2 Months 'Til Mrs. (2 'Til Series) (33 page)

Saturday, February 26
^th

It seems that best laid plans hardly ever came to
fruition, at least not in her life. Catherine had
planned
to be on the
road first thing Friday morning, at the helm of the U-Haul carrying her
everything
to Minnesota, but instead they hadn’t pulled away from the curb in front of what
used to be her apartment until almost noon—thanks to Tara who’d pulled an
all-nighter with the friendly brawn she’d asked to come over to help them pack
the truck (his payment, she said, even though he hadn’t finished the job yet). Then
seven hours into the trip, not even all the way through Pennsylvania, Catherine
was nodding off and Tara was similarly useless, so they had to call it a day.
Of course she’d
planned
not to stop until they were well into Ohio,
maybe even knocking on Indiana’s door—

But today was different. Things were looking up. A 4
a.m. wake-up call had gotten them back on the road well before the sun, which
had since made its appearance and was steadily trying to outpace them on the
trek west. Weather forecast: clear as far as the eye could see. Temperature: a balmy
seventy thanks to the heater. Barring any roadwork or weekend traffic, they
would be in Nekoyah by nightfall—only a few hours later than planned. Catherine
was optimistic.

“You know, I’ve never been much for road trips, but
after the last few weeks this is like a vacation. I can finally just be still
and swallow up long boring roads rather than run around between New York and
Jersey and Philly and Chesterton like a chicken with my head cut off.” Between
packing and planning and re-planning… and the Little Trager scare, Catherine
didn’t need any more action and adventure. And surprises were overrated.

Except for the surprise bridal shower—put together and
hosted by Lacey.
That
was a surprise she’d been able to enjoy,
especially after finding out not a half hour before that she was indeed alone
in her own skin for the time being. Hallelujah! Mimosas all around—hold the OJ!
It was everything a shower should be. Full of tittering women—her mother and
aunts and friends and the overly ecstatic bride-to-be—and all the cutesy bridal
games, and prizes, and gifts galore that were currently packed in the back of
the truck.

“I think I could get used to this truck driving thing.
It makes me feel powerful. Maybe I could do this for a living,” Catherine
mused.

No answer from the peanut gallery that always had an
answer or opinion or just something to share—like it or not. And this was a
big
career move she was floating. “Tara?” she prodded, sneaking a glance next
to her where her copilot was sleeping, completely upright like a horse. Great
company she was. And as luck would have it, the radio didn’t work. “Tara!”

She jolted awake. “What? Did I miss an exit?”

“You fell asleep. I thought you were here to keep me
up, but between yesterday and today you’ve slept ninety percent of the
time. You said it would be safer to travel together.”

“Yeah, so someone can always catch a nap.”

Catherine shook her head in disbelief.

“You know, when I agreed to do this—”

“
Offered
,” Catherine reminded her.

“Whatever. I’m just sayin’ I had no idea how
long
this
trip was going to be. And boring,” Tara groaned.

“You think it’s boring for you. I’m the one talking to
myself.”

“Where the hell are we anyway?” Tara asked.

“Still in Indiana, I think.”

“Well, let’s get out and walk on Indiana-hallowed
ground.”

“Why?”

“’Cuz I want to eventually be able to say that I
walked on every state in the union. It’s on my bucket list.”

“Really?” Catherine was surprised Tara was that deep.

“No,” she guffawed. “I’ve got to pee like a
racehorse.”

“How can you have to pee already? I still have more
than half a tank of gas.”

“Asking me that isn’t going to make the pee go away.
Pull over.”

*****

“Cool, I always wanted to give this a try.”

“Knock yourself out.” Catherine waved a hand
dismissively at the soda that sat in the cup holder, the one she’d bought
during Tara’s pee break. The less she drank the better anyway.

“So when did you take up this little habit?”

“What habit are you talking about? Hanging around with
you? Truck driving? Getting married?” she snorted.

“This,” Tara said around a mouthful.

“What?” She turned to look. Tara’s cheeks and lips
were ballooned out from her teeth comically.
Where did she get more food?
Catherine
wondered, totally jealous. Tara had eaten something at every stop along the
way, most recently a hotdog… and now what? Dessert?

