The Bride Wore Dead

by E M Kaplan

  There was no getting around it. She would have to ask Drew how he felt. Eventually. It was inevitable because she couldn’t keep escalating like this and not say anything. Not with her big mouth. And it might possibly hurt one or both of them, or worse, it might mess up the whole dynamic of the four of them, Susan and Benjy included. Most likely, she would humiliate herself. Sign me up for that…Josie gave a silent groan and once again shoved away her thoughts for more immediate matters. Feelings were something she could always box up and refrigerate for later. For now, she had to put on her amateur detective cap and slip on her Nancy Drew fan club secret decoder ring.

  She decided her first task was to retrace the steps of Leann and Peter’s honeymoon. While her flight was in the queue for takeoff from Logan, she scribbled on the back of a barf bag with a golf pencil she found wedged in the seat pocket in front of her. Retracing your steps was always what you did when you lost something, so Josie thought it was as good a method as any to start. Unfortunately for Leann…she’d lost the only thing that really mattered.

  Going backward from the end of Leann’s life, Josie wrote: “Cause of death.” She thought, then wrote, “Events before the reaction” meaning the allergic reaction, or whatever had killed Leann. Then, “Witnesses…” She realized at that point, she had about as much hope of figuring out what happened as…a food critic, who was wildly out of her league. She folded up the barf bag and crammed it back into the seat pocket. Let some airsick bastard put it to real use.

  “It’s not my job,” she told herself. She was just going to look around and to observe the area and the people. And she was going to a place where the bed was made for her. Meals cooked for her. And also, close to her family—her aunt Ruth, her cousin Libby, her uncle Jack. It would be a relief to see them again. Josie leaned back and shut her eyes, listening to the engines rev up. She took a deep breath. Was she up for this? Her stomach was strangely quiet this morning, as if it had resolved to be good and let her brain do the freaking out. Here she was on a plane, the most motion she’d seen in months other than Susan’s SUV, which was considerable, too. If she could handle Susan’s driving, this flight ought to be a piece of cake—the thought made her smile to herself.

  #

  The flight attendant recited the emergency instructions in a bored tone. Josie wasn’t paying attention. They were flying from Boston to Tucson with a stop in Texas. If they had to have an emergency water landing, they were in a hell of a lot more trouble than just crashing. Instructions for what to do in an emergency never made Josie feel confident or prepared. And at the end of the spiel, her seatmate—an older woman with a thick Boston accent—maybe the Brookline area—said loudly, “What does that mean that it’s a ‘peanut-free flight?’ It’s not politically correct to eat peanuts anymore? Poor George Washington Carver, rolling over in his poor Negro grave. If people are allergic to nuts, why can’t they just not eat them?” She said “can’t” like “cont”, like Emmanuel Kant. “Are people so sensitive nowadays that they can’t breathe dust from a peanut?”

  So much for napping. Josie opened her eyes. “I’m not sure.” Her seatmate got out some fuzzy pink yarn and a crochet needle. She was a funny little woman—all fuzzy herself. Fuzzy gray hair, fuzzy sweater, fuzzy face and cheeks, even. Grandmotherly in a stereotypical way—she was probably sharper than she looked. Josie speculated: seventy-five years of life experience honed to a fine edge on New York Times crossword puzzles. Expert horticulturist. Family historian. Subscription to Cat Fancy.

  “Sensitive this. Sensitive that. I think it’s all in people’s minds,” the elderly woman continued, her voice a little scratchy in a pleasant way. “Don’t you think that’s possible?”

  “That it’s all in their minds?”

  “Yes. That they might be, you know, making it up a little.” The woman gave a shrug of her thin shoulders.

  “Why would people pretend they’re sick?” Josie said.

  The woman shrugged. “I’ve never heard of so many people having allergies before now. What’s wrong with people? Maybe it’s something in the environment? Not enough people are riding the buses. I’ve been taking the T for sixty-seven years. I’ve only been sick twice in my life. Once with the chicken pox when I was four years-old. Once when I lost a baby—my second child, born dead. Almost bled to death myself. Did I blame the o-zone? No, I did not.”

