Caroline laughed. “He did? I love him. He’s a good guy, our Darwin.”
“What’s an antelope?”
Caroline smiled. “Well, you know Martin is new in town, right? He hasn’t had a chance to make too many friends yet.”
“Yes…”
“Well, the wedding is next week and, while Martin has friends from out of town who are coming, they aren’t arriving until the big day. But someone has to arrange a bachelor party the night before. At least according to Darwin. And he volunteered.”
“That’s sweet of him.”
“Very. The Antelope is where Darwin’s taking them. It’s a new bar.”
“Oh. Well, that was rather less mysterious than I expected,” Dani said. “But Caro, Darwin! I thought he was hot back in school, but he’s a volcano of attractiveness now!”
“What? Darwin? Our Darwin? Darwin the clown?”
“Maybe he’s your Darwin, but he was never mine,” Dani said with a little sigh. “Though I wouldn’t mind giving it a go. Is there a wife in the picture?”
“Nope. Not for the last five years,” Caroline said.
“How come?” Dani asked.
“Ooh, there’s the boutique!” Caroline said, apparently not hearing Dani’s question. “Let’s find parking!”
*****
Despite herself, Dani was impressed. The boutique was as classy as anything she’d seen in Paris or Milan. A rack at one end showcased a row of multicolored dresses and in little alcoves above them stood handbags that had expensive stamped all over them. Greek replica statues were displayed throughout the room and Louis XV chairs stood waiting for the tired shopper to plonk down on them.
A woman with dark hair gathered around one shoulder and topaz eyes that outshone everything else in the room, strode up to them.
“Mona?” Dani gasped in surprise. She’d been a mousy, unattractive classmate all those years ago. But there was barely a remnant of that little girl in the confident woman who stood before her now.
“Dani Hedley?” Mona smiled and instinctively gave her a hug. Dani stiffened, as she always did when strangers came into her personal space. Still, there was real warmth in both Mona’s hug and her smile.
“How long has it been? How are you?” Mona asked. “Caro has showed me some of your photos. I hear you’ve had a really amazing life lately! One day you’re in Europe, then Africa, then Australia! It must be wonderful!”
“Well, it’s for work so…I guess I just got lucky with my assignments.”
“Lucky?” Caroline put an arm around Dani and seemed to puff up with pride. “Luck isn’t a factor in it! You remember her in school, right? She always had a camera plastered to her face! Well, it paid off. To his credit, Dad never protested, no matter how many rolls of film she used up.”
“Oh, rolls of photos! Wow! Remember those?! That was back when we still had to wait a whole day for film to get developed!” Mona smiled. “Now I take and delete at least sixty selfies a day without a single thought! I couldn’t imagine taking photos for a living. I am so jealous!”
Dani looked down at the ground. Praise made her uncomfortable. It made her feel as though fate, which had somehow blessed her, would turn on her at any moment. It was an irrational fear but, still, there it was. She’d even refused two awards for her work, so far, solely because she thought it would be arrogant to accept them. So the attention from Mona and Caroline made her want to melt into the ground and creep away.
“I’ve been told you’ve designed the world’s most beautiful dress for Caro?” Dani asked, changing the subject.
“Oh, yes!” Caroline’s smile broadened. “Let me put it on, Mona, please? I want to show Dani!”
“Right this way, Miss Bride-To-Be. Dani, you can hang right here for a minute.”
“My pleasure.”
Dani moved to a rack and began browsing through the dresses as Caro was swept away. She paused over an ice-blue chiffon A-line and wondered what Caro’s plans for the bridesmaid’s gowns were. She hadn’t even thought to ask yet.
After a few minutes, the bell over the door tinkled and Dani looked up. Her eyes widened a little.
The man who walked in looked as though he belonged in a Hollywood adventure movie. He was tall and broad, with a head full of fluffy brown hair and warm topaz eyes. Dressed impeccably in a dark pullover with tan khakis, he had a jacket swung lazily around one shoulder. He looked briefly at Dani and dismissed her with a polite smile.
