Jill Churchill - A Groom With a View

These happy thoughts were suddenly and violently interrupted by what Jane first thought to be a siren, but was a piercing scream that went on and on and on. There was a horrified silence in the main room. Jane leaped to her feet and ran to the closed door of the side room, colliding with Shelley and Mel as she reached it.

Mel opened the door just wide enough for thethree of them to slip in, then slammed it behind them.

Kitty was standing with her back to them in the center of the room, shrieking. Dwayne was sprawled at her feet, his eyes closed, a huge red stain spread across his white shirt. Mel stepped forward and took her arm. She turned to him with a knife in her hand. She stopped screaming and started whimpering. He pinched the blade of the knife between two fingers and she released it, looking down at it with horror. Mel bent to put down the knife and examine Dwayne. "Shelley, call 911," he said calmly.

Kitty drifted backwards, her eyes still on Dwayne, and backed into Jane.

Livvy and Jack had pushed through the crowd and entered the room. Jack stood with his back to the door, keeping anyone else from entering. Livvy had one hand over her mouth and was clutching her father's sleeve with the other.

Kitty turned to Jane. Hiccupping and crying, she said, "Someone s-said the cake was beautiful. I–I wanted to look before it was cut. I c-came in. Dwayne was there. On the f-floor. I thought he'd f-fainted."

“Calm down, Kitty," Jane said.

“Then I 1-looked. There was a knife in his ch-chest." Her voice had risen to a shriek again. "I pulled it out. I thought it would s-save him. B-but there was all that blood."

“You shouldn't have touched it," Jane said, averting her eyes from Dwayne.

“I know. I know. But I thought—" She looked over Jane's shoulder.

“Livvy, why did you have to do this?" Kitty asked.

Livvy made a noise like a mouse caught in a trap. A little squeak. Then said, "Me? Me! You think I stabbed my husband?"

“You could have divorced him," Kitty said, sobbing. "You could have had the marriage annulled. You didn't have to kill him.”

Livvy's eyes rolled back and she slipped to the floor in a heap.

Mel sent Jane to guard the front door and make sure no one left.

“Is he dead?" she whispered.

“Very. “

The guests were babbling hysterically. Several grabbed at Jane as she passed through the crowd around the door.

“What's happened?”

“Who was screaming?" they asked.

“There's been an accident," she said loudly, her voice shaking. "Keep the doorway clear. Don't anybody leave." She had to pluck several hands off her sleeve to get away.

She could already hear sirens when she reached the door. Iva Thatcher had followed Jane and said, in a frail, trembling voice, "It's not Livvy, is it?”

Jane gave Iva a quick hug. "No, no. It's not Livvy. It's Dwayne. I'm afraid he's dead.”

“Dead! How?”

Jane didn't want Iva starting a riot of rumor. "I don't know," Jane lied.

Two police cars and an ambulance pulled up as well as a beat-to-hell green Plymouth. A very short, tough-looking elderly man got out of the car. Jane guessed it was Gus Ambler, the old sheriff Mel had gotten the background on the Thatchers from.

“Where is the victim?" John Smith asked.

Jane pointed the way and stood aside as he and the ambulance attendants rushed past. The old man was last and puffing with the effort to hurry.

“I'm with the police," he said gruffly.

“I thought so," Jane said, letting him pass. She couldn't have stopped his headlong rhinoceros progress if she'd tried.

She closed the door and leaned back against it with her eyes closed. If she'd had her car keys in her possession at that moment, she might well have grabbed Shelley and staggered to her rusty, familiar station wagon and driven away.

Twenty ··

It was the longest afternoon and evening of Jane's life.

The Thatcher family and everybody else who had been known to be in the lodge when Mrs. Crossthwait died had been told in no uncertain terms that they had to stay until the next day. It went far beyond mere coincidence that two murders should occur within the same group of people without there being a connection. Jane and Shelley took their turns at calling home and explaining that they would be delayed another day. Jane didn't elaborate to her mother-in-law why this was. She just let her think it was to finish off all the loose ends.

She overheard Layla on the phone a few minutes later, sobbing to her husband that she wanted to come home to him and the babies. Shortly after Layla's call, she spotted Eden on the phone, talking very quietly and intensely, funneling her words into the mouthpiece with her hand so as to not be overheard.

Everyone present had to be questioned. The guests were all upset and some of them wasted a lot of time being indignant and rude out of sheer fright and the desire to get away. The off-duty police officers were called in and the county sheriff's office sent a scene-of-the-crime unit.

Mrs. Hessling was too grief-stricken to even speak coherently and Errol begged the police to let her go back to the motel. The coroner, who was also the local doctor, had shown up and supported the idea, even supplying Errol with a mild sedative to give her.

Surprisingly, Iva got involved. "You must stay with your brother's… body," she told Errol. "It isn't decent to leave him with strangers. I'll take your mother back and keep an eye on her while my sister watches over Livvy.”

Mr. Willis and Larkspur both attempted to escape on the grounds that they had business scheduled for the next day, but were told it was too bad and they better get in touch with their assistants or partners and instruct them to take over. They did so with very bad grace.

The guests were all given paper and pencils and asked to write down everything they'd seen and heard, no matter how trivial, from the moment the photographer took the group picture until Kitty had started screaming.

Most of them had only the vaguest recollection of what they'd noticed. A few admitted they'd had too much champagne to remember much. Some wrote virtual tomes of "he said and then I said." Each had to give his or her written report to one of the off-duty officers, who read them, asked additional questions about times and locations, and made a red check mark at the top of the first page. This was what Jane, feeling very much like a prison guard, had to collect before people were allowed to leave in twos and threes.

Between departures, she skimmed through the reports and decided it was going to take a much better mind than hers to fit the various stories together and deduce anything coherent from them. It seemed that Kitty wasn't the only one who had heard how spectacular the wedding cake was and sneaked into the side room to take a look at it in its uncut glory. Several observers claimed they'd seen Layla go in the room. Others described someone who was obviously Eden going through the door.

One trophy wife, whose handwriting suggested she was way beyond mere tipsiness, claimed she'd seen Jack Thatcher go in the room in a most "furtive" manner, looking about to make sure no one saw him. But a great many of the other reports mentioned having spoken to Jack in the main room at one time or another. Jane wondered when he could have found time to skulk into the side room when he was so busy being the gracious host. She also wondered if the woman had a husband in a position to benefit financially if Jack Thatcher were arrested for murder.

Two people said they'd seen Layla go up the stairs to the second floor, another claimed to have seen Eden come down the stairs. Although their looks and dresses were really quite different, apparently the bridesmaids in their pink dresses were indistinguishable to the casual observer. One of the groomsmen claimed he'd been sitting on the second step talking to a pretty girl whose name he couldn't remember and that nobody went up or down the stairs.