In-Laws & Outlaws (5 page)

S
tacy sat
bolt upright in her bed at five o’clock the next morning, jolted awake from a nightmare involving feuding families, copious amount of liquor from an open bar, and a chain saw.

“Open bar!” she screamed, reaching for the notebook she kept on her nightstand and scribbling furiously. “No… open… bar,” she muttered as she wrote, underlining the words three times for emphasis before falling back against her pillows so hard the headboard thumped noisily against the wall. She stared at the ceiling for a long time, unable to go back to sleep, but was still startled when her cell phone rang.

“Hello?” she asked, not recognizing the number and knowing it was too early for a stranger to call.

“Miss East! You have to help me! Priscilla’s refusing to marry me!” Porter shouted through the phone, choking up as he cried.

“Wait a minute, slow down. Porter? What’s this all about?” she asked, sitting up in bed and brushing the hair back from her eyes.

“She just told me,” he said through his sobs. “She said she can’t do this anymore, and that if our families are trying so hard to keep us apart, maybe they know something we don’t. Miss East, what am I gonna do? Priscilla means everything to me! I’d be happy to never lay eyes on any of that bunch ever again if that’s what I had to agree to, but Priscilla has always cared about family. She’s willing to let that bunch of…”

Stacy waited patiently, shuddering from time to time, as Porter let fly a string of obscenities that would have made a sailor blush. She let him vent without admonishing him, mostly because he was only saying the very words she’d struggled to keep bottled up inside ever since meeting these people.

“I’m sorry, Miss East, I shouldn’t have spoken like that to you,” he finally moaned, having worn himself out as he spewed the words.

“No, no, it’s quite understandable at a time like this. And you’re sure this is really about the fighting, and not more like cold feet? Anything like that?” Stacy asked, but she wasn’t even finished asking before Porter argued.

“No, I’m sure of it. This is what we’ve wanted for over a year now, we’ve just both been too chicken to tell our families. We’ve even talked about running away together, but she’s always said she’d never do that, she’d never go behind her family’s backs. She said, ‘I’m no coward. If we’re getting married, we’re doing it right, with everyone there to give us their blessing.’ I’ve always known that about her, and I gotta say, I really admired her for it. If it was up to me, I’d have turned tail and run, and not come home until it was a done deal. She’s definitely the braver one of the two of us!”

“Okay, I see your point. But tell me, where is Priscilla now?”

“She’s staying at her parents’ place. We bought a house, but she wouldn’t move in until we were officially married. It’s one of the things—”

Stacy finished his sentence in her mind, having heard some form of it many, many times over the past few weeks.
One of the things I love about her
.

“Can you convince her to come meet with me today? Both of you? Let’s just talk about this and see what we can come up with.”

“I’ll try, but I don’t know that she’ll agree. She’s stubborn, especially when it comes to her family.” He sobbed softly, then recovered enough to apologize for waking her up and thank her for trying to help. He hung up, and Stacy decided now was as good a time as any to go for a run since she was wide awake.

Her run wasn’t a structured thing or an organized effort at weight loss. It was actually more of a habit, a coping mechanism that she fell back on when her work or her personal life got too stressful or too crazy. This run, though, instead of helping her feel better and more in charge, only left her feeling even more confused and helpless to stop the hurricane of hatred oozing from among her chief clients.

She went through the motions of cleaning up from her run, having a light breakfast, and driving in to the office, and had still not come up with a plan to keep this wedding from becoming a multiple homicide, if they managed to have a wedding at all. She decided she had to keep a positive outlook, for the young couple’s sake, and was determined that they would be getting married, somehow. That didn’t diminish the need for safety from the ruffians who were plotting against them, and her first task for the day would be to call an emergency security detail meeting and consider the need for backup, especially someone to keep an eye on those two feisty nonagenarians.

Like everything else associated with this wedding, that proved to be easier said than done.

“Miss East,” the stocky, fireplug head of security with the Brooklyn accent began, “don’t take this wrong, but have you seen these people? We don’t got enough guys to keep these screwballs from killing each other! Two of my guys have already filed claims last month after they had to get stitches when the dad rammed his pickup truck into the picnic table where the other family was eating. My guys had to stand guard just for a cake sampling! Guarding pieces of cake! That’s insulting! I got guys on my crew who served in Iraq! Some of ‘em worked security detail for Diana Ross! I even got some who may or may not have killed a foreign dictator or two! And now I’m bringing in extra workers to watch a wedding. It’s not right, you hear me?”

“I understand your concerns, Mr. Giudice, but it’s very important that we bring in a large team of individuals in order to prevent the bride and groom from experiencing any problems. I want to make sure their day is perfect, and there’s no way it can be perfect if they so much as lay eyes on anyone who is genetically or geographically related to them.”

