‘We are coming back for her later,’ I assured him.
Buster licked his nose. ‘There’s just no cure for what you have, is there?’
Given that I was having a conversation with my dog, I worried he might be right. As I pulled away, I wound down my window to call to Amber, but she was already nowhere in sight. Wondering if I was a genius or an idiot, and certain I would find out in the next day or so, I pointed the car towards Rochester and enjoyed working the stick as I took the back roads through the countryside to get there.
Too Distracted
There was a coffee waiting for me when I arrived; I could see it through the front window of the boutique. No doubt Mindy made the trip to the coffee shop in the High Street because it was one of the few tasks she knew how to do and because Justin felt prompted by my phone call.
Justin jumped to his feet when he spotted me coming in. ‘Felicity, goodness, I still can’t believe something like this would happen to you.’
Mindy appeared from the backroom with a stack of promotional material in her hands. ‘Oh, hi, Auntie. How was the big house?’
The juxtaposition in attitude felt like social commentary on the generational gap. Justin was horrified to hear I got arrested. Mindy thought it was cool.
Opting to focus on my business, I said, ‘It’s something we can discuss at a later date. Right now, we have several weddings looming and a need to fill our diary as far into next year as we can.’ Justin knew how right I was. Our continued success depended entirely upon landing the next big client and the one after that, ad infinitum. One thing with our market was the lack of repeat custom.
It happened sometimes that an attendee at one of our weddings would then be impressed enough to choose my firm without even looking for alternatives, but for the most part I was out hunting down the clients, not waiting for them to come to me.
For the weddings already booked and being arranged there were all manner of strange and wonderful requests. We had a request to get Rod Stewart to perform at a billionaire octogenarian’s wedding. He was tying the knot with an athletic woman in her early thirties. My biggest hope with that wedding was that the groom would survive to attend the ceremony. Trying to book Rod Stewart is just one example of where my time goes.
Not that I mind. Weddings like that one would pay all our wages and all the bills for the year and do me no harm in my bid to attract the attention of Prince Marcus.
We settled down to get to work and I tried to focus my attention, I truly did. The wedding on Raven Island next weekend would see me and my entire entourage travelling to stay there on Friday. Justin was going two days earlier with Mindy to start making sure everything was as it should be. They would be there to meet the caterers as they arrived, oversee cleaning, make arrangements for the band who were to arrive on the Saturday morning … there was a lot to do. The celebrity couple had spent over forty thousand pounds just on flowers which all had to be arranged according to their specifications.
To make things more interesting, the island could only be accessed by vehicle twice a day at low tide. There was a window of about forty minutes when the causeway became exposed, that is provided a storm hadn’t shifted a sandbar to make it impassable or it wasn’t the time of the moon cycle when the low tide was still too high to expose the road.
Complex? Yes. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.
Yet, despite all that stuff swirling around in my head, I could not shift the questions about Derek Bleakwith and John Ramsey. Who was the man I overheard plotting to destroy evidence last night? Who did tamper with John Ramsey’s brakes? It certainly wasn’t Derek getting his own back for John pushing him. Were they even tampered with? Or had Vince, the pirate that he is, made it up because he wanted to come to my house for breakfast?
After an hour of not being very productive because I just couldn’t get my mind to stay on the job, I accepted defeat.
‘Mindy do you feel like getting out of the boutique for a while? I need to visit a few people.’
My question made Justin raise his head. ‘Everything okay, Felicity?’
I gave him a half shrug and blew out a breath to show my frustration. ‘I am distracted by the events of last night,’ I told him the truth. ‘I can’t concentrate so I’m going to feed the voices in my head and hope they shut up.’
Mindy asked, ‘What are you going to feed them with?’ She had a hopeful expression like I was going to take her out for burgers.
With a deep breath in through my nose, I set my resolve and said, ‘Answers.’
Buster clambered to his feet, licking his nose with a snuffling snort. ‘Adventure dog reporting for duty. Let’s go get the bad guys.’
I collected my coat and bag, gave Buster’s lead to Mindy – she could strain to keep him under control instead of me for once – and we left the boutique.
In the carpark, Mindy spotted Archie’s car. ‘Oh, wow! I didn’t realise you still had this. Uncle Archibald’s car is soooo old. How come you have this and not your Mercedes?’
I frowned but said nothing. The car wasn’t as old as me. I opened my mouth to explain that I’d needed to drop Amber off this morning but shut it again before the first word made it past my lips. How would I explain