“Dipping.”

“Like skinny dipping?
Eew
, never.”

“Dipping,” Tara enunciated slowly, fighting her
mouthful and holding a little can in the air.

“Oh my God! That’s not mine!” Catherine screeched,
bobbling the steering wheel in her hands and causing them to swerve out of
their lane to a chorus of horns from neighboring cars. “Why would you think that’s
mine?”

“Because it was right here next to your purse.” She
wiped at a little river of brown drool that was trying to escape the corner of
her mouth.

“Disgusting! Whose is that? … And you put it in your
mouth?”

“My wips and gums feew, wike, totawy numb,” Tara said,
garbling the words drunkenly. “Ooh, and my head…. God, I’m dizzy…. Are you
dizzy?”

“Where did it come from?” Catherine screamed, like the
can of dip was a massive spider or a nuclear bomb or something much more
sinister than tobacco.

“The wast wenter?”

“The what?”

“The wast wenter,” she said again, only louder.

“Huh?”

“Wast dwiber,” Tara said, pantomiming steering.

“Yuck!”

“I wonder if he weft his spit cup too.” Tara rummaged
around the passenger side but came up empty, so she rolled down the window,
coughing and gacking.

Catherine threw up a little in her mouth.

“That shit is lethal,” Tara exclaimed, massaging her
jaw to bring it back to life from the buzz.

“Hey, it looks like he left behind some other stuff
too,” Tara said, moving the purse. “Is this yours?” She pulled a hunting knife out
from under the seat.”

“Of course not!”

A moment of silence passed between them and then Tara
held up a man’s wallet from the floor of the truck. “Cat… I don’t think we’re
in our truck anymore.”

Catherine whipped the wheel to the right and brought
the truck to a brake-whining, skidding stop on the shoulder. They both got out
and went around to the back, sliding the door open to take a look at their
cargo, hoping they wouldn’t find dead bodies or anything—hoping to hell they
would find her furniture and boxes of things… and her wedding dress that
Georgia had offered to keep at her place until the wedding but Catherine had
insisted on keeping with her at all times up until the event.

“Holy fuck!” Tara exclaimed as Catherine crumbled to
the asphalt.

“I need to report my wedding dress missing.” Catherine’s
voice was shaking.

The police officer at the desk looked her over
carefully and fully, like a human lie detector. He was cute, although not as
drop-your-panties sexy as Fynn.
Oh God, Fynn!
He was expecting her in
Nekoyah tonight. And now she was stuck in godknowswhere driving someone else’s
U-Haul full of useless crap (or perhaps their life’s worth, but that was
neither here nor there), while her dress might be halfway to East Jabip at this
point.

“Ma’am?” the officer prodded.

There was that word again. Midwestern politeness was
killing
her self-esteem.
I’m a bride!
she wanted to scream, which in her
mind made it technically impossible to be a ma’am at the same time. A bride-to-be
was a “Miss” and then in a glorious moment, sealed with a kiss, she became “Mrs.”—
poof
just like that.

“Excuse me, I asked if you were wearing it at the
time,” he said carefully, motioning to a passing female officer to join him
behind the counter in case there was a physical altercation to report or maybe
a rape kit needed.

Catherine looked down at herself, wondering why he
would even ask that, unless maybe she was naked. She’d blanked out for a while there
after they opened the truck to find it looked like the set of
Sanford &
Son
inside, so anything seemed possible. But no, she wasn’t nude;
bedraggled maybe, but fully clothed.

“Were you assaulted?” the female officer asked.

“No, she wasn’t—she did that to herself,” Tara said,
sidling up to the counter, brushing aside the rat’s-nest-haired, smudge-faced,
ripped-jeaned figure that she’d come in with. She leaned over the counter to
give both officers an unobstructed view of her
goods, gauging which one
would be most helpful. “It seems that my friend is in shock. You see, she’s
getting married in just over a week, and this wedding dress is the only thing
that has survived the wedding plans…. At least it
had
survived up until
now.”

