The Chocolate Bridal Bash (19 page)

I might have, too, if I hadn’t skidded on a chunk of ice. I realized I was about to go flying out into the traffic lane, right in front of the big black car. Somehow I didn’t feel confident about the car stopping.

As I started to fall, I desperately grabbed at the grille of the pickup. This pulled a muscle in my shoulder, but it kept me from falling headlong in front of the black car. I saw the furry hat though the windshield; then I pivoted and sat down on the pickup’s front bumper. A long black Lincoln roared by, but I couldn’t see anything through the heavily tinted side windows. I jumped up, still hanging onto the grille, but I stepped on another chunk of ice and realized I was going down again. I had time for just a glimpse of the black car’s tag. It wasn’t a Michigan tag, and it was leaving the area rapidly.

I regained a fairly firm footing and stood there in the slushy parking lot, staring at the departing car. By then the Lincoln had turned into another lane and was almost out of sight. I started trying to brush the mud from the pickup’s bumper off my jeans and ski jacket.

“Lee! Lee! Are you all right?”

Mom was picking her way across the parking lot. She wore boots, but they were indoor, high-heeled boots designed for a Dallas business office. Suddenly I was terribly annoyed with her.

“I told you to go back to the terminal,” I said angrily.

“Are you all right?”

“I may have pulled a muscle, but I’ll live. Which is more than you might.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think that guy was kidnapping you so he could take you out to dinner?”

“Kidnapping me?” Mom rolled her eyes. “Honestly, Lee. You live such a dramatic life.”

That set the tone for the next half hour of our relationship.

My mom thought I was imagining the trouble she’d barely avoided, and I thought she was deliberately misunderstanding the situation. I didn’t help matters by getting my tongue tied in knots after I rushed up to an airport security officer and blurted out the whole story.

“Just a mix-up,” Mom told the guard, a burly blond guy with a crew cut.

“Missile, my left foot,” I said. “I mean mix-up! It was no mix-up. It was a delicate kidney attester. I mean, kidnapping attempt.” I made myself slow down. “It was a deliberate kidnapping attempt. And it was dumb lust—I mean, luck! It was only dumb luck that kept it from being successful.”

The burly blond guy grinned, and I ground my teeth. The Grand Rapids Police, of course, had officers on duty at the airport, and one of them joined us. That guy—even taller and burlier than the security man—didn’t look convinced either. I tried to reach Hogan Jones on my cell phone, to ask him to tell the Grand Rapids authorities that I wasn’t a complete idiot. But Hogan wasn’t available, and the name of a village police chief—one with a force of five if you counted the dispatcher—didn’t impress either officer. Hogan knows people on the Grand Rapids force, but apparently neither of these guys had met him.

“I’m sure it was just a mix-up,” Mom repeated. “The escort must have been sent to pick up some other passenger. Then, when Lee ran up to us, he saw that he had the wrong person. He was embarrassed and went away.” The blond guy nodded his crew cut, and the Grand Rapids cop looked stony.

I tried to stick to my guns. “But you said he carried a sign with your name on it, Mom. Sally McKinney.”

“Maybe I was mistaken, Lee. Maybe it was just ’McKinney.’ Or it could have been some other ‘Mc’name. McKennon, maybe. Or McSomething else.”

“The man wasn’t carrying a sign when I saw you,” I said. “What happened to it?”

Mom looked puzzled. “I don’t really remember. Could he have simply dropped it into the trash?”

“We can look,” I said. I stalked back toward the gate, leading a procession of the crew cut security man, a uniformed Grand Rapids cop, and my mom, who was still objecting to the whole process with every step. We retraced my mom’s steps, going back to the passageway that she would have come down after disembarking, and having her identify the spot where her well-dressed escort had been waiting. We looked in the nearest trash container. It held no sign, and no pieces of cardboard that could have once been a sign.

I led them on through the big waiting room. She’d made a stop at the ladies room, Mom said, and the escort had stood outside. There was a trash container at that spot. No sign was in it.

To my relief, Joe showed up then. I’d called his cell phone before we’d even reached the security office, but he had taken time to deliver the boat before he came back to the airport.

Of course, he had to hear the whole story from the beginning. And once more Mom assured everyone the whole thing was some sort of mix-up.

I was steaming, which meant I was talking more like an idiot than ever. “I know that my mom had a narrow estate. I mean, escape! That man tried to thatch her. I mean, snatch her!”

“But there’s no physical evidence,” the security guard said, “and your mom thinks it was just a mistake.”

I looked for Joe, but he’d disappeared. So had the Grand Rapids cop.

“I appreciate your concern for your mother,” the security man said, “but there’s no physical evidence.”

“And what physical evidence could there be?”

“How about this?” It was Joe’s voice.

We all swung toward it, and I saw that he was coming out of the men’s room. Using a paper towel, he was holding a handful of torn cardboard. He showed us the top piece. “cKi” it read. We all crowded into the business center and laid the pieces out on a worktable, assembling them like a jigsaw puzzle.

The pieces spelled out “Sally McKinney.”

“See,” I said to my mom. “He
was
trying to snatch you.”

But my mom’s jaw was clamped into that firm, Dutch line that I’d learned meant she and I were about to have a fight.

“It doesn’t prove anything,” she said. “All it proves is that he thought—thought—he was supposed to meet me. He had the wrong person, that’s all. He must have looked at the wrong list. If we ask at the Avis desk—which we should have done before imposing on the time of the security guards, I’m sure that they’ll tell us he was supposed to meet someone else on that flight.”

She took a deep and determined breath, then went on. “But at any rate, I’m sure it was only a mix-up, and I want to drop the matter.”

