Honeymoon With Murder (2 page)

Annie peered from behind the Dumpster and saw Maisie’s plump rear disappearing into the service entrance of Lingerie for Loving Ladies.

With a leap as agile as a fawn evading a bobcat, Annie reached the back step of Death on Demand, fumbled with the key, and darted inside. As the storeroom door closed behind her, she let out her breath in an enormous whoosh.

For a moment, she didn’t even move. She just leaned against the door and tried not to think.

However, it was beyond her capacity for thought control to ignore the monumental truth: today was her Wedding Day.

She was thrilled, terrified, excited, panicked, profoundly sentimental—and poised for flight. Until she thought of Max. Dear, wonderful Max. How did he feel right now? She glanced down at her watch. Almost eight. He would be showering. Her lips curved in a smile. She enjoyed thinking of Max in the shower, warm water pelting his broad shoulders and nicely muscled legs. In fact, Max was nicely muscled….

Eight o’clock.

Annie swallowed. In half an hour she was due at the Wedding Day Breakfast. She wondered if, once past the ceremony, she would shed this proclivity to think in capital letters. It was the inevitable consequence of several weeks spent in close and continuing contact with Laurel, Max’s mother.

Laurel …

She was unlike anyone Annie had ever met. Annie determinedly ignored the nervous, wiggly little thought deep in the recesses of her mind that Laurel was merely Max intensified. In fact, Annie refused consciously to entertain that treacherous supposition. Max, of course, was laid back. His unflappability, his poise, his imperviousness to worry, accounted for much of his charm. But he was
not
spacey. Max was wonderful, and late this afternoon he would become her husband.

Annie pushed off the door like a shot and catapulted into the coffee area and began to pace.

She was too young to get married.

She was too old to get married.

She struggled to breathe. Was she having a heart attack? She was too young to have a heart attack. Then why was she breathless and feeling as if her chest were an expanding cavity? She was too old to be acting like this.

Panting, she drew in gulps of the wonderful, soothing aroma of her bookstore, which was, of course, the finest mystery bookstore this side of Atlanta, with its glistening heart-pine floors and row after row of books, all the mysteries any reader could want and more, from Aarons to
Zangwill, and a coffee bar with Colombian, French, and Hawaiian blends, and a sleekly black, resident stuffed raven named Edgar, of course, in honor of Edgar Allan Poe, the dark genius who originated the mystery, and a resident (not stuffed) cat, also sleekly black.

“Agatha? Agatha?”

An ebony head lifted languidly from the coffee bar. In the light cascading luminously from the high south windows, the amber eyes glowed wickedly.

Annie flung herself toward the coffee bar and grabbed the sleek feline. “Agatha, love, I’m panicked.”

Agatha hissed, wriggled like an eel, and wormed free, scratching Annie’s right wrist as she dropped to the floor.

“Oh. You’re on Max’s side, I guess.”

But Agatha had fled into the deeper shadows of the rattan-and-wicker reading area, no doubt seeking sanctuary beneath her favorite Whitmani fern.

Licking absently at her wound, Annie turned back toward the coffee area. She must get a grip on herself. She was committed. Three hundred eighty-seven guests were at various stages of dress this morning on the island of Broward’s Rock in anticipation of a magnificent Wedding Day Breakfast, and Annie had to go. And to the Wedding at five
P.M.
Yes, dammit. Capital letters. Capital hysteria.

One chest-expanding breath.

Two.

Three.

She again drew deeply on the soothing scent of old bookbindings, leather, paper, and ink. Of course, mysteries. She would contemplate mysteries, immerse her mind in—

With a shock, she realized she’d scarcely been in the store since September began. She’d been too occupied with wedding plans—and with Laurel—but that was another story. Still, it startled her to realize she hadn’t even looked at this months display of mystery paintings. Obviously, Ingrid, her most patient and wonderful assistant, who would tonight serve as Matron of Honor (no, she
wouldn’t
think about the wedding!), had ordered and hung the five—and weren’t they excellent!

In the first watercolor, an imposing, broad-shouldered
figure sat in a high armchair behind a red brocade-covered bench. He held aloft a blackwood gavel, poised to bang against the bench. He wore a glossy black silk judges cap, with gauze wings, and a long, official robe of heavy green brocade. Intelligence glowed in the dark eyes set off by almond-toned skin, a full black beard, and long sideburns. Dotting the painting like colorful butterflies were miniature renditions of a magnificent Buddhist temple, a tilted bronze bell, two golden hairpins, and the wooden hand gong often carried by mendicant monks.