“Mona?” he called out. “You here?”
“She’s in the back with my sister,” Dani said. “They’re trying on a gown.”
“Ugh.” He looked at his watch. “Well, when she comes back could you tell her I’ll be waiting at Fanny’s? We were supposed to have lunch toge-” He froze, dropping his jacket as Caroline and Mona came out from the back. His jaw seemed to come unhinged and looked as if it were about to drop to the floor along with his jacket.
Dani swung around and gave a little gasp. When she went in, Caroline had looked like the girl next door in her jeans and ponytail. Now, wrapped in a lace dress with a mile long trail, her hair pinned up to reveal toned shoulders and her brown eyes sparkling with happiness, Caro looked nothing short of drop-dead-gorgeous.
“How about it, Dani? How do you think he’ll react when he sees me in this?” Caroline gave a happy little twirl and, then, as her broad smile moved from Dani to the man standing by the door, she froze.
“Leo?” she gasped. Her face turned pale as her eyes grew wide. The easy happiness that had enveloped her seemed to disappear as her whole body stiffened.
Dani swung around to look at him again. Of course! She thought he’d seemed familiar! Leo Chadwick, Mona’s older brother.
Leo recovered himself and picked his jacket up from the floor. “I-I just came…Mona said we had to have lunch. I was just…I mean, I never got around to saying congratulations, Caro. The wedding is next week, isn’t it?”
Caroline’s eyes were flecked with hate. “Yes. And thank you,” she said in an icy voice. “I’ll just get back into my jeans, Mona. Maybe we can do the fitting another time.”
“Oh, no. No. I don’t mean to disturb you,” Leo said. “I’ll be waiting at Fanny’s Diner, Mona. Good luck with everything, Caro.” That said, he shot out of the door, letting it slam behind him as he walked away.
Leo and Caroline had been that couple every high school seems to have. The couple that was destined to be married, the couple they based movies on. It had started in grade school, when the three of them - Leo, Caroline & the now infamous, Jess - had first become best friends. Then, when they were thirteen, Leo asked Caroline out on a date. Dani still remembered how, after he’d walked her home, Caroline had run up to her room and danced around it for half an hour. They’d spent hours talking about him afterwards.
Once again, Dani felt that weird tension in Caroline. Why was her sister acting so strange? After seeing this, she realized that Jessica had been right, they did need to talk. Dani had been away for a long time, but now that she was back, she was going to make sure that Caroline didn’t end up doing something she regretted.
*****
Chapter 4
A Brief History of Their Time
They decided to have dinner at home after all. Caroline’s mood was nothing short of foul for the rest of the day. She seemed to sink into some kind of reverie that Dani found it impossible to shake her out of. She ate dinner in silence and announced that she had a headache shortly after, retiring early to her room.
That left Dani alone with her father as they cleaned up in the kitchen.
“Sharon said she’s sorry she couldn’t make it. She’ll be working late tonight,” Harry said. He handed the last washed dish to Dani, who dried it quickly and left it on the rack.
Dani paused. She was hurt, but this wasn’t unexpected. Her instinct had been right. Sharon was angry at her, for some reason. She’d have to find out why.
“So, what shall we do then? Have a glass of wine? Wa
tch a movie? You used to love Beauty and The Beast. I probably have it on DVD somewhere,” her dad chirped.
“Dad, that was ten years ago,” Dani smiled at him. “I really don’t watch cartoons anymore.”
“What, you’re too old for cartoons now?” Harry sighed. “Well, I’ll tell you a secret: I still love cartoons.”
“Oh, I know you do. You always did,” Dani said. “It’s why I forced myself to keep watching them even though I was eighteen. That way you had an excuse to watch them with me.”
Harry laughed. “You figured it out way back then? Smart cookie.”
“Dad…” Dani hesitated.
She didn’t want to say what she was about to, but something inside was propelling her.
“Yes?” he asked, looking at her.
