You May Now Kill the Bride

by Deborah Donnelly

  “Oh, too bad we didn’t know!” Kimmie’s smile was guileless, but was that malice in her eyes? “She could have stayed at our town house in Rome.”

  I gave up. If the Winter sisters wanted to see my mother as a low-rent lady from the sticks, let ’em. They couldn’t dictate Owen’s personal life, much as they’d like to, and if he and Mom were good for each other that was all that mattered.

  Amused to find myself such a champion of Mom’s romance, I relaxed a little and sampled the oyster stew. It tasted of the ocean, if the ocean were glossy with cream, with an undercurrent of sherry and a spray of cayenne.

  “Guy’s quite a chef,” I marveled as I reached the bottom of my bowl. “Has he worked for Owen long?”

  “Long enough.” Kimmie sent her sister a wicked little look. “The thing about Guy is—”

  “What are your plans this week, Carrie?” said Adrienne loudly. She was clearly indifferent to the answer.

  “Well, I’ve got a little business to take care of, but mostly just sightseeing.” More silence followed, and I cast around for something to fill it. “I understand there’s an unusual mausoleum near here?”

  “Eww, that old place.” Kimmie’s nose was the kind that wrinkled adorably. “It’s totally gross, ashes and everything.”

  “Perhaps Carrie is a ghost hunter,” said Adrienne dryly. “Do you commune with spirits, Carrie? Afterglow Vista is supposed to be haunted.”

  Enough of this. I don’t even like lemonade.

  “It’s Carnegie, not Carrie. If we’re going to be friends, and maybe even family, you’ll want to get it right, won’t you?”

  Adrienne sat back as if I’d slapped her, and I continued sweetly, “So, if the mausoleum is so gross, maybe you have some other suggestions for me?”

  She sniffed. “I thought Guy gave you a guidebook. Or were you too busy with your little wedding to read it?”

  “Exactly.” I drained my wineglass—it was somehow my third—and stood up. “I was too busy with my little wedding, but I’ll go read it now and let the two of you bitch about me behind my back. Good night.”

  Chapter Eight

  My dramatic exit from the dining room was somewhat marred when I stumbled on the edge of the Persian carpet. But then I heard Kimmie giggle, so I recovered my balance and stalked up the stairs in a satisfyingly haughty manner.

  Once up there, of course, the wind went right out of my indignant sails. No telling how late Mom and Owen would be, and meanwhile I was confined to my room like a scolded child. No sunset from the veranda for me, not with those two harpies around.

  I considered going out for a drive, but my head was too addled with wine to manage the SUV. The hot tub, then? No, the thought of running the gauntlet of Adrienne’s cold stares was simply too infuriating.

  All right, I’d stay here and study the damn guidebook. Come to think of it, I’d had a long day and that bed looked awfully inviting. So I stretched out, opened the book at random, and started to read about the Pig War.

  In case you’re not up on your wars, this one happened—or didn’t happen—in the 1850s. There was a turf battle between the Americans and the British over the Northwest Territories, so both sides put troops on San Juan Island. When an English porker wandered into a Yankee cornfield and got itself shot, everybody armed to the teeth. There could have been a major war, but after years of saber-rattling the border was settled by arbitration, so the final casualties totaled precisely one pig. Hence the Pig War. Who knew?

  It was the kind of thing Aaron loved, being a history buff, but I was underwhelmed. If they’d shot a hamster, I thought drowsily, they wouldn’t even call it a war and the whole thing would be long forgotten. Takes a catchy name to go down in history.

  I turned the page idly, and another catchy name jumped out at me. “The Afterglow Vista Mausoleum commemorates John S. McMillin, founder of the local limeworks, once the largest west of the Mississippi.”

  What on earth is a limeworks? Maybe there was a Lime War, or a Lemon War . . . The guidebook slumped gently against my chest, and I slept.

  I woke up in the dark and in my clothes, confused about where I was and whose footsteps I was hearing.

  “Aaron?” I heard myself murmur.

  The footsteps stopped. Or had they been there at all? I thought I’d heard someone moving along the hallway near my door, which I’d left ajar to get more air. If I had, it must be Guy returning from his rendezvous. Mom and Owen would be back by now too, but it was far too late to greet them.

