I had waited so long for the question. But now he was waiting for my answer, so I had to give it. I went on instinct, the way that Alyson was always telling me to.
“Of course I will marry you, Matt.”
But there was a text on my phone as we cracked open the champagne that Matt had brought with him. I no longer had his number saved, but I knew who it was. There was only one possibility. Chris.
It said, “You are making a mistake.”
What the heck?
I didn’t know how he had known or what he had seen, but I was shaken. I stared out the window trying to see where he was hiding, but all I could see was an empty street.
Then I saw.
Byron.
And I remembered. She had my number.
Marriages and Murder
Hang Ten Cozy Mystery, Book 11
1
Claire
There were giggles as the bridesmaids chased after the bride. A flurry of white and pink taffeta entered the vintage Mercedes Benz and a door slammed over the veil. Hard. Ouch. I flinched when I saw her hair get stuck in the door. The bride survived. She shot us a thumbs-up. They were off to take photos of the happy day, ruined hair and all.
“You’re lucky!” the owner of Eden Bay Vineyard said as he handed me a glass of wine to test. “You get to taste test not only the wine but the ceremony too! This is what yours will look like. If you want.” We’d caught the tail end of a Sunday ceremony. Enough to hear them say “I do” from a distance.
Weddings had always frightened me. The size of them, mostly. The scale. Not necessarily the actual vows and promising yourself to only one person forever, but then again, committing to anything for that length of time was terrifying, right?
My fiancé, Matt, grabbed my hand and shot me a warm smile.
The sun was shining down on Eden Bay Vineyard that afternoon. A short fifteen-minute drive from the beach, it was a pretty and festive place with a ballroom, reception hall, and a restaurant. And of course the wine cellars. The place wasn’t known for having the FINEST grapes in Australia, and it was a bit sparkly and tacky compared to the sprawling vineyards in inland NSW, but it was still a nice venue.
I just wasn’t sure I wanted to get married there.
My wine glass was still full. Growing warmer in my hands.
“Come on, you like wine, don’t you?” Matt said with a laugh.
Ha-ha. It wasn’t about the wine.
The thing was, I thought we had sort of agreed—before I had even agreed to marry Matt—that we would have the wedding at the bookshop that I owned. Fabled Books. And that had made my heart soar. That was a small space. A safe one. Cozy. He told me we were ‘just looking’ at the other locations just to be sure, and I had agreed that was a wise idea, because yes, you never knew what else was out there. Better to be aware of all your options before you committed to only one thing.
I smiled at him and gulped down the glass. Hmm. A little sweet and tangy. Like the grapes hadn’t been aged enough.
The owner, Bas, was drolly pouring another glass for me. He handed it over. “I suppose you think people only come to these things for the free wine, hey?” I whispered to him. He had this look on his face as though the answer was ‘of course,’ but he was trying to make a sale and couldn’t say that to a prospective bride and groom.
“So, if you want to leave a deposit today, we can still find you a slot in the spring/summer season.”
Whoa. It wasn’t time for a deposit just yet. We had other places we needed to look at first, including the state library, which was a forty-minute drive away. But that was a place we were going to have to book far in advance, and Matt wanted to have the wedding in the next couple of months before his parents went overseas again. And before the weather turned colder.
Matt was ready to write the check. I told him I needed to think about it.
Like, really think about it.
When I opened the bookshop the following day, I thought I was hearing things when the first customer I served—a perky redhead with cute dark freckles and a petite figure—asked if we held weddings at the bookshop. I had to blink a few times and shook my head.
“No. I mean well, maybe. Why do you ask?”
She grinned at me, reached into her purse, and pulled out a copy of my book, the one I had written, and placed it on the counter. It was called The Bookshelf, about a murder that had taken place right there in Eden Bay. Well, right there in that bookshop.
This woman must have been a local if she owned the book. No one else knew about it. I was pretty sure that every copy I had ever sold I’d actually personally sold, face to face, in the shop.
But she told me she was from out of town, from north of Sydney, near Newcastle, and that she had ordered the book online. I was going to have to check my stats later, but I was pretty sure that she was the only one. She told me that her name was Lilly and she had traveled all this way to meet me and see the place where the events of the book took place.
“We need a venue, like now.” She had a frantic look in her eyes as she explained the whole situation—about how there had been a fire at the previous venue and that all ceremonies there had to be cancelled. “And everything else is booked out, Claire, at this time of year! I’m not sure if you know how difficult it is to get a wedding venue at short notice, but…”
Well, actually, I did know a little about that. I was getting a crash course of my own in how difficult it was to be a bride.
“Oh, but don’t think it’s simply convenience sake…” Lilly said, leaning over the counter to reassure me with a pat on the hand. “I have been such a massive fan ever since I read the book, and this would have actually been my first choice if Charles had agreed to it. This place has such a romantic charm. And to have you involved with the wedding would pretty much be a dream come true.”
