catch her breath. Deep down she knew what she’d seen and what she’d heard, but she’d done a pretty decent job so far of pretending that it was something other than mob hits. Finding out that one of the brides was stepping out on her future husband with the unfortunate man in the unfortunate golf pants was more than Stacy’s nerves could take.
She let her head drop to her desk until a moment later when she heard her office door open. She looked up and felt a mixture of relief and consternation when she saw Jeremiah, wearing what looked for all the world like his “I told you so” face.
“What can you possibly want besides the joy of rubbing it in my face?” Stacy asked in a weary voice, barely able to hold her head up. Jeremiah gave her a sympathetic smile.
“First of all, I have never rubbed ‘it’ in anyone’s face, especially not a lady. My mother raised me better than that. You know, a good friend would pull up a chair and sit beside you, then listen while you talked… I am not that good friend. Get up. We’ve got work to do.”
“Where are we going?” she asked, pulling back slightly when Jeremiah took her hand and led her to the door.
He turned and sighed, put out at having to explain how right he’d been. “We need this wedding. You’ve said so yourself. This wedding is not only going to pay our salaries and our bills, it’s going to make sure I spend next winter somewhere tropical, smelling various orchids for the spring wedding season. But before we can do that, we’ve got to be sure we’re on the right side of both the law and the mob. We’ve got one and a half dead men to sort through so we can move forward with this wedding.”
“How did you come up with half a dead man? Is he just injured?” Stacy asked, confused.
“No, but you heard a gunshot, only there was no dead guy in the office. So maybe he’s only half a dead man?”
“I’m sorry, wait. How in the world is this our problem? Why do we have to go sticking our noses in where they don’t belong and aren’t particularly wanted?”
“Oh, how the mighty have turned frighty!” Jeremiah teased, a knowing look on his face. “I thought we didn’t care about the mob or killing or rumors. I thought we had a job to do!”
“Exactly my point! We have a wedding to put on, not a mystery to solve like Scooby and Friends! Why do we have to get involved?”
“Because you know you’re never going to let it rest until you do. You can’t do your job if you’re afraid of your own clients. You said it yourself, something fishy is going on, and we’re getting sucked into it. Let’s find out who these people are, then we can get started on our actual jobs.”
“Sorry, I’m just not up for playing Nancy Drew. I don’t have a curious bone in my body, at least not where the Mafia is concerned.” Stacy pulled her hand free from Jeremiah’s grasp and crossed her arms defiantly.
“Okay, then. It’s time for you to tear up their contracts and give back their deposits. Because you can’t go near this event with a murder or two hanging over your head.” Jeremiah glared back just as defiantly as he held out his cell phone for her to take. “Go ahead, Stace. Pick up the phone and tell Nathan you’re off this wedding. Tell him that his company isn’t going to take part in an event that has been overshadowed by the death of someone who loved the bride, someone she probably loved very much.”
The florist’s not-so-subtle reminder to Stacy about why they did this job—that feeling they got from seeing two people find their perfect happy ending—was a low blow and he knew it, but Stacy took the bait. She threw her hands up in frustration.
“What do we have to do?”
Chapter 9
“Rod, if I needed to know some info on somebody but I didn’t want to tell you why, what are the chances it wouldn’t make its way back to Nathan? Just on a scale of one to bite my ass, I mean,” Stacy asked her detective friend over the phone.
“No can do, Stacy. I know exactly why you’re calling and I’m not buying it. If you go within five miles of this case, I’ll have you locked up for obstruction just to save your skinny butt.”
“Aw, you think I have a skinny butt? I mean, what are you talking about?” she demanded. “I’m not up to anything, and you’d better not have me arrested!”
“If you’re not up to anything—let’s say, anything like investigating the intentional drowning of Joey Trippetto—then why don’t we just sit down for a nice chat with Nathan?”
“Why in the world does everyone keep throwing my husband’s name around? You know, I had a life before I married him, and I still do. I’m not afraid of anybody, least of all him. He, for one, trusts me to make a good choice, unlike some people who are at this very moment standing in my way. I should have you arrested for obstructing a wedding in progress.”
“That’s not a thing, Stacy. It’s not even a pretend thing. Sixth grade girls would think you’re a moron for suggesting it.”
“Be quiet! If you’re not going to help me with the information I want, then you leave me no choice but to get it straight from the source. I’ll be at Mr. D’Argenzio’s office if anyone’s looking for me.” She was about to press end and lay her phone down, but Rod’s frantic but tiny voice burst through her phone’s speaker.
