A Wedding to Die For Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Teaser chapter

  TILL DEATH DO YOU PART

  A hair-raising scream ripped through the house. The music stopped. No more laughing. No more conversations.

  Sylvia whispered, “Oh my God,” then took off in the direction of the scream. I followed, with Kate close behind me.

  Sylvia was about three feet ahead of me, but had ditched the high heels since I last saw her and was snaking through the crowd with ease, headed toward a closed room on the other side of the foyer.

  When she reached the double doors, she pushed them open but then stopped in the entry.

  Unable to get past her, I stared over her shoulder.

  Megan was sitting on the floor by a fireplace, ivory satin puffed around her like a soft cloud. Her father’s head was in her lap, a huge, vicious Merlot-colored stain damning that beautiful dress. . . .

  More praise for Leann Sweeney’s Pick Your Poison

  “A dandy debut that will leave mystery fans eager to read more about Abby Rose.”

  —Bill Crider, author of We’ll Always Have Murder

  “Pick Your Poison goes down sweet.”

  —Rick Riordan, Edgar Award-winning author of Cold Springs

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, January 2005

  Copyright © Leann Sweeney, 2005

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-11804-7

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  1

  My daddy always said that if you want to round up some liars head to a wedding or a funeral. So as I sat in a back pew at Seacliff First Baptist, I got to wondering how many liars were in attendance this afternoon. Seeing as how I’d been invited to the rehearsal dinner for this little shindig, I believe I’d already met a few candidates.

  Thanks to a frigid wind sneaking between every door crack and window sash in the old church, my teeth were chattering like dice in a crap game. The building sat a few blocks from Galveston Bay and a blue norther had barreled through last night, leaving behind a genuine taste of winter.

  Most of the hundred people in attendance, including me, still wore their coats, and I shoved my hands in my pockets. Leaning toward my sister, who had reluctantly agreed to come with me, I said, “Remind me never to get married in January.”

  “You did get married in January,” she whispered.

  “That never really happened,” I shot back.

  “Oh, I forgot. Denial is Abby’s best friend.”

  “Denial’s the perfect friend once you discover you married a greedy, womanizing alcoholic,” I answered.

  Before she could respond, the gentle organ music abruptly crescendoed.

  A bridesmaid swathed in Christmas green rustled down the aisle so fast you’d have thought she was trying to catch her own echo. This would be Courtney, a cousin of the bride. The one who liked margaritas. And wine. And studly groomsmen. Next came the other cousin, Roxanne, a stripped-down model of her sister—pallid as the moon, skinny as a bed slat, and suffering from a very bad hair day. She looked ready to cry, her spider mum bouquet trembling at her waist. If I had hair like that, I’d be ready to cry, too.

  The maid of honor, Margie, looked, well . . . happy in contrast to everyone else, including the nervous lineup of tuxedoed men waiting near the altar. The groom kept pulling at his coat sleeves and even from where I sat, I could see sweat glistening on his forehead. He’d better watch out or it might freeze right there.

  From the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a woman in a beige wool pantsuit wearing this retro chocolate brown cloche hat. She tiptoed into the church and sidled behind the bride and her father, carefully avoiding Megan Beadford’s train. After the woman slipped into an empty pew on the groom’s side, I realized she had not signed the bride’s book on the lectern.

  Didn’t she know you had to sign in at weddings? Ordinarily this detail wouldn’t have bothered me, but I had been assigned to oversee that book, a small task I suppose Megan felt I could handle after so far failing at what she’d hired me to do. The bride had wanted her biological mother here today, but though I’d been successful with several other cases in my new profession as an adoption PI, I still had no decent leads on Megan’s background.

  So why am I an adoption PI rather than the mean-street variety? Because some things change you forever, lead you down the road you’re supposed to take. The events of last summer did that for me even though they nearly shredded my heart. Those wounds make my ticker beat a little faster, a little harder, and a little more urgently now. It all started when my gardener was murdered. I’d wanted to find out why. One thing led to another, and in the end I discovered that my adoptive daddy lied to Kate and me about our biological parents up until the da
y he died, learned that our birth mother had been murdered when she’d tried desperately to find the twin baby girls (me and my sister) who had been stolen from her. My daddy didn’t do the stealing, but he didn’t ask enough questions about the babies he was adopting, either.

