by Annie Knox
“That’s what he said when he called about the apartment, but he’s never given so much as a hint about what he’s writing.”
“I can’t believe the crew around here hasn’t figured out all his deepest secrets by now. You and your friends are pretty nibby.”
“Oh, believe me, it’s not for lack of trying. We’ve had some long conversations about Mr. Colona over dinners, drinks, card games—you name it. I think he’s a novelist, maybe a J. D. Salinger kind of guy, and he’s hiding out while some sort of sex scandal blows over.”
“Really? Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. He’s got these dark haunted eyes and long black hair. He could play Heathcliff in a remake of Wuthering Heights if he grew just a few more inches. He’s got to have a troubled past and a broken love story.”
“You get all that from his hair? I think you’re being overly romantic.”
“That’s what Rena says.” My best friend and business partner had been teasing me mercilessly about having a crush on my tenant, as though I needed another wrinkle in my strange personal life.
A week after Harvey and Ingrid’s wedding, Trendy Tails was playing host to a doggy wedding . . . puptials, if you will. The dogs in question were Hetty Tucker’s retired greyhound, Romeo, and Louise Collins’s pudgy beagle, Pearl. Hetty and Louise had always been close, so they hadn’t been difficult to work with. But their sons . . .
Neither Hetty nor Louise could drive, so each depended on her son to get her to our planning sessions. Sean Tucker and Jack Collins were night and day. Sean was intellectual, reserved, a true romantic. In a past life he might have written lots of poetry about sheep or painted women frolicking through the woods in diaphanous gowns. Jack Collins was a cop. A man’s man. In a past life, he was a cop. At our meetings, the two men danced around each other like alley cats with their backs up, hissing and spitting at each other at every opportunity. They were different, sure, but I’m not sure where the animosity came from. I honestly didn’t know what to do with either one of them.
“Anyway,” I continued, “Rena thinks he’s a retired crime boss who’s writing a tell-all book. She says that once you get past his polished shoes and perfectly pressed dress shirts, he looks a little rough around the edges, like maybe he’s broken a few knees in his time. Meanwhile, Lucy and Xander both think he’s an investigative journalist doing an exposé on . . . Well, they don’t exactly know what he plans to expose. And of course Sean and Dru, the practical members of our little gang, think we’re all crazy and we ought to let the man have his privacy.”
“Sean and Dru are probably right.” Ingrid leaned forward and called into the living room, “Don’t you think so, Harvey?”
“Ya, sure.”
Ingrid chuckled. “It’s nice to be right all the time,” she said.
“I know we shouldn’t be such busybodies, but honestly, our speculations are perfectly tame compared to Aunt Dolly’s. She’s come up with far more harebrained theories than the rest of us. She’s completely obsessed with the man.”
“Your aunt Dolly is a nut job,” Ingrid huffed.
I shrugged. “Yeah, well, she’s our nut job. She fancies herself quite the sleuth after the hubbub last Halloween.”
Last fall, my friends and I had found ourselves in the middle of a murder investigation, trying to keep Rena from being hauled to the hoosegow. Ever since we’d sussed out the killer, Aunt Dolly had taken to watching and taking notes on true-crime shows. She’d even suggested she might try to get her private investigator’s license.
“She’s dragging me right behind her, straight to the loony bin,” Ingrid complained. “All this stuff with the wedding: favors and veils and nonsense.”
I gave Ingrid a sidelong glance. “Come on, I know you’re not a girly girl, but you must be enjoying all the attention just a little.”
Ingrid grinned at me around a gravy-stained toothpick. “Maybe just a little,” she said with a wink.
Lord help me, I thought. Between Ingrid blowing hot and cold, Dolly blowing plain old crazy, and Harvey endlessly blowing his nose, this wedding might be the death of me.
That afternoon, I set to work making favors for the wedding, listening to Rena humming out of tune while she worked on cookies for Ingrid and Harvey’s reception. I sucked in a big lungful of vanilla-and-sugar-scented air.
At the tinkling of the bell above our doorway, I looked up to find Aunt Dolly using her rear end to bump open Trendy Tails’s door. She managed to maneuver herself into the shop with her arms filled with boxes of white tissue wedding decorations. Thankfully, I’d already ordered decorations for Pearl and Romeo’s doggy wedding. We could give the decorations a dress rehearsal, using them to perk up Trendy Tails for Ingrid and Harvey.
“How’s the blushing bride today?” Dolly asked, her voice brimming with high spirits and good cheer.
I set the last little packet of Jordan almonds, bundled neatly in a circle of white tulle, and raised a finger to my lips. “She’s upstairs,” I mouthed.
“Gotcha,” Dolly mouthed back.
