'Til Death Do Us Part (2 page)

“Sure. She lives here in New York, right?”

“Lived,” she said almost defiantly. “She’s dead now.”

“You’re kidding,” I exclaimed. The news took me totally by surprise.
“How?”

“She was electrocuted in her apartment—down on the Lower East Side. It happened in September.”

I sat there momentarily speechless while Ashley took a fortifying sip of her martini. As she swallowed, she laid her French-manicured hand flat against the front of her dress, as if it helped the vodka to go down more easily. When she set the glass on the table again, I caught the cloying scent of olives.

“Gosh, I vaguely remember hearing that someone in the business died like that,” I said finally. “But I had no idea it was her. What happened, exactly?”

“She was taking a bath and a CD player slipped into the tub,” Ashley said.

“That’s horrible.”

“I know. And hard to believe someone wouldn’t know better than to set it so close to the tub.”

She had an odd way of punctuating her comments with a sniff. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Are you thinking—”

“Until last week I didn’t think much about it at all,” she said, suddenly sounding frantic. “I’d never even met Jamie before the wedding. But—you’re not going to believe this. Two weeks ago another of the bridesmaids died. My roommate—Robin Lolly.”

I let out a gasp so loud that a media mogul type at the next table turned his head in our direction. She was right. I could barely believe what I was hearing.

“How?”
I asked.

“She was taking antidepressants, and she had some kind of fatal reaction. It was from mixing them with the wrong kind of food.” Her eyes filled with tears as she spoke, but they seemed to come as much from nervous tension as from sadness.

“Robin?” I said. “She’s the one who managed the shop at Peyton’s farm?”

“Yes, yes,” Ashley said impatiently. “She was the pretty one—with the long blond hair. She may have still been using her married name when you met her—Atkins.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “Were you two very close?”

“We weren’t what you’d call best friends,” she said, shaking her head quickly, “but we’d known each other since high school. Robin, Peyton, Prudence—she was the maid of honor, remember?—and I all went to Greenwich Academy together. Robin and I started sharing a town house last March. My roommate had moved out, and Robin needed a place to live after her divorce.”

“Was she at home when she died?”

“No, she was up in Vermont—all alone—at a ski house her parents left her. She’d driven up on Friday, and the coroner said she must have died shortly after she arrived—though her body wasn’t discovered until a cleaning person came in Monday morning.” Her voice choked as she spoke the last sentence.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “This must be awful for you—and for Peyton, too.”

“Look,” she said, suddenly, grasping my arm so hard that it would have taken the Jaws of Life to remove it. “Don’t you find it odd that two perfectly healthy young women who were in a wedding together would die within a few months of each other in such bizarre circumstances?”

“Are you saying you think someone
killed
the two of them?” I asked. “Because they were
bridesmaids
?”

“All I know is that something’s not right about it—and I’m going out of my mind. Robin and Jamie hadn’t even met until the wedding. But they became friends after that. And now suddenly they’re both dead—as a result of these strange accidents. I’m terrified something could happen to
me
.”

“I know how upsetting this must be, but it really sounds like nothing more than an awful coincidence.”

She shook her head agitatedly. “That’s what
everyone
says—Peyton and everyone else.”

“Well, do you have anything else to go on?” I asked.

“To begin with, I find this whole food-and-drug-mixing thing preposterous. Robin was very clear about the foods she wasn’t supposed to eat. She told me what they were so that if I ever cooked for us, I wouldn’t include any of them.”

It was hard to imagine Ashley doing anything with food other than calling the Zone Gourmet delivery line.

“But sometimes people cheat with food, no matter how religious they say they’re going to be about their diets,” I told her.

She glanced nervously around the room, as if she were afraid of eavesdroppers, then leaned closer to me.

“No, she knew how dangerous even a tiny slip in her diet could be. I just don’t think she would have cheated. And that’s not all. After Jamie’s death, Robin got really weird. She seemed nervous and tense.”

“But that was probably just normal grieving,” I suggested.

She let out a ragged sigh. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “I thought you of all people would take it more seriously. I guess if my life is in danger, I’m going to have to take care of myself.”

There was a manic edge to her voice, and the media mogul glanced over again. It probably appeared as if I were trying to talk her down from a coke high.

“Ashley, look, you need to chill on this. Even if the worst happened and someone killed both of them, it may have to do with their being
friends
, not being in the wedding together.”

“No, no,” she said, shaking her head. “I thought that too for about forty seconds, but then I remembered something. Right after Jamie died, Robin started asking me about the wedding. She wanted to know if anything had seemed strange to me that day.”

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck shoot up, as if they’d been lollygagging around, half listening, and now something had finally caught their attention.

“What do you mean,
strange
?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Nothing occurred to me when she asked other than the fact that the damn bridesmaid dresses made us look like giant balls of butter—and when I asked her to be more specific, she told me to never mind. At the time I didn’t associate her question with Jamie’s death, but now I see it has to be connected.”

I asked if she’d pointed any of this out to the police, and she said she’d told the officer in charge of the investigation of Robin’s death about Jamie, but he had dismissed it. The out-of-state factor had clearly deterred the police from seeing any connection.

“So what exactly is it that you want from me?” I asked finally.

“Come to Greenwich. Just look into this. Isn’t that what you
do
?”

A woman like Ashley wouldn’t care that it wasn’t
really
what I did. Yes, I’d gotten involved in a couple of murder cases, yet basically I’m just a reporter. But trust fund chicks like her were only interested in locating the spot where their needs intersected with what you had to give.