A world sheathed in ice and snow glittered in the second painting. A monk, his habit covered by a thick traveling cloak, stood in snow-crusted boots by the edge of a frozen brook, staring grimly down at the body of a beautiful woman, held in the ice like a fly in amber.

Moonlight bathed a cliff face in the third painting, illuminating a grotesque figure, swathed in yards of crumbling bandages that covered both body and face. Against the rotting bandages of its breast, the creature pressed the unconscious form of a young woman. Two striking figures stared in astonishment and horror, a strong-featured, black-haired woman and a tall, well-built man with a bronzed face, bright blue eyes, and a dimpled chin. The man carried a limp, turbaned figure in his arms.

In the fourth painting, fantasy and reality warred. A brown-handled kitchen knife protruded from the chest of an actor dressed as a Munchkin, the knife obscenely visible against the yellow coat of his comic soldiers uniform. He lay dead on the Yellow Brick Road, staring sightlessly up toward the sound-stage lights. The middle-aged man kneeling beside the body had a tough face with a nose that had taken too many blows.

In the fifth painting, a traveler in bedouin dress but with a European face pitched a tent beside a dying camel. The desert wastes stretched endlessly, and a burning sun glittered in a cloudless sky. But there was neither despair nor fear on the face of the man, only utter and complete determination.

Henny Brawley, of course, was probably five furlongs ahead of the competition in discovering the titles and authors represented. She was always excited at the prospect
of receiving a free book. Henny was by far the most avid mystery fan on the island. Her taste ran from Millar to Rice, Van Dine to Langton, Kienzle to Maron, and that wouldn’t begin to cite them all. Moreover, she would immediately recognize this sub-genre (historical mysteries). She especially enjoyed Peter Lovesey and advised everyone who would listen to read
The Detective Wore Silk Drawers
. Henny also enjoyed dabbling in real mysteries, and had earned Annie’s undying (perhaps quite literally) respect for her timely arrival at the bookstore in the recent affair involving murder below stage during an amateur theatrical rehearsal of
Arsenic and Old Lace
.

Recalling those difficult days, Annie groaned. Laurel had wrested control of the wedding plans while Annie was distracted by homicide. So, for the rest of the summer, Annie had engaged in guerrilla actions to try and regain mastery over the ceremony, one lightning foray at dawn to the seamstress, a clutch of impassioned midnight pleas to Max (these were usually very effective), several preemptive strikes on the telephone to various wholesalers and jobbers around the country.

As a result, the ceremony was not quite as Laurel had hoped. (A Cosmic Statement on Love.) But it also wasn’t quite what Annie had envisioned (a dignified, simple exchange of vows) when she plighted her troth. Perhaps it would be fair to say it was a curious and original amalgam of the traditional—and the not-so-traditional.

And it would begin at five
P.M
.

The telephone rang.

Annie jerked around and regarded it warily. It was certainly too late for Laurel to call with new ideas. Surely she couldn’t have any innovative suggestions, with the wedding only hours away.

The shrill ring sounded again.

Refusing to answer would be a cop-out. She hadn’t reached that point. Yet. Besides, it was probably a book rep. Or one of those infuriating robots that opened the onversation with, “Please——don’t——hang——up. This——call——could——change——your——life.” Or a friend. Or a wrong number.

She yanked the receiver up in mid-peal. “Death on Demand.”

“Annie, my sweet.” As always, Laurel’s husky voice brimmed with good cheer, delight, and eagerness. Annie had a vision of blond beauty levitating by a phone. “I had a feeling you might be—well, just a little bit nervy. And when I couldn’t find you
anywhere
, well, I knew you would have run to earth in your burrow.” A pause. “The shop.” In case Annie had by any chance missed her point. “And I thought, the very
best
thing I can do is help you take yourself
out
of yourself.”

Annie pondered that interesting suggestion while the throaty discourse continued. It wasn’t necessary to hear Laurel’s every word. There were so many extraneous bits, asides about the glorious future of the world as a result of the recent Harmonic Convergence, the necessity of synchronizing with new vibrations, and the duty of each earthling to help cleanse the planet in preparation for the Momentous Events that would unfold in 2012, according to newly interpreted Mayan writings.

