Goodbye Cruller World Page 2

  “Come down, Dep,” I urged.

  I closed my mouth just in time. The slightly damp catnip mouse bounced off my chin.

  I rattled her halter. That plus the catnip mouse at my feet must have convinced her to trot down her kitty-sized staircase. Grasping my warm fur baby, I pulled the cat carrier into the center of the office.

  Despite a flurry of caterwauling and spread-out kitty toes, I managed to shut her into her carrier. I called goodbye to Tom, took the vociferous cat out to the garage in the back of our parking lot, and opened the overhead door.

  Our Deputy Donut delivery vehicle was a restored 1950 Ford Fordor, a four-door sedan painted like a police cruiser, black with white doors and roof. However, the insignia on the doors was our Deputy Donut logo, the silhouette of a cat wearing a rakishly tilted Deputy Donut hat, faux-fur donut and all. Instead of a light bar, a large plastic donut lay flat on the roof. It was topped by dripping white “icing” and sprinkles that were actually tiny lights programmed to change colors and patterns in a zillion ways. A megaphone-shaped loudspeaker in front of the donut resembled an old-fashioned siren.

  I buckled Dep’s carrier into the back seat. During the entire eight-block ride, Dep commented loudly about the indignities she was suffering. I parked behind my own car in the driveway of our Victorian cottage, took the carrier inside, and let Dep out in the living room. “I’ll come home and change around nine,” I promised.

  Switching her tail back and forth, she looked away.

  My phone rang. Why was Detective Brent Fyne calling? I knew it was silly, but I answered his call with the sort of pinpricks of anxiety I would always feel when a law-enforcement officer called unexpectedly, even when he called from his personal phone. “Hi, Brent.”

  “Hi, Em. I’m on duty later tonight. I was wondering if I could bring over pizza and beer for a quick dinner.”

  “That sounds great, but Tom and I are providing the late-night snacks at a wedding reception, and I’ll be working until the wee hours. How does tomorrow sound instead?”

  He agreed, and we disconnected.

  Brent and I were friends again despite my standoffishness during the first three years after Alec was shot. Brent and Alec had been best friends and had also been partners on the Fallingbrook police force, first as patrolmen and later as detectives. They’d been together the night that Alec was killed and a bullet grazed Brent’s arm. I’d been a 911 dispatcher, but I wasn’t working that fateful night. Out-of-town friends had been visiting only one evening, and I’d traded shifts with a new dispatcher so I could go out to dinner with my friends.

  I would always feel guilty about going out that night. If I hadn’t traded shifts, maybe I could have gotten emergency responders to Alec in time to save him. Brent had told me that I couldn’t have sped the response. Brent had radioed police headquarters even before a witness phoned 911, and the ambulance had arrived almost immediately.

  But I still felt guilty.

  During those first three years, my raw grief had excluded Brent. I hadn’t wanted to think about Alec and the night I lost him. However, just over a year ago, Brent’s investigation of the murder of a Deputy Donut customer had forced me to spend time with Brent. Finally, I’d understood that both of us missed Alec terribly. Alec and I had often gotten together with Brent and whatever woman he was dating at the time. Brent was a good man, and he and I had lots in common, including the shared pain that we almost never mentioned to each other. We were friends again, but the friendship was tenuous, and the time we spent together was always casual, like a pizza and beer at my place before he headed off to an evening shift. Sometimes I wondered if Brent was visiting me or the cat he’d gotten to know when Alec was alive.

  I said goodbye to Dep. Undoubtedly having figured out that I was about to abandon her, she ignored me.

  I drove Tom’s and my “police car” to Deputy Donut and went into the kitchen. In his black jeans, white shirt, sturdy white cotton apron embroidered with our Deputy Donut logo, and his donut-trimmed “police” hat slightly askew on his short salt-and-pepper hair, Tom was kneading the last batch of yeast dough. He patted it into a ball and put it into our proofing cabinet, where it would rise in controlled warmth and humidity.

  Leaving his apron and hat behind, we locked up and climbed into his shiny black SUV, a powerful monster similar to vehicles he’d driven as police chief. I knew from experience that he still drove like he was on the way to a life-or-death emergency. I fastened my seat belt, gripped the armrests, and held my breath.

