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Chapter One

The victim generously waited to be murdered until the final vows had been spoken and we were officially declared married. And that’s pretty much the best thing I can say about my wedding.

Not that it hadn’t begun auspiciously. I used to be a wedding coordinator at Provincetown’s Race Point Inn—of which I was now co-owner—and so I had considerable experience wrangling vendors, petulant family members, and weather forecasts. And my partner Ali and I had reached an uneasy compromise with my mother in terms of the size and lavishness of the affair—no small feat, as my mother is abnormally addicted to big weddings. We were in addition juggling two religions and two cultures, as Ali is Muslim and his parents and extended family are all Lebanese. And we had somehow navigated all that.

What we hadn’t reckoned with, of course, was the body falling through the awning onto the terrace and, of course, the screams that followed.

***

“Sydney, you are not going to make this stop you,” was what Mirela said.

“Stop me from doing what?” I probably sounded distracted, mainly because I was distracted. The police, in the persons of a bunch of uniformed officers and my sometimes-sort-of-friend Julie Agassi, who was the head of Provincetown’s small detective unit, were swarming all over the place, putting up tape and directing people away from the immediate area. The rescue squad was there, too, though what they thought they could do to help a man who seemed to have broken every bone in his body and spread a great deal of his viscera around the patio was unknown. The wedding guests, in various stages of shock and occasional hysteria, had allowed themselves to be herded into the inn’s restaurant, already set up for the wedding dinner.

My mother was demanding loudly how such a thing could have been allowed and asking about suing the owners, apparently forgetting for the moment that I was one of them. My newly minted husband, Ali, was dealing with his parents, who’d seen more than enough of this kind of violence before they’d permanently fled Beirut and were dealing with some sort of PTSD shock.

And now my best friend Mirela was giving me… what? A pep talk?

“You should go now,” she said. “Leave for the honeymoon. You and Ali. There is no dinner. There is no dancing.”

“We weren’t doing dancing anyway,” I said blankly. After the initial shock, it was dawning on me that I was standing twenty feet from a corpse, wearing a bloodied wedding gown, and realizing—priorities being priorities—that I was not going to have, after all, a wedding feast catered by Adrienne the diva chef, who kept our restaurant’s Michelin stars intact and who has made P’town a destination for world-class dining. “This,” I said to Mirela, “is the worst wedding I’ve ever planned.”

She tossed the blonde hair escaping from her up-do—not that she looked any less gorgeous a little bedraggled—and peered at me. “Are you feeling all right?”

“No,” I said.

She took my elbow and turned me away from the scene unfolding on the terrace. “What you need,” she said firmly, “is a drink.”

“What I need is fourteen drinks,” I said. “But I should check on my mother—”

“The last thing you do is check on your mother,” she said. Mirela and my mother are not what you might call simpatico, mostly due to my mother’s criticisms of Mirela’s single status and her underappreciation of Mirela’s art (which earned her grudging respect only when she learned that the work routinely sold in the six-figure range).

“It doesn’t look like anything,” was her response to the abstract paintings that were now exhibited worldwide, and, “I don’t understand why she can’t find a husband.”

Mirela steered me to the bar area, already filling up with wedding guests in various stages of shock and all, apparently, requiring alcohol. She caught the bartender’s eye—a skill all the Bulgarians I’ve ever met have perfected—and he uncorked a bottle of wine and handed it across to her. She grabbed it without letting go of my elbow, and pulled me out of the restaurant and over to the small lounge area that had the advantage of having a door, which she closed behind us right away. “Here,” she said, handing me the bottle, and rooting around in a cupboard for a glass.

I was looking at the label in some dismay. “This is Châteauneuf-du-Pape,” I protested.

“Of course it is.” Her voice was brisk. “You need a drink.”

“A deplorable reason to drink this,” I insisted. It’s my favorite wine ever.

“Even more deplorable, sunshine,” said Mirela, “is that your guests will drink it if you do not.”

I sat down on the couch. I was understanding what romance writers were talking about when they used terms like “crumple.” I took a swig of wine straight out of the bottle, heaping blasphemy on blasphemy. “Where’s Ali?”

“He will find us.” She gave up trying to locate a glass and slanted a look over. “You are regaining color,” she informed me.

Which was more than we could say about the fellow out on the inn’s patio.

When the door opened, it wasn’t Ali standing there, but Julie, officious and sharp, her blonde hair and blue eyes making her look, always, like some kind of ice princess. “I thought you might be hiding somewhere,” she said.

I gave a weak gesture with the wine bottle. “Join the party,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes. “Are you drunk?”

“Not yet.”

“Then hold off.” She half-turned and spoke to someone behind her, and another cop came in, pulling the door closed behind him. He looked around the room, fast, the way cops do when they go anywhere, and found a straight chair and pulled out a notebook.

I know about what cops do. My husband is one of them. “It’s an odd word, isn’t it, husband?” I said. “Sounds sort of like a thump.”

