Madeline smiled, and it occurred to Savannah that she looked very tired. In fact, she looked far more exhausted than even Savannah, herself, felt.
“Just a few more minutes now,” Madeline told her. “Are you ready to do this?”
“Very ready. My sister has a couple more songs to sing. She’s been practicing for weeks. If I don’t let her do the whole set, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“She’s quite good.”
“Yes. She is. We’re very proud of her.”
The cell phone Madeline was holding in her hand rang with a cheerful little tune that sounded familiar to Savannah, but she couldn’t place it at the moment.
When Madeline glanced down at the caller ID, a look crossed her face that Savannah could only describe as worried ... maybe even frightened.
Quickly she switched the phone off, then shoved it into her purse. She glanced out at the congregation on the lawn. “As soon as your sister finishes, you can go. I think we’ve got your bridesmaids all corralled.”
Savannah surveyed the long line of women standing behind her in their assorted blue dresses. The Reid girls. All of them, except Atlanta, the performer.
Marietta, Vidalia, Jesup, Cordele, and Alma. Each so similar to Savannah, yet unique in their own special way.
For the past few days, they had nearly driven her crazy, but she wouldn’t have taken a million dollars for any of them.
“You have a nice family,” Madeline said, as though reading her mind. “I don’t have any sisters. You’re lucky.”
“Yes, I am.”
“I don’t think you need me anymore. I’m going to run back to the bridal suite and just tidy it up a bit. I don’t want you and your groom going to a messy room afterward.”
“I did leave my clothes thrown around and my rollers out,” Savannah said.
Madeline gave her a sad, wan smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it and get back here in time to see you two kiss. Good luck.”
As Savannah watched her walk away, she wondered why she had disliked the woman so much at first. But it didn’t matter now. Some people just took some getting used to, and Savannah had decided that Madeline Aberson was one of them. Sorta like grits and liver without bacon and onions.
Two songs later, Savannah turned to her entourage. “Okay,” she said, “it’s about time. Are we all ready?”
There was a lot of nodding of big hair, some nervous grins.
Savannah did a quick check. “Bouquet, Granny’s white Bible, Grandpa Reid’s wedding band ...” She turned to Marietta. “You have the ring, right?”
The blank look on Marietta’s face struck terror in her heart.
“Oh, Lord, Mari! You do have the ring, don’t you? You’re the maid of honor, for heaven’s sake!”
“I put it in the bag.”
“What bag?”
“That big trash bag that had all your junk in it.”
“You just tossed Grandpa’s ring in there? Are you crazy? I’m supposed to be putting it on Dirk’s finger in a couple of minutes!”
“I didn’t know what to do with it! I was gonna put it in my bra for safekeeping, but it just felt ... well ... wrong ... to stick our grandpa’s ring in my bra with my boob. Yuck!”
“Marietta, I should brain you, you nitwit!”
Alma left her place near the back of the line and ran up to Savannah. “I’ll go get it. Where is it?”
But Savannah was already on her way, running out of the room and racing down the hall toward the bridal suite.
She realized she was making quite a spectacle of herself, skirts hiked high, feet flying as she sped down the hall. People stared, open-mouthed, as she pushed past them, shouting, “Excuse me. Pardon me. Oops, sorry about that,” as she stepped on a few toes.
Before she was even halfway there, the pain in her chest and her thigh warned her that running around like a maniac was not on the list of activities the doctors had recommended to aid in her recovery.
She forced herself to slow down as she neared the room. So what if she took a few seconds longer? She was the bride. Nobody was going to start the wedding without her.
With a shaking hand, she shoved the security card into the lock and opened the door to the suite.
She half expected to run into Madeline, but the rooms were silent and still as she passed through them, frantically looking for the plastic garbage bag.
“Oh, Lord, please help me find it,” she muttered as she searched the sitting room, then the bedroom. “Please ... they couldn’t have thrown it out ... please ... please ... please.”
