Page 1 of A Rose of Steel
Chapter One
There was going to be a wedding at the funeral home.
I stood in a sea of rubrum lilies, mums, and baby’s breath. Bubblegum pink taffeta bridesmaids’ dresses with sweetheart necklines exposed more cleavage than any blushing bride should want her groom to witness, and short front hemlines uncovered perfectly tanned thighs.
And like everything in Texas the wedding was going to be big. A happy occasion, most everyone I’d seen that morning had been all smiles, especially my auntie. It would be her first time officiating a couple’s nuptials. But the love in the air was suffocating me.
I wanted no part of it.
Unfortunately, the backyard of the Ball Funeral Home & Crematorium, the wedding venue, doubled as our family home—a renovated southern plantation—and I just couldn’t seem to get around all the festivities. It was a beautiful setting if you were able to block out the dead bodies inside.
Trying to fix a bite to eat and brew a cup of coffee in my brand new Keurig meant I kept stumbling over wedding vendors, the photographer and the fighting flower girl and ring bearer.
I was definitely in the need of a caffeine fix right about now, and had purposely purchased the kind of brew master with pods so Auntie Zanne couldn’t try to fix any of her “teas” in with the coffee grounds.
And before I could get a cup to my lips, I’d been pulled right into the thicket of things by one of the bridesmaids. J.R., our Jack Russell terrier, watched at my feet without so much as a whimper as she wrapped her arm around mine and gave a yank. Dragging me with her, at the bride’s request so she cooed, into one of the rooms off the kitchen hallway where the wedding party was readying for the ceremony. So far, though, I wasn’t sure she’d noticed I’d arrived.
“Most people would kill to marry Bumper Hackett,” the red-headed bridesmaid squealed as I made myself flush with the wall, hoping to make a quick escape. “Ain’t that so, Tonya?”
“I know I would,” Bridesmaid Tonya, who had grabbed me, admitted.
“Jorianne Alvarez,” the first bridesmaid said. “You are so lucky!”
“Thank you, Marilee, but rest assured, I’d be the one killing somebody,” the bride said, no hint of jest in her Texan twang. “Blood on my hands,” she looked up toward the ceiling, “I swear to God, if anybody tried to take Bumper from me.” She stood in front of the Cheval mirror and slid pink gloss across her lips. She smacked them to even out the color.
“That lil’ ole Bumper bump you got there insured nobody else was gonna get ’em,” Bridesmaid Marilee quipped. She nodded her head toward the emerging bulge under the soft tulle skirt of Jorianne’s crisp white sheer-shouldered, silk and Chantilly lace wedding gown.
“You got that right,” the bride said, she tossed the blonde ringlets from her face and held up a hand to be high-fived. “But that ain’t nothing compared to the fire my momma set under him.”
That sent her bridesmaids into a fit of giggles.
I shook my head. It was no wonder I’d witnessed the groom having panic attacks from the time he’d arrived. Inhaler in hand, short of breath, he was flush and feverish looking. A thin layer of sweat glistening across his forehead in the early morning sun and a constant cough, he’d almost run a rut into the lawn as he circled the backyard.
The make-shift dressing room was cluttered with duffle bags, curling irons, makeup, and clothes that the girls had changed out of strewn around the room. The light and airy scents of the flowers mixed with perfume filled the room and evoked jollity and a girlishness energy.
“Sugarplum,” my Auntie Zanne said as she poked her head into the room. “We’re gonna start soon, you getting the girls together?”
Added to her many other social excursions, Suzanne Arelia Sophie Babet Derbinay, christened as such by the Holy Roman Catholic Church, known by Babet to most, but Auntie Zanne to me was officiating and hosting.
I held up my hand. “Not my job. I was grabbing something to eat when one of them pulled me in,” I said. Auntie slipped into the room and shut the door behind her.
“Oh, we almost forgot we sent Tonya after her,” Marilee, the redheaded bridesmaid, chortled. She looked to my Auntie Zanne. “We wanted her to keep an eye on Bumper, Miss Babet. He’s as nervous as a fly in a glue pot.”
“It’s his asthma,” the bride said. She walked over to the window which faced the backyard where the wedding was going to take place, pulling back the sheer curtains she peered out. “It acts up when he gets nervous. Just look at him, poor baby.” She shook her head. “He’s been sucking on that inhaler for the last couple of days.”
Marilee and Tonya moved to the window to take a gander.
“Maybe he should see a doctor,” I said.
“Ain’t you a doctor?” Marilee turned to me and said, a whole lot of accent and too much bite in her words. “DoctorRomaine Wilder, right?” She squinted an eye at me. “Or are you not a real doctor. Just one of them with letters behind their names?”
I decided not to even answer that comment.
“My momma ain’t gonna let him outta her sight,” Jorianne said, a smile beaming across her face, her bright blue eyes sparkling. “And that includes letting him go to the doctor’s. She said he can go after we tie the knot.”
“Unless he drops dead at the altar,” the third bridesmaid said. She’d hadn’t said a word until now. Standing in a corner brushing her hair and applying makeup, the short, thin bridesmaid had a quiet softness to her. Probably considered cute, she seemed mousy next to the stunningly beautiful bride.
The smiles on the other three girls’ faces bottomed out.