  Or was it? I grabbed for my travel alarm, but in the unfamiliar darkness I sent it clattering to the floor. “Oh, hell.”

  I groped in the air for the lamp, then drew back my hand at the thought of that antique glass globe joining the clock in a nasty smash.

  As I hesitated, I thought I heard them again, faint tapping footsteps. But they were receding down the stairs. Had Guy been home once already and was going out again? I shrugged and fell back onto my pillow. Maybe he was a midnight snacker.

  I listened for a few more minutes, but my eyelids were heavy. It was such an ideal pillow, substantial yet soft, and it cradled my heavy head so nicely . . .

  My dreams, and any odd sounds attending them, melted away in a dawn that sent pearly light filtering into my room through the limbs of the madrona. I stood up and stretched my own cramped limbs, wishing that I too was out in the open air.

  Well, why not? It was far too early to wake anyone else—according to my clock when I fished it from under the bed—but that didn’t mean I had to stay indoors. I pulled a sweatshirt over my crumpled clothes, knotted a silk scarf round my neck in case it was chilly, and tiptoed across the hall to the bathroom.

  When I came out again I paused, wondering if I’d disturbed Guy. But all was silence, so I slipped down the shadowy stairwell and out the front door.

  Freedom! I surveyed my unpeopled early-morning kingdom, from the dew-spangled grass at my feet to the mist-softened islands stretching out to the horizon. With long exuberant strides I followed the driveway to the road and turned downhill, toward the village, without seeing or even hearing a single vehicle. I love Seattle, but the traffic is hellish, and this was heaven.

  I was partway to the village, and a possible cup of coffee, when a dark and sinuous creature rippled across the road and stopped at the verge to look back at me. I say “creature” because my mind went flipping through cat and dog and even raccoon before it registered that this was a fox.

  “Oh,” I breathed. “Oh, you beauty.”

  A black fox, with a silvery frost to its fur and shadowy red-brown eyes that regarded me impassively. I held my breath. Suddenly, fluidly, the fox turned away and trotted down a path into the woods, bushy black tail floating behind, its white tip disappearing into the dimness.

  I followed, mesmerized, not really expecting to find the fox again, but enchanted to meet a fellow wanderer in the dawn. The path led uphill through a stand of some leafy tree, alder perhaps, and then into evergreens interspersed with madronas.

  The woods seemed enchanted as well, dim and cool and hushed. The thin straight fir trunks and the stately curves of the madronas were touched with gold here and there by the rising sun, and their scattered leaves and needles silenced my footfalls as I moved between them. Not a whisper of wind disturbed the illusion of magical unreality.

  The path crested the hill and dropped toward a clearing, where a cluster of thicker trunks rose up, thick and pale and . . . No, they weren’t trees at all, but pillars, tall fluted pillars of stone arranged around a pavilion like a little Greek temple. One pillar was broken, leaving only a jagged base and crown, but the others supported a stone pediment, if that was the word, shaped like a ring and open to the sky.

  In the center of the temple stood a table and six chairs. Ordinary, everyday shapes—but they were fashioned entirely of stone. The table was round and massive, the chairs low and simple with block-shaped bases and rounded backs. Utterly ordinary shapes, but in this material and i
n this setting, they were utterly eerie.

  Ghosts. The hush and the half-light and the glimpse of a wild creature had lulled me into a dreamlike state, and I instantly imagined a dinner party of phantoms vanishing into the ether. But their furniture was real enough, the stone surfaces cool to the touch of my fingers, and the chairs looked solid and even inviting.

  So inviting that I began to sit down. But as I did I noticed carving on one of the chair backs and stepped around to see. Dorothy Hiett McMillin, it read, and down below, Jan. 19, 1894–May 19, 1980.

  I drew back with a small involuntary cry. Of course, this was Kimmie’s “totally gross” old place, which Sigrid had discouraged me from visiting—the mausoleum called Afterglow Vista. And I’d almost plunked my butt on Dorothy’s grave. Though I wasn’t sure you called it a grave, if you were dealing with ashes instead of a body. That must be why the chairs had solid bases, to contain the urns.

