“Finally!” Gertie threw her hands in the air. “You understand the problem.”
“There’s no problem for me,” Ida Belle said. “I don’t want to get dressed in a way I never have before, then sit down to a fancy dinner that wouldn’t be my first choice in some building that would charge too much and insist on throwing flowers everywhere.”
“But this is your wedding,” Gertie said. “It only happens once and quite frankly, as long as you waited to say yes, I’m surprised one of you isn’t already in the grave.”
“Look,” Ida Belle said, “I appreciate that you want to make it special, but Walter wants to marry me, and God knows, he’s had plenty of time to get a fix on who I am. If I put on some fancy gown and have a fancy dinner in a fancy building, then he’s not marrying me at all. That’s me pretending to be someone else.”
“Oh, good point,” I said, storing that one in case I ever took the scary plunge into permanency with Carter.
“Fine,” Gertie said. “Then what do you plan on wearing to be married to the man who has waited patiently for a million years for you to wise up?”
“Don’t worry,” Ida Belle said. “Wedding wardrobe is our next stop.”
Gertie eyed her suspiciously. “Where exactly are we going?”
“Army-Navy store,” Ida Belle said.
The dismayed look on Gertie’s face was so hilarious I snapped a picture of her.
“You’re not wearing camo to your wedding!” Gertie insisted.
“It will be new camo,” Ida Belle said.
I laughed. “Gertie, you haven’t looked this upset since Ida Belle told you Francis couldn’t sing in the church choir.”
“An idea almost as ridiculous as me wearing a wedding dress,” Ida Belle said.
“The choir needs another tenor,” Gertie said. “And Francis loves singing.”
“He also loves talking,” I said. “He’ll hijack the sermon and since he spent half his life with nuns and the other half with criminals, I hesitate to think what kind of trouble that would cause. Maybe you could check with Celia. Francis is Catholic, after all.”
Gertie gave me a dirty look. “I would never allow Francis in the Catholic church, especially as long as Celia’s running the show over there. Any congregation that has Celia in charge of their events doesn’t deserve to have Francis’s talent to entertain them.”
“She called animal control on you again, didn’t she?” Ida Belle asked.
Gertie threw her hands in the air, chunking the dress behind the couch. “All I was doing was walking down Main Street with Francis on my shoulder. It wasn’t like I was going into the café with him or anything. I just wanted to grab some fruit for him at the General Store, and he likes to pick his own.”
“Yeah, I can’t see why she would have a problem with that at all,” Ida Belle said.
“I know, right?” Gertie said, clearly missing the sarcasm. “It’s like she wakes up every day trying to figure out how to make the entire world as miserable as she is.”
“That seems a fairly accurate statement,” I agreed.
I heard someone clearing their throat behind me and turned around to see an older woman with the word ‘Manager’ on her name tag. She was wearing a forced smile until she caught sight of the ruined dress, then it changed to a pained look.
“I understand there was a problem with the dress,” she said.
“The dress was fine until your saleslady threw a tray of dessert at it,” I said.
“Yes, well,” the woman said, looking increasingly more uncomfortable. “She was under the impression that you were going to harm her.”
I shook my head. “I was just trying to save the desserts before she passed out. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it.”
“So you’re not…” The woman’s voice trailed off.
“An assassin?” I asked. “Not anymore. Nowadays, I try to apprehend people without killing them. Doesn’t always work out, but you know how it goes—you have the best intentions when you head off to work and sometimes things just don’t go the way you planned.”
She paled a bit. “You’re joking, of course.”
“Heck no, she’s not joking,” Gertie said. “Fortune was one of the CIA’s best operatives.”
The woman relaxed a tiny bit. “CIA. I see.”
Gertie smiled. “So it’s all aboveboard. Government-sanctioned killing, and you know our government always gets everything right.”
The pained look returned.
“Well, is there anything I can help you with?” she asked, looking at me but not directly in the eyes. “Are you the bride-to-be?”
“Good God, no,” I said and pointed to Ida Belle. “That’s