The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) by Jessie Bishop Powell Page A

Bub to throw the whole thing off.”
    “Oh, she did
not
! Lance Lakeland, they can both go . . . sleep in a hotel for all I care. How dare . . .” I suddenly thought I might cry.
    “And I wouldn’t know any of it if Bub hadn’t warned me. He’s not going to do it. Not going to mess us up. She called him yesterday and practically ordered him to come in. Fed him some line about her own stress level. But then when he got to our place this morning, she had some scheme to crash everything. She was going to blow up your parents’ house.”
    Stunned, I started to ask, “How?” But I stopped myself. “You know what?” I said instead. “I don’t care. Not even a little bit.” The need to cry was even stronger now. “They can both go straight . . . home.”
    Lance blew air out his nose. “They can’t and you know it,” he said. “Or she can’t, anyway.”
    “I know nothing of the
kind,
” I shouted. My voice echoed around the pickup’s little cab and I deliberately lowered it. “If she doesn’t want to see us get married,” I hissed, “she knows how to book a hotel room and airline ticket for herself. And as for him . . .”
    “And he offered to leave, and I told him not to.”
    “Why?” Our rapid drive abruptly turned slow as Lance exited the bypass and we came up behind a giant combine. It stretched so far across the little two-lane highway that cars going the other way had to pull almost into the drainage ditch to avoid getting broadsided. There was nothing for us and the three cars ahead of us to do but slow down and follow until the combine reached either its destination or a pullout long and wide enough that it could let us pass.
    “I wanted to tell you all this earlier, but we got interrupted,” Lance continued. “Alex sees the same things you and I have been talking about ever since Mom got here. She goes off on these irrational tangents about things nobody can understand. She isn’t eating right, and she doesn’t seem to really realize where she is half the time.”
    “Oh, no.” My anger with Sophia turned suddenly to concern. I had interpreted all of the things Lance was describing as symptoms of my mother-in-law’s dislike for me. “I thought when you and I agreed she made no sense, we were saying something different.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I thought we were saying her behavior was rude and inappropriate. I didn’t think we were saying she might be ill.”
    “Not might,” Lance quickly corrected me. “Alex thinks her meds are off.”
    “Her insulin?” A lifetime of obesity had left Sophia with diabetes, even though she was comparatively thin right now. She also took thyroid medication.
    Lance nodded. “And . . . others,” he said. “Bub’s waiting for Dad’s flight to get in, and they’re going to get her to a doctor this afternoon. He offered to take off and let Dad handle it, because he knows how much of a problem it is for us to have him here right now.”
    “You mean because he doesn’t want to deal with it. And what
others
? Do you mean her thyroid drug?”
    The combine finally pulled off and we took our turn to pass it. Lance shook his head, but he didn’t answer me.
    “What others?”
I demanded, my voice low.
    Lance shook his head. “It’s . . . a longer conversation than we have time for right now, OK? I’ll tell you tonight.”
    I started reviewing every word Sophia had said in the last week with a new ear. Perhaps Alex could be useful in his stay after all, but I was skeptical. And I was still far more concerned right now with my own mother and her notoriously high stress level. I leaned against my window and let the topic of Alex and Sophia drop. We would deal with them later. “Right now, we have to talk my mother down from completely resewing my dress or having a crisis about centerpieces in the next twelve to twenty-four hours.”
    “Ah yes,” Lance said. “The dress.”

C HAPTER 6
----
    Lance wasn’t comfortable with my dress. He had only