by Ally Gray
“Well, you can help me figure out what to do with the delivery of daisies that showed up for the Lancaster wedding, you know, instead of the oceana roses the bride wanted.”
“WHAT?”
“Yeah. I called the distributor, and he checked the order again. Someone called and made the change two hours before they shipped. He was nice enough to include a restocking fee and a special order fee on top of it, since the change occurred after the roses I ordered were already on the truck for delivery.” Jeremiah waved a carbon-copy invoice for emphasis. “It gets better. These daisies are neon green. The caller requested they be dyed with the food coloring in the water buckets. Oh, and there was an extra charge for the dye, too.”
“Green?” Stacy cried, but immediately put up her hand, closing her eyes. She took a cleansing, mind-clearing, personality-altering breath before she spoke again. “No, I am not going to get upset. If the bride can find something to like about these people, so can I. Or I can at least not wish them all to die in a fiery car accident. No, you’re a floral genius, I’m sure you can make the daisies work.”
Jeremiah gaped at his boss. Where was the take charge woman who could work miracles in a crisis? The woman who could conjure the correct order seemingly out of thin air?
“Who are you, and what have you done with our beloved Stacy?” he demanded, finally narrowing his eyes in suspicion of the woman who was basically throwing in the towel right in front of him.
“What do you mean?” she asked, opening her eyes again and looking at him, confused.
“What do I mean? What do you mean?! You want me to just ‘make it work’ when the bride specifically requested the same flowers that her parents had at their wedding? Where is my spitfire of a boss who would snatch up that phone, bare her fangs and claws, and demand the wholesaler get the right flowers down here pronto?”
“Oh, that. Well, you see, I’ve finally figured out that there’s no point. If we run around behind these jerks and clean up every single one of their nasty attempts at ruining this wedding, they’ll just keep trying. They’ll get more and more outrageous until they finally do something that gets someone physically hurt, and I don’t want that on my conscience. I don’t want to push them to the point that they burn our building down! So if they think they’ve won, so be it. The bride doesn’t seem to have a problem with it, so neither will we. We’ll just carry on and follow her lead, and make the most beautiful wedding we can with whatever scraps the families let us have.”
“So that’s it? You’re giving up?” he demanded, his anger at one of the people he cared about most in the entire world starting to break through.
“Technically speaking, no. I can fully understand why it might seem that way, but I’m not giving up. I’m just producing the finest wedding we can under the circumstances. Make the daisies work, Jeremiah. It’ll be okay.” She looked up and met his eyes with a sad, defeated smile. “I promise it will be okay.”
He frowned at her, the disappointment written clearly on his face, but he nodded and went back to work.
Now Stacy just had to find a way to make good on her promise.
Chapter 9
“Priscilla, it’s so good to see you,” Stacy said softly, taking the girl by both hands and pulling her into a hug. Instead of looking like she’d expected a woman who’d called off a wedding to look, Priscilla just looked miserable. Her eyes were swollen from hours of crying, her nose was red, and there were dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep. Even worse, the overall effect highlighted something else, the hollows in the girl’s cheeks and collarbones, hollows that hadn’t been there before. All the stress the families were causing had made her lose any appetite she’d had for the past few weeks, and the girl simply wasn’t eating.
Porter walked in behind Priscilla, and he looked just as rough. He was gaunt, with matching bags under his eyes. He hadn’t shaved and apparently hadn’t brushed his hair. Stacy refrained from breathing too deeply through her nose in case the couple hadn’t had the time or energy to think about other areas of personal hygiene, even though it would be understandable in their situation.
“Let’s have a seat, and we can talk,” she began, leading the couple to an overstuffed sofa in her office and taking a seat across from them in an armchair. She poured them each some tea from a prepared tea service on the low table in front of them. She handed over a box of tissues with their tea cups, knowing they would need them.
For the next hour, she listened intently as they spoke, nodding her head from time to time to show her interest and sympathy. But on the inside, Stacy was thinking murderous thoughts. She let the couple vent their hurt, their anger, and their frustration, all while amusing herself with images of different relatives drowning in quicksand while she stood over them, or being dragged behind a speeding train that Stacy had arranged specifically for the occasion. She remember to smile or make sympathetic sounds in all the right places, even while plotting a murder.
“So let me understand,” she said suddenly when she heard something that sounded like hope in the conversation. “You’re not getting married because someone in Porter’s family killed your Great Granny?”
“Right! How can I marry into a family that hates my family so much? Hates them enough to kill? I can’t spend the rest of my life ducking for cover. And besides, what about our children?” Her voice caught on that word as she suddenly realized she would never have a family with the man she loved. Fresh tears poured down her cheeks. “I can’t raise children in a family with this much hatred. It’s not right.”
Stacy teared up a little herself when she looked for Porter’s reaction. This was a man who was torn up inside, one who was on the brink of dying of a broken heart right on her sofa.
“Baby, I’ve told you, I promise we don’t ever have to see my family! If that’s how little they care about us and our happiness, I’ll be done with them!” he protested, but Priscilla shook her head.
