Deadly Forecast: A Psychic Eye Mystery (43 page)

Cat looked at me with such fury that I took a step back. “It. Matters.”

Candice and I were quick to nod. “Yes, of course it does,” I said. “Sorry. I think
I’ve got the prewedding jitters and stuff is just coming out of my mouth all willy-nilly—”

“Sundance,” Candice interrupted.

“Yeah?”

“Shut it.”

“Okay.”

Candice and I both pushed big old smiles onto our faces and squared our shoulders
like good little soldiers.

Cat’s glare intensified, and then her gaze dropped to the guest list in my hands like
she expected me to get right on it…and I wasn’t about to do that because it sounded
like a real pain in the keister and why not just let the guests come or not come on
their own?

Candice lifted the clipboard out of my hand and surveyed the guest list. “I’ll help
Abby with this, Cat,” she promised, which was Candice-speak for “I’ll tell you what
you want to hear if only you’ll cut us some slack, Cat.”

Cat’s glare diminished to a simple scowl before she raised her hand and snapped her
fingers. Jenny Makeanote was at her side in a hot second, and with one nod from Cat,
Jenny was off again, hurrying into the reception tent only to rush right back out
holding two garment bags, which she gave to Cat, who in turn handed one each to us.
“Here are your dresses. The limo will be at Candice’s condo at eight thirty a.m. and
the driver will take you anywhere you’d like for breakfast, but you’ll need to be
here
promptly at ten a.m. I’ve assigned you the two dressing rooms on the ground floor.
Abby, you’ll have the one at the back of the corridor straight off the main hall.
Candice, yours is the second-to-last door on the left of that corridor. I have hair
and makeup scheduled for both of you at ten thirty and eleven—there was some mix-up
with the schedule, so you’ll each be getting makeup before hair. Please don’t put
on your gowns until after you’ve had your hair and makeup applied. Abby, Jenny will
be available if you need someone to help you dress.”

I felt my face flush. She was starting to sound a bit too much like my mother for
my taste. “I’ll be fine, Cat, thanks.”

“The ceremony is at three, right?” Candice said.

“Yes.
Promptly
at three. If the rain holds off, then we’ll do the ceremony first and most of the
pictures second, but, Abby, the photographer will want to get some photos of you prior
to the ceremony, so be ready for him no later than two o’clock.”

“Are Dutch, Milo, and Brice getting ready here?” I asked, glancing at my fiancé, who
was still laughing and joking with Milo and his brothers.

“No. They’re having breakfast together along with Dutch’s brothers, his mom, and his
aunt. Then everyone will be driven here, where Dottie and Vivian will be given the
upstairs dressing rooms, and the boys will be given full run of the guesthouse.”

“Guesthouse? What guesthouse?”

Cat rolled her eyes. “The one right over there.” I looked to where Cat was pointing
and saw a modest-sized cottage on the other side of the lawn about fifty yards away.

“I’ve also secured the newlywed suite for the two of you for tomorrow night.”

“Newlywed suite?”

Cat’s scowl deepened. “If you’d come here and taken the tour
like I told you to eight hundred times, you’d know that there is a romantic cottage
up that cliff and tucked into those woods.”

I again looked to where she was pointing and very faintly I could just make out the
outline of a stone cottage way up the bluff overlooking the lawn we were standing
on. Holding up my cane, I asked, “How the heck am I supposed to get up there?” There
was clearly no road up to the cottage, and with my cane and bad hips there was no
way I could hike up the side of a steep bluff.

Cat pointed to her left at the woods that flanked that portion of the lawn. “If you
go to the left of the driveway out front, there’s a little footpath that leads to
a gondola made for two that takes you up to the cottage.”

“A
gondola
?” Was she kidding?

“It’s perfectly safe, Abby,” Cat said.

“I’ve been up in it many times,” Jenny Makeanote assured me. “It’s actually a beautiful
ride through the trees.”

I wasn’t convinced until Cat said, “I thought you’d be excited to have a little cottage
to yourselves up in the hills where no one can get to you. I mean, with Dutch’s brothers
staying at your house…” She let the last part of that sentence trail off, and after
thinking about it, and all the practical jokes Mike, Chris, and Paul might pull on
us, I pushed that well-practiced smile onto my lips and nodded like a happy-faced
bobblehead. “Awesome! What’s a wedding night of bliss without a gondola ride?”

