The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery)

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  In an effort to derail my fiancé, who was now reenacting Olivia’s flight to safety by running up and down the courthouse steps. I asked, “When is the adoption hearing?”

  “Half an hour.” Stan’s rich baritone contrasted with Lance’s nasal imitation of Olivia’s voice. “I can’t thank you enough for writing us a reference. I really wanted someone from a younger age bracket to tell social services we were fit for the job.”

  “You’ll be wonderful. You are wonderful.”

  Stan moved to stand beside Natasha, who finally looked up and smiled at him. The smile softened her face and lifted the appearance of boredom from it. In spite of my own urgency, I couldn’t help but see the beauty there. She sank quickly back into inspection of her nails and prodded the corner of one step with her toe. I had seen the moment of transformation, and I’d seen the dullness settle down around her again.

  Even though it was her adoption under discussion, she was demonstrating studied indifference to the topic. Not so unusual for her age group, I supposed, but it made me doubly grateful for my own teenaged nieces, who had greeted my invitation to be bridesmaids with joyful cheers.

  “Tasha’s had a hard time of it these last couple of years,” Gert said. Natasha looked up again, and the smile she exchanged with her grandmother was something wonderful. Her eyes softened, as well as her mouth. She walked away from Stan to hug Gert. She did not resume her study of the ground, but instead leaned into the older woman and closed her eyes.

  I felt like a voyeur watching them, and turned my head to Lance, who was looking at me. He had finally stopped talking apes. Natasha and Gert’s relationship must have been complicated, but the love in their faces was obvious, and it made me feel like everything Lance and I had put into worrying about this wedding was trivial. Here we were fretting over a commitment that had been real for a decade, while these two were looking forward to a relationship they had only enjoyed for a comparatively little while.

  Seeing them put my own wedding jitters in perspective. But Natasha and Gert’s fretful exchange earlier had also increased my certainty that my own mother’s worried state about tomorrow’s ceremony would be approaching a high. If we didn’t get to her lunch soon, she would very likely spend the first ten minutes of that lunch telling us off.

  Lance wrapped his arm around my shoulders. I put mine around his waist and started edging him down the steps. He smelled good, like sweat, the barn, and an Ohio forest.

  “Congratulations,” I told the Oeschles. I tried to remember if I was supposed to give any kind of a toast tomorrow night. Surely, yes. I wondered how I could mention Natasha in it.

  Lance allowed me to pull him along, and we were about to turn away when Stan said, “Do you think Art needs any help out there? I’d be glad to lend some muscle if it would do any good.”

  “I don’t think muscle is what he needs,” I said, still tugging Lance away. I didn’t add, And your muscles are a little past their prime.

  Lance shook his head and added, “But if you get a chance to call him and tell him to stay out of trouble for us, it would really help.”

  “Glad to,” Stan said. “I’ll give him a ring before we go in here.” He looked into the courthouse building as he spoke, like he thought they might miss their hearing time standing talking to us.

  “Thanks,” I said. “We won’t delay you any longer.”

  “I hope it all goes smoothly,” Lance added as I finally got his feet moving in the right direction.

  “The problems are all behind us,” Stan called after us. “It’s smooth sailing from here on out.”

  Stan’s problems might have all been behind him, but Lance’s and mine were only beginning. “Drive fast,” I said as we got into the truck. “Before Mama works herself up into a swivet.”

  Lance drove in silence for a few minutes. Then he said, “There’s something you should know.”

  “What? With Art?” My mind was already back at the center.

  “No. With Bub and Mom.”

  “What?” I said again. I did not have time to worry about Alex and Sophia right now.

  He said, “I was trying to tell you right when things went crazy this morning.” Even as he spoke, he was flying down the road, guiding our pickup out of town and back toward my parents’ house. “I meant to bring it up as soon as things calmed down, but they never really did, and I got preoccupied driving to get the license.”

  “Lance, what is it?” Wasn’t it enough that Alex was here at all?

  “Mom thinks the wedding is a bad idea,” Lance told me.

