The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (8 page)

“Isn’t it bad luck to have your wedding dress fitted too many times?” Lance asked. He parked behind my mother’s car and we got out.

“Of course not,” I told him. “It’s very
good
luck, because it’s less likely to fall off you walking down the aisle.” I would have thought that Lance would be happier about my re-refitting. Waiting around one more time while Mama went over me with a pincushion looking for flaws put off the trip to find centerpieces. He started to grumble something else, and I added, “Anyway, it delays the trip to the craft store.”

“There is that.”

“After lunch, you get to tell my dad we’ll be back later to stay the night.” I walked in ahead of him, denying him the chance to retort.

As I had expected, our lunch conversation centered around Mama’s last-minute concerns. She was worried about the cake, because we had declined to go for a tasting sometime last month and had left the flavor entirely up to the baker.

“You didn’t at least tell them marble or yellow?” she demanded.

“Or chocolate,” Daddy added, sipping his coffee. “You might have ordered chocolate.”

“I’m sure Ironweed Confections knows your favorite flavors and mine,” I told them. “We’ve been getting Saturday cupcakes there I think since I was born.” And I had so told them a flavor; they wouldn’t take the order without it. But I wasn’t releasing that detail for public consumption and debate.

Mama wasn’t sure about the plastic tablecloths currently sitting in her basement. “Why don’t we look at getting decent replacements today?” she wanted to know. “You got those other ones at some chain back in March.”

“And at bargain basement prices,” I added.

“Exactly. You have no idea what might be wrong with them. Every one already has a hole for all we know.”

“They’re fine,” I said. “It’s quite enough that we have to have centerpieces,” a detail I considered frivolous. “We can put any holes under those.”

And that brought the conversation back to its origin, and Mama’s real fussing point today. She was deciding between a central candle surrounded by ivy and a simple bowl with floating votives for each table. She wanted Lance and me to agree on one or the other. I didn’t like either, but found the votives less kitschy. Lance wasn’t much help. He sat with his arms crossed over his chest once he finished his sandwich. Then, whenever Mama asked a question, he waited for me to answer and agreed with me using monosyllables.

Mama said, “I’m sure the bowls should be clear glass, but they would need to be opaque to be sure we could hide holes in the tablecloths.”

“Mama, there won’t be holes.”

“How can you be sure?”

Lance ventured, “Opaque bowls will look fine.”

And Daddy backed him up, saying, “Exactly!” He was even more of a conscript than Lance and I at these festivities.

Everyone but Mama was finished eating by that time, and Lance and I started putting away the bread and condiments. “Go on upstairs, Noel,” Mama said.

“Oh, leave them alone, Lenore,” Daddy said. He got up. “I’m going back to my garden.” We would be getting married in that garden tomorrow. He was far more concerned with making the roses beautiful. The back door banged behind him, and I heard a chorus of barking from my parents’ dogs, who had been banned from the kitchen for the meal.

Lance and I got as far as taking the dishes to the sink before Mama finished her own meal. She waved to us and dusted some crumbs off her chin. “I’ll get that later,” she said. Then my Nana banged into the kitchen. “There you are!” Mama exclaimed. “I was worried something had happened to you.”

“Please, I’m only eighty. I don’t think we need to take away my car keys yet.”

“Noel, get her a sandwich.” Mama opened the refrigerator and pulled the ham back out.

“I ate before I came over.”

“But you knew this was a planning lunch.”

“Which is exactly why I ate first. Let’s go fit that dress.”

“You two get ready,” I said. “Lance and I are just going to load the dishwasher and I’ll be up.”

Mama started to say something, but Nana shooed her on out of the kitchen. I was grateful that my grandmother recognized my need for a few minutes alone with my fiancé. I knew they would both be waiting with needles outpointed if I didn’t hurry to join them. But I wanted just a few more minutes alone with Lance before the wedding madness ensued.

