With this ring, p.1
With This Ring, page 1
part #17.50 of Deborah Knott Series
WITH THIS RING
By Margaret Maron
Copyright © 2012 by Margaret Maron. All rights reserved. First published in Crimes of the Heart, 1995. All of the characters in this story are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
INTRODUCTION
The whole subject of bridesmaid’s dresses amuses me immensely. No one dress could be equally flattering to any bride’s six best friends, so someone’s nose is always out of joint. And as for their usefulness as a party/cocktail dress? In my lifetime, I have only seen two that might actually be worn after the wedding.
— Margaret Maron
WITH THIS RING
“Major Bryant,” said Dwight’s voice when he finally picked up his extension at the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department.
“Can you still button the pants of your Army dress uniform?” I asked.
“Say what?”
“I was out at your mother’s last week.” I let a hint of mischief slip into my tone. “She said that picture of you at the White House was taken only three years ago, but I reckon you’ve put on a few pounds since you came home and started eating regular.”
As if a district court judge has nothing better to do with her time than call just to needle him about his thickening waistline, Dwight bit like a large-mouth bass suckered by some plastic feathers and shiny paint.
“Listen,” he said. “I bet I can fit into my old clothes a lot better’n you could fit into yours.”
I reeled him in. “It’s a bet. Loser pays for the tickets.”
“Wait a minute. You want to back that mule up and walk her past me again?”
“The Widdington jaycees are putting on a charity ball for Valentine’s Day,” I explained. “I know you don’t own a tuxedo, but—”
“You and that Chapin guy have a fight?” Dwight growled. “Or don’t he know how to dance in a monkey suit?”
For the life of me, I can’t understand Dwight’s attitude. It’s not like Kidd’s the first man he’s ever seen me with, and it’s certainly not like he’s interested in me himself. Our families have known each other five or six generations and Dwight’s always treated me like he’s one of my older brothers. One of my bossy older brothers. Unfortunately, small-town social life resembles the Ark—everything two by two; so when I need an escort and don’t have one on tap, I just call Dwight, who’s divorced and still unattached. By choice, he says.
Yet ever since I met Kidd Chapin down at the coast last spring, Dwight’s done nothing but snipe at him. Dwight’s a chief of detectives; Kidd’s a game warden. Both like to hunt and fish and stomp around in the woods. Wouldn’t you think they’d mesh together tight as Velcro?
Oil and vinegar.
I’ve decided it’s a guy thing and nothing worth bothering my pretty little head with.
“Kidd has to be at a conference down in Atlanta that weekend. Look, if you don’t want to come dancing and help me act the fool, fine. I’ll call Davis, see if he’s free that night.”
Davis Reed’s a good-timing, currently unmarried state representative from down east and Dwight hates his politics. (Hey, I’d never actually sleep with a Republican, but that doesn’t mean I won’t let one buy me dinner.)
“Act the fool how?” Dwight asked cautiously, and I knew I had him flopping in my net.
“It’s a bridesmaids ball,” I said. “Everybody’s supposed to wear something we’ve worn in a wedding.”
“What’s so foolish about that?”
“Dwight Bryant, have you ever looked at one of those dresses?” I was torn between amusement and exasperation.
Men.
But that’s not fair. Why should I badmouth men when it’s women that keep putting four to eight of their best friends into some of the most ridiculous dresses known to polite society?
Was it a man that thought it’d look really darling to send us down the aisle one Christmas wearing red plaid taffeta over four-foot-round hoop skirts and carrying tall white candles?
Lighted white candles that dripped wax all down the front of our skirts?
No, that was Missy Randolph.
Was it a man that put us in skintight sheaths of bright pink satin so that the bride looked like a silver spoon surrounded by six Pepto-Bismol bottles?
No, that was Portland Smith.
“What about this one?” said Aunt Zell as we prowled the far end of her unheated attic where several long gowns hung like ghosts from the rafter nails, each Cinderella fantasy shrouded in a white cotton sheet. “You girls were just precious in these picture hats.”
