by Laura Durham
"By Santa Claus," Kate added.
Mack placed two oversized cappuccinos in front of us, then turned back to the machine to retrieve his own refilled demitasse cup. "Now this I want to hear."
"It's nothing really." I wrapped my hands around the warm cup and enjoyed the heat, even if it wasn't cold outside. "Fern is all worked up because a friend of his claims that Kris Kringle Jingle is missing."
Mack nearly dropped his small cup. "Missing? Is he sure?"
"We don't know," I said. "Reese went with him to interview the lady who insists he's disappeared."
Kate eyed Mack over the rim of her mug as she took a sip. "Why? Do you know Kris?"
"Kris Kringle Jingle?" Mack looked at her as if her question was absurd. "Of course we know him." He leaned his head back and bellowed for Buster, then turned back to us. "When it isn't the holidays, he's one of our local laborers. Mostly loading the vans and unloading shipments."
Buster appeared from the door leading into the back of the shop, his face lighting up when he saw us. "Sorry about that. I was on the phone trying to get more holly for Greta Van Strubbel's party." He pushed the black biker goggles further up on his bald head. "Although I'm not sure how the holly and berry theme is going to play if it hits eighty degrees."
I didn't know how both men were still completely decked out in black leather pants and thick jackets emblazoned with Road Riders for Jesus patches when it was so warm. Just looking at them made me sweat, but I didn't say anything.
"Tell us about it," Kate said. "Saturday's wedding has an icicle theme, remember?"
"Did you know about Kris?" Mack said to Buster.
"Kris Kringle Jingle?" Buster asked, stroking one hand down his brown goatee. "No, what?"
Mack waved a beefy hand toward me and Kate. "The ladies say he's missing."
"To be perfectly accurate," Kate said, "Fern is the one who says he's missing. And he's getting his information from a woman named Jeannie."
Mack drained his espresso in a single gulp. "That would explain why we didn't see him yesterday. He usually passes by and belts out a verse of 'The Little Drummer Boy.'"
Buster blinked hard a few times. More evidence that Buster and Mack were softies, despite their intimidating appearance. "That song gets us every time." He swiped at his eyes. "Do they think something has happened to him?"
"Reese went with Fern to talk to this Jeannie woman."
Mack put a hand to his heart. "That's a relief. I know your fiancé will be able to find him."
"If he's missing," I said. "It's so warm, he might just be taking a break at home instead of having to be out in a heavy Santa suit in this heat."
"Home?" Buster cocked his head at me. "Kris doesn't have a home."
Kate's mug clattered on the table. "What do you mean he doesn't have a home?"
"An apartment then?" I asked, lowering my own mug before I took a drink.
Mack shook his head. "He moves around the shelters, and he sometimes rents a cheap motel room, especially when it gets really cold or he works a lot of jobs for us, but Kris has been homeless for years."
I remembered that Buster and Mack often employed the neighborhood homeless when they needed extra labor, paying them under the table with cash and feeding them well throughout the day.
Buster shoved his hands into the pockets of his snug leather pants. "He can usually be found at one of the shelters. Have they searched all those yet?"
"I don't know." I glanced at Kate, who looked just as shocked as I was. I'd seen Kris Kringle Jingle charming people with holiday songs for years, and never once had I suspected he was homeless. Now that I knew the singing Santa lived on the street, I found my own stomach tightening with worry. Suddenly, our weddings didn't seem like the most important thing in the world.
Chapter 5
I pushed against my front door, but it only slid forward a few inches. Glancing back at Kate, who held her high heels in one hand after the climb up three flights of stairs, I sighed. "This is not a good sign."
"Hold on a second," Richard called out from the crack in the door. "I need to move this so you can get inside."
After a notable amount of heaving and groaning, the door opened. If I weren’t absolutely sure I'd walked into the correct stone-fronted apartment building and up the right number of stairs, I would have thought I was in the wrong place.
“Holy holly berries,” Kate whispered as she stared through the doorframe, obviously still under the influence of Buster and Mack.
