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

by Jessie Bishop Powell

  Rachel was not a child anymore. She was seventeen now, and Marguerite would not want her oldest in the room with Lance while they were both in pajamas. My sister read sex into everything her two oldest daughters did and said, fearful of becoming a grandmother too soon. It didn’t matter that she wouldn’t suspect Lance specifically of harboring intentions toward her children. She mistrusted all males where her slender dark-haired girls were concerned. Besides, I wanted to let Lance sleep. “Let’s head down to the kitchen,” I said.

  Rachel didn’t answer right away. I turned my head and saw her kneeling beside the bed. Once again, I was transported back to those summers when she stayed with us. Marguerite insisted she was too young the first summer. She said, “She’ll be home before the first night is over,” which would have been awkward since they were living in Schenectady, and Ohio to New York was no short drive.

  But she needed the child care. Brenda, at three, was too young to send away, and the last months of that pregnancy with Poppy had gone very badly for my sister. Mama went up to stay with the family, to cook, clean, and care for Marguerite. I came for a weekend, but I couldn’t stay because I had a job. Moreover, I had only recently escaped my relationship with Alex and tentatively begun one with Lance. I didn’t like to be away from work and home long. I offered to take Rachel home with me, promised to keep her a safe distance from the animal enclosures and generally protect her from harm. (Alex was safely locked away in a rehab program at the time.)

  Although Mama and Marguerite never would have admitted it, two young children in the house with Marguerite overwrought and on bed rest would have been a strain. Which was why I got to keep the leggy, thoughtful Rachel at all. There had been one long tearful night when I thought Marguerite might be right, but the second morning Rachel had come to me like this, kneeling, serious, whispering me awake to ask, “Can we go meet the monkeys now, Aunt Noel?”

  But this morning, my niece did not want to go see the monkeys. This morning, something was wrong. Her oblong, olive-skinned face was tear-streaked, and she was still sniffing a little. She turned her head, and our eyes met. “Help me,” she whispered.

  “Oh, honey.” I sat up and pulled her into my arms. “What is it?”

  She nuzzled against my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she said in a choked whisper. “I wasn’t thinking of the dress.”

  “The dress?”

  My wedding gown was still upstairs on Mama’s dressmaker’s form, waiting for me to lift it up and put it on tonight. If one of the siblings had done something to it, I’d be more inclined to suspect the eight-year-old Bryce, with his fondness for stairs and boundless energy, not the cautious, responsible Rachel.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” she repeated, “about the wedding. I was . . . it was after Mom tried to cancel senior prom.” She looked at me in mute appeal, suddenly wary. Marguerite had lobbied the school board to halt the dance rather than allow a lesbian couple to attend. One of the girls was a close friend of Rachel’s, and Rachel joined her friends in supporting the couple. After one horrible rally with mother and daughter hurling insults across a parking lot, Rachel simply picked up and moved out.

  There had been a couple of rocky weeks when both my sister and my niece called me nightly expecting comfort and support. In the end, Marguerite relented, realizing that her relationship with her daughter was more important than a dance. Rachel had come home, but the damage Marguerite had caused was permanent, and now the two didn’t talk much to one another, even though they shared a house again.

  I patted the bed beside me, since it seemed we wouldn’t be heading down for breakfast yet. Rachel climbed up and asked, “You’ve seen the dresses, right? Mom e-mailed pictures?”

  Ah. The bridesmaids’ dresses. Because I would have put this off also until late, Marguerite had simply taken the detail out of my hands. She demanded to know my colors back in January and assigned me some when I refused to pick. By March, she had her children perfectly outfitted in powder blue and sea foam green, and I had one less thing to worry about for June. And she had e-mailed pictures. I had never actually opened the attachment. Lance and I had instead allowed my sister to figure out the groomsmen’s vintage colored lapels by working with my friend Hannah in her vintage store down in Ironweed.

  Marguerite had been in her element coordinating Art, Xian, and Chesley to match Rachel, Brenda, and Poppy. Handy that she lived in Cleveland now, not all the way up in New York. The prom debacle was in late April, after the bridesmaids’ dresses had been selected. I was getting a glimmer of what my niece might be talking about. Lance was awake now, perched up on his left elbow, stroking my back with his right hand. I turned my head and briefly met his eyes. He shrugged with his right arm, and I knew that whatever my niece had to say, he would be fine with it.