“The hats were okay,” I conceded, shivering in the February chill, “though that shade of lavender made me look downright jaundiced. It was the scratchy lace mitts. My wrists itched for a week. And Katy’s parasol kept poking all the ushers in the eye.”
“Such a pretty garden wedding,” Aunt Zell sighed as she pulled the sheet back over that gown. “Too bad they split up before the first frost. Now where’s the dress you wore when Seth and Minnie married? You were cute as a June bug in it.”
“That was a flower girl dress,” I reminded her. “And have you ever seen a flower girl that wasn’t cute as a June bug?”
Here in Colleton County, if a groom has a sister, she will be in the wedding even if she and bride despise each other. For the record, I never exactly despised any of my bothers’ brides (some of the boys got married before I was even born), but scattering rose petals can get awfully tiresome after you’ve done it four or five times.
The attic was too chilly for lingering and I quickly narrowed my choices down to two.
The ball committee promised us prizes in various categories. If total tacky were a category, surely the dress I’d worn in Caroline Corbett’s wedding would be an automatic winner: moss green lace over a moss polyester sateen that had already started mutating toward chartreuse before the first chord of Mendelssohn was ever played. The neckline dipped so low in front that only a cluster of green chiffon roses preserved our maiden modesty. Droopy shoulder flounces were tied up with dangling sateen ribbons that had tickled my arms just enough to keep me slapping for a fly or a mosquito. Accessories included a floppy picture hat big as a cartwheel and a wicker basket filled with more chiffon roses. What finally decided me against wearing it to the ball were the tiered net petticoats that shredded pantyhose and legs indiscriminately.
Besides, the frosty air made bare-armed summer frocks look even more inane than usual. I was drawn instead to a wintery blue velvet concoction.
Janelle Mayhew’s idea of Victorian began with a high, tight white lace collar, descended to pouf sleeves that had to be stuffed with tissue paper to hold their balloon shape, and was topped (or should I say bottomed?) by an enormous bustle. The white plumed fan had barely begun to molt and it ought to amuse Dwight. Besides, the dark blue velvet, bustle and all, actually flattered my sandy blonde hair and turned my blue eyes sapphire. As a thirty-something judge, maybe it’d be more dignified to go for pretty instead of comic.
More politic, too, because Janelle and Glenn Riggsbee were Widdington jaycees and certain to be at the ball. Their restaurant has prospered over the years and they contributed to my last campaign by hosting a big reception for me out there in the country.
The old-fashioned dress had been a little on the loose side twelve years ago; now it needed a whalebone corset with power lacing. Even with a girdle, I was going to have to sit up straight all evening and remember to laugh no harder than Queen Victoria.
When Dwight came to pick me up that Saturday night, he was wearing a borrowed black tuxedo and the fuchsia sateen cummerbund and clip-on bow tie that had been dyed to match the bridesmaids’ dresses when he ushered for a friend in D.C.
“Aw and I was really looking forward to your sword,” I teased.
“Mama could’ve let out the pants,” Dwight said sheepishly, “but she said she’d rather pay for the damn tickets herself than try to get that dress jacket to fit.”
Before he’d write me a check for the cost of the tickets, he rousted Aunt Zell from upstairs where she and Uncle Ash were watching the news and made her swear she hadn’t added a gusset of blue velvet in my side seams.
“No gloating, okay?”
“I never gloat,” I told him, tucking the check away in my beaded evening bag.
He and Aunt Zell both snorted.
Widdington’s about 35 minutes east of Dobbs and we drove over with Avery and Portland Brewer. Portland is Uncle Ash’s sister’s daughter and therefore Aunt Zell’s niece by marriage, which makes us courtesy cousins. Not that a family connection is needed. We laugh at the same things and have been friends since Junior Girls class in Sunday school.
When Dwight opened the rear door of their car, she twisted around in the front seat and said, “Oh, shoot! I told Avery I just knew you were going to wear that pig-pink thing Mother made y’all buy for our wedding.”