  I clucked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. “That’s not new.”

  “She’s decided it’s cursed.”

  Okay. That was new. “Oh, no. I know she doesn’t like me, but that’s going a little far.”

  “It isn’t you. Or she says not,” Lance explained. “It’s the location. She wants us to use our own house or go to a church. Now that she’s been over to your folks’ place, she swears it’s got bad karma.”

  “Your mother wouldn’t know bad karma from bad lunch-meat!”

  “I know, I know. I didn’t say I think this.”

  But I wasn’t finished. “She doesn’t like it that my parents’ house used to be a funeral home? It’s a little late. If she wanted a say in it, she should have come and helped us pick a venue that suited her. What business does she have voicing an opinion about any of this now? We’re getting married tomorrow. Couldn’t she have spoken up sooner? And I don’t know if . . .”

  Lance interrupted me. “It gets worse.”

  “It what?” I stared holes into Lance’s right ear while he went on speeding down the road.

  “Gets worse,” he repeated. “She called in Bub to throw the whole thing off.”

  “Oh, she did not! Lance Lakeland, they can both go . . . sleep in a hotel for all I care. How dare . . .” I suddenly thought I might cry.

  “And I wouldn’t know any of it if Bub hadn’t warned me. He’s not going to do it. Not going to mess us up. She called him yesterday and practically ordered him to come in. Fed him some line about her own stress level. But then when he got to our place this morning, she had some scheme to crash everything. She was going to blow up your parents’ house.”

  Stunned, I started to ask, “How?” But I stopped myself. “You know what?” I said instead. “I don’t care. Not even a little bit.” The need to cry was even stronger now. “They can both go straight . . . home.”

  Lance blew air out his nose. “They can’t and you know it,” he said. “Or she can’t, anyway.”

  “I know nothing of the kind,” I shouted. My voice echoed around the pickup’s little cab and I deliberately lowered it. “If she doesn’t want to see us get married,” I hissed, “she knows how to book a hotel room and airline ticket for herself. And as for him . . .”

  “And he offered to leave, and I told him not to.”

  “Why?” Our rapid drive abruptly turned slow as Lance exited the bypass and we came up behind a giant combine. It stretched so far across the little two-lane highway that cars going the other way had to pull almost into the drainage ditch to avoid getting broadsided. There was nothing for us and the three cars ahead of us to do but slow down and follow until the combine reached either its destination or a pullout long and wide enough that it could let us pass.

  “I wanted to tell you all this earlier, but we got interrupted,” Lance continued. “Alex sees the same things you and I have been talking about ever since Mom got here. She goes off on these irrational tangents about things nobody can understand. She isn’t eating right, and she doesn’t seem to really realize where she is half the time.”

  “Oh, no.” My anger with Sophia turned suddenly to concern. I had interpreted all of the things Lance was describing as symptoms of my mother-in-law’s dislike for me. “I thought when you and I agreed she made no sense, we were saying something different.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought we were saying her
behavior was rude and inappropriate. I didn’t think we were saying she might be ill.”

  “Not might,” Lance quickly corrected me. “Alex thinks her meds are off.”

  “Her insulin?” A lifetime of obesity had left Sophia with diabetes, even though she was comparatively thin right now. She also took thyroid medication.

  Lance nodded. “And . . . others,” he said. “Bub’s waiting for Dad’s flight to get in, and they’re going to get her to a doctor this afternoon. He offered to take off and let Dad handle it, because he knows how much of a problem it is for us to have him here right now.”

  “You mean because he doesn’t want to deal with it. And what others? Do you mean her thyroid drug?”

  The combine finally pulled off and we took our turn to pass it. Lance shook his head, but he didn’t answer me.

  “What others?” I demanded, my voice low.

  Lance shook his head. “It’s . . . a longer conversation than we have time for right now, OK? I’ll tell you tonight.”

