Fatally Flaky

life.

“And anyway,” Jack admitted, “it’s best for Lucas and me if we take each other in small doses. I know he’s my son, but I’m telling the truth. I mean, after he got divorced, I paid for him to go to physician’s assistant school. And when he graduated, what did he do? Told me to stop smoking and drinking. That’s gratitude for you.”

“You should stop drinking and smoking,” I immediately countered.

Jack snorted. “You, too?”

To Lucas Carmichael’s further dismay, Jack had not moved close to him when he’d moved to our town. Instead, Jack had bought a dilapidated mansion across the street from us. The house was a sixty-year-old Victorian-style monstrosity that had served as an inn, a restaurant, and a bar, all pretty much unsuccessfully. Now the old Painted Lady was in something of a state of disrepair, and Jack, a multimillionaire who confessed to knowing next to nothing about remodeling, was cheerfully bending his staccato energies to hiring people to fix up the place.

“Hey, Gertie Girl.” Jack opened his newly sculpted oak door—one of the things he’d actually managed to get subcontracted and completed since he’d been here. “It’s good to see you so early.”

“I brought you something, Jack.”

“You’re wonderful.”

“I just worry about you eating right.”

“Don’t you start.” He peered out at the mailbox at the end of his driveway. “You bring me my mail from yesterday? I was a bit too trashed last night to get it.”

“No, but I can—”

“Oh, Goldy, are you here again?” whined Lucas, who was standing behind his father. Lucas, who was about thirty, had a face like an inverted triangle—a broad, pale forehead, wide-set blue eyes, and a pointed chin—and that face reminded me, as it usually did, of a mouse having just recovered from a near drowning. He frowned at me. “Jack said you were catering a wedding today.”

Jack said gently, “Goldy can bring me bread if she wants to, Lucas.”

Lucas brushed back his blond bangs, then shoved his hands into the pockets of his rumpled jeans. “Well, I hope that it’s not filled with ingredients that are bad for you.” Lucas and I had always had an uneasy relationship. To me, he’d always seemed somewhat wretched, and no matter how many times I’d tried to be nice to him, he’d always held me at arm’s length. I worried that Lucas was jealous of my relationship with Jack, and Jack moving in across the street from us hadn’t eased that apprehension.

“Thanks for the bread.” Jack took the proffered loaf from my hand. “I’ll see you at Ceci’s wedding. When does it start?”

“You’re coming?” I asked, surprised.

“She adores Doc Finn, and he’s an honored guest. I’m riding Finn’s coattails to the party.”

“Great.”

I waved to Lucas and hightailed it out of there, unwilling to deal with Lucas’s complaining or desperate- rodent appearance. The old anxiety about Lucas’s competitive feelings toward me bloomed as I scampered back across the street. For it wasn’t just the puzzles, games, toys, books, and fantastic birthday presents Jack had always given me that made me worry. In a moment of too-much-booze weakness, Jack had confessed to Lucas that I was in a terrible marriage—the one to my first husband, aka the Jerk—and that he, Jack, wanted to help me. Without warning, Jack had given me a large sum of money to get away from the Jerk. When Jack told his son about this, hoping to be congratulated for his generosity, Three Mile Island hadn’t had a meltdown to match Lucas’s.

Since then, Jack had told me not to tell Lucas about any gifts that came my way. I promised not to, but I still felt uncomfortable.

I ducked through the rain and into our house. In the kitchen, I was surprised to see Tom consulting my printed schedule for Cecelia O’Neal’s wedding. Cecelia was due to get married at my conference center at noon.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Tom raised an eyebrow in my direction, then shuffled to the walk-in, pulled out a box, and brought it to the counter.

“Helping you,” he supplied. Tom was ever the master of laconic communication.

“Don’t you have to go to work?”

“Got somebody filling in for me.”

“Tom, what is going on?”

“Ceci’s mother just called.” Tom cocked an eyebrow at me. “Her name’s Dodie O’Neal?” When I nodded, Tom went on, “It seems her ex-husband is threatening to show up at the wedding. Dodie’s hired some security guards. And so I’m going to help you and Julian in the kitchen. When we get over there, I’ll explain the situation.”

Great, I thought, as Tom and I loaded my van. Two days before the twice-delayed wedding of Bridezilla Billie, and I had been doing all in my power to put everything dealing with those worrisome nuptials out of my mind. What was it about nature, something about it abhorring a vacuum? Now we had a threatened disruption to what had promised to be a fairly straightforward wedding.

“Stay calm.” I found myself whispering my new mantra to myself as I piloted my van through the downpour to my event center. Tom, behind me, was driving his own vehicle, in case he was called away by the department. “Stay calm, stay calm,” I said again. “See?” I said to no one but myself, since I was alone in the van. “Talking aloud with no one there? I am going nuts.”

Okay, well, security guards or no, I needed to concentrate on Ceci O’Neal’s wedding. Cecelia, unlike Billie, had been easy to deal with. A tall, twenty-five-year-old woman who had a cap of short, black curls, Cecelia was unfailingly kind and gracious. She was also a selfless single mother. When she’d heard about an orphanage in Romania that needed adoptive parents, off she went on a discount flight to Eastern Europe, which was more than I would have done, and brought home little bawling Lissa, then an infant. Ceci doted on Lissa.

More than once, I’d thought of sending Ceci over to where Billie Attenborough lived with her mother in Flicker Ridge, an upscale development not far from Aspen Meadow Country Club. My idea was that Ceci would give Billie a class in Basic Civility.

But I frowned at the thought of security guards. I already knew that Cecelia’s biological father, Norman O’Neal, had decamped soon after Cecelia was born. This was right after Dodie had finished putting Norman through law school, which established good old Norm in the Jerk category. After a brief internship at a large firm, Norman had established a flourishing practice right here in Aspen Meadow. When we were doing the contracts, Dodie had related how Norman had wangled his way out of paying much in the way of child support. Still, for twenty years Dodie had proudly worked as a secretary—no euphemistic “administrative assistant” for her—down at the University of Denver.

My cell rang, interrupting my reverie. It was Dodie O’Neal.

“Sorry about the security guards,” Dodie apologized.

“Tom told me. Don’t worry about it.”

Dodie said, “Last week, Norman announced to his firm that he would be giving his daughter away. And not only that, but he boasted that he’d been asked to give the first toast at the reception.”

“Oh, Lord.”

When I’d gently asked Dodie and Cecelia if there was a father in the picture, they had firmly replied that Norman O’Neal was having exactly no part in the wedding. Dodie would be giving her daughter away. And Doc Finn was doing the first toast. Period.

“Problem is,” Dodie said now, “Norman has a terrible temper. I’ve always wondered how lawyers could get away with being bullies. Now I know.”

I sighed, thinking of various scenarios, all of which ended in catastrophe. Before signing off, Dodie said she was confident everything would work out. She’d given an old photo of Norm to the security agency, and she believed the agency’s claim that all would be well.

After ten minutes of carefully driving through the rain, I pulled into my gravel parking lot. Tom was right behind me. I could hear his argument now: if armed guards were needed, so was he.

It was just before nine, three hours before the wedding was set to begin. The two guards, who were helping the valets, were already on duty. I told them we were the caterer and the caterer’s husband, and they let us right