Wedding of the Century

by Patricia McLinn

  Miss Trudi’s grounds had always tended toward wildness, and Annette never remembered the house being in what she would consider pristine condition. But the dismay she’d felt at pulling up in front of Bliss House had deepened with each step into the property. It could have used all the skilled workers on Every Detail’s database full-time for months.

  “Come in, come in!” The words floated from inside, and the music stopped.

  Only by jiggling the handle could Annette turn it. Even then, the door stuck, and she had to shove it with her shoulder. The door gave all at once. She stumbled into the large old-fashioned kitchen and found herself enfolded in a lavender chiffon embrace.

  “Come in, come in. I am so glad you could come by today.”

  Over Miss Trudi’s shoulder, she took in the room.

  A large table dominated the right side. Piles of books occupied most of the table, with one end clear. Each chair around the table was covered by a quilt, spread or blanket. Their patterns added a cheerful brightness. So did the lamps around the room, including one with a fringed red gingham shade that was perched in the middle of an expanse of wooden countertop to the right of the stove. Behind the lamp marched a row of teapots of various sizes and colors.

  Beyond these overlapping pools of light lurked a cavern of darkness. One rectangle of more intense darkness indicated a hallway to the right.

  “My dear, how wonderful to see you. Let me take your coat.” It was whisked away before Annette could get her bearings. “Sit down, and I’ll bring you some tea.”

  She selected a chair, watching Miss Trudi at the antiquated stove. “About the front doorbell, I’m sure my brother Max could—oh, no, I was forgetting his wrist—but I’m sure he’ll know someone who can fix that bell for you—”

  “No need, no need. The tea will be ready in a moment. The kettle was almost on the boil when you arrived—such good timing.”

  “But the bell—”

  “The bell’s okay.”

  Miss Trudi had not said those words. Annette was looking right at her, and the woman’s lips hadn’t moved. Moreover, the voice was a child’s.

  Looking around, Annette discovered that the red quilt she’d thought was covering the chair at the head of the table was wrapped around a small figure, leaving only the pale oval of a face exposed.

  An odd little shiver took Annette by surprise. Although not yet in the throes of a true Wisconsin freeze, the warm spell was fading and the room was chilly, she decided. The quilts and blankets on the chairs were not a fashion statement, but a necessity. She drew a knit blanket around her shoulders.

  “The sign says the bell’s broken.”

  “Doesn’t say broken. Says it doesn’t work.”

  “The child’s right,” Miss Trudi said from the stove. “The bell doesn’t work.”

  “But—”

  “It makes noise okay. But,” said the child, “we don’t pay any attention to it, Miss Trudi and me.”

  “Never have liked rude, buzzing things,” Miss Trudi murmured. “Here’s the tea. This will warm you both up in no time.”

  “Thank you, Miss Trudi.” Annette’s words came out as an unintentional chorus with the child’s. She had pushed back the quilt to reach for a blue mug.

  Miss Trudi placed a cutting board with a loaf of bread wrapped in a cloth, a knife, a pot of jam with a spoon and two small plates on the table.

  “But your back door sticks and…” Annette didn’t bother to finish, because Miss Trudi had disappeared into the darkness beyond the kitchen.

  She smiled at the child and received a look of unwavering concentration.

  Annette considered herself neutral on children. She didn’t crave them as many women her age seemed to. Nor was she wary of them. She had made no pronouncements, even in the privacy of her heart, about whether she would ever have children or whether she needed them to live a fulfilled life.

  She had the feeling the kid had catalogued every pore on her face, not to mention her long jersey skirt, boots and tunic-length sweater over a long-sleeved knit top. Annette felt justified in looking back.

  The quilt revealed only the face. A girl’s face. Her cheeks were rosy, with health or cold or reflected color from the quilt or all three. Her features were regular, her nose straight and short, her mouth too wide for perfection, the line of her lips cut in a firm mold. Judging from her brows and lashes, her hair was fair. Her eyes were bright blue. And direct to the point of being disconcerting.

