Chapter 6
Savannah tried to call Dirk, but, as any well-behaved bridegroom would do, he had turned his cell phone off.
Her hand was shaking so badly that she could hardly punch the buttons on her own phone, which she had stashed in her purse in the bridal suite closet.
She tried Tammy, Ryan, and John. But no one answered.
Get a hold on your nerves, gal, she told herself, as she drew some deep breaths. You’re not going to be any good to anybody if you don’t get it together.
She considered just running back the way she’d come to get help, but her knees felt like warm Jell-O, the pain in her chest made her wonder if she might be having a heart attack, and she wasn’t sure she’d even make it.
Quickly, she ran down a mental list of her guests and wedding party. Who was the most likely to have their cell phone on ... wedding or no wedding?
She punched in another number, and sure enough, there was an answer on the second ring.
“Hello?” drawled a syrupy sweet Southern voice.
“Marietta, it’s me, Savannah.”
“Savannah! Hightail it back here, girl! We’re all waiting for you! Did you find Grandpa’s ring?”
“Mari, listen to me. Go get Dirk. Right now.”
“But ... ? What are you talking about? Are you gonna ... ?”
“Hush up. Don’t argue with me, girl. Just do what I’m tellin’ you. Walk out the door and down there where everybody’s at and hand your phone to Dirk. Do it now!”
“Are you chickenin’ out? Is that what this is all about? ’Cause if you dragged all of us all the way here from Georgia just so that you could—”
“MARIETTA! Damn your hide, girl! Make tracks! Now!”
“Okay! Sheez, Louise ... you don’t have to scream at me! I’m going! I’m going!”
Suddenly, every bit of strength in Savannah’s legs disappeared, and she sank abruptly to the floor, there in the door frame, between the bedroom and the patio.
From where she sat, she could see, all too graphically, the face of the victim, whom she had pulled from the water.
She’d thought there might be a chance, even a slim one, that the body wasn’t as dead as it looked.
But it was.
Madeline Aberson had definitely passed from life to death ... and there would be no coming back.
Savannah wasn’t sure what had happened to her. She didn’t know if the woman had drowned, or worse. It wasn’t clear where all that blood had come from.
The blood that was now all over the front of Savannah’s white wedding gown.
For a moment, Savannah had a horrible sense of déjà vu. It was so similar to her recent nightmare.
Through the phone she could hear Marietta say to Dirk, “Yeah, it’s her. She wants to talk to you. I don’t know, but she’s in a fettle about something. You’d better talk to her.”
She heard a loud clatter and Marietta curse, “Damnation. I dropped it. Here.”
“Savannah? Honey ... what the hell?” Dirk sounded deeply concerned, and she couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t exactly standard wedding protocol for the bride to call her waiting groom on the phone. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. But you have to leave there and come to the bridal suite.”
“What? Why? Aren’t we supposed to be—”
“Yes, I’m sorry, sugar, but it ain’t happening right now. We’ve got us a ten-fifty-five right here in our room.”
“No way! You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I wish I was. It’s Madeline Aberson.”
“Aw, man ... this bites.” He turned away from the phone and she heard him say, “No, Gran, she’s all right. But there’s a problem. A bad problem, back in our suite. I’m gonna have to go see about it. Atlanta, could you sing another song or two?”
She heard Atlanta begin a nice rendition of Paul Stookey’s “Wedding Song.”
Then Dirk said into the phone, “Is there any way in hell it’s an accident or natural causes and not a ten-fifty-five?”
Savannah got up onto her knees and scooted closer to the body. The front showed no signs of trauma, so with considerable effort, she rolled Madeline onto her side and peered at the back.
She saw what appeared to be three small puncture wounds between the shoulder blades.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t an accident, unless she fell on something and stabbed herself in the back three times.”
“Damn.”
“My feelings exactly. You might as well bring Dr. Liu along with you. And send everybody else home.”
“Again.” He sounded as sad and defeated as she felt.
“Yes, darlin’. Again.”
“Who else has been in here?” Dr. Jennifer Liu asked as she looked around the luxury suite that was to have been Savannah and Dirk’s private haven, but was now the scene of a gruesome crime.
Savannah stood on the opposite side of the corpse with Dirk, surveying the sad situation. Nothing looked out of the ordinary ... except the dead woman sprawled on the tile between them.
“To my knowledge, just Madeline and myself,” Savannah said. “Maybe a maid. The bed had been turned back since I saw it earlier ... when I was in here, changing into my gown.”
Savannah resisted the urge to look into the room, at the open closet, where her gown lay in a crumpled mess of satin, lace, pool water, and blood.
“And, of course,” Dirk said, “the killer.”
Dr. Liu stood, rising to well over six feet tall in her fashionable ultra-high pumps. She pulled a red silk scarf from around her neck and tied her long, silky black hair back into a ponytail. Her beautiful face registered the transformation from casual, carefree wedding guest to county coroner at the scene of a homicide.
