by Ally Gray
“Amy?” Stacy asked, cocking an eyebrow suggestively and switching to her most sarcastic tone. “I don’t recall anyone named Amy barging onto my property and putting me in a headlock. There was a very smartly dressed but unfortunately masculine looking woman named ‘Detective Something or Other,’ but definitely no Amys on the premises today.”
“One in the same,” Rod admitted, looking away sheepishly at having called his colleague by her name, giving away the fledgling relationship between the two of them. Stacy smiled knowingly while Rod surveyed the damage to the company’s once ornate Tiffany windowed front door. “You’re gonna put in a claim for all this, right?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll get to it.” Stacy flicked a hand in the building’s direction. “For now, I’ve got work to do. There’s the little matter of a bride without a dress to deal with.”
“This is becoming a thing with you guys, isn’t it? First the beauty queen’s dress gets defaced while in your care, and now this? It’s like you’re in cahoots with the dress people. You might as well start telling your clients to go ahead and order a backup, just to be safe.”
“Excuse me? Are you seriously implying that it wasn’t your officers who destroyed that dress in there? A dress that my client saved up for an entire year to buy? How dare you!” Stacy whirled around and glared at Rod furiously, anger burning in her eyes. Rod put his hands up, both apologetically and somewhat defensively.
“You’re right, I was only teasing. But what are you gonna do now? Shouldn’t you give your traumatized staff the rest of the day off, or something?”
“Are you kidding? Besides the other events on the calendar, we’re still aiming for a wedding in the near future. They have too much work to do to let a little thing like near-incarceration stand in their way. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got plenty of things myself that I need to be doing right now, and standing around talking to Benedict Arnold isn’t high on my list! And you can tell Detective ‘Amy’ to get her skinny tail over here and start cleaning up some of this mess!”
Since decorated police detectives weren’t in the habit of repairing structural damage, Stacy’s security men got to work at least making the offices usable again, much to Mandy and Tori’s delight. Stacy had to remind them more than once to stop ogling the men as they lifted heavy objects, and she actually caught the two of them trying to overturn an armoire just to watch the men hoist it back up into place.
She’d stalled long enough, even though the events of that morning gave her plenty of excuses to be occupied, but now it was time to make the dreaded phone call to the bride with the horrible news about the crime scene that was now her dress. Stacy had flashbacks to having to call another bride with the devastating news, but she hoped—no, she knew—that Priscilla was one level-headed girl. It would hurt, but she would understand, especially when she learned that this was most likely just another attempt by her in-laws to ruin her special day.
Understanding didn’t begin to cover it.
* * *
“I know you couldn’t have done anything to stop it, Miss East,” the girl said in the most pitiful little voice Stacy had heard in a long time. “They think they’re getting back at each other over something or other, but nobody’s stopping to think about Porter and me. Your hands were tied…literally!” Priscilla laughed lightly at her last comment, amazing Stacy to no end. She was taking this far better than anyone else would have in her shoes, and it sparked quite a revelation.
This poor girl—and her poor groom, too, most likely—had been putting up with this their whole lives. No one should be this jaded at their ages, Stacy thought somberly, but for these two, watching their families’ heart-breaking capers and over the top behavior was just par for the course. It was horribly unfair, and she vowed (again) to do anything she could to stop it.
It was too bad that Stacy’s vow would be put to the test—and receive a miserably failing grade—only a few short hours later.
Chapter 7
After fielding phone calls from angry relatives for a solid three hours, each filled with more spit, venom, and accusation than the last, Stacy was ready to call it quits and go into the birthday clown business. No client’s case had ever made her feel more desperate, more like a fraud, or made her miss Abigail more. Abigail would have known exactly how to handle these people, Stacy thought miserably, brushing at a tear in the corner of her eye.
“These morons haven’t even posted bail! How are they allowed to call me and complain?” she demanded before realizing she was talking to herself. “It’s like they’ve got nothing better to do than yell at me. I’m not the one who killed the old lady!”
The sound of a truck backing up outside Stacy’s office brought her out of her unhappy thoughts. Truck deliveries were as common as dirt at her business, but not in front of the building when there was clearly a large, professionally-lettered sign that indicated deliveries were made in the rear of the building. She got up and walked over to the window, brushing back the damask draperies with the back of her hand. The sight of four identical mid-sized dump trucks from Doran’s Manure & Fertilizer, stationed at various points on the property and already hoisting up to drop their loads—the thought of that wording almost made her throw up—did manage to cause her to scream out loud.
“STOOOOOOOOOOPPP!” Stacy continued to scream as she ran across the yard, waving frantically to the drivers whom she knew couldn’t hear her over the mechanism on each vehicle lifting the truck bed. The stench hit her before she reached the first truck, before the first clod of poo rolled off the truck and landed unceremoniously on the lawn.
She didn’t wait for an acknowledgment or an explanation, but instead raced to the closest truck and threw open the door of the cab. She climbed the three steps up to the driver’s seat, shoved the driver aside and blared the horn with all her might, holding the horn down for several long seconds before tapping out a rhythmic pattern on the horn to signal to the other drivers.
