The courthouse, built in 1896 from Indiana limestone, housed the county and circuit courts, plus all the government offices. Around the square were the typical assortment of family-owned shops, banks, law offices, and restaurants. Five blocks east of the square marked the western edge of the campus of New Chapel University, a small, private college where I would have graduated from law school if I wouldn’t have flunked out.
Because I
had
flunked out, I’d had to rethink my career plans to find something I could do successfully. It had been a very short list. Then I’d learned that the quaint little flower shop where I’d once worked part-time was for sale—a stroke of luck for me because I loved flowers and actually had a talent for growing things. So I used the rest of my grandfather’s college trust as a down payment and had an instant career, which mollified my stunned parents. It also saved the owner, Lottie Dombowski, from bankruptcy caused by her husband’s massive medical bills. Now Lottie worked for me, doing what she loved best, and I worked for the bank, trying to make the mortgage payments.
Inside the shop, my assistant Grace Bingham was preparing her coffee machines for the day. As soon as I stepped inside and shut the door, she sang out in her crisp British accent, “Good morning, dear. How are we today?”
Grace spent years working as a nurse and sometimes still spoke in first person plural. I met her the summer I law clerked for Dave Hammond, a lawyer with a one-man office on the square. Grace was his legal secretary at the time. After she retired and found herself with too much time on her hands, I persuaded her to work for me at Bloomers. It was a perfect fit.
“We are in a good mood,” I called back. “The sun is shining, the temperature is just right, and it’s Monday. The only way it could get better is if twenty orders came in overnight.” I peered into the parlor. “They didn’t, did they?”
“No, dear, only five.”
Grace handled as many tasks as I cared to load on her. Since she was an expert tea steeper, coffee brewer, and scone baker, her main job was to run the parlor. It was one of our many efforts to lure in more customers. We were in dire need of more customers, especially now that a gigantic floral and hobby shop had opened on the main highway.
At that moment Lottie came bustling through the curtain from the workroom in back, a bundle of white roses in her ample arms, her usual pink satin bow pinned into the short, brassy curls above her right ear. It was a daring look for a forty-five-year-old mother of a highly embarrassable seventeen-year-old boy. Even more daring considering that she had
four
highly embarrassable seventeen-year-old boys. Lottie’s opinion on that was simple: Suck it up.
“Oh, good, you made it before Jillian did,” she said to me as she stocked a container in the glass display cooler.
The gray clouds were moving in. I almost expected to hear ominous music in the background. “Jillian is coming? Now? Something dreadful must have happened to get her up before noon.”
Lottie rolled her eyes. “She’s got another bee in her bonnet about her wedding plans.”
Grace handed me a rose-patterned china cup filled with her gourmet coffee, fixed just the way I liked it with a good shot of half-and-half. “Drink up, dear. You’ll need the fortification. You know how tiring your cousin can be.”
Grace phrased it so politely. My term would have been
pain in the ass,
which Jillian had been since she hit puberty and discovered that boys adored her. Jillian Knight was twenty-five, tall, gorgeous, and one year younger than me. She was also the only other girl in the family, which was about all we had in common.
My father was a retired cop. Jillian’s was a stockbroker. My mother was a kindergarten teacher. Jillian’s mother wielded a five iron at the New Chapel Country Club. I paid the mortgage on a floral shop. Jillian got paid to shop for other people’s wardrobes. As children, my brothers, Jonathan and Jordan, and I worked for our allowances. Jillian allowed their maid to work for hers.
The only justice in our separate worlds was that my two brothers became successful surgeons, while Jillian’s brother waited tables in a Chicago diner. For years, our families spent all holidays together, and that had given Jillian and me a siblinglike relationship: we loved each other but didn’t get along.
“I’m telling you, Abby, don’t pay for that bridesmaid dress,” Lottie warned.
I waved away her concern. “Jillian won’t call off
this
wedding. She wouldn’t dare.”
“Ha! Look at her track record.”
Lottie had a good point. Jillian got engaged once a year—it seemed to be a hobby of hers. Her list of ex-fiancés read like a travel brochure: an Italian restaurant owner from Chicago’s Little Italy; a moody Parisian artist named Jean Luc; an English consulate Sir Something-or-Other; and a Greek plastic surgeon with an unpronounceable name. This was the first time she’d ever made it to the actual choosing-of-the-flowers stage.
