Death by Marriage

by Blair Bancroft

Fortunately, one of Peter’s customers actually wanted to buy something, and I slipped out, happy for an opportunity to gaze at the display window of Aquarius Rising, the next shop north. Aquarius is a marvelous pastiche of crystals, gemstones, hand-crafted jewelry, essential oils, New Age literature, and the occasional odd sculpture that left little to the imagination. A geode of blue crystal called to me from the center of window. Eagerly, I reached for the door, paused, then turned away. Aquarius was nearly as crowded as The Second Chance Boutique. I waved to Amy and Sloane and passed on by. No time for questions, but I’d be back. That blue crystal was mine.

  I skipped Carolee’s Fabrics, my home-away-from-home, and peeked through the window of Nature’s Foods. Oops. Almost every last person in Golden Beach must be partying tonight. From the gourmet cheese counter and olive bar to artistically arranged organic fruit and take-out meals, the place was sizzling. Not for the first time I wondered if I was in the wrong business. I turned back toward Carolee’s Fabrics and one of my favorite people, the manager, Alyce Jahnke.

  Alyce, who proved that last was best. Five minutes later she was giving me an indignant earful.

  Chapter 5

  I hadn’t known Alyce well when we were in high school. She was two years ahead of me, with all the golden aura of a cheerleader going steady since ninth grade with the sure-footed left end who caught Chad Yarnell’s passes. They’d married right out of high school, and by the time I came home from my freshman year at college, she was a mother. And twice again since. Alyce joked that at the rate her oldest daughter was growing, she might make Alyce a grandmother by the time she was forty.

  I shuddered. Not that I didn’t consider Alyce my second-best friend (after Crystal), but the thought of teenage children made me add a mental dead bolt to that niche where I’d consigned Chief Boone Talbot.

  I suppose some would say it’s sad that my two best friends are business-related. And maybe it is. But it’s tough to start a small business, even tougher to keep it going. If you want to survive, there’s not much time for social life. Particularly when you’ve crashed and burned as badly as I had in New York. Crystal was my right arm, and Alyce? Well, Alyce was manager of Carolee’s Fabrics, a national chain, and since I probably bought enough fabric to support the store’s electric bill, we inevitably saw a lot of each other.

  Alyce was smart, competent, spunky, and endowed with enough down-to-earth common sense to give an artistic temperament like mine a swift kick in the pants when necessary. Tall and still lean after three children, she had the athletic build of a long-distance runner. Even her face was thin, only her pert brown curls and a light in her matching brown eyes revealing her good humor and good heart.

  Alyce was at the register when I stepped through the door, with two assistants working the cutting tables. She bagged the customer’s fabric, thread, and zipper, handed her the receipt regurgitated by her state-of-the-art cash register, and wished her a good day. As soon as the customer headed for the door, Alyce called for one of the assistants to take over the register, glanced at me, and jerked her head toward the backroom.

  “I’ve got those doohickeys you ordered,” she said as I followed her down the narrow aisle between towering rolls of drapery fabric. “Came in this morning, though what you want them for I can’t imagine.”

  Sometimes I wondered the same. But without the scantywear designs by Randi Wolff—a secret a.k.a. known only to Crystal and myself—DreamWear might have folded long since. Fortunately for the shop’s initial start-up, my mother had inherited money from all those orange groves, plus she didn’t become top dog in Golden Beach real estate by sitting on her nicely rounded derrière. Mom invested heavily in DreamWear and was my silent partner. She’d even protested when I started paying her a partner’s share, but this was something I had to do, even though I’d been forced to create Erotic Designs by Randi Wolff to do it. I kept it very quiet—no web page, no advertising. I worked exclusively with a distribution company in Los Angeles. But Randi’s startling success often kept me up late at night, fulfilling orders in my attic workroom in the sprawling stucco mansion at 100 Royal Palm Drive.

  When we reached the backroom, Alyce handed me my special order, which I shoved in my purse without looking. Animation lit her face as she drew a deep breath and prepared to launch into something she’d evidently been bursting to say all day. “Have you heard what they’re saying about Jeb Brannigan?” she demanded. “I never heard such crap. He wouldn’t touch that tarted-up aging bit of trailer trash if she came to him on her knees, begging.”

