You May Now Kill the Bride

by Deborah Donnelly

  But first thing tomorrow morning, with the boys under the watchful eye of their favorite sitter Francine, Lily would slip away to the Owl’s Roost to wallow in utter bridetude with me.

  We planned to quaff champagne with our breakfast, fuss with Lily’s hair and makeup, and take our own sweet time getting dressed. Then Lily’s brother Darwin would fetch her away for a scenic drive around the island and some private time together—they were very close—while I hustled over to Lavender and Lace to make all ready for the bride’s arrival.

  During the ceremony itself, Marcus and Ethan would play their parts and eat their cake, but afterward Francine would whisk them off on a whale-watching excursion and then back to Seattle, leaving the newlyweds on their own for the week.

  “No Harry Potter on my honeymoon,” Lily had said, soon after Mike proposed. “I didn’t even have a honeymoon the first time, so this one’s going to be strictly R-rated.”

  “More like X-rated!” I exclaimed now, as she displayed her new lingerie behind the closed door of 6C. I lifted one particular wisp of scarlet silk. “My heavens . . .”

  “Heaven has nothing to do with it.” Lily smirked. “In fact—”

  She was interrupted by a hearty knock on the door and quickly tucked the wisp back into her suitcase. Our visitor was Donald Coe, bearing a florist’s arrangement of roses and baby’s breath.

  “Just delivered,” he announced merrily, “for Lily James in care of Carnegie Kincaid. Would that be you, miss? The blushing bride?”

  He grinned at Lily, whose ebony cheeks would hardly show a blush, and she grinned right back.

  “You bet it is.”

  “I thought so,” he chuckled, presenting her with the vase.

  So far so good—no hint of racism here—but then Donald settled himself, quite uninvited, into a chair. “The missus said she saw you two on the dock, and I said that must be the lady for the honeymoon suite tomorrow night. Welcome to the Owl’s Roost! Didja notice the islands across the channel there? The big one is Saturna. Now, Saturna is in Canada, and if you could walk on water and you kept on going—”

  “Oh, look,” said Lily, waving the enclosure card. “These are from my staff at the library. Where shall we put them?”

  We dislodged our host from his chair as we fussed around finding a spot for the flowers, but even then he didn’t take the hint.

  “Guess where you’d find yourself if you kept on going?” He leaned comfortably against the wall by the room’s open door and folded his arms on his paunch. “Why, you’d find yourself in downtown Vancouver, B.C.! Isn’t that something?”

  Lily nodded, nonplussed. I could read her mind: was her honeymoon going to be punctuated by monologues from this affable bore?

  “Yessir,” Donald plowed on, “and if you keep a sharp lookout on the channel, you might see a killer whale! How about that? Isn’t that something?”

  Happily for us the cavalry arrived at this point, with the John Wayne part taken by Pamela Coe with a good-size wrench in her hand. She could have bopped her hubby on his bald head without protest from us, but she did even better by handing him both the wrench and his marching orders.

  “Now, Mr. Coe, let’s not pester these girls. The drain in 3A is stopped up again, so you get yourself in there and fix it, you hear me?”

  “At your service, Mrs. Miser,” he grumbled, but in a jocular tone, and smiled at her complacently. “That’s my missus! Never hire a plumber or a ’lectrician when you can tackle the job yourself for free. Hardly ever parts with a dime, isn’t that something?”

  Pamela shooed him out the door and then turned back to us, wrinkling her nose in apology.

  “I’ll keep him away from you and your man next week,” she told Lily, and as she did I wondered what it was like being married to a professional nuisance. “And I’ll have your suite all ready for— Oh! Oh, look at that!”

  She was gazing over Lily’s shoulder at the wedding gown, which we’d hung carefully from the back of the closet door. The gleaming purple satin and the cascade of ruffles stood out against the humdrum furnishings of the room like an orchid against crabgrass.

  “Can I touch it?” asked Pamela shyly, and when Lily nodded she reached out to stroke the ruffles with one plump hand. “I’ve never seen anything so pretty.”

  Then she gave a sharp little sigh and hurried away with her face averted, closing the door softly behind her.

  “Was she crying?” said Lily.

