The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (26 page)

That first date, for prom, she wanted finger curls, so she slept with her hair in tiny rollers and wore them around the house all the next day. She got in the shower with the curlers still in her hair, and when teenaged vanity caused her to try and wash the hair without taking it down, her nails caught and she had both hands tangled screaming, “Mama, Noel, get me loose or I won’t be able to dance!” We freed her, she danced, and now she needed to leave the bathroom so I could finish my own hair.

“I meant that my hands aren’t all caught up in my curlers, OK? They can’t exactly start without me, and I’ll be out soon.”

Marguerite sighed heavily, but presently I heard the door bang shut behind her. I re-sudsed my scalp, letting the hot water run down my back. Outside the shower, I could hear my phone ringing in my pocket. I ignored it. Whatever it was, it would wait. I was getting married.

The door popped open again. “Margie,
go away
I said.”

“It’s me,” Rachel said.

“Oh. What’s up, honey?” With my eyes closed, I fumbled for the conditioner.

“Two things.”

I added conditioner and scratched my hair. Rachel did not continue, so I said, “What’s the first?”

“OK, first, Lance’s brother Alex sent you a message. He said to tell you ‘Mom is absolutely in Seattle.’ I guess he’s worried you’ll think she’s coming to blow up more cars or something.”

I rinsed, then opened my eyes, looking for a razor and not finding it. With everything else that had happened, I had hardly processed my car’s untimely demise. From the back of the deputy’s cruiser, I had noticed the blackened patch by the curb in a distant way, almost like it didn’t relate to me at all. “To be honest, honey, she’s not even on my radar.”

My legs were hairy like an ape’s. I tried to remember if I had shaved them yet at all this year. Mostly, I left off shaving sometime in late September when the shorts went up into the attic and picked up the razor again in April. I was pretty sure I had forgotten to start up again this year. Oops.

I moved assorted soaps and shampoos around without finding any razors. I was tempted to skip it, given our current hurry. It was a hygiene ritual I engaged in largely for Lance’s benefit anyway. In bed, he liked to reach down and run his hand around from my calf to my shin and up to my knee. He never said so, but I knew he liked it best when the path was smooth.

“Does Grandmama have a razor over there in the medicine cabinet?” I asked my niece. Her grandmama was my mama, and Mama didn’t ever leave her legs unshaved.

Sounds of rummaging while I lathered up my legs. Then, “No. Do you want to borrow mine?”

“It will probably be the last thing the razor ever does if I do,” I warned her. “I haven’t shaved since last fall.”

I couldn’t tell if the sound she made was smothered laughter or not. “It’s OK,” she said. “It’s disposable.”

When Rachel opened the door to go get it, Marguerite said, “Is she hurrying up in there?”

“Yeah,” my niece said. “But she still has to shave.”

“That’s going to take
forever
!” my sister wailed. “She never mows that down. You can’t see the forest for the trees on her legs!”

I definitely forgot to shave this year. The only thing surprising about that was that Lance would normally have fixed the problem. If I didn’t shave my legs for too long, he was apt to do it for me. I didn’t hear Rachel’s answer to her mother, because she closed the door, but whatever it was, it drew Marguerite down the hall, and their voices retreated. A few minutes later, in which time the soap had run all off my legs, the door opened again. “Thanks, honey,” I said, poking one hand out of the curtain for the much-needed implement and reaching down again for the soap with the other.

“Oh, you’re most welcome.”

It wasn’t Rachel.

I heard the lock snick shut, and I stuck my head out of the shower in time to see Lance drop his borrowed robe. “Trust a man with a razor?” he asked.

If the shower hadn’t been so hot, I think I would have broken out in gooseflesh. I know I felt his words with an electric jolt. “I trust you not to cut me,” I said. “And that’s about all.”

He said, “Give me your leg.”

At home, this ritual could last until the shower ran cold and had to be turned off. Lance was a leg man, and our thick bathroom rugs had been a purchase dedicated to that pursuit. “We don’t have time to fool around right now,” I said.

“Then I’ll have to hurry up.” He followed that statement with a positively wolfish smile.

