Miz Scarlet and the Bewildered Bridegroom (33 page)

“It’s the big day,” I
heard Jenny say from across the room. “I’m so
excited.”

“Me too,” I admitted.
“Let’s get going.”

Lacey and Laurel were
the first ones down for breakfast. Jenny set them up in the dining
room. They were starting on their coffee when Gunnar joined them.
Ten minutes later, Annalee made it a foursome.

Over pancakes and
sausage, the happy couple shared their romantic tale with the
Googins girls. They had met on a cruise to the Caribbean, two
single people in search of companionship. He’d been widowed for
three years; she was in the middle of an amicable divorce from her
husband of thirty years.

“This dashing man had
the cabin next to mine,” Annalee told them. “I kept bumping into
him everywhere I went. When I found out he was assigned to my table
in the dining room, I admit my heart fluttered at the thought of
getting to know him better.”

Half an hour later,
Lacey felt comfortable enough to spill the beans on the events of
the last couple of weeks. In her typical dramatic fashion, she gave
an exciting blow-by-blow account of Karin’s dastardly effort to
ruin the Four Acorns Inn. By the time she was done, Gunnar and
Annalee were mesmerized by our plight and so grateful that we had
managed to rescue the inn from such an evil plan. And that’s when
the subject of Edna Rivera came up.

“Oh lordy!” I groaned,
hearing the ensuing conversation as I stood in the butler’s pantry
pouring hot coffee into the thermal carafe. Jenny, passing through
with dirty dishes in hand, snickered.

“You know how Lacey
loves an audience,” she reminded me. “But I wouldn’t worry too
much, Miz Scarlet.”

“No?”

“They’re still laughing
about Edna’s reason for divorcing Big Larry.”

It was true. I heard my
mother explaining about the little lie that sent Edna to divorce
court.

“And because she lied
on the application for the license, they weren’t legally married.
Once she realized that, Edna broke up with Big Larry, figuring that
once the divorce was final, they could reunite and remarry. It
never occurred to her that her husband was every bit as stubborn as
she was. By the time he got around to agreeing to marry her again,
he made the mistake of saying it was for his baby daughter’s sake.
That just got Edna all riled up because she wanted him
to
want
to marry her because he loved
her.”

“And now?” Gunnar
laughed. “Did they ever manage to work it out?”

That was Lacey’s chance
to tell about the Christmas reunion and how Edna and Big Larry
finally saw the light when she confessed her bad behavior. “At the
moment, Edna’s in Boston. We’ve got our fingers crossed that
they’ll make it a permanent thing.”

“That has to be the
most convoluted love story I ever heard,” the groom admitted. “I’m
so glad I don’t have to go through that kind of
craziness.”

The rest of the wedding
party came down in dribs and drabs. By the time everyone had
finished eating breakfast, it was after ten. Annalee’s two sons and
her grandsons, Kyle and Kevin, invited Gunnar along for a hike up
to White Oak Hill. Bur gave them a map and showed them the way to
the trail head. Ellie and Zak wanted to take a walking tour of
Cheswick. I suspected they wanted to see what Wallace’s mansion was
like from the street. Ranie and Jackie offered to help Annalee with
wedding preparations, but the bride waved them off.

“No, I’m fine. I think
I’ll just sit in my room and read for a while. Why don’t you take
the girls to the Lutz Museum?”

I gave Annalee’s
daughters-in-law a brochure about the local children’s museum,
promising them it was a fun place for kids. “And it’s only a mile
or so down the road from here.”

The house was quiet
after the guests scattered. Jenny, Laurel, Lacey, and I sat down at
the dining room table to go over our checklist one more
time.

“Music, justice of the
peace, cocktail hour, photographs....” Item by item, we confirmed
our plans, making sure we were ready.

Just before noon, I was
in the kitchen when Gunnar burst into the room. “Have you seen
Annalee?”

“She said she was going
to sit in her room and read a book.”

“She’s not there!” he
cried, alarm in his voice. “She’s not answering her
phone!”

“Maybe she’s taking a
bath,” I suggested, thinking this was a case of wedding jitters.
“Why don’t you give her a few minutes and try
again?”

“Something terrible has
happened to her! I just know it.”

“I’m
sure....”

“Check her room. Maybe
she’s had a heart attack!”

I studied the man with
the wild look in his eye. From what I had already observed, Gunnar
Magnusdotter wasn’t the type to get hysterical. Maybe he was right.
Maybe something had happened to Annalee.

I knocked several times
on her door as the distraught groom waited impatiently. He tried to
open it, but it was locked. After waiting a minute, I took out my
master key and entered the Red Oak Room. No sooner had I taken a
step forward than Gunnar burst past me, heading straight for the
bathroom.

“She’s not here!” He
emerged a moment later. “Where could she be?”

“Can you try her cell
phone again?”

A moment later, I heard
the faint strains of Mendelssohn’s
Wedding March
wafting
through the air. It seemed to rise from the seat of the arm chair
by the window.

“Her cell phone is
here! I knew something terrible had happened. Annalee never goes
anywhere without it!”

“Let me call Kenny.
He’s a retired public safety officer and the local head of Mercer
Security,” I offered, trying to calm Gunnar down, but the man was
insistent that I call the police.

“If you won’t make the
call, I’ll just have to do it myself!”

“Wait just a second,” I
cajoled him. “I have a friend who’s a state trooper. Let me call
her and see what she recommends.”

What I didn’t tell him
was that Larry and Max were spending the weekend together at his
place. The second she picked up, he would be out the door and on
his way to the inn, even before I finished explaining the
situation. That’s the benefit of killing two birds with one
stone.

