Weddings Can Be Murder (24 page)

I heard a couple of mutters as the group
headed toward the elevator but none of them tried to get past Nurse
Barricade to speak to Ron or me.

“Thank you,” I said to her as the elevator
door swooshed shut with them inside. “Dealing with them hasn’t been
fun.”

“This ain’t about fun, sweetie. It’s about
protecting my patients.”

I wanted to bristle at ‘sweetie’ but her
attitude was cool. I had to be happy she was there, along with the
police, to stand guard over Vic. I paced the length of the waiting
area twice. At this hour we were the only ones there. Kent Taylor’s
five minutes began to feel awfully long but finally he emerged and
walked over to us. I found myself holding my breath.

“You’re in the clear, Ron,” he said.

I thought my big brother was going to weep.
He blinked several times and swallowed hard.

“How is she?” he asked. “Is she in a lot of
pain?”

“She’s pretty doped up. No pain. But she
dozed a couple times.” He stuffed the small notebook into his inner
jacket pocket. “What she did say was very clear. Two men,
strangers, broke into her house and shot her.”

“What did they want?” I asked.

He shook his head. “She didn’t know. Usually
with a home invasion it’s druggies wanting cash, the kind of guys
who’ll take your TV set and jewelry and sell it to support their
habit.”

Something seemed off. As far as I’d noticed,
nothing of value had been taken. Certainly the TV and other
electronics were still in place. Even Vic’s purse had been
there.

“My guess,” said Taylor, “is they either
didn’t think she’d be home or thought they could intimidate her
into handing her stuff over to them. One guy got flustered and the
gun went off. She said she got out of the house and ran for her
life. I’m thinking once they’d shot her they didn’t dare hang
around. Late at night like that, any neighbor could have become
involved. The men probably took off without getting what they came
for. Anyway, once she’s back home and feeling up to it, she can let
us know what, if anything, is missing.”

His conclusion about the men leaving quickly
seemed obvious, but there were still a lot of holes in the
scenario.

I wanted to ask more questions but Taylor
was in a hurry. Most likely the hospital call had interrupted his
own plans for the evening. He walked away before I got the chance
to bring up the other thing I wanted to ask.

Ron was already on his way to the nurse’s
station, and this time he didn’t really ask.

“I’m going to sit beside her for the night.
She needs to know I’m here.”

“No long conversations,” said the
no-nonsense nurse.

Remembering what Taylor had said about
Victoria’s drowsiness, long talks seemed unlikely. Still, I
completely understood my brother’s need to be at his fiancée’s
side. I followed him past the desk, across the hall and up to the
two uniformed officers at the door. They’d gotten the word from
Taylor, obviously, because they parted to let us in.

It’s unnerving to see someone you love lying
in a hospital bed, bandaged and hooked to strange, noisy equipment.
Last time I’d seen Victoria she’d been glowing with anticipation of
her wedding, beautiful and perfect. Now she seemed smaller,
shrunken somehow under wraps and blankets. Her face had been
washed, but not thoroughly, leaving ragged scraps of days-old
mascara, and her hair’s luxuriant waves had morphed into stringy
dark hanks. A stickler for looking good in public, she would be
horrified. A thick bandage covered her injured shoulder and both
feet had bulky wraps of gauze and tape. I thought of what the nurse
had said about her losing toes to frostbite.

Ron moved past all that, looking only at her
face, reaching for the hand lying outside the blanket. He picked it
up, stroking her fingers and being careful not to touch the IV line
taped to a vein. His lower lip quivered and I looked away to give
him a moment’s privacy.

“She won’t be able to talk to you,” I said.
“You might as well at least sit down.”

I spotted a chair in the corner and shoved
it close until it touched the backs of his legs. Like a robotic
man, he bent at the hips and knees and sank onto the seat.

“She’s battling infection,” said a voice at
the door.