  Josie blinked at the woman. “Sorry. I’m not following you.”

  “My daughter, she got me connected to the Internet. I’m on the broadband so I have high speed. I can talk on the phone at the same time, if I want to. I have a smartphone, too, on the 4G LTE. Though, who wants to talk on the phone anymore when you can say everything you want by the email and no one interrupts you. But I like the Internet—those message boards and community sites. I read all sorts of stories out there. People talking about this and that. ‘My son can’t eat gluten.’ ‘My child can’t eat corn, corn syrup, corn this and that.’ I read these newsgroups and chatrooms. I’m on the Huffington Post.”

  “You think people are making up these stories?” Josie asked wondering if there were any other empty seats on the plane.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never suffered from any allergies like this myself. Sixty-seven years old…plus the fifteen years I don’t tell anyone about.” She winked at Josie. “All I’m saying is that people like to talk about themselves. And if being sick gives them a better story to tell other people, then maybe they’re not all that sick.”

  “But what about the people who get sick and die from allergies? That happens now and then.”

  The woman thought about it. “Well…maybe they really were sick. With all these people out there making up stories, who can tell who the real sickies are? The Internet is full of these people. It’s a whole different world out there.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “It’s really wonderful, actually,” the woman continued. “Here you have an arena where people of all types can get together and talk. And you can’t see what race a person is, what age, what gender the person is. It’s a great equalizer, the Internet. You don’t even know what country they’re from—especially if they speak good English. Of course, they could just be very bad spellers. You can’t even tell. It’s very addictive.”

  “So I’ve heard,” said Josie and was relieved to see her seatmate set aside her yarn and take out a book.

  The woman took a piece of paper from her book and wrote on it briefly. Then, she handed the paper to Josie. “Here’s my e-mail address.”

  The paper said “sillydaisygirl16@gmail.com.” The woman took the paper back and wrote some more. She handed it back to Josie. “That’s the chatroom that I’m always in. If you go online sometime, you should say hi to me. I promise not to flame you.”

  Josie took the paper. “I’m not really going to be online much for a while. While I’m traveling.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to be on for a while, either. I don’t know what I’m going to do without it. Are you going to San Francisco, too?”

  “No, I’m changing planes in Dallas. I’m going to Arizona,” Josie told her and teased, “But you should be able to find a way to get online in San Francisco. I hear a few people have access in that area.”

  “Oh. I guess so. I don’t think I’m going to have much time though. I’m going to see my grandson. He’s dying of AIDS.”

  #

  Josie stared at the woman in stunned silence. But the woman had stopped talking and was looking out the window. As if she had logged off, so to speak.

  She wondered what had compelled the woman to talk to her, to tell her such intimate details of her life. This wasn’t just an isolated incident either. People did it all the time, like Mr. Obregon and his apple pie. Do I have a sign on me asking you to use me, to please tell me your secrets? Maybe it’s the way I look. Or how I look when I’m listening to you go on and on. What a curse of a characteristic for a misanthropist to have, she thought ruefully. It was true, she didn’t like pe
ople. Every so often, she liked a specific person. But in general—in undiluted mobs—people were terrible.

  Maybe it was a sign of a different kind—this woman talking to her—like a sign from God. If the plane crashed, Josie had plenty of unfinished business that she’d leave behind. She took a quick inventory: a friend she needed to apologize to; a friend she needed to confess to that she in all likelihood, for the most part, was pretty sure that she might, in fact, love him, more or less; a dog she had yet to win over; a mother to reintroduce herself to; and a credit score that was teetering on the brink of being seriously screwed up. Never mind paying off the debt she was starting to feel she owed the dead bride, and a separate, but equally pressing responsibility to Greta Williams.

