The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (17 page)

“Less than that,” Rachel said, “because Brenda and I are helping with the decorations as soon as the tables and chairs get here.”

“Right,” I said. “Whatever I do to your dress, I’ve got to double for Brenda’s.”

“No.” Rachel shook her head. “The dresses aren’t alike. I’m kind of lucky I don’t have Bren’s. Hers has off-the-shoulder sleeves that . . . there isn’t much I’d be able to do if I had it.” She looked at the ground and flushed even more deeply than when the not-quite-curse had popped out earlier.

“Honey, we can do this,” I told her.

“Absolutely,” Lance said.

I wanted to ask him,
How would you know?
But Rachel’s face relaxed, and instead I tried to think. If we could work out a wedding without a best man, surely Rachel’s dress would be a cinch. Six fifteen in the a.m. Mama could maybe whip together a couple of puff sleeves between now and then, but those might not be long enough and might still leave Rachel’s shoulder blade exposed. And it would mean letting Mama see the tattoo for fittings, and, while I was sure she wouldn’t want it visible in this evening’s ceremony, I couldn’t imagine that she would want to keep secrets from Marguerite. Maybe a wrap of some kind, carefully draped?

“OK, coffee,” I said. “And let’s get you out of this bedroom before your mom decides something inappropriate is happening between you and Lance.”

“Oh, God,” Rachel said. “She’s going to drive me nuts, Aunt Noel.”

“Me too, honey,” I told her. “And she’s been my sister a lot longer than she’s been your mother.”

In the hall, we met Marguerite coming down for breakfast. She glanced at the three of us suspiciously, as if she could sense that we were plotting against her. Truthfully, she probably
could
tell something was up. She had a sixth sense for trouble that she had been using against me since our own teenaged years. “Good morning,” she said rather stiffly.

“Morning, Mom.”

Forcing joviality I didn’t feel at all, I seized Marguerite by the arm and all but dragged her downstairs to the kitchen with me. “Let’s get this going,” I said to her. “After everything that went wrong yesterday, I’m going to need your help more than ever.”

My sister seemed surprised. She stopped between steps and studied me for a moment with a skeptical eyebrow cocked.
Am I laying this on too thick?
I wondered.

Then her natural tendency to organize and direct kicked in, and she continued her descent. She said, “Breakfast first.”

As soon as I got some caffeine in my system, the beginnings of a plan came to me. It was simple, really. I had to add a jacket to Rachel’s dress. There was no other way to ensure that her shoulders would remain covered for the entire ceremony. We wouldn’t be making one of those in twelve hours (now closer to eleven), though. It would have to be purchased. And I would have to do it without hurting Marguerite’s feelings too badly or tipping her off about Rachel’s arm. Yeah. Simple.

Once we had eaten, Bryce dashing around the table helicopter-like until Mama sent him out back to exercise the dogs, I said to Marguerite, “Let’s see these bridesmaids’ dresses you put so much effort into finding.”

Marguerite smiled suddenly. “All right,” she said. “Let’s. Do you want the girls to model?”

“No,” I said hastily. “I want to see them laid out in front of Nana’s gown. I know you had to work without knowing what my dress would be, and I want to make sure they all look right together.”

“Not much we can do now if they don’t,” Marguerite said.

“Oh, you know,” I said. “
We
can always do something.” Calling on her sense of team play. It worked, because she didn’t protest my reasoning again as we trooped up the stairs together.

The dresses stunned me. The only direction I had given was that I didn’t want three identical bridesmaids. I wanted dresses that matched each girl’s personality. This was an adult wedding, and I didn’t want the ceremony to look like I was playing dollies. Quite frankly, I still expected matchy-matchy copies of the same gown in different sizes. Rachel’s comment that her sleeves differed from Brenda’s had been the first hint that my sister had actually followed my request. Now, when she let me into Mama’s workroom with the girls’ gowns laid out in front of Nana’s dress, I could see that she hadn’t merely done what I asked. She had intuited things I couldn’t have guessed I would want and worked them into the selections.

Marguerite had not sewn these, but she had spent a lot of time and money finding them. “Oh, Margie,” I said, using her childhood nickname without thinking. “They’re amazing.” If she had been anyone else, in that moment I would have reneged on my plan for adding a jacket to Rachel’s gown. Tattoo be damned, I didn’t want to alter a thing about any of these.

