It didn’t rain. Ruth’s mother said it would. When confronted on her negativity, she declared the best way to insure something didn’t happen was to bet that it would, tempt fate, sort of. Wash the car—get rain. She said it worked when Ruth was a teenager and it should now. No one believed her, especially the part about Ruth, but it did not rain. Ike’s deputies put together a betting pool on the exact time Ike would actually marry the professor. Most people believed he would be late and the only issue was how late. Time slots in fifteen-minute intervals were charted out. Charley Picket won. He maintained a wedding would not happen at all. He won on a technicality. For those who actually paid attention to the words of the service, it soon became apparent that Ike and Ruth were already married and the service simply conferred a church blessing on it. Nobody really cared.
Food and drink were laid out on tables next to the church on the only grass available and guests, crashers, and two tourists from Pennsylvania who, since it was a weekday, thought they were witnessing an historical re-enactment of some sort, joined the celebration.
Townies performed a complex gavotte with the academics. Mutual suspicion and disdain seasoned with the grain alcohol Billy dumped in his mother’s famous lemon-strawberry punch heightened the strain, but there were no fights. When enough of the spiked punch had finally kicked in, the mood shifted and one of the town’s livelier citizens actually danced with the chairwoman of Callend’s Philosophy Department. This was all the more remarkable as there was no music provided at the time and neither dancer seemed to notice.
“Okay, Schwartz, where is he?”
“Where is who?”
“You know. Where is your buddy and mega-trouble maker, Charlie Garland, spook, spy, and ruiner of weekends?”
“Charlie? Did you invite Charlie?”
“Don’t go all innocent with me, Bunky. He’s here, isn’t he?”
“Probably, but in spite of what you may believe, I did not invite him. He called and said he’d see me Monday, that is today, well before I could get around to it.”
“Then you were going to invite him?” Ike shrugged. “How’d he know we were doing this?”
“He’s CIA. He knows everything. If you don’t believe it, ask him. He even knew about the Budding Rose Wedding Chapel.”
“I hate him. So, where is he?”
Ike pivoted around and did a quick mental inventory of the crowd. He paused for a moment to watch the tourists from Pennsylvania. They were taking pictures and interviewing some of the guests, notebooks at the ready. The townsfolk were used to this “innocents from the north behavior” and, because of the spiked punch and the general gaiety of the moment, were busy helping them fill their notebooks with some completely fictitious Civil War minutia. Ike and Ruth’s wedding would be described a week later on one of the visitor’s blogs, as the annual celebratory re-enactment of Picketsville’s savior, General Percival Frontain’s marriage to Lucinda Lee Picket, great-granddaughter of the town’s founder and hero of the Revolutionary War, Horatio Bellweather Picket. Several of his readers would bookmark the story and the reference would later appear in the footnotes of two term papers and the subplot for a bad historical novel.
“Charlie Garland is over there next to the cake entertaining your mother. Do you think we need to mount an intervention?”
“No. My mother can take her chances like everyone else. Who’s that with him?”
“Um…that is, if I am not mistaken, Harry Grafton.”
“And he is?”
“An associate of Charlie’s and more you do not want to know.’
“The woman with him looks familiar.”
“She should. She graduated from Callend. Her name used to be Jennifer Ames. I presume it is now Grafton. I’m missing Armand Dillon. He would have loved this.”
Ruth sighed. “He would have and you’re not the only one. Since his death, the University Development Office has to do actual work now to raise money.”
“No more picking up the phone and calling ‘Uncle Armand’ for seed money, matching funds, outright gifts?”
“Alas, no. Okay, I think we’re done here, let’s blow this joint.”
“We have to cut the cake first.”
“Okay, then let’s cut the cake and then blow this joint.”
“Cut the cake. Right.”
“Should we should say something to Darla before we go?”
“We could, but we won’t just now. She needs time to decompress. She has had a horrific week which topped off a horrific life. There may still be some, or a great deal of residual enmity directed toward police in general and me in particular. I don’t want to spook her into running away again. The Rev is working with her. He’s good at that stuff. Give him time with her. When we get back we will see where she is and if and when adopting her or whatever it is we do would be appropriate. It could be some time, Ruth, before that child is wrapped tight enough to deal with you and me.”
“And you and I with her, I suspect. You’re right. I am used to receiving immediate results, I’m afraid. In this instance, I will have to wait.”
Ike was told that Darla insisted she be called Darlene Dellinger, not Darla Smut. They were her birth certificate names after all. She stood to one side between Mary and Blake Fisher in a very new party frock. Since she’d managed to escape her mother and the life she’d been forced to live, she’d worn nothing but slacks and jeans. She seemed uncomfortable in a dress. She held the front down with one hand and kept her feet together. Vulnerable would describe her best. The party ebbed and flowed around her. She didn’t appear able to take it all in. So many happy people. Blake had spent the previous night explaining to her that the sheriff’s office as she knew it had vanished absolutely and that the new sheriff had only her best interests at heart and had been trying to protect her from the LeBruns of the world. She’d given him a weak smile and he’d guessed it would take time before she believed any of what he said, but then she started asking questions about what had happened and what people were doing. Youth, given a chance, has remarkable powers of healing.
“By the way, O groom of mine,’ Ruth said, bringing Ike back to the moment, “you said you would tell me where we were going when we finally do cut and run, pun intended.”
“Yes, I did. Thank you for reminding me. For the ‘unbridled’ portion of this inspired Morris Dance, I have arranged for you to take a week off—”
“A week? I can’t take a week off. We just got back from too many weeks off already, Ike.”
“Nevertheless, with the skillful connivance of Agnes, your loyal and at the moment teary-eyed administrative assistant, I have managed to have you off the books for one whole week beginning today. This afternoon, we head out to Roanoke.”
“Roanoke! You want me to spend quality romantic time celebrating this matrimonial crash and burn with a week in Roanoke? Really?”
“Not the city, Miz President, the airport. From there we shall hop our way across the country and spend a rollicking week in Sedona, Arizona.”
“What’s in Sedona, Arizona? Hell, aside from being in Arizona, where is Sedona?”
“Middle of the state, out of the worst of the heat and very pretty. We will have a week in a luxury resort, complete with a spa, mud baths, and cucumber slices on the eyes if that is your wish, crystal shops with New Age woo-woo, art galleries, good food, pink jeeps, red rocks, and energy vortexes.”
“Energy vortexes, you mean like a New Age filling station?”
“Um, yes that would pretty much cover it.”
“Right. So, what could possibly go wrong with that?”