  Josie listened to the drone of the engines. They sounded solid enough—the plane probably wasn’t going to crash today. She thought about Leann’s warm handshake; and she stewed over the idea that Greta Williams asked her to go to Arizona. Josie had no doubt that it was actually Greta Williams who wanted her to come because—if she could be sure about one thing—Greta Williams would never be a messenger boy for anyone but herself. There was also that strange falter in her voice when she’d lied about the bride’s mother wanting her to look into this whole mess.

  What was Greta Williams’s story, Josie wondered. Did she have some secret reason to hate her new daughter-in-law? Did she hire a man to do Leann in? Take out a hit on her? Or however it was done. Maybe there was an Oedipal complex in the Williams family, although if it came to that, Michael Williams seemed a stronger argument for that, judging by the way he and his mother had their heads close together in conversation when Josie had observed them at the wedding reception. There was something creepy and intimate the way they had stood together. Strange family to want to marry into.

  Poor Leann. Josie had a sudden wave of pity. It seemed as if everything had been just starting for her. New married life. New name. New home. New mother-in-law. Josie grimaced. New, possibly murderous, husband. That theory was starting to seem more impossible, the closer Josie got to Arizona. How could he have possibly killed Leann when the authorities said she’d died of an allergic reaction—a bee sting? She had probably died of natural causes, as far as Josie knew, just unnaturally early.

  Josie dug in her pocket, nearly elbowing her seatmate, who was now snoring softly. She found Mr. Obregon’s neatly-written list of names of people that she was supposed to contact. “Puerta,” it said at the top—that was the name of the town just outside of Tucson that Castle Ranch was in. Underneath that was a list of about five names. One of them was a doctor. Another was a detective of some kind—maybe police, maybe private. There were addresses and phone numbers, too. Obregon had been very thorough. In return, she had told him to be sure to check out Bill Lake and Doug Campbell, those two former boyfriends of Leann’s who had shared a table with Josie at the wedding.

  She studied the list again and said the names to herself quietly. Dr. James Bosarch. Det. Mike Flores. Lilian Horner. Tammy Roberts. Maria Garza. She repeated them once more, setting them up in her mind like bottles on a fence post. She would talk to each one, gather what she could, and eliminate each one from her list of things to do. Set them up and knock them down.

  Josie put the list away and leaned her head back. It was best to try to sleep. She was starting to get a bubble of worry in her stomach. Sleep was the best escape when you were strapped in an airplane seat. And she absolutely wasn’t interested in the meal.

  Someone was tugging on her sleeve. “We’re here,” her seatmate told her. ‘We’re about to land in Dallas.” Groggy, Josie retrieved her bag from under the seat in front of her. When they eventually de-planed past the grouchy flight attendants and through the swampy retractable tunnel, Josie turned to say goodbye to the woman, sillydaisygirl16, but the older woman had already been swallowed up by the current of passengers in the terminal.

  #

  On the second leg of her flight, she fell asleep even before the plane took off. And when she woke up later, it was dark outside of the airplane window. But that was all right—she’d seen the view a million times. She checked her watch. They were probably somewhere over New Mexico by now. If she closed her eyes, she could see in her mind’s eye the red clays and white sands of the land threaded in one another. The heavy veins of erosion from an ice age thaw. All she could say about that was that Georgia O’Keefe had gotten something right in the feeling of her paintings. Josie didn’t care very much for the colors, but the emotion was right. Cow skulls and starkness—something harsh and female.

  Momentarily, Josie’s mind drew her to the darker memory of the trip out after she’d had to put her mother into the nursing home. “Booby trap” was what her mother had called it in the beginning, when she’d still understood what was happening to her. Looney bin. Booby hatch. Shady Oaks. Originally, a therapist told her that her mother was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. She was a Thai, a young bride that Josie’s father had brought back to the States after the Vietnam War. Their imaginary honeymoon lingered in Josie’s mind. Her mother had worked as a grocery bagger in the commissary on the military base learning English while Josie was a small child. After Josie’s father died, her mother opened a small restaurant that served southern Thai dishes. The restaurant had done well, but the stress of running it and of being widowed had broken her down. Initially that had been the case, the therapist said. But what had seemed like PTSD evolved into the early indicators of Alzheimer’s.