“After the whole thing with mom…I ran away. I mean, I know that, officially, I went to college. But, the truth is, I was just running away from Innocence. I shouldn’t have. I should have stayed back like Caroline and helped you.”
“What are you talking about?” He turned to face her, surprised.
“I didn’t come home for ten years because I couldn’t bear it.” Dani said. “I shouldn’t have done that. I should have come back and faced you all. I just couldn’t bear to.”
“If you’re feeling guilty, don’t,” her father said. “It wasn’t your fault that your mother ran away with another man. It wasn’t your fault she stole half the town’s money before she did. If anything, it was my fault. I never saw through her. I was blinded by love, I suppose. The sad thing is, part of me is still in love with her. It just seems impossible to shake her off.”
Dani bit her lip. It was hard to hear something that she’d avoided thinking of for ten years spoken about so bluntly.
They’d grown up happy. Dani’s mother was on the town council and her father ran a sporting goods store in town. Her father had inherited the mansion and quite a bit of money from Dani’s grandfather. Of course, Dani wasn’t consciously aware of this as a child. She only knew that she had a father, a mother and two sisters she loved. She vaguely knew, in the way children did, that they were rich, that not everyone grew up in mansions and hired men to landscape their garden.
Then, when she was eighteen, life changed.
The day after she graduated school, her mother disappeared.
The funny thing was, the truth of the situation hadn’t dawned on her for some time. At first, Dani and her sisters had been worried. They’d been convinced that their mother, Angela, had been kidnapped or was otherwise in trouble. The thought that she’d run away hadn’t even crossed their minds.
Slowly, though, the evidence had piled up. Angela had left behind no notes, but a careful scrutiny of her books had convinced the sheriff that she had been stealing funds from the town for a long time. Angela had vanished without a trace, and so had the money. The sheriff had concluded that Angela had been colluding with an unknown man, with whom she’d run off, and the case was never solved.
Soon after, Dani had vanished, too. A thousand little things had pricked at her. The way people stopped talking when she entered a room. The way their smiles never quite reached up to their eyes. The way whispers would follow in her wake when she walked down the street or through a store. Or, worst of all, the way the word Thief now seemed inextricably linked with her surname.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, her family had seemingly disintegrated, too. They never ate together at the table anymore. Instead, each of them hid up in their bedroom. Their father, always so jovial, had become a shrunken shell of himself. He’d spend days just watching videos of their mother - home videos, videos of the plays she had acted in, videos of her recording monologues.
Yes, she’d been an actor all along. Their father had thought the acting was simply a hobby, limited to the plays she put on with the local theater group. But, in fact, Angela had been acting throughout their relationship.
Unable to watch her family being torn apart, Dani poured her heart and soul into landing in a good college. And, as soon as she was accepted, she’d packed her bags and never looked back.
She’d avoided her family ever since. It wasn’t just the bad memories that kept her away. It was her conscience. She was convinced it was her fault that everything had fallen apart. After all, there was one secret Dani knew that neither her father or sisters did. Even now. And Dani couldn’t bear finding out how they’d react if she told them. Part of her wanted so badly to tell them everything. She looked at her father, wanting to just blurt it out. Yet she knew that if she told him, he would probably hate her forever. So would Caroline and Sharon. That’s why she’d run away ten years ago. And that’s why, even now, she found herself drowning in guilt when she faced them.
“Come on, Dani.” Her father put an arm around her and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “I can see you’ve got guilt written all over your face.”
“Guilt? Me? No…what?”
“This is exactly how you’d look whenever I opened the fridge to find all the chocolate cake gone, you know. Sharon could hide her expressions well and so could Caro, but you were always an open book. I always knew when you’d eaten it.”
Dani laughed. “Dad!”
“It’s true. Do you think I don’t know why you left town at eighteen and refused to return? You think all your excuses fooled me? It wasn’t the travel or your assignments keeping you away. It was your own conscience.”
Dani’s hand clutched around the wrist of her other hand. “What do you mean?”