Jillian’s current groom-to-be was Claymore Osborne, who, coincidentally, was the younger brother of my former fiancé, Pryce Osborne the Second. Claymore was every bit as boorish and snooty as Pryce was, but that didn’t matter to Jillian. What mattered was that Claymore stood to inherit half the Osborne fortune. Jillian always did go after money.
The wedding was set for the Fourth of July, three weeks away. At first Jillian wanted to hold it in a field of daisies, but having none in the area suitable for a wedding ceremony, she settled for a hotel ballroom that she believed had daisies in the carpet. Somewhere.
On top of choosing me as a bridesmaid, Jillian had also asked me to do her wedding flowers. I had agreed because Jillian’s wedding would most certainly be lavish, and that meant expensive flowers, which translated into money to pay my bills. I really needed to pay my bills.
“Here are your messages, dear,” Grace said, handing me a small pile of memos. “Lottie has breakfast ready in the kitchen.”
Monday breakfast was a tradition at Bloomers, and I was already drooling in anticipation. There were four messages: three from my mother and one from a client named Trudee DeWitt, or “Double-E Double-T,” as she called herself, who needed to know when I was coming over to consult with her on decorations for her party.
The three messages from my mother all said the same thing: “Call me. Urgent.” Nearly all her messages claimed urgency. One of these days, I’ve told her, it really will be urgent and then won’t she be sorry? The Mother Who Cried Wolf.
I took the memos and the coffee and headed for the workroom, a gardenlike haven where I’ve spent some of my happiest moments. As soon as I stepped through the curtain I had to stop to inhale the aromas—rose, lily, eucalyptus, buttered toast, scrambled eggs. It didn’t get any better than that.
I dropped the messages on my desk—a messy affair littered with a computer, printer, phone, a pencil cup shaped like a grinning cat, a few framed photos, and assorted office items—and went to the kitchen to grab a plate of food. While I ate, Lottie and I went over the orders and discussed the coming week so we could make a list and call our suppliers. After washing my plate in the tiny kitchen sink, I tacked the orders on the corkboard and sat at my desk to call Trudee.
I had just punched in her number when I heard the bell over the front door jingle, and a moment later the curtain parted and the bride-to-be swept in, pausing to look around the room in confusion. I could understand her bewilderment. The workroom was a riot of color and shape and texture and scents. Dried and silk flowers sat in tall containers, ribbon-festooned wreaths adorned the walls, and brightly hued foil and painted pots lined the shelves. A small person like me, even with my red hair, could blend right in. A female Waldo.
“Abby!” she cried dramatically when she spotted me, brushing a silken strand of copper hair off her face. Jillian never did anything without drama. “Thank goodness you’re here!” She threw her long, tanned arms around my shoulders and sobbed hideously, ignoring the phone pressed to my ear.
“Trudee? This is Abby Knight. You called?”
“It’s horrible, Abby. I just can’t bear it,” Jillian wept. She lifted her head from my shoulder to stare me in the face, and since she was taller than me—everyone was taller than me—it required her to bend her knees to put us at an even eye level. She cupped my head with her hands. “Abby, you have to help me.”
“Wednesday at four o’clock?” I said into the phone, giving my cousin a hard glare while trying to maintain a smile in my voice. “It’s on my calendar. I’ll see you then.”
Jillian took the phone from my hand and put it in the cradle. “Are you
listening
to me?”
“No, I am
not
listening to you. I’m seething with fury and that tends to make the blood pound in my ears. Did you happen to notice I was on the phone?” I turned to write Wednesday’s meeting on the calendar hanging on the corkboard.
“Irate customer?” Jillian asked, settling herself on a stool at the worktable. When I looked around at her to see if she were serious or just really stupid, she had crossed one linen-clad leg over the other and was gazing at me expectantly, her tears magically gone.
I saw Lottie hovering outside the curtain and knew she was waiting to get on the computer. “Let’s go to the parlor and talk.”
