Chapter Three
Rachel’s wedding planner called himself Lord Valentine but his real name was Bob. When he wasn’t wearing tights and strutting around like a—man who wore tights for fun and recreational purposes—he pumped gas at the local gas station. But Jake wasn’t fooled. Even when “Bob” was giving him a fill up and washing his windshield, Jake could see Lord Valentine peeking out. The way Jake figured it, the real person inhabiting that Bobshaped hole in the world was Lord Valentine. Bob was just a cover so that Lord Valentine could get by in the world when he couldn’t wear his tights and have people address him as Lord. Rachel found him the way a lot of desperate brides with fantasy wedding hopes found him: at the local Renaissance Faire. There he put on a last-minute wedding each day for eight solid weekends—
and collected enough referrals to keep him busy planning weddings the rest of the year.
Rachel got his card, and then dragged Jake to a “Lord Valentine Original” wedding. There he saw plenty of women wearing corsets who had no business wearing corsets. Or rather, they should be wearing corsets, but under their clothes where descent women wore their underwear, not out for the entire world to see with parts of them spilling out everywhere.
Jake was still having nightmares about that. It gave new meaning to the phrase “poured into that dress.”
Other than the expansive tracts of land, so to speak, Jake saw a very embarrassed young groom who normally wore jeans with holes in them get henpecked into a pair of tights, a speedo and something that Lord Valentine called a doublet. Jake wasn’t sure what folks in the Renaissance had for wearing their underwear on the outside, but he planned to ask this Lord Valentine when he and Rachel met with the guy today.
If he could just get there.
Half-an-hour after Dr. Dave set off to alert Rachel to his predicament, she appeared around the corner of the building leading a harassed looking man with her.
“Jake, this is Mr. Prunella. He’s the hotel manager.”
Jake nodded in greeting.
Mr. Prunella smiled in a nervous way. “What... ah. . . seems to be... the ah...”
Jake cut his thumb over his shoulder at Billy. “I can’t get in.”
The guard was quick to jump in with his side of things. “Mr. Johanson from the UFO True Believers said that the contract—”
“Contract?” Rachel was prepared to meet the security goon’s shout octave-for-octave. “Well, my contract states—”
“Rae.” Jake grabbed her by the arm, and forced her to walk away. Despite the fact he’d just been about to give up his pacifist stance and go hunting for his old police-issue .38 caliber, he felt calmer now. Something about having an insane bride on his hands was oddly reassuring. Maybe he just liked having someone more stressed, and possibly more psycho, than him that he could help talk down.
“Yes, I... ah... see the problem.” Mr. Prunella turned to Jake with a pleading look. “If you’ll just... ah... follow me?”
Jake let out a less-than-happy snort, and with one arm firmly around Rachel, he followed the hotel manager back around the building.
“We’re sorry for the inconvenience,” Mr. Prunella said. “Your wedding planner didn’t notify the hotel that you were in law enforcement. When we booked the UFO convention, we thought that the government official clause was kind of silly. We never even thought it was going to come into play.”
“How is this going to work, Mr. Prunella?” Rachel asked. Her voice had a low, deadly tone that Jake hadn’t heard in a long time. In fact, the last time he’d heard it was when a government bureaucrat was looking to have her property seized for the highway expansion. Oddly enough, he gave up after a flock of pigeons took up permanent residence in the tree next to his garage. And another in the tree next to his office.
It had been an awfully bad summer for pigeons that year, if Jake remembered.
Which just goes to show, you shouldn’t cross a vet who can play Dr. Doolittle to the animal kingdom.
“We’re just going to have to keep all festivities at least 15 feet away from the convention at all times. At least the part of the festivities where Mr. Coltrane is involved.”
“That’s going to be rough to manage,” Jake said. “Isn’t the ballroom right over the main floor of the convention?”
“Well.” Mr. Prunella cleared his throat. “Only part of it. They’ve commandeered the lounge, but that’s not covered by their contract. And we never measured the ceilings. So if we can carefully reroute the aisle for the wedding to account for that, we should be able to keep to the letter of both contracts.”
“Are you saying that I’m going to be walking up a crooked aisle?”
Rachel glared at him. “I’ve never heard of a bride walking in at a right angle.”
“Rae.” Jake patted her shoulder. “It’s going to be okay. That dress you picked out doesn’t even have a train.”
“But what about the photographer, Jake?”
