Steps to the Altar (30 page)

At first, I mostly listened as she talked about this book she’d just bought that had chapters and chapters of unusual weddings and wedding spots.

“In Las Vegas, you can have a Star Trek wedding, a King Arthur wedding, or even a Godfather wedding complete with a fake attack by rival mobsters.”

I raised my eyebrows at that one, but didn’t say a word.

“I’m kind of partial to the Beach Blanket Bingo wedding package, though,” she continued, her eyes on her stitching. “Two muscle men would carry me down the aisle on a surfboard to any song I’d like. I was thinking the Beach Boys’ ‘Wish They All Could Be California Girls’ would be about right. I think I’ve lived here long enough to qualify for that, don’t you?”

Okay, that one made me giggle. “You aren’t serious?”

She shook her head. “Just wanted to see if I could get you to smile.”

“So you did,” I said, giving her a half smile.

“I mean in your eyes.”

I bent my head back over my square. “I’m fine.” But I knew I wasn’t fooling her a bit.

“Did you go see Mac?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And I’m fine.”

There was a moment of silence, then I couldn’t stand it. “Gabe thinks he might be in love with someone else,” I blurted out.

She never dropped a stitch. “Go on,” she said.

I stopped sewing and poured the whole story out. By the time I was done, tears were flowing down my face and I could barely talk.

Dove got up, fetched a clean embroidered tea towel, and handed it to me, patting me gently on the back. “It’s going to be okay, honeybun. It’s just a little hitch in the rope.”

“Hitch! Try a big old slip knot that gets tighter and tighter every day. Geeze, I want to kill him. Not to mention her! I wish I’d never met him. I truly do. What a total loser. What a jerk. I hope he ends up toothless and impotent. And I hope she, I hope she . . .” I just couldn’t think of something bad enough. “I hope she develops canker sores the size of Kansas. I can’t believe I’ve been sitting around moaning and groaning about this. Let them have each other. It’s just what they deserve. I was fine before he came into my life and I’ll be fine long after he’s gone.”

She let me rant and rave for a good ten minutes. The flat-out anger dried my tears so I tossed the tea towel aside. When, like an old-fashioned windup toy, I’d finally ran out of steam, she spoke in a clear, calm voice.

“You two can survive this, you know. Sometimes in a marriage, one person has to be the stronger, the more forgiving. If you’re together long enough, it evens out. Trust me, honeybun, a marriage can even survive one of the partners thinking they are in love with someone else. Usually, those feelings aren’t real, they’re just something hurting inside that person.”

I gazed at her in misery, my anger dissipated and replaced now by an overwhelming sadness. “I’ve done the best I can, Gramma. I’ve been the best wife I know how to be. I know I’ve failed in some ways . . .”

“This is not necessarily something you could have prevented,” Dove said. “This is old business that he never took care of when he should have. And business like that tends to come back to bite us in the butt. Trust him, Benni. Trust yourself. Trust that you and he were meant to be together. And if he wants forgiveness, give it to him. In the long run, it will make you both better people.”

My temper flared again. “Trust him! You
are
kidding. Dove, you’re not
hearing
me. He told me he thought he might be in love with another woman. Shoot, maybe he’s always been in love with her. Maybe I was the mistake. Trust him? Right now I trust him about as much as I would a rattlesnake. For all I know, they’re in bed together as we speak.”

She
tsked
under her breath. “My hearing’s just fine, young lady. And I’m telling you, I doubt what he feels for that woman is love. This I do know. He’s an honorable man. He would never cheat on you.”

Anger melted back into misery. “You don’t know that for sure.”

“No, not for sure, but I trust
my
instincts and they say he’s suffering over this as much as you. He’ll come around. And just remember one other thing. There’s not a one of us that can’t be tempted in that way and lots of others. It’s not the temptation that does us in, it’s the giving in to it that seals the bargain with the devil.”

I shrugged, feigning indifference, though I knew I wasn’t fooling Dove a bit. “Right now, I’m not sure I care whether he gives in to temptation or not.”

Her eyes gave me a disbelieving look over the top of her glasses.

I sighed. Not only was I losing my husband, but I was obviously disappointing Dove with my reactions. “Did anything like this ever happen to you and Grampa?”

She nodded, her eyes growing hazy with memory. “It’s not that unusual. Sometimes a person thinks they want this, that, or the other when what they really want is just not to feel bad inside. And it might take them a while to figure out that all those things won’t heal that longing inside. That you got to face the fact you have the longing, then let God fix it.”

“So when Grampa—” Before I could go any further, my cell phone rang. It was Joan Sackett from the police department.

“Hey, Benni, I’ve got some information for you.”

“Great!” I said, fumbling around for some paper and pencil. “What did you find out?”

“That old cop I saw at the festival called me back with Bob Weston’s phone number. Believe it or not, he doesn’t live far away. Up around Jolon.”

Jolon was a very small town about seventy-five miles north near the San Antonio Mission in Monterey County. The mission was the only one located on an active military base—Fort Hunter-Leggitt. I’d visited the mission once for a high school history class field trip.

“What’s his story?” I asked.

“He must be in his late seventies, early eighties,” she continued. “He was one of the detectives who worked on the Sullivan murder. I gave him a call and paved the way a bit for you. Seems like a nice old guy. Pretty talkative once he was convinced I was really a cop. I flirted with him a bit so he’d let me interview him for the department’s oral history project. Can you imagine the untold stories knocking around in that man’s head?”

I took down his number and thanked Joan profusely for getting back to me so quickly. Then I called the number. Mr. Weston answered on the third ring.

“Mr. Weston? This is Benni Harper. Joan Sackett of the San Celina Police Department said she—”

His voice was strong and blunt as a brick. I would have known he was a cop without ever being told. “Yes, yes, young woman. I was just on the phone with her. Tell me, is she married?”

“Uh . . . divorced, I think.”

“Fine, fine. What about you?”

I hesitated a moment, then said, “Married.”

“You sure?”

I cleared my throat. “Absolutely.”

“Hmp,”
he answered as if he already knew everything that had taken place between me and Gabe. I bet he’d been a good detective. “So, when do you want to meet?”

“As soon as you can,” I said.

“How about tonight? The Hacienda Restaurant at Hearst’s old hunting lodge? Know where that is? It’s the Monday night steak special. Two top sirloin dinners for nine-fifty. I’m not averse to a woman buying me a meal, by the way. How’s six o’clock sound? I don’t want them to run out of lime sherbet. It’s my favorite.”

“Of course,” I said, a bit unnerved by his shotgun approach. “I’ll meet you there. Did Joan tell you my husband—”

“Is the chief of police. She did. I’ve heard about him. Fine police officer, I’m told, even if he did sell out to management. Cares about the ranks. Not too full of himself. Too good-looking, they say, which is never a plus in our business, distracts the females too much, interferes with investigating except on the rare occasion when you can use it. But there you go. We all have our crosses to bear. Joan said you wanted to discuss the Sullivan mess. Been a long time since anyone’s wanted to know about that. Don’t know if I can help much. Will your husband be joining us?”

“No, it’s just me. I’ll explain my involvement when I see you, Mr. Weston. Six o’clock is great. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”

“No problem, missy. Old man like me doesn’t get to have dinner with a young woman too often. Looking forward to it. And you tell that Joan that I’ll be calling her.”

“I sure will,” I said, smiling in spite of myself.

“What’s that all about?” Dove asked when I got off.

I explained the latest twist in my search for the truth in the Sullivan murder.

“That man will have some interesting stories, no doubt,” Dove said. “And who knows? Maybe he’ll give you something you can use.”