  The sun was well up now and the air was warming, but I shivered anyway. Bodies or not, I’d never seen a place quite so spooky. Or so fascinating, in a macabre sort of way. I circled the table reverently, reading the inscriptions on each chair, and resolved to learn more about the McMillin clan and their bizarre burials.

  Looking past the table, I realized that I’d arrived at the mausoleum by the back way. A course of shallow stone steps led toward a well-tended walkway, and to one side a wooden platform projected out from the pavilion’s edge like a stage. I also realized that the broken pillar had been artfully crafted to look broken, rather than being damaged by nature or vandalism.

  But there had been vandalism; that was evident now in the growing daylight. The tabletop, nicely inlaid with a decorative border, showed scratches and gouging. Shards of a beer bottle lay at the base of one pillar, and some idiot had dripped dark red paint down the back of a chair and smeared a trail of it across the stone floor and platform.

  “Moron,” I muttered, and glanced over the side to see if there was worse to come. “Some people should be—oh, God. Oh, God.”

  There was a body, after all, at Afterglow Vista. The far edge of the platform hung several feet above the forest floor, and down in the dirt sprawled the motionless figure of a man.

  Horrified, I stumbled backward between the pillars, but smacking into a chair brought me to my senses. I went scrambling down the steps and across the slope toward the body, my thoughts in chaos.

  I thought the man must be the vandal, injured in the midst of his misdeeds. Or else some midnight reveler, blind with beer, who’d tumbled off the unprotected edge and been abandoned by his friends.

  But no friend had been here in the night. The figure wore a dark red shirt, and the shirt had gone even darker where a puddle of blood had welled up and dried between the shoulder blades.

  The man was Guy Price, and he’d been stabbed in the back.

  I crouched close beside him, my knees in the pool of cold and sticky blood, but there seemed to be nothing I could do. Beyond the stab wound, the fall from the platform had done something dreadful to his spine. His hips were twisted at a sickening angle, and though his eyes were wide open, the pupils had shrunk to pinpoints.

  I was about to run for help when Guy managed to speak, a mere thread of sound, weak and forlorn.

  “Pen . . .” The fingers of one outflung hand twitched as if to grasp something, and the voice grew urgent. “Pen . . .”

  “I don’t have a pen,” I said helplessly. “What do you want to write? Just tell me, and I’ll remember it, I promise.”

  Silence, except for my own murmuring.

  “I’m here, Guy,” I said gently, over and over. “You’re not alone. I’m here.”

  Then a trickle of blood ran from his lips, and he was gone.

  I’d been calm enough so far, but now dull cold horror closed around me like a blinding fog. I staggered to my feet and fled the mausoleum at a stumbling run.

  I wasn’t running from the killer, though, because I didn’t even have the presence of mind to wonder if he was lurking nearby. I was running from the presence of death.

  Gasping and sobbing, I raced down the walk and found myself on the roadway, frantically waving down an oncoming car. A police car! It swerved around me, horn blaring, and rocked to a stop. A blond giant in uniform emerged, and I rushed toward him.

  “Officer, someone’s been—oof!”

  I’m not the most sure-footed person at the best of times, and this was far from the best. Another time I might have avoided the pothole, or at least recovered my balance when I stepped into it. Instead I pitched forward and sprawled full-length at the officer’s feet.

  Chapter Nine

  The blond giant was Deputy Sheriff Jeffrey Austin, “like Texas, not Jane.” He told me this after I dragged some air back into my lungs, but it didn’t register till later.

  His appearance registered immediately, though. Deputy Austin was about six foot eight, with enormous shoulders and arms the size of my thighs, only with a lot more muscle. I became personally acquainted with the muscles when I tried to stand up and my knees turned to mashed potatoes. I’ve never fainted in my life, but I came damn close.

  “Whoa, there!”

  Austin saved me from hitting the ground again, lifting me the way I’d lift a child. He carried me easily to his patrol car, where he tucked me into the backseat and listened gravely as I stammered out my story. Then he spoke into his radio, asked me to stay put, and jogged up the walkway toward the mausoleum. When he came back his handsome face, as broadly sculpted as his body, was stiff and pale.