The nurse who’d been such a drill sergeant
with those media folks now had a voice tender and caring. She moved
into the room and checked a bag of clear fluid hanging from a hook
near the head of the bed. “That GSW nearly got her even though the
bullet itself only lodged in muscle. We’re pumping in the
antibiotics and she should be a whole lot better in a day or
two.”

She touched a button here, a dial there,
moving around the room efficiently.

Ron hadn’t taken his eyes from Victoria’s
face.

“I’m gonna go,” I said, patting his shoulder
and giving the nurse a smile. “Call if you need me—otherwise I’d
better tend to my hubby at home.”

Ron tilted his head until his cheek rested
against my hand and we held that pose for a moment.

“I’ll come back in the morning unless you
want a break sooner.” I realized it was already nearly ten
o’clock.

I drove through fairly quiet streets,
avoiding the university. With some exceptions Albuquerque isn’t a
big night-life city. I made it home in about fifteen minutes and
that was mainly because I’d hit three red lights in a row along
Lomas.

The first thing I noticed on my own
street—the news vans were all gone. Now that there was no killer
bridegroom, apparently there was not much of a story. Sad but
true.

Elsa’s place was dark. Poor dear had
probably not slept much with all the commotion outside, and I knew
for a fact several other neighbors had pestered her for information
about us. Yet another thing to deal with sometime in the future,
the family reputation within our own neighborhood. There’d been so
many home sales in the past ten years or so, nobody knew us
long-term, the way Elsa did.

From behind our drawn living room drapes, I
could tell the television was on which told me Drake was waiting
up. I let myself in, got jumped by the exuberant puppy, and greeted
Drake as he came through the kitchen door.

“Want some hot chocolate?” he asked. He had
a steaming mug in his hand.

“That’s yours,” I protested.

“Won’t take but a second to make another
one.” He took my jacket and handed me the cocoa, then ducked back
into the kitchen.

The show he’d been watching ended and a
newscast came on, telling me what I already knew—missing Victoria
Morgan had been found and the police were now considering this to
be a case of home invasion. A couple of experts were brought on to
give statistics on the shocking number of these crimes. I was just
happy not to hear Ron’s name on the news, for once.

I filled in Drake on Victoria’s condition
and Ron’s reaction to knowing she would be all right.

“I never really thought Ron would find the
right person,” I said, “the way I did.”

In quick order, the cocoa was gone, the TV
shut off, and we found ourselves in bed celebrating the fact that
we have each other—as only we can do.

* * *

Three days later, the doctors cleared
Victoria to go home. She was considered something of a miracle
patient having only lost one pinkie toe to frostbite and with what
would eventually become a dimpled crease across the top of her left
shoulder. There would be some physical therapy to make sure use of
that arm had not been compromised and she might have to adapt some
of her sandals and most of her strapless dresses. All in all, we
were one very lucky family.

I called Kent Taylor to be sure it was all
right for us to take down the crime scene tape and deliver Victoria
to her own home. While I wouldn’t have minded taking her in at our
place, I know too well the feeling a person has when she simply
wants to go
home
, to be in her own bed. With the detective’s
clearance, I headed over there. I had roughly four hours to clean
the house and make it comfortable for our patient’s
recuperation.

Armed with a few bags of groceries and some
basic cleaning supplies I parked in the driveway beside Victoria’s
now-dusty blue PT Cruiser. Ripping the yellow strands of tape away
from the door frame was one of the most pleasurable things I’d done
in the past week, I’ll tell you. It shouldn’t take me long to
straighten the furniture, run a dust cloth over everything and
vacuum up any stray footprints the police had left behind. I would
stash her vacation suitcase discreetly away in a closet and put a
roast in the oven so she and Ron would have a hot dinner tonight.
All those great plans sort of went
whoosh
the minute I
opened the front door.

The place had been ransacked. The hairs on
my arms prickled as I looked around.

The hall closet door stood ajar, drawers in
the console hung open, sofa cushions lay on the floor spouting
tufts of stuffing. Books were strewn from the shelves. As I moved
toward the kitchen I saw cupboard doors open and items from a linen
closet flung about.