  “I think so. Poor woman, being stuck with him! Not much romance in that marriage.”

  “None at all, it looks like.”

  We shared a little shudder of sympathy, and then she went back to displaying her trousseau. As I marveled over each item, I felt a bit wistful myself. I wasn’t in Pamela’s middle-aged rut, of course, but I wouldn’t have minded picking out my own wedding gown one of these days. As it was, my date for this wedding wasn’t even returning my calls. Always the bridal planner, never the bride . . .

  As if to illustrate my lament, Lily’s cell phone sounded, and from the way she lit up I knew the caller was Mike. But after a laughing exchange about the boys and their ice-cream expedition, her voice became guarded.

  “Actually, Carnegie and I ran into them at the market just after you left. . . . Yes, they seem very nice. . . . Sure, we’ll be ready to go.” She said good-bye and then grimaced at me. “Showtime. He’s coming to get us for lunch and a visit to the Nyquists’.”

  At lunch Marcus showed off his newly grown-up table manners for Aunt Carrie, but on the drive to Lavender and Lace he reverted to his usual boisterous self. I sat between him and Ethan in the back, where the three of us engaged in a hilarious bout of rock, paper, scissors.

  At one point I interrupted the game to ask Mike a carefully worded question. “Tell me, how did Aaron take it when he heard what happened to India?”

  “Quietly, I guess you’d say. He just gave Tony his statement and then said he was going for a long walk somewhere.”

  “No message for me?”

  “No.” Mike met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Sorry.”

  “No big deal,” I said. Or is it a big deal, this constant bickering? I need to decide that pretty soon, I thought, as we pulled up to the farm and parked by the tidy white shop. And so does Aaron.

  Lily was right about the Nyquists in one respect. Now that they’d had time to absorb the fact of this mixed marriage, they made a better show of welcoming Lily. They even left the shop in the care of an assistant so they could both lead us along the winding path to the ornamental pond.

  Absorbing, however, is not accepting. Sigrid’s subdued courtesy was nothing at all like the joyful greeting she had given me as a friend of the unseen and presumably white bride. And Erik kept a little apart from us and once again spoke hardly a word. The Nyquists might be going through the motions but I felt the chill, and I knew that Lily did too.

  “There is room here on the grass for all your friends to stand,” said Sigrid, gesturing at the area around the willow tree. There was no one around except the swans, who glided toward us, leaving arrowhead ripples on the water’s surface. “Does it seem satisfactory?”

  “It’s lovely,” Lily replied, equally polite. Then she took Mike’s hand and her voice grew warmer. “It’s more than lovely, it’s perfect.”

  “Just like you,” said Mike, and gave her a gratified kiss on the cheek. He was still in his tourist outfit, shorts and fanny pack and all, and between the bare knees and the goofy grin of infatuation he looked about nineteen years old, and quite adorable.

  He held on to Lily’s hand as he turned back to Sigrid. “The place looks great. Was it a big deal, going organic?”

  “It took much time, and much work.” She gazed with pride at the gently undulating lavender fields around us. They stretched outward from the pond like a living patchwork quilt, in subtle shades of green and lilac and violet under the blue sky. “But our business has profited.”

  Sigrid talked about the process o
f securing organic certification, which was apparently a major undertaking for a small operation like theirs. She addressed herself solely to Mike, but if he noticed anything amiss between his old friends and his fiancée, he didn’t show it. Perhaps he simply thought them shy.

  Or perhaps he thought that the sedate Nyquists were taken aback by this pair of irrepressible little boys. Certainly Marcus supported that idea, having recently concluded that he was not a little boy at all but an alien from outer space. Just now he was tugging at Erik’s elbow.

  “I came to the earth ’bout a gazillion years ago to play with all the dinosaurs,” he announced. “Then I decided to be bornded to Mommy.”

  “I see,” said the old man gravely. Then, since the alien clearly expected more of a reaction, “And what did you and the dinosaurs live on?”

  “I told you, on the earth.”

  A faint unwilling smile tugged at Erik’s carved-oak features. “I meant, what did you eat?”

  Marcus shrugged. “Plants, I guess. And maybe apple juice.”