“That’s not right, and you know it,” she answered softly, taking his hands and shaking through her tears. “I can’t ask you to turn your back on them, and I won’t be the reason you did. You might think you can do it right now, but over time, you’ll come to resent me for making you choose.”
“Priscilla, I want you to think very clearly right now, and I know that’s hard at a time like this,” Stacy said sagely, steepling her fingers under her chin and leaning forward slightly. “We don’t even know for sure there was a murder! Remember, Porter’s mom has insisted that there were no peanuts in the food.”
Stacy didn’t get to continue, as her cell phone buzzed in her blazer pocket. She checked the number but didn’t recognize it straight away, and was relieved to hear Detective Sims’ voice on the other end when she finally excused herself and said hello.
“There’s no time for pleasantries, I’m afraid,” he said. “Your little game where you had everybody arrested for murder? It turns out it’s no joke. We had the guys at the lab analyze the food from the rehearsal. Checking food for content like peanuts is a really simple process, it’s just a matter of swabbing some chemicals on a few samples, so we got the results back right away. They came up empty, everything was clean.”
“So that means there was no murder, right?” Stacy asked, turning in her chair and lowering her voice to keep Priscilla and Porter from hearing too much. “She could have died any number of ways?”
“Wrong, kiddo. I’m sorry to say, we had them test the dishes, too, just to be on the safe side. Someone smeared the plates with peanut oil, almost all of them. Whoever it was probably couldn’t take a chance on trying to make sure the great-grandmother used the correct plate, so they wiped all of them down with trace amounts. Given the family’s description of the severity of her allergies, that tiny amount is all it took.”
“Who would do such a thing?” she started to ask, but then remembered she’d actually met these people. There was almost no way to narrow down the choices.
“I couldn’t even begin to gi
ve you an idea at this point, but I’ll keep you posted once I’m finished helping Amy—I mean, Detective McFadden—corroborate all the suspects’ stories.” Rod said goodbye and hung up, leaving Stacy staring at the quiet phone in her hands and thinking about how long it was going to take him to get to the bottom of it. She turned back to the couple on her sofa, her heart melting again at the sight of their tear-stained faces.
“Well, it seems there’s been a development,” she began hesitantly, knowing that what she had to tell them would not only set off a fresh wave of tears, but would also seal Priscilla’s heart against marrying her groom. She explained what Rod had told her, but was surprised that Priscilla only nodded.
“See? I knew it. They’d stop at nothing to keep us apart.”
Porter started to protest, but Stacy beat him to it. “Sweetheart,” she began, using a term of endearment that she rarely resorted to when speaking to a client, “think this through. Everything that’s happened so far has been bothersome, and even ugly, but murder? That’s taking things pretty far, don’t you think? Even if someone thought it would be funny to make Great Granny break out in a rash or swell up with hives, that’s one thing, but everyone knew it was a deathly allergy. That goes way beyond pranks to try to prevent the wedding.”
“Then what other motive could they have?” she asked. Stacy sat up straighter at hearing what sounded like hope in Priscilla’s voice. This was a girl who desperately wanted to marry the man she adored, but who was making the wise decision to cut losses now, before anything more could happen. Stacy smiled reassuringly.
“That’s what we’re about to find out.”
Chapter 10
“Now, start over. You mean you planned for someone to be killed? Should we be worried about something?” Jeremiah asked, late that night as everyone met around the conference table, eyeing Stacy warily even as he struggled to apologize for his previous accusing attitude. Priscilla and Porter sat huddled together, barely occupying one space at the table, let alone two, as the other staff members watched expectantly.
“I didn’t plan for it, silly. What do you take me for? I was already thinking about having them all arrested for the pranks, just to get them out of the way long enough for these two kids to get married. I figured they couldn’t do too much harm from lockup. Then the old lady collapsed, and the only right thing to do was to have them all taken in. What was I supposed to do? Any one of them could have done it, so I had no choice.”
“Oh, I don’t know… you could have at least acted sad about the whole thing.”
“I really did try, but I’m telling you even Meryl Streep couldn’t pull off a performance that convincing.”
“Well, I’ll let it slide since they have since nearly caused all of us to go to the big house ourselves. But next time you have the opportunity to smile at a funeral, don’t. Okay?” Jeremiah asked, reaching out and brushing back a lock of escaped hair from his boss’ forehead so he could see her worried face clearly. Stacy shook her head, her shoulders slumping in near-defeat again. For as long as she’d worked in this business she’d always believed—and her reputation confirmed it—that she didn’t have a breaking point. But this wedding was on the brink of making retiring to a cabin in the woods and becoming a hermit sound really good. “Come on, it can’t be that bad.”
Jeremiah ate his words when she told him the details of the detective’s call. He shook his head, refusing to believe these things that had seemed like majorly annoying pranks could actually be so cold-blooded. He was prevented from arguing with Rod’s theories when Stacy sat up straighter and looked around the table with a fiery expression before jumping up from the table and racing to her file cabinet. She grabbed several file folders and her laptop, and carried them over to the table before spreading the folders around among her top staff. “Here you go, ladies and gentlemen, let’s get busy.”