“And where was it stolen from?” the male officer
asked, giving Catherine a wary glance while he talked to the seemingly normal
girl instead.

“Well, Officer Kryler,” Tara purred, reading the
nameplate on the counter, “it was on I-80.”

He eyed them both narrowly, like maybe he was being
set up, an elaborate prank. “Perhaps you should be talking to a state trooper
then,” he offered blandly, trying his best to avert his eyes from Tara’s
cleavage.

“It wasn’t exactly
on
the highway,” she
clarified. “Or do state troopers handle all the rest stops too?”

“Where exactly did this happen?” he asked, sighing.

“I don’t exactly know where we were when it happened.
My eyeballs were floating, so I couldn’t read the signs…. Where are we now?”

“Drunk possibly… or high,” the female officer noted
derisively.

“We most certainly are not,” Tara asserted. “Although
I
am
still a little woozy after that dip. But I didn’t do
that
until after the robbery. And I wasn’t the one driving anyway.”

“So what exactly happened? Did someone pull up next to
your car, tell you to pull over, and steal the dress?” the woman offered, her
tone saying she thought they were potheads, or airheads at the very least.

“No. It happened at a rest stop.”

“Do tell.” Officer Kryler settled himself back against
his chair like there was all the time in the world to sort this out—like they
were here for his entertainment.

“Someone took off with our U-Haul,” Tara said
definitively.

“They’re getting away as we speak! My dress could end
up in China!” Catherine suddenly blubbered from behind.

Both officers shook their heads piteously at the
theatrics.

“What if they did leave the state?” Tara asked, taking
Catherine’s outburst and running with it. “Isn’t transporting stolen goods
across state lines a felony?”  

But Catherine jabbed her hard in the ribs to try to
stop her from incriminating them any further. The seal on the wall most
definitely read Illinois, which meant that at some point
they
had
crossed state lines themselves.

“Don’t get ahead of yourselves,” he said, barely holding
back an obscene chuckle. “Was it just the dress inside?”

“No, my whole life was inside!” Catherine screeched.

“She’s in the middle of moving from New York to
Minnesota,” Tara clarified.

“So you stopped at a rest stop to… rest, and then you
came back to the parking lot to find the truck was gone?” Officer Kryler asked
slowly, a pace designed for the extremely young, exceptionally inebriated, or
simpleminded.

“Sort of,” Tara said cagily, suddenly seeming to
realize the ramifications of going to the police to report the stolen dress.

“Then why don’t you tell me exactly what happened.”

“Well, I
really
had to pee after the Big Gulp
that I got back a ways and Catherine here wouldn’t just pull off into the
breakdown lane so that I could use nature’s restroom. She insisted that we find
a real rest stop. Of course if we had done things
my
way she would still
have her dress and everything, but she can be such a—”

“Please, Miss, could you stick to the actual crime
here?”

She’s Miss and I’m a ma’am? Do a few years show
that much?
Catherine smarted. But she didn’t have the faculties to put up a
fight or do anything other than half listen to Tara’s slanderous review of
events.

“I think denying a friend—bridesmaid, no less,
although I
should
be the maid of honor seeing as how you don’t see
her
here helping her supposedly best friend in her time of need—”

“Miss,” he prodded again.

“I’m just sayin’ that denying anyone the chance to pee
when they need to is a crime. It’s
torture
. And I believe torture isn’t
allowed in this great country of ours.”

“Miss—”

“It’s Tara actually, and if I wasn’t just passing
through I know something else I’d like to do here,” she said lasciviously.

“Could you please finish the story?” He kept his
professional tone in check but blushed like a schoolboy.

Without skipping a beat, Tara continued, “So I finally
got a chance to pee and after all that grumbling, when I got back to the truck—ASAP
just like she told me to—it turned out that
she
had to pee too. Can you
believe that? Well, since I had a few extra minutes to kill I went to grab a
hotdog because I can’t pass by a hotdog on a rotating grill without getting hotdogs
on the brain and the only way to shake
that
monkey off your back is to
get one. And then, even though she was pissed that I wasn’t at the truck where
I was supposed to be, she came back with a soda. Obviously it was okay for
her
to stop for refreshments; so I submit that what’s good for the goose should be
good for the goose’s friend too, right?”