“We’ll put him in the corner. It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
“Alright.” Rachel let out a long, wearisome sigh. The look she gave him suggested that if it wasn’t alright, she’d be saying ‘I told you so’ for the rest of their lives. But that was okay. After six months of this rapidly escalating insanity, Jake was discovering that the best way to handle his blushing bride was to be reasonable at all times and treat her as if she was a live grenade, barely a hair’s breath away from going off.
Mr. Prunella gave Jake a grateful look.
“So how are we going to get him up to the ballroom?” Rachel asked. “The second he shows his face in the lobby, he’s going to get dog piled by all those suits with the UFO convention.”
“We can use the secret passageway in the carriage house to enter the building,” Mr. Prunella said, “then take the fire exit to the second floor. We can smuggle Mr. Coltrane up there with no one from the UFO True Believers’ Association the wiser.”
He led them into the carriage house and unlocked the doorway to the secret passage. Jake glanced at the white carriage and shuddered as he remembered the way Rachel and Average searched obsessively to find a pumpkin-shaped Cinderella coach before settling on an Amish buggy. Now if they could just keep Rachel ignorant of the fact that the Amish weren’t around in the Renaissance, everything would be fine. He looked around the secret passage dubiously.
“Any chance that this passage goes past their meeting room?”
Jake asked with a bemused grin.
“Jake!” Rachel smacked his shoulder. “We’ve got more important things to do than harass the alien nut jobs.”
In Jake’s opinion, this was just one more sign that they should have eloped. Before this whole wedding mess started, Rachel would have been on board with the idea of getting harmless revenge on the alien convention for causing them so many problems. But that was before she turned into The Creature from the Tulle Lagoon. Now, heaven help anyone who stood in the way of her perfect wedding. It was getting so that Jake had a running narration in his head that sounded like the lead-in to a bad fifty’s B-movie. Once in a lifetime, the creature rises from its slumber. It terrorizes the countryside in its obsessive search for color-coordinating flowers, bridesmaid dresses and shoes with names like Sea Foam and Truffle. The creature cuts a broadswath of destruction wherever it goes terrorizing bridegrooms everywhere withs watches of cloth, hors ‘d oeuvres, menus and magazines the size of the greaterCleveland phone book filled with identical white dresses. Mr. Prunella locked the door and led them across the landing to another exit. They followed him out to the fire escape, and then up the staircase to the second floor.
“There you go,” Mr. Prunella said. “Please hug the balcony rail as you go down the hall so that Mr. Coltrane doesn’t violate the terms of our contract, and we should be fine.”
“I don’t believe this,” Rachel muttered as they left the hotel manager behind and walked down the hall. “He actually expects us to hug a wall. If the space cadets don’t know where you are, how are they supposed to know if you’re violating the contract?”
“I’m sure they’ll see me walking along the balcony,” Jake said quietly as he pressed his backside up to the rail and sidestepped along it. “If for no other reason, than because I’m walking this way.”
“You look ridiculous, Jake! How am I supposed to walk down the aisle with a groom who looks more like a ninja than a cavalier?”
“Just pretend that I’m James Bond. You always wanted to be a Bond girl, didn’t you?”
Rachel crossed her arms and glared at him. But Jake waggled his eyebrows at her. Before long, she threw her hands up, laughed, and shook her head. “How is it you always know the right thing to say to me?”
“Because I’m smart and I love you?”
“Maybe.” She smiled. Her eyes sparkled as she threw her arms around him, and pulled his head down for a kiss.
“Achem!” The sound of someone’s throat clearing brought them up short. Jake let out a low growl and looked over Rachel’s shoulder to see Lord Valentine standing there in his lace and crap.
“Oh!” Rachel jumped back, startled. Jake cursed inwardly. After years of dating in secret and telling everyone that they were not sleeping together, Rachel just wasn’t used to public displays of affection. He was fighting an uphill battle to get her to even hold hands with him in public.
“No! Don’t mind me. I’m just here, waiting. And we’re only a half-hour behind schedule. It’s not as if I have other couples to see to this weekend or other weddings to plan.”
Lord Valentine even had an affected French accent. It was like listening to Pepe Le Pew or the rude Frenchman in Monty Python andthe Holy Grail. Jake was pretty convinced that no Frenchman had ever sounded that way at any point in history. But that particular opinion was classified under things that he couldn’t tell Rachel because she would surely make him sleep on the couch.
“Sorry,” Rachel said apologetically.
“Not too sorry,” Jake said. Both Rachel and Lord Valentine glared at him. In response, Jake grinned. “Hey, I’m getting married. I’m allowed to kiss my bride.”