Marguerite had alternated colors, so that Rachel and Poppy, the oldest and youngest, were wearing sea foam green and Brenda, in the middle, had powder blue. Bryce’s ring bearer suit matched Brenda’s blue dress. And the dresses were none of them alike.

Poppy said, “Oh please, let me put mine on, Aunt Noel. I’ll take it off after a minute.”

“All right,” I said. “But only a minute.”

“Now Poppy,” Marguerite said. “We already discussed . . .”

Brenda stomped her mother’s toe. “I’m so sorry!” she said, even though it had looked pretty deliberate.

Marguerite threw her daughter a look that I couldn’t understand and said, “We already discussed how soon before the ceremony to put on . . .”

“Oh
please,
” Poppy begged.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“We didn’t know Auntie Noel would want to
see
them!” Poppy said.

“Be careful,” Marguerite said. “I don’t want anything to happen to it before the ceremony.” Poppy seized her dress and dashed to the other side of the room with Marguerite chasing rapidly after her. At ten, Poppy was the most energetic of my nieces. Rachel was thoughtful, and Brenda was athletic, but Poppy had earned the nickname “our little dynamo” early in her life and showed no signs of shedding it. Although Bryce was more boisterous, Poppy had her mother’s nonstop energy. Also, of all four children, she was the only one whose features favored Marguerite’s. Where Rachel, Brenda, and Bryce all had their father’s hair, almost black, Poppy’s locks were more of a mousy brown like their mother’s. Like mine, for that matter. Poppy also had her mother’s round face with its rosebud lips and incongruously lengthy nose, which seemed too sharp to hold the glasses the child was forever pushing back up.

“What was
that
?” I asked Brenda.

Brenda rolled her eyes. “Mom’s never going to listen to what anybody else wants,” she muttered.

It didn’t seem like much of an excuse to go trampling Marguerite’s feet.

Poppy flashed me her best smile as she spun back across the room in her ensemble. She wore a simple A-line that came to her calves. Mama would call it tea-length. Its flared sleeves almost reached Poppy’s wrists at their longest point. Although the dress itself was sea foam green, a powder-blue sash tied at her hip. Flowers stitched around the hem in a slightly darker shade emphasized the skirt’s simplicity and brought out Poppy’s dark green eyes. The top boasted a rounded neckline that showed off an ivory cameo necklace Marguerite had probably coordinated with my jewelry by magic. Poppy would have wrist-length gloves that matched the flower stitching and a bow in the back of her bobbed hair later tonight, in addition to the pair of modest heels she had already put on.

Since we were down a man, Poppy would be walking in with Bryce. It was difficult to tell whether he had been upgraded to junior groomsman from ring bearer or Poppy had been downgraded from full to junior bridesmaid or both, but they liked the change. Poppy had told me at breakfast, “I felt funny walking in with a guy, you know? And Bryce didn’t want to come in first all by himself.”

Yes, I did know. Or I should have. Even though Xian was only slightly taller than I was, he was still over a foot higher than Poppy, and we hadn’t considered the pairings at all when I selected young family members for bridesmaids but Lance chose adult friends for groomsmen. Now, Xian would walk with Brenda, who was actually a little taller than he was, and Chesley would accompany Rachel. Only Lance would be alone, waiting for me at the front of the garden, while we both tried not to think about who
should
have been walking with Rachel.

Poppy spun a less-than-perfect circle on her heel, drawing me back to the present and the dresses. She lost her balance at the end and fell back into Marguerite, reminding me why I wanted the gown back off of her as quickly as possible. All that energy didn’t come with quite enough coordination for a fancy wedding if she got dressed much more than an hour early. Eleven hours? Disaster writ large. “You look beautiful,” I told her. “Let’s get you out of it until later.”

Marguerite stepped behind Mama’s changing screens with her. I turned my attention to Brenda’s dress, the only blue one. It looked like it would be a little shorter on Brenda than Poppy’s was on her. The layered skirt was probably knee length. It had an asymmetrical waist, and the top ran up to a sweetheart neckline in silky pleats. Like Poppy’s dress, Brenda’s had flared sleeves, though Poppy’s looked a bit longer. “Polyester,” Brenda told me when I bent down to touch the fabric. “Can you believe that?” At five foot three, Brenda was taller than I was, but not nearly by so much as Rachel. She wore her curly hair short for running. It was quite a bit longer than Mama’s pixie, but not as long as even Poppy’s bob. The dress suited her perfectly.