  We remained there in the car, not speaking, until more officers arrived. My sense of time was slipping around, but it wasn’t much later that I was back at Owen’s house, having my bloody hands swabbed and photographed and my clothes impounded.

  As if I wasn’t feeling strange enough, I wasn’t allowed to talk to Mom or anyone else. A different officer stood outside my door while I changed into fresh clothes, then escorted me down to the veranda. I sat listlessly on the porch swing, waiting to be questioned, blinking my eyes against the sunlight that danced on the straits. Somehow, unbelievably, it was still a lovely September morning.

  Owen and his daughters, along with my mother, were inside the house being interviewed in separate rooms. The police don’t say “interrogate,” at least not to your face. They say “interview.” I was mulling this over, restricting my thoughts to safe topics like word choice instead of dark ones like murder, when it struck me. What kind of cop makes remarks about Jane Austen?

  Apparently the kind who deliberately sits on something low so as not to overwhelm the witness. Deputy Austin pulled up a footstool and arranged himself on it, opening a small notebook with a leather cover. A breeze stole up the front lawn and ruffled the pages.

  “How are you doing, Ms. Kincaid? I put you out here so you’d get the fresh air. Feeling up to some questions?”

  I nodded, gulping. We started with the softball stuff, name and address and occupation, and how long I planned to be on the island. Then he flipped to a new page and fired a fastball over the plate. “What was your relationship with Guy Price?”

  “We didn’t have a relationship! I only met him yesterday.”

  Austin’s eyebrows rose. They were broad, straight brows, a shade darker than his fair hair, above innocent-looking pale blue eyes. Nice eyes, actually, but that was beside the point.

  “So you two were acquaintances?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then, that was your relationship.” His long lips curved in a smile. Everything about Deputy Austin was nicely proportioned, just big, as if he’d been enlarged on a copy machine for people. “What did you think I meant?”

  “Nothing,” I said, flustered. “Aren’t you supposed to put me at ease so I’ll tell you things?”

  “Point taken.” He clicked his ballpoint—it almost disappeared within his massive hand—and smiled some more. “Now, what have you got to tell me?”

  Imagine a man that big having dimp
les that cute, I thought. Then, appalled at this levity, I gave him a scrupulous description of my morning, including every minute detail from the appearance of the fox to the last words of Guy Price. Austin nodded and scribbled, asking for clarification here and repetition there.

  When I was done he said, “We need your cooperation on this, Ms. Kincaid.”

  “Carnegie.” Might as well keep things straight, with Ms. Louise Kincaid around.

  “All right, Carnegie, it would really help our investigation if you don’t discuss the details of the scene with anyone, especially the media. Would you agree to that?”

  “Of course. Anything else?”

  “That’s it for now.” He flipped the notebook shut. “And they’re called silver foxes, by the way, even though some of them are red and some black. Sounds like you’re a nature lover. Me too.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. In the office they give me a bad time about being a bird-watcher.” I found myself relaxing just a little, but then he went on, “I understand you spent some time in the victim’s bedroom yesterday.”

  I stiffened. “Guy has a suite. I mean, he had one. I was in the office, not the bedroom. What are you implying?”

  “Not a thing. But I’d like you to take a quick look there now and tell us if anything seems different to you. Kimberly Winter has already looked around, but the more we know about Mr. Price’s last hours, the better. So if you’ll just—”

  “I will not wait, I want to see my daughter!” The front door banged open and my mother appeared like an avenging . . . well, mother. Her feathery silver hair was in disarray, and her crumpled white blouse told me that she’d worn it yesterday and put it on hastily this morning. “There you are, sweetheart. Are you all right?”

  Mom’s not much of a hugger—she’s better with yelling at policemen—but she hugged me now as I rose from the porch swing.

  “I’m fine, Mom, really. I just have to go up and look at Guy’s room.”

  “May I ask why?” Adrienne had planted herself in the doorway with her arms folded fiercely, as if to guard the old homestead against marauding desperadoes. A shotgun and sunbonnet would have fit right in. “I think we’ve had quite enough disruption without—”