She was just about to burst into tears of full-blown hysteria when she saw the corner of the white bag sticking out of a small garbage can beneath the bathroom sink.
Yanking it out, she pulled it open and searched inside. At first she thought it was empty. But then she saw a small wad of tissue paper in the very bottom.
She pulled it out, unwrapped it, and found the precious band of gold that had adorned her grandfather’s ring finger for so many years.
For just a moment, she clasped it gratefully to her heart, then turned to race back to the reception hall.
Then she heard it: the cheerful little song that Madeline Aberson’s phone had played before. And in an instant she recognized it as “La Cucaracha.” “The Cockroach,” an old Mexican folksong.
The music sounded nearby ... in the direction of the bedroom.
Savannah called out, “Madeline?”
But there was no response as the music got louder and louder.
She glanced toward the door. She really had to get back to the ceremony, and yet ...
“Madeline?”
She hurried toward the bedroom and noticed, for the first time, that the French doors leading out onto a small, enclosed patio, were open. The music was coming from that direction.
“Madeline, are you there?” she said as she approached the doors. Just beyond them she could see the tiny, private pool ... just big enough for the bridal couple to do a bit of skinny dipping, if they so desired.
The music stopped just as Savannah reached the doors.
From there, she could see the pool, adorned with floating white lilies and ivory candles. No doubt, thanks to Madeline. Savannah realized this was part of the “tidying up” she had been doing.
So romantic. Such a perfect setting for newlyweds.
At least, it should have been.
But for the body, floating facedown in the middle of it and the red blood staining the crystalline waters.
Chapter 6
Savannah tried to call Dirk, but, as any well-behaved bridegroom would do, he had turned his cell phone off.
Her hand was shaking so badly that she could hardly punch the buttons on her own phone, which she had stashed in her purse in the bridal suite closet.
She tried Tammy, Ryan, and John. But no one answered.
Get a hold on your nerves, gal, she told herself, as she drew some deep breaths. You’re not going to be any good to anybody if you don’t get it together.
She considered just running back the way she’d come to get help, but her knees felt like warm Jell-O, the pain in her chest made her wonder if she might be having a heart attack, and she wasn’t sure she’d even make it.
Quickly, she ran down a mental list of her guests and wedding party. Who was the most likely to have their cell phone on ... wedding or no wedding?
She punched in another number, and sure enough, there was an answer on the second ring.
“Hello?” drawled a syrupy sweet Southern voice.
“Marietta, it’s me, Savannah.”
“Savannah! Hightail it back here, girl! We’re all waiting for you! Did you find Grandpa’s ring?”
“Mari, listen to me. Go get Dirk. Right now.”
“But ... ? What are you talking about? Are you gonna ... ?”
“Hush up. Don’t argue with me, girl. Just do what I’m tellin’ you. Walk out the door and down there where everybody’s at and hand yo
ur phone to Dirk. Do it now!”
“Are you chickenin’ out? Is that what this is all about? ’Cause if you dragged all of us all the way here from Georgia just so that you could—”
“MARIETTA! Damn your hide, girl! Make tracks! Now!”
“Okay! Sheez, Louise ... you don’t have to scream at me! I’m going! I’m going!”
Suddenly, every bit of strength in Savannah’s legs disappeared, and she sank abruptly to the floor, there in the door frame, between the bedroom and the patio.
From where she sat, she could see, all too graphically, the face of the victim, whom she had pulled from the water.
She’d thought there might be a chance, even a slim one, that the body wasn’t as dead as it looked.
But it was.
Madeline Aberson had definitely passed from life to death ... and there would be no coming back.
Savannah wasn’t sure what had happened to her. She didn’t know if the woman had drowned, or worse. It wasn’t clear where all that blood had come from.
The blood that was now all over the front of Savannah’s white wedding gown.
For a moment, Savannah had a horrible sense of déjà vu. It was so similar to her recent nightmare.