“Um, what exactly are we looking for?” Tori asked, passing another folder to Mandy, who looked just as clueless.
“Someone wanted Great Granny dead, and wanted it to look like an accident, right? No, scratch that. Even worse than an accident, they wanted Porter’s family to look guilty. WHY? We’re gonna figure out who could have had a grudge big enough to kill.”
Stacy continued to smile gratefully at her senior staff members and security chiefs who had stayed to help solve the crime. She cleared her throat lightly to bring the tensions in the room back to a manageable level, then turned to look at the saddest little hopefully-soon-to-be newlyweds the world had ever known.
“You all know why we’re here. Porter and Priscilla were slated to be married tomorrow, and the bride has decided that she cannot go through with the wedding with this hanging over their heads. I don’t pretend to agree with that decision, but as her event coordinators, we are duty bound to honor that request. That being said—” Here Stacy paused to force down the bad taste that was threatening to rise in her throat at what she was going to say next. “—we need to get these people cleared of any wrongdoing and out from under police custody in order for this wedding to take place. That’s why I think it’s best to start at the very beginning. We need to start from day one in order to understand how this feud even got started.”
Porter and Priscilla exchanged a questioning glance, then both shrugged their shoulders. “Like I’ve told you, we’re not exactly sure on the details since it was all before our time, and the story kept getting twisted over the years. From what we could piece together, it either had to do with a goat breaking down a fence, or a vehicle with a bad set of brakes. One of those two things is behind it.”
The staff waited in quiet dismay, watching the couple’s faces to see if they were kidding.
“That’s it?” Stacy finally asked, her jaw falling slack in disbelief. “A goat or a car part? All of this has been about a goat or a fifty dollar set of brakes from Bob’s Auto Parts Warehouse?” The couple nodded.
“Well, in either case,” Priscilla continued, trying patiently to explain in her ever-loyal way, “it escalated because the other party wouldn’t make the situation right. Either a goat broke through a fence and damaged the fence, or somebody in one of the families bought a car from somebody in the other family, only it had bad brakes and caused the driver to run over the goat. And then the other party wouldn’t pay any restitution.”
“Wait, how many goats are in this story?” Jeremiah asked before Tori kicked him under the table.
Priscilla actually looked incensed at the implication that there would be more than one goat in this family, despite all of the craziness they’d suffered over the past few weeks. “Just the one goat. What do we look like, a bunch of hillbillies with goats running around all over the place?”
“Do not answer that, if you value your job,” Stacy said to her entire staff in a dry, sarcastic tone. “So, help me understand. A goat belonging to… somebody?” The couple nodded. “And we’re not sure which family actually owned the goat?” They shook their heads. “So we don’t even know who owned the fence?” The couple shook their heads again. “I suppose it doesn’t actually matter. But how many generations ago was this whole mess involving a goat, a fence, and/or a car?”
“The best we can figure is it was Great Granny’s dad, and Porter’s relative of about the same age. That’s the only way any of it would even make sense. If the folks involved are all dead, and there’s no one alive who remembers how the original fighting got started, then we’re just all carrying on over nothing.”
“Wait a minute, back up. What did you just say? Did you say, ‘If the folks are all dead’?” Stacy looked around the table for any sign that the others were following her. “It’s a pretty weak motive, I’ll admit, but is it even remotely possible someone killed Great Granny because she’s the last person to have lived through the feud in the first place?”
There were quiet murmurs around the table as everyone pondered the possibility.
“That would have to have been one cruel relative to have taken it that
far,” Porter finally offered, and several others nodded in agreement.
“Or, selfless?” Mr. Giudice suggested. “What if the guy smoked the old lady—sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it came out—I mean, offed the old lady, just to put an end to all this crazy feuding and stuff? Stranger things have happened, especially in large families who hold a grudge. I should know, I’m Italian.”
“It’s a possibility, that’s for sure,” Stacy said, confirming his theory while trying hard not to sound like she was grasping at straws. “But the police already said someone intentionally put peanut oil on the dishes. Why would they do that unless they were trying to sneak it into someone’s food? Or unless they were trying to frame Mrs. Lancaster for murder since she made the food?” Porter blanched at hearing his mother’s name and the word “murder” in the same sentence, and Priscilla gripped his hand tighter. She leaned her head on his shoulder in a touching display that made Stacy wonder for the hundredth time how these two could be so much in love with so much hatred going on around them.
Then it hit her like a bolt of lightning, a flash so clear it was as though the little naked angels had fluttered down with a banner that explained it all. She sat up straighter in her chair and placed both hands flat on the table in front of her to make her announcement.
“I think I know,” she began in a slow, distant voice, her eyes taking on a far off look as she concentrated, struggling to connect the dots between all the various characters she’d met in this odd play. “Jeremiah, what was that you said about smiling at a funeral? I don’t think this was about the feud at all, it never was. It’s about greed.”
Chapter 11
“So what are we looking for?” her staff asked once again as they began to sift through the papers in the manila folders.
