One Last Look

by Linda Lael Miller

  Organ music swelled, seeming to push at the very walls.

  Emma started up the aisle at a nudge from Loretta, who followed a few moments later. Sonterra looked more than handsome, standing up there in his wedding getup, with Eddie flanking him as co–best man, along with his older brother, Mike.

  At a nod from Father Morales, Alex and I started up the aisle.

  I flashed on my scary wedding dream, imagined myself standing up there at the altar, Sonterra lifting the veil, my head replaced by a bare skull.

  I shivered, and Alex patted my hand.

  I locked eyeballs with Sonterra, and felt a slight tugging sensation deep inside, as though an invisible string stretched between us, and he was pulling on the other end.

  I kept going, but the floor felt strangely soft beneath my feet, and my head was spinning.

  We made it to the front, and I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

  “Who giveth this woman to be married?” Father Morales asked.

  Alex replied, “I do,” and stepped back to join his wife and Sonterra’s beaming sisters and elderly aunts in the front pew.

  The priest, his face glistening, his dark gaze darting periodically around the sanctuary, opened his book, and the ceremony began.

  I spoke, as prompted, though Emma had to elbow me a couple of times. The whole thing was going off without a hitch, so I shouldn’t have been nervous.

  “I now pronounce you man and wife,” Father Morales said, at long last, and smiled nervously. “You may kiss the bride.”

  Sonterra turned to face me, lifted the veil, and winked down at me before planting a smacker on my mouth.

  Cheers erupted. The organ piped up again, and flash-bulbs went off all over the place. Father Morales stepped between us, smiling for the throwaway cameras Alberta Sonterra had supplied, and that was when it happened.

  I heard a sharp pop, and Father Morales dropped, folding slowly to his knees, then pitching forward down the altar steps.

  “Everybody down!” Sonterra yelled, tackling me and managing to take Emma to the floor in the same move.

  Screams of panic echoed off the walls. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw blood spreading around Morales’s head.

  “Stay here!” Sonterra rasped, and rolled off me to run down the aisle, with Eddie right behind him. Special Agent Timmons walked the full length of a pew, jumped into the aisle, and dashed after them.

  Still prone, I groped for Emma’s hand, then Loretta’s.

  Outside, tires squealed on dry asphalt.

  “Are you both all right?” I asked.

  My bewildered bridesmaids murmured insensibly, clearly stunned, but unharmed as far as I could tell.

  Alex low-crawled to Father Morales, turned him over. The bullet had struck him in the forehead, and his eyes were open wide, staring toward heaven.

  More squealing of tires. Sonterra, Eddie, and Special Agent Timmons, chasing the shooter, no doubt.

  I’m not Catholic, but I crossed myself as I sat up. The skirt of my wedding dress was blood-spattered; I felt the sticky wetness against my legs, and it was all I could do not to rip the thing off in revulsion, then and there.

  Sonterra’s brother was on a cell phone, calling for an ambulance.

  Deputy Dave lumbered up the aisle, crouched beside Father Morales, opposite Alex. I wondered distractedly where he’d been sitting; I hadn’t noticed him when I swept the assembly, coming up the aisle. “Police,” Dave explained glumly, at Alex’s questioning glance. “Looks like the padre is a goner.”

  My father-in-law’s jaw tightened, and I was struck, once again, by the family resemblance. In twenty years, Sonterra would look just like dear old dad. I decided I could live with that.

  “You could put it that way, yes,” he said.

  I got to my feet, but the floor had gone spongy again, and Emma took a quick, firm grip on my arm. Held me up until she was sure I could stand on my own.

  I looked out over the crowd, most of them just rising from beneath and behind the heavy wooden pews. Somebody snapped another picture, and I blanked, as dazed as if the flash had gone off an inch from my nose.

  “Is anyone hurt?” I asked when I’d recovered.

  “If it hadn’t been for those damn ghosts clogging up the channels,” Mrs. K complained, rising from the floor and dusting herself off, “I would have foreseen this and warned you.”

  I stepped closer, put an arm around her. “It’s all right,” I said.