I was flattered. And I sympathized. I knew how difficult it was to find a wedding location. And one that both the bride and groom agreed on.
But a wedding here? I glanced up at the second floor. Before I had cleared out the loft? That was what I had planned to do before my own ceremony. Hmmm, I wasn’t sure it would work.
Lilly was pleading with me though, and I felt my resistance melting away.
“Please, Claire. I am begging you.”
Well…it would be good practice for our own wedding, right? Because I was pretty sure that when all the dust settled on the venue scouting, that this is where we would actually tie the knot. It had to be.
“Sure,” I said, thinking that I would at least have a week or two to get things sorted, to get the mess upstairs cleared, but the immediacy was far greater than that.
“Okay, phew,” she said, collapsing forward a little in relief. “The wedding is on Sunday and some of the wedding party will be arriving in town tomorrow…”
“This weekend?!” I asked, repeating it back to her, sure that I must have misunderstood. How would it even be possible to get a wedding organized by that weekend?
But Lilly assured me that she already had all the items she needed and would just ship them from the previous venue. And she would do all the work as far as preparations went. I warned her how difficult it would be to clear out the top floor, but she was determined, and even the thick layers of dust up there didn’t put her off.
Well. Okay. I agreed to the plan. After all, just how badly could things go?
2
Alyson
Two Days Later
I thought there had been a bomb. Or an earthquake. No, seriously. When I wandered into the bookshop and saw that every book from the top level had been pushed down to the bottom in a foot-high pile, I was worried that Claire was trapped under the rubble and was about to call for help. I had my phone out ready to make the call when I heard Claire’s voice behind me.
I jumped. “I thought you were dead. What happened?”
“The bride happened. This was her version of clearing out the top level.”
Well. It was empty
.
“At least they are paying me a lot of money for this,” Claire said with a heavy sigh and something resembling a smile. But it didn’t seem as though the money really made her feel any better about it at all. She looked defeated as she looked at the mess. “Oh my goodness, what is Bianca going to say when she sees all this?”
I thought Bianca was the least of her problems.
“Umm, how are they going to hold a wedding here in four days?” I asked. Even with the top level cleared, the guests were still going to have to move through the rubble at the bottom. And what about the pictures? I coughed. The dust had all been stirred up and seemed to hang in the air.
“That’s a very good question,” Claire replied. “And I want answers.”
“She can’t just leave it like this, surely,” I said.
Claire was trying to call the bride—Lilly was her name, apparently—but so far, there had been no answer.
I was kinda amused by the whole thing, to be honest with you. I pulled a lollypop out of my pocket and started to suck on it as I looked around at the mess. I had always thought Claire kept the place too neat. Now it definitely looked more rustic. When you thought about it, what was the point of keeping books on shelves anyway? You were only going to pull them off. May as well have them all in random piles on the ground in the first place.
Claire put her phone down and grumbled that Lilly was still not picking up. “She better not be expecting me to clear this all out for her. You know how brides can get.”
Hmmm. I did. Claire had only been engaged for a few weeks and I had already noticed a change in her temperament. It was shorter. Less patience. Less cool and calm.
But there was one positive thing to focus on.
“That will look amazing in all of the photos,” I said, nodding toward my mural on the wall. I had painted it about six months earlier to brighten up the drab white walls.
“Huh?” Claire looked confused about what I meant and then shook her head when she realized. “Oh, that won’t be in the photos, Lilly wants that covered up with thick sheets of white satin.”
Oh, that was it. I didn’t like this Lilly person one bit. It was one thing to make a mess in my best friend’s shop—that was just slightly amusing—but this? This was going too far. She wanted to have her wedding at the shop because of all the charm and then she wanted to go covering all the charm up?
Claire’s phone rang and she jumped to pick it up. I could hear a voice on the other end but only because it was very loud and booming. And it sounded male.
“I’m going to guess that wasn’t the bride then?” I asked Claire after she hung up.
She looked a little pale. Definitely worried. She shook her head. “No. The groom.” She actually started to bite her carefully-manicured nails. “Alyson, he is saying that Lilly never came back to their hotel room last night.”
I took a step forward. My mind was already in full detective mode. Cold feet? Or something more sinister? “Did she leave a note? Anything?”
Claire shook her head. “Nothing. Just disappeared into thin air.”
There was a crash behind me as a pile of rubble fell over and pushed into another pile and sent that one toppling, then the one after that in a domino effect until it reached one of the actually still upright book shelves and sent that—and thousands of dollars’ worth of new books—toppling over into the stack of old dusty books.
Claire groaned. I knew that as a Virgo and a princess, she wanted to go to clean up the mess immediately.
But apparently, we had a missing bride to go find. And that was a more important mess to clean up.
3
Claire
There was a hunched-over lump in the shape of a man waiting for me that evening when I returned to the shop. He wore a checkered white and black shirt and had thick black-framed glasses that he had to remove for the occasion because he was sobbing his eyes out.
The groom. Or at least, the prospective groom. This was what happened when a groom got left at the altar. At least, this groom.
