Bone Dance (22 page)

“I'd better follow her.” Richard headed for the door. “She may do herself a mischief, the state she's in.”

“Tell her I'll make provision for her,” I called after him. I got tied up with the lawyer, and it was late when we finished. Richard still hadn't returned, and I thought he must have gone straight to his hotel room in Merton.

In the morning, I wandered round the house waiting for him and worrying about Laura. She had stayed away all night.

She walked into the tower room just before lunch, a pale waif in a crumpled black dress. I rushed to speak, to reassure her.

“I'll arrange for you to have the house, Laura, and half the money. I won't need it in England.”

Laura lowered her eyes. Her hands stroked the wrinkles in her dress. “I stayed with him last night, Ruth. He has to marry me now. He's coming to tell you soon.” She yawned. “I came by to get some clothes.”

Richard had finally succumbed to Laura's smile.

The deep anger which had smouldered inside me for years, ignited. She wouldn't win this time . . .

“Ruth, Ruth, are you okay?” I hear a voice calling. “Take a breath, dear.”

I open my eyes. Carol is patting my hand, a frown creasing her forehead.

“I'm fine.” I whisper. I feel on my lap. “The paper. Where is it?”

“Here it is.” She bends down and picks it off the floor. “Would you like me to read it now?”

I shake my head. “Read it to her.” I point across the room. My cousin, Laura, sits in the chair beside the window. The best chair in the room. She's been here since the death of her third husband. Two old men are dallying close by.

She pats her yellow curls and smiles as Carol goes towards her, but her eyes are on mine. I'm glad she will finally know what happened. We hold each other's gaze while Carol reads the story.

Then Laura gets up. Leaning on her cane, she shuffles over to me.

“When you told the military police you'd sent him away, I believed you,” she says. “Didn't you ask him what happened?”

“Ask him?” My hands start to shake. I am gulping for air. A vice is squeezing my lungs.

She stares at me. “You didn't.” She laughs, “Oh, Ruth, I never slept with him. We spent the night drinking stewed tea in the mess. I said I was going to tell you we'd spent the night together, and you know what he told me?”

I cannot breathe. I clutch at the pain in my chest. My heart is breaking.

“He said, ‘Ruth won't believe anything you say without checking with me'. He was wrong, wasn't he?”

Liz Palmer
writes from her home in the Gatineau Hills. She has had stories in three of the previous Ladies' Killing Circle anthologies. She won the Capital Crime Writers short mystery contest in 2001 and placed 2nd in 2002. She loves to kayak on still mornings
.

Sing a song of sixpence

A socket full of die

Mabel fixed the outlet

To make her husband fry.

When the plug was shoved in

Brad began to roast

Oh, wasn't it a dainty dish

To make her husband toast?

Joy Hewitt Mann

The cramped vestry was airless and hot. Under my heavy robe, I could feel a trickle of sweat running down my back. Trust the Koff-Carstairs wedding to be on the steamiest day of the year. I wondered how Father Donald was going to stand the heat once he put on his vestments. And where was Father Donald? The wedding was due to start in less than ten minutes.

The door crashed open, hitting my elbow and knocking Sunday's bulletins off the table. “Oh, shoot! Did I hit you with the door? Dear Charles, my faithful lay reader, you're always here first.” Father Donald lumbered in like a huge overinflated beach ball, the illusion heightened by the striking orange and yellow striped shorts and pistachio green
T
-shirt he was wearing. His flip-flops squeaked in protest at every step.

“Dottie's idea,” he beamed, holding out the hems of his shorts and looking down at himself proudly. I doubted his sister Dorothy had ever suggested such an ensemble. “Well, not really her idea, but she encouraged me to dress coolly, that is, as coolly as you can dress on a day like this, although I'm not sure she really meant shorts, but then who will see them, except you, although on the other hand, I suppose if something untoward were to happen, and I had to remove my vestments, although, knowing what I'm wearing . . .”

I threw the alb over his head, mercifully muffling whatever he was saying. I confess that I pulled the cincture rather tighter than necessary around his middle, effectively cutting off his breath, his words and his train of thought, if he ever had one.

“Ooof! Easy there. I'm not a sack of potatoes, you know, although I might look like one, or perhaps a sack of flour, what with the alb being white and all, and . . .”

The door banged open again, this time, striking Father Donald rather smartly on his ample rear.

“Oh, sorry, Rev'rint Peasgood. I didn't see you there.” I wondered at the blindness of anyone who could miss the mountain of white in the middle of the vestry.

It was William (“Call me Billy . . .”) Koff, father of the bride, resplendent and sweating heavily in his white rental tux garnished with a deep purple cummerbund. “The Missus just reminded me that I had to give you a little somethin' for your services today.” His eyes slid over to me, and I felt the dealer's appraisal of his glance. “You and your sidekick here.” I winced. I'd been called a lot of things since I started serving with Father Donald in St. Grimbald's, but never a “sidekick”. He handed me a large white envelope. “Money's tight right now, what with the wedding and all, and little Krystal and the Missus wanting nothing but the best . . .” The seams on the jacket strained as he searched fruitlessly for a handkerchief and finally pulled out the purple fan of silk in his breast pocket to wipe his crimson face. “. . . and sales is down everywhere,” he continued, stuffing the now damp piece of silk back into the pocket, “and the business is no exception, so when I noticed that you hadn't bought tickets to the reception, why, me ‘n the Missus thought you'd just as soon come and join in the festivities, as our guests, so to speak.”

I opened the envelope with a sinking feeling. When two
garish gold and purple pieces of card fell into my hands, I kissed my new LaFlamme omelet pan goodbye.