“Lady, what are you doing?” the crew manager called up to her, his hands on his hips and a confused expression on his face. He signaled to the other confused drivers, and Stacy leaned back against the seat with an exhausted sigh when she heard the grinding noise of the trucks fizzle to a halt.
Stacy turned and held out her hand to be helped down from the truck, a classic Abigail move if there ever was one. Once someone has had to help you steady yourself, they were putty in your hands—even if those hands were now greasy and smelled oddly of…what? So far from being a weak, pitiful-me move, it was more like a cold, calculated, controlling move to put your adversaries in their place. And a man about to dump a truckload of pig manure on her property was an adversary if she’d ever seen one.
The driver looked at her hand with contempt, but Stacy stared him down until he begrudgingly reached up and took it—another lesson learned at the feet of Abigail, the master. Stacy put more pressure than was probably necessary on his hand as she stepped daintily to the ground, nothing like the thundering behemoth in stilettos that she’d been while racing out there. She stood up tall, smoothed out her pencil skirt, and squared her shoulders before giving him a frosty smile.
“Now, will you please explain how I may help you today?”
“Help me? You can help me by staying out of a company vehicle. Insurance doesn’t cover people jumping up in the cab and smashing the horn.”
“I see. Trust me, I’ll do my best to make sure I am never, ever, ever in one of your vehicles again. Of course, that would be so much easier to accomplish if your vehicle wasn’t parked in front of my place of business.” Take that, she thought. Don’t dish it out if you don’t plan to take a bite yourself.
“We got orders to deliver four loads of premium grade in this spot,” he answered without the least bit of remorse, pointing with an outstretched arm to the grassy area under the swooping crepe myrtle trees. “The owner said a guy came by today and paid in full, and gave us clear directions on where it was all supposed to go.”
The driver looked dazed, failing to see the problem. Stacy pointed, then realized she’d have to spell it out for him. “Harold? Harry? Harry Butts? You took delivery instructions from a man who called himself Harry Butts?”
“Hey, I don’t care what people say their names are. I’m delivering waste from farm animals, not uncut cocaine. I go where my boss says go.”
“Well, I promise you, it wasn’t supposed to be delivered to this… wait a minute. Paid in cash? As in, non-refundable, non-traceable?” The driver shrugged, but looked like he agreed. “Can you describe this person? And who exactly is your boss, maybe he can get to the bottom of this? You know, never mind, they all look alike in that family anyway.”
Stacy looked around at the trucks before inspiration hit. She tore a sheet of paper off her own ever present clipboard and pulled a pen out of her skirt pocket before scribbling furiously.
“I want you to take all four truckloads to this address, and inquire in the office before simply dumping them on the ground, please.”
“Where’s this place?” he asked, turning the paper she gave him around so he could read it.
“It’s the community gardens over by the old train depot. Less fortunate members of town are given garden plots to plant fresh produce, and they’re taught nutrition classes, organic and sustainable agriculture, there’s even a farmer’s market where they can earn some money. They even have to give a portion of their harvests to the soup kitchen. I have a good idea who’s behind this—well, a short list of names, actually—and I think the donation of their hard-earned pig poo is in order. Please remember to check in with the office staff and find out where they’d like it placed, I’m sure they have a compost pile already that you can unload this near. Oh, and be sure to tell them the name of the generous donor who paid you in full, just so the staff of the organization can enjoy a good laugh when they try to send a thank you card.”
She turned on her heel and marched back into the old house, seething and smiling at the same time. There was a long overdue meeting coming, and she would see to it that it happened by the close of business today.
Chapter 8
Stacy sat bolt upright in her bed at five o’clock the next morning, jolted awake from a nightmare involving feuding families, copious amount of liquor from an open bar, and a chain saw.
“Open bar!” she screamed, reaching for the notebook she kept on her nightstand and scribbling furiously. “No… open… bar,” she muttered as she wrote, underlining the words three times for emphasis before falling back against her pillows so hard the headboard thumped noisily against the wall. She stared at the ceiling for a long time, unable to go back to sleep, but was still startled when her cell phone rang.
“Hello?” she asked, not recognizing the number and knowing it was too early for a stranger to call.
“Miss East! You have to help me! Priscilla’s refusing to marry me!” Porter shouted through the phone, choking up as he cried.
“Wait a minute, slow down. Porter? What’s this all about?” she asked, sitting up in bed and brushing the hair back from her eyes.
“She just told me,” he said through his sobs. “She said she can’t do this anymore, and that if our families are trying so hard to keep us apart, maybe they know something we don’t. Miss East, what am I gonna do? Priscilla means everything to me! I’d be happy to never lay eyes on any of that bunch ever again if that’s what I had to agree to, but Priscilla has always cared about family. She’s willing to let that bunch of…”
Stacy waited patiently, shuddering from time to time, as Porter let fly a string of obscenities that would have made a sailor blush. She let him vent without admonishing him, mostly because he was only saying the very words she’d struggled to keep bottled up inside ever since meeting these people.