  “How is your tea, my dears?” Miss Trudi’s voice floated to them from the dimness.

  “It’s very good, Miss Trudi. I— Oh!” The older woman had stepped into the light, and she wore her red coat. “I am sorry, if I’d known you were going out—”

  Annette began to stand, but her action and her words stopped as she wondered if the older woman wore her coat because she couldn’t afford to heat her home. Why wasn’t anyone doing something?

  “Sit, sit. I asked you for this hour.” Miss Trudi pressed a surprisingly strong hand to Annette’s shoulder. “This works out perfectly. I have an errand to run, so this would be an excellent time for you two to get acquainted.”

  Annette’s heart felt as if it shrank away from her ribs. She didn’t believe in premonitions, but maybe her heart had other opinions. “Acquainted?”

  “Yes, this is Nell Corbett, Steve’s little girl,” Miss Trudi said brightly, as if the child’s existence hadn’t changed Annette’s life. “Nell, I’d like you to meet Annette Trevetti. She’s my friend and a friend of your father’s.”

  “Max is your brother,” the child declared.

  Annette was too preoccupied for more than a nod to Nell. “Miss Trudi, you can’t—”

  “I must. For a short time.” She gave Annette a direct look, all fluttering and twittering gone. “And so must you.” And then she whirled out, saying, “Help yourselves to more tea, my dears.”

  The door slammed closed, but neither Annette nor the girl moved.

  Steve’s daughter.

  Annette sucked in a breath.

  Lily standing in the church, smoothing her palm over her abdomen. This is Steve Corbett’s baby. Images of Steve and Lily. Steve expressionless. We’ll talk about this later, Annette. This child was theirs. This child was…

  Simply a child.

  Who had not made the choices. Who had not committed the betrayals.

  The breath eased out of Annette, slow and painful.

  “Would you like more tea?” She made herself say the child’s name. “Nell.”

  “No.” She opened her eyes wide, then frowned. “Thank you.”

  It was so obviously tacked on that Annette could almost hear Steve saying, What do you say? the way parents did, and Nell producing the obligatory thank-you. And then that image of father and child brought stinging heat to her eyes.

  “But I’d like some bread and jam.”

  Annette blinked hard. “Miss Trudi left it for us, so go ahead and have a piece.” She tipped her head toward the food, but the girl shook her head.

  “I’m not supposed to cut my own bread.”

  Annette felt like an idiot. Here she’d been trying to force a sharp knife onto the child. She picked up the knife and adjusted the loaf to cut it.

  “That’s a good idea,” she said. “Knives can be dangerous even for—”

  “I can use a knife.” The girl’s haughtiness evaporated with her next words. “But I’m not supposed to use hammers. I used the hammer to open a box and Daddy said I polar iced it.”

  “Polar iced it? Like the Arctic?”

  She shrugged. “That’s what he said.”

  Polar iced…

  “Pulverized. Could that be what he said?”

  “’Spose. Pullerize?”

  “Pulverize. It means smashing to little pieces.” Steve used to tease her about using the word, and it became a shared joke. I’m going to pulverize that final.

  “Pulverize,” Nell repeated. “But that’s not what Daddy didn’t li
ke about the bread. I took too much. Daddy said other people should slice the bread until I know the difference between a slice and half a loaf.”

  A splutter of laughter took Annette by surprise. It was a good thing she’d completed the cut or she might have sliced herself—and wouldn’t that be a fine example.

  “He said he wanted two pieces.” Nell sounded aggrieved. “So I cut it in half.”

  Annette controlled her response as she placed a slice on Nell’s plate, then pushed the pot of jam forward. “A very reasonable conclusion.”

  “I know. I like bread.”

  Nell unwrapped the quilt enough to spoon a listing strawberry mountain on her bread. Apparently she liked jam, too.

  “Daddy says liking something’s not a good enough reason.” She sighed. The kind of exhalation that couldn’t quite make sense of the world.

