A Catered Wedding (28 page)

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Authors: Isis Crawford

BOOK: A Catered Wedding
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Rob slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Why didn't I think of that? Hey, maybe what you're doing can replace a GPS system.”
“Hey. Just give me half a minute.”
And Bernie closed her eyes again. Her teacher had always told her that the way to find something is not to look for it. Which sounded really helpful until you got into a situation like this. Bernie took another deep breath and tried visualizing the hunting lodge, but for some reason she kept on seeing sheep. Maybe she should start doing her prostrations again she thought as she opened her eyes.
“Okay,” she said. “Let's go to the left.”
“That's where Marvin is?”
“Yes,” she lied. “That's where Marvin is.” What the hell. There was a fifty percent chance she was right.
 
 
Fifteen minutes later Rob was saying to Bernie, “Admit it, you don't have a clue where Marvin is,” as they were walking down the hallway on their way to the media room.
“I admit it,” Bernie said. So far they'd been in the den, the weight room, the sewing room, the library, and two bathrooms, and if Marvin was there, he was invisible. Further, there was no sign that he had been in any of the places they'd been through—that of course being too much to ask. “This is ridiculous,” Bernie added. The size of the lodge combined with the quiet was giving her the heebie-jeebies. “For all we know, he could be eating lunch with the Jura, Ditas, Joe, and the Walker sisters in the gazebo at this very minute.”
Rob frowned. “Gazebo? Why a gazebo?”
“Why not a gazebo? They have them on English estates.”
“How could I have forgotten?” Rob tucked his sunglasses back in the front of his T-shirt. “He could also be a prisoner, you know.”
“Yeah
, Design
just forgot to include the plans for the dungeon in their floor plan. I understand they're all the rage these days.”
“I'm serious.”
“So am I.” Bernie held up her hand. Were those voices she was hearing? “Do you hear anything?”
“Oh yes,” Rob said.
Bernie watched him look around for somewhere to hide. “The closet,” he said.
But when he opened the door, it was full.
“We're not going to fit in there,” Bernie mouthed.
Think
.
Think
, she told herself. And suddenly she remembered. The room where the falcons were kept was a couple of feet away. She hesitated for a moment, but then she decided the birds couldn't be that bad—it wasn't like she was going into a cage of man-eating lions.
She motioned for Rob to follow her. The voices were getting closer. Jura and Vladimir from the sound of them.
Well on the bright side, at least we know Vladimir is still alive,
Bernie thought as she reached the door. Without pausing, she flung it open and stepped inside with Rob following on her heels.
The falcons all turned their heads.
They're looking at us like we're lunch,
Bernie thought. Maybe this hadn't been the best choice she decided as one of the scenes from Hitchcock's
The Birds
flashed through her mind.
This is not good she told herself. Always maintain an optimistic attitude when possible. Maybe they just didn't look friendly because of the way their beaks curved. If she recalled correctly their name was derived from
faix
which in Latin which meant sickle, a word choice no doubt having to do with the shape and sharpness of their beaks. Not very comforting when you thought about it.
“Did you know that only the females hunt,” Bernie whispered to Rob. “The males are called tercels.”
“No, I didn't know and I don't care,” he whispered back.
As Bernie looked at Rob it struck her that although both she and he were backed up against the far wall the front side of the cage, which was composed of wire, was facing the outside. Anyone walking around the left side of the building could see them.
“We have to get out of here,” Rob mouthed pointing to the outside.
“I know,” Bernie mouthed back.
But there was nowhere to go. From the sound of their voices Jura and Vladimir were getting closer. She looked at the falcons again. They were clicking their beaks. That didn't seem like a good sign either, not that she knew much about avian habits.
“Good birdies,” she cooed. She did like them in theory. She just liked them better when someone else was holding them.
The clicking became louder. Suddenly she heard Jura saying something about Joe complaining that someone was feeding the falcons when they weren't supposed to and Vladimir replying that he'd look into it as one of the falcons flew over and landed on Bernie's shoulder. She could feel talons digging through her T-shirt into her skin. It felt worse than the time Brandon had put his pet iguana on her shoulder. She gritted her teeth.
Don't scream
, she told herself. Jura and Vladimir are right outside the door.
She reached up and tried to remove the falcon, but the bird seemed perfectly happy on her new perch and responded to Bernie's efforts by digging its claws in a little deeper and clicking her beak in Bernie's ear.
Not a good thing
, Bernie thought as she tried not to visualize the falcon biting off a piece of her earlobe. Why had she worn her big hoop earrings? she thought as she could feel the bird tug on it. Then it must have gotten bored because it flew back to its perch.
Bernie sighed with relief as she brushed off a couple of the falcon's feathers that had landed on the front of her T-shirt. One stuck to her hand and she picked it off.
And that's when it struck her. She put her hand up to her mouth. All this time it had been right in front of her and she hadn't seen it.
Unfrigginbelievable.
Chapter 31
L
ibby was not happy. Things were definitely not going the way she and Bernie had planned. At all. For openers—and for closers too for that matter—Ditas was proving to be less hospitable than the Greeks had been to the Trojans. Well actually Libby didn't know that, having pretty much slept through her literature class. She just assumed it.
She'd gotten as far as the lodge's kitchen before Ditas had swooped down on her. She'd been thinking that she'd expected to see a barebones kind of setup like at the West Vale mansion instead of something that looked as if it had come out of a shelter magazine when Ditas had stormed through the door.
“How the hell did you get in here?” he demanded not giving her a chance to tell him the story she and Bernie had concocted.
Libby didn't even get the word “guard” out of her mouth when Ditas started in again.
“They shouldn't have let you in without calling the main house and informing someone,” he growled. “They know better than that. This is a hunting preserve, not a nursery school. You could have gotten shot wandering around.”
“It wasn't their fault,” Libby told him. “I . . .”
“I don't care whose fault it is,” Ditas shouted. “I'll sort that out later. What I want to know is what are you doing here?”
Libby lifted the large picnic hamper she was carrying. “Eunice and Gertrude asked me to bring this by. They . . .”
Ditas grimaced. “I should have known this had something to do with them. Fine. I'll give it to them.” And with that he yanked the hamper out of Libby's hand.
“But . . .” she objected.
“Anything else?”
“Well . . . Do you have lions here?” Libby blurted out.
Dumb
, she thought.
Really dumb
.
Ditas looked at her as if she were demented.
“What in heavens name made you ask something like that?”
Libby knew she should say something else, anything else, to keep the conversation going, but she couldn't think of what. Her mind had gone blank. If Bernie were here, she'd come up with something to say Libby thought. But Bernie wasn't here. She was. And the words weren't coming.
“Fine,” Ditas said.
Libby felt powerless as he put his hand around her arm and propelled her out the front door. Then he accompanied her to the van, waited while she started it, and stood there as she pulled out of the driveway. She could see him until she went around the bend in the road. What was she going to do? Bubbles of panic began percolating through her chest.
“I am such a pathetic loser,” she wailed.
“No, you're not,” Libby heard someone say.
She slammed on the brakes. Now she was going crazy as well.
“Hey, be careful,” the voice said as Libby whipped her head around.
“Marvin? Is that you?” she asked at the identical time that he pulled the same red and white-checkered tablecloth that Rob and Bernie had hidden under off his head.
“Who did you expect? Big Bird?”
“Oh my god.” Libby put her hand up to her mouth. She wanted to hug him and hit him at the same time. “What are you doing here? Rob and Bernie are still in the lodge looking for you.”
“They are?” Marvin said as he made his way towards the front of the van.
“Of course.”
Marvin wiggled into the front seat. “Oh dear,” he said settling himself down.
“‘Oh dear' is right,” Libby said. Now that he was closer she could see he had a small grease stain on his cheek, his glasses were askew, and his hair was matted down. He looked so bedraggled all of her anger melted away.
“You could have suffocated in that trunk,” she said as she reached into her backpack, took out a bottle of Evian, removed the cap, and handed the water to him.
“Believe me at one point I thought I was going to,” Marvin told her after he'd finished it.
“What if you couldn't have gotten the top opened?”
“I wedged a little piece of paper in the lock so it couldn't close all the way.” He wiped his hand across his mouth.
Libby took the bottle back and handed Marvin a peach. “What were you thinking, doing something like that?”
“I guess I wasn't,” Marvin confessed as he took a bite.
“But it was very brave of you to do it,” Libby told him while she thought:
Did I just say brave instead of stupid? I'm beginning to sound like Bernie.
“So tell me what happened.”
Marvin readjusted his glasses. “Well, my dad didn't need me today so I decided to take the train down to the city and check out the garage in the apartment where Eunice and Gertrude live, you know, just for the hell of it.
“When I got there I asked the doorman if Eunice and Gertrude Walker were in and he said they'd come in but he hadn't seen them come out. Did I want him to buzz them? And I said no—I mean what would I say to them—and the guy gave me this funny glance and I decided I'd better leave before I blew everything.
“I was going to call your dad, but then I thought what if they're using their car and they've already left. The doorman wouldn't have seen them go so I went around the corner to the building's garage and asked the parking attendant if they'd left and he told me they'd called for their car twenty minutes ago.”
“I'm surprised he told you that.”
“I paid him fifty bucks. For another fifty he showed me where the car was. I wanted to be sure it was the right one before I called your dad. And there it was: their big old Oldsmobile brougham. So then I tried to call your dad or Clyde but my cell wasn't getting a signal in there and then as I was trying to figure things out Eunice and Gertrude came down and put a couple of things in their trunk—they didn't see me because I was back behind one of the support columns.
“Then they went to talk to the parking attendant and the trunk popped back open. I guess they hadn't closed it all the way. Well, I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to lose them. It wasn't like I had a car to follow them with.”
Marvin readjusted his glasses. “I don't know what came over me. I think I've been watching too many action movies lately, but before I knew it I'd crawled inside and closed the door after me. It was awful. The trunk smelled of gasoline and it was so hot I thought I was going to pass out at which point I decided this wasn't such a good idea after all. But it was too late. Before I could do anything, Eunice and Gertrude had come back and we'd taken off.
“I tried to call you when I was in the trunk but I couldn't get my cell phone out of my pants pocket. By the way, this peach is very good,” Marvin said as he took another bite.
“It's from Pennsylvania,” Libby said automatically while she handed Marvin a napkin.
He wiped his hands. “So I called you when we got here. Then my cell died. I'm sorry. I didn't mean for you to come and get me.”
“And you would have gotten back how?”
“Hitchhiked?” Marvin made a face. “All I can think about is how your father is never going to talk to me again after something like this.”
“He's not going to know,” Libby told Marvin as she punched Bernie's number into her cell. “At least not if I can help it. We're going to pick up Bernie and Rob and get out of here.”
But that wasn't the way it worked out, because as Libby bitterly reflected, with Bernie things never went according to plan.
“We'll meet you at the side door in ten more minutes,” her sister told her after Libby had explained the situation. Then she'd clicked off.
Libby tried calling Bernie back, but she'd shut off her phone.
“Great,” Libby said to Marvin. “Simply great. You don't suppose Ditas will shoot us if he sees that we're still on his property? I mean, respectable businessmen don't do things like that, right? That would be excessive, don't you think?”
“In my view it certainly would be,” Marvin replied as he straightened his glasses again. “Unfortunately, I can't vouch for Ditas's thoughts on the matter.”
 
“Well, at least Libby found Marvin,” Bernie told Rob. “That's a good thing.”
He nodded. “I don't think I've ever seen so many weapons in my life.”
“Amazing, isn't it?” Bernie answered as she looked around the gunroom. And she'd thought the gunroom at the West Vale house had been full. This one was crammed to the gills. “They could take over a small country with the amount of stuff they have in here.”
As far as she could see, the only thing missing was a small nuclear device and actually it wouldn't surprise her if there was one hidden away somewhere, she thought, as she looked around the room trying to spot where the crossbows were.
She could understand the rifles. She could even, if pressed, understand the 9mm Glock—although as far as she knew they were not used for target practice or hunting. But the semi-automatics? The missile launcher? Please. Were they arming themselves for the end of civilization as we know it? Then Bernie spotted what she was looking for.
“Here we go,” she said as she headed over to the far corner of the room.
She estimated there had to be somewhere between twenty and thirty crossbows, compound bows, and long bows hung on the wall. Nearby there were two shelves on which were arranged boxes of arrows, as well as boxes with different tips for hunting and target practice.
Bernie slipped her ring up and down her finger. What she was looking for had to be here somewhere. She started going through the arrows. There were arrows with two green feathers and one white one, arrows with two red feathers and one white one, arrows with two white feathers and one red one, arrows with two yellow feathers and one white one.
Damn. She straightened up and massaged the small of her back. She'd gone through the two boxes and what she was looking for apparently wasn't here. She couldn't be wrong. She just couldn't be. She glanced at her watch. She'd told Libby she'd meet her at the door in ten minutes, and it was almost past that now.
All right,
she told herself.
Calm down. What you're looking for is here. You're just not seeing it.
Bernie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and made her mind go blank. After a few moments she opened her eyes and scanned the area. A little ways down, half hidden behind an umbrella stand made out of an elephant foot she spotted a long leather box lying on the shelf. This is it, she said to herself as she moved towards it. She didn't know how she knew, but she did.
She grabbed the box and took the top off. Ten arrows lay nestled inside the velvet lining. They were all fletched with feathers from Joe's falcons. Here it was. The proof she'd been looking for.
“I can't believe I didn't spot this sooner,” she said to Rob. Something about the arrow in Leeza's heart had bothered her from the first. She just hadn't known what it was until now.
“And look at this.” Rob lifted up a glass-enclosed box full of displayed butterflies. “Didn't you say Leeza was buried with a butterfly pin? Suggestive don't you think?”
“Only to someone with an overactive imagination,” Bernie heard someone say.
She spun around. Joe was standing in the room along with Vladimir and Jura and Ditas. How could she and Rob have not heard them? As she looked at the three men she was once again struck by the family resemblance. They all had the same cleft chin, the same thin mouth. Jura was the biggest, followed by Ditas, and Joe. It was like the three bears.
“Now put my specimen collection down,” Joe told Rob. “It's worth a great deal of money.”
“Don't you think it's more than coincidence that Leeza was buried with a butterfly pin? Did you give one to her?” Bernie asked.
Joe laughed and shook his head. “I bet you got high marks in creative writing when you were in school.”
“No. I got high marks for finding the truth.” At which point Bernie turned to Jura and raised the arrow she was holding. “It looks as if your brother's arrow killed your bride,” she told him.
Jura didn't say anything. Neither did Ditas.
I could be talking about the weather for all the reaction they're showing,
Bernie decided.
What's wrong with them?
she wondered as Ditas told Jura, “We have to get a new security team. I'm not paying hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for this.” And he gestured towards Bernie and Rob.
“Didn't you hear what I just said?” Bernie asked him.
“Of course he heard,” Eunice said as she stepped in the doorway flanked by Esmeralda on one side and Gertrude on the other. “He already knows. So does Ditas. They knew from the moment they saw that arrow.”

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