Bride and Doom by Deborah Donnelly

Author:Deborah Donnelly
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780440336532
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-12-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-one

As I neared my front door, I heard voices from out on the deck, so I went around the corner of the houseboat to see who was visiting this early in the day.

“Mom, Owen! I didn’t expect you till Friday.”

Mom and I hugged, then her fiancé shook my hand warmly. Mom wasn’t a big hugger as a rule, but her relationship with Owen Winter had softened her. There were other changes too—she’d bought a snazzy new car, and her perpetually permed and colored hair was now a free and feathery silver—but whether those were pre- or post-Owen I wasn’t sure.

Owen himself was a bluff and hearty executive type, retired early from Boeing, who’d met Mom in Sun Valley when she drove up from Boise for an author’s reading. He was well read and good-natured, and so smitten with my mother that I had to approve of him.

I even let him call me Carrie, the way she did. I didn’t offer the same leeway to Adrienne and Kimmie, Owen’s obnoxious daughters, but they did it anyway. The whole family called my mother Lou, for Louise, which took some getting used to. I’d never get used to the daughters, who I thought of privately as the Bitch Sisters.

“Good to see you, Carrie,” Owen was saying now. “Quite a view you’ve got here. How do you like houseboat living?”

“Love it,” I said, thinking, They haven’t heard about the murder yet. Good. “Come on inside. Can you stay long?”

“Owen can’t stay at all,” Mom explained, as I unlocked the sliding glass doors that led through the porch and into the living room. “He has a board meeting at his bank for a few hours, and then we’re going up to Snoqualmie Falls for two nights at the lodge. Isn’t that lovely?”

My mother was a hardworking teacher throughout her marriage to my hardworking dad, then well into her widowhood. It did my heart good to see her relaxed and retired now, squired around to fancy places by her well-to-do beau.

“Sounds wonderful, Mom. Especially with all this sunshine.”

“I was hoping you’d have time to visit with me this morning,” she went on. “I would have called ahead, but it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and then your cell phone didn’t answer.”

“New number,” I said.

“But why—”

“Eddie helped me find a better phone plan.” I’d learned to edit my reports to my mother, and the purse snatching wasn’t something I wanted to discuss. “I do have some things going on today, but why don’t you come along to Boris’s studio with me? He’s expecting me soon, and I know he’d love to see you, especially after—well, I’ll tell you in the car.”

I couldn’t very well edit away the fact that Boris had been accused of murder, but somehow I didn’t feel like relating the whole thing in front of my future step-father. “Then we can have an early lunch at By Bread Alone. I need to check in with Juice.”

“Juice?” said Owen.

“She makes wedding cakes,” Mom, who’d met her once, explained.

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