He rogered the call and told Ashe, “We’ll stop Grim Reapers and check them for paint cans.”
Small chance of finding an armed Reaper, Garreth figured, but it placated Ashe.
At the high school, Duncan, still in his Darth Vader helmet, stood by his car. “I am your father, Luke,” he intoned, “and I tell you it’s criminal to miss what’s inside.” His voice returned to normal. “You gotta at least take a look. I’ll mind the store.”
After watching the shivaree, Garreth had to admit to curiosity about the reception.
A blast of sound and blood scent greeted him when he stepped through the gym door…the roar of overlapping voices, laughter, some whooping…and even louder than the voices, music: “The Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A DJ’s sound table sat on a stage at the far end of the gym, the DJ himself dressed as a zombie. Under a ceiling of a monstrous black spider centered in an even more monstrous black and orange crepe streamer web, dancers in line dance formation sang along as they followed the song’s directions — led by the groom and bride, whose dress now had a shingling of green…money pinned to it. A jump to the left, a step to the right, hands on the hips. On the stage, the DJ danced to the music, too. Garreth spotted Nat and Charly in the middle of a line, costumed as an Old West marshal and dance hall floozie, doing the pelvic thrusts with enthusiasm.
Garreth tore his vision from that to go check out the cake. Half of it had been sliced up, but enough remained to recognize a castle. Cake slices and punch bowls with skull-shaped cups flanked it, while a generous buffet spread down the table next to it, tended by a cowboy and French maid.
The music ended in cheers from the dancers.
Nat and Charly came over to him, panting a little. “Quite a bash, huh.” Nat raised his voice to be heard. “Try the punch. The orange, not the blue; it’s unleaded. The eyeballs are edible and not bad tasting. I think this will count as the wedding of the year, and probably acquire mythic proportions in memory.”
Charly laughed. “Exactly what Naomi, mother of the bride, is afraid of. Look at her.” She pointed at a table across the dance floor. “That has to be the stiffest upper lip in history. She’s been planning the perfect fairytale wedding since Julie was born and I’d love to have been a fly on the wall the day Julie announced her and Jason’s plans. I have it on good authority Julie delivered that news with an ultimatum to cut off Naomi’s histrionics: my way or the highway…threatening to elope.”
Garreth followed the direction of Charly’s finger, but instead of the bride’s mother, he saw Mary Catherine Haas and Anna Bieber at the next table. Oh, yes, last week she said something about making a wedding present. “How is Anna Bieber related to the couple?”
“She’s Jason’s great-grandmother,” Nat said.
“Then you’re related to Anna, too?”
“Only by marriage. Her son Jacob married my father’s sister Alicia.”
The DJ picked up a mike. “Now, folks, radio Z-O-M-B-I brings you music directly from the Mos Eisley Cantina! Please secure the safety on your weapons before entering the dance floor.” Music started again, this time the bar music from Star Wars.
Charly grabbed Nat’s arm. “I love this. Come on, twinkletoes. Dancin’ time!”
They charged back onto the dance floor.
Garreth circled around it to Anna’s table. “Good evening, Anna. So this was the wedding you mentioned. Do Julie and Jason like the flannel sheets?”
“Very much. Let me introduce you around…if you can hear me. Everyone, this is Garreth Mikaelian, the young man who came hunting his grandmother. You know Dorothy and my sister Mary Catherine. This is another daughter Emily, and Martina, wife of my son Edward, and Leona, wife of my son David. And this is someone I think you’ll be especially interested to meet…my daughter Mada.”
His pulse leaped, thoughts ricocheting from amazement — Lane still came, and early! — to panic over how to handle her here, in a crowd with her family. Until he saw where Anna pointed. Then his gut plunged in dismay. He stared across the table at a total stranger…at a ruined face, stretched so much by face lifts no elasticity remained, only a tight mask looking more like plastic than skin.
Mada was not Lane.
“She decided to surprise us by coming for the wedding. Isn’t that nice?”
His face felt frozen into stone. Smiling used all his will, so did keeping his voice normal. “Very nice.” Somehow he also forced out a polite greeting to the woman. Not Lane. The words reverberated in his skull.
She nodded, murmuring a reply lost in the din of music and voices.
At a loss what to say or do next, he retreated…held his radio to his ear and shouted at Anna, “I’ve got to go. You all enjoy the reception.”
In the car he leaned his forehead on the steering wheel. “You’re totally screwed up,” Serruto had said. He was…but where did he go wrong? His mind churned. The shark’s tooth and postmark led him here. That was Lane’s picture in the high school yearbook and in Anna’s photo album. How could Mada not be Lane?
Someone rapped on the passenger window. He looked over to see Mada outside. Though he just wanted to get the hell away, he ran down the window. “May I help you?”
She smiled. “I’m hurt, Inspector; don’t you don’t recognize me?”
The voice jolted him like electricity. Lane’s voice! He peered more closely at her. Those were Lane’s eyes in that travesty of a face.
Before he could find his voice, she climbed into the car. “Didn’t you come all this way to find me? Now you have. Where do we go from here?”
17
Lane’s question had a simple answer…San Francisco, so she could stand trial. But he found himself saying, “That’s an interesting makeup job.”
She sniffed. “Well, I can hardly come home looking eighteen, can I. The old-face prosthetics used for movies don’t look real in everyday light. Faking a bad facelift works, though. People don’t want to look too closely. I didn’t recognize you, either, until Mama introduced you. I could hardly believe it when she told me about you showing up in Baumen, let alone her bombshell that you had joined the local police. I had to come home and see for myself. How did you find Baumen?”
“I’ll tell you all about it on the way back to San Francisco.”
Her forehead twitched in a movement that without the restricting prosthetic might have been raised brows. “Are we going back to San Francisco?”
He made his voice flat. “I’m arresting you for the murders of Mossman and Adair, and my attempted murder.”
She laughed. “Really? Point one, I did not try to kill you.”
“Yes you did.”
She considered…shrugged. “Well, yes, I did…but then chose to let you live.”
“You left me bleeding to death.”
“Not to a permanent death.”
Anger flared in him. “You knew what would happen to me!”
“Of course. Point two, Inspector…how will you take me back?”
He frowned. How did she think? “There’s a warrant for your arrest. Extradition will be arranged and you’ll — “
She hissed, interrupting him. “Are you that dense? I mean, by what means will you force me to accompany you and how will you imprison me: rose stem handcuffs? A cell with garlic on the bars? May I remind you that anything used against me hurts you equally, if you can even convince your law enforcement colleagues to agree to such nonsense.”
He stared at her. What an idiot he was…so focused on finding her he never considered the problems afterward! He could not just let her walk away, though. There must be a way to handle her.
That fish symbol torn from Mossman’s neck suggested an answer. “Maybe I can wrap your wrists in a rosary.”
She snorted. “Superstition.”
Superstition? Before she snorted, Garreth caught the beginning of a flinch. The crucifix Anna wore, another on the wall of her livingroom wall, and that picture of the Virgin Mary in the diningroom told him Lane had been brought up Catholic…and her involuntary flinch said its symbols affected her.