  She looked down at Father Morales. Shook her head sadly.

  Deputy Dave finally went into cop-mode. “Did anybody see the gunman?” he thundered, surveying the gathering.

  Everyone looked blank, which was answer enough.

  Shanda, breaking out of Lamont’s protective embrace, hurried up to me. “We’ve got to get you out of here, Clare,” she said. “Whoever fired that shot might have been after you, and there’s no telling if they’ll try again.”

  I didn’t think there was any real danger of that. The shooter would be too busy trying to elude Sonterra and his sidekicks to do anything as fancy as doubling back.

  Alex remained by Father Morales’s side, and Alberta came to join him, but she was watching me. Sonterra’s siblings attended to the aunts, who were understandably shaken. “Clare, your friend is right,” the elder Mrs. Sonterra said. “You might not be safe here.”

  I looked down at poor Father Morales.

  No safe places, I thought.

  “I want to stay until they take him away,” I said. “It wouldn’t be right to leave him—”

  Alex raised his gaze to my face. “Go,” he said. “You must think of the child now, Clare. I will wait with Father.”

  And so it was that I left the church as a married woman, with my gown soaked with blood and my groom off chasing an armed killer.

  Loretta had driven Emma, Shanda, Mrs. K, and me to the church in the Hummer, before the ceremony, while Sonterra, Eddie, and Lamont brought the SUV, and the Sonterra clan traveled in their own vehicles. My all-female entourage and I piled into my rig, though this time, Shanda drove.

  Lamont had decided to stay behind with Alex and some of the other men.

  The house filled up fast with murmuring wedding guests. We hadn’t planned a formal reception, but people tend to go into huddles after an experience like the one we’d just shared.

  Shanda followed me upstairs and helped me out of the ruined wedding gown. I showered and put on a nubby bathrobe with a zipper up the front. I couldn’t seem to get warm.

  Loretta was serving coffee as fast as the pot would brew it, and somebody had made a run to the supermarket to fetch the cakes Shanda ordered earlier. One of them had “Happy Birthday, Hernando” written across the top in hot pink icing.

  “Maybe we should cook something,” Loretta whispered.

  “These people have been through enough trauma for one day,” Emma put in, studying the hodgepodge of cakes. “Who’s Hernando?”

  “I don’t know,” Loretta said. “But they must have canceled his birthday.”

  I thought sadly of Father Morales. His next birthday had been canceled, too, along with any others he might have had coming to him.

  The all-too-familiar wail of sirens sounded in the distance. The State Police, I presumed, along with paramedics and a contingent from Tucson PD.

  Dry Creek was getting to be a regular hotbed of crime.

  Despite the piles of presents on the dining room table, the gathering felt more like a wake than an impromptu wedding reception. Guests, many of them townspeople we were just getting to know, sought me out, offering hugs and condolences, and I wandered aimlessly from one part of the house to another, unable to stand still.

  I was back in the crowded kitchen when Sonterra appeared, with Eddie and Timmons. I knew by their faces that they’d lost the shooter. Dry Creek is a small town, but there are a lot of places to hide.

  Sonterra weaved his way between guests to reach me. Drew me close. “I’m sorry,
Babe,” he whispered, close to my ear. “This is some wedding day.”

  I nodded against his shoulder, letting myself cling a little. Then I drew back far enough to look up into his eyes. “Did you get a look at the gunman?”

  Sonterra shook his head. “He was driving an old GMC pickup, though. Red. Lots of rust. He was just rounding the corner by the time we got the SUV rolling. No sign of him anywhere, which means he’s probably holed up in a garage somewhere. I radioed the State Police to put up roadblocks on both ends of town, and I’d like to think we’ve got him sewed up, but he could have ditched the truck and headed for the desert on foot.”

  It took me a couple of beats to catch up. “Do you think it could be the same guy who ran me off the road that night?”

  Sonterra nodded. “It’s possible. I stopped by the station for a look at the paint-chip reports. They jibe with the truck we saw.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Work,” he said. He kissed the tip of my nose. “You’ll be okay?”