“Ah l’amour.” Lord Valentine clasped his hands to his chest. Jake changed his mind and decided that Lord Valentine sounded more like the little candlestick on the cartoon his son watched after school. But again he kept his observations to himself not willing to risk a wedding beat down.
“However, save it until after the ceremony, please. Now come along, we have much to do.”
Jake checked his sarcastic impulse and instead followed Rachel and Lord Valentine back to the ballroom. He hugged the rail the whole way. When they arrived, Lord Valentine turned to give Jake a confused stare. “What is this?”
“Our latest fiasco.” Rachel made a sour face. As quickly as she could, using wide gestures for punctuation, she explained the situation to Lord Valentine. Though the foppish wedding planner listened to the situation with a serious expression, Jake was certain that he was laughing inside. Particularly when he hid his mouth behind a hand-stitched lace handkerchief and his mustache twitched.
“This is proving to be quite the challenge,” Lord Valentine said.
“But no matter. It’s an old Italian custom dating back to the Roman period. The groom will approach the bride from the left side of the room. That’s why, in Europe, all cars drive on the left side of the road.”
“Huh.” Rachel nodded thoughtfully. “I didn’t know that. Maybe we should have that put in the programs.”
“But of course!” Lord Valentine said. “I shall have my retinue see to it!”
“Retinue?”
“My—how do you say? Assistants? Lackeys? Boot-lickers? That one is my personal favorite. So expressive! Anyway, I needed the extra help to make your wedding a success. Only the best for the likes of our town’s foremost citizens. And such a deal!”
“What kind of a deal are we talking here?” Jake said with a large amount of trepidation. It seemed like these days “we’re getting married” was actually a code phrase. The real meaning, as near as he could tell, was “please, knock me down, rifle through my pockets and take whatever extra cash you can find while you’re in there. And oh, by the way, did I mention that I have a Mastercard?”
“For you? A mere one hundred dollars per assistant. Such a trivial sum.”
Jake snorted at that. For some reason, everything attached to a wedding was a trivial sum. And all these trivial sums seemed to come in one hundred dollar increments. “And how many assistants are we talking here?”
Lord Valentine’s face twisted in a slight annoyance. “Three?
Maybe four? As I said, the number is a minor detail. I shall introduce you to them forthwith.”
Jake and Rachel looked at each other and shrugged. “Just let Average know about the extra expense,” Rachel said. “She’s keeping the running tally in her head.”
“After you, darlin’,” Jake said. Rachel nodded, and walked ahead of them into the ballroom.
“Hey, Val?” Jake whispered as he pulled the wedding planner aside.
Lord Valentine winced. “Must you reduce my name to a single, crass syllable?”
“Must you charge an extra hundred dollars a head for each of your retinue?”
Valentine hesitated with his mouth open. Then his eyes narrowed shrewdly, and he lay a long, bony finger alongside his nose. “I see. A point. Very well, how may I help you?”
“That crap about the Romans and the left side of the road?”
“Oui?”
“You made that up, didn’t you?”
The wedding planner let out an indelicate snort. “I — how do you say? Lied through my nose?”
“Wrong orifice, but close enough.” Jake clapped him on the back. The wedding planner stumbled three steps and glared at Jake. “You and I are going to get along just fine.”
“That, my dear officer, is the point.”
A thought occurred to Jake as they headed for the ballroom.
“Say, Val?”
Lord Valentine stopped, and heaved a dramatic sigh. “Oui?”
“You haven’t seen the carriage, have you?”
“You mean the one down in the carriage house? The white one?”
“Yeah, that one.” Jake cringed inwardly.
“My complements to you.” Valentine nodded. “On finding a perfect reproduction of the coach in which Catherine of Aragon was conveyed to Arthur Tudor in 1501.”
A slow, lazy smile of approval spread across Jake’s face. “Is that a fact?”
“It is.”
“Alright then.”
Given the way Jake had to slide along the wall, then loop around the hinged side of the door and into the ballroom, he let Lord Valentine go in first to hold it open for him. The room itself was huge, with floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall and the same polished pine covering the floor and trimming the wall.
“Isn’t it gorgeous, Jake?” Rachel asked.
Jake was more interested in all the people already in the room. Six of them. At one hundred dollars a person.
“Who are all these people?” He hugged the corner as he looked around the room like a bobble-headed doll.
“My retinue!” Lord Valentine said with an expansive gesture.
“I thought you said there were three of them.”
Lord Valentine stopped, counted on his fingers, and then counted noses of the people in the room. Then he smiled toothily at Jake.
“Ah, a mere trifle.”
Jake shook his head.
