Godiva clearly didn’t notice. She gazed into the distance. “Bird, you are . . . Minnie Witherspoon, elder daughter of Constantine Witherspoon IV. The family calls you . . . Aunt Minnie the Meanie. You’re a penny-pinching witch who knows all the family secrets. A mistress of blackmail!”
Bird, the youngest of them in her mid-fifties, loyally tried to assume a penny-pinching expression, but her sweet, round face framed by curly gray hair wasn’t made for meanness. She looked more like she’d bitten into a wormy apple.
Godiva whirled and pointed at Doris. “You’re Minnie’s baby sister . . . Oona the doormat, everyone’s favorite punching bag. Minnie expects you to clean up after the reception, as she was too cheap to pay the caterers for that.”
Doris rose slowly. Acting was second nature to her, and not just because she taught high school drama. She had been slipping in and out of roles her entire life, mostly in self-defense. She felt the wedding fade away as she pulled Godiva’s words into herself, creating Oona.
Her shoulders hunched and she began biting her thumbnail as she shuffled away from Minnie the Meanie.
“After no sleep last night, it’s one insult too many. While Minnie starts to march away—no, that direction, Bird, toward the gazebo—to gloat over the huge stack of super-expensive presents—Oona sees the solid gold cake plate . . .”
Doris grabbed the plastic cake plate covered with bits of frosting and crumbs.
“ . . . and in a fit of silent rage, creeps up behind Minnie—perfect, perfect—and conks her across the noggin!”
Doris swooshed the plate down, tapping it lightly against Bird’s head. Oops. She’d streaked Bird’s hair with frosting.
Bird, who served as victim in most of these scenarios, was used to being splattered and splashed with fake blood. On one memorable occasion, she’d used toothpaste foam around her mouth to represent poison. She flopped across the wooden steps to the gazebo, letting her head hang over the side. Bird was the first to admit that while she had no talent whatsoever at acting, by now she was very good at being skewered, shot, smothered, stabbed, hanged, and poisoned.
“ . . . Oona freezes! She realizes what she’s done,” came Godiva’s voice as narrator.
Doris froze, staring down at Bird’s healthy pink complexion as she lolled with her mouth open and her eyes closed.
“Oona looks at the murder weapon . . .”
Doris stared down at the cake plate—the golden cake plate, a family heirloom handed down for generations. Guided by Godiva’s whispering voice, she scuttled back to the cake table and used napkins to feverishly clean the bloodstains off the cake plate, rubbing and rubbing Lady Macbeth-style. Then she grabbed handfuls of her skirt to pick up the cake plate so that no fresh finger prints
would mar the gold.
“ . . .she lets out a laugh of triumph . . .”
Doris uttered her best Lady Macbeth cackle.
“Whoa, Doris, that’s incredibly creepy,” Bird whispered, still sprawled on the gazebo steps.
“Then she sees the dent on the golden plate, made by Minnie’s noggin! Oh no! She’d left evidence of her evil deed!”
Doris froze, her mouth falling open in horror.
“She hears footsteps in the hall!”
Doris clutched the cake plate to her chest. Then, before Godiva speak again, she flung the cake plate down, hoping to obscure the dent by making it look as if it had been knocked off the table. She clutched the napkins—the bloody napkins that had rubbed away her handprints as well as Minnie’s blood—and began to scuttle away.
“Perfect! Doris, that was amazing! In two minutes, I got a whole life for Oona—poor boring Oona, everybody’s gofer—”
Each word stabbed into Oona. Doris.
Godiva stopped abruptly at the sound of fervent applause. On the pathway on the other side of the gazebo, a dapper man stood clapping.
“Joey!” Bird abruptly sat up, no longer a corpse. “You came!”
Mikhail ran to Bird, offering his hands to pull her to her feet.
Doris, Godiva, and Jen had heard about Mikhail’s friend Joey Hu, but they’d never met him. They all stared as he walked toward them, still applauding.
“Straight from the airport,” Joey said. “I seem to have missed the wedding, for which I apologize. But have I lucked into one of G.T. Hidalgo’s famous book openings, happening before my nose?”
He smiled around in open delight. Joey Hu was a quick-moving, slender man slightly taller than Doris, with a pointed chin and unruly blond hair going to silver at the temples. His dark eyes were wide-spaced below his slanting brows. He looked as if he was Mikhail’s age, but he moved like a young man.