“Those are stab wounds, no doubt about it,” she said, pointing to the three wounds on Madeline Aberson’s back. “Those are relatively small lacerations. Not large enough for a knife, even taking into account the skin gaping.”
“An ice pick?” Savannah asked.
Dr. Liu nodded. “Something like that.”
Dirk pointed to the pool with its water lilies, candles ... and gruesome red staining. “It doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of blood in the water there,” he said. “Not enough for a person to have bled out, I wouldn’t think.”
“Me either,” the doctor said. “But with that sort of a penetration wound, the fatal bleeding could be mostly internal. Depending on the trajectory, at least one of those looks like it could have pierced the heart itself. Wouldn’t have taken long if that were the case.”
“It couldn’t have taken very long,” Savannah told them as she sat on a nearby patio chair. She was feeling far more weak and shaky than she would have admitted to either of them. “She left me there in the reception room to come back here and tidy up a bit. It wasn’t more than about six or seven minutes later when I came up here to get Grandpa Reid’s ring.”
“That’s not much time for the killer to get his business done,” Dirk said.
“And she was dead when you got here?” Dr. Liu asked Savannah.
“Absolutely. I pulled her out of the water, flipped her on her back, and did some CPR. But it was obvious to me right away that she was past helping.”
“What are the odds she drowned?” Dirk asked. “After all, if she was facedown in the water ...”
“It’s possible,” Dr. Liu said. “I’ll know once I get her on the table and check the lungs.”
Dirk left the patio and walked back inside. Savannah followed him.
She saw a look of sadness cross his face as he glanced over at the bed with its carefully turned-down covers and heart-shaped candies wrapped in pink and blue foil on the pillows, along with a card that read, “Congratulations to the Bride and Groom.”
He turned toward her and caught sight of the bloodied gown she had left in the closet when she’d changed back into her street clothes.
She wished she’d thought to close the closet door.
He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her to his side. “Dammit, babe, I can’t believe this happened to us again. The fire, the mud slide, and now this? What the hell’s goin’ on?”
She looked up at him and read her own thought there in his eyes. Maybe it isn’t meant to be.
But just as quickly, she pushed the dark idea away.
“No,” she told him. “Don’t go there. We are meant to be together. We are! We’ve just got some world-class stink-o wedding luck.”
He laughed, but there wasn’t a lot of mirth in the sound. He kissed her on the forehead. “Fire, mud, and murder ... You think?”
As Savannah stood on the sweeping lawn, watching her guests leave the country club premises—once again, not having viewed her nuptial vows—she couldn’t help uttering a couple of unladylike curses under her breath.
Under her breath, because her grandmother was six feet away.
Then she added, a bit louder, “You’d think that with a couple dozen of San Carmelita’s finest on the property, somebody would’ve seen something.”
Faithful Tammy stood next to her, an equally mournful look on her face. “How about security cameras?”
“Dirk’s with the club’s manager checking them now,” Savannah told her. “It doesn’t look promising. Needless to say, they don’t have any trained on the bridal suite’s balcony. The whole idea for a honeymoon is to have some privacy.”
Jesup walked up just in time to hear the end of the conversation. Looking far less mournful than Tammy. In fact, she looked quite chipper as she said, “Maybe it was random ... some lunatic who’s still roaming the halls, looking for another victim.”
Savannah tried to overlook her enthusiasm. The kid had been born on Halloween, a fact she took deeply to heart. She couldn’t help being a bit of a ghoul.
“Could be,” Savannah said. “But I doubt it. Most people who get murdered know who killed ’em and why.”
“Huh?” Jesup shook her head and walked away.
Marietta hurried up to them, a distressed look on her face. “Are we gonna eat anything?” she asked. “I mean, just ’cause the wedding’s off doesn’t mean we have to starve to death, does it?”
“There’s cake and ice cream in the reception hall. Go chow down,” Savannah said.
The thought of one more wedding cake that wasn’t going to be ceremonially cut by herself and her bridegroom was Savannah’s undoing.
She could take a dead body showing up in her bridal suite. She could even stand yet another ruined bridal gown.
But another cake ... it was just too much.
Granny Reid detected the imminent breakdown and reached for her oldest grandchild, drawing her into her arms. “There, there, sugar pie ... Don’t you go tunin’ up now! You’ve been such a brave girl so far and—”
“Shhhh, Granny!” Savannah said, gently pushing her away, “Do not be nice to me! Just don’t! If you say anything sweet, I’m gonna lose it right here and now, and it won’t be a pretty sight, I guarantee you, ’cause I’ve been saving it up for a long time now.”
Granny smiled and nodded. “I understand. Save it up a little bit longer. But sooner or later, you’re gonna have to let it out, or you’re gonna pop!”