  A few miles north of Fallingbrook, he had to slow down to negotiate the hills and curves on a two-lane road hemmed in by tall trees. On our left, the sun was low and already hidden from ground level by a forest of pines, but on our right, the crowns of maples glowed red and gold in orange light reflecting from clouds.

  Jenn and Roger’s ceremony in a cute Gothic chapel in downtown Fallingbrook should have ended. Had Jenn gotten over her jitters? And her puffy eyes?

  Wind sent yellow leaves skipping across the road in front of us. Even though I was wearing one of the bulkier sweaters that Jenn had designed, a scrumptious turquoise, blue, and purple one, I shivered.

  We crossed a bridge over a foam-flecked stream so dark it looked almost black. Tom sped up the next rise. Near the top, a carved wooden sign said LITTLE LAKE LODGE. The lodge’s logo, a row of three pines—big, bigger, biggest—was carved in relief below the name and painted dark green. Tom slammed on the brakes, wheeled left, and zoomed up Little Lake Lodge’s steep driveway.

  We crested the hill. A cleared area sloped down to the lodge, a sandy beach, and Little Lake, bisected by a blinding pathway leading, it seemed, directly to the setting sun.

  Little Lake wasn’t actually little, unless you compared it to other lakes in the Fallingbrook chain. Shading my eyes, I could barely make out the far shore.

  The lodge was definitely not little. It was about a hundred years old and built of logs. Its steeply pitched roof and wide eaves sheltered three stories of white-mullioned, red-sashed windows. The lobby entrance, capped by a peaked roof supported by substantial peeled tree trunks, faced the flat main parking lot and beyond that, lawns and gardens sweeping up the hill toward the road we’d left.

  Following instructions Jenn had given us, Tom stopped at the south end of the lodge and backed into a parking spot near a rustic pine door labeled DELIVERIES ONLY. We carefully removed our blanket-wrapped donut wall from the SUV. Tom carried it while I brought his cordless drill and a box of screws.

  The floor of the corridor inside was concrete painted deep red, while the walls were peeled and varnished logs. On the left, a closed solid pine door was marked RUFFED GROUSE. Applause sounded behind that door. Even though Tom was carrying the donut wall, he executed a comical bow toward the door, and I had to stifle a giggle. If anyone was behind the next door on the left, titled CALL OF THE LOON, they were silent. Farther, on the right, we found the door to the banquet hall. The name on that door was, as Jenn had told us, WILD GOOSE.

  I opened the door, and we were in another sort of corridor, a dimly lit and narrow one between the log wall and sheeny white drapes hanging from the ceiling. To our right, cartons were stacked behind what had to be the reception’s temporary bar.

  Closer, but still on our right, masking tape outlined the back two-thirds of a square on the carpet’s red, purple, and beige swirls. The drapes were semitranslucent, and we could sort of see into the more brightly lit banquet room. We lifted the hem of one of the curtains and found the rest of the taped square. We were supposed to center the table supporting our donut wall over that square.

  I put the drill and screws down and helped Tom lean the donut wall against the logs. Next to the left side of the taped square, the edges of two curtains met. We widened the gap and peeked into the banquet hall.

  Maybe Jenn hadn’t been sure she wanted to marry Roger, but she had definitely created a dreamy setting for their reception. Lights were brighter than where we were standin
g, mostly behind the curtains, but they were still romantically low, and the entire room was draped, floor to ceiling, in those white curtains. The curtains themselves were decorated with swags of periwinkle tulle tied with gold bows trailing long ribbons. Rows of round tables were covered in white tablecloths overlaid by squares of sheer, glittery periwinkle fabric and set with white napkins and china. Crystal and cutlery sparkled, while simple white vases held purple and white flowers. On a dais to our far right, the long, rectangular head table faced the length of the room. Larger vases on the head table were empty, probably waiting for Jenn’s and her attendants’ bouquets. Although tables and chairs covered most of the flashy carpeting, the floor in front of the head table was a much calmer-looking parquet.

  On the other side of the room from us, gold-backed chairs like the ones around the tables were in a semicircle behind music stands and microphones.