We settled at a table in front of the bay window in the cozy Victorian-style parlor. Once Grace had brought coffee for Jill and refreshed my cup I said, “What’s the problem?”
“Claymore. He’s being completely unreasonable. He insists that Punch be his best man even though Punch dumped Onora and now she refuses to walk up the aisle with him. And please don’t tell me to switch my maid of honor. I simply must have Onora as my maid of honor. I mean, look at her name, for heaven’s sake. Abby, what are you staring at? Have you heard a word I’ve said?”
I dragged my gaze from the scene across the street, where sheriff’s deputies were moving prisoners from a van to the courthouse for hearings. “Sorry. You lost me after you said Punch. Who’s Punch?”
“Claymore’s best man, former fraternity brother. You met him.”
We paused as three middle-aged women came into the parlor and took seats at a table nearby. Grace immediately breezed over to take their orders. “I haven’t met any of the wedding party,” I said to my cousin.
“Right. Okay, Punch, Flip, Bertie, and Pryce are the groomsmen. They were in the same fraternity at Harvard, except that Pryce graduated two years earlier.”
“With names like those I would have guessed the Ringling Brothers School for Acrobats.”
“The Ringling what?”
“The Ringling Brothers . . . Barnum and Bailey . . . A
circus,
Jill. Did you grow up in Azkaban? Never mind. Hand me the pitcher of cream. And the bridesmaids?”
“Onora, Ursula, Sabina, and—” She paused to count them on her fingers. “There’s one more.”
“Me. The one without the
a
at the end of her name.”
“Of course it’s you, silly.”
“Your sorority sisters, I assume?”
“Yes. Well, except for you.”
I was so glad she pointed that out. “So getting back to Punch,” I prompted, liberally lacing my coffee with swirls of creamy calories, which helped subdue the urge to choke her.
“His real name is Paulin Chumley, so they call him Punch. Everyone went by a nickname in the frat house.”
“He’s lucky they didn’t call him Chump.”
Jillian didn’t get my joke. She wasn’t real swift on the uptake. “Punch fits him better. He’s a brute who likes to use his fists and thinks he’s God’s gift to women.”
“The kind of guy I love to hate.”
“Exactly. In college he drove a genuine army Hummer. Now he owns a swanky sports bar. You know the type. He always has to prove he has the Y chromosome. He even wears a solid gold punching bag earring. He says it’s his logo.”
“Kind of carries that theme thing a bit too far, don’t you think? Just out of curiosity, what’s Claymore’s nickname?”
“Clay.”
“That’s original. Can’t Punch be a plain old groomsman instead of the best man?”
Jillian heaved a big sigh. “That’s what I keep telling Claymore! Onora would be fine with that arrangement as long as she doesn’t have to stand anywhere near Punch. She detests him. I mean, she really, really
detests
him. And to tell you the truth, I can barely tolerate him myself—he’s such a chauvinist. But Claymore says he can’t drop Punch’s rank because that would show a lack of moral fiber, whatever that means.”
It would have been pointless to try to explain it to her. The only fiber she understood was listed on the labels sewn into her clothing. And I was the one who had flunked out of school. I rested my chin on one hand and gave her a glazed look. “Just what exactly do you want
me
to do?”
“Talk to Pryce. Claymore looks up to Pryce. If Pryce tells him to switch men, Claymore will listen. Pryce should be the best man anyway. I mean, he’s his brother, for pity sake.”
“I have two questions. First, what would make you believe that Pryce would listen to me? He dumped me, remember? Two months before the wedding? When I failed to meet the Osborne standard of excellence? And second, if you can’t come to some resolution with Claymore now, what does that bode for your future?”
“You obviously don’t know anything about marriage.”
“Neither do you. Hand me the cream.”
“I know this much,” she said, pushing the little ceramic pitcher toward me, “Claymore hates making decisions, so once we’re married I will make the decisions for both of us. See? Problem solved.”
Poor Claymore would never know what hit him.
“Besides, Pryce still carries a torch for you, so of course he’ll listen. He’ll hang on your every word.”
I glanced over at the three ladies, who had stopped talking and were now quietly stirring their lattes so they could hear more about this so-called torch.