The Grand Rapids policeman, who had been completely silent during the whole episode, finally spoke. “Would you be willing to sign a complaint?”

“No!” Mom’s voice was extremely firm.

I took a breath as deep as my mom’s had been and opened my mouth, ready to join battle.

But Joe surprised me by putting his arm around my shoulder. “Let it go, Lee,” he said softly. “There’s no point. We’ll sort this out after we get home.”

“But Mom doesn’t know all the crazy things that have been happening around here,” I said.

“What crazy things?” the Grand Rapids cop said.

“Oh, like strange—” The look on Mom’s face stopped me cold. I realized that she didn’t want me to bring up her history as a runaway bride, and it really didn’t seem to be a good idea.

“What crazy things?” the cop repeated.

“Oh, my fiancé and I found a dead man two days ago.”

Joe spoke quickly. “He was a patient in a nursing home.”

The cop shrugged and appeared to have lost interest.

“Let’s pick up your mom’s car and get on home,” Joe said again.

I began to see that I might be better off keeping my mouth shut. If we could just get to Warner Pier, Hogan could advise me.

So the whole kidnapping episode ended in anticlimax. I tried again to talk Mom out of renting a car, assuring her that Joe’s pickup was a perfectly comfortable vehicle for the ride to Warner Pier and that she could borrow my van the rest of her stay. But she wouldn’t be convinced. A half hour later—by now it was getting dark—we were leaving Gerald Ford Airport in a midsized Chevy. Joe was following us. Mom put my name on the rental agreement, and she asked me to drive, since I knew the way. A new bypass had opened, making the trip to Warner Pier much shorter than it had been when she came to Michigan for Uncle Phil’s funeral.

We didn’t say much until we merged onto I-96. Then Mom turned to me and made that sound I always called a “significant sigh.” When I was growing up, it usually meant I’d said or done the wrong thing and was going to hear about it.

But this time, she surprised me with praise.

“Lee, I did appreciate your efforts back there. And I’m sure you were right. That man did try to kidnap me.”

“Mom! If you agreed that I was right, how could you refuse to sign a complaint!”

“Joe and that cop found the sign, and I noticed it was saved, in case I change my mind, and we need it as evidence someday. But you were not only right about the kidnapping attempt, you were right about something else. ‘Strange things,’ you said. A lot of strange things have been happening. And maybe we need to talk about them before we involve yet another law enforcement agency.”

She sighed again. “So I’m going to break down and tell you about the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to me. Or ever will happen to me.”

M
y head whipped toward Mom. I swerved slightly and nearly hit a passing car, but I got back into my own lane before his horn stopped blaring.

Embarrassing? Mom was going to tell me about her most embarrassing moment? People don’t leave their homes because they’re embarrassed. What could this have to do with all the suspicious things that had happened?

Mom was giving another deep sigh. “You probably wouldn’t even think it was embarrassing,” she said. “Your generation, I mean. Times have changed so much. But Bill and I—I know the sexual revolution had happened before our engagement, but it hadn’t hit Warner Pier High. Oh, we all knew that Ed—Bill’s brother—had lived in a commune, and there were whispers about what went on there. But the kids in high school still talked about who was ‘doing it.’ And my mother—Oh, Lee, sometimes I’m glad you never knew my mother.”

“Aunt Nettie said she had sort of come unglued after your dad died.”

“That’s the politest way it can be expressed. Yelling, screaming, crying. I don’t think that Phil and Nettie knew what was going on at all.”

“Aunt Nettie says they didn’t. She says they were so focused on starting their business . . . I think she feels that they let you down.”

“I never blamed them because our mom was nuts. But one of the things she was nuts about was making sure that Bill and I didn’t have sex. She would question me. Where did we go? What did we do? She didn’t come out and say what she was afraid of—she seemed to be afraid of the word—but her meaning was clear.”

Mom laughed, though the sound wasn’t humorous. “She was trying so hard to keep us celibate and was so sure that we were going to rip our clothes off and go at it if we got a chance that she had the oppositeopposite effect, if you can understand what I mean. I became self-conscious, scared of having sex. On the day of the rehearsal, if she’d asked me if I wanted to call the wedding off, I’m afraid I would have.”

“Maybe that’s why you were willing to leave when Bill told you to.”

“No, the evening of the rehearsal things took quite a different path.” Mom sighed again. “Vita and Ed Dykstra had everybody over for a picnic dinner after the rehearsal. It was really nice. Vita was a wonderful cook. And she was so creative. You probably know that.”

I realized that I’d never told Mom that Vita Dykstra had changed into Lovie, the town nut, running around collecting aluminum cans. I decided this wasn’t the moment, and Mom went on.

“Anyway, it was a lovely evening, and everyone was being so nice—including Bill. He really was a sweetheart, and I was realizing how lucky I was to get him. It was all fine until we were leaving, and Mother blew it. The minister was shaking my hand and making the kind of glowing remarks the occasion called for— about young love and a happy future—and Mother pops up and says, ‘Yes, Reverend Vanoss. Now I won’t have to worry about her getting pregnant.’ ”

“That wasn’t cool!”

“No! I was so crushed I began to cry. I said, ‘You’ve never had to worry about that!’ And I ran off and got in Bill’s car. I think maybe Mother started to come after me, but Bill stopped her. I could see him talking to her. Bill was always tactful, you know. I’m sure he told her he’d calm me down and bring me home. Of course, that made me madder than ever. I felt that he was taking her side. When Bill got in the car, he must have thought he was sharing the front seat with a buzz saw.”

“Poor guy.”

“Oh, he handled it. He took my hand, and he said, ‘Tomorrow night we’ll be on our honeymoon.’ And he kissed my palm.”