“Stacy! No, wait! Don’t hang up, I’ll help you!”
“Good. You were almost too late, you know,” Stacy reminded him. “One more second and I’d have refused to help you.”
“Help me? Are you high? I’m the one helping you! Helping you not to go walking into something you won’t be able to talk yourself out of, that is,” he retorted angrily, knowing he’d been beaten at his own game. “But why are you doing this? Don’t you have some ladderback chairs to wrap in tulle or little lace baggies of birdseed to wrap? You know, something useful like that?”
“For your information, the brides have requested lattice-back chairs.”
“Are you serious? You’ve got to be kidding. You’re arguing with me over chairs when I’m trying to keep you from jumping right into a known organized crime family’s den of misdeeds?”
“Hey, I don’t have a choice in where they have the reception! If they choose to do it at the country club, that’s not my problem. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of this so the wedding can move forward, with or without the guilty parties present. Understood? Nabbing the bad guys is your problem, filling little lace baggies with birdseed is my problem, remember?” Stacy’s tone dared him to argue, but Rod had known her long enough that he was immune to the intimidation.
“And I’m trying to tell you that if you don’t back off, you’re going to have both the entire D’Argenzio crime syndicate and my chief of police breathing down your neck. It’s going to be a race to see who gets to you first!”
Stacy was stunned into silence. It hadn’t crossed her mind that she could end up as a target in all of this, even after her first unfortunate meeting with the father of the bride. It wasn’t her fault he’d thought she had arrived to bring some other kind of contracts for him. But now she only wanted to find out who the dead boyfriend was and how he figured into all this before the family could be implicated, thereby cancelling the wedding.
“Just meet me at the golf course in an hour, okay?” Stacy said, trying really hard not to whine. She was feeling faint from exhaustion, and the sudden rush of heat that flooded her weary body made her break out in a light sweat across her forehead. She grabbed a tissue from the box on her desk and blotted her face, being careful of her makeup.
An hour later, Stacy waited behind the wheel of her sporty little car for the nondescript yet still somehow ugly car that all detectives seemed to drive. Instead, the sound of approaching tires behind her car made her look up. Instead of a dark blue Crown Victoria, the Corvette Rod had given Nathan rolled up behind her, so close to her car that she wondered if he was crazy enough to scratch the paint on both of their favorite cars.
“Soooo… whatcha doin’?” Nathan asked in a slow, sing-song voice as he got in the passenger seat of her car. H
e turned to her with a patient grin on his face, even though under the surface Stacy knew he was anything but happy.
“Nothing much, actually. I’m just waiting to meet a friend. And you?”
“Don’t play innocent with me, Stacy. Rod called me—”
“That jerk! Who does he think he is, tattling on me like I’m cheating off his test paper? And to my husband, no less!” Stacy batted her eyelashes and clasped her hands together in front of her chest in a mockery of the damsel in distress look. “Oh, thank goodness you’re here, sweetie, maybe you can save me from this big scary car that I’m too meek and stupid to drive!”
“Now hold on just a minute! It wasn’t like that, but you’re not even going to let me explain before you go flying off the handle and acting like all the men in your life are out to oppress you somehow. As if we could even get by with it if we wanted to!” Nathan gritted his teeth and took a deep breath, turning away from Stacy to look out the window. The last thing he wanted to do was say something he’d regret later. “Rod called me because he got called away to a case and he knew you were expecting him here. He was afraid you’d go on inside and start digging around by yourself, fully expecting him to back you up. Since he’s not coming, he called me.”
“Oh,” Stacy answered quietly after a morbidly embarrassing pause.
“Yeah, ‘oh’ is right. He was looking out for you. And you know what? So am I! That’s why I’m here. But you’re just determined to make me into some kind of chauvinistic ‘lord and master’ over my household. Why are you so afraid of having a great marriage, and of trusting me enough to be your best friend?”
“I’m not—” she began, looking down at her hands twisted in her lap and letting her voice trail off.
“Yes, you are. Look, I know you were single for a long time, and I know you’ve had to take charge of your own life and your career. You’ve been running this company—my company, to be exact—for ages, and it’s got to be hard to let go of some of that control. But Stacy… I’ve never once treated you as anything other than your own person. Our marriage isn’t gonna survive if you can’t get it through your head that I’m not here to rule over you. I chased you for years before you agreed to marry me, and I did it because I love you. But ever since we got married you’ve been acting like I’m gonna turn the tables and become some kind of controlling jerk just because I managed to trap you into saying ‘I do.’ It’s not like that, so why are you determined to act like it is?”