CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 14
You Don’t Have to Do the Dress Rehearsal the Night Before the Wedding, Do You?
Mrs. and Mr. Winter are happy to see their son safe and sound but don’t agree with his insistence on not going to the police.
But it turns out our chorus of guesses in the basement were right. Most of the police force—such as it is 57 —is off island, and so even if Fred wanted to call them in, it likely wouldn’t do much good until a couple of days from now when it probably won’t matter.
I’m saying that like I know something.
I don’t.
Not at this point.
But no one’s feeling like doing a wedding rehearsal after all of this, that’s for sure.
“We don’t need to rehearse, darling, do we? We know our lines,” Emma says, walking arm in arm with Fred in a way that looks romantic but is really her half propping him up.
Fred insists that he’s fine, and they leave together to go back to their room.
“What’s that about?” Harper asks, coming up to me with Shawna, who looks stressed for a change.
Ha ha.
Stressed is her resting face.
“They’re skipping the rehearsal. Fred bumped his head and needs to lie down for a bit.”
“Oh, no!” Shawna says. “But I need them in their places.”
“Don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Is he okay?” Harper says, as Shawna says, “Is the wedding canceled?”
Was that a note of hope in her voice?
I mean, it probably was.
Because she has no interest in planning this wedding.
Not because she’s the one who hit Fred on the head.
“Wedding is still on,” I say with a confidence I don’t feel.
What I do feