Terror in Taffeta (19 page)

“A bid? Brody, it's me. Can you not hear me?” My cell phone worked pretty well in Mexico, but Brody's often had bad reception.

“I'll have to look at my calendar and get back to you.”

“What?” It was like he and I were having completely different conversations. “Is that some sort of code?”

“Brody, who is that?” a familiar voice in the background demanded. Mrs. Abernathy. Of course.

“Ohhhh,” I said. “They're standing right there, aren't they?”

“Yes, sir. That is correct.”

“Is she still pissed? Never mind, I know the answer to that already.” If he was afraid to tell them it was me on the phone, then it must be bad. “Okay, come meet me at Evan's house, okay? Cough once for yes, twice for no.”

“Sounds good,” he said. “I should be able to get a proposal over to you within half an hour.”

“Great,” I replied. “See you then.”

“I look forward to working with you.”

I hung up and dialed Evan to let him know I was coming over, but it went to voice mail. Luckily, he'd given me the spare key to his house in case I needed it. He'd told me to make myself at home, an offer I was relieved to be able to take advantage of. If there was one thing I could use right now, it was anything vaguely resembling a home. It didn't even have to be my home, but it was good to have someplace to retreat to where I wasn't on duty twenty-four hours a day.

This whole experience had been enough to make me rethink my career choices. An occasional bridezilla I could handle, but having to travel to other countries with people I barely knew and then being held responsible for their happiness was starting to seem like a bad idea.

Maybe I should have been a funeral planner instead. Your responsibilities are finite, the expectations aren't as high, and no one's going to be happy anyway.

Besides, business seemed to be booming.

 

CHAPTER 19

While I waited for Brody to arrive, I perched awkwardly on Evan's sofa. I was trying to make myself at home, like Evan had instructed, but it felt odd to be in his house without him there.

Just act natural
.
What would you do if you were at home?

I kicked off my shoes and leaned back on a scratchy, kilim-weave throw pillow.

If I were at home, I would replace this pillow,
I thought, tossing it to the other end of the couch and sitting up again. Relaxing just wasn't on the agenda at the moment.

I noticed an ancient PC on a desk in the corner. Surely it had Internet access. I could at least use my time productively while I waited, lest I start rearranging Evan's kitchen out of sheer nervousness. The connection was slow, but I was able to find a couple of new posts on Craigslist for last-minute rentals, which I jotted on a notepad I found in the desk drawer. I couldn't return to the villa without something good to report, and if I didn't have answers about Father Villarreal, I could at least distract the family by telling them to start packing.

As long as I was online, I Googled Father Villarreal and confirmed that there was only one of him in the entire state of Guanajuato. Unfortunately, it was the one in the coffin, not the one who'd performed the ceremony. If only I had Googled him in the first place, I would have known what the real Father Villarreal looked like, and then I would have known to ask more questions when Father What's-His-Face arrived. Of course, I didn't usually feel the need to run background checks on my officiants—although maybe it was time to start.

That gave me an idea. I might not be able to look up the wedding crasher's name, but I could probably find his face. I texted Brody and told him to bring the pictures he had taken at the wedding.

Moments later, there was a knock at the door, and I scrambled out of Evan's oversized leather desk chair to go answer it.

“These pictures?” Brody asked, waving his digital camera in the air as I swung open the door.

“Hooray! You read my mind.”

“I did indeed.” Brody came in and set his things on the painted wooden bench near the front door.

“How did Mrs. Abernathy seem?” I asked. I hoped that having a little bit of time to process the morning's events had helped her put things into perspective.

“Not that different from usual. Although she did tell me that I might as well burn all the pictures from the wedding since they were probably going to have to do it all over again anyway, but I figured she was being hyperbolic. Anyway, Nicole and Vince filled me in on what happened. I figured you'd want to look through the photos to see if we could find some evidence of fake Father Villarreal.”

“Yes! That's exactly what I was thinking. Thank you.”

“Actually, I uploaded them all earlier, so we can look at them online, too, if you want.”

“Perfect,” I said, gesturing over to the desk. “Evan is on dial-up, but I'm already connected.”

“I will warn you,” Brody said. “Whoever this man was, he was awfully camera shy. At the time, I thought it was kind of odd, but I guess if he was an impostor, he'd have good reason to avoid the camera.”

Sure enough, our mystery priest had managed to position himself so that his face was obscured by the backs of the couple's heads for the entire ceremony. You could glimpse a forehead here or an ear there, but without Photoshop, we wouldn't be able to do anything with the separate body parts.

“Go back further, to before the wedding,” I said.

Brody had taken the requisite photos of the bride fixing her veil in the mirror and the groom doing shots with his friends. There were pictures of us setting up, including one of Mrs. Abernathy scolding the florists. There were even pictures of me in there, making faces at the camera to render myself an unappealing subject, in an effort to keep Brody from taking any more.

“Wait!” I said, as he was scrolling through some shots of the guests arriving. “In the background there. That's him!” The man we had known as Father Villarreal was crossing the courtyard behind a group of cousins in sunny, flowered dresses, smiling for the camera with their arms around each other.

“You're right,” Brody said, zooming in on the man in the background. “It's a little blurry, but it's him.”

“If this were television, I would just say ‘Enhance,' and you could magically make him be in focus and even smile for the camera.”

“You mean like this?” Brody clicked a couple of buttons, and the picture got brighter and a little sharper.

“Wow, that's cool! Now make him look straight at us!”

“Ha. Nice try. I think this will help, though. You can at least tell what he looks like.”

Twenty minutes later, armed with a stack of printouts, we set out on our dual missions: finding suitable accommodations and identifying the man in the picture. We stopped by the police station, but the detectives were out detecting, so we left a message. We swung back by the church but found it locked up tight while everyone was at the cemetery. We stepped into a couple of shops to see if anyone recognized the picture of the mystery priest but didn't get anything more than confused shrugs. I asked a couple of random passersby if they'd ever seen our man before, but suddenly no one spoke English anymore, and by the time I stammered out something in Spanish, they were already halfway down the street.

“Maybe we could put his face on a milk carton,” Brody suggested.

“Right. With a caption that says, ‘Have you seen this priest?'”

Brody shook his head. “I'm not even sure which is weirder. The fact that this isn't really Father Villarreal, or the fact that Father Villarreal is dead.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “Who would kill a priest?”

Brody shrugged. “Maybe someone confessed something they shouldn't have.”

I stared at the photo, studying the mystery man's features. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that it was no misunderstanding that had placed him there on the same day Dana had died, and another idea started to take shape in my head.

“Brody, what if this guy killed Father Villarreal to keep him from showing up at the wedding?”

“But why kill him? Didn't you say someone had already called the church and canceled?”

“Yeah, but what if Father Villarreal found out? Maybe he realized somebody was planning to go in his place and he tried to stop it from happening.”

Brody looked dubious. “I don't know—that's pretty far-fetched.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but what about this whole thing
isn't
crazy?”

Since we weren't getting anywhere with the search for the man who had introduced himself as Father Villarreal, we turned our attention to the last few rental options remaining in the entire town of San Miguel.

We started with the most promising: a three-bedroom near the center of town that promised “incomparable views.” The pictures I had seen online looked pretty nice, but in reality the house could generously be described as a hovel. The views were incomparable, but that didn't mean they were good. It just meant that you couldn't really compare the tiny slice of sky you could see out the window to an actual view. The first of the small, dank bedrooms was serviceable, but the second held a single bed with a sagging mattress centered under a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

“Where's the third bedroom?” I asked the grizzled middle-aged man giving us the not-so-grand tour.

He jerked his chin toward the foldout couch sitting sadly in the corner of the cramped living room. “No extra charge for sheets!”

“Okay, thanks,” I replied, edging toward the door. “We've got some other places to check out, but we'll think about it.”

“Don't wait too long! It won't last,” he said, looking amazed that we were walking away from such splendor.

I was willing to take my chances.

The next place was better—although I couldn't help but notice that it smelled like a combination of freshly scrubbed mildew, Marlboro Lights, and pine-scented air freshener. Brody wrinkled his nose while I concentrated on breathing through my mouth. They'd get used to the smell after a while, right?

Sadly, I had to put it down as a “maybe.”

We arrived at the third house on my list, just a few blocks away on Calle Recreo. With its plain adobe walls, it looked like every other house in San Miguel from the outside, and there was no telling what would be on the other side of the door. I knocked a couple of times and looked at Brody hopefully. “Cross your fingers.”

“Can't be any worse than the other two!” he said encouragingly.

A tiny woman who introduced herself as Marisol opened the door. “Oh, you're early!” she said. She had a towel thrown over one shoulder and was holding a broom and a dustpan in her hand. “Sorry, I was just getting it cleaned up. The family that just checked out brought their kids, and they made a bit of a mess.”

“Thanks for agreeing to show it to us on short notice,” I said, smiling as we stepped through the wooden door into the garden. “We're in a bit of a pinch.”

“Well, you're in luck,” she told us. “This place usually books up months in advance, but there was a last-minute cancellation.”

I felt a flood of relief as she showed us around. It was more modest than the villa, but it was nicely furnished with heavy wooden antiques. There were a few more floral prints than I would have preferred, but it was comfortable and cheerful, and it even smelled good, like mint castile soap and sunshine.

On the landscaped patio, an orange tabby lounged on the warm tile, making me miss my two fluffballs back home. Thank God Laurel was taking care of them while I was gone. I didn't know what I was going to do when she started traveling with me for work, because she was their favorite pet sitter.

“I don't know who he belongs to, but he loves hanging out here, so I guess you could say he comes with the place,” Marisol told us. I knelt to stroke him and he flopped onto his side, stretching so I could scratch his tummy. Maybe I was being unduly influenced by my newfound feline companion, but I liked the place, and I thought Mrs. Abernathy would, too.

I looked up at Brody, who was giving me a big smile and a thumbs-up behind Marisol's back.

“We'll take it!” I said, relieved to have at least one thing settled. While she drew up the paperwork, I quickly called to cancel the motel outside of town, eliciting some grumbles from the surly desk clerk. He'd get over it, and much more quickly than Mrs. Abernathy would have gotten over a room with a bed that vibrated if you inserted a couple of pesos.

Feeling lucky, I showed Marisol the picture of the impostor priest, but like everyone else we'd shown it to, she shook her head. Still, I'd averted the immediate disaster and could now focus on the other pressing matters at hand: hunting down the fake Father Villarreal, dropping by the jail to visit the bride's sister—oh, and figuring out who'd offed one of the bridesmaids. A wedding planner's work is just never done.

We dashed back to the villa to share the good news, and while it didn't stop me from having to have “the talk” with Mrs. Abernathy again—the one where she demanded to know who that man who'd married Vince and Nicole was while I explained that I didn't know—it did give me a good excuse to cut it short so I could go tell the others our plan. I found the newlyweds in their room, and told them the happy news that they wouldn't have to share a motel room with the mother of the bride.

Next, I visited Kirk's room. After hearing him call, “Come in,” in response to my knock, I swung the door open to find him sitting on the floor amid a sea of items, some his, some distinctly feminine. The boxes I had filled and taped shut were open, their contents spread out on the floor.

“Um, Kirk, I wanted to tell you to start packing.” He was clutching the pashmina shawl Dana had brought for cool evenings, looking like he had no idea what to do next. “But on a related note, you might want to
stop
unpacking.”