  “A very good choice,” said Erik. “I believe dinosaurs would like apple juice.”

  “Uh-huh. C’n I go swimming?”

  “Not here,” I said hastily, with visions of a sudden skinny dip disrupting tomorrow’s proceedings. “This isn’t swimming water, OK? Absolutely no swimming.”

  “OK, I’ll just pet the ducks.”

  He darted toward the pond, and there followed one of those fast-forward scenes that happen so often around kids. In an eyeblink, Marcus was knee-deep in the water, the outraged swans were honking and fanning their enormous and rather menacing wings, and all five adults were rushing into the fray to restore order.

  Once the scolding, soothing, and wringing out of socks had been accomplished, all seemed to be well—until we realized that the alien’s little brother was nowhere in sight.

  “Ethan!” Lily shouted in exasperation. “Ethan James, you get back here right this second!”

  As we peered around, I realized that some of the lavender bushes were quite tall and more than sufficiently dense to hide a small boy.

  “That means now, Ethan.” Mike raised his voice, but managed to sound quite calm and not at all forbidding. “Let’s see you jump up and give a big yell for me, OK?”

  A minute passed, then another, with no result. Mike sighed. “Selective deafness. Sigrid, would you and Erik stay here with Marcus, please? I’ll run across and make sure Ethan doesn’t go near the road.”

  “I’ll go back to the shop and our car,” said Lily. “Sometimes he just backtracks. Carnegie, could you check up there?”

  She pointed up a slope of flowers to some fir trees, and I set off. I doubted that Ethan could have reached the trees so quickly, so as I strode along the path I looked carefully down each row of bushes.

  Sure enough, I found the little fugitive not too far away, crouched out of sight behind a sheltering wall of fragrant, rustling wands of pinkish violet flowers. He lifted a ragged strip of cardboard toward me, gripping it tightly by one end and following it closely with spellbound eyes.

  “I found a ant!” he whispered. “A little one, so don’t scare him. His name is Joey.”

  I smothered a laugh and waved my arms to signal Lily. Then I crouched down myself. “Better say good-bye to Joey, Ethan. Your mommy’s looking for you. Go ahead, put him down so he can go home.”

  I helped to guide his little fist to the ground, and as I did so I noticed a line of incomplete text printed on the scrap of cardboard. The scrap seemed to have been torn from a container of some kind, and the words gave me something new to consider about the upright, blameless, and certifiably all-natural Nyquists.

  I didn’t know what illius 85 parts per million broad-spectrum fungici was exactly, but it sure as hell didn’t sound organic to me.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Confront the Nyquists, or suppress the evidence? It made for an interesting dilemma, and one that I was still pondering an hour or so later as we entered the Hotel de Haro.

  On the way back from the farm, Mike and Lily had tried to update each other on the friends and relatives they’d be meeting tonight. But my honorary nephews were growing restless, making conversation difficult, so I offered to shepherd them through the Roche Harbor marina to look at the boats.

  “Oh, could you?” said Lily, as the boys loudly voiced their enthusiasm. “Hush, you two. Inside voices, remember?”

  They obeyed, at least for the moment, trooping quietly through the quaint old lobby of the hotel. The crooked wooden windows gave the place an air of romance, like a coaching inn from a Daphne du Maurier novel. And speaking of romance . . .

  “Just give me a minute to try Aaron’s room,” I told Lily.

  “No problem. I’ll get Marcus into dry shoes. And I’ll give Ethan another little talk about not wandering.”

  “I’ll hang on to him, don’t worry.”

  “I never do, girl.” She gave my hand a quick squeeze. “What would I do without you? Maybe Aaron can go along.”

  But Aaron still didn’t answer, and I wondered briefly if something had happened to him. Then the boys came clattering downstairs, and I shook off the thought as they hustled me past the hotel gardens toward the water. Mere flowers held no allure when there were boats to be seen.

  Confront, suppress . . . Keeping an eagle eye on Marcus and holding Ethan firmly by the hand, I strolled along and pondered my options. I’d been tempted to produce the evidence back at the lavender farm, just to jolt Erik and Sigrid out of their frosty reserve. But that would just be getting back at them for their attitude toward Lily, so I’d decided to take more time to think the matter over.