Even though Kate and I had only been gone a couple of hours, my apartment didn't look remotely like I'd left it. The single plastic crate Richard had arrived with had been joined by a stack of glass racks, more plastic crates, and piles of empty cardboard boxes all pushed into the hallway. Richard had clearly gotten a few deliveries after we'd left, and I was both impressed and shocked he'd actually had rental furniture hauled up to my fourth-floor apartment. At least, I hoped it was rental.
The yellow twill sofa and overstuffed chair that comprised the bulk of my living room furniture were gone, as was the beige rug that covered the hardwood floors. In their place were a stylish gray sofa and a pair of pickle wood French chairs upholstered in a gray-and-white chevron pattern. My glass coffee table remained, but the paperwork was gone. It was now topped with a pair of rattan trays arranged with stacks of slipcovered books, bowls of moss balls, and milk glass vases filled with white orchids.
My dining room table had been cleared, draped in a linen I recognized as "White Etched Velvet" from Party Settings rental company and fully set as if I were having a dinner party for eight. Matte silver chargers were topped with white plates, and a gray hemstitched linen napkin was banded around the top plate. Cut glassware and ornate silverware completed the look.
The Christmas tree, which had been sparsely decorated, now stood covered from tip to trunk in ivory, silver, and gold. An ivory crushed velvet ribbon wrapped around the tree as a garland and glass ball ornaments reflected the twinkle of the white lights. Even the base was swathed in a silver crushed velvet skirt and surrounded by boxes wrapped in gold paper.
"I thought you were adding a few design elements,” I said, hearing my voice crack. "Where's all my stuff?"
"Not to worry, darling." Richard bustled forward and took me by the elbow. "Your furniture is still here. It's in the back."
"The back?" Kate stepped inside tentatively, as if she wasn't sure about the new version of my apartment. "Where in the back? On the fire escape?"
Richard gave her a side-eye glance. "Of course not. As much as that tired, old stuff might deserve it, I did not relegate it to the fire escape. The couch is in the bedroom and the chair is in the office."
I cast a glance down my hallway. Neither the bedroom nor the office had tons of extra space, so I was afraid to see where exactly the furniture had gone.
"And all this is for...?" I prompted.
"The photo shoot, of course." Richard threw his arms wide. "If the magazine is going to photograph you in your Georgetown apartment, we can't have pictures of you and Kate sitting on a saggy old couch covered in pizza stains."
I understood his logic, but the new furniture looked too chic to sit on. And what kind of person kept a dining table fully set? I knew I would have a hard time looking like I was at home in a place that was decidedly not me.
He patted my arm. "Trust me. All the magazine shoots are like this. No one actually lives in houses that look like the ones in Architectural Digest. Everything is staged to some degree."
"This is definitely some degree," Kate mumbled.
"So I'm supposed to live with this until the photo shoot?" I asked, wondering what Reese would think when he saw the new and improved look. This was definitely not a living room where you kicked your feet up onto the coffee table anymore. I twisted around as I scanned the room. "Where's the TV?"
Richard jerked a thumb behind him. "In your bedroom. It made the room look too butch."
"Problem solved," Kate said, p
oking at one of the glassless silver geometric terrariums on the coffee table. "This is definitely where testosterone goes to die."
"You won't have to suffer very long," Richard said, flouncing off toward the kitchen. "The shoot is tomorrow morning, and I can have everything removed by the afternoon."
"Tomorrow morning?" I repeated. "You didn't tell me the shoot was so soon."
"No need to drag things out, am I right?" Richard said. "Anyway, tomorrow was the only time slot the photographer had. If we'd waited, you'd miss getting into the next issue."
I did a quick mental rundown of the week's schedule. We didn't have any meetings scheduled the next morning, but I worried that the confirmation calls for Saturday's wedding were getting pushed off again. I usually blocked out a full day leading up to a wedding just so Kate and I could focus on the last-minute details and go over the paperwork for a final time.
