A Scrying Shame (17 page)

June gestured for them to have a seat and settled herself at the head of the table. She began quizzing Chandra on her cake decorating experience. They talked for a while about basket-weave piping and almond paste and fondant and such. Chandra promised to e-mail June her portfolio the next day. They both seemed pleased with the results of the meeting.

When they’d finished, June folded her hands and turned to Arie. “Well, then. Now that that’s taken care of . . . are you telling me Riann is interested in my services as a wedding coordinator?”

Arie didn’t want to add yet another lie—especially one that could be checked so easily—to the slew that she already had going, but she didn’t want June to stop talking, either.

“I don’t think she’s made that decision yet. She’s really in the planning stages.”

“Considering Dick is too smart to get caught by that little gold digger, I’m not surprised. I bet he hasn’t even given her a ring yet, has he?”

Arie’s eyes almost popped out of her head and rolled across the table.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” June said. “You know as well as I do the old coot has no intentions of proposing. And it’s not like I’m talking bad about a client. Marissa was my client, and she was an angel.”

“She was?” Arie asked.

“Well, I’m not saying she was my easiest client, but she certainly wasn’t the worst. At least she was capable of making a decision when she needed to. She knew what she wanted, and she made sure she got it. But she wasn’t completely unreasonable, either. Did you know she grew up poor? People like that either hate where they came from, or they hate who they were. Marissa hated where she came from, so she concentrated on enjoying where she’d gotten. She had fun with her money. She didn’t need to treat people like dirt to make herself feel better.”

“She and Riann grew up together, didn’t they?” Arie already knew the answer, but she wondered how much June did.

“They sure did, but you’d never get Riann to admit that. Or that snotty little Kelli, either. They’re the second kind of rags-to-riches. They hate who they were, so they treat everyone like doody to forget how they feel about themselves. They need to prove they’re better than anyone else. To themselves, anyway. Nobody else cares. I try to stay away from that kind as much as possible, but in my line of work, you can’t always tell. Not at first, anyway.”

“But eventually . . .” Chandra said.

“Oh, eventually, they all show their true colors. And funny enough, it’s usually when they have to deal with subordinates. Service workers, I guess you’d call them. You know who I mean—waitresses, beauticians, any kind of clerk. The ones who are grateful to have gotten out of wherever they came from treat service workers like regular people. Good work gets tipped, bad work doesn’t; no fuss, no muss. Marissa was like that. And she wasn’t stingy with saying ‘thank you,’ either. But those nasty ones . . . give them a little power, and oh, boy. Get out of their way. If you’re lucky, that is.”

“Riann’s been nice so far,” Arie said. “But I know what you mean.”

“How long of you been working for her?”

“Um . . . about two and a half hours.”

June snorted. “Well, good luck with that. You couldn’t pay me enough. But then again, maybe she didn’t like me. I know she didn’t like Marissa listening to me. Every suggestion I made, Riann stuck her nose in with twelve reasons why it wasn’t good enough or wouldn’t work. Marissa didn’t pay her any mind, though. If she liked the suggestion I made, she approved it. If she didn’t, well, never mind. We went on to the next thing.”

June sighed. “I wish she could’ve had her wedding. Such a shame . . .”

“Who do you think killed her?” Arie asked.

June shook her head knowingly. “You know what they say. Look to the loved ones first.”

“You think it was Chad?” Arie said. “You said they were fighting about the prenup.”

“They were. But I think he really loved her. I’m sure her being rich didn’t hurt any, and maybe that’s why he went after her in the first place. But I’ve worked with couples for over twenty years now. I can tell when someone’s in love and when they’re not. I really do think they loved each other.”

“Then who?”

June tilted her head, making her hairdo bobble precariously. “Are you a private eye or something?”

Chandra laughed.

Arie gave her the evil eye.
What was so funny about that?
To June, however, she said, “No, of course not. I’m just interested.”

June squinted at her speculatively for a few moments. “I guess I can understand that, especially if you’re working for that woman.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know they had a fight that afternoon, right? A vicious one. I’d taken some estimates for the reception venue over to Marissa’s apartment for her to go over and could hear them plain as day through the front door. Not that I was trying to listen, of course, but—”

“Riann and Marissa?” Arie’s heart thudded against her chest. “Do the police know that?”