  I started reviewing every word Sophia had said in the last week with a new ear. Perhaps Alex could be useful in his stay after all, but I was skeptical. And I was still far more concerned right now with my own mother and her notoriously high stress level. I leaned against my window and let the topic of Alex and Sophia drop. We would deal with them later. “Right now, we have to talk my mother down from completely resewing my dress or having a crisis about centerpieces in the next twelve to twenty-four hours.”

  “Ah yes,” Lance said. “The dress.”

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  Lance wasn’t comfortable with my dress. He had only been introduced to it once, two weeks ago, and the meeting had not gone well. I had worn it downstairs into my parents’ back parlor. Instead of gasping with amazement when I walked in the room, he said, “I don’t like it.” In an instant, I understood why brides traditionally kept their grooms in the dark about such decisions. But I wanted him to see this dress, wanted him to see me in it, wanted him to approve, and it wasn’t working at all. It was yet another decision we had left until nearly too late, and his reaction had been anything but complacent.

  My folks had a front parlor, a back parlor, and a room we had labeled the living room, though it had probably started life as yet another formal parlor area. I envisioned myself stumbling from room to room, posing in different lights so that Lance could evaluate me until he liked what he saw. The idea didn’t make me happy, especially since Mama and Daddy had a lot of rooms to choose from.

  He had studied me wearing it and said, “You look like a kid playing dress up. The arms are too long and it sags in the chest.”

  I tried to show him how it would appear when alterations were finished, twisting up a handful of fabric to get it pulled tight across my breasts. But the chiffon slipped out of my grasp, and the sleeves got in my way. Finally, I gave up and said, “It’s what I have, Lance. And it was my grandmother’s.”

  “Your grandmother is four inches taller than you and a whole lot . . .” He stopped himself.

  “A whole lot what?” I demanded, though I knew what he was going to say.

  “You know,” he said, gesturing around his own chest. “Bigger.”

  By “bigger,” he meant chestier. I barely graduated into a B cup, and it’s hard for me to find clothes that don’t erase my hard-won breast bump. In the normal course of things, I didn’t think about it much. But formal occasions never failed to remind me that I lived in a C+ world. It didn’t help that every other woman in my family except Mama suffers from boobs in excess, or that my little sister actually had to have hers reduced to save herself from back problems. I did not appreciate Lance’s mentioning it right then. “I’ll be wearing a padded bra, and Mama will take that in,” I snarled at him.

  I had already seen myself in Mama’s full-length mirrors in the sewing room upstairs, so I knew how I looked. Lance’s description wasn’t at all inaccurate. But from the way Mama had described the alterations she would make, I knew the dress would be perfect. I had hoped to paint a similar picture for Lance, but he wasn’t even giving me a chance. Even the parlor’s natural light wasn’t adjusting my fiancé’s opinion.

  “But the sleeves,” he went on. “And the . . . whatever you call the bottom.”

  “The train?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “The part out in front.”

  “The hemline,” I told him. “The hemline can be taken in, too.” I crossed my arms. “Is your only problem with my grandmother’s wedding dress that it doesn’t fit?”

  We eyed each other in our formal wear. Mama was adamant that I would wear my grandmother’s gown. Lance had still lacked for a tux when I gave in, so Art supplied a loaner to keep the groom from having to visit a suit shop with the newly arrived Sophia. Mama, being a matcher and balancer, had wanted at least photographs of Lance’s selection to compare with my dress. We had stopped by Art’s to take pictures, and he instead handed the suit bag over. Of course, Mama had made Lance put it on.

  Where my dress was huge on me, Art’s suit fit Lance almost perfectly. It was unexpected, since Art was a little shorter than Lance, but they had the same leg length, and the two inches Art needed to make room for what he termed his bulging biceps and shoulders also left room for Lance’s added height. I still found the fit suspicious. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that Art had taken Lance’s spare clothes out of his locker at the sanctuary and bought the suit entirely to fit its current wearer. Mama would need to take in a little in the jacket to make the arrangement work, but the length was perfect.

  Thus, it wasn’t too surprising that Lance had asked, “Not fitting seems like a pretty big problem, doesn’t it?”