“I’m sorry, Miss East, I shouldn’t have spoken like that to you,” he finally moaned, having worn himself out as he spewed the words.
“No, no, it’s quite understandable at a time like this. And you’re sure this is really about the fighting, and not more like cold feet? Anything like that?” Stacy asked, but she wasn’t even finished asking before Porter argued.
“No, I’m sure of it. This is what we’ve wanted for over a year now, we’ve just both been too chicken to tell our families. We’ve even talked about running away together, but she’s always said she’d never do that, she’d never go behind her family’s backs. She said, ‘I’m no coward. If we’re getting married, we’re doing it right, with everyone there to give us their blessing.’ I’ve always known that about her, and I gotta say, I really admired her for it. If it was up to me, I’d have turned tail and run, and not come home until it was a done deal. She’s definitely the braver one of the two of us!”
“Okay, I see your point. But tell me, where is Priscilla now?”
“She’s staying at her parents’ place. We bought a house, but she wouldn’t move in until we were officially married. It’s one of the things—”
Stacy finished his sentence in her mind, having heard some form of it many, many times over the past few weeks. One of the things I love about her.
“Can you convince her to come meet with me today? Both of you? Let’s just talk about this and see what we can come up with.”
“I’ll try, but I don’t know that she’ll agree. She’s stubborn, especially when it comes to her family.” He sobbed softly, then recovered enough to apologize for waking her up and thank her for trying to help. He hung up, and Stacy decided now was as good a time as any to go for a run since she was wide awake.
Her run wasn’t a structured thing or an organized effort at weight loss. It was actually more of a habit, a coping mechanism that she fell back on when her work or her personal life got too stressful or too crazy. This run, though, instead of helping her feel better and more in charge, only left her feeling even more confused and helpless to stop the hurricane of hatred oozing from among her chief clients.
She went through the motions of cleaning up from her run, having a light breakfast, and driving in to the office, and had still not come up with a plan to keep this wedding from becoming a multiple homicide, if they managed to have a wedding at all. She decided she had to keep a positive outlook, for the young couple’s sake, and was determined that they would be getting married, somehow. That didn’t diminish the need for safety from the ruffians who were plotting against them, and her first task for the day would be to call an emergency security detail meeting and consider the need for backup, especially someone to keep an eye on those two feisty nonagenarians.
Like everything else associated with this wedding, that proved to be easier said than done.
“Miss East,” the stocky, fireplug head of security with the Brooklyn accent began, “don’t take this wrong, but have you seen these people? We don’t got enough guys to keep these screwballs from killing each other! Two of my guys have already filed claims last month after they had to get stitches when the dad rammed his pickup truck into the picnic table where the other family was eating. My guys had to stand guard just for a cake sampling! Guarding pieces of cake! That’s insulting! I got guys on my crew who served in Iraq! Some of ‘em worked security detail for Diana Ross! I even got some who may or may not have killed a foreign dictator or two! And now I’m bringing in extra workers to watch a wedding. It’s not right, you hear me?”
“I understand your concerns, Mr. Giudice, but it’s very important that we bring in a large team of individuals in order to prevent the bride and groom from
experiencing any problems. I want to make sure their day is perfect, and there’s no way it can be perfect if they so much as lay eyes on anyone who is genetically or geographically related to them.”
“My boys and I will do our best to keep everybody separated, but you gotta watch those folks. They’re a shifty bunch, ma’am, and I can’t make any guarantees. Unless you want us to… you know…” He made a pummeling motion with one fist against his outstretched hand, then slid his pointed index finger across his throat while making a horrible face.
Stacy’s eyes went wide. “Are you seriously offering to kill some of these people, Mr. Giudice?” Instead of answering, the grizzled, tattooed man only shrugged, offering his open hands as an answer.
“How much do you think it would cost to hide the bodies?” she whispered, leaning closer for a second. She straightened up immediately, wondering what could have possible come over her. “No, please forget I said that. It was rude of me.”
“Hey, you’re just saying what we’re all thinking,” he said with a sigh before standing up to leave and signaling for his men to follow. “I’ll get to work on finding some more guys. I’ll start with the county jail and see if any of the inmates still have some community service to work off. Maybe they got some really violent guys who could handle this job!”
Stacy thanked them for their time, her mind still reeling with the possibility of just having a large slaying moment before the ceremony. It wouldn’t be the first dead body she’d had to deal with at a high-stakes event throughout her career, she remembered with a shudder, but it sure would be the first time she’d enjoy the sight of one.
“You’re thinking evil thoughts, I just know it,” Jeremiah called from her office door, interrupting the happy images playing in her mind of a bride and groom smiling at the front of a funeral procession.
“You think you know me, but you don’t,” she retorted, willing the guilty pink flush she knew would be coloring her face to go away. “What can I do for?”