“I doubt it. They didn’t ask me anything about Riann, and I didn’t volunteer. But it was a doozy, let me tell you.”

“What was it about?” Chandra asked.

Despite the fact that they seemed to have the house to themselves, the three women had lowered their voices and drawn close together in the age-old gossip huddle.

“A man, of course,” June said. “Isn’t it always? Riann accused Marissa of going home with some guy the night before. I guess the girls were having a night out, but apparently some old boyfriend of Marissa’s showed up unannounced. Riann called Marissa a hypocrite—talk about the pot and the kettle. Then Marissa told Riann she was a jealous bitch and always had been. That was probably true. And then Riann called Marissa a whore and a sellout and a thief. And then, let me tell you, it got
really
ugly.”

“Okay, if Marissa went home with some guy,” Arie said, “I get why Riann might call her a whore, but why sellout?”

“Or thief?” Chandra added.

June shrugged. “You got me.”

“And you never told the police? Not even after Marissa’s murder?” Arie said.

June sighed again. “I know, I know. It’s . . . look, this is all I have.” She spread out her arms. “This house. This business. That’s it.”

“Plus a bazillion garden gnomes,” Chandra muttered.

“Brides are always acting up,” June went on as though she hadn’t heard. “Getting married is the most stressful thing a woman ever has to deal with. They fall apart, and I’m supposed to be there to pick up the pieces. If word gets out that I’m blabbing about their silly tantrums, I might as well close up shop and apply at Walmart.”

“But it wasn’t only a silly tantrum, was it?” Arie pushed.

“How do I know? Riann was mad, sure, but if she was going to try to kill Marissa, she would’ve done it right then. I may not like her, but I can’t imagine her sneaking back to Marissa’s apartment hours later and chasing her from room to room with a butcher knife. Besides, Kelli told me that Riann already told the police about the ex-boyfriend, so they would have known how she felt about Marissa’s . . . indiscretion, shall we say.”

Arie and Chandra exchanged glances.
Marissa’s indiscretion? Brant?

Arie lay twisted in a tangle of sweaty sheets. Flinging them off, she padded out to the kitchen.

Was Brant Marissa’s “little indiscretion”?

She rummaged in the fridge for something good to eat. Her mother had stocked the crisper with apples and oranges, but they weren’t quite what Arie had in mind. Brant, of course, had always loved fruits and vegetables.

She’d called him earlier, but he hadn’t answered. Hadn’t—or wouldn’t. When she tried leaving a message, she discovered his voice mailbox was full—another very un-Brantlike behavior. Arie’s brother didn’t let things pile up. He’d been born making lists, preferably alphabetized and in order of priority. Nothing satisfied his neat little soul like crossing off items, one by one. 

The uncertainty of not being able to contact him made Arie feel even more estranged from her brother, from her whole family, really. She’d never been close to her mother, of course. But lately, she’d even felt disconnected from her father. It made her feel sad, but also guilty.

Arie hadn’t wanted to come back from the Other Side. It had been too beautiful. There really weren’t any words capable of describing the place she’d been allowed to visit briefly and then been sent away from.

She sprawled across the table and buried her head in her arms. Crying over her ejection from heaven wasn’t a new thing. Arie had been depressed for months afterward, but she’d thought she’d gotten past the raw, aching emptiness.

Guess not.

The kitchen lights flicked on. Grumpa, in a short, ratty green robe, blinked at her blearily from the doorway.

“What the heck is wrong with you?”

Arie wiped her face on her sleeve. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

“Did you have a bad day at work or something?” He remained in the doorway, his pale, spindly legs sticking out of the bottom of his robe like stalks.

“I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

“You still upset over that parking lot thing?”

Arie stiffened.

“‘That parking lot thing’? I
died
in that parking lot, Grumpa. I was murdered.”

“Look. I’m eighty-three years old. You think I haven’t thought about dying? But I realized I’ve got two choices. So do you, and so does every other breathing animal on this earth. You can focus on death, or you can focus on life. I’m not going to waste the time I have left.”

