The Secret Wedding Dress (2 page)

While she went around the house to retrieve soap and brushes
from the motor home that served as her Mutt Mobile, she heard Oscar start barking wildly. Rushing back with her supplies, she expected to find that he’d flushed out a squirrel or a rabbit, both of which her frequent boarder considered great sport. So far, the score remained squirrels and rabbits about fifty, Oscar zero. But this time, Sylvie was startled to learn that Oscar had treed a very frightened, very large gold cat. It perched on a limb that hung over Sylvie’s side of the fence.

“Nice kitty.” She dropped her supplies and grabbed Oscar’s collar. He launched himself at the branch, causing the cat to hiss and spit. The dog’s lunge yanked Sylvie right out of her slide sandals and sent her sprawling on her backside.

“Darn you, Oscar.” Scrambling to her hands and knees, this time latching on to the leather collar with both hands, she said, “Leave that cat alone! She has to belong to my new neighbor. This is no way to make a first impression, Oscar.” The words no sooner left Sylvie’s lips than a child started shrieking.

“Daddy, Daddy, I accidentally let Fluffy out of the house, and…help, Daddy, she’s stuck up the tree.”

Sylvie couldn’t see the child nor, apparently, could the kid see that Sylvie was trying to rectify the situation. Excited by the cat, and the strange voice calling from the next yard, Oscar thought this was fantastic fun. So much so, he tore loose from Sylvie’s grasp and bounded against the fence. Hard enough to threaten its stability.

Deciding she needed leverage to pry Oscar away from his quarry, Sylvie ran to the porch for his leash. It was then that she realized she’d left both hoses running. The dog’s bath had begun to overflow, washing gallons of warm water over the tub edge and down the hill. Sylvie took only long enough to wrench off the faucets, as the din by the tree had grown markedly. Frenzied now, the barking dog drowned out the hissing cat and the girl’s strident cries for help.

Sylvie managed to connect the leash to his collar as an upstairs
window next door flew open wide. “What’s going on down there?” a masculine voice bellowed.

“A little cat-dog mixup is all,” Sylvie called breathlessly, doing her best to wrest Oscar aside. Since she was facing the sun, the man framed in the window was no more than a shape. Unfortunately, the muddy trail of water from the tub had made its way to where Sylvie dug in her bare heels. She lost purchase on the slick, wet grass and went down again, this time in a wet, muddy heap.

It didn’t help to have the man yell at her in a tone implying she must be the dumbest, most inept person who’d ever had the temerity to occupy a home next to his. “Lady, you shouldn’t own a beast you can’t control. I’m trying to log in moving boxes. I have two movers anxious to finish and get back on the road. Rianne, get in here right now. Fluffy will come down as soon as that woman takes her horse of a dog away from our fence.”

Sylvie longed to blister the stupid man’s ears. She resisted for the sake of the child—until she heard Iva’s back door slam. As a rule she didn’t swear, but she uttered a nice round curse as warm mud squished below her mud-soaked cutoffs. Anger at her neighbor’s insensitivity gave her added strength. Enough to regain her footing and convince Oscar that playtime was over.

She bathed him at once. Fluffy the cat still hadn’t budged from the tree. Sylvie blow-dried Oscar while Fluffy continued to glare at them from the woefully sagging branch.

“Now who’s too stupid to live?” Sylvie shook her fist at the owl-eyed feline. She shoved a squeaky-clean Oscar into the safety of her laundry room. Then she drained the dirty tub and scrubbed as much mud off her legs as she could. Assuming the cat would indeed come down once everyone left the yard, Sylvie went to take a shower.

An hour later, she peeked out her kitchen window and realized Fluffy was still frozen to that branch. “Darn it,” she grumbled, only too aware of the many tales about firemen summoned to rescue stranded cats. And unless she coaxed
that cat out of the tree, Oscar could never be allowed to go into her back yard.

The sun had dried most of the wet grass, Sylvie saw after stepping out a side door Oscar wasn’t watching. Standing on her side of the fence, hands on hips, Sylvie studied the cat—and heard soft sniffling coming from the other yard. Concerned, Sylvie shinnied up the tree to its first fork. That placed her high enough to look into her neighbor’s yard. “Hi,” she said to a small girl who sat with both arms wrapped around her knees. “My name is Sylvie. Are you Rianne?”

The girl nodded, her face streaked with tears.

“I’m worried about my cat. Daddy’s real busy, but Fluffy’s only ever lived in a ‘partment. I don’t want to leave her, ‘cause maybe she’ll get lost.”