Since it was only three o’clock, I continued working on the quilt until four. We had only one square left, which Dove assured me she could finish tonight. “You get on the road. And keep that cell phone with you. That’s a lonely drive out to The Hacienda. Me and Isaac went there a while back for some real good prime rib.”

“It’s two-for-one steak night apparently.”

“Well, then, eat up. The protein will make you feel better.”

As I gathered up my jacket and purse, I turned back to Dove, determined to hear the whole story of Grampa falling in love with someone else. I wanted to know how long it took her to forgive him, did she feel differently about him, did she ever regret not just kicking his butt out.

“When Grampa fell in love with that other woman,” I said, “how long before you and he . . . before things were okay?”

She looked up from the last square she was quilting. I knew Dove. She was superstitious, though she would deny it. She would deliberately drop a stitch in this square so, like the Amish, she would not insult God by attempting a perfect quilt. I could have told her there were plenty of dropped stitches in my squares. Not unlike my life.

Her white eyebrows went up slightly. “Who said it was Grampa?”

20

BENNI

ON THE DRIVE out to The Hacienda I marveled at how my gramma could still surprise me. I didn’t have time to find out the details about this other man she’d thought she’d loved, which was probably why she didn’t mention it until I was ready to leave.

“We’ll discuss it someday,” she said, walking me to the door. “Just remember it was your grampa who understood what true love was. He waited for me until I came to my senses. And for that, he owns a piece of my heart that no one else ever will.” With that statement, she kissed my cheek, bopped me on the butt with her palm, and told me to get along, find out the truth about Maple Sullivan, and bring it on back to her. She needed a good story to take to the next historical meeting.

The shadows were growing long when I made the turn off Interstate 101 for The Hacienda. I passed an empty guard shack, the only indication that I was now on military property. It had been a rainy winter and the hills were a brilliant green dotted with yellow ground clouds of wild mustard and Bermuda buttercups, a flower whose stems tasted sour when you chewed them, somewhere between lemon and lime. The early rain guaranteed that feed would be abundant this year. Not one car passed me as I drove into the hills dotted with white clusters of early popcorn weed. A diamond-shaped yellow-and-black sign flashed by on my right—TANK CROSSING—reminding me that this wasn’t just an ordinary country road.

The Hacienda Restaurant and Lodge was located near a group of obviously military buildings. Though I’d lived in San Celina most of my life, I’d never come to this restaurant in southern Monterey County. I didn’t even remember these buildings from my school field trip. I drove up the small hill to the mission-style lodge and parked next to a Monterey County Sheriff’s car. Once in a spacious courtyard covered with flattened grass, I followed a couple who appeared to know where they were going. We passed under one of the archways and had a choice of two glass doors. The left went into the restaurant, the right into a cocktail lounge, which was just starting to fill with people. The couple chose the restaurant and I followed.

The restaurant was one large room lit by rustic, octagon-shaped chandeliers resembling wagon wheels. The high-beamed ceilings and adobe walls echoed the mission theme. Greco-style painting with a slightly Native American and Mexican motif edged all the deep windows and the archways leading to the kitchen and the small-windowed back room that seemed to serve as the salad bar. Above this archway, there was, incongruously, a lighted bingo board. Behind the entry an elaborate mural had been painted of the early military history of California. In calligraphic lettering it announced:

The Military Come to the Providence of California.

While I waited behind the couple, I picked up a brochure with The Hacienda pictured on front. The buildings were designed in 1929 by Julia Morgan, a close friend of William Randolph Hearst and the designer of the infamous Hearst Castle. The rooms in the lodge were originally built for the workers of Hearst’s vast cattle ranch and were also used to provide Hearst’s myriad of friends with a “ranch” experience including barbecues, dances, and impromptu rodeos. The brochure claimed the ranch had enjoyed visits from Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Herbert Hoover, and other celebrities and politicians. Now it was a semisecret spot for birders, hikers, and vacationers looking for an inexpensive, low-stress hideaway.