“Oh, how thoughtful!” Father Donald grabbed one of the tickets. “A buffet! My favourite!” There go the profits, I thought. The latest trend in weddings seems to be to sell tickets to the reception, the takings of same either offsetting the wedding costs or going to the bridal couple. “Dottie's off to the A.C.W. meeting tonight, so I was going to have to fend for myself, although she always makes up a salad plate, but I think that a person needs something more substantial after a long day, not that a wedding is such a long day, although, on the other hand, it probably is for you . . .”

I threw the heavy white and gold chasuble over his head, once again cutting off the flow. The sounds of taped synthesizer “Pachelbel's Canon” floated in from the church.

“Uh-oh, that's my cue,” Billy smirked. “Sounds pretty good, eh? Cheaper than an organist, that's for sure.”

And so the wedding began, in all its inexorable awfulness. From the canned music to the purple and gold, gum-chewing bridesmaids, to the soloist wearing skin-tight black Capri pants and crooning to a karaoke version of “Wind Beneath My Wings”, and the ever-so-tasteful unicorn tattoo clearly visible on the bride's ample bosom, the wedding was all one might expect from the union of the only daughter of the proprietor of Billy's Bargain and Auction Barn (“Bid High, Bid Low, It's All Got to Go”), to Trevor Carstairs, owner of Carstairs Fine Antiques and Collectibles (“Rare coins our specialty”), and only son of retired shipping magnate, Richard Carstairs.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the two front pews. On the bride's side, Billy sat with a selection of female relatives, each sporting a large, purple silk orchid corsage. On the groom's side, Elaine and Richard Carstairs sat alone.
Elaine, grim-faced, wore a cream Chanel suit without the requisite orchid. Richard was in a wheelchair and looked pale, but then I'd heard his recent heart surgery hadn't been all that successful. They neither spoke to, nor looked at, any of the Koffs. Come to that, they didn't speak to each other, either. I'd heard rumours of trouble between them, partly due to Richard's iron control over the purse strings and partly to Elaine's obsessive devotion to Trevor. In fact, at one of our Wine Club meetings, Edith Bricks had confided to me that Richard said he would cut his son off without a penny if Trevor married Krystal Koff. I wondered how Elaine would handle this blow to her precious boy's future.

Krystal and Trevor's affair had been the talk of the village for months, particularly Trevor's inexplicable infatuation with Krystal Koff, a miniature (if one can use that word to describe a 180 pound young woman) of her mother, Rita. For a man who'd inherited his father's love of fine things, Krystal seemed an unlikely acquisition for Trevor. The affair, much encouraged by the Koffs, culminated in an announcement of impending parenthood and today's gala event. The rumours of Trevor's disinheritance had obviously not reached the Koffs, and who was Krystal to flout the convention of shot-gun weddings in our parish? Trevor seemed too besotted to care about either.

In just under thirty minutes, Father Donald, despite several enormous gaffes and slip-ups, had delivered enough of the marriage ceremony to make the union legal. The wedding party headed off for a quick spin around town, horns blaring, sans Carstairs, then to the Lions Club Centennial Park and Playground for photographs, with the Carstairs. Father Donald and I made a quick stop at the Rectory so he could slip into something more appropriate for a wedding reception at the Lodge.

Only the fact that the reception was at the Lodge impelled me to accept the ticket for the wedding dinner. I was neither a member, nor had I ever been invited to this secretive old building on the edge of town. This was a golden opportunity to inspect a small piece of local history. Last I'd heard, Billy was the current Grand Poo-Bah or whatever the head honcho is called, and so, no doubt, got the Lodge cheap for the reception.

By the time I'd got Father Donald decently attired and to the Lodge, everyone else was more or less assembled. I was horrified to be greeted by Billy, bow tie hanging, cummerbund undone, not in a receiving line as one might expect, but seated at a card table, where he was enthusiastically selling tickets for the drinks. Another money-maker.

Next to the table was a large bird cage on a stand, lavishly decorated with purple doves and orchids.

“Oh,” said Father Donald, “what an interesting gift for the happy couple. I'm giving them a set of church mugs, well, not me, but Dottie and me, well, actually just Dottie. She does all that sort of thing, gifts and such, although I often suggest ideas to her, not that she listens to them, well, she listens, but doesn't usually take up my ideas, although I thought the one about giving a lifetime subscription to
St. Grimbald's Gleanings
was pretty good, that is if you like to read, or read things like
The Gleanings
, and I must say, Dottie is an amazing writer . . .”

“It's a money cage,” Billy interrupted.

“A what?” Father Donald gaped at the cage.

“A money cage. You put in a twenty and I write your name on one of these slips of paper, and at the end of the evening, we have a little draw, and you could be the lucky winner of a new toaster oven.” He winked at me. “Got two of them as wedding presents, they did, so I says to myself, let's just do a deal here.”

Sure enough, the bottom of the cage was covered with twenties. I figured there was nearly a thousand dollars in there already. I briefly toyed with the idea for St. Grimbald's organ fund.

“Oh, I'd love to. I know Dottie could use a new toaster oven. Oh, shoot! The Bishop. Doesn't like raffles. Not that I'd tell him, but if he were to find out from someone here perhaps, although I doubt anyone here talks to the Bishop much, not that they aren't the Bishop's kind of people, or that the Bishop wouldn't talk to them . . .”

“That's all right, Rev'rint. It's just my way of getting a little extra folding green for the happy couple. Now, what's your poison?” Billy brandished the roll of drink tickets.

In a moment of rashness, I asked for a glass of white wine, not expecting French, mind you, but willing to settle for California.

“White wine? Sorry, pal. We're offering beer, made it myself, or Swish and mix. Three bucks a ticket or four for ten dollars.”

I purchased tickets for ginger ale. At a dollar a can, it looked like glasses were extra. I noticed the Carstairs had done the same, although Elaine had somehow managed to acquire a straw.