Murder With Peacocks(104)
I grabbed a few hors d'oeuvres on my way past the buffet and trudged upstairs to Samantha's room. She wasn't there. I saw only Michael and the two little seamstresses staring out the window.
"Where's Samantha?" I asked.
Michael pointed out the window. I managed to find enough space to peer out over the seamstresses' heads.
"Dashed out without even changing," he muttered. Mother and Mrs. Brewster came in.
"So where is she?" Mother gushed. "I can't wait to see her in that lovely suit!"
It was a long driveway, but down at the other end we could see that Rob, still faintly elegant in his damp, limp gray morning suit was helping Samantha into the passenger's seat of her red MG. Stuffing her in, actually; she was still in her bridal gown, hoops and all, and he was bashing armfuls of expensive fabric down around her. God knows how he was going to find the gearshift under all that froth. He didn't even try to deal with the veil, just took it off, crumpled it into a ball, and shoved it down in the space behind the seats.
It was a lucky thing their backs were to us; they couldn't see the venomous looks they were getting from the two seamstresses. Or hear Michael sighing, "Oh, shit." I echoed his sentiments: what, pray tell, had happened to the bouquet throwing? We'd had a special throwing bouquet made, a slightly more compact version of the one Samantha had carried down the aisle, thereby nearly doubling the bouquet budget. Perhaps she'd held an impromptu throwing while I'd been looking for her. I peered down the driveway. No signs of a bouquet. But I did see Mrs. Fenniman pop up, apparently from the azalea bed, and begin throwing birdseed at them from one of the little lace-trimmed bags, and Rob was just getting into the car when--
"Where's Samantha?" Rob said, sticking his head in the door. Wearing his traveling clothes.
"Rob?" I said.
"If Rob's here--" Mrs. Brewster said.
"Who the hell is that?" I asked.
"Such language!" said Mother.
"Who the hell is who?" asked Rob.
"Who the hell is that driving off with Samantha?" Mrs. Brewster and I said, in unison.
"Oh, dear." Mother sighed. "That's very bad luck when two people say the same thing. You must both link your little fingers together and say--"
"Not now, Mother," I said, on my way to the door.
Despite the handicap of my hoop skirts, I won the race to the end of driveway, finishing a hair before Mrs. Brewster. Michael came loping along close behind us, while Mother and Rob, not being quite sure what the fuss was all about, finished in a dead heat for last. Mrs. Fenniman, who had obviously gotten rather heavily into the Episcopalian punch, still had a great deal of birdseed left, so she chucked some at us as we pulled up. But, of course, we were all too late. As Mrs. Brewster and I reached the end of the driveway, we could just see the MG disappearing around the corner. And catch a few bars of a Beach Boys song blaring from the radio. "I Get Around."
That's Samantha for you. Always a stickler for those appropriate little details that really make an occasion.
As we stood, dumbfounded, something fell out of the dogwood trees above us and bounced off my head onto the gravel. Samantha's wedding bouquet. I heard a burst of high musical laughter from the upstairs window and looked up to see the seamstresses bobbing back out of sight.
"So that's what she did with it," Mrs. Brewster said triumphantly, as if the discovery of the bouquet more than made up for Samantha's absence.
"You seem to have an affinity for these things," Michael remarked, as he picked up the now-battered bouquet and handed it to me.
As soon as Rob understood what was going on, he insisted on dashing after them in the first car available. Mine. Several other birdseed-bearing guests had arrived at the end of the driveway, and they and Mrs. Fenniman cheered and pelted him as he pulled out. As word of the--was elopement the appropriate word? Flight, I suppose, was more accurate. As word of the flight spread, most of the male guests felt compelled for some reason to drive off in pursuit. No one was too clear on who they were pursuing, Rob, or Samantha and her fellow traveler, who turned out to be Ian, the last-minute substitute usher. There was a great deal of coming and going as cars drove up to report on where they'd been and what they'd seen, or hadn't seen and then set out again fortified with food and drink from the buffet. Mrs. Fenniman and her fellow harpies stood around by the driveway, swilling punch and sniping at the passing cars with handfuls of birdseed, giggling uproariously all the while, until at last they reached the point where they couldn't open the little bags and began throwing them whole, at which point somebody had the good sense to confiscate the remaining birdseed. They tried to keep up the barrage with acorns and pine cones, but that took most of the fun out of it and they lost interest fairly quickly.