Julie ignored me and said to the uniform, “Interview Sydney Riley, eight-fifteen pm.” She sat on a chair she pulled over close to the couch, snapping her fingers in front of my face. “Focus, Sydney,” she said.

I sighed and put the bottle on the floor. Not too far away, just in case.

She still wasn’t sure of me. “Can you go find Ali?” Julie asked Mirela, who nodded and slipped out the door. Even Mirela knows not to argue with her. “Tell us what happened here,” said Julie.

I was having some trouble focusing on her. How can you feel drunk on one swig of wine? “I got married,” I said. “Somebody died.” I paused. “Who was he?”

“Not one of your wedding guests,” Julie said, almost absently. She was looking at a list, probably supplied by Mike, the Race Point Inn’s co-owner. He’s frighteningly competent. “Unless he was a last-minute addition? Do you know someone named Barclay Cargill?”

“That can’t be a real name,” I said automatically, then realized she was serious. “No. No, I’ve never heard of him.”

“He was staying at your inn.”

I stared at her. “We have eighty rooms,” I said. “I’m not the manager. You really think I know everybody?”

“You may remember him.” She produced her iPhone, flipped it around a bit, then extended it to me. The man in the photo had dark hair and a beard that were starting to turn gray; what was most remarkable was that he was wearing a three-piece suit. People in P’town don’t wear three-piece suits.

Some people in P’town don’t wear much at all.

Julie retrieved her phone. “He’s an attorney,” she said.

She’d gotten her information remarkably quickly. “Okay,” I said. “So did he jump, or was he pushed?”

She was unamused. “You’re being remarkably flippant about someone’s violent death.”

“I’m remarkably flippant about anyone who gets murdered in the middle of my wedding.” I plucked at my ivory lace overskirt. “Just thought I’d remind you, in case you thought I was wearing this for a costume party. If he weren’t already dead, my mother would have killed him by now.”

She sighed. Julie sighs a lot when she’s around me. She’s even been known to refer to me as Provincetown’s answer to Miss Marple, and she doesn’t mean that in a good way.

It’s not exactly my fault that when someone gets murdered I end up having something to do with figuring it out. Julie thinks there’s some sort of cause and effect, but there really isn’t. I just know a lot of people—and it’s a small town.

But having a murder committed during my wedding? That was taking this whole amateur sleuthing thing just a little too far.

As though reading my thoughts, Julie said, “All right. You don’t know this man. Good. Can I take it that you won’t be trying to figure out what happened to him?”

The events of the past hour were starting to turn nasty on me, and I really wanted to be with Ali, not Julie. “No more than you are,” I said sweetly. It was a jab, of course: in Massachusetts, possible homicides are investigated by the state police, not the local force. I knew it was a sore spot with Julie, who thinks she’s better at it than they are. She can secure the scene, take preliminary statements, and assist the Staties when they arrive. “Is that all? Because—”

The door swung open and I’ve never, I think, been happier to see anyone. “Are you all right?” asked Ali. He didn’t even wait for me to respond. “She can give her statement later,” he said to Julie.

“She needs to do it while it’s fresh in her mind,” Julie said.

“Like most of our guests, she didn’t see anything until the individual was already on the ground,” said Ali. “She doesn’t need this now.”

“Maybe you two could stop talking about me like I’m not here?” I asked, my voice sharper than I’d meant it to be. Ali came and sat beside me, carefully moving the bottle of Châteauneuf aside so he wouldn’t knock it over. He knew I’d need it later; it wasn’t exactly an occasion for Champagne, despite all the Veuve Clicquot that Martin, the maître d’, had waiting for us on ice.

Not that Ali drank alcohol, anyway.

I slid my hand into his; for all my rather aggressive petulance, I was feeling a little lost and a little sad. It was finally dawning on me that someone had died. At my inn. At my wedding.

Ali looked, of course, wonderful. He annoyingly always does. He has beautiful dark eyes and beautiful olive skin and dark hair that curls ever so slightly and is always just a little too long, and designer stubble that makes him look sexy and a little dangerous.

Well, he is an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The danger is real.

Julie was giving up. She jerked her head towards the other cop, who closed his notebook, stood up, and left the room. “You may be needed later on,” she said to me. “Both of you, in fact. Should the state police have any questions about the individual.” Oh, yeah, I’d hit a nerve.

I liked that business about the “individual.” I’d come way too close to saying something about him crashing the party. It must have been the shock; I hadn’t had nearly enough wine to account for it.

“We’re leaving in the morning,” I said.

“You can’t—” she started, automatically, and I interrupted her. “Honeymoon,” I said firmly. 

“We’ll be back next week,” said Ali.

Even Julie Agassi knows when she’s beaten. She gave us one last stern official look, and fled.

“Well,” said Ali, putting his arm around my shoulder. “How do you like married life so far?

*** Excerpt from The Honeymoon Homicides by Jeannette de Beauvoir. Copyright 2024 by Jeannette de Beauvoir. Reproduced with permission from Jeannette de Beauvoir. All rights reserved.