I thought for a moment, sipping my wine. It sounded on the surface as if the situation really
were
nothing more than a dreadful coincidence. But the question Robin had asked about the wedding disturbed me. At the very least I wanted to talk to Peyton. She must be reeling from it all.

I told Ashley okay, that I would visit Greenwich—to talk to Peyton and possibly make some other inquiries. The next day, Wednesday, would actually be the best day for me to make the one-hour drive, because I needed to be at
Gloss
on Thursday afternoon for a meeting with the deputy editor. Ashley seemed instantly relieved. I took down her number and told her that I would be in contact with her tomorrow, after I figured out what time I’d be leaving.

We asked for the check and she paid it, though there was a moment when I thought she was going to ask me to split it. Typical. After walking her to the elevator, I slipped out the rear entrance of the hotel on 58th Street. The snow was still coming down hard and cars crawled along the street, their wheels sometimes spinning and whining. Miraculously, a taxi appeared and no one tried to bulldoze me for it. As I nestled into the warmth of the cab, I realized that a knot had formed in my stomach. The conversation with Ashley had rattled me.

Back in my apartment, I pulled off my coat and boots and, without turning on the lights, flopped down on the couch. I don’t exactly live in Hilton-sister style, but for a single girl in Manhattan I’ve got a pretty nice place—a one-bedroom with a living room big enough for a dining table and a terrace off it. The view is to the west, to nothing in particular, but it’s charming. I see dozens of gray- and red- and sand-colored buildings with old shingled water towers scattered over the rooftops.

Lit by the blanket of snow on the terrace, my living room was practically aglow. I sank back into the cushions and tried to conjure up Peyton’s wedding day. Much of it was a blur by now, though I could recall the big details. The ceremony, in a Protestant church in Greenwich, had taken all of fifteen minutes. The reception, on the other hand, had gone on for hours, starting with a cocktail hour that had featured a vodka-and-caviar station among other extravagances. Dinner was five courses long, including a cheese course before dessert.

The phone rang suddenly, startling me. I picked it up from the side table next to the couch. It was Jack, just calling to say good night.

“I tried earlier,” he said. “I didn’t think you were going out tonight.” Not accusatory, just curious. I blurted out the whole story.

“That’s definitely weird,” he said. “But I wouldn’t let it worry you. In all likelihood, it’s just a coincidence.”

“Doesn’t it defy some natural law of probability?” I asked, knowing that because of his training as a shrink, he might be up on such things.

“Not really. It’s known as a cluster. It’s a set of random events that seem significant because there is more than an average amount of them. But they’re just that—random. They really don’t mean anything.”

He told me again not to be alarmed, and then we moved on to a discussion about the upcoming weekend. It was momentarily distracting, but no sooner was I off the phone than I felt a new wave of disquietude. The two deaths could be random, sure, but then there was that odd question Robin had asked of Ashley: Did anything about the wedding seem strange? I couldn’t imagine, though, what occurrence that April day could possibly have led someone to murder two women who had just met.

I finally turned on the lights, and after traipsing down the hall to my tiny office—which had once been a walk-in closet—I rummaged through my desk drawer until I found a photo of the wedding party that Peyton had sent me last summer as a souvenir. There were Peyton and David in the center and, off to David’s left, the best man, Trip, one of his business partners, and several older groomsmen I’d barely spoken to that weekend. Off to Peyton’s right were the maid of honor and the five bridesmaids. And there I was among them, my short, blondish brown hair shellacked into a Doris Day style and all five feet six inches of me entombed in yards and yards of yellow taffeta.

You see, that’s why Ashley’s story troubled me so much. I’d been a bridesmaid in Peyton Cross’s wedding, too.

CHAPTER 2

I
KNOW WHAT
you’re wondering right now. If Peyton Cross considered me such a good friend that she’d asked me to be part of her bridal party, then why hadn’t I seen her since her wedding day?

Well, have you ever heard the term
Bridezilla
? It refers to a bride who acts so monstrously that by the time the wedding is over, everyone who was intimately involved in it feels terrorized and nearly trampled to death. That phrase fit Peyton to a T. As I mentioned, she’s always had a flair for self-absorption, but during the weeks before her wedding it became clear to me that she had begun to morph into some kind of maniac, a true überbitch.

It wasn’t just that she’d picked out those heinous dresses for her wedding party and insisted that everything else we wore be identical, right down to the Donna Karan nude hose (frankly, I was surprised that she didn’t inspect our panties to see if they matched). She also made insane demands about our physical appearance. We were forbidden to tan in the two months before the wedding because she didn’t want to appear paler than any of us. And we couldn’t highlight our hair without her permission. She was constantly haranguing us via e-mail with new details about the event and our role in it. The night before the wedding, the two carloads of bridesmaids were delayed on our way from the church to the rehearsal dinner because of a traffic accident. We ended up being about twenty-five minutes late. Rather than show any concern about our well-being, Peyton had thrown a shit fit when we appeared. She dressed us down right in front of the guests, claiming we’d disrupted the rhythm of the evening.

I’d actually been surprised that Peyton had even asked me to be in the damn wedding. Or, rather, basically informed me that I would be accepting this honor. Her strategy had been to call me out of the blue the previous autumn and inquire what I was doing the third weekend in April. When I’d answered, “Off the top of my head, nothing,” she’d made her request, leaving me without an out. She’d reminded me then that she had promised me back in college that no matter
when
she got married, I’d be in the wedding. I’d clearly been smashed at the time because I had no memory of such a pact.