by Leslie Caine
Table of Contents
Two Funerals and a Wedding
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
About the Author
Discover Leslie Caine
Two Funerals and a Wedding
A Domestic Bliss Mystery (#8)
Leslie Caine
Copyright
This Ebook is licensed to you for your personal enjoyment only.
This Ebook may not be sold, shared, or given away.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Two Funerals and a Wedding
Copyright © 2014 by Leslie Caine
Ebook ISBN:
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
NYLA Publishing
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Dedication
To all of my fabulous friends in the coffee group at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, Colorado. You mean the world to me!
Chapter 1
“Do you ever get a feeling of impending doom, Erin?” Aunt Bea asked me with a sigh.
This was hardly a time for me to be gloomy. I was marrying the man of my dreams, Steve Sullivan, two weeks from Saturday. He was also my business partner in our interior design company, and Aunt Bea was one of our clients. She and I were currently doing a walkthrough of the new, enormous wine cellar that I’d designed for her.
“I do now. Are you trying to tell me you don’t like what I’ve done with this space?” I joked. Or at least, I certainly hoped I was joking. She had declined my offer to allow my highly skilled crew to help her stock the shelves, so the unopened wine boxes were now marring the ambience. The overall effect was like trying to enjoy a glorious ocean beach when your lounge chair is completely surrounded by garish-colored tents and huge umbrellas.
“Not at all, my dear. I’m thoroughly enthralled with it. I’m so glad you convinced me to add an extension to the basement. Those goldenrod and maroon colors on the plaster walls are so warm and rich, you can almost taste them. The vines on the columns. The marble-top table. My basement could be a five-star restaurant in India.”
“Excellent. That’s precisely what I was aiming for.” Although it would have felt better if her vocal tones hadn’t been so flat. As an interior designer, I pride myself on being able to ascertain my clients’ unique tastes, then refine them so that we create a space in which their guests exclaim: “I love it! This room is so you!” Identifying Bea’s tastes had been a snap; her aim was to make visitors feel as though they’d entered a palace in India the instant they’d stepped inside her front door. Which was more than a little jarring, considering that this was a moderately sized, nondescript beige-with-white-trim two-story house in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. Throughout her entire house, every room had a gold-and-burgundy color palate, along with numerous white-marble surfaces and pillars. Sitar music played on a nonstop loop from small speakers in every room (except for this one, thank heavens). The aroma of cinnamon and saffron perpetually wafted through the air, even though she hated to cook and had most of her meals delivered.
If I ever managed to convince Aunt Bea to let me redo her home, I would steer her toward subtlety—the less-is-more tenet of design that my affiliation with Steve Sullivan had helped me to refine. My biggest accomplishment so far was to convince her to let the wine cellar be her house’s singular sound-system-free zone. Not wanting to state bluntly that her interminable Ravi Shankar music was discussed whenever anyone as much as mentioned her house, I had resorted to flowery language. I told her, “A fine glass of wine generates its own symphony.” (Yes, my cloying statement was over the top, but I’m passionate about my career and will use every means available to get the best results.)
“I can’t figure out what’s gotten into me lately,” she continued. “I just feel so anxious and pessimistic.”
She truly did seem uneasy and kept fidgeting with her hair, which she wore in a bun. She was one of those lucky older women whose hair had turned snow white. She had a rather Buddha-like body, yet she seemed comfortable with her weight and moved gracefully, despite her gold, scepter-like cane that seemed to be more of a fashion statement than a crutch. Maybe she was suffering from arthritic pain, or depression. I decided not to risk insulting her by asking. Instead, I merely nodded and made a sympathetic noise.
She shuddered as if trying to shake off her mood like a wet dog ridding water from its fur. “I can’t even tell you how greatly I’m looking forward to your nuptials.”
“Not as much as I am,” I said, beaming despite Aunt Bea’s somber mood. It always made me smile whenever someone brought up the subject of my impending wedding to Steve Sullivan. “But let’s get back to business for a minute. Do you like the spacing between shelves?”
She nodded. “They look perfect.”
As Bea and I stepped around wine crates and inched along the rows of empty shelving, we discussed the minute details of the first-rate craftsmanship. This project had been pricey, yet Aunt Bea hadn’t batted an eye. In the twenty years since Bea’s husband had deserted her, she had made a fortune as a wine distributor, traveling extensively and eventually selling her home in Denver and moving to Napa. Last winter, she’d moved here to Crestview, Colorado, and had bought this house, tucked among the aspen and blue spruce in the foothills of the Rockies.