  “I haven’t seen them yet, love,” I admitted to her.

  “Oh.” Rachel seemed to be thinking this over. Then she said, “They really are pretty. You know Mom. She’d never do anything gauche.” She paused. “Here’s the problem. Mine has spaghetti straps. And that was the last thing on my mind. And, oh Aunt Noel, I’m so sorry.” It looked for a minute like she was going to cry, but she didn’t. She also didn’t say anything else. She lapsed into one of those Rachel-ian silences that indicated complete discomfort with a topic.

  “Rachel,” I said, “Whatever it is, you know I support you. We support you.”

  She smiled at that and leaned heavily against me. Finally, she said, “I went and got a tattoo. And Mom hasn’t got any idea at all, and I can’t stand for her to find out.” She hunched over to rest on my shoulder. She had gotten too tall to cuddle up to me comfortably, and I regretted it, because she needed holding. I did the best I could, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her into a tight hug.

  Finally, I said, “A tattoo’s not such a bad thing. Some are really nice. Let’s see it.”

  “It really is. Nice, that is.” She rolled up one of her nightgown’s long sleeves. At the top, the tattoo covered her shoulder, then vanished into the nightgown’s fabric. At the bottom, it extended a couple of inches toward her elbow. It featured a young woman’s face in profile. The artist had captured Rachel’s upturned nose and oblong eyes beautifully in ink. But instead of long dark tresses, the tattoo had rainbow hair. I stared at it for a little while, then said, “Honey, if you want this to show in the wedding, it is absolutely fine with us. Right, Lance?”

  Lance was sitting all the way up now, studying Rachel’s shoulder from behind me. “Yes,” he said. “Absolutely.”

  “It’s not you. It’s Mom,” Rachel reminded us.

  “It’s a little bit big to cover up with an adhesive bandage,” I pointed out.

  “I know. I even tried one of those big knee-sized ones, but the rainbow actually wraps up over my shoulder. Mom’s no dummy. She’d ask questions.”

  “That she would,” I said. “How did you even get it without some kind of parental consent?”

  “Oh, you know,” she said. “It was April, and I was living on Lisa’s couch. And you know Cleveland’s Pride community really ...”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Lance interrupted.

  “Pride,” Rachel said. “You know. Gay pride.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Sorry. Not awake.” Then he added, apparently thinking now about her sleeping on anybody’s couch, “You could have come to us, you know.”

  “Little far to drive to school every day,” Rachel said. “And we were pretty busy with the protests. But thanks, Uncle Lance.” Then she suddenly burst out, “I wish I hadn’t moved back in! It would have been better if I’d stayed away, but I didn’t want . . . I mean, she’s my mom, and I’m already . . .” Rachel’s sentence trailed off. She didn’t need to finish the statement. Her choice to attend college in the middle of the Arizona desert, about as far from her mother as she could manage without leaving the country altogether, was another sore spot for my sister.

  “The tattoo,” I said. “How did that come about?”
/>   “Oh. Yeah. Lisa’s uncle was pretty pissed . . . sorry . . . pretty furious with Mom.” Rachel still blushed when she swore. Or anyway, when she did it around us. I was pretty sure that by her age I had been deliberately cursing in front of my parents entirely to enjoy their reactions. It was strange that a girl brave enough to stand up to her mother at a rally still got embarrassed over mildly bad words in front of her aunt. Rachel continued, “Lisa and I have been friends since grade school, and Lisa went through so much crap when she came out, and to have her best friend’s mom try to turn her into an untouchable over prom . . .” My niece dissolved into silence again, and it took several minutes of back patting to bring her back around.

  Finally, she continued. “It was awful. Not only that half the community didn’t want Lisa and Nancy at prom, but that it should be my mom leading the pack. Anyway, Lisa’s uncle does tats. A couple of the organizers helped me come up with this one and he inked it. But when Mom backed down, I didn’t want to throw it in her face so much. If I can get to August, I’ll be gone, and when she sees me on holidays she’ll think I did it at school.”