She had a winter coat draped over the droop-shouldered horror of Caroline Corbett’s green lace. In Portland’s case, the polyester underlining had gone past chartreuse, right on into an acid yellow. “I’m competing in the ‘Most Unusual Color Combination’ category,” she giggled.
“Where’s your hat and garden basket?”
“In the trunk,” said Avery. “The brim’s so wide she couldn’t fit in the car.”
Before the interior light went off, Portland noticed my pearl earrings. “I thought we wore red-and-blue rhinestone hoops with that dress?”
“We did. That’s why Elizabe
“She just said that to throw suspicion off herself,” said Portland. “I still think she’s the one who took it.”
“They never did get it back, did they?” asked Avery as he waited for a pickup to pass before pulling away from the curb.
“Huh?” said Dwight.
“Oh, that’s right,” I remembered. “You were probably stationed in Germany or some place when Janelle Mayhew married Glenn Riggsbee. This is the dress Portland and I and their three sisters wore in their wedding.”
“All five of you?” he asked dryly. “No wonder you can still squeeze into it.”
I fluttered my ostrich plume fan under his chin. “Why, Rhett, honey, you just say the sweetest thangs? Don’t y’all pay him no nevermind,” I told Portland and Avery. “He’s still pouting ’cause he couldn’t get into his little ol’ dress uniform?”
“You said you never gloat,” Dwight reminded me. “What ring?”
Avery sailed through the last stoplight in Dobbs and headed east along a back-country road. As we drove through the cold winter night, stars blazing overhead, we took turns telling Dwight about Janelle’s godawful engagement ring and how it disappeared in the middle of her wedding to Glenn Riggsbee.
“It all began with Elizabeth and Nancy—Glenn’s two sisters,” said Portland. “Both of them wanted the ring he gave Janelle.”
Dwight might not’ve graduated from college, but he knows about Freudian complexes. “Isn’t that a little unnatural?”
“We’re talking greed, not Greek,” I told him, “and strictly speaking, it really began with Glenn’s great-uncle.”
Glenn Riggsbee was named for his mother’s favorite uncle, a larger than life character who ran away from home at fifteen and went wild-catting in Texas back in the twenties. Unlike most kids who go off to seek their fortunes and slink home a few years later hoping nobody’ll notice their tails dragging in the mud, Great-Uncle Glenn hit a gusher before he was eighteen, married a flashy dancehall blonde before he was twenty, and lived high, wide, and handsome for the next fifty years.
He and his wife never had children, so when she died and the big money ran out, he came back to Colleton County, bought a little house next door to his niece and settled down to bossing Glenn and his sisters around like they were his own grandchildren. Portland and I never even heard of him till our good friend Janelle Mayhew started dating Glenn, but we heard plenty after that because Janelle was terrified of him.
With good reason.
True, he’d been a Daddy Warbucks to Mrs. Riggsbee and her children when he had lots of money, lavishing her with expensive treats and setting up trust funds so Glenn and his two sisters could go to college in style. And yes, he continued to be generous with the dregs of his fortune, helping Glenn buy a first car, for instance, or doling out to the girls some of his late wife’s gold and silver baubles.
But in old age, he was just as opinionated and short-tempered as he’d been in his youth. Any help he gave was on his terms and any gifts he gave came with elastic strings attached. For such a renegade, he had a surprisingly wide streak of conservatism.
He had expected both of Glenn’s sisters to become school teachers and to stop work once they had babies. When Elizabeth majored in accounting and had a chance to buy into a new insurance brokerage firm soon after graduation, he refused to help. Said it wasn’t fitting for an unmarried woman to be in a position to boss around married men.
The same thing happened when Nancy wanted to become a minister. A woman preacher? The very concept shocked him to the core. “Be damned if I’ll bankroll such blasphemy!” Somehow he found a legal loophole that let him tie up Nancy’s college trust fund until she tearfully promised not to take any theology courses.