Back when she’d lived in Denver, Bea had become an honorary “aunt” to my adorable soon-to-be husband and his sisters. She was also an old friend of my beloved landlady and housemate, Audrey Munroe. Audrey called her “Aunt Bea,” too, despite their being roughly the same age. Audrey’s explanation had been: “It’s a nickname. Her actual name is Barbara Elizabeth Quince, but she preferred ‘Beth’ to ‘Elizabeth’ or ‘Barbara,’ which made her initials B.B.Q.” Audrey never got around to explaining how she went from Beth to Aunt Bea, and I never asked. Conversations with Audrey are like Aunt Bea’s bottles of Cabernet. They’re absolutely delightful, provided it’s past the noon hour when you open one, and you restrain yourself from overindulging in them. I loved the woman dearly. Audrey was walking me down the aisle, a concept that never failed to make me smile; as if, for all of our disagreements, Audrey could ever “give me
away.”
The moment we finished our walkthrough, Aunt Bea said she’d like to sit at the table for a minute before we went back upstairs. We claimed our customary seats at the four-top table in her cozy, faux “Indian restaurant,” just outside the carved oak door to her wine cellar.
“What is our Mister Sullivan up to today?” she asked.
“He’s working on the design of the new restaurant on Maple Street.”
“Steve’s designing ‘Parsley and Sage’?” she asked, with a grimace. “That figures. I’m sure Drew is taking full advantage of Steve’s generosity.” She snorted. “I just hope he isn’t leading Steve into trouble. It would be just like that self-centered jerk to con Steve into loaning him money, and then repay him with a jar of parsley and sage.”
She was referring to Drew Benson, Steve’s best man. Having met in second grade, Drew and Steve were each other’s oldest and closest friends, and I felt compelled to defend him. “Steve says that Drew saved his life when they were horsing around on the roof of a skyscraper in Denver.”
“That’s true,” Aunt Bea said, “but I’m certain it was Drew’s idea to climb onto that ledge in the first place.”
She was not alone in that assumption. I liked all of Steve’s friends immensely, but Drew was the type of guy you enjoyed most when he was just a voice on the phone. He’d left Denver and moved to Napa shortly before Steve and I had started dating. Now that he was opening another restaurant here in town, Drew was planning on living here at least six months every year. Unfortunately, Steve seemed to revert to a more boisterous—and boyish—version of himself whenever the two of them were together.
“I never see Steve anymore,” Bea said, somewhat echoing my own train of thought.
His absence from Aunt Bea’s life was due to his dislike of her. Bea had lived in the same Denver neighborhood where Steve and Drew had grown up. When Steve and I were drawing up our invitations, he had described her as “the loon from the family closet.” After working on Aunt Bea’s wine cellar for three months now, I had found her to be eccentric but not at all “loon-like.” I’d begun to suspect that Steve’s troubles with her were mostly due to her animosity toward Drew—for whom Steve had a blind spot in his heart.
“You’ll see each other at the party tomorrow night at Parsley and Sage.” When she gave me a blank stare, I added, “And at the wedding the Saturday after next.”
“Oh, I’ll be at both celebrations, Erin. As long as my premonitions turn out to be unfounded and I’m still up and kicking.”
“Are you seriously afraid you won’t be around in two weeks?” I asked.
Her only answer was a heavy sigh. My worry about her began in earnest.
“Did you have a bad dream last night? Are you feeling under the weather?”
“No, but I should have a talk with that young man of yours. I guess it can wait until tomorrow night. We need to discuss some serious matters. Ask him to carve out some private time for me at the party.”
“Okay. I’ll do that.”
Our eyes met briefly, and I could see real fear there. I got the feeling that she was so scared about her impending death that she wanted to speak with Steve about her will.
“Are you all right, Aunt Bea? Is there anything I can do?”
“Not really, Erin.” She was glancing around at the exceptionally well-constructed walls and ceiling as if she expected them to crumble all around us. “But thanks for asking.”
“You’re not envisioning the wine cellar collapsing, are you?”
“No, but I feel like…we’ve unearthed something. I think we’ve unleashed an evil spirit into the world when we constructed the foundation for this cellar.”
“Evil spirit?” I scoffed. “I doubt we dug deep enough into the Colorado bedrock to reach Hades, Aunt Bea.”
She rapped the floor with her cane three times, as if testing her theory to see if cracks—closely followed by demons—would emerge. “You’re young and naïve, Erin. There are evil spirits. And we coddle them with our alcoholic ‘spirits.’ Liquor sometimes keeps them at bay, and sometimes sets them loose.”
Unsure how to take her bizarre pronouncement, I decided to try to lift her mood by being supportive. “It’s true that drinking can bring out the absolute worst in some people. But for most of us occasional drinkers, it simply encourages us to let our hair down a little and have a good time.”
She glared at me as if I’d insulted her. “I’m not talking about some innocuous piffle, Erin. I’ve made a small fortune in this very industry—by selling well-aged alcoholic beverages. I literally mean that evil spirits are released when we open something that’s been confined for many years…be it in the earth, the trunk of a tree, or an old bottle of wine.”