Cat narrowed her eyes at me. She could sense fake enthusiasm a gondola ride away.
“
Any
way,” she continued, “as I said, you’ll need to be dressed and ready by two. The photographer
swears that with such a small wedding party he can get all the pictures he needs in
an hour, and the rest during and after the ceremony. Which reminds me, Jenny Makeanote,
I need to sign the checks
for the photographer, caterer, and baker tonight so that you can deliver them promptly
when they arrive here tomorrow.”

A tiny thread of a thought floated up from the back of my mind, but at that moment
Cat raised her bullhorn again and yelled, “Let’s go, people! We have the rehearsal
dinner to get to! And Milo, please make sure the Rivers boys aren’t driving, okay?”

Just like that, whatever thought had been about to surface evaporated and I was whisked
off to a celebratory dinner, wishing the whole time that Dutch and I could sneak away
and avoid the next day entirely.

*   *   *

I
woke up on the day of my wedding feeling terrible. It might have been that I’d been
sleeping on a lumpy couch for five days. Or it could have been that I’d had several
glasses of red wine the night before. Or it could have been that I’d had a restless
and fitful night’s sleep, never really falling into more than a doze.

Mostly, though, it was probably because I didn’t want to show up to my own wedding.

I sat up blearily and listened. The clock on the far wall said it was half past five,
but no stirring sounds came from Brice and Candice’s room. They appeared to be sleeping
in.

I felt too restless to stay put, so I stood up, got dressed, left Candice a note in
case she woke up and wondered where I was, and headed out.

I spent some time in my favorite coffee shop. It was nice and quiet on a Saturday
morning, but after a while I felt too anxious and troubled to stay there too.

Getting in my car, I drove over to the new house. Several cars were parked in our
driveway, but I didn’t pull in. Instead I sat at the top of the drive, staring at
our new beautiful home, and simply
couldn’t shake the ominous feeling I had that today was going to be awful.

Tears welled in my eyes for no reason I could identify, but I was helpless to stop
them. I just felt sad. Terribly, terribly sad. And the more I tried to rationalize
it as simply being overwhelmed by the wedding and the case I’d been working, the more
the melancholy seemed to settle into my bones.

Finally I drove off and just meandered around the winding roads for an hour or two.
I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know that I could talk to either Candice or
Dutch about what I was feeling without them thinking the wrong thing.

Around then I got a text from Candice asking where I was. Remembering the limo and
our plans for breakfast, I texted her an apology and told her to go ahead without
me. I’d meet her at the venue. She immediately called my phone, but I didn’t pick
up. I couldn’t talk to her without completely losing it and all I wanted was a little
time to myself to try to pull it together.

I drove south to a park I knew and pulled into a space near a man-made lake and just
stared out the window for a while. But my emotions wouldn’t settle and the more I
tried to figure out what the heck was going on with me, the more the answer seemed
to elude me. I tried to think happy thoughts, that in just a few hours Dutch and I
would be man and wife. I knew the idea should’ve made me happy, but it was as if some
kind of a barrier had gone up inside me, and any thoughts about marrying Dutch only
filled me with dread. In fact, the thought of walking down that aisle in a few hours
made me almost physically ill.

Still, because so many people expected me to show up and smile like a good little
bride, I eventually left the park and made my way over to the manor house, where I
sat until nine, when the manager came out to let me in. She showed me to the room
I’d been assigned, and then left me to go answer the doorbell. I saw
that my gown had been placed on a hook next to a full-length mirror (after handing
us our dresses the night before, Cat had thought better of it, and she’d grabbed them
back and had them kept here).

I moved over to my dress and ran my hand down the beautiful silk. And then I burst
into tears.

After having a good cry, I blew my nose, dried my eyes, and tried to find a distraction.
Moving to the window, I focused on the wedding preparations. The day was gloomy, but
the cold front that was supposed to sweep through Austin and bring rain and strong
winds hadn’t arrived yet. In fact, there seemed to be small holes in the clouds where
some rays of the sun were managing to get through.