Our eyes locked, and it was only a few seconds before I handed him the soap. The wedding was going to have to be delayed by a few more minutes. My sister shouting at us on the other side of the door only added to the thrill. She had absolutely no idea what was really going on in the bathroom. She didn’t figure it out until Lance and I emerged, either.

“You said you did this all the time at home!” Marguerite accused him. “You said you could get it done for her faster than she could do it herself!” Somewhere around the middle of that second sentence, the double entendre finally stuck in her prudish mind, and she suddenly flushed scarlet.

“My legs
are
shaved now,” I told her. “And it’s not like we ever agreed to wait until the honeymoon.”

The sound she made was a cross between an angry teakettle and a coach’s whistle.

I pecked Lance chastely on the cheek and said, “Come on, Marguerite. Help me with my hair.”

Up in the sewing room, my wedding dress faced me from its dressmaker’s form. Beside it, in an inelegant pile, I found my stockings and petticoats. (I would need two, the second meant to give the skirt a little bit of flare at the bottom.) I got into the hose and the first petticoat before someone knocked.

Marguerite, who was already tugging on my bangs, pinning them back as she got ready to put my wet hair in its French braid, said, “I’m hurrying,” around a mouthful of bobby pins. “I’ll have her down there as soon as I can.”

Because of the pins, it was doubtful the person on the other side understood her. “It’s me,” Rachel said. “You decent, Aunt Noel?”

“Yeah, reasonably. It’s safe to come in.”

She did. Her bridesmaid’s dress was even more stunning on her than it had been laid out this morning. Now she had a shiny matching jacket with three-quarter sleeves. The dress hung lower in the back than the front, so it framed her body and emphasized her curves. “That’s breathtaking,” I told her.

“Thanks,” she said. “I wore it to prom, too, without the jacket. It works as more than a bridesmaid’s gown.”

“That’s wonderful,” I told her. Then, to my sister, “Hang on, Margie. Let me get the top petticoat on before you do anything drastic up there.”

Marguerite let go of my head long enough for me to tuck it through the topmost layer of underwear. She said, “What do you need, Rachel? Can you tell everybody we’re about fifteen minutes out?” Again, most of her message was lost to the pins in her mouth.

“I’ll tell them,” she promised. “I had two things to say earlier,” she said to me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Margie, do you want me to sit down?”

“No, I can reach the top if you’re standing.” Some handy things about having a tall little sister.

“What was the other one?” I asked my niece.

“You sounded so supportive earlier,” she began. Marguerite groaned and Rachel trailed off.

“I meant it, honey,” I said quickly, trying to drown out my sister’s obvious dismay. “If you don’t want to wear the jacket, your tattoo is welcome to be in our wedding.” Margie groaned again and jerked my scalp pulling back the bangs. “Ouch!” I said.

She mumbled an apology.

“Not that,” Rachel said.

“What is it, Rachel?”

She started again. “You sounded so supportive earlier. So I called up Lisa and invited her down. I hope it’s OK.”

Marguerite spat out the bobby pins. They speckled into my hair and down my back. “No, it is
not
OK!” she told her daughter.

I cut her off. “Margie, shut up!” I jerked my hair free from her braiding clutch and turned around to face her. “It’s not your wedding, and it isn’t yours to say.” I glared at her for another moment, waiting to see whether or not she would advance her argument. She looked away first and began collecting her bobby pins.

“Rachel, it’s fine,” I told my niece. “I’m glad you did. If Lisa were your boyfriend, I doubt anybody would have thought twice about it. And if I’d known in the first place, I’d have sent the invitation myself.”

For an instant, it looked like Rachel might cry. Marguerite exclaimed, “For God’s sake, don’t ruin your makeup.”

So I hugged my niece instead. “It’s good,” I said. “We’ll talk later.”

I gave myself over to my sister’s none-too-gentle ministrations, and she dispatched Rachel to make sure everyone else was in readiness. I seriously considered telling her to leave my hair alone. She was still peeved and yanking on me like it was her wedding I was screwing up. The clock on Mama’s wall said six forty-five. We would be an hour late. Not bad, considering.