Kate shrugged. "I guess it's better we get it out of the way. Do we know what we're wearing?"
I almost smacked my forehead as I thought about the jam-packed dry-cleaning bag hanging in my closet. Did I have anything clean to wear? Come to think of it, did I own anything stylish enough for a magazine feature? "Should we go with all black, since that's what we usually wear on a wedding day?"
Richard groaned loudly. "Black again? I'm sure you two can come up with something a little less predictable than black."
"But it's DC," I said, knowing that a black dress might be my only unwrinkled option. "Everyone in DC wears black, even to weddings."
Richard's head appeared in the open space between the kitchen and living room. "Which is why you need to wear something else. Anything else."
Kate leaned close to me. "Don't worry. I'll take care of wardrobe."
I eyed her. "Do I need to remind you that microminis and J. Lo necklines do not scream 'elite wedding planner'?"
Before my assistant could make a face at me, I heard a sharp intake of breath behind us.
"I would ask if you've been robbed," Fern said as he walked in, "but it's rare that burglars leave the place looking better than before."
Reese followed him, his eyes wide. "Um, babe?"
"I know, I know," I said, before he could ask. "It's all Richard's doing for the magazine shoot, but it will be gone by tomorrow."
"You're doing a magazine shoot tomorrow?" Fern asked, fluttering his fingers at his throat. "And you didn't ask me to do your hair?"
"Richard just told us about it," Kate said. "Are you free tomorrow morning?"
"For a magazine shoot?" Fern grinned. "Of course I am. If I have any society hussies booked at the salon, I'll just reschedule them. They can get bleached blonde another day."
"You know, the people who said things would get routine after we moved in together could not have been more wrong," Reese said, letting out a breath.
"Not everyone has my friends,” I reminded him, taking his hand in mine. "How did it go with Jeannie?"
His expression went from bemused to serious. "I took a statement from her. She seems pretty credible, and I feel confident she told us the truth."
"So Kris Kringle Jingle is missing?"
"It seems so, and Jeannie is convinced that something bad has happened to him," my fiancé said. "She says he was acting nervous the day before he vanished, and he told her that he'd seen something he shouldn't have."
"But he didn't say exactly what?" I asked.
Reese shook his head. "It's not much to go on, but I issued a BOLO for Kris. Luckily, people take a lot of photos with him during the holidays, so I have a good description and a decent image."
“Be on the lookout,” Fern mouthed to Kate, with a nudge.
“I know what BOLO means,” she said. “We do have cops show up to about half our weddings, remember?”
I tried to ignore her statement, and the fact that it was sort of true.
"Did you know he was homeless?" I asked Reese. "Buster and Mack use him as seasonal labor and they told us he usually rotates through the shelters, but occasionally gets a motel room."
"I knew. Did you know he refuses to take money for singing Christmas carols? Jeannie says it was his way of thanking people for helping him out during the year."
Now that I thought about it, I'd never noticed him asking for money. It was probably one of the reasons I hadn't guessed he was homeless. Concern for the singing Santa gnawed at the back of my mind again, but I told myself that Reese was on the case.
"Is that the office phone?" Kate asked as a muffled ringing came from down the hall.
"Yep," I said, hurrying toward it and pushing open the door to Wedding Belles headquarters. My mouth fell open when I realized that the overstuffed chair that used to sit across from my couch now took up almost every square inch of floor space in my home office.
The room had not been spacious to start with--the desk, office chair, high bookshelf, and tall filing cabinet leaving enough room on the floor for us to store client supplies and assemble gift bags. Richard had shoved the chair far enough into the room so the door could close, and had stacked everything from the floor into the chair. The only way I could get to the ringing phone on the desk was to dive for it or somehow clamber over the chair that faced away from me.
"Remind me to kill you later," I yelled to Richard as I gingerly stepped onto the back of the chair and attempted to keep my balance. Edging from the back to the arm, I managed to crab walk my way from the upholstered chair to my swivel office chair, collapsing into it and picking up the phone.