  And then there were the betrayals. We had a slew of those. Our aunt Caroline knew the truth and never spoke up. A dear family friend helped daddy with our illegal adoption and never came clean until I confronted him. But my ex-husband was the biggest liar and cheat of all, even more worthless than I’d realized when I divorced him. He had blackmailed my adoptive father, killed the one person who wanted to tell me the truth about our mother’s death, and then tried to murder me when I figured out exactly what he’d done. And all for money. That’s all I had ever meant to him—money.

  But as horrible as all those things had been to endure, they had led me here today, to my new job as an adoption PI, to a real sense of purpose for the first time in my life. I might have come to this church as Megan’s friend, but the job she’d hired me for still hovered in my brain like a hummingbird buzzing in the background. She would get her truth if I had anything to say about it. People deserve the truth.

  Just then the latecomer dropped her handbag, the long leather clutch bag falling with a thump onto the old oak floor.

  “Is she carrying rocks to throw at the bride and groom rather than rice?” I whispered to Kate.

  “Shhh,” answered my sister, who was staring over her shoulder.

  Making a mental note to corral the lady in the hat after the ceremony, I followed Kate’s gaze and focused on Megan. She had seed pearls woven into her fine blond hair, and a cathedral-length veil billowed out behind her. The dress was ivory silk, an A-line devoid of sparkle or beads. This elegant simplicity suited her personality, and by the admiring smile on Kate’s face I guessed she agreed with me.

  We had become friendly with Megan and her fiancé, Travis, in the last few months. Who couldn’t be friends with folks as sweet and innocent and full of hope as those two? When I’d first met Megan, I figured she was about sixteen, but she came to me with a copy of her birth certificate proving she was twenty years old. That piece of paper had been my only clue in the adoption search, mainly because Megan was adamant that her adoptive parents not know she’d hired me. Besides being sweet and innocent, she was also as stubborn as a two-headed mule, a trait we happened to share.

  Kate and I tried to convince her not to keep secrets, arguing that maybe her parents would understand Megan’s need to find out about her past and would then help us with valuable details about the adoption. But Megan wouldn’t budge, saying she knew it would hurt their feelings. When her parents had told her she was adopted—they’d waited until she was a teenager—they requested she not look for her biological mother. But asking a teenager not to do something is sort of like asking a gator not to bite you. She couldn’t stop thinking about a reunion and finally hired me without their knowledge.

  I may not have delivered on Megan’s request in time for the wedding, but we talked every week. When she mentioned that the woman who was supposed to do the wedding book delivered a premature baby last weekend, I volunteered to fill in. That’s how I’d ended up at that disaster of a wedding rehearsal dinner last night and this chilly affair today.

  Mendelssohn’s overture began. Everyone rose to face Megan and her father as they slowly walked toward the preacher and groom. Once they reached the altar, the balding, stern-faced James Beadford kissed his adopted daughter and placed her satin-gloved fingers into Travis Crane’s outstretched hand. The bride and groom stared into each other’s eyes, then turned to the preacher.

  Here’s where the lying starts, I thought to my cynical self.

  Thirty minutes later, I did the driving while Kate directed us to the reception at the Beadford house. She was using the tiny map insertion from the invitation. The lady with the hat had gotten away from me during the crushing exodus after the ceremony, but I assumed there would be others besides her I would have to catch up with to sign the book—those folks who skip the ceremony and just show up for the booze and the food. I knew about those types because of my own January wedding several years back, the one I hadn’t really forgotten. The one I could only hope to forget in time.

  I maneuvered my Camry through a sparsely populated upscale neighborhood ever closer to the ocean and finally came upon parked cars lining both sides of a dead-end street. Folks who had dragged their dress-up winter coats out of mothballs were walking up the hill to a monstrous white house at the end of the cul-de-sac. We’d found the spot. I turned the car around and parked down the block so we could make a quick getaway after we’d made nice with all these strangers.

  My sister knew Megan almost as well as I did since she’d done a psychological profile on her, something Kate does on all my clients. Kind of handy having a shrink for a sister. Texas’s Central Adoption Registry requires a similar screening before they hook up long-lost relatives. Since Texas is a closed adoption state, all records are sealed by the court, but the registry offers a legal means for adoptees and their biological relatives to meet if both sides independently send in paperwork expressing their wish for a reunion. Once the registry finds a match, they interview both sides and arrange the meeting, thus avoiding a lengthy court petition to unseal records.