Meanwhile, out on the lawn there was a flurry of activity—chairs were being set out,
flowers were being arranged, a red carpet was being unrolled. Everyone was working
hard, but I could see them all periodically give the sky a wary glance.

Cat and her bullhorn hadn’t yet arrived, but I knew she’d be here soon. In her place
was Jenny Makeanote, who was talking to a man wearing Wellies with several pet carriers
in tow. It seemed we were going to have swans after all. She handed him an envelope,
then made a check mark on her clipboard before moving off to hand another envelope
to a woman in a white apron I recognized from one of the meetings with Cat. She’d
been the caterer, I thought.

With a sigh I moved away from the window and began checking out the digs. They were
nice. There was a bottle of champagne chilling on a side table, along with a saran-wrapped
fruit plate containing white grapes, pears, and sliced cheese. Nothing that might
stain a wedding gown, I noticed.

There was also a photo album on the bureau, and curiously I opened it. Inside were
the wedding photos of all the brides and grooms that had gotten married at the lovely
estate.

As I was mindlessly flipping through the album, that tiny thread of a thought that
I’d had in the back of my mind from the night before finally surfaced and bloomed
so fully that I gasped. It had mingled with the image of Jenny handing envelopes to
the swan handler and the caterer. “Checks!” I gasped. “He would have written them
all checks or put down a deposit using a credit card!”

If I was right and Buzz had used Rita’s salon, Carly Threadgill’s bridal store, and
Simon Salisbury’s photography studio for his own wedding, then he would have put down
some sort of deposit and made a payment. We already had Carly’s and Rita’s financial
statements—that’d been part of the initial investigation into the bombs at their shops—and
I was certain that we’d already collected Simon’s bank statement records; that’d be
useful in helping nail him as a dealer in child pornography. It would take only a
few minutes for one of the agents to sort through the deposits in Rita’s, Carly’s,
and Simon’s accounts for a name that was consistent on all three statements. I was
certain Buzz’s name would pop up.

Whirling around, I ran to the bed where I’d thrown my purse and pawed through it to
find my cell. Hauling it out, I was thumbing through my contacts list when there was
a loud knock on the door and Cat sashayed in, holding tightly to her bullhorn and
Jenny Makeanote close on her heels, along with Kendra, the makeup artist Cat had hired,
who was carrying several small makeup bags.

“Who’re you calling?” Cat demanded right away.

At first I ignored her. I was way too excited about what I’d just figured out, but
Cat was clearly out of patience with me because quick as a feline she was in front
of me, pulling the phone out of my hands.

“Hey!” I yelled at her. “Give that back! I have to call Gaston!”

“Who’s Gaston?” Cat demanded, moving the phone behind her and out of my reach.

“He’s my boss, Cat, and I
really
have to call him! It’s important! I have a solid lead he
has
to follow up on!”

Cat squinted at me like she thought I was crazy. “Abby,” she said crisply, “this is
your
wedding day
! You’re not calling
anybody
.”

“Fine, then let me just call Brice really quick….” I made another grab for my phone,
but Cat was too fast for me.

“No!” she yelled, twisting away and handing the phone to Jenny Makeanote, who took
it and dashed out of the room like a running back with a football at the Super Bowl.

I wanted to swat my sister. “Fine. Then I need to talk to Candice, Cat.”

Cat shook her head, all the while continuing to look at me like I was a nut. “Candice
isn’t here yet, and I’m not letting you talk to her even when she does arrive. You
are
not
working today; do you hear me? And you are
not
sending any of our FBI wedding guests or the groomsman on some wild-goose chase to
hunt down some silly lead. You’re always chasing a lead, Abby. That’s your number
one excuse, actually.” Cat then adopted a tone a few octaves higher than her own,
which I supposed was some kind of imitation of me. “Oh, Cat, I can’t help out with
all the gazillion things that need to get done for
my
wedding because I’m chasing a lead! Oh, Cat, Candice and I have to run out on you
because we have a lead! Oh, look, the wind just blew in a
new lead
and now I’m going to do my disappearing act and
drive you crazy
!”