  “Which means,” I said, “that we have”—I paused to check the clock—“a little under twelve hours to do something about those spaghetti straps.”

  “Less than that,” Rachel said, “because Brenda and I are helping with the decorations as soon as the tables and chairs get here.”

  “Right,” I said. “Whatever I do to your dress, I’ve got to double for Brenda’s.”

  “No.” Rachel shook her head. “The dresses aren’t alike. I’m kind of lucky I don’t have Bren’s. Hers has off-the-shoulder sleeves that . . . there isn’t much I’d be able to do if I had it.” She looked at the ground and flushed even more deeply than when the not-quite-curse had popped out earlier.

  “Honey, we can do this,” I told her.

  “Absolutely,” Lance said.

  I wanted to ask him, How would you know? But Rachel’s face relaxed, and instead I tried to think. If we could work out a wedding without a best man, surely Rachel’s dress would be a cinch. Six fifteen in the a.m. Mama could maybe whip together a couple of puff sleeves between now and then, but those might not be long enough and might still leave Rachel’s shoulder blade exposed. And it would mean letting Mama see the tattoo for fittings, and, while I was sure she wouldn’t want it visible in this evening’s ceremony, I couldn’t imagine that she would want to keep secrets from Marguerite. Maybe a wrap of some kind, carefully draped?

  “OK, coffee,” I said. “And let’s get you out of this bedroom before your mom decides something inappropriate is happening between you and Lance.”

  “Oh, God,” Rachel said. “She’s going to drive me nuts, Aunt Noel.”

  “Me too, honey,” I told her. “And she’s been my sister a lot longer than she’s been your mother.”

  In the hall, we met Marguerite coming down for breakfast. She glanced at the three of us suspiciously, as if she could sense that we were plotting against her. Truthfully, she probably could tell something was up. She had a sixth sense for trouble that she had been using against me since our own teenaged years. “Good morning,” she said rather stiffly.

  “Morning, Mom.”

  Forcing joviality I didn’t feel at all, I seized Marguerite by the arm and all but dragged her downstairs to the kitchen with me. “Let’s get this going,” I said to her. “After everything that went wrong yesterday, I’m going to need your help more than ever.”

  My sister seemed surprised. She stopped between steps and studied me for a moment with a skeptical eyebrow cocked. Am I laying this on too thick? I wondered.

  Then her natural tendency to organize and direct kicked in, and she continued her descent. She said, “Breakfast first.”

  As soon as I got some caffeine in my system, the beginnings of a plan came to me. It was simple, really. I had to add a jacket to Rachel’s dress. There was no other way to ensure that her shoulders would remain covered for the entire ceremony. We wouldn’t be making one of those in twelve hours (now closer to eleven), though. It would have to be purchased. And I would have to do it without hurting Marguerite’s feelings too badly or tipping her off about Rachel’s arm. Yeah. Simple.

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  Once we had eaten, Bryce dashing around the table helicopter-like until Mama sent him out back to exercise the dogs, I said to Marguerite, “Let’s see these bridesmaids’ dresses you put so much effort into finding.”

  Marguerite smiled suddenly. “All right,” she said. “Let’s. Do you want the girls to model?”

  “No,” I said hastily. “I want to see them laid out in front of Nana’s gown. I know you had to work without knowing what my dress would be, and I want to make sure they all look right together.”

  “Not much we can do now if they don’t,” Marguerite said.

  “Oh, you know,” I said. “We can always do something.” Calling on her sense of team play. It worked, because she didn’t protest my reasoning again as we trooped up the stairs together.

  The dresses stunned me. The only direction I had given was that I didn’t want three identical bridesmaids. I wanted dresses that matched each girl’s personality. This was an adult wedding, and I didn’t want the ceremony to look like I was playing dollies. Quite frankly, I still expected matchy-matchy copies of the same gown in different sizes. Rachel’s comment that her sleeves differed from Brenda’s had been the first hint that my sister had actually followed my request. Now, when she let me into Mama’s workroom with the girls’ gowns laid out in front of Nana’s dress, I could see that she hadn’t merely done what I asked. She had intuited things I couldn’t have guessed I would want and worked them into the selections.