Through the phone she could hear Marietta say to Dirk, “Yeah, it’s her. She wants to talk to you. I don’t know, but she’s in a fettle about something. You’d better talk to her.”
She heard a loud clatter and Marietta curse, “Damnation. I dropped it. Here.”
“Savannah? Honey ... what the hell?” Dirk sounded deeply concerned, and she couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t exactly standard wedding protocol for the bride to call her waiting groom on the phone. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. But you have to leave there and come to the bridal suite.”
“What? Why? Aren’t we supposed to be—”
“Yes, I’m sorry, sugar, but it ain’t happening right now. We’ve got us a ten-fifty-five right here in our room.”
“No way! You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I wish I was. It’s Madeline Aberson.”
“Aw, man ... this bites.” He turned away from the phone and she heard him say, “No, Gran, she’s all right. But there’s a problem. A bad problem, back in our suite. I’m gonna have to go see about it. Atlanta, could you sing another song or two?”
She heard Atlanta begin a nice rendition of Paul Stookey’s “Wedding Song.”
Then Dirk said into the phone, “Is there any way in hell it’s an accident or natural causes and not a ten-fifty-five?”
Savannah got up onto her knees and scooted closer to the body. The front showed no signs of trauma, so with considerable effort, she rolled Madeline onto her side and peered at the back.
She saw what appeared to be three small puncture wounds between the shoulder blades.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t an accident, unless she fell on something and stabbed herself in the back three times.”
“Damn.”
“My feelings exactly. You might as well bring Dr. Liu along with you. And send everybody else home.”
“Again.” He sounded as sad and defeated as she felt.
“Yes, darlin’. Again.”
“Who else has been in here?” Dr. Jennifer Liu asked as she looked around the luxury suite that was to have been Savannah and Dirk’s private haven, but was now the scene of a gruesome crime.
Savannah stood on the opposite side of the corpse with Dirk, surveying the sad situation. Nothing looked out of the ordinary ... except the dead woman sprawled on the tile between them.
“To my knowledge, just Madeline and myself,” Savannah said. “Maybe a maid. The bed had been turned back since I saw it earlier ... when I was in here, changing into my gown.”
Savannah resisted the urge to look into the room, at the open closet, where her gown lay in a crumpled mess of satin, lace, pool water, and blood.
“And, of course,” Dirk said, “the killer.”
Dr. Liu stood, rising to well over six feet tall in her fashionable ultra-high pumps. She pulled a red silk scarf from around her neck and tied her long, silky black hair back into a ponytail. Her beautiful face registered the transformation from casual, carefree wedding guest to county coroner at the scene of a homicide.
“Those are stab wounds, no doubt about it,” she said, pointing to the three wounds on Madeline Aberson’s back. “Those are relatively small lacerations. Not large enough for a knife, even taking into account the skin gaping.”
“An ice pick?” Savannah asked.
Dr. Liu nodded. “Something like that.”
Dirk pointed to the pool with its water lilies, candles ... and gruesome red staining. “It doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of blood in the water there,” he said. “Not enough for a person to have bled out, I wouldn’t think.”
“Me either,” the doctor said. “But with that sort of a penetration wound, the fatal bleeding could be mostly internal. Depending on the trajectory, at least one of those looks like it could have pierced the heart itself. Wouldn’t have taken long if that were the case.”
“It couldn’t have taken very long,” Savannah told them as she sat on a nearby patio chair. She was feeling far more weak and shaky than she would have admitted to either of them. “She left me there in the reception room to come back here and tidy up a bit. It wasn’t more than about six or seven minutes later when I came up here to get Grandpa Reid’s ring.”
“That’s not much time for the killer to get his business done,” Dirk said.
“And she was dead when you got here?” Dr. Liu asked Savannah.
“Absolutely. I pulled her out of the water, flipped her on her back, and did some CPR. But it was obvious to me right away that she was past helping.”
