Ray stayed behind. "Since you paid me and all," Ray said, quietly. "Why don't I come on over and help you with stuff?"

"Thanks, Ray. I don't think I'm allowed to be in the party business, so there won't be any work."

"I can always find something to keep me busy," he said, smiling.

When they were gone, Wes and Holly and I sat back down with Paul. Alba had bustled off into the kitchen.

"Well, that's that." I kicked off one red clog and watched it skid across the hardwood floor.

"Wait until you hear this, Maddie."

I looked at Paul. He was more animated than I had ever seen him. Wes noticed it as well.

"The reason I was late? There's a rumor going around that Five Star may be bought."

"Someone's buying out the studio?"

"They say that food company, Sammy Foods, is looking them over pretty good. And it's no coincidence that I get a call this morning that maybe Five Star would consider an out-of-court settlement after all."

"You're kidding?" I looked at Paul.

"Maybe they need to clear their books of ongoing cases, whatever. I need to get back to them. But don't you worry. This thing is far from over. Buck up there, kiddo."

"Thanks, Paul. Hey, would you like something to drink?"

"Can't stay, pal. I'm supposed to be moving tonight, but my office is a mess. I gotta get packing." He smiled at me. "Anyway, you've gotten yourself mixed up with the police again, haven't you? Better watch yourself. Next thing you know you'll be in their computers."

"What can I do?" I asked, smiling at him.

"It's the computers that get you. They start tracking you, baby, and that's all she wrote. Keep below their radar, Maddie. That's the way."

Paul was a major conspiracy theorist. We all have our hobbies.

Holly looked at me. "Maddie, maybe I could go over and help Paul. If you're not going to be needing me this morning, I mean."

"Great," I said.

"Yeah?" Paul raised his head, relieved. "Excellent."

"Okay," Holly said, standing, grabbing her enormous mesh shoulder bag. "I'll go catch Ray. See you tonight."

"I'm going out for dinner tonight, actually."

All eyes were suddenly on me.

"It's Honnett." I looked over at Paul. "He's this cop I know. From before."

"Right," he said, deadpan. "The one that's had the hots for you."

"Hots?"

"That's legalese," Wes explained.

"Listen. He asked me a lot of questions last night. Naturally. Poor Vivian Duncan is dead. I told him I'd get together as much information as I could and we decided to go over it at dinner."

They stared at me.

"What?"

"So is it a...?" Holly looked at me, hesitant to use the word "date."

"Holly, get off of her case," Paul said gruffly. "Can't you see she's got a business meeting?"

"Right," I agreed.

But then, dammit! Paul hit us all with his three-beat grin.

It was just before lunch. Wes had gone out and I was sitting alone in my office, brooding. I had been trying to pull together all the papers I could find that related to Vivian Duncan and her business. Since she had been trying to woo us, her attorney had sent over a lot of documents that made her look very good on paper. In addition, she had also messengered over half a dozen memory books, albums of photos filled with samples of invitations and menus from many of her firm's most lavish weddings.

Just then, Alba came to my office, filling up the doorway, looking full of purpose. She called out in her high-pitched voice, accented with Spanish, "Miss Madeline, there is a young lady at the door for you. She said is important." Then she moved aside.

Behind her I could see a woman's shape.

"Sara?"

Yesterday's bride walked on into my office and stood there, silently. Alba took the cue to leave.

"You didn't go on your honeymoon." As if their entire wedding, and all their future memories of it, hadn't been screwed up enough already!

She shook her head.

"Oh, Sara. Sit down. Is there anything..."

"He's gone." She stood in front of the large desk I usually shared with Wesley and stared at it. "Brent is gone."

"What do you mean?" I was suddenly alarmed.

"He just took off. I haven't seen him all night. We were...we were supposed to leave on our honeymoon this morning." She looked at her watch. "A few hours ago, I guess it is."

"That's terrible."

"Grandfather was sending us on a photo safari, but now those plans are ruined. They said we couldn't leave." She shook her head at the harsh memory. "Even Brent's dad's friends couldn't pull any strings. Let me tell you, my grandfather was furious!"

I imagined that Big Jack Gantree was on the phone with a U.S. senator even as we spoke.

"But I thought you said Brent was missing."

"It's the last straw! Last night, we were separated for a while. And then, later, I couldn't find him anywhere. He just disappeared."

"From the wedding?"

She nodded, and then all at once her lovely young face crumpled. Tears streamed down her cheeks and her nose began to run.

"I left the dinner. Just for a minute, I told him. And then..."

"That's when you came out and saw..."

Her tears kept coming. "Then the police wouldn't let me go back into the dinner. No one would let me back into my own...my own wedding."

I'm very fast on the Kleenex. I had a new box over to her in about two seconds.

"Thank you," she sniffed, pulling tissues from the box, one at a time, until she had a fistful.

"So you didn't see Brent," I said.

"No. When they finally, finally, finally..." She honked into the tissues and then wadded them up. "When they let me back into the hall, the tables were all moved around. My friends had already gone home. My grandfather was beside himself by then to let everyone go. They were old, some of my great-aunts, you know? But Brent...I just...He just was gone." She threw the wad of Kleenex onto the desk, bursting into fresh tears.