  I blinked at that one. Jeb Brannigan scored with every female he could lay his hands on. I sincerely doubted he made exceptions for social climbing trailer trash, particularly one who looked like Vanessa Kellerman. I did a fast mental review of Golden Beach relationships. Jeb was in the class ahead of me in high school, two years younger than Alyce, her boyfriend Gene, and Chad Yarnell.

  “I didn’t realize you knew Jeb,” I said.

  “My daddy and the old Chief were buds. Jeb and me spent a lot of time together when we were kids. Fishing, swimming, picnics, barbecues, even some hunting. He was a wild one, but that’s what boys are, right? I mean, look at Scott.”

  Right.

  “You know Jeb’s a chaser,” I said carefully, “so what makes you think he and Vanessa Kellerman weren’t an item?”

  Alyce beamed a “gotcha” smile. “‘Cuz Gene and I were out in our boat last Sunday, and there’s Jeb and some girl barely over the legal limit making out like mad on Tucker’s Island. I mean, smack in the middle of Golden Beach Inlet in full view of everybody.” Alyce backed an inch or two down from her high horse, and shrugged. “Okay, so they were up near the underbrush and I used the binoculars, but it was Jeb and some kid young enough to be Vanessa Kellerman’s daughter.”

  Interesting. If Jeb really was doing the nasty with Mrs. Santa, he wasn’t completely ensnared in her charms. Not enough to deliberately bump Martin Kellerman overboard. Not enough to risk a charge of murder.

  “You’re sure it was Jeb?”

  “Told you. I’ve known him all my life.” Alyce’s brown eyes shone with the light of the true believer. She poked her head out the door, and sighed. “Line-up at the cutting counter. “Gotta go.” She frowned, squirmed a bit. “Sorry for the tirade. I know you don’t like Jeb, but all these rumors made me mad.” Alyce dashed through the gauntlet of drapery fabrics, past buttons and ribbons, and quickly dispatched her assistant back to the cutting tables.

  Slowly I followed, my mind whirling with possibilities. No need to check out my special order. Alyce would add it to my discounted, tax-exempt bill, which I paid once a month. Easier to keep track of my frequently exorbitant fabric expenses that way.

  Unfortunately, there was no way around a glaring fact—I was going to have to talk to Jeb Brannigan. Aargh!

  I made it to the Farmer’s Market on the old Tamiami Trail five minutes before it closed. In addition to an impressive array of locally grown vegies, they make their own gator jerky. It’s a taste I’ve never acquired, but Scott likes it, and even if I hadn’t wanted to ask him some questions, I would have bought the jerky. He’d had a tough night and deserved a treat.

  But when I pulled into the driveway, Scott’s red ’06 Vette was noticeably absent. Mom, never one to favor one child over another, had given it to him the year she helped me establish DreamWear. Scott loved that car, though why a guy built like a Viking warrior would want to compress himself into a space the size of a shoebox was beyond me. It wasn’t as if Scott needed a Vette as a chick magnet. Far from it. For his sixteenth birthday I’d glued pink ribbons to an aluminum baseball bat and wrapped it up with a can of skunk spray. I’d added a card telling him he was never going to make it through high school without these added bits of chick deterrent.

  We’d all laughed about it at the time, but the truth was, he’d have been better off if he’d actually used them.

  I took one last look at Scott’s apartment over the detach
ed garage before starting up the brick path to the back door. I’d lived here for as long as I could remember, but somehow, today, the beauty of it leaped at me. Perhaps, after an overdose of harsh reality the past twenty hours, I needed a generous dollop from the other side of the scales.

  Our house might not qualify as a mansion by the standards of Palm Beach or Miami, not even by some of the sprawling McMansions built in Sarasota over the last twenty years, but for a gulf-front retirement town built from scratch back in the nineteen-twenties, the Wallaces’ three-story pink stucco with red-tiled roof was the cat’s meow. Nothing but the best for the railroad executives who started it all. And saw it slip through their fingers during the Great Depression.

  The landscaping around our house on Royal Palm Drive was elaborate when it was built. Ninety years later, it could only be called lush. In the front, a giant live oak and its companion magnolia sheltered the house from the street. The back yard was a mass of greenery, including orange, grapefruit, and avocado trees. Scott swore the avocado deliberately dropped its fat fruit onto his roof like a thunderclap in the middle of the night just to give him a hard time. The backyard was fenced, with orange trumpet vine, yellow alamondon, and hot pink bougainvillea providing a riot of color against the coral pink stucco wall that matched the house.

