Linda O. Johnston - Marriage - Classified

A bridal gown?

The fairy tale had clearly gone sour, for the white was stained red. Blood. A lot of it.

Hers? She didn’t think so; only the side of her head hurt, and blood from a head wound would not have gotten to the front of her skirt that way.

But if not hers, then whose?

She sat higher and pulled her legs under her. The movement was excruciating.

She saw the source of the blood then. Probably also the cause of the woman’s screams.

Beside her, on the floor, lay a man. His clothing, too, was formal: a tuxedo, or so she thought. It was hard to tell, for he was covered in blood. His hair was gray, she noticed that, for his face was only a few shades lighter. His eyes were open. He stared sightlessly toward the ceiling.

“Are you all right?” She heard the hysteria in her voice, even as she realized the absurdity of her question. The man beside her, whoever he was, was clearly dead.

JORDAN DAWES didn’t wait for the hotel elevator. He didn’t wait to see if anyone followed him. He ran down the musty-smelling stairway, taking the steps three and four at a time. He thought he heard other rushing footfalls behind him, but it didn’t matter. He continued to run.

The call had come in on the hotel security radio. A maid had found a couple of bodies in a room on the third floor. Security had called the police.

They hadn’t had far to call. Nearly the entire police force of Santa Gregoria, California, was on the hotel’s top floor, celebrating a wedding.

He reached the third floor and shoved open the door to the hallway. Which room was it?

A maid stood at the end of the hall, sobbing hysterically. She was being comforted by another uniformed woman.

“Where?” Jordan demanded.

The woman pointed with a shaky finger. “Room Three thirty-s-seven,” she stammered.

The door was slightly ajar. Jordan automatically grabbed his 9 mm Beretta from its holster beneath his formal black coat, held it primed and ready with the barrel pointed upward, and kicked open the door. The only response was silence.

He carefully edged around the door frame, alert, ready to defend himself if necessary. Ready for whatever might be waiting…or so he thought.

Nothing could have prepared him for what he found. “Sara!” he exclaimed. “Casper. What the—damn!”

On the floor, covered in blood, lay the obviously lifeless body of Casper Shepard, Chief of Police of Santa Gregoria. Jordan nevertheless bent to check his carotid pulse. There was none. He scowled in helpless rage.

Beside Casper sat his daughter, Sara. She was trembling. Her head was bowed. Her white wedding gown was stained with blood.

“Why did you leave the reception?” Jordan demanded as he reached her side and knelt, ignoring the stiffness of his tuxedo trousers. “Tell me what happened here.” He knew, of course. He just hadn’t expected anything so soon. And certainly not here. He was afraid to take Sara into his arms. Was she injured?

“I don’t know,” was her only reply to his questions. Tears cascaded down cheeks as smooth as the finest porcelain. Their paleness contrasted starkly with the lovely raven color of her upswept hair. Her lips—full, pink lips that had smiled at him so teasingly only a short while earlier—trembled as her white teeth gnawed at them nervously.

“Are you hurt?” Jordan carefully touched her arms, her legs, trying to determine if any of the blood was hers or if it all came from her father.

“My head,” she said.

He took her gracefully tapered, trembling chin in his hand and gently turned her head to the side. Only then did he see the ugly red seeping against the blackness of her hair. He sucked in a breath.

He noticed from the corner of his eye that they were no longer alone in the room. Others from the wedding party, members of the Santa Gregoria police force, had joined them. “Get the medics here right away!” Jordan demanded. He turned back to Sara. “We’ll get you help right away…sweetheart.” He glanced at June Roehmer, a policewoman who knelt on the floor on Sara’s other side.

“Has she said anything?” June asked as though Sara wasn’t even there. “Did she tell you what happened?”

“Not yet, but she was just about to. Weren’t you, honey?”

“Honey?” Sara blinked her enormous, soulful hazel eyes at Jordan. “Is that…is that my name?”

He stared at her. And then he stifled a smile. “No, it’s Sara.” He wanted to throw his arms around her, even laugh—though without mirth. She had to be the smartest woman Jordan had ever met. “You don’t remember your name? How about what happened here?” He made a point of asking in front of June. If Sara gave the right answer, word would get around: she didn’t recall who had killed Casper. Had hit her. Had most likely run away when the maid interrupted—but who probably had every intention of silencing the sole living witness, Sara.

But if Sara pretended she didn’t remember, it would buy them time. The killer wouldn’t feel compelled to act quite so fast. They could set up a trap—another trap.

He wanted to kiss Sara. He’d already discovered that she’d grown into a woman who was both beautiful and as sexy as sin. Now he knew she was brilliant, too. Struck hard on the head and she still managed to come up with a scheme on the spur of the moment.

He looked at her. She was also a darned good actress. The pensiveness that drew her smooth forehead into a mass of wrinkles segued into a wide-eyed look of shock. “I…No,” she said. “I don’t remember anything.” And then she burst into tears.

EVERYTHING AROUND HER became a horrifying jumble.

Sara—that was her name, wasn’t it?

Why couldn’t she remember?

Her head hurt….

The man who had joined her was kind and handsome and formally dressed. “Who are you?” she asked, desperate for any kind of knowledge.

“Jordan Dawes,” he replied in a tone that implied she should know.

“But who—” she began just as three men in white outfits arrived, carrying all sorts of frightening equipment she couldn’t identify.

“Check her over first,” Jordan commanded the Emergency Medical Technicians. Kneeling at her side, he blocked her line of sight from the rest of the room. “There’s nothing you can do for him.” He nodded in the direction she couldn’t see.

She knew who “him” referred to—the bleeding man on the floor beside her. Shouldn’t she know who he was?

The EMTs put her on a gurney and wheeled her through some halls, down an elevator and out a door. There was an IV in her arm.

The handsome man with the slight Southern accent stayed with her in the ambulance. She was still wearing the bloody wedding gown. Why? She shook nearly uncontrollably from fear.

Jordan held her hand. “It’ll be all right, Sara,” he said.

But how could anything be all right? She couldn’t remember—

“Please ask them to turn off the siren,” she begged as its shrieking sliced into her aching head. He obliged. Every bump and turn the ambulance made aggravated the pounding pain in her head.

At the Santa Gregoria Memorial Hospital’s emergency room, she was whisked off almost immediately for a CAT scan. When they brought her back to the emergency room, Jordan was waiting. “What’s wrong with her?” he asked the doctor assigned to her, a young resident with sleepy eyes.

“The CAT scan didn’t show any bleeding inside her brain, so it’s probably a memory loss brought on by the trauma of the blow to her head…and what she witnessed.”

What she witnessed. She didn’t recall. Had she seen who had struck the poor man on the floor…the decedent?

Decedent. Why had that word come to mind?

More examinations, more questions. All she wanted to do was to sleep, but they wouldn’t allow it.