“The way I look at it is, I’ve got three choices. One, cancel the wedding—or at least the venue, which I reallyreallydon’t want to do. Two, do it anyway, and just let the chips fall where they may—”
“But someone might die,” Ben interjected.
“I know. Iknow. I don’t want anyone to die, that’s for sure.” She huffed again. “Or, my third option is to try and figure out how to put Brenda Tremaine’s ghost to rest so wecanhave the wedding there.
“It’s just going to be so beautiful, Ben! We’re going to do a forest of white painted trees on the balcony, sprayed with glitter paint. They’re not really trees, but big branches that just look like trees,” she added when he gave her a skeptical look. “And the balcony railing itself is going to be swagged with greenery and lights with a big wreath hanging from the center, right where the pictures will all be taken. It’ll be at midnight, of course, and so we’re actually going to do about three dozen hurricanes all over the balcony—”
“Hurricanes?” He looked very confused.
“Oh, you know, glass containers with candles in them to protect from the wind. All different sizes and shapes, and all the candles will be in cream or ecru or champagne colors. And some of them will hold three candles, some only two or one…it’s going to look so stunningly beautiful.” She sighed.
She’d never done an outdoor winter wedding before—after all, who did something like that? Well, CQEvents did! She hoped anyway. And if she pulled it off, it was going to besogorgeous.
“And the bride will be wearing an elegant evening suit in ecru, trimmed with big white fur lapels and cuffs, and a lovely fur hat that looks a little like those big Russian things, but prettier.”
“Right. Oh, let me check on the stew.” Ben popped up from the couch and was gone before Callie could say anything else.
The fire was still raging merrily when, a few moments later, Ben came back in with a tray of bread and butter, along with two large bowls of stew.
“Wow. This looks great,” she said, hardly able to wait to dig in. “Where’d you get the stew?”
“I made it. On the weekend, I like to make big batches of stuff and freeze it so I have an easy dinner during the week.”
“You chop your own wood, keep a clean house, and you can cook too? How come no lucky girl’s ever snatched you up?” she said, half teasing, half beingverynosy. And wistful.
Was she imagining it or was he blushing? Good. Maybe that would loosen him up a little.
“Oh, well, I—it just makes sense to plan ahead, you know. Anyway, I was doing some research about the last few weddings on the Tremaine Tower balcony, you know, after last week.” He was talking fast, as if trying to change the subject.
So shy and awkward. She justlovedthat about him. He’d always been that way, and that was part of what had attracted her to him, even back in high school when most girls were ga-ga over football or soccer players. But Ben was quiet, steady, intelligent, and calm. And pretty nerdy. Some people might call him boring, but Callie figured she had enough excitement and energy in her personality for the both of them.
“Did you really?” she asked, internally delighted that he’d spent some time worrying about what was really her problem. “Did you find out anything that might help the—uh—situation?”
“I’m not sure. I just wanted to know more about all of the instances. The first one was Brenda and Barclay, of course. Everyone knows about that, and about how Lonna Donne supposedly cursed them and started this unpleasant trend. That was December 31, 1929. Here’s a picture of them right before she collapsed.” He tapped on the computer tablet he’d just retrieved and passed it to Callie.
“And they had no idea what caused Brenda to die?” she asked as she looked at the photograph of the beautiful couple.
The bride and groom were holding coupes filled with something that didn’t look like champagne—it was a darker color—and they beamed out over the crowd as the leaned over the railing and waved to their friends and family.
Ben shook his head. “No—there wasn’t a mark on her, and she didn’t have any health problems. No poison or anything like that. I mean, it wasn’t like they had CSI in 1930, but they did do postmortems. So the timing of her death and the fact that they couldn’t attribute a cause added to the curse story.”
Callie had been reading the article and she stopped suddenly. “Oh!That’swhat it is.”
“What?” He straightened up in his seat. “You figured it out?”
“Well, I figured out what the red stuff is that was all over my face. I think.” She tapped the tablet screen and scrolled to the section in the article. “Brenda and Barclay had had a signature cocktail at their wedding—a cranberry champagne cocktail. She washoldinga glass of it when she collapsed and died—and the way the newspaper article described her…let me read it to you. ‘Her horribly crumpled body lay in a heap of glittering silk, her cocktail glass shattered on the ground beside her. As if to punctuate the terrible moment, there were streaks of red on her face that had splashed up from the drink as Brenda Tremaine collapsed in sudden, inexplicable death.’ The journalists were a lot more dramatic in their descriptions back then,” she added with a wry smile.
“So she—her ghost—is replicating the moment of her death with the red streaks,” Ben said, nodding thoughtfully. “All right, that’s logical.”
“And cranberry juice really stains,” she said. “So what else did you find out about the other deaths?” She handed the tablet back to him.
“All right, so three years later, Peggy Wilmington and Reginald Bowersox decided to have their wedding at Tremaine Tower, and they came out on the balcony to wave to all of their friends when the clock was striking midnight. At the twelfth and final toll of the bells,bothof them fell to the floor of the balcony—suddenly dead.”
“Both of them? How awful.” Callie was well into her stew and she was amazed at how good it was. She hoped there was enough for a second helping.
“Right? And same thing—no obvious cause of death was found on either of them. Then no one tried anything until 1939…New Year’s Eve, same deal and Felicity Kelly and Patrick McMurtaugh tied the knot in front of a whole lot of their friends and family—some of whom were on the balcony with them. Felicity and Patrick were just about to pose for a picture for a reporter below, and when the clock finished striking midnight and the ball lit up, someone noticed that Felicity had collapsed on the balcony. She was dead as well. No obvious cause of death. So by that time, the idea of the curse had really taken hold, obviously.” He paused from scrolling through his tablet to sample the stew for a few bites. “The other two instances—in 1943 and 1947—were similar. And for all of them, there was no clear cause of death. It was like they just dropped dead for no reason. Here, take a look. I pulled up pictures of all of them.”
Callie took the tablet again, still feeling moved that he’d spent all this time worrying about her problem. It was his family’s building, too, but he didn’t seem to have had any interest in the curse until she came along. She smiled to herself. Good old Ben.