  I swallowed, nodded. I wasn’t scared for myself, but I didn’t like the idea of Sonterra out there doing a door-to-door search, and maybe coming face-to-face with a firearm.

  “I’ll make this up to you somehow,” he said, and tried to smile. Then he gave me a chaste kiss and went upstairs to change out of his suit. When he left the house, Eddie and Special Agent Timmons went with him.

  Presently, Alex and the rest of the family arrived on the scene. Alex looked strained, and there were blood spatters on his pant legs. Someone brought his suitcase in from the car and, after a shower, he came downstairs in jeans and a white cotton shirt, open at the throat.

  “My son is out chasing a madman on his wedding day,” he lamented, when we got a chance to talk. “He should be here, with his wife.”

  “It’s his job,” I said gently.

  “He needs a different job,” Alex maintained. “Tonio could have worked with Mike and me, in the landscaping business. It’s a good life. But oh, no. He has to be a cop.”

  “He’ll be all right,” I insisted.

  “Will he?” Alex asked.

  “We have to believe he will.”

  Alex kissed my forehead. “I’m very sorry that your wedding day turned out like this, Clare Sonterra.”

  Clare Sonterra.

  I liked the sound of that, though it would take some getting used to. “At least your son finally made an honest woman out of me.”

  Alex smiled. “You were always an honest woman,” he said. Then we both began to circulate again. I felt like a fish swimming against the current.

  After another hour or so of excruciating small talk and the expected isn’t-it-awfuls, the crowd began to dwindle, and I was grateful for that. In the end, it all came down to Shanda and Lamont, Mrs. K, Emma, Loretta, and me. Even Alex and the rest of the Sonterra bunch made their excuses and headed home to Phoenix. There’s nothing like a murder to spoil a celebration.

  The rest of us gathered around the kitchen table, and what was left of Hernando’s birthday cake, and Mrs. K brought out her well-worn tarot deck, always somewhere on her person, and began to shuffle.

  It was disconcerting, somehow, even though I’d seen her do it any number of times before.

  Nobody batted an eye when she threw the Death card.

  Then she tossed the Three of Pentacles after it. I blinked. The card showed two people in medieval dress, faces upturned to a third person, standing on a platform or bench. An ornate cathedral window showed clearly in the background.

  “The gunman was inside the church,” Mrs. K said flatly, after studying the card for a while. “And he had two accomplices.”

  “He must have stepped through the door, fired, and run out again,” Loretta concluded. “I remember hearing his tires screech.”

  Mrs. K shook her head very slowly, and her gaze moved from one face to the next until it locked onto mine. “That was a distraction. He—or she—was already inside. Another person was driving the truck.”

  “But someone would have seen him!” I protested. What had happened to Father Morales was terrible. The idea that the killer might have been sitting among the guests through the whole ceremony, just waiting for his chance, only made it worse. Who was he, and who were his partners in crime?

  “There’s the choir room, and that hallway leading to the restrooms,” Loretta recalled. “The shooter could have been lurking there and blended in when everybody dived for the floor. There was a lot of confusion.” She paused. “Anyway, once they figure out the trajectory, they’ll know where he was standing when he pulled the trigger.”

  I flashed on Deputy Dave, back at the church. It had seemed then that he’d appeared out of nowhere. He’d abused his children, and almost certainly his wife, and there was no love lost between him and Sonterra, but now that I’d gone over the incident a hundred times in my mind, I knew neither Sonterra nor I had been the target. The hit was too precise for that.

  Father Morales had been the intended victim all along. But why?

  What possible reason could Dave Rathburn have had for killing him?

  He’d been a very kind man, beloved in the community. What possible reason could anyone have had for ending his life that way?

  Mrs. K’s hands shook a little as she put her cards away. “I’m not feeling well,” she said, without looking at anyone in particular. “I need to go home.”

  “I thought you were going to spend tonight at the ranch,” Loretta said.

  “I need to go home,” Mrs. K repeated. “Right now.”

  Shanda and Lamont exchanged glances.

  “I’ll drive,” Lamont said.

