Free The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) by Jessie Bishop Powell Page A

opened the refrigerator and pulled the ham back out.
    “I ate before I came over.”
    “But you knew this was a planning lunch.”
    “Which is exactly why I ate first. Let’s go fit that dress.”
    “You two get ready,” I said. “Lance and I are just going to load the dishwasher and I’ll be up.”
    Mama started to say something, but Nana shooed her on out of the kitchen. I was grateful that my grandmother recognized my need for a few minutes alone with my fiancé. I knew they would both be waiting with needles outpointed if I didn’t hurry to join them. But I wanted just a few more minutes alone with Lance before the wedding madness ensued.
    He frowned at their retreating figures, and I handed him a plate. Half of his problem was that he wanted to get the centerpiece search over with (if we had to have centerpieces at all), and the other half was that he didn’t really want anything to do with the process. He was trying very hard to be a twenty-first-century groom, but we both knew he couldn’t have cared less about the decorations. He stayed involved because he knew I didn’t care either. Every time we came to detail tension, I threatened to make him elope and swore the entire ceremony was for the relatives.
    Lance and I tucked the last of the dishes into the rack and loaded the machine with soap. I was thinking about my mother and grandmother. I said, “I don’t understand those two. They snipe back and forth so much, but they don’t even seem angry half the time.”
    “Who?” Lance asked. “Your parents?”
    “No. Mama and Nana. But that’s another thing. Why can’t Daddy keep track of his cards? Mama whispered before you came in that he’s had another card stolen because he left it somewhere. Your mom has issues and my dad’s going senile. Crazy, isn’t it?”
    Lance turned and walked toward the door, heading for Daddy and the rose gardens. Then, quite suddenly, he said, “I think your mom and grandmother learned to get by that way. It probably goes back to Franny having to be a single parent in the nineteen fifties. She was joking about it with you when you asked, but we both know your nana didn’t have things easy.” I loved how Lance had made the leap to a two-week-old conversation, knowing I would be there, too. He continued, “I think she and your mom learned to put up with each other is all.” Then he turned and went back out to make sure there was going to be room for us to stay here this evening.
    As if that could possibly be a problem. Mama and Daddy had whole wings of the house to shut off in cold weather. Lance and I could have lived like the Mad Tea Party and slept in a different room every night if we stayed here regularly. Even with Nana staying for the wedding
and
my sister and her family coming in tonight, they would have space for us. Still, it would have been rude not to give any warning at all, and Lance enjoyed spending time with Daddy, even if he pretended not to know anything at all about the flowers.
    Mama and Daddy lived in a huge old Victorian house that had once belonged to the town mortician. It came with an overgrown English garden for them to rehabilitate. Sophia only learned the house’s history when she came into town, and that was surely why she thought the place was cursed. I found her conclusion ridiculous.
    In twenty-four years of living here, the closest my parents had come to a haunting was some mysterious attic scraping probably caused by squirrels. The building had been both funeral parlor and morgue, and Sophia most likely thought dead bodies last present seventy-odd years ago guaranteed lingering unhappy spirits.
Some of those people died gently in their sleep,
I fumed now as I mounted the steps to try on my dress one last time.
Quite a lot of them did.
    It seemed unlikely that Sophia was considering how commonplace a dwelling like this one would have been in the late 1800s. In the nineteenth century, it wasn’t at all unusual for the local funeral