“It took me a long time to get over what happened,” her father said. “I even went to a therapist, you know. He said that sometimes kids can feel unreasonably guilty about their parents’ actions. You’ve somehow taken it into your head that your mother left because you made her unhappy, isn’t that it? That’s why you felt guilty and didn’t want to face us?”
That wasn’t it at all. Her guilt was well deserved. But how could she tell him that? She stayed silent.
“Well, I’m telling you right now, it was your mother’s fault, and not yours. You had nothing to do with it. Your mother was a liar and a thief, and that’s upsetting, but it happens. It’s been ten years and we’re all over it. I’m glad to have you back, kiddo. The family isn’t whole without you.”
“Do you really think that?”
“I really do,” he said. “Caro and I are both over the moon that you’ve returned.”
Sharon wasn’t included in that list, she noticed. Changing the topic, she asked, “Speaking of Caro, Dad, I haven’t talked to her much in the last year and half. This whole wedding is so sudden.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Harry sighed. “It’s hard on me, you know. My sweet little Caro all grown up! Sharon has her own apartment already, and you’ve been gone a while. But now Caroline will move out, too, and it’ll be just me here in this big house. Maybe I should sell it and move somewhere smaller.”
“Maybe,” Dani considered. “Dad, do you really like Martin? I mean, don’t you think it all happened a little too fast?”
“What do you mean?” He looked up at her with calculation in his eyes, as if he was waiting for her to make a statement before he agreed to it.
“I mean…when I left town ten years ago, Caro was happy with Leo Chadwick. The two of them had been inseparable and I thought, well, I think everyone thought, that they’d end up married eventually. So what happened?”
Her father sighed. “They broke up, as young lovers often do. You know how they were.”
“I know,” Dani said. “In high school alone they broke up and got back together at least fifty times. They had more drama between them than all of Dawson’s Creek and 90210 combined. But, I don’t know. I always thought that, in the end, they’d be together. Their love was one of the pillars of my childhood. Kind of like a mountain in the background, to be taken for granted as if it would always be there.” Dani gave a rueful laugh. “I guess I was wrong.”
Her father sighed and got out a bottle of wine. “I r
espect Caro’s decisions, Dani. If I have my doubts, I keep them to myself. I suggest you do, too. Especially so close to the wedding.”
“But why did she break up with Leo?” Dani asked. “Do you think she maybe still has feelings for him? We met him today and the way they looked at each other…there was a spark in the air.”
“You think I haven’t asked her?” Harry sighed. “I loved Leo. To be honest, over the years I felt like he was almost a son to me. I’d have been very happy if they’d eventually settled down together. But life doesn’t work like the movies, and Caro must have had her reasons.”
“I still want to talk to her about it,” Dani said. “I don’t want her doing something hasty and then regretting it for the rest of her life.”
“Believe me, I know what you mean,” Harry smiled. “Alright, maybe we should both talk to her in the morning. We’ll clear it up. Make sure she really loves Martin.”
By morning, however, life had changed. And it was all thanks to the death that would become the talk of the town.
*****
Darwin woke up at 3am to the sound of a ringing phone. Blinking, he shot up straight and grabbed the cellphone on his nightstand.
“Hello?”
“Deputy Scholl?” A nervous sounding Jim Miller was on the line. “You better get down here immediately. The sheriff is visiting her sister in the neighboring town. She said it’d take two hours to reach back home and I don’t know what to do!”
“Jim? What’s wrong? Where are you?” Jim Miller was their newest recruit, just two months into his post as Junior Deputy.
“I’m in the woods behind the Hedley Mansion,” Jim said. “Some hikers…well, somebody…called it in. Said they’d heard a shot. I came out here and Xena, my K9, she went wild. I found a body! Darwin, please, get down here, would you? I really have no idea what the procedure is. I don’t know what to do!”
“I’ll be right there,” Darwin said. “Stay calm, Jim. You’re doing fine. Just seal off the crime scene and make sure nobody else touches it. Alright? Have you called forensics?”
Killer Dress: A Small Town Cozy Mystery (Shot & Framed Book 1) Page 3