“My boys and I will do our best to keep everybody separated, but you gotta watch those folks. They’re a shifty bunch, ma’am, and I can’t make any guarantees. Unless you want us to… you know…” He made a pummeling motion with one fist against his outstretched hand, then slid his pointed index finger across his throat while making a horrible face.

Stacy’s eyes went wide. “Are you seriously offering to kill some of these people, Mr. Giudice?” Instead of answering, the grizzled, tattooed man only shrugged, offering his open hands as an answer.

“How much do you think it would cost to hide the bodies?” she whispered, leaning closer for a second. She straightened up immediately, wondering what could have possible come over her. “No, please forget I said that. It was rude of me.”

“Hey, you’re just saying what we’re all thinking,” he said with a sigh before standing up to leave and signaling for his men to follow. “I’ll get to work on finding some more guys. I’ll start with the county jail and see if any of the inmates still have some community service to work off. Maybe they got some really violent guys who could handle this job!”

Stacy thanked them for their time, her mind still reeling with the possibility of just having a large slaying moment before the ceremony. It wouldn’t be the first dead body she’d had to deal with at a high-stakes event throughout her career, she remembered with a shudder, but it sure would be the first time she’d enjoy the sight of one.

“You’re thinking evil thoughts, I just know it,” Jeremiah called from her office door, interrupting the happy images playing in her mind of a bride and groom smiling at the front of a funeral procession.

“You think you know me, but you don’t,” she retorted, willing the guilty pink flush she knew would be coloring her face to go away. “What can I do for?”

“Well, you can help me figure out what to do with the delivery of daisies that showed up for the Lancaster wedding, you know, instead of the oceana roses the bride wanted.”

“WHAT?”

“Yeah. I called the distributor, and he checked the order again. Someone called and made the change two hours before they shipped. He was nice enough to include a restocking fee and a special order fee on top of it, since the change occurred after the roses I ordered were already on the truck for delivery.” Jeremiah waved a carbon-copy invoice for emphasis. “It gets better. These daisies are neon green. The caller requested they be dyed with the food coloring in the water buckets. Oh, and there was an extra charge for the dye, too.”

“Green?” Stacy cried, but immediately put up her hand, closing her eyes. She took a cleansing, mind-clearing, personality-altering breath before she spoke again. “No, I am not going to get upset. If the bride can find something to like about these people, so can I. Or I can at least not wish them all to die in a fiery car accident. No, you’re a floral genius, I’m sure you can make the daisies work.”

Jeremiah gaped at his boss. Where was the take charge woman who could work miracles in a crisis? The woman who could conjure the correct order seemingly out of thin air?

“Who are you, and what have you done with our beloved Stacy?” he demanded, finally narrowing his eyes in suspicion of the woman who was basically throwing in the towel right in front of him.

“What do you mean?” she asked, opening her eyes again and looking at him, confused.

“What do I mean? What do
you
mean?! You want me to just ‘make it work’ when the bride specifically requested the same flowers that her parents had at their wedding? Where is my spitfire of a boss who would snatch up that phone, bare her fangs and claws, and demand the wholesaler get the right flowers down here pronto?”

“Oh, that. Well, you see, I’ve finally figured out that there’s no point. If we run around behind these jerks and clean up every single one of their nasty attempts at ruining this wedding, they’ll just keep trying. They’ll get more and more outrageous until they finally do something that gets someone physically hurt, and I don’t want that on my conscience. I don’t want to push them to the point that they burn our building down! So if they think they’ve won, so be it. The bride doesn’t seem to have a problem with it, so neither will we. We’ll just carry on and follow her lead, and make the most beautiful wedding we can with whatever scraps the families let us have.”

“So that’s it? You’re giving up?” he demanded, his anger at one of the people he cared about most in the entire world starting to break through.

“Technically speaking, no. I can fully understand why it might seem that way, but I’m not giving up. I’m just producing the finest wedding we can under the circumstances. Make the daisies work, Jeremiah. It’ll be okay.” She looked up and met his eyes with a sad, defeated smile. “I promise it will be okay.”

He frowned at her, the disappointment written clearly on his face, but he nodded and went back to work.

Now Stacy just had to find a way to make good on her promise.

“
P
riscilla
, it’s so good to see you,” Stacy said softly, taking the girl by both hands and pulling her into a hug. Instead of looking like she’d expected a woman who’d called off a wedding to look, Priscilla just looked miserable. Her eyes were swollen from hours of crying, her nose was red, and there were dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep. Even worse, the overall effect highlighted something else, the hollows in the girl’s cheeks and collarbones, hollows that hadn’t been there before. All the stress the families were causing had made her lose any appetite she’d had for the past few weeks, and the girl simply wasn’t eating.

Porter walked in behind Priscilla, and he looked just as rough. He was gaunt, with matching bags under his eyes. He hadn’t shaved and apparently hadn’t brushed his hair. Stacy refrained from breathing too deeply through her nose in case the couple hadn’t had the time or energy to think about other areas of personal hygiene, even though it would be understandable in their situation.