  Annette, thoughtfully spreading jam on her bread, could have joined her. Daddy. How strange to think of Steve in that connection with this small girl. Even though they had talked about having children. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t known he was a father. Still, it squeezed something inside her.

  “Can I ask you somethin’?”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you have a dog?”

  The question was simple and direct and totally unexpected. “No.” Not enough money when she was young, not enough time when she had the money.

  “I like dogs.”

  “I like dogs, too.”

  “Then why don’t you have one?”

  “I have to be away from home a lot, so a dog would be lonely.”

  “I could visit the dog every day after school and all day on the weekends and then he wouldn’t be lonely.”

  Annette caught the insides of her cheeks between her teeth. “I live too far away for you to do that, Nell.”

  “Oh.” Nell immediately jettisoned Annette’s dog-owning prospects. “Miss Trudi says her cats catch things that get into the house. Not like burglars—a dog would be good for burglars—but mice and icky stuff. Cats don’t like to be squeezed.” Which probably explained why Annette hadn’t seen so much as the tip of a cat tail. “The ladies at the library say—”

  The jangle of the doorknob was the only warning before the door burst open. Steve came in, propelled by the effort needed to open it.

  “Hi, Daddy. Want some bread? She cuts pretty good.” Nell looked toward Annette. A frown scrunched her light brows. “Don’t be scared, it’s my daddy.”

  “Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “Miss Trudi says to come in without knocking.”

  The dual references to her being scared made Annette aware she had a hand over her thundering heart. She dropped it to her lap. “You startled me.”

  His attention had gone from one face to another at first, but now he focused on Nell. A slice of concern showed through as he scanned her face.

  But why would he be concerned?

  Then it hit her. He was looking for signs that the girl was upset. Because he was worried about how Annette might have treated his daughter. The realization sliced Annette as surely as the knife could have, and much deeper.

  How could he think she would be hurtful to a child?

  “I should be going. Miss Trudi had to leave, so I stayed to—” To look after his daughter. “But now that you’re here…” She stood, looking around for her coat before remembering Miss Trudi had taken it away. “I have a great many things to do. If you would tell me where Miss Trudi might have put my coat…”

  He spread his hands. “Don’t have a clue.”

  Steve was relaxed and smiling. Clearly his anxiety had been relieved. Good for him.

  “Do you know my daddy?” Nell asked.

  “A long, long time ago, your father and I knew each other.”

  “Are you the one who used to go on dates with him?”

  The one? No. That had been the problem. Knowing Tobias, someone would eventually tell her that her father had been about to marry Annette when Lily’s pregnancy changed the course of events. Annette would not be that someone.

  “Yes, we went on dates.” The words sounded fine to her—even and casual. If she had to avoid looking toward Steve as she said them, what did that matter?

  “Can I ask you somethin’?” Nell asked again.

  “Be careful how you answer this,” Steve murmured.

  Did he think she would be cold because Nell was his daughter with Lily? Annette bent to be face-to-face with the seated girl. “Of course you can ask me something.”

  “Is it true you were so poor you had to raise mice in a church, but you drank a lot while you worked, and you made a real big company and now you’ve sold it for a bazillion dollars and you’re going to buy the whole town and tell powers to be dumped in the lake?”

  Annette stood up straight.

  Steve cleared his throat. “Maybe I can help translate. Had to raise mice in a church. Nell, could that have been poor as church mice?”

  “I guess, but why would a mouse be poor in a church?”

  “We’ll talk about that later. In fact, I think we should leave Ms. Trevetti alone and apologize for hitting her with all your questions.”

  “Not at all,” Annette said with her best don’t-tread-on-me smile. “No sense leaving for later what we can—what we will—talk about right now. The answer to your first question, Nell, about whether it’s true I grew up poor, is yes. My family was poor. My father went away when I was little.”

  “Like my mom,” Nell said with a wise nod that took Annette aback as much as the words had. Nell was so young to know about such things…as she had been.