He frowned at their retreating figures, and I handed him a plate. Half of his problem was that he wanted to get the centerpiece search over with (if we had to have centerpieces at all), and the other half was that he didn’t really want anything to do with the process. He was trying very hard to be a twenty-first-century groom, but we both knew he couldn’t have cared less about the decorations. He stayed involved because he knew I didn’t care either. Every time we came to detail tension, I threatened to make him elope and swore the entire ceremony was for the relatives.

Lance and I tucked the last of the dishes into the rack and loaded the machine with soap. I was thinking about my mother and grandmother. I said, “I don’t understand those two. They snipe back and forth so much, but they don’t even seem angry half the time.”

“Who?” Lance asked. “Your parents?”

“No. Mama and Nana. But that’s another thing. Why can’t Daddy keep track of his cards? Mama whispered before you came in that he’s had another card stolen because he left it somewhere. Your mom has issues and my dad’s going senile. Crazy, isn’t it?”

Lance turned and walked toward the door, heading for Daddy and the rose gardens. Then, quite suddenly, he said, “I think your mom and grandmother learned to get by that way. It probably goes back to Franny having to be a single parent in the nineteen fifties. She was joking about it with you when you asked, but we both know your nana didn’t have things easy.” I loved how Lance had made the leap to a two-week-old conversation, knowing I would be there, too. He continued, “I think she and your mom learned to put up with each other is all.” Then he turned and went back out to make sure there was going to be room for us to stay here this evening.

As if that could possibly be a problem. Mama and Daddy had whole wings of the house to shut off in cold weather. Lance and I could have lived like the Mad Tea Party and slept in a different room every night if we stayed here regularly. Even with Nana staying for the wedding
and
my sister and her family coming in tonight, they would have space for us. Still, it would have been rude not to give any warning at all, and Lance enjoyed spending time with Daddy, even if he pretended not to know anything at all about the flowers.

Mama and Daddy lived in a huge old Victorian house that had once belonged to the town mortician. It came with an overgrown English garden for them to rehabilitate. Sophia only learned the house’s history when she came into town, and that was surely why she thought the place was cursed. I found her conclusion ridiculous.

In twenty-four years of living here, the closest my parents had come to a haunting was some mysterious attic scraping probably caused by squirrels. The building had been both funeral parlor and morgue, and Sophia most likely thought dead bodies last present seventy-odd years ago guaranteed lingering unhappy spirits.
Some of those people died gently in their sleep,
I fumed now as I mounted the steps to try on my dress one last time.
Quite a lot of them did.

It seemed unlikely that Sophia was considering how commonplace a dwelling like this one would have been in the late 1800s. In the nineteenth century, it wasn’t at all unusual for the local funeral home to double as the morgue and be operated out of a person’s home. These buildings tended to be large to accommodate their dual role and allow for big wakes.

The town of Granton, however, burned in the 1930s, during the Depression. While this was one of the few homes and businesses to survive the fire unscathed, the funeral jobs had shifted when people drifted into the county seat of Ironweed only a few miles down the road, unable to rebuild in a time of need. By then, the county had a morgue of its own, and the funeral director simply moved his business out of his abode and set up an office in town.

When he died some years later, his home passed into other hands. Those hands all belonged to the same family for a few generations. My parents waited a long time for the house to come on the market. Daddy had his eye on the gardens. Mama had hers on the turrets.

Growing up in Ironweed, it had been one of those things I heard about for my entire childhood. We used to drive out to old Granton (which didn’t even rate its own zip code) to look at “our” house and plan our futures in it. Mama even took the step of giving the widowed owner our phone number and telling her we were interested if she ever wanted to sell.

Nothing came of it until my first year of college. Then, one day, my little sister got home from school and the phone was ringing. It was Mrs. Johnson calling from the bank, ready to finish a deal she considered my mother to have initiated some six years previously.

Within a week my family was moving.

At that point, I was not attending Ironweed U. I completed my undergraduate work at Midwestern College, a couple of hours to the east. So I heard about the move while living in a dorm and came home at Thanks giving to find all my old possessions at the new house. Over two decades later, many of those belongings still sat in boxes in a closet in a room Mama had labeled mine. She wouldn’t throw them out, and I hadn’t needed them since before they were relocated.