  After her mother went to the inpatient facility in Massachusetts, Josie had gone to Arizona to live with her Aunt Ruth. Josie finished high school in Tucson, but then went back to Boston for college and to be closer to her mom. Although Aunt Ruth had Libby, a daughter about Josie’s age, Ruth was actually Josie’s great-aunt. But whatever the connection, visiting Aunt Ruth always made Josie feel closer to her father. At the same time, it was kind of a sock in the gut.

  CHAPTER 10

  A sign at the top of the ramp read, “Bienvenidos a Tucson!” Josie saw her adopted cousin Libby, red-blonde hair swept back in a loose ponytail and big frame in man-sized coveralls. Her size nine feet were in white Nike basketball shoes. A child in a woman’s body since age eleven. That was Libby.

  Libby was built as if she had been designed by a higher power, a divine craftsman who used tools and rulers and measurements. She was on a bigger scale than most people—well over six feet tall and broad all the way through—not fat, just large. Her face was big as well, but in proportion with the rest of her. She had wide smiling cheeks that were freckled and a relatively small, up-turned nose. Her heavily lashed eyes were a little too widely set apart, maybe the result of fetal alcohol syndrome—a gift from her addict birth mother. Libby was what people in small towns called “slow.” But none of that really matters when you’re always assured of a place to live, people to love you, and a role to play, as Libby was.

  “You sure don’t have very much stuff,” Libby said, hugging her, nearly squeezing the breath out of her. She smelled like McDonald’s French fries, that warm, golden smell. Josie suspected her cousin might have a crumpled French fry envelope in her overalls pocket. Maybe more than one.

  “Just some sandals in a bag,” Josie said hugging her back. She had a sense of people’s amusement at their height difference as Libby stooped down to reach her.

  “Gad, you’re small. Aren’t you eating anymore? Are you doing a diet?” Libby’s chiding was a familiar mix of Aunt Ruth’s down-home diction and Libby’s own childlike banter.

  “I eat a lot,” Josie told her. “Just have trouble hanging on to it.”

  “I got some Pepto at home,” Libby said. “That always helps. ‘Coats as it soothes,’ you know.”

  “Maybe,” Josie told her as they walked together through the terminal. She was warmed from the belly out, happy to see her cousin’s freckled face smiling at her.

  “‘Maybe’ means no.” Libby grinned. “Just like always.”

  Somethin
g about the near-frigid air that was spilling out of the air conditioner, the framed posters of women in Mexican fiesta dresses, and the red and blue college logos everywhere made Josie feel stronger. It was all intensely familiar. She was on her turf now—and maybe it would help her settle herself. She knew what she would see as they drove out to the house—low stucco buildings, green-trunked palo verde trees, and sky that came down to meet the ground in a 360-degree sweep around her. In a place like this, she could almost fool herself that the future held infinite possibility.

  From behind her someone called out, “Josie? Josie Tucker, is that you?” She cringed. What a bizarre place Tucson was. In any other town of nearly a half million people, the odds of running into a high school classmate in the airport at eleven o’clock at night were slim to nil. But, no.

  “Hey Kelly,” she said recognizing the voice even though she hadn’t seen the owner in a good ten or twelve years. She stretched her face into a facsimile of a death mask grimace…er, polite smile.

  Kelly Peters, her classmate but never her friend, propelled herself toward Josie and squeezed her tightly. “I can’t believe how great you look.” Apparently, looking “great” to Kelly meant borderline emaciation. “What have you been up to all these years? Are you still in New York? How many kids do you have?”

  Josie fought to keep the revulsion off her face. “I’m doing well. How are you?” Nothing like a cheerleader’s soul in the body of a grown woman. The pleated skirt and tight sweater might still fit, but there was something indecent about her world outlook. She had a whole lot of chipper-ness about her that Josie wished someone had squelched a tad. Just a little.