Nothing appeared as it had the night I made
my little foray for business files and the contents of her
safe.

I set down the items I’d carried—two food
sacks and my purse—and dashed downstairs to see if the intruders
had also located the safe. The same disarray was evident here but
they’d not moved the heavy lamp which concealed the opening to the
safe. Not that it mattered—they would have needed a master
safe-cracker to get into it, of that I felt sure, and I’d already
taken the contents.

My mind whirled with the implications. I
should probably call the police immediately and report this, but
they were stuck on the random-home-invasion theory and might not
even listen to me. Worse, they would be all over the place for
hours, completely disrupting Victoria’s homecoming. None of the
typical burglary items were taken—two flat screen TVs and some
other electronic gear were all in place. She was so desperately
looking forward to being home again … I couldn’t ruin that for
her.

I started with the furniture in the
basement, straightening and organizing, stuffing the filling back
into cushions and pillows as best I could, working my way through
the house. The jolt of fear, which ran like an electrical tingle
throughout my body, propelled me to maximum efficiency. My hands
worked coolly while my brain buzzed along at a zillion miles a
minute.

The men who’d broken in, that fateful night,
must have been watching the place and come back for whatever they
wanted in the first place. The good news about that was they were
obviously after something other than Victoria herself. Knowing they
hadn’t intended to murder her was some consolation at least. On the
other hand, if she knew what they wanted and where they could get
it, they might have plans to come back and force her to reveal
whatever it was.

I couldn’t get all this out of my mind as I
neatened the kitchen and put the new food away in the fridge. Every
room had received the same treatment, telling me the searchers had
spent some time. I’d already found their point of entry, the back
door I’d left unlocked after my own hasty departure.

Oh my god.
The knowledge hit me at
once. The car that had pulled into her driveway the early morning I
was there—it had to be those men coming back. I’d escaped with
moments to spare.

The theory made perfect sense. Knowing the
police were finished with the house and the owner was gone, they
knew they had plenty of time to search at their leisure. It had
been daybreak when I was there. They might have stayed all day,
with no neighbors the wiser, perhaps thinking their car belonged to
one of the relatives … or maybe they’d only used the driveway to
turn around, not left a car in sight at all.

I’d finished what I could do in the bedroom
and office, forcing myself to stop guessing at what the intruders
might have done. We needed facts, and the only place we could
likely get them was from Victoria herself. It wouldn’t be easy, but
we would need to discuss this soon.

I’d plumped the last of the living room
cushions and pushed the sofa back in place when I heard Ron’s car
in the driveway. By the time I reached the front door, he’d helped
her from the passenger seat into a wheelchair he must have borrowed
somewhere. One foot was encased in some kind of fat medical-looking
‘boot’ and her left arm was in a sling. She wore the new flannel
nightgown and plush robe I’d taken to the hospital as a gift
yesterday.

Getting the wheelchair up the front steps
proved too much of a challenge so Ron simply picked her up and
carried her into the house, while I wheeled the chair along and set
it to the side.

“We’ll have to rearrange things a little,” I
said, “but that’s no problem. I’ll do it.”

Victoria, without makeup or styled hair,
still looked beautiful to us. She gave an almost-exact replica of
her old smile. “I don’t plan to be in that chair very long. The
doctor said I could walk on this boot as soon as I feel ready. They
just didn’t want me going into a swoon the moment I stood up on my
own.”

“And I’m not leaving her side,” Ron said. He
stood beside the couch where he’d deposited her.

She gave him a scolding look. “We talked
about that. I’ll be able to get around the house in a day or two.
You have your office to run.”

No one mentioned that they’d both cleared
their calendars, planning to be away on their honeymoon for another
ten days. They would have been in sunny Florida until right before
Christmas, coming back all tanned and fit and rubbing it in our
pasty winter-white faces.

“I was just about to put a roast in the oven
for your dinner,” I told them. “Ron? Want to give me a hand?”

He sent a quizzical look my way. Since when
did Charlie cook? Much less, since when did Ron ever lend a hand in
the kitchen?