  I scraped back my chair, worried about Mrs. K. I’d never seen her quite so upset before. Now that I really looked at her, I realized that she’d aged ten years since morning, and there was a frightening, bluish tinge to her lips.

  I took her arm and led her into the dining room. “Are you all right, Mrs. K?” I asked, clasping both her hands.

  She looked at me, blinked. “Have you seen her?” she asked, in a strange tone, with no inflection at all.

  “Seen who?”

  “The apparition. The second Clare.”

  “No,” I said. “Not since that night at Loretta’s.”

  “You didn’t see yourself wearing a wedding dress? You’re absolutely sure?”

  “No,” I repeated, even more worried than before.

  “This is a warning,” Mrs. K whispered, staring at me as though I were opaque, reflecting her own image back to her. “She must have been trying to prepare you for the incident on the road, when you saw her before.” She considered that, then shook her head, but in the next instant, she seemed herself again. She was focused, and in deadly earnest. “Clare, listen to me, for your baby’s sake and for your own. Something terrible is going to happen if you stay in this town. It’s an evil place—”

  I cupped her papery cheeks in my hands. Her skin felt hot against my palms. “I promise I will be careful,” I said slowly, and as gently as I could. “That has to be good enough, Mrs. K. I can’t run away. I won’t run away.”

  Tears shimmered in her eyes. “I know,” she said with resignation and real despair. “There are times when I wish you were a coward, and this is one of them.”

  I kissed her forehead. Mrs. K was like a mother to me, and I loved her dearly. “Trouble has a way of sticking to my heels until I face it head-on. There’s really no other option.”

  She nodded sorrowfully, pulled a hankie out of her skirt pocket, and dabbed at her eyes. I hugged her.

  I felt a deep sadness when she left with Shanda and Lamont.

  “That woman needs psychiatric treatment,” Loretta said when they were gone. “Ghosts. Death cards. Killers hiding in churches—”

  Emma opened the freezer door, took out three TV dinners, and glanced at the instructions. “Mrs. K is stone sane,” she remarked almost idly. “If she says the killer was in the church all along, then he was.”

 
; Loretta shuddered. “If I hadn’t sworn off liquor,” she said, “I’d ask for a martini right about now.”

  I patted her shoulder. “I’ll make tea.”

  My best friend stared at me. “How can you be so calm? This is your wedding day. The priest gets blown away, right in front of you—”

  Emma put down the TV dinners, crossed to Loretta, laid hands on her shoulders, and pressed her into a chair at the table. “Chill,” she said. “You’re going off the deep end.”

  Loretta buried her face in her hands.

  I filled the teakettle, plugged it in, and got out cups and tea bags. The truth was, I was as shaken as Loretta, but I figured I could hold off the creepy-crawlies if I kept myself occupied.

  “How can you sleep in this place?” Loretta asked.

  I assumed she was referring to Mrs. K’s ghosts. “They were here first,” I said reasonably. “Anyway, they’ll probably move on, now that the bones are on the winding forensic route to eternal peace.”

  “Maybe we should hide out at the ranch,” Loretta said, looking at me oddly. I think she was wondering if I’d finally gone around the metaphysical bend.

  I shook my head firmly. “I’ll tell you what I told Mrs. K. Nobody—and I mean nobody—is going to scare me off.”

  “You’re too brave for your own good,” Loretta argued.

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “But I’m not going anywhere.”

  Emma took one of the TV dinners out of its carton, popped it into the microwave, and dropped a bomb. “I think Father Morales knew something was going to happen.”

  Loretta looked confused. “What?”

  Emma glanced at me, then turned to set the timer on the microwave and push the START button. “He was sweating like a pig,” she reflected. “Am I the only one who noticed that?”

  “No,” I admitted, leaning back against the counter and folding my arms while I waited for the kettle to boil. “I saw it, too.” My mind went into rewind, past the wedding, past last night’s hot sex with Sonterra, to the point where he came home from St. Swithin’s. He’d gone there at Father Morales’s request, I remembered, and been puzzled when he got to the church because the priest gave him a tour and made small talk.