“Let’s have a seat, and we can talk,” she began, leading the couple to an overstuffed sofa in her office and taking a seat across from them in an armchair. She poured them each some tea from a prepared tea service on the low table in front of them. She handed over a box of tissues with their tea cups, knowing they would need them.

For the next hour, she listened intently as they spoke, nodding her head from time to time to show her interest and sympathy. But on the inside, Stacy was thinking murderous thoughts. She let the couple vent their hurt, their anger, and their frustration, all while amusing herself with images of different relatives drowning in quicksand while she stood over them, or being dragged behind a speeding train that Stacy had arranged specifically for the occasion. She remember to smile or make sympathetic sounds in all the right places, even while plotting a murder.

“So let me understand,” she said suddenly when she heard something that sounded like hope in the conversation. “You’re not getting married because someone in Porter’s family killed your Great Granny?”

“Right! How can I marry into a family that hates my family so much? Hates them enough to kill? I can’t spend the rest of my life ducking for cover. And besides, what about our children?” Her voice caught on that word as she suddenly realized she would never have a family with the man she loved. Fresh tears poured down her cheeks. “I can’t raise children in a family with this much hatred. It’s not right.”

Stacy teared up a little herself when she looked for Porter’s reaction. This was a man who was torn up inside, one who was on the brink of dying of a broken heart right on her sofa.

“Baby, I’ve told you, I promise we don’t ever have to see my family! If that’s how little they care about us and our happiness, I’ll be done with them!” he protested, but Priscilla shook her head.

“That’s not right, and you know it,” she answered softly, taking his hands and shaking through her tears. “I can’t ask you to turn your back on them, and I won’t be the reason you did. You might think you can do it right now, but over time, you’ll come to resent me for making you choose.”

“Priscilla, I want you to think very clearly right now, and I know that’s hard at a time like this,” Stacy said sagely, steepling her fingers under her chin and leaning forward slightly. “We don’t even know for sure there was a murder! Remember, Porter’s mom has insisted that there were no peanuts in the food.”

Stacy didn’t get to continue, as her cell phone buzzed in her blazer pocket. She checked the number but didn’t recognize it straight away, and was relieved to hear Detective Sims’ voice on the other end when she finally excused herself and said hello.

“There’s no time for pleasantries, I’m afraid,” he said. “Your little game where you had everybody arrested for murder? It turns out it’s no joke. We had the guys at the lab analyze the food from the rehearsal. Checking food for content like peanuts is a really simple process, it’s just a matter of swabbing some chemicals on a few samples, so we got the results back right away. They came up empty, everything was clean.”

“So that means there was no murder, right?” Stacy asked, turning in her chair and lowering her voice to keep Priscilla and Porter from hearing too much. “She could have died any number of ways?”

“Wrong, kiddo. I’m sorry to say, we had them test the dishes, too, just to be on the safe side. Someone smeared the plates with peanut oil, almost all of them. Whoever it was probably couldn’t take a chance on trying to make sure the great-grandmother used the correct plate, so they wiped all of them down with trace amounts. Given the family’s description of the severity of her allergies, that tiny amount is all it took.”

“Who would do such a thing?” she started to ask, but then remembered she’d actually met these people. There was almost no way to narrow down the choices.

“I couldn’t even begin to give you an idea at this point, but I’ll keep you posted once I’m finished helping Amy—I mean, Detective McFadden—corroborate all the suspects’ stories.” Rod said goodbye and hung up, leaving Stacy staring at the quiet phone in her hands and thinking about how long it was going to take him to get to the bottom of it. She turned back to the couple on her sofa, her heart melting again at the sight of their tear-stained faces.

“Well, it seems there’s been a development,” she began hesitantly, knowing that what she had to tell them would not only set off a fresh wave of tears, but would also seal Priscilla’s heart against marrying her groom. She explained what Rod had told her, but was surprised that Priscilla only nodded.

“See? I knew it. They’d stop at nothing to keep us apart.”

Porter started to protest, but Stacy beat him to it. “Sweetheart,” she began, using a term of endearment that she rarely resorted to when speaking to a client, “think this through. Everything that’s happened so far has been bothersome, and even ugly, but murder? That’s taking things pretty far, don’t you think? Even if someone thought it would be funny to make Great Granny break out in a rash or swell up with hives, that’s one thing, but everyone knew it was a deathly allergy. That goes way beyond pranks to try to prevent the wedding.”

“Then what other motive could they have?” she asked. Stacy sat up straighter at hearing what sounded like hope in Priscilla’s voice. This was a girl who desperately wanted to marry the man she adored, but who was making the wise decision to cut losses now, before anything more could happen. Stacy smiled reassuringly.

“That’s what we’re about to find out.”