“Ah.” Sylvie considered the distance from her to the cat. It wasn’t that the span was so great, but the limb seemed pretty frail. “Where was your apartment?”

“Atlanta. I’m six, almost. I loved my school and my teacher. Do you think they’ve got a nice school here?”

“I’m sure of it. I lived in Briarwood all my life, well, except for a few years I went off to work in New York City. There’s a bunch of things that’re way better here.”

The girl stared at Sylvie with huge, watery eyes. “I’ll like it okay. My daddy said it takes time to get used to somewhere new. What happened to your dog? My daddy said that dog’s gonna be trouble.”

Sylvie smiled at the girl who obviously planned to parrot everything her father said. No telling what she might discover about her new neighbors at this rate.

“Oscar isn’t really my dog,” she explained. “Normally he’s friendly and loveable. I bathe pets and sometimes dogsit, too. Look, honey, why don’t I try to get Fluffy down?”

“I’d like that, thank you,” the child said politely.

Sylvie inched out on the limb. “Is your last name Whitaker?”

“Uh-uh. Mercer. Rianne
Mercer. My daddy’s name is Joel, and my mommy’s name is Lynn.”

Creeping out several more inches, Sylvie absorbed those facts. It must mean that Iva’s great nephew had sold his inheritance. She was about to ask, when she heard the limb crack. Her heart jackhammered wildly. The Mercers’ back door flew open and the man with the gruff voice called, “Rianne? Where are you, sweetie? The movers need you to tell us where you want your bed.”

The girl swung around. “Can I come in a minute, Daddy? Fluffy’s still in the tree.”

Sylvie heard dark muttering that mirrored the thoughts running through her head. Then she heard a sound like pebbles striking metal. Rianne’s dad was pouring dry cat food into a bowl—but that only occurred to her when, big as you please, Fluffy leaped down from her perch. She landed safely below on all fours and dashed through her back door. Rianne shouted gleefully and raced after her pet.

Sylvie was glad her ignominious fall into her yard, limb and all, took place after her obnoxious, arrogant neighbor had closed his door. Luckily, her pride was all that suffered injury. Although, she mused, limping toward her cabin, who knew what aches and pains she’d have come morning?

J
OEL
M
ERCER
had gotten a fair glimpse of his neighbor, wrapped tight around a sagging tree branch. His earlier impression had been of a scrawny dark-haired woman in her mid-to-late twenties, who behaved in a somewhat bizarre fashion. Hell, what was he thinking? She’d acted like a complete fruitcake.

Seeing her on to that branch was his second glimpse, and it did nothing to alter his first opinion. She’d changed clothes to climb trees, apparently. Her hair no longer hung straight to her chin as it had; she’d secured a twist atop her head with what resembled a large metal chip-bag clip. Spiky hair poked
out every which way. Joel wondered if she’d been attempting to spy on him. Was that why she’d decided to swing through the trees like Jane of the jungle? God only knew, but Joel had run into of some pretty odd women hanging out in Atlanta’s singles bars. Women he’d labeled predators. In spite of his weekly comic strip, which centered on a couple of zany cartoon girlfriends named Poppy and Rose and described their dating misadventures, Joel usually managed to keep his private life fairly tame. Making his life tamer still had been his one goal in moving to laid-back Briarwood, North Carolina, into the home he’d inherited from his great-aunt. That, and keeping Rianne from seeing her mother’s face splashed all over half the billboards in town because it confused and upset her. Joel didn’t begrudge Lynn her newly acquired high-powered TV anchor job. He did resent that she never made time to spend with their daughter.

“Rianne, let Fluffy eat in peace. I need you to come upstairs and pick the bedroom you’d like. Then we’ll set up your bed.”

The girl skipped up the curving staircase, landing hard on both feet at the top. “I never choosed my room in our ’partment.”

“Choosed isn’t a word, honey. It’s
chose.
And you should say
a
partment.”

“Why?” She slipped her hand in Joel’s.

Answering his daughter’s endless
whys
had been his second-biggest challenge as single dad to a precocious child. The first, he discovered, was figuring out how to safely shuffle Rianne in and out of women’s public restrooms in restaurants, malls and parks. Now,
that
took charm and ingenuity. He always had to garner the aid of kind, elderly ladies; he’d learned to sense which faces to trust.

“The rules about using the proper words will fall into place when your new first-grade teacher gives you word lists. I’ll help you study them.”

“Daddy, the lady next door said I’ll like school here. She
said she’s lived here her whole life, ‘cept for when she lived in New York City.”