“Taffeta,” Marguerite corrected as she returned with Poppy’s dress draped carefully over her arm. Poppy herself could be heard jumping down the stairs with noisy thuds that shook the walls.

Brenda ignored her mother and continued, “Mom totally had to show me on the Internet, because I was dead sure it was silk. Doesn’t it feel like silk to you?” I nodded without speaking, touching the beadwork that ran under the neckline. “Isn’t that
amazing
detail?” Brenda went on. “And there’s more in the hem. I swear they look like they’re held on with air.” She continued talking, though her voice had turned into background noise. “I will absolutely
die
if one of those invisible strings breaks. You know, one did in the store. The first one I tried on was too tight across the chest, and it went ‘pop’ when I pulled it over my head, and there were little blue beads all over the boutique floor.”

“Margie,” I said, looking up at my sister while Brenda rattled on about the dress, “these are amazing. They’re perfect.” With an effort, I lowered my voice and went on, “There’s only one problem . . .”

“What is it?” Marguerite said fast, holding Poppy’s dress a little closer. “What’s wrong?”

I sighed. Oh, it felt
bad
to pretend like there was something wrong. “Look at Rachel’s,” I said.

Rachel’s dress was the most beautiful of the three. It was a narrow sheath with spaghetti straps and fabric that seemed made to drape. “Charmeuse,” Brenda supplied without being asked. “They told me that at the store, because I knew it was different from mine, but I didn’t know how, and I still thought mine was silk.” Still talking, she wasn’t watching my sister and I stare at each other.

“Hold it up,” I directed Rachel.

Against her body, it looked even prettier, even over the nightgown. The sea foam green wasn’t quite the same shade as Poppy’s, or else the shine made Rachel’s seem brighter, more sophisticated. As a seamstress’s daughter, I had a good idea of how a formfitting dress like this one would look on Rachel’s slender frame, and as an aunt, I had to applaud my sister for letting her daughter wear something so sensual.

“Brenda, hold yours up, too,” I said, to give my other niece something to do besides talk. I wondered if I had brought this on by criticizing her behavior. Rachel was holding hers against her chest. Brenda did the same, flipping the sleeves up around her neck a little to get them out of her way. “Now hand me Poppy’s,” I told Marguerite. She handed me the third dress with great reluctance. I displayed it alongside the other two. “Now stand back and look,” I said.

Rachel, Brenda, and I were arrayed around the dressmaker’s form. We displayed the three gowns for an inspection that would have taken place months ago if I hadn’t been such a lazy bride. Lucky for Rachel that I was, or I never would have found fault with Marguerite’s choices.

Now I let my sister study us without speaking, willing her to see. Brenda was still talking, explaining the differences between charmeuse, taffeta, and a variety of other silky fabrics. “And you can make taffeta out of silk,” she wound up, “but it’s less expensive with polyester, and a lot easier to clean.”

Come on, sis,
I thought.

Then Brenda blurted out, “It’s the
sleeves,
Mom. Everybody but Rachel has sleeves. Auntie Noel has those long sleeves, and Poppy and I have flares. But Rachel has those little spaghetti straps. It makes her the odd one out.”

“Oh no!” Marguerite said. “Brenda, you’re right.” In an appreciative tone, she added, “Honey, you should really go into fashion.” I wasn’t sure if I could have been so polite to a child who had just deliberately planted her foot on mine. Then she was quiet for a minute before she continued, half under her breath. “Why didn’t I think of that before? I knew you were going to be in Nana’s dress, Noel. I’m so sorry. I should have . . .”

“It’s okay!” I cut her off. “It’s fine. And I wasn’t sure about Nana’s dress until a couple of weeks ago. All three of them are beautiful. But . . .”

“I should have been thinking more like a bride,” Marguerite went on. “I got so caught up in matching the girls without really
matching
them, you know . . . but now, OK. Rachel, we’re going to have to sew sleeves on that thing. I’ll get Mama and Nana on it right now.”

“What about a cape?” Now that Brenda’s expertise had been complimented, she had moved to stand by Marguerite. It was a little funny to see Brenda still holding her own dress up in front of her while offering her opinion of Rachel’s gown to her mother.