Officer Kryler rubbed his face like he was exhausted
just following the story.

“Anyway, when we got back to the parking lot we drove
off—”

“In the U-Haul?” he offered, perplexed.

“In
a
U-Haul,” she corrected.

“
A
U-Haul?”

“Well, we seem to have possibly
—accidentally
—gotten
in the wrong truck. As soon as we realized we tried to go back to the rest stop—got
off everywhere—but like I said, we don’t even know which one it was, so we
turned around and stopped at the nearest police station.” She spread her arms
to encompass the space they were occupying as proof.

“My lucky day,” Officer Kryler breathed, looking to
his fellow officers like he was searching for the joke.

*****

“Do you think that is one of those one-way window
thingies?” Tara asked, pointing to the wall of glass next to them like an awestruck
child.

Catherine gave Tara the hairy eyeball from her side of
the table in the small cube of a room.

“Oh, come on, Cat! I just told them what happened.
Somebody had to; you were blubbering like an idiot.”

“And you were blabbing like an idiot…. And now we’ve
been arrested,” she moaned.

“Not arrested. We’re just being held for questioning,”
Tara corrected. “Besides, it isn’t like they separated us. It can’t be
that
bad
if they put us in the same room where we could sync up our stories—ooh, unless
they’re trying to break us. Keeping us in close quarters to see if we turn on
each other. Hoping for a girl fight.” She eyed the glass speculatively.

“I can’t believe you got me into this.”

“
I
got you into this? If you had let me pee
when
I needed to pee in the first place, then we would be in Nekoyah by now with
your truck and your dress and everything. But you just
had
to stop at a
sanctioned rest area with plumbing and shit—and hotdogs. See, that was your
downfall.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m just sayin’ you’re the one who left the keys in
the truck—left it running for that matter.”

“And you’re the one who was supposed to stay at the truck
while I used the bathroom,” Catherine pointed out plainly.

“If you had to pee, why’d you give me crap for needing
to go?”

“I
decided
that I should go so we wouldn’t have
to stop again for a while.

“Well, I
decided
I should get something to eat
so we wouldn’t have to stop again for a while,” Tara countered, using
Catherine’s argument against her.

“So what the hell do we do if they arrest us? Huh,
Tara? Who the fuck are we going to call to bail us out? How am I going to be
able to leave the state for my wedding if I’m out on bond?”

“They’re not going to arrest us.”

“We
stole
someone’s truck.”

“And we turned ourselves in. That has to count for
something. They’re the ones who took off with our stuff and never looked back.”

“They probably never looked
in
the back,”
Catherine corrected.

“Besides, we might be the victims here. A setup. Maybe
they pulled a bait-and-switch on us.”

Catherine humphed, wondering if that was at all
possible—

“Ahem.” A man in wrinkled plainclothes and probably a
week’s worth of growth on his face came into the room, covering a yawn from
working too many days straight—probably the unassuming closer for tough cases
in these parts.

We’re small potatoes—hardly worth your trouble,
Catherine
tried to say with her eyes.

“Aw, where’s the cute cop from the desk?” Tara whined.

“You’ve been turned over to me,” the man said—pleasant
face, brown hair, a smidge of gray in his beard. He was tall and lanky and lean
and had to fold himself awkwardly to fit at the table.

“Are you our public defender?” Tara asked brightly.

“No, I’m Detective Banks…. Why? Are you trying to
lawyer up?” he jabbed.

“I don’t want a lawyer. I don’t want anything but to
clear up this mess and get my things back,” Catherine said as calmly and
succinctly as possible, trying to regain control of the situation. She might
look like she’d been buried alive and clawed her way out, but that meant she
was a survivor.

“Then can you please explain how you ended up here?”
he asked, a bemused smirk on his face.

“But I already told that tasty cop out front,” Tara
pointed out.

“Humor me.”

“Well, you see, she wouldn’t let me go to the bath—”

“I’ll explain,” Catherine said, cutting Tara off
forcefully before she made things any worse. “It was all just a giant mistake
actually….”