  Also scattered along the fence was an amazing variety of hibiscuses, with azaleas tucked into sheltered corners. In the back, along the south wall, a staghorn fern crawled up one of the original slash pines that hadn’t been cleared when Golden Beach moved off the drawing boards and into reality. Nestled between the pine and a giant split-leaf philodendron was an old-fashioned wooden bench swing, shaded to the point of obscurity by the trees and plants around it.

  I’d spent a lot of time in that swing as a child, as a teen, as a black-haired gypsy trying to co-exist in a world of sun-streaked blonds with names like Bubba, Bo, Mary Sue, and Betty Jane. The odd thing was, I was more intellectually suited to my parents than Scott was. When he was nine, he’d asked if he was adopted too. Heart-wrenching maybe, but not too surprising from a boy whose father, mother, and older sister loved to learn, while Scott was a throwback to the era of knights in shining armor or maybe the barbarian hordes that overran Europe, taking the Roman Empire with them. Every last warrior well-muscled and happily illiterate. Which didn’t mean they weren’t intelligent. They simply had the right skill set for their day and age. In the twelfth century Scott would have been the King’s Champion.

  Unfortunately, this wasn’t the twelfth century. Mom was a graduate of the University of Florida at Gainesville; my father, a History Professor at New College. The small state-funded college in Sarasota—Florida’s answer to the Ivy League—was frequently number one on the list of the best college “buys” in the country. A reputation well-deserved. We lost Dad two years ago to a surprise cancer that was unstoppable, but we’d had him long enough to benefit greatly from his gentle humor, sharp wit, and good old-fashioned common sense. No wonder I was so naive when I went off to college, and still trusting when I charged off to New York. Growing up with the constant love and support of family, and surrounded by the peaceful ambiance of Golden Beach, it wasn’t surprising I didn’t recognize evil, even when it wormed its way right into my bed.

  Tonight it was Crystal’s turn to cook. She’d gotten up early this morning and popped all the ingredients for a pot roast with vegies into a crockpot. Voilà! Instant supper. Mom had called to say she had a late house showing, rare on a Saturday afternoon. Since this was the age of the cellphone, we had the table set and I was pouring scotch onto a tumbler full of ice cubes when she walked through the door. She tossed her purse onto a marquetry side table in the foyer and grabbed the glass.

  “Bless you!” Mom said, and drained half the scotch in one swallow. Jo—short for Jo-Ann—Wallace, is an inch or so shorter than I am, but she makes up for it in attitude. Or maybe it’s what they called “carriage” back in the nineteenth century. That thing where girls had to walk around with books on their heads so they’d learn to stand up straight and hold their heads high. Mom sails through life like a Coast Guard cutter after drug smugglers. She inherited a small-time real estate business, which my grandfather ran more like a hobby, and skyrocketed it into the top agency in Sarasota County, heavily aided by advertising as Jo Wallace Real Estate in an era when Gulfcoast women did not dabble in real estate or any profession except teacher, librarian, nurse, and hair-stylist. Many a customer had been shocked to discover “Jo” was female. But, in the end, it hadn’t kept them from buying.

  No one has ever seen a gray hair on Mom’s head. It’s as beautifully sandy blonde as it was when I was a child, shaped into vaguely tousled designer perfection by the owner/operator of Beauty Is Us, Golden Beach’s finest salon. She may have put on a pound or five, but she still looks as if she belongs on a runway instead of fighting the daily cut-throat battle of real estate in Golden Beach. Whether wearing a pantsuit, skirt suit, or tailored dress, Mom’s the ultimate model of a professional businesswoman, complete with unchipped manicure and pedicure.

  “Pot roast,” Mom chortled, taking her place at the head of the table. “Crystal, you are a treasure.”

  Crystal beamed. She needed that, I realized, after the day we’d had.

  Mom looked up, fork poised halfway to her mouth. Concern clouded her sharp eyes. “Scott is late. Don’t tell me there was another emergency.”

  “I’m not sure he went to work,” I said, squirming. “I had a call from Zack Stevens about one o’clock asking if I knew where he was.” Zack managed the marina at the jetties, and he had added with more than a hint of annoyance that Jeb Brannigan was working his ass off trying to keep up with distress calls from weekend boaters.