With the skill of much recent practice, Annie winnowed the bright phrases, always alert for any reference to the wedding.

But the kicker still caught her by total surprise.

“What?” she demanded. “What did you say?”

Simple, direct questions unnerved Laurel, eliciting verbiage festooned with qualifications, interpretations, explanations, and disclaimers, but the essential message remained the same.

“I’d better go see,” Annie cut in hastily. She thumped down the receiver and raced for the back door.

Annie braked just long enough to wave at the entry-point guard, shot through the open gate, pulled the wheel hard left, and squealed off the blacktop onto a rutted dirt road that snaked around clumps of palmettos and dipped into sloughs. A plume of grey dust boiled in her wake. She flew past Jerry’s Gas ’N Go.

Not far now.

The Volvo’s chassis quivered at the jolts, but Annie kept her foot on the accelerator until she screeched to a stop just past the honeysuckle-covered wooden arch that marked the entrance to Nightingale Courts.

She turned off her motor, looked around, and wondered if Laurel had suddenly become a practical joker.

Because nothing disturbed the gentle, early morning quiet of this sun-burnished pocket of Broward’s Rock. Nightingale Courts, a semicircle of seven cabins, faced the salt marsh. At high tide, only the tips of the spartina grass could be glimpsed. At low tide, the marsh drained to shining mud flats and shallow salt-pan pools. Just past eight o’clock on this lovely September morning, the tide was flowing in; a hungry dolphin out in the sound sliced through the water in search of a tasty breakfast of herring, mackerel, and whiting; a fisherman in a bright yellow tank top and cutoffs leaned against the railing at the end of one of the piers that poked through the marsh to deep water; a ringbilled gull zeroed in on an unwary mouse, and a well-hidden clapper rail cackled derisively Three delicately plumed snowy egrets searched contentedly for crabs.

It could not have been more placid or cheerful, the balmy morning sunshine bathing the cabins, the weathered wooden piers, and, across the inlet, the thick clumps of yucca and sea myrtle that partially screened from view two ramshackle cabins. The sunlight glistened, too, on the shiny tin roof of Jerry’s Gas ’N Go.

As far as Annie could see, she and yellow tank top were the only people up and about.

Feeling foolish, she stepped out of the Volvo and walked past the mailboxes toward the cabins. Built in the thirties as tourist courts, they’d fallen on hard times during the sixties, but had been bought and refurbished as rental units in the late seventies. Stuccoed a cheerful pink, they added a touch of California to the island. Annie had always enjoyed coming to Nightingale Courts to see Ingrid, who managed the property in exchange for her living quarters in Cabin 3.

Ingrid’s door opened. She started down her steps, paused, then waved eagerly.

They met midway on the path.

“Ingrid, who’s the man—”

“Annie, what are you doing—”

They stopped and looked at each other in surprise.

Annie spread her hands in puzzlement. “Laurel called
and said you were having a rip-roaring fight with somebody. Or, to be more accurate, she said, ‘Ingrid is involved in a confrontational encounter with a somewhat sinister individual, and I do feel, Annie, that steps must be taken to assure her safety.’”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Ingrid laughed shamefacedly. “I always knew the island grapevine was unmatched for intelligence-gathering capabilities this side of the CIA, but still, I’m impressed.”

Annie looked warily around, searching the grove of palmettos. “Where’s Laurel?”

“I haven’t seen her this morning, but I suppose—Oh, she must have been here when I had my run-in with Jesse Penrick. You know Jesse! As for Laurel, she was probably coming from an early morning session with Ophelia.”

“Ophelia? Session?” Annie wasn’t much given to the kind of psychic intuitions that regularly cast such dark shadows in the paths of Mary Roberts Rinehart heroines, but she felt an undeniable quiver in the nerve endings around her spine. “Sessions?”

“Oh, Annie, not to worry. It’s all nonsense, of course, but no harm done. I’ll tell you all about it later.” Ingrid glanced at her watch and clapped her hands. “Good grief, we only have two minutes to make it across the island to the breakfast!”

That’s how the rest of Annie’s wedding day went, in a breathless, tearing, headlong rush, with no more time for worry, cold feet, or panic. If the day at certain moments reminded her strongly of the islands annual triathlon, with all its attendant noise, confusion, concurrent activities, and exhaustion of available volunteers, she didn’t permit herself to dwell on the parallels.