"Great wedding, huh? Great memories. This wasn't the way it was supposed to turn out." She attacked the box of tissues again. One by one, her fingers grabbed them into a ball.

"Sara, honey, you have no idea where Brent might be? Did you call his family?"

"Of course I did. He never came home. I called everyone, even his relatives, the ones that came to town for the wedding." She sniffed. "Nobody's seen him."

"He's probably just upset."

"He's upset?" She looked at me, aghast, her point of a chin quivering. "I'm upset! And I don't want to tell the police he's missing," Sara whined on, before blowing her nose in the handful of tissues.

Why, I wondered, had she come to tell me all this?

"My grandfather says," Sara dabbed at her eyes, carefully, "that you are friends with Chuck Honnett."

That's right. Lt. Honnett, the old school buddy of the missing bridegroom's father, should be told about this.

"If we go to him, he'll have to make a report. Make it official. But Grandfather thought that you...well, could you ask him to find Brentie for me? Sort of off the record?"

"Sara. They don't do that. You need to make an official..."

"No. I will not go to the police and tell them my new husband hasn't had the balls to come home on his own wedding night!"

Chapter 11.

It was turning out to be one of those days.

"Don't expect me to cry."

Vivian Duncan's daughter, Beryl, with her short brown hair, and her fierce gray eyes, and her navy Brooks Brothers suit, appeared calm.

"Okay," I said, folding a kitchen towel.

Beryl had insisted it was imperative that we meet about her mother's business, right away. When I tried to talk her out of it, she insisted on coming over. I felt myself sinking another inch deeper into wedding consultant quicksand.

Wes says people like to bounce things off of me. I make people comfy. It's my curse. Holly thinks it's less complicated than that. She said people hang around because of the food. I wondered, looking at Beryl: succor or sugar?

"Here's the irony," Beryl was saying. "Now that my mother is dead, everybody feels so sorry for me." Her voice trailed down low. "Which is really funny. You'd have to know my family to get it. Vivian was not the traditional mother. She had very high standards. Extremely high. I never..." Beryl took a deep breath and plunged on. "I was a disappointment. When she found the time to notice me. Now that Vivian is dead, I'm finding it hard to feel very sad. She was not a nice woman."

It might surprise you, but listening to Beryl Duncan trash her dead mother didn't strike me as shocking. It all depends on what you expect from people. What I expect is: people are weird. This viewpoint has always worked for me. It allows for a lot of, frankly, odd behavior to cross my path without need for constant judgement.

My feeling is, no one can know what's going on with another human being, no matter how many daytime talk shows one might watch. I'm practical. Since I don't have the energy to be walking a mile in everyone else's bloody moccasins, I just give everybody credit for having suffered through lousy childhoods and leave it at that.

In fact, it's kind of a good guideline for living. Cut 'em some slack. Tread softly. Be careful how you judge. I figure you never know what hellacious pain the average jerk is in, so be kind. Come to think of it, this attitude of mine may explain why people I hardly know keep turning up. And like Beryl, they tend to unload.

"Do you think I might have a taste of that?" Beryl was checking out the large bucket of homemade ice cream on the counter.

Or, then again, maybe Holly was right about the food thing.

I'd been working on a new ice cream recipe with my brand new toy when Beryl had insisted on a visit.

"It's almost ready." I went to a drawer and pulled out a silver teaspoon.

"Vivian was not cut out to be a mother," Beryl continued, perching on the edge of a stool, resting her plain hands on the marble countertop. She didn't wear any rings, I noticed, and her nails were short and unpolished. "It was all about her. Always. The rest of us didn't exist. Or, no-we existed as accessories. When I was very young, she used to order her hairstylist to bleach my hair, too, so Vivian's blond would seem real. I was only four. She was embarrassed at the preschool mothers' day luncheon or something. She thought I was throwing off her image, I guess. And I was so young, what did I know? I thought mommy hated me."

See what I mean? Everybody has had a lousy childhood. Even if they weren't beaten, there are still scars.

Beryl ran her hand though her cropped brown hair. "And do you want to know what's really pathetic? I just stopped coloring it. Years of therapy, let me tell you, just to free myself from peroxide."

I pushed a spatula into the ice cream. Firm to hardish. Nice. Not that I wasn't sympathetic to Beryl and her "issues," exactly, but then I couldn't let my pet project melt, either. In any case, it didn't seem to matter. She just kept on talking.

"I realize the woman is dead now, but Vivian was an unhappy woman. She was a hollow, miserable, self-centered, ego-driven..."

Beryl needed to get it all out. When she took another breath, I fully expected her to speak even more ill of the dead. Instead, she seemed to run out of venom. "What flavor is that?"

"It's experimental. I call it Deep, Dark Brown Sugar."

"Really." Beryl picked up a silver teaspoon and fiddled with it.

Although it was not quite lunch hour, was there ever really a wrong time for ice cream?

"By the way," Beryl said, "if I can ask...why did you tell all those stories to the police?"

I looked up at her, drawing a blank.