I stretched my back and answered her in a voice that wouldn’t carry up to my apartment on the third floor, where Ingrid Whitfield had gone to sulk. “Take your pick,” I said. “Irritable, grumpy, annoyed, occasionally hostile. She’s spent a lot of time storming up and down the stairs, muttering that she and Harvey should have just gone to Vegas like they originally planned. At one point she bellowed at Harvey that they should call off all this ‘stuff and nonsense’ and just keep on living in sin.”
Rena sauntered out of the kitchen to join us during my explanation. “We’ve been having a great time,” she deadpanned. “Maybe we should get Ingrid on that show about bridezillas. I bet she’d be their first postmenopausal bride.”
Dolly snorted a laugh as she carefully lowered her load onto the giant red worktable in what used to be the dining room of the gingerbread Victorian house. She shoved aside the tangle of ribbons and fabric swatches that littered the table, the detritus of my early morning efforts to create “cat’s pajamas.” The unfinished results hung on a wooden cat-shaped form I’d had made special by a carpenter in Bemidji. Eventually I would try the jammies on Jinx, but she was too feisty to serve as a model during development.
“I guess we shouldn’t be surprised,” Dolly whispered. “Ingrid’s always been a pill, and a bride must be an awkward hat for her to wear.”
Dolly made a good point. Our octogenarian friend would pick corduroy over cashmere any day of the week.
Still, I thought Ingrid’s irritability went deeper than that. She seemed uncharacteristically vulnerable. I had a sneaking suspicion why.
Ingrid had spent most of her adult life running the Merryville Gift Haus in the space now occupied by my store, Trendy Tails. She’d supported me in starting up the business right before she left for Boca, but it must still have been difficult to come back and see no trace of her own well-loved shop left. What’s more, the second-floor apartment in which Ingrid had lived for over four decades was now occupied by a stranger, a renter she’d never even met. It’s hard to deal with the fact that life in your hometown could continue on without you.
“Well,” Rena said, “one way or another it will be over tonight.”
“That sounds ominous,” Dolly said with a shiver.
Rena laughed. “You haven’t seen ominous until you’ve seen the thundercloud that gathered over Ingrid when she found out Jane Porter was bringing a plus one to the wedding.”
“It’s not like Jane’s marrying Knute Nelsen,” Dolly huffed. “They just gad about town together.”
Rena started pulling rolls of crepe paper and tissue paper wedding bells from the box Dolly had brought. “Why would she care about Jane’s love life, even if she was going to tie the knot with Knute?”
Dolly hummed thoughtfully. “I think the whole reason Ingrid invited Jane was that she had a vision of Jane curled in a puddle of misery while she walked down the aisle with Harvey. Jane having a
date takes some of the fun out of it.”
“Geesh,” I muttered, fanning out a honeycomb bell and slipping the plastic clips in place to hold it open. “Ingrid’s always been brusque, but I’ve never known her to be mean-spirited. Other than a few sour grapes over a canasta hand, what does she have against Jane, anyway?”
“You don’t know?” Dolly gasped.
Rena’s eyes lit from within as she leaned in for a good dish. “No, we don’t. . . . Spill it.”
Dolly hummed nervously, studying the ceiling as though she could pinpoint Ingrid’s precise location there. “Well,” she finally whispered, “Jane and Arnold Whitfield dated in high school, when Harvey and Ingrid were together. Everyone thought Jane and Arnold would get married and Harvey and Ingrid would live their own happily ever after. But then Jane moved to Chicago to do some modeling, Harvey got sent to military school, and things just sort of happened the way they happened. . . . Next thing you know, Arnold and Ingrid were engaged.
“Then back, oh, thirty some years ago now, when Arnold was still alive, Ingrid spent a few months up in Duluth looking after her sister, who’d broken a hip. When she got back, she and Arnold had a big blowup, and he ended up spending a month or so with his brother in St. Paul. When he came home, he brought Ingrid a fancy new dishwasher. I don’t think either one of them ever told a soul about that fight, but we all knew. And we all knew its cause: Jane and Arnold had, uh . . . well . . .”
Rena squealed. “Oh, no, they didn’t! Arnold Whitfield and Jane Porter had a fling?”
“Hush,” Dolly urged, glancing up at the ceiling again.
“Man,” I whispered, “Jane picked the wrong woman to betray, didn’t she?”
“You bet she did,” Dolly continued. “Ingrid seemed to forgive Arnold, but she never forgave Jane. What’s more, without so much as a word she made sure everyone in Merryville remembered that Jane’s morals were a little loose. I know Ingrid never hung her head in shame over the affair, but this . . . well, this was her big chance to beat out Jane in the love game once and for all.”
I slipped a ribbon through the grommets on the tops of three of the honeycomb tissue bells, making a little cluster to hang from the chandelier in the front room. “Wow. I never would have guessed. I can’t imagine Ingrid putting up with a tomcatting husband. I guess everyone has secrets.”
Dolly finished nestling the bundles of Jordan almonds in a lace-lined basket. “That they do, my dear. That they do. Don’t you ever forget it.”