“What are the odds she drowned?” Dirk asked. “After all, if she was facedown in the water ...”
“It’s possible,” Dr. Liu said. “I’ll know once I get her on the table and check the lungs.”
Dirk left the patio and walked back inside. Savannah followed him.
She saw a look of sadness cross his face as he glanced over at the bed with its carefully turned-down covers and heart-shaped candies wrapped in pink and blue foil on the pillows, along with a card that read, “Congratulations to the Bride and Groom.”
He turned toward her and caught sight of the bloodied gown she had left in the closet when she’d changed back into her street clothes.
She wished she’d thought to close the closet door.
He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her to his side. “Dammit, babe, I can’t believe this happened to us again. The fire, the mud slide, and now this? What the hell’s goin’ on?”
She looked up at him and read her own thought there in his eyes. Maybe it isn’t meant to be.
But just as quickly, she pushed the dark idea away.
“No,” she told him. “Don’t go there. We are meant to be together. We are! We’ve just got some world-class stink-o wedding luck.”
He laughed, but there wasn’t a lot of mirth in the sound. He kissed her on the forehead. “Fire, mud, and murder ... You think?”
As Savannah stood on the sweeping lawn, watching her guests leave the country club premises—once again, not having viewed her nuptial vows—she couldn’t help uttering a couple of unladylike curses under her breath.
Under her breath, because her grandmother was six feet away.
Then she added, a bit louder, “You’d think that with a couple dozen of San Carmelita’s finest on the property, somebody would’ve seen something.”
Faithful Tammy stood next to her, an equally mournful look on her face. “How about security cameras?”
“Dirk’s with the club’s manager checking them now,” Savannah told her. “It doesn’t look promising. Needless to say, they don’t have any trained on the bridal suite’s balcony. The whole idea for a honeymoon is to have some privacy.”
Jesup walked up just in time to hear the end of the conve
rsation. Looking far less mournful than Tammy. In fact, she looked quite chipper as she said, “Maybe it was random ... some lunatic who’s still roaming the halls, looking for another victim.”
Savannah tried to overlook her enthusiasm. The kid had been born on Halloween, a fact she took deeply to heart. She couldn’t help being a bit of a ghoul.
“Could be,” Savannah said. “But I doubt it. Most people who get murdered know who killed ’em and why.”
“Huh?” Jesup shook her head and walked away.
Marietta hurried up to them, a distressed look on her face. “Are we gonna eat anything?” she asked. “I mean, just ’cause the wedding’s off doesn’t mean we have to starve to death, does it?”
“There’s cake and ice cream in the reception hall. Go chow down,” Savannah said.
The thought of one more wedding cake that wasn’t going to be ceremonially cut by herself and her bridegroom was Savannah’s undoing.
She could take a dead body showing up in her bridal suite. She could even stand yet another ruined bridal gown.
But another cake ... it was just too much.
Granny Reid detected the imminent breakdown and reached for her oldest grandchild, drawing her into her arms. “There, there, sugar pie ... Don’t you go tunin’ up now! You’ve been such a brave girl so far and—”
“Shhhh, Granny!” Savannah said, gently pushing her away, “Do not be nice to me! Just don’t! If you say anything sweet, I’m gonna lose it right here and now, and it won’t be a pretty sight, I guarantee you, ’cause I’ve been saving it up for a long time now.”
Granny smiled and nodded. “I understand. Save it up a little bit longer. But sooner or later, you’re gonna have to let it out, or you’re gonna pop!”
Savannah’s cell phone rang. She answered it and heard a depressed Dirk on the other end. “Van, honey,” he said, “I hate to even ask you this, but ... do you want your wedding gown? CSI wants to take it with them, but I’ll fight ’em for it, if you want me to.”
She sighed. “Let them have it. I had up-close contact with the body, wearing it. They’ll have to check it.”
“All right,” she heard him say, “you can take it.”
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