  Unsurprising, but annoying. I had wished for my mother-in-law. If she had been present, Lance wouldn’t have been able to argue with me. He would have been too busy keeping her bad behavior under control. But Sophia pled a migraine. Personally, I thought she had a hangover. She had flown in the night before, and after a quick dinner with my folks, had been picked up by some girlfriend from Columbus.

  “Maybe if it were too little.” I had twisted to follow his movements. He circled me in a half arc, stopping so he wouldn’t have to dodge the dress’s modest train. “But too big is really easy to fix.” Why couldn’t Sophia be here to irritate and distract her son? She liked to flit. She had friends from Lance and Alex’s days at Ironweed and she was using her two weeks’ stay to get together with several of them. She had arrived home early that morning and gone straight to bed. I was simply relieved she had stayed the night with her buddy rather than either of them driving home after whatever they drank the night before.

  “Is that the only thing you don’t like?”

  “I don’t know!” Lance suddenly flopped down on the sofa. “I want you to have a dress of your own. Don’t you think we can afford that?” He made us sound like paupers. Our salaries at the sanctuary didn’t leave much room for extras, but we were frugal, and the answer was that if I had wanted to buy a new gown, we could have covered it. But it was both an expense I didn’t desire, and an argument with my mother I could safely avoid.

  All in all, Mama was more fretful about the upcoming ceremony and about this dress in particular than either Lance or I. She had just wanted to get started pinning and measuring. In contrast, once I accepted the gown, I lost any interest the subject had held and wished Mama could use a dressmaker’s doll as a stand-in for the living bride.

  Growing up with a seamstress parent, I knew that if Mama felt she could perfect the dress in two weeks, then it would really only take one. She had made prom dresses for my sister Marguerite and me while running a successful sewing business out of the house I grew up in. Altering my grandmother’s gown while enjoying semiretirement would be quite simple. Still, her peace of mind mattered to me, and I liked the gown.

  I sat beside Lance, forcing him to jerk his legs out of my way. “Have you ever priced out a wedding dress?” I asked. Two could play th
e pauper game. “I’d rather have a nice reception. And I like this. It suits me.”

  “Don’t you look like a pair of dolls,” Mama had rounded the corner into the parlor. I supposed so, I in my then ill-fitting dress, Lance in Art’s white tuxedo.

  Lance and I sank deeper into the couch, holding hands. Without looking at Mama, Lance said, “It seems like the dress is so important in the wedding. I don’t want you to have somebody’s castoff.”

  “Just because Nana never got to use it, that does not make this dress a castoff,” I snapped. When Bill Cox skipped town the same day of his wedding to my grandmother Franny, the town gossips had a field day speculating whether the two had ever wedded at all. They had not. Mama remained prudently silent. We contemplated these words for a little while before I added, “I think the dress looks fine. The dry cleaner can get out the yellow, and Mama can take in the seams. It’s not like you aren’t wearing somebody else’s clothes, too.” Probably a falsehood, but he hadn’t worked that out yet. “The suit and dress will go together,” I went on, “and that’s all we needed to figure out today anyway. I’m not so far out of date, and you’re not so very trendy that we clash, and neither one of us is horribly ‘eggshell’ with our white.” Mama hated eggshell.

  Lance had grunted and loosened his tie, which was black.

  “You look adorable,” Mama had said. “Now hop up and let’s get you changed. I’ll run it uptown to the cleaner’s after lunch.” Mama never went downtown. She always went uptown. Downtown meant Columbus, which could have been in Europe to hear her talk about how far away it was. Uptown mean Iron-weed.

  Lance grunted again.

  I told him, “When people have lived together as long as we have, different things matter. Maybe when I was thirty and fresh out of grad school, I’d have wanted everything to be new. But honestly, I don’t think of our wedding like some testament to how pretty I look in lace.”

  “You do look pretty in lace,” Lance offered, snuggling in closer on the couch, rather than getting up as Mama had suggested. He leaned around to put his arm around me and try for a kiss.