Murder Has a Sweet Tooth - By Miranda Bliss Page 0,34
sunshine in a lemon yellow taffeta dress with a swingy skirt and spaghetti straps. It wasn’t what she’d been wearing last time I saw her out in the restaurant, and I realized that sometime after we’d locked the front door, she must have ducked into my office to change her clothes. That could only mean one thing—Eve had a date.
“Perfect timing!” she crooned. “The wedding is exactly what I wanted to talk to you both about.”
“Er . . .” I looked to Jim for guidance, but since he knew better than to try and put the brakes on Eve—or to get between two best friends—he grabbed a nearby towel and pretended to be busy wiping off the stove even though Marc had already cleaned it and it was spotless. I knew I was on my own. “We weren’t talking about the wedding,” I told Eve. “Not exactly, anyway. We were talking about Alex.”
“Oh, pshaw!” Eve can get away with saying things like that. She’s a former beauty queen with a honey-thick Southern accent. When she tossed her head, her blonde hair gleamed in the overhead lights. “I’m not the least little bit worried about Alex. You’re going to take care of that, Annie. By the time the wedding rolls around, we’ll all be laughing about this crazy mix-up. You’re going to prove who really killed that poor woman and Alex won’t ever have to think about this whole mess ever again.”
“I’m glad you have that much faith in me. I’m just not sure—”
“Of course you are.” Eve waved away my protests with one perfectly manicured hand. “You always work things out. You’re not going to let Alex down. I know that, Annie. So does Jim and everyone else. That’s why we can worry about other things. Like . . .” She took a deep breath and looked from one of us to the other. Why did I have a feeling I wasn’t going to like whatever it was Eve said? “Wedding favors!”
“We’ve talked about that. Jim and I thought—”
“Oh, I know what you thought. You thought you’d give something small and tasteful to every guest. A candle shaped like a wedding cake maybe. Or an African violet plant. That’s all well and good. For an ordinary wedding. But then I got to thinking, and what I was thinking was, who’s going to remember a wedding where what they get is a small and tasteful favor?”
“So we’re talking big and not in good taste?”
Eve was on a roll so she ignored Jim’s comment. She reached into the Kate Spade bag she had on one shoulder and pulled out what looked like a spiral-bound—
“Calendar?” Call me slow, but I couldn’t put the concept of calendar and wedding favor together. I stared at her in wonder.
“Not just any calendar. I had a special sample made.” Smiling with every ounce of beauty-queen charm she had, Eve flipped open the calendar. Open, it was bigger than a regular piece of copy paper, maybe twenty inches tall by eleven or so inches wide. She happened to open it to the page that showed July. On one page, the dates were marked with boxes. The other page was a picture of Eve’s pup Doc in a swimsuit and little terry-cloth beach cover-up. Eve was so excited, she could barely keep still. “Every month features a picture of Doc. Isn’t it adorable?”
“It is. He is.” A smile pasted to my face, I reached for the calendar and paged through it. In August, Doc was dressed in back-to-school duds. He even had a backpack. September showed him in an apple orchard. He was wearing overalls and a straw hat. Predictably, in October, he was dressed in a Halloween costume, a little red devil, complete with horns. “This is—”
“I know. Brilliant!” Eve sparkled as only Eve can. “Everyone’s going to love it, because everyone loves Doc. And look . . .” She plucked the calendar out of my hands and flipped through the pages. “Here in April, the date of your wedding is marked so that everyone remembers your anniversary. And Doc . . .” She made a little ta-da gesture to show off the picture of Doc in a tux. Where she’d found another Japanese terrier owner to go along with the plan, I don’t know, but there was another dog in the picture. She was dressed like a bride.
“Annie . . .” From behind me, Jim’s voice simmered somewhere between heaven help me and you tell her or