As a male, Glenn was, theoretically, free to major in whatever he wanted, but you can imagine Great-Uncle Glenn’s reaction when he finally realized that Glenn planned to use his shiny new degree in restaurant management to turn an old dilapidated farmhouse into a restaurant.
“A restaurant out in the middle of the country? Stupidest damn thing I ever heard of,” he snorted. “Don’t expect me to help finance it.”
In vain did Glenn point out that I-40 was going to dot the county with housing developments full of wage-earning commuters happy to pay someone else to fix supper.
Nor did it open Great-Uncle Glenn’s wallet when he heard that Janelle was taking cooking courses at the local community college. Indeed, he took to wondering audibly if she was good enough for young Glenn. After all, what kind of trashy mama did Janelle have that wouldn’t teach her own daughter how to fry chicken and make buttermilk biscuits?
While it’s true that the Mayhews were even poorer than the Riggsbees, they were by no means trash and Janelle was always a hard worker. She also has lovely manners and yes-sirred and no-sirred Great-Uncle Glenn till, when Glenn said he was going to ask her to set a date, the old man went to his lock-box at Dobbs First National and gave Glenn the platinum and diamond ring he’d bought to woo his dancehall wife.
We’d never seen anything quite like it: a huge rose-cut yellow diamond surrounded by forty tapered baguette diamonds, sapphires and rubies in a ballerina mount.
“What’s a ballerina mount?” asked Dwight.
“Picture a big yellow golf ball surrounded by a red, white and blue ruffle,” I said.
“Sounds sort of ugly to me,” he ventured.
“It was beyond ugly,” Portland assured him.
“But the diamond was what they call a flawless fancy yellow and was supposed to have been insured for eighty thousand dollars,” I recalled.
“Supposed to be?”
“That’s why I’m sure Elizabeth took it,” said Portland. “Where else did she get the money to buy a partnership?”
“Circumstantial evidence,” Avery murmured. Like Portland, he’s an attorney, too.
“Not entirely,” she argued. “See, Dwight, Elizabeth hadn’t bought in with Bob McAdams yet, but she’d been working there a couple of years and she was supposed to have written up a policy for the ring once it went from Great-Uncle Glenn’s lock-box to Janelle’s finger—”
“But Elizabeth assumed the Mayhews had household insurance,” I said. “And since Janelle was still living at home to save money for the restaurant, Elizabeth thought that would protect it up to the wedding.”
“That’s what she claimed,” said Portland, “but even if the Mayhews did have insurance, no piddly little renters’ policy would ever cover an eighty-thousand-dollar ring. Uh-uh, Deb’rah. She knew there’d be hard-nosed investigators swarming all over the place if Janelle filed a claim for eighty thousand. No policy, no claim. No claim, no serious investigation.”
“No policy?” asked Dwight from the darkness beside me.
“Elizabeth dated it to take effect at twelve noon, which was when the ceremony took place and when Janelle’s residence would officially change from her parents’ house. The last time anybody saw the ring was at eleven-thirty when Janelle stuck it in her make-up bag in the choir robing room next to the vestibule.”
I took up the tale. “And before you ask, no, nobody was seen going into that room between the time we finished dressing until after the ceremony. Miss Louisa Ferncliff directed the wedding and she was right there in the vestibule the whole time, making sure the ushers knew whether the guests were bride’s side or groom’s and then sending us down the aisle spaced just right. If anybody’d gone back in, she’d have seen them.”
“Who was last out of the robing room?”
“Janelle and me,” Portland answered. “Her sister Faye was maid of honor and I was matron of honor. Deb’rah went first, then Nancy, Elizabeth, Faye and me. The room was empty after Janelle and I went out to the vestibule and I pulled the door shut.”
“So who was first back in?”
I shrugged. “All of us. There was a receiving line with the parents right after the recessional, then we all went to put on fresh lipstick for the formal pictures and that’s when Janelle discovered the ring was gone.”
“And the only ones in the robing room the whole time were you six?”
“Are you kidding?” said Portland. “Both mothers were in and out, as well as Miss Louisa, the photographer, the minister’s wife—”