Still, I liked this house. I had grown up looking forward to living here, and it felt like home to me. I enjoyed its character and thought my parents had done an excellent job making it their own, with restoration work on the interior and much planting in the garden. I lived with them for a lot of graduate school, and I found the house as comfortable as if I
had
spent my childhood in it.

Upstairs, Mama said, “You’ve left so many important things until so
late.
”

“The only things left are little,” I protested. “My dress, decorations, flowers, the caterer and the license. We got the license this morning, and I talked to the catering company last Wednesday. And I always knew the dress would be fine.”

“And now you don’t have flowers at all,” Mama snapped.

“Oh for pity’s sake, I have an entire rose garden full of them. Could anything in this whole world be more lovely than Daddy’s flowers?”

Mama had to concede that point. “But the
caterer,
” she fussed, looking to Nana. “You call the caterer a ‘little’ detail. You can’t expect much from a company you booked on a week’s notice.”

“They’ll be fine,” I said. “I know them.” They supplied the food for all of the center’s fund-raising events, and I didn’t think it really mattered much what we served. Nobody remembers the food at a wedding. And we
booked
them back when we set the date. We finalized the menu a little on the tardy side. I didn’t give Mama the satisfaction of knowing that the caterer shared her opinion about food chosen a week and a half in advance based largely on what was already on order.

“That’s certainly true,” Mama agreed. “I don’t think there’s one of these businesses that one of us doesn’t know some way or another.”

I was standing in a ridiculous corset and my panties while she fussed with the zipper that she had sewn under the buttons before she would let me pull on the dress. Then heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs and Lance’s head appeared in the doorway, saving me from having to think up a response to something that hadn’t been a question to begin with. “It’s Bub,” he said, without apologizing for barging in on me half naked. “He and Mom are having some kind of a catfight. I’m going to try to sort it out without dragging you in. I’ll be back to get you later. You’re going to have to cope with the centerpieces without me.”

“Lance, if he’s hurt your mother,” I began. But I didn’t know where to end the sentence.

“No,” Lance said, “I don’t think so. He’s the one calling. I’ll tell you when I know more.” And he headed down to the truck alone. Now, I regretted being trapped into a final fitting. I regretted his brother’s unexpected arrival. And most of all, I regretted loaning my mother-in-law my car for the length of her stay, especially since she had only used it once. Mostly, her friends spirited her places. If Lance and I hadn’t been riding together, I could have followed him over after I finished with this dress nonsense, and made Mama and Nana deal with the centerpieces after all.

“Hurry up,” I said to my mother. “We haven’t got all day for this.”

Mama ignored me and actually set the dress down. “When were you planning to tell me that Alexander Lakeland is here?”

Thanks so
much
honey,
I thought at Lance.
There was a
reason
I had you talking to Daddy about why we needed a room, and an even better reason why I had you doing it after the rest of us were upstairs.

“I found out before the orangutan crisis, Mama, and Lance heard right before that.” We had explained the morning’s events briefly before Mama launched into wedding mode at lunch. “We invited Alex for Sophia’s sake, and she made him come.”

“Really,” Mama said. “That’s what he says? And you believe him?”

Nana said, “Let go of it, Lenore.”

Mama rounded on her instead. “How am I supposed to let go of what he did?”

“If
I
can do it, then you can, Mama,” I snapped, seizing the dress and jerking it on.

“Be
careful,
” Mama scolded, hurrying to help me get my arms and head through the right holes. She didn’t raise the issue again, but the rest of the fitting was tense and unhappy as memories filled the room.

We headed out to buy centerpieces in a similar mood. We drove uptown to Ironweed, even though there was not one store in town that could possibly satisfy our needs. We got out on the town square and Mama said, “Now, I think we need to try Winkie’s Trinkets first, then the Diamond Dovecote after that. They always have little things.”

“Mama,” I said. “Can’t we be a little practical? There’s nothing here for us. None of these shops will have more than a few of any one item in stock.”