“Put the guy on speaker
phone, Miz Scarlet,” Larry instructed me. A moment later, she was
peppering him with questions, wanting to know how well he really
knew the woman he was supposed to marry. I stood there while she
directed him to check Annalee’s incoming and outgoing phone calls.
As I listened to the conversation, I realized Larry was actually
treating this like a real case. There was no mistaking the concern
in her voice.

“I’m here,” Max
announced from the doorway. “Where are we at,
Larry?”

“I’m about to run a
check,” she told her former police partner. “You want to handle
that end of things?”

“Happy to do that.
Kenny’s on his way. We’ll set up a command center here. Are you
sending some help?”

“We don’t have anything
solid to go on yet, Maxie. Can you scrounge up some kind of
probable cause for me, so I can get the ball rolling? Anything look
out of place, any signs of violence?”

“Her suitcase is still
here. So is her purse. Does she take medication,
Gunnar?”

“What?” The groom was
still reeling from the emotional blow of discovering his bride was
missing. “Um, pills? I think it’s something for her
thyroid.”

Max found the
prescription bottle in Annalee’s travel case perched on the
bathroom counter. “She didn’t take it with her, but maybe it’s
because she already took her daily dose.”

“It’s possible,” Larry
agreed. “Any note on the scene?”

“I don’t see
one.”

“She said she was going
to read,” I remembered. “Maybe she took her book down to the garden
or to the park.”

“Not without her cell
phone. That always goes everywhere with her!” Gunnar insisted.
“Besides, there’s her book!”

He pointed to the
paperback on the side table. I picked it up to examine it. It was a
copy of
Reluctant
Witness
, a tale about a wedding
planner on the run. Obviously Annalee was in wedding mode, right
down to her choice of story.

“Maybe she finished the
book and decided to go for a walk,” I suggested gently. “She just
wanted to get some fresh air and forgot that she didn’t have her
cell phone with her.”

“I’m telling you that
woman never goes anywhere without that damn phone! Something’s
happened to her!”

Chapter Twenty Four --

By this time, Kenny and
Bur were organizing a search party downstairs in the vestibule.
They were already dividing up the search area.

“I’m going with them,”
Gunnar informed Max. “I can’t just sit around and wait while she’s
in danger!”

Vic and Van insisted on
participating in the hunt for the missing bride. The young boys
would stay behind with my mother, despite their
protests.

“Scarlet, you stay
here. Larry’s on her way now. I’ll keep you updated as we work the
grid. If you hear anything, anything at all, you call
me.”

“I will,” I
promised.

I heard the sounds of
footsteps hurrying down the stairs. Voices raised in worried
conversation floated up from the hallway below. How could this have
happened? How could Annalee Pinault have just vanished like that?
It didn’t make any sense. One moment she was the happy bride and
the next she was gone. Was the Four Acorns Inn cursed by some
malevolent hand?

“I don’t believe it,” I
sighed, sinking down on the unmade bed. “I just don’t believe
it.”

“Neither do I,” Jenny
agreed, joining me in the Red Oak Room. “Do you really think she
was kidnapped?”

“Yes, Miz Scarlet,”
said another female voice out in the hallway. “Do
tell.”

“Larry!” I had to admit
I was relieved to see her. Dressed in a pair of pink jeans and a
white tank top, she had chosen a pair of white running shoes in
place of the stylish heels she usually wore. Her long black hair
was pulled back in a pony tail, her face unadorned, save for a
little lip gloss. That told me all I needed to know. Larry was
worried that the bride might actually be the victim of a crime. Had
we been too quick to assume Karin was the sole mastermind of the
plot to ruin the Four Acorns Inn? Did she have an
accomplice?

“Do you think Karin’s
boyfriend did this?” I asked. Maybe it was time to consider Seth
Von Bethen a suspect.

“I doubt it,” Larry
replied, even as she was busy taking notes on her Smartphone. “Is
that spelled B-e-t-h-e-n?”

“Yes.” I picked up the
paperback from the arm chair, so Larry could sit down and make her
phone calls in relative comfort. As I did, a thin sheet of white
paper escaped from between the pages and floated across the floor.
Bending down to pick it up, I notice the Four Acorns Inn logo at
the top of the page.

“What’s that?” the
homicide cop inquired. She held out her hand expectantly. I
pretended not to notice, engrossed in the printed message in my
hand.

“It’s a note from
Gunnar. He wants her to know how happy he is that she’s marrying
him today.”

“That’s so romantic!”
Jenny leaned over my shoulder to read it with me. “He’s glad she’s
not like...ut-oh.”

“Ut-oh what?” Larry
wanted to know. Those dark eyes flashed and then narrowed as Larry
studied my assistant.

“Um....” The girl
gulped, giving herself away.

“Scarlet, spill the
beans!” Now I was in the spotlight as the detective glared in my
direction.

“Well, ah...Lacey told
Annalee and Gunnar about how your parents split up and, um...how
they divorced because Edna wasn’t legally old enough to
marry.”

“So?”

“Gunnar writes that
he’s glad they don’t have that kind of
relationship.”

“Aren’t we all,” said
the daughter of the Queen of Clean and the spitball king. “What
else does he say?”

“That’s it.” I handed
her the sheet of paper so she could see for herself there was
nothing else there.

“Well, unless the bride
has some sort of deep, dark secret, that’s a dead end,” Larry
decided, placing the note on the side table with an air of
dismissal. “Any chance I can get a cup of coffee? Maxie and I,
er...slept in this morning.”