“Let it go, Jake.” Rachel cocked a hip and put a hand on it. “If Lord Valentine thinks we need all these people to help us, then who are we to argue?”
“Only the folks paying the bill,” Jake muttered.
“La!” Lord Valentine clapped his hands. He moved to stand between a heavyset couple that looked to Jake like they belonged in a movie about King Henry VIII. “This is Lady Margaret and the Duke of Earl.”
Jake blinked. “Wasn’t that—”
“Yes, yes! Moving right along.” Lord Valentine’s expression pleaded with Jake not to ask. Jake shrugged. As far as he was concerned, Val had earned a free pass with the carriage thing.
“Next we have Lord Doug and Lady Elane.” Lord Valentine stood next to a couple who looked like they’d just escaped from the set of The Three Musketeers.
“Lord Doug?”
“It’s a work in progress,” Lord Doug said. “I’m actually thinking of changing it to—”
“No time! Moving along.” Lord Valentine cut him off with an impatient wave. He put his arm around a man in a pirate’s hat. “This is Captain Morgan of the Jolly Parrot.”
“Arrrr.” Captain Morgan nodded to them.
Jake gave the captain a cautious look. “And he is?”
“The best bartender that ever lived,” Captain Morgan said with a wink.
“You do know we live in a dry county, don’t you?” Jake said.
“Arrr?” Captain Morgan looked surprised.
“And that I’m the town’s cop.”
“Not to worry, mate-y. I’ll see that your wedding be dry. . . insofar as anyone would notice.”
“Now listen—” Jake said.
“And moving right along,” Lord Valentine interrupted before Jake could launch into a tirade. He pointed to a gentleman in a vikingstyle, horned helmet. “This is Monk.”
Monk leered at Rachel. “Pleased to meet you.”
Jake pulled Lord Valentine aside. “He’s part of your group?”
Lord Valentine gave him a look that said that he was definitely part of the group. “But of course.”
“Not very Renassance-y, is he?”
“We need Monk for the heavy lifting.”
“You’re not going to wear the horns during the ceremony, are you?” Rachel asked him with a frown.
Monk looked offended. “They’re traditional.”
“Traditionally what?” Rachel crossed her arms.
Lord Valentine made a placating gesture with his hands. “We typically let Monk keep track of les enfants during the ceremonies.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Jake looked at the behemoth in the Viking getup. “He watches kids?”
“Oui.” Lord Valentine said. “He is most effective with the ring toss. And if you tie ribbons to his helm, he is quite an enjoyable maypole.”
“Okay,” Jake said. “Maypole. Gotcha.” Mentally, he made a note to remind Rachel to have Average spread the word around the diner: leave the kids at home.
“Just so.” Lord Valentine nodded. “We should sit now and go through the ceremony.”
“Just a sec, Val.” Jake held a hand up. He took Rachel by the arm and pulled her aside. “Honey, you sure about this?” he whispered. Rachel gave Jake a patient look. “We’ve been through this, Jake. Horace has you working down at the station right up until the day of the wedding, and between getting the vet practice ready for my absence and moving into the house with you and Tommy, I’ve got to have some help planning this thing.”
“Yeah, but hon, he keeps tacking on these charges. I mean, six helpers? Who needs six helpers?”
Rachel raised an eyebrow at him. “Can’t you just—I don’t know—
play lotto and come up with the cash?”
Jake pressed his lips into a thin line and exhaled slowly through his nose. “You know I don’t like to abuse my luck that way.”
“Oh, no!” She threw her hands up. “You like to save it for times when we’re being shot at.”
“Now that’s hitting below the belt, sweetheart!” Jake stabbed his finger at her.
Just then a knock on the door interrupted their conversation.
“What now?” Jake turned to see Sarah stick her head in. He noted that the fair-skinned girl seemed paler than usual. Instantly, the policeman in him kicked in.
“Sarah? What’s wrong?”
“Jake, is Dr. Dave still here?”
“Still?” Jake asked.
“I gave him and Average a tour of the basement earlier,” Sarah said. “They were headed back to town, but I hoped that he had come up here to say goodbye before he left and that I could catch him.”
“We haven’t seen him,” Rachel said.
Sarah swallowed convulsively. Her eyes darted from Jake to Rachel with a measuring look. Then she looked at the motley crew of wedding planners. “Well, then Rachel better come quick,” she said.
“What’s going on?” Rachel asked.
“It’s Mr. Prunella.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Rachel’s voice rose an octave.
“He sat down on a chair over in the gift shop and fell asleep. Now I can’t wake him.”