  Marguerite had not sewn these, but she had spent a lot of time and money finding them. “Oh, Margie,” I said, using her childhood nickname without thinking. “They’re amazing.” If she had been anyone else, in that moment I would have reneged on my plan for adding a jacket to Rachel’s gown. Tattoo be damned, I didn’t want to alter a thing about any of these.

  Marguerite had alternated colors, so that Rachel and Poppy, the oldest and youngest, were wearing sea foam green and Brenda, in the middle, had powder blue. Bryce’s ring bearer suit matched Brenda’s blue dress. And the dresses were none of them alike.

  Poppy said, “Oh please, let me put mine on, Aunt Noel. I’ll take it off after a minute.”

  “All right,” I said. “But only a minute.”

  “Now Poppy,” Marguerite said. “We already discussed . . .”

  Brenda stomped her mother’s toe. “I’m so sorry!” she said, even though it had looked pretty deliberate.

  Marguerite threw her daughter a look that I couldn’t understand and said, “We already discussed how soon before the ceremony to put on . . .”

  “Oh please,” Poppy begged.

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “We didn’t know Auntie Noel would want to see them!” Poppy said.

  “Be careful,” Marguerite said. “I don’t want anything to happen to it before the ceremony.” Poppy seized her dress and dashed to the other side of the room with Marguerite chasing rapidly after her. At ten, Poppy was the most energetic of my nieces. Rachel was thoughtful, and Brenda was athletic, but Poppy had earned the nickname “our little dynamo” early in her life and showed no signs of shedding it. Although Bryce was more boisterous, Poppy had her mother’s nonstop energy. Also, of all four children, she was the only one whose features favored Marguerite’s. Where Rachel, Brenda, and Bryce all had their father’s hair, almost black, Poppy’s locks were more of a mousy brown like their mother’s. Like mine, for that matter. Poppy also had her mother’s round face with its rosebud lips and incongruously lengthy nose, which seemed too sharp to hold the glasses the child was forever pushing back up.

  “What was that?” I asked Brenda.

  Brenda rolled her eyes. “Mom’s never going to listen to what anybody else wants,” she muttered.
/>   It didn’t seem like much of an excuse to go trampling Marguerite’s feet.

  Poppy flashed me her best smile as she spun back across the room in her ensemble. She wore a simple A-line that came to her calves. Mama would call it tea-length. Its flared sleeves almost reached Poppy’s wrists at their longest point. Although the dress itself was sea foam green, a powder-blue sash tied at her hip. Flowers stitched around the hem in a slightly darker shade emphasized the skirt’s simplicity and brought out Poppy’s dark green eyes. The top boasted a rounded neckline that showed off an ivory cameo necklace Marguerite had probably coordinated with my jewelry by magic. Poppy would have wrist-length gloves that matched the flower stitching and a bow in the back of her bobbed hair later tonight, in addition to the pair of modest heels she had already put on.

  Since we were down a man, Poppy would be walking in with Bryce. It was difficult to tell whether he had been upgraded to junior groomsman from ring bearer or Poppy had been downgraded from full to junior bridesmaid or both, but they liked the change. Poppy had told me at breakfast, “I felt funny walking in with a guy, you know? And Bryce didn’t want to come in first all by himself.”

  Yes, I did know. Or I should have. Even though Xian was only slightly taller than I was, he was still over a foot higher than Poppy, and we hadn’t considered the pairings at all when I selected young family members for bridesmaids but Lance chose adult friends for groomsmen. Now, Xian would walk with Brenda, who was actually a little taller than he was, and Chesley would accompany Rachel. Only Lance would be alone, waiting for me at the front of the garden, while we both tried not to think about who should have been walking with Rachel.

  Poppy spun a less-than-perfect circle on her heel, drawing me back to the present and the dresses. She lost her balance at the end and fell back into Marguerite, reminding me why I wanted the gown back off of her as quickly as possible. All that energy didn’t come with quite enough coordination for a fancy wedding if she got dressed much more than an hour early. Eleven hours? Disaster writ large. “You look beautiful,” I told her. “Let’s get you out of it until later.”