“She didn’t live in that house, Rianne. I knew the couple who lived there. Mr. Shea taught me how to fish in the lake I showed you. His wife, Mary, baked the best oatmeal-raisin cookies I’ve ever tasted. I can almost smell them even now. Okay, snooks, this is the yellow room. Across the hall, the other room is painted…violet, I guess. One of its walls is covered in flower wallpaper. We can change the paint color and pick out new paper, if you’d like.”

“I like this room, Daddy. Oh, look, there’s a bench in the window. I can see Oscar playing in the lady’s yard.”

Joel knelt on the bench and gazed down on his neighbor’s backyard. Given the amount of land attached to the Whitaker estate, he wondered why his great-uncle Harvey hadn’t picked a more secluded spot to build. “Considering the size of the neighbor’s dog and the way he scared poor Fluffy, I’d rather you stayed far away from that woman and her pet.”

“Oscar’s not hers. She baby-sits him. She gives doggies baths and sometimes dogs stay with her, like I did at my baby-sitter’s the days when you worked late.”

“Gr…eat!” Joel heaved out the word. “I see a dog run and kennels. Hmm. I wouldn’t have thought that would be a legal business inside the city limits.”

“Why?”

“Just because,” Joel said, eyeing the neighbor’s yard as the movers hauled in Rianne’s bed. He turned from the window with a frown. He’d always sworn he wouldn’t resort to answering his kids’ questions with
just because.
As a boy he’d had an inquisitive mind. His parents, who fought constantly, never gave straight answers. Their bitterness had led to their eventual breakup and to his estrangement from them. Which was another reason this house and Briarwood held such fond memories for him. Iva and her good friends, Bill and Mary Shea, had nothing but time to lavish on a lonely, neglected
boy. Joel’s folks had finally split the year he’d turned fifteen. His dad, a career Army man, went on to a new duty station in Hawaii. He’d remarried ASAP, and his new wife had given birth to a son. Joel’s dad seemed to forget he had an older son from his first marriage. He retired in Hilo, so Joel had never met his stepbrother. And his mom had continued with her job in Atlanta until she, too, met and married a new man. Seventeen by then, Joel elected to stay behind. His high school teachers and counselors secured him an art scholarship, for which he’d always be grateful. As a lonely child, he’d coped with moving from one army base to the next by drawing funny caricatures of the people around him. His drawing ability, combined with observational skills and a dry wit made him a good living from the time he’d hired on to create political cartoons a decade ago, to now. After a few years, the paper had offered him his own, more lucrative, weekly strip, which went into syndication a while ago.

“I’m going to have the movers bring in the posts for your bed, Rianne. How about if, after they go, you help me by handing over the bolts, nuts and wrenches I need? Then I’ll assemble my bed. After I finish that, I’ll fix us something to eat.”

“What?”

“Whatever I find in the first food box I open. Tomorrow, early, we’ll go grocery shopping.”

Putting together beds soon became a chore that was next to impossible to complete. But by then, what to fix for supper was no longer an issue. Within minutes of the moving van’s departure, a steady stream of Briarwood matrons started bringing in so much food Joel was astonished—and wary. Especially after the first talkative stranger, a woman named Millie McDaniel, informed Joel that she owned the only hair salon in town, and he realized that along with casseroles came questions. Briarwood’s self-appointed welcoming committee was determined to find out the intimate details of his life. But ever since his very public divorce from a prominent newschaser, Joel
had learned how to smile politely and say nothing personal.

Seconds after he shut the door on a very persistent shopkeeper, Joel noticed his next-door neighbor striding down her lane. Where earlier she’d worn raggedy cutoffs, she now had on a floaty pink sundress. Joel hesitated just inside his door, juggling a layer cake in one hand and a macaroni-and-beef casserole in the other. Because she carried a covered metal pan, he assumed she was about to be his next inquisitor. Joel vacillated between meeting her head-on and pretending not to hear his doorbell.

Instead of escaping, he edged out onto the porch, admiring the change a dress made in her appearance. A full skirt swished appealingly around her slender ankles. On one ankle he identified a circle of gemstones winking in the setting sun. A minute or so passed while he enumerated her other attributes. Then two things dawned on Joel. One, she’d noticed him ogling her. Two, she wasn’t going to his house. A car had pulled into her lane, and a spiffily dressed man emerged from the sleek black Mercedes coupe. He whipped open his passenger door and relieved the woman of her pan of goodies, then waited while she folded her full skirt inside the car. The man watched Joel, too.