  Beside the space obviously reserved for a band, a break in the white drapes revealed glossy pine double doors. A squarish red glow lit the white drapes above the doors.

  “Well,” my father-in-law grumbled, “I guess people will be able to see the exit sign after one of those candles on the tables tips over and the room fills with smoke.” We turned around. The exit sign above the door we’d used wasn’t clearly visible, either. We went out that way, into the service corridor. “There are lots of places to hide in that banquet hall,” Tom commented.

  I laughed. “Who’s going to hide at a wedding reception?”

  “The bride, if she’s smart. Or anyone who needs a nap.”

  “You’re such a romantic.”

  He held a hand over his heart. “A hopeless romantic. With the accent on ‘hopeless.’ ”

  I laughed again. And then I sobered and asked him, “Do you know something about Roger?” Maybe when Tom was police chief, he had arrested or charged Roger. . . .

  “Who’s Roger?”

  “The groom. Roger Banchen.”

  “Nope. But I’ve seen grooms who’ve made me want to hide.”

  Outside, Tom opened the back of his SUV. Carefully, we removed the table that would support the donut wall. We’d painted the table periwinkle to match a swatch of fabric that Jenn had given me. We carried the table into the banquet hall and set it over the taped square, putting one-third of the table in front of a section of white curtain and the other two-thirds behind it. The curtain pooled on top of the table and drooped to the floor on both sides.

  Jenn had left a periwinkle tablecloth on the bar for us. We refolded the tablecloth to fit the front third of the table, touching the floor on all three sides. We would have space underneath the table, behind the tablecloth and the white curtains, to stow things out of sight, including any napping reception guests.

  Tom and I unwrapped the donut wall, which we had constructed of thick plywood with dowels sticking out the front. Each dowel was long enough to hold about three donuts. We had surrounded the plywood with a shadow-box frame and had painted the entire thing periwinkle.

  Since I’d last seen the donut wall, my mother-in-law, Cindy, had painted a gold heart outline near the top of the donut wall and had written inside it, in gold curlicued script, Jenn & Roger. She’d also written Jenn above the top dowel on the right side of the wall and Roger above the top dowel on the left. I clapped my hands. “Tell Cindy I love it!”

  To hold the tablecloth in place, we set the front edge of the donut wall on the back folds of the tablecloth. Then we lined up the holes in the braces at the back of the wall with holes that Tom had pre-drilled in the top of the table, and I steadied the wall while Tom used the drill to twirl the screws into place. I straightened the pooled hem of the white curtain and folded it neatly over the braces to make space for the boxes of donuts I would bring later that evening.

  Jenn had also left several vases of flowers plus two three-tiered cake stands, china with lacy edges, on the bar for us. We set the flowers and cake stands on the tablecloth in front of the donut wall and then stood back to have a good look at our creation.

  I couldn’t help grinning. The donut station Jenn had ordered for her guests’ late-night snacks was both pretty and fun, and later, after I loaded those dowels and cake stands with donuts, it would be even prettier and more fun.

  I heard voices beyond the banquet hall’s double doors. Both doors opened with unnecessary violence.

  A short, thin man marched into the room. His thick eyebrows and heavily gelled black hair overshadowed a pointy nose and close-set shoe-button eyes. Judging by his outfit—black tux, white pleated shirt, and black bowtie—and the authority in his stride, he was the maître d’ from the lodge’s main restaurant.

  Her makeup thick, her veil trailing, and her blond hair waving loosely around her face, Jenn attempted to maneuver her meringue of white ruffles and lace through the double doorway.

  Behind her, a bony woman in a shoulder-baring periwinkle gown frowned. Even though the woman’s fine brown hair was pinned up and decorated with ribbons and flowers and she was wearing gold sandals with impossibly high clear heels instead of unzipped boots flopping around her ankles, I recognized her—Suzanne, Jenn’s half-sister.

  Suzanne fussed with Jenn’s frills until Jenn popped through the doorway. Suzanne and two shorter and less peevish-looking women in gowns matching Suzanne’s came in. They were wearing gold sandals, too, but theirs had short gold heels.

  Three men—they looked like teenagers, actually—in gray tuxes with gray bowties followed the bridesmaids into the banquet hall and stopped, awkwardly shuffling their feet and staring around as if flummoxed by the silky draperies and bouffant tulle.