  Now, with the scrap of cardboard burning a hole in my pocket, all I could think was that I wished I’d never seen the damn thing in the first place. Clearly Erik and Sigrid were cheating on their organic certification, but what business was that of mine? Why antagonize them even further and spoil the serenity of Lily’s wedding? Why—

  “That’s a bad word!”

  We had reached the marina and Marcus, defender of decency, stood pointing at a sign that hung over the tanks and hoses of a marine waste-pumping station. Draped with nautical flags, the sign read M.V. PHECAL PHREAK, We Take Crap from Anyone.

  Ethan, who couldn’t read, giggled anyway and chanted, “Bad word, bad word, bad word.”

  “It’s meant as a joke, Marcus.” I held out my other hand. “Come on, there’s some giant boats down there. Let’s go see them.”

  But Marcus made it clear that he disdained the holding of hands as babyish. So I let him lead us down the long narrow dock, which made a jaunty line of gray planks and white boats against the brilliant blue of the forest-ringed bay. Every slip seemed to be occupied, the smaller motorboats on our right hand and the big cabin cruisers to our left, with gull-spattered pilings every five or six yards.

  I checked my watch as we went. Another twenty minutes and the boys would go back to their mother. Ethan needed a nap, and I could use one myself. I had that light-headed feeling brought on by a shortage of sleep, and there was still the party at ZZ’s to get through tonight.

  At least we’d have a nice evening for it. The sky above us was as clear as it could be, and the forecast looked good for tomorrow too. Happy the bride that the sun shines upon. . . .

  I returned to my pondering. I was all for truth, justice, and the organic way, but was I willing to get involved in the Nyquists’ situation? No, I told myself, better to mind my own business. I had my hands full anyway, between the wedding and the murders. Mike had been reassuring, but he wasn’t running the investigation, so for all I knew I was still a suspect.

  I was certainly still curious. India’s death looked professional, as he’d pointed out, but what about Guy’s? Had a drug dealer really wielded that knife, or was it a woman scorned, as my instincts suggested? Or maybe one of Guy’s blackmail victims . . .

  Blackmail. The thought stopped me in my tracks. What was it Erik had said when I o
verhead him behind the door of the lavender shop? “If this goes on we are ruined.” And he mentioned Sigrid’s new ideas, ideas that she claimed were good for the future of the land. Of course, the organic program!

  If the Nyquists had cheated on their certification, and Guy the inveterate snoop had found out about it, maybe they really were among the victims of his blackmailing ways. And maybe they’d done something about it. . . .

  Ridiculous. These two stiff, proper old people, luring a strong young man to a rendezvous in the darkness and then stabbing him? Ethan pulled impatiently at my hand and I continued on, thinking furiously and hardly seeing my surroundings. Instead I was seeing Afterglow Vista, the Grecian columns pale in the half-light, the ghostly stone table surrounded by empty stone chairs. Had Guy gone there to do a deal, or meet a lover, only to find Erik Nyquist lurking in the shadows?

  No, it was absurd. I was turning paranoid on this little island where everyone knew everyone and half of them seemed to have motives for killing Guy Price. I was still feeling sheepish about suspecting Owen. What would Mike think if I implied the same suspicion about his old friends?

  Normally I would talk over a tangle like this with Lily, but that was out of the question this time. The Nyquists wouldn’t detract from her wedding, and neither would I. As for Aaron, we couldn’t seem to cross paths without sex or anger or both getting in the way. I suddenly wished I had nothing to think about but dinosaurs and aliens.

  “Aunt Carrie,” said my little alien, “why is that man so big?”

  Once again Marcus was pointing, this time at someone following us from the landward end of the dock.

  “It’s not polite to talk about people’s looks,” I said automatically, having heard Lily say it dozens of times before.

  “He looks like a football player. I saw them on TV, and they’re superbig just like that.”

  “It’s still not polite.”

  I glanced surreptitiously behind me to see if the stranger had heard him. But the superbig man wasn’t a stranger. He was Jeff Austin, in jeans and T-shirt, striding purposefully down the gray planking toward us with another casually dressed man at his side.