With a grunt of frustration, Marguerite let go of me again, swearing under her breath because I was the only person she knew whose hair was harder to work with wet. While she went for the dryer, I pulled my dress off the model and over my head. I could have stepped into it, but if I was putting on the dress ahead of the hair, there wasn’t any reason to do it the other way. Mama had replaced the button loops with a zipper hidden under the row of pearls. It simplified things tremendously to only have a few buttons for Marguerite to hook up above the zipper, which she did as soon as she returned and collected the last of the bobby pins.

While she braided, I thought hard about the day. Our final discovery had completely collapsed my joy at having captured Lucy. What had happened to Stan Oeschle? Why would the police think he had hidden something in our barn, and what would that something have been? Did they think
he
had beaten Art to death? Did they still think it, if he had been carried out on a stretcher?

It would have been easy to get mired in the questions again, and I didn’t want to. I wanted to enjoy my wedding. Margie, hired or volunteered, had put an enormous amount of her own energy into making this wedding come off. It must seem as if I didn’t value her efforts at all. She deserved an explanation for my erratic behavior. Some of it, anyway. She wouldn’t ever understand the shower delay.

“We found one of the orangutans, Marguerite.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to catch it?”

“We
did
catch it. We got it, and it’s safe, and it ran us a little late, OK? I’m really sorry.”

She turned on the dryer and blew it around my scalp. But she stopped pulling quite so hard on my hair, so I knew she heard me, that I was at least partially forgiven.

Downstairs, Nana was waiting to approve me before I could go outside. “Yes,” she said, and smiled. “That’s how that dress was meant to be worn. It suits you.” That had been almost exactly my own thought when I first put it on. Good. She embraced me carefully, then pecked both my cheeks. “Now,” she said. “Let’s have a wedding.”

“No, hang on!” This time it was Brenda, trailing me down the stairs, waving my cell phone.

“What?” Margie demanded. “We don’t have time for any more
hang ons.
The men are all in place, and all they’re waiting for is us to come out the door before they start the bride’s march.”

“Sorry.” By her tone, Brenda evidently wasn’t sorry at all. She seemed to be quite a bit more versed than I was in ignoring my sister’s moods. “Here.” She handed me the phone.

“Hello?”

“Noel! I’m glad I caught you.” It was Rick on the phone. Art’s forgotten nephew. That was probably who tried to call in the shower, too. “Did you get my message?” he asked.

“No, I’m sorry.”

Margie glared daggers and I turned away so I couldn’t see her.

“It’s fine,” he said quickly. “I know you’re trying to get a wedding on. But when I called the sanctuary, they told me you found
one
of the orangutans.”

“Yes,” I said. “The female.”

“Congratulations. I had no idea there were two!”

“No,” I said. “I suppose at the hospital yesterday we still only knew about the one.”

“That makes sense. Anyway, I’ll be brief.” I was glad he would. Margie had come around the side to continue sending out malevolent vibes. Rick went on, “I told your friend Christian my little piece, and he said you would want to know too. I should have said yesterday, but nothing was right then.” His voice rose a little, then fell toward the end. I agreed. Nothing was right yesterday.

“What is it?” Margie or no, he certainly had my attention.

“I wanted you to know you have somewhere to put her.”

He
did
know what Art had been up to! “What do you mean?”

“You have an enclosure for the female orangutan, once her health is stable. Christian figures he’ll care for her at the Ohio Zoo here at first. But you’ve got room for her. The male, too, if you can catch him.”

“What are you talking about?” But I knew. We were right. Lance and I were right. “That isn’t mall construction we’ve been hearing!” I said.

“It is,” he told me. “But not
only
mall construction. And we’ve been entering the property through the back of the mall to avoid arousing suspicion. We’ve been back there building an orangutan enclosure and new administration building. The admin building’s got to be finished, and we need to get an inspection. But we’re done with the major work. I wanted you to know . . . I
know
Uncle Art would have wanted you to know . . . if you can catch that other animal, they both have a home.”

My God, Art.
Tears welled and threatened to fall. I held them back largely because Marguerite was still giving my phone and me the hairy eyeball. I had a thousand questions and Rick probably only knew the answer to a hundred. But the joy of finding Lucy, of capturing her alive and still probably pregnant, all rushed back in. “I want to see it,” I said. “First thing in the morning.”

“You got it,” he said. “Call and I’ll take you out for the tour. Go get married, Noel.”