  “Oh.” One word that concealed a hundred meanings. Mom loved Scott, but she’d given up her illusions years ago. Someday Scott might grow up. Evidently, it wasn’t going to be today.

  I could tell Mom shared my bad feeling about his absence. After last night, Scott needed support from his family, and I had my doubts about the kind of sympathy he might be getting elsewhere. Okay, so where Scott is concerned, I tend to hover. Unfortunately, he’d never given us any reason not to.

  After supper I cleaned up, while Mom went off to put her day’s notes into the computer and Crystal did her laundry. Then I climbed the stairs to the third floor. Saturday night in Golden Beach and I had a date in the attic with Randi Wolff. It’s not quite an attic. Half the third floor was a gloomy attic; the other half had been designed for two bedrooms and a bath for live-in “help,” an era that was gone in less than a decade after the house was built. Until the birth of DreamWear, the rooms had remained empty.

  To make a workshop, we’d taken out the wall between the two bedrooms and added a large skylight. I had a design table, a cutting table, and a sewing machine table, surrounded by cabinets along all four walls. Mom and I had also tackled nearly fifty years of accumulated Wallace discards in the attic across the hall. We kept the historical items, such as old photos and weddings dresses, sold the unwanted antiques to Peter Koonce, and made room for rolling racks of costumes under construction, costumes awaiting repair, or costumes that should be trashed but I just didn’t have the heart to do it.

  To top it all off, Mom gifted me with a dormer window overlooking the backyard. It was wide enough to accommodate my sewing machine table, giving me a terrific view twenty-four/seven. Well, maybe not tonight. The stars were always at their most brilliant in the winter, but I’d have to turn out the lights to see them. And I had too much work to do to take time out for star-gazing. But first . . .

  I called the pool hall on my cellphone. No Scott, Stan told me. Hadn’t seen him for a coupla days. I tried Bud’s Snook Shack, out on the Arcadia River at the eastern edge of town. Scott Wallace? Bud had heard about last night, but hadn’t seen Scott for three or four days.

  That was it. Any more calls and Scott would go postal about my checking up on him. I was being silly, turning femini
ne freakoid over nothing. This was far from the first night Scott had failed to appear for supper. It was just that . . . well . . . it’s not like he pulled mutilated bodies out of the Intracoastal canal every night of the week.

  I settled down to a job for my Designer Hat Number Three. I called this branch of the business “Semi-Randi.” For DreamWear I mostly went for the authentic look. Outfits that looked as if they really might have been worn by Medieval Knights, Fair Maidens, Robin Hood and his Merrie Men, or by seventeenth century pirates and their female companions. I designed for SCA members, for heaven’s sake, and you couldn’t get a more demanding clientele than the members of the Society for Creative Anachronism. I mean, those guys are authenticity Nazis.

  But my Semi-Randi designs were for a catalog business that specialized in outfits for those who wanted sexy, slinky, provocative, slit-down-to-there or slit up to where the sun don’t shine—while keeping the essentials covered. Which was what made these designs Semi-Randi instead of full-out Erotic Designs by Randi Wolff. At the moment I was working on a female pirate outfit that was going to end up looking a bit like the French Maid Mrs. Santa. Lots of red, but with black trim instead of white, and black front lacing that allowed the bouffant red “silk” mini-dress to pouf out in all the right places.

  I sketched in a few more layers of see-thru red fabric on the short skirt, added a black scarf set at a rakish angle on the drawing’s head. I pursed my lips, then added a row of gold coins to each end of the scarf. Oh, yeah. The buyer for the catalog company was going to love it.

  I glanced at the wall clock above the design table. Eleven-forty. A natural night-owl, why was I so tired? And it all rushed back. Martin Kellerman. Scott. Maybe three hours sleep last night. Time to call it a night.

  My bedroom is a corner room on the second floor, with views of the backyard and the driveway. Scott’s Vette still wasn’t there. We had a two-car garage, but only Mom got to put her car inside. The other garage space was taken up by the ride-on mower and full panoply of garden equipment. Whenever Mom got fed up with a particularly difficult customer, she whacked the stuffing out of the weeds and other invasive species in the backyard. Since Golden Beach real estate customers were not known for their unfailing amiability, the backyard looked like we were bucking for space in Better Homes & Gardens. So far Mom hadn’t hacked up my old swing, but I always feared that day was coming.