"Wedding Belles," I said, steadying my breath. "This is Annabelle."
"You're dead," the voice on the other end said.
My stomach churned as I realized that I knew the voice. Very well.
Chapter 6
“You're sure it was Brianna on the phone?" Kate asked, sitting on a stool next to mine the next morning and sipping from a to-go cup of coffee.
We'd positioned the high stools in front of my living room window to get the most natural morning light, and because the sliver of space was the only place in my apartment that wasn't overly staged and styled. My living room had been transformed from frumpy and functional to ornate and over-the-top, and I hardly recognized it.
"Of course I'm sure." I held a bottle of cold Mocha Frappuccino in my lap as Fern sprayed a puff of hairspray on the back of my hair. "First of all, it sounded exactly like her, Southern accent and all. Secondly, who else hates us enough to threaten murder, and probably most damning, I heard someone in the background say her name."
"Amateur," Fern muttered.
"Who's Brianna?" Carl asked as he peered at Kate's face through black-framed, hipster glasses, then began dabbing foundation on her cheeks.
"I forget you've been out of the wedding scene," I said, sliding my gaze over to the makeup artist with short, dark hair and colorful tattoos swirling down both arms.
Although Carl had been one of my original go-to makeup artists, he'd stopped taking weddings for several years in order to serve as the first lady's personal makeup artist. Because the job had involved traveling around the world with her, locking in weddings months out had been impossible. But since the change in the administration, he was now available for weddings again, and we'd even been able to pull in this last-minute favor.
It was a Wedding Belles rule to only hire nice people--sometimes easier said than done in a business with plenty of divas--and Carl fit that bill to a tee. Not only was he a talented makeup artist, he was as sweet and humble as they came, despite his famous client catapulting him into the limelight.
"You're lucky you don't know her," Kate said, her eyes closed as Carl patted something over her lids. "She's all Instagram smoke and mirrors."
He straightened up and assessed Kate's face. "And she threatened to kill you? Why?"
"We have a bit of a complicated relationship with her," I said, shifting on the stool as Fern pulled a round brush through my hair.
Fern let out another blast of hairspray. "That floozy is just jealous of
our girls. She's been trying to spread rumors about them ever since she arrived."
I fought the urge to twist around and gape at Fern. Bold words from the man who'd spread the story of Brianna using her wedding planning business as a front for a high-end call girl service. Although I appreciated his loyalty, Fern had only fanned the flames of our feud.
"It's complicated," I said, "but she does seem to have it in for us."
"But why call out of the blue and threaten your life?" Kate asked.
"She called the Wedding Belles line," I reminded her, taking a swig of my cold coffee as Fern stopped brushing. "The threat might not have been just for me."
"Thanks for that," Kate said. "But why now? Most people get less vindictive over the holidays."
"Speak for yourself," Richard said, emerging from my kitchen behind us. "Anyone who's waited in line for a photo with Santa deserves to be homicidal."
"I doubt Brianna was having a bad reaction from waiting in line to see Santa." Especially since she was a single twentysomething. "Wait a second. How do you know anything about waiting in line to get a photo with Santa?"
"You don't think I'm going to let the fisherman's sweater I got Hermès in Ireland go to waste, do you? He's very photogenic, you know."
"Who's Hermès?" Carl whispered as Richard bustled around the dining table, no doubt putting the final touches on the completely unrealistic tablescape.
"His dog," Kate whispered back.
"If we eliminate holiday stress from the equation, there must be a reason for her to be mad enough to call and threaten us," I said, trying to get back on topic.
"And she didn't say why we were dead?" Kate asked, coughing as Carl dusted her face liberally with powder.
I shook my head. "Just that we were dead and she'd get us back."
"And nothing unusual has happened in the past few days?" Carl asked, bending over his pop-up table arranged neatly with palettes and pencils.
I nibbled the corner of my mouth. "I wouldn't say that. We did book a last-minute New Year's Eve wedding."