  Kate’s psychological profile of Megan confirmed what I had already decided—that she was stable enough to handle bad news if it came to that. I’d gotten a firsthand taste of her maturity already. She’d dreamed of a private meeting with her biological mother after the reception, maybe at a hotel in Houston before she and Travis took off on their honeymoon to Hawaii. But when I told her last week I still couldn’t get anywhere in my document searches, she didn’t go off the deep end. She just calmly told me to keep trying.

  As Kate and I trudged up the hill toward the house, she said, “How did Megan explain your presence at the rehearsal dinner last night? Has she changed her mind about telling her parents who you really are?”

  “No. She introduced me as a new friend she’d met at the health club.”

  Kate laughed. “It’s a good thing they don’t know you like I do.”

  “Hey. Since Jeff and I have been together, we run a couple miles two or three times a week, so I’m more fit than you think.” Jeff Kline, whose cologne still clung to my pillow this morning, works Houston Homicide. He’d investigated the death of my yardman, the one who’d been unlucky enough to get in my ex-husband’s way, and we’d been spending plenty of time together since last summer.

  “You’re more of everything since you hooked up with our cop friend. Don’t let go of that guy if you can help it.”

  “Believe me, I won’t.” My nose started to run and I sniffed. The wind off the bay was cold enough to make a lawyer put his hands in his own pockets.

  Kate offered me a tissue. “So am I allowed to be your sister once we get inside this place? I’m sure you and Megan will want to have a consistent story. We wouldn’t want to alert the relatives that she hired you.”

  “By your sarcasm I’m guessing you’re still convinced Megan should have told her parents.”

  “Keeping secrets from your family is never a good idea.” Her coffee-colored shoulder-length hair was practically horizontal as she bowed her head against the wind.

  “Maybe not, but Megan shouldn’t have to learn the same way we did about our past. No one should.”

  “It’s not like her parents lied to her, Abby.”

  “Okay, so they didn’t lie like Daddy did, but they waited way too long to tell her the truth and then made her feel like she’d be betraying them if she tried to learn about her past.”

  “Are you substituting your judgment for theirs?”

  “Guess that’s not fair,” I mumbled. “I just don’t feel comfortable at weddings and it’s reduced me to whining. What say we go for some food, a little small talk, then get the hell out?”

  “Now, there’s a plan I won’t arg
ue with,” she said.

  We approached the wide stone stairs leading up to the house, and the sounds of stringed instruments drifted out through the open front door. Just as we reached the steps, the limo carrying the bride and groom arrived. Travis helped Megan out of the backseat, and Roxanne appeared in all her greenness from out of nowhere. She eagerly lifted Megan’s gown to keep it from dragging on the pavement. They all went inside to a round of applause.

  Not only was the wedding photographer busy doing his job, the hat lady was standing right behind him snapping her own pictures. Seeing her reminded me of my mission: to seek out all guests and get their signatures and well wishes in the embossed book clutched at my side. Not exactly a job for Superman, but I felt obligated. “Come on, Kate. I have to catch up with that woman in the brown hat.”

  But before we reached her, she disappeared into the throng following Megan and Travis inside. When we reached the front door, Megan’s mother stepped out to greet us.

  “Thank goodness you’re here,” said Sylvia Beadford. “I see you have the book.” She nodded at the album under my arm.

  An apple-shaped, overly made-up woman, she wore a turquoise silk suit that complemented her dusky pink complexion. But Sylvia’s ruby lipstick was smeared and her rose corsage was already wilting. The frosted hair hadn’t wilted though. She had enough hairspray on those beauty-shop curls to put a new hole in the ozone layer. From her tense demeanor, I guessed she was having far less of a good time than those inside whose laughter nearly overpowered the music. Note to self: Never have girl babies who put you through wedding torture.

  I held up the album. “I missed a few people and Megan said she wanted—”

  “I’ll handle that.” She took the book, saying, “Meanwhile, I could use your help.”

  “Sure—and by the way, this is my sister, Kate.”