  With the discipline that had helped so much in business, Annette focused on what she’d been saying. “My mother worked very hard but she didn’t earn much money. After she died, my brother, Max, worked very hard so we could have a house and food and go to school, but yes, we were poor.”

  “Mr. Max isn’t poor now, is he? Because if he is, we could give him the rest of the bread.” Nell looked at the remains of the loaf with sorrowful resolve.

  Annette and Max had turned aside charity as much as they could during those hard years, but sometimes there had been no choice. That still rubbed raw. But how could she not like this child for her concern for Max? “No, he isn’t poor now. Now, what was the next part of your question?”

  “You drank a lot while making a big company,” Steve supplied. “I’d guess workaholic.”

  It was rather like doing a crossword puzzle, which he practiced daily. “I did work a lot—you have to when you’re creating a company the way my partner and I did. But I didn’t drink a lot,” she added.

  “And now you’ve sold it for a bazillion dollars,” Steve said from behind her while Nell nodded.

  “My partner and I are selling our company. Sorry—” She held up a hand as Nell’s lips parted. “I can’t tell you how much money we’ll get, because it’s also my partner’s business, and that would be telling you someone else’s secret. But I’m sure it’s nowhere near a bazillion dollars. And…what else?”

  “Buying the town. Though if Tobias were for sale, I’d tell you,” Steve told his daughter.

  “I’m definitely not going to buy this town,” Annette said with emphasis. “I’ll be leaving as soon as my brother’s wrist has healed.”

  “Sounds like you would be willing to dump Tobias in the lake,” Steve said.

  She cut him a look. “I could be tempted.”

  “Not her dumping it in the lake,” Nell protested. “Telling powers to be dumped in the lake.”

  Annette looked to Steve for explanation, but he shook his head. “Sorry, this one isn’t computing.”

  “That’s what they said,” Nell insisted, growing impatient.

  Annette muttered the words again, started to shake her head then stopped. “Tell the powers that be to jump in the lake.”

  “Yeah,” Nell confirmed, as if that’s what she’d said all along.

  But Steve gave a faint whistle and said, “You�
��re good—very good.”

  She suppressed a grin—how could she want to grin at him when she’d told him to get lost this morning and he’d thought so little of her that he’d worried how she might treat his child? She faced Nell. “So people said I would tell the powers that be to jump in the lake, and you’re asking if that’s true, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you know what powers that be means?” Nell shook her head. “It’s people who run something—the ones everybody knows about, like town officials or—”

  “Like my daddy?”

  “Yes, and others. To tell you the truth, Nell, there are some of them I might be tempted to tell to jump in the lake. But that’s not polite, so I’m going to try very hard to not do that.”

  Nell sucked her lip between her teeth. “It’s too cold for my daddy to jump in the lake now. So if you can’t keep being good forever can you wait until summer?”

  Annette bit the inside of her cheeks. “I can do that. Any more questions?”

  “Nah. But I’m not going to build a company, even to make a bazillion dollars. I thought I’d be president of India—prime minister of India,” she corrected herself. “And president of the United States. But you gotta be real, real old to do that. So first I’m going to be a great actress. That’s better than a star. I’m going to be an actress they talk about forever, like Sarah Bernhardt and Helen Hayes.”

  Miss Trudi’s fingerprints were all over that statement. Then Nell added one that was all her own. “No one will forget Nell Corbett or I’ll pulverize them.”

  “I believe that,” Annette said in all sincerity.

  “That’s if the FBI doesn’t get her,” Steve added, in an aside.

  Nell gave him a quelling look, but relented. “I could be in the FBI, too. I’d make a good spy.” Annette wasn’t sure if she’d mixed up federal agencies or intended to add the CIA to her resume.

  “I meant if the FBI didn’t bring you in as a top ten most wanted criminal.”

  Nell rolled her eyes, then jumped up. “Oh, Squid!”

  When Nell dashed across the kitchen, Annette deduced that the exclamation had been in reaction to sighting a mottled-gray cat mincing along the base of the counters and not a menu request—thank heavens.