He could barely introduce himself, he was crying so much. I opened the door and let him inside. I tried to offer him a drink, but he was incapable of even getting liquids down. Too much liquid was leaving him through his tear ducts.
Oh my goodness. I had never seen a grown man cry this much. “Do you think she just doesn’t love me?”
Charlie Lewis was an artist, so maybe that explained his overdramatic temperament. He was still looking at me for answers. Reassurance. Apparently, I was the last person to see Lilly in Eden Bay before she had disappeared. But I didn’t have all the answers. I didn’t have any of them.
I had no idea what to say to him, so I figured the best thing to say was just what he wanted to hear. Or at least what might make him stop crying.
“I am sure she loves you, Charlie. I saw her here in the shop begging me to have the wedding here. That is not the action of a woman who doesn’t very much want to get married.”
Hmm. I kinda had a point. Maybe I wasn’t just placating him. It didn’t make sense for Lilly to run away when she had been so desperate to have the wedding
And maybe this wasn’t just a case of cold feet.
Alyson had already taken off on the trail, trying to find the members of the wedding party who were in town. Or at least, that was what I’d sent her to do while I met Charlie late that evening. He had been speaking to the police before that. Trying to get them to take Lilly’s disappearance seriously. Apparently, they hadn’t. It wasn’t that unusual for a bride to just run away.
But to Charlie, it was. It was very unusual. It was the end of his world.
He looked up at me—at once hopeful that she hadn’t skipped town on him but at the same time worried that it could be something far more dire.
“Do you think something might have happened to her?” Charlie stood up and took a step closer to me. There was almost an accusatory look in his eyes. “I never wanted to have the wedding here. I read the book, you know. Who would want to get married in a place where something like that happened?”
“It was a work of fiction,” I said, gulping as I took a step back. I began to think I preferred him when he was crying.
I didn’t want to mention that it was based on true events and the only thing I had changed was the ending, the reveal of the killer. Better that he just thought it was fiction for the time being.
Charlie bellowed at me. “Well, if you are such a great detective, find Lilly and bring her back here to me!”
I tried to open my mouth to tell him that I was already doing that, but his anger had choked me up and all I could manage was a nod.
I rang Alyson with my hands still shaking and asked how she was getting on with tracking down the bridesmaids. But she interrupted that question and told me she was coming straight over. She wanted to see Charlie in person. But by the time she arrived, he had already gone back to his hotel.
She was pacing as soon as she got to the shop. “Nah, he’s hiding something,” she said when I told her how it had all gone down.
I didn’t like her just jumping to conclusions. “You haven’t even met him.”
She shook her head and stopped pacing. “His reaction is too over the top. Like he wants to appear devastated but isn’t really.”
Hmm. He had laid it on pretty thick. Maybe she had a point. But he had seemed really genuine. I don’t know how anyone could fake-cry that heavily. I decided that the two of them should actually meet. Seeing as she hadn’t even bothered to find the bridesmaids yet and had gone surfing instead, if the state of her still-wet curls was anything to go by.
“What’s in it for me?” Alyson asked. Of course she had to be difficult, didn’t she? “I am busy with my business and triathlon training at the moment, so I’ve had second thoughts about helping you find this runaway bride. Especially if she doesn’t want to be found.”
“He is offering to pay us. Five thousand dollars on the bride’s return.”
“I’m in.
”
4
Alyson
It was the following day that we headed down to the pier to meet our fate. Or at least, our number one suspect.
Princess had tried to convince me that this guy was for real. That someone had kidnapped his fiancée and he simply wanted her back. Innocent. But the closer we got to the shore, the fishier it all seemed. No pun intended. Ha. That was a pretty good pun, though.
At first, I’d thought—well, why is this guy offering to pay us so much cash if he is the one who has kidnapped Lilly? Or worse. But then I started to think, maybe it’s just to throw us off the scent… First the tears, then the cash. What next?
And then I actually met Charlie Lewis.
This guy looked like he was from another century. I’m not even sure which one. Definitely at least two centuries back. I’m not much of a history buff. I was planning to study English the following semester at university, and I really hoped there wasn’t going to be any history involved. I’d decided to drop my business subjects all together, and they were boring enough.
But anyway, Charlie Lewis was wearing a flowing sort of blouse in white and then a black vest over the top of that and tiny little spectacles. Sort of like he was a doctor from the Old West.
And he was putting on the waterworks for us even from a distance. Pacing. Throwing his head back. Full hysterics.
Hmmm. If he was just pretending, he was a very good actor. Claire told me he was an artist. I noted down his full name to see if I could find any acting credits on the internet.
“Who is this?” he asked rudely when I approached.
Claire cleared her throat. “This is Alyson Foulkes. She is also a detective. Don’t worry. If you’ve read the books, then you would know the character of Annalyse, which is partially based on Alyson.”
Hang Ten Australian Cozy Mystery Boxed Set Page 91