Savannah’s cell phone rang. She answered it and heard a depressed Dirk on the other end. “Van, honey,” he said, “I hate to even ask you this, but ... do you want your wedding gown? CSI wants to take it with them, but I’ll fight ’em for it, if you want me to.”
She sighed. “Let them have it. I had up-close contact with the body, wearing it. They’ll have to check it.”
“All right,” she heard him say, “you can take it.”
Savannah closed her burning eyes for a moment and wondered if Zsa Zsa Gabor or Liz Taylor went through that many wedding gowns.
“They’re asking me if you’re gonna want it back,” he said.
She thought about it only for a second, remembered her awful dream, and the real-life nightmare of dragging Madeline Aberson’s dead body out of that pool.
“No,” she said. “I’d rather just get married in my Minnie Mouse jammies next time.”
As she was telling him good-bye, a wave of women in blue flowed toward her, an ocean of discontent wrapped in silk and satin.
“What was that call about?” Marietta demanded to know, hands on her ample hips. “What is it this time?”
“Yeah!” Vidalia held a toddler on each hip. Jack and Jillian were hanging on to her skirt. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t I get to be your flower girl,” Jillian whined, “again?”
“It’s not my fault!” Jack complained. “Marietta never put the rings on my pillow! I couldn’t be the ring bearer if nobody gave me the rings!”
But Atlanta was the most indignant of all. “What the heck were you two doing? You left me standing up there in front of God and everybody, singing my heart out for half an hour! I was running out of songs! It would have served you right if I’d started doing Christmas carols! I’m plum hoarse now.”
“Okay!” Granny held up one hand like a traffic cop. “That’s enough! You bunch o’ hyenas back off right now. Can’t you see your sister’s got way more problems right now than the likes of you? She needs your support, not your belly achin’.”
As they had when they were children, the entire group instantly amended their ways. When Granny spoke, they didn’t dare not listen.
Memories of a certain wooden paddle, hung on the back of the kitchen door, lasted a lifetime.
“That’s better,” Gran said. “The sad fact is: Somebody got themselves kilt in Savannah’s fancy bridal suite, and Dirk’s in there with the coroner, trying to figure out what happened.”
“Yes, he is,” Savannah told them, “and I need to get back in there with him. I just came out here to tell everybody how sorry I am that this sort of thing happened ... again ... and to tell you to eat whatever you want in there in the reception room and then get along home.”
“But when are we gonna eat supper?” Marietta wanted to know. “Are you going to be home in time to cook us something fit to eat? We can’t keep ordering pizza like we’ve been doing. It’s expensive.”
“Yeah,” Atlanta agreed. “And that cake and ice cream’s only gonna last so long in our stomachs, you know. I worked up a powerful appetite with all that singing.”
Granny spun Atlanta around and gave her a not so gentle shove toward the clubhouse. Then she turned and did the same to Marietta. “You girls oughta give some thought to something other than your bellies once in a while. You know, gluttony’s a sin when carried to extremes.”
Fortunately, at that moment, Ryan and John strolled by on their way to the clubhouse. When Marietta caught sight of Ryan, she wasted no time leaving her sisters behind and scurrying after him.
“Look at her following him,” Granny remarked, “trailing after him like an orphaned pup.”
“Eh, more like a bitch in heat,” Savannah muttered under her breath.
“I heard that, Savannah girl.” Granny gave her a disapproving look, tinged with a grin.
“And you disagree?”
They both watched as Marietta caught up with Ryan and grabbed him by the arm. She leaned into him, making sure that her voluptuous curves nestled into his side, whether he wanted to be nestled or not. All the while she was tittering like a teenybopper, instead of acting like the forty-plus woman she was.
“Do I disagree?” Gran said. “Only with your choice of words. Not with your evaluation of the situation.”
Gran turned to Savannah, reached up, and tucked one of her dark curls back behind her ear, then laid her soft hand along her granddaughter’s cheek. “You get back to your man, sweetie pie. Don’t pay this bunch no never mind. I’ll see to it they behave themselves and get back home all right.”
“What about feeding them?”
“That’s the least of your troubles. Every blamed one of them knows full well how to stack a bologna sandwich if it comes to that. They’re not a bunch of helpless children anymore, even if they do act like it when you and me are around. We spoil that lot, Savannah. Always have.”
“Is it okay, then, really, if I work this case with Dirk and leave you all to fend for yourselves?”
“It’s more than okay. It’s the right thing to do. Take care of your detective business. It’s what you do best, and the only thing that’ll take your mind off what you lost here today.”
As Savannah walked away from her grandmother and crossed the lawn, heading back to the clubhouse and the crime scene, she knew that she wasn’t going to be able to hold it together much longer. She felt like she had been through a rough cycle in a giant washing machine.
And she was about to fall apart at the seams.