Ah. Here was the “loon” side coming out.
“But you believe that good spirits are released, too, don’t you?” I asked hopefully. The woman was supplying the wine and champagne for my wedding. Her current indigo mood gave me visions that she would tap on her champagne glass to command everyone’s attention, only to announce at our reception: “The evil spirits in this champagne will burn our souls like acid. We are going to suffer for all eternity. Bottoms up!”
“Good forces are always balancing out the evil forces in this world, Erin. That’s a comforting thought…until you find yourself the victim of an opposing force. And by the time you get to be my age, you realize how blurred the line between good and evil really is.”
Her remarks were unsettling. Was she implying that she’d crossed over to the dark side at some juncture of her life?
Using her cane to steady herself, she rose from her jacquard chair and slowly turned in a full circle, studying our surroundings once more. “Good work, Erin. I’m very pleased. The next time you come here, it will be completely finished. All of my precious bottles will be put where they belong, and the ugly packaging will be out of sight.”
“That’s precisely what I typically say to my clients. I wish I could at least help you shelve your wine bottles.”
She shook her head. “I’m very particular about who touches my personal stock. But I’m giving you your own bottles of excellent vintages for your wedding. I’ll also bring some of my premium wine tomorrow night to Audrey’s.”
“‘Audrey’s?’” I repeated. “The party is at Parsley and Sage.”
“No, it isn’t. I meant to mention that to you earlier, but kept getting distracted by this or that. It’s at Audrey Munroe’s, dear.” She patted my arm as if I was a confused child. “You’re falling victim to the scatter-brained-bride syndrome. You’ve got too much on your mind these days.”
“That’s true, but the party really is at Parsley and Sage. Steve, Audrey, and I wrote the invitations together,” I explained as we made our way upstairs. “It’s one of the bennies that Drew gave Steve for designing his restaurant. He’s letting us hold the party there before his grand opening in two weeks.”
She began to sort through some mail in a nook of her antique writing desk in her foyer. “The invitation said that your shower was at Audrey’s. I have my invitation right here. I got it three or four weeks ago.”
She handed me the invitation. The printing and stationery was the same as the cards I’d helped Audrey stuff into envelopes, except for the venue address—and the now-missing ‘no gifts’ request. Audrey must have redone them all. Our party was indeed being held at Audrey’s house.
Stunned and embarrassed, my cheeks felt hot. I stared at the address and turned it over to check the flip side. How had this happened? The party was tomorrow, yet I hadn’t been told the party was now taking place at my current, albeit temporary, residence.
“This isn’t a complete surprise to you, is it?” she asked. “I spoke to Steve about this a couple of weeks ago. I called him to ask about the location, because I thought there must have been a mistake; you’d mentioned earlier that it was at the restaurant. Audrey and your future husband aren’t conspiring to keep the location of your wedding shower a secr
et, are they?”
“No,” I lied. “Of course not.”
“I hope I didn’t spoil their surprise,” she suggested as if she knew I was fibbing.
“No, Aunt Bea. I just…forgot that we’d switched venues.”
She searched my eyes, still not buying my story. “That would be an inauspicious way to start a marriage. If he’s waited this long to tell you where your own party was.”
“It was just a mistake.”
“I’m sure. Because your fiancé is too mature to still be suffering from Drew’s bad influence.” She clicked her tongue and shook her head in disgust. “All the trouble those two boys used to get themselves into! By high school, the cops were giving them a scolding every couple of months. Thank goodness one of them outgrew all of that nonsense before they got themselves killed.”
Chapter 2
To my annoyance, my parking space at Audrey’s house was blocked by a moving van in the alley behind Audrey’s house. Two men were carrying out the dining room table, to be replaced tomorrow, no doubt, with the rental chairs and occasional tables from “Gala Rentals.” I hoped that Audrey had also taken it on herself to keep Hildi, my black cat, upstairs and out from under the movers’ feet.
I marched down the sidewalk, ruminating over having heard for the first time that Steve and Drew had apparently run crosswise with the law as teenagers. My thoughts warred between wishing that Steve had chosen a better “best” man and feeling guilty for harboring such ill will toward Drew Benson. As an African-American teenager, Drew caught the attention of the Denver police more quickly than if he’d been Caucasian. He’d been adopted as an infant by a white couple in Cherry Creek, the affluent neighborhood in Denver where Steve had grown up. I had been adopted myself and had endured schoolyard bullying. With Drew being black and having white parents, his challenges must have been exponentially greater than mine. It was quite possible that Drew was completely worthy of Steve’s appreciation and admiration. It was also possible, though, that the guy was a complete jerk, and that Steve was blinded by his loyalty and wonderful childhood memories.