  His shoulders back, the maître d’ did what one of my friends called a short-man walk to the head table. The soles of his shoes smacked the parquet dance floor. He stopped, turned around, and beckoned to a harried-looking man with a camera bag. A colorless woman wearing a gray pantsuit and carrying a larger camera bag and a tripod followed the man toward the maître d’.

  Jenn wound her way between tables to us. Her bouquet smelled like the old-fashioned roses, sweetness peppered with cinnamon and cloves, that had been my grandmother’s pride and joy. “Your donut wall is beautiful!” Jenn crowed. “Thank you so much! You’ve done a wonderful job, more than I could have dreamed of.” She picked up the smallest vase of flowers. “This would be perfect up here, don’t you think?” She set it on the flat top of the donut wall’s frame. It just barely fit.

  With loud snaps near the head table, the photographer’s assistant lengthened the tripod’s telescoping legs.

  The maître d’ bore down on us and waved his hand at the shimmering white drapes. “What’s with all this tent stuff, Jenn? You wanted to feel like you were inside someone’s enormous nightgown?”

  Jenn opened her mouth, but whatever she might have been about to say was interrupted by the slam of the door behind the donut wall. The nearest sections of the “enormous nightgown” billowed and fluttered.

  Behind me, Tom quipped, “Gown with the wind.”

  I bit off a snicker when I noticed that the man in the tux was glaring. His anger wasn’t aimed at me, however. It appeared to be aimed at our donut wall. “More purple!” he yelled. “Whatever got into you, Jenn?”

  Finally, she found her voice. “It’s periwinkle.”

  Veins stood out at the side of the man’s reddening neck. “It’s girly.”

  Jenn stared toward where her feet should be underneath her own enormous gown.

  I wanted to tell the man in the tux, Wedding receptions tend to be girly.

  As if I’d spoken aloud, the man, who I was quickly deciding was not the maître d’, scowled at me. “Where are the donuts?”

  “I’ll bring them before ten,” I said.

  “They should be hanging on that board now.” He had to be Jenn’s new husband. No wonder Suzanne had warned her against marrying him.

  I regretted not having joined forces with Suzanne.

  Jenn appeared to be pondering whether a dress t
he size of hers could sink through that gaudy carpeting and into the lodge’s basement.

  Obviously, she wasn’t going to help me. I said, “Donuts would dry out if we hung them now.”

  Roger scolded, “You should have made some for now and some for later.”

  My face heated, but I managed to say coolly, “Our contract says they’re to be served as late-night snacks, after dinner and speeches. During the dancing. At ten.”

  Tom moved closer to me. “We’re about to go make them. They’ll be fresh.”

  The man turned on Jenn. “You couldn’t even write a contract right? Do I have to think of everything?”

  Jenn set a tentative, perfectly manicured hand on his sleeve. “Roger . . .”

  He shook her off and yanked a folded piece of paper and a chewed-on pencil out of a pocket in his tuxedo trousers. He stabbed the pencil down on the paper. Even in the romantically low lighting, I could see the dark marks he made. “I wrote right here that we were to have our pictures taken in front of that donut board.” He pointed at our lovely donut wall. “But it’s useless now.” He stroked the point of his pencil angrily across the paper, and then narrowed those small eyes at his bride. “So, Wife, bring your bouquet. Let’s see if you can set it into the vase where it belongs, and we’ll try to have the head table pictures taken.” He stomped toward the front of the room.

  Jenn threw us an apologetic look. Clutching skirt fabric in one fist and her bouquet in the other, she minced away, brushing that voluminous skirt against gilded chairs. The scent of roses drifted from her.

  The man in the black tux turned around and shouted, “Hey, donut people! You messed up. You missed a big promotional opportunity!”

  Jenn pleaded, “Roger . . .”

  In front of the head table, the three young men in gray tuxes took a run at the shiny parquet floor.

  Suzanne flapped her hands and called out, “Boys!”

  Arms out for balance, the young men slid from one side of the dance floor to the other.

  My eyes wide, I turned to Tom. “They really are kids. The groomsmen. All of them.”