“Oh, right. You’re telling me you focus on life? Because it sure doesn’t seem to make you very happy. In fact, I can honestly say you suck at it.”

“That’s because I’m still getting used to it. Happiness is a habit, and I ain’t used to it yet. And don’t say suck. It’s not ladylike.”

Arie thunked her head down on the table. Her mother had shape-shifted into a crabby old man in a puke-green bathrobe.

“It’s all your fault, anyway,” Grumpa said.

Arie picked her head up and glared at him. “Your century-old bad attitude is my fault now?”

“See, that’s rude. Who’s the one with the bad attitude now?”

Grumpa shuffled over to the refrigerator and pulled the door of the bottom freezer open. His robe was so short that for a brief, paralyzing moment, Arie thought she was going to be treated to the sight of her grandfather’s bare butt. She experienced a whole-body shudder that almost tipped her chair over.

“Maybe you should explain that.” Arie was getting another headache.

“Well, that parking lot thing. I’d never thought about you dying before me.” He was still rummaging around in the freezer. “And then afterward, you got all sad and weepy.”

He stood, a couple of frozen Snickers bars clutched in his scrawny hand. Arie’s heart lifted, and the possibility of forgiving his chronic insensitivity and general crabbiness loomed. He tossed one over to her and then peeled the wrapper halfway down his own.

Lucky for him. She was not above candy snatching from the elderly, or anyone else, for that matter.

“I figured, if you got that down in the dumps about not staying dead, it must’ve been pretty nice. So I decided not to worry about it anymore. Death, I mean. And I decided there were still some things I wanted to do before my time did come, just in case.”

“In case what?”

“Well . . . just in case I didn’t qualify for that nice place. Sometimes, I’m a little hard to get along with.”

“I’ve noticed.”

Grumpa ignored her. “And in case I didn’t get a second chance the way you did.”

A second chance
. . . there was something in that.

“What things do you want to do before your time comes?”

Grumpa looked startled, then his expression folded back into its usual sour lines. “None of your beeswax, little girl. You mind your business; I’ll mind mine.”

So much for bonding.

Arie had to talk to Brant, but he wasn’t exactly cooperating. She’d left several messages, including one at work. When he continued to avoid her calls, she pulled out the big guns. She threatened to—what else?—tell their mother that he wouldn’t talk to her.

He called fourteen minutes later, but he was not pleased.

It took a while, but Arie finally got him to agree to a meeting—his place in Madison, where he’d lived since graduating college. Neither of them wanted to chance a run-in with their mother. Arie had to use her GPS to find his house, a small Craftsman-style starter home in a decent neighborhood.

If she’d expected a heartwarming welcome, she didn’t get it. Brant answered the door in jeans and an old gray UWM sweatshirt with coffee stains on the front. It was an outfit most people would look relaxed in. On Brant, however, it only served to illustrate the distress he must have felt.

It occurred to Arie that her brother had suffered a significant loss. She felt a wave of guilt at her insensitivity.

They settled in the living room. Brant seemed distracted and apprehensive. He cleared his throat. “So, what do you want?”

“I want to know what’s going on.” Arie flung up a hand. “And don’t say ‘nothing’. We both know you’re in trouble.”

Brant didn’t speak right away. When he did, it was only to ask if Arie had told their parents.

“Not yet,” she answered. “But if this gets any worse, they are going to have to know.”

He frowned. “What do you mean, worse?”

“Oh, come on, Brant. I know the cops are questioning you about Marissa. And Riann said you showed up one night when she and Marissa went out, and Marissa went home with you.”

Brant scrubbed his face with his hands and groaned. “That bitch. Look, you need to stay out of this. I didn’t kill Marissa. I loved her”—Brant’s eyes met his sister’s—”and she loved me.”

“She was engaged to—”

“She was going to break it off. It wasn’t working out. The asshole was starting to show his true colors, and they were fighting all the time.”

“Over the prenup?”

Brant looked surprised. “How do you—”

“Never mind how I know. I just do. Marissa was going through with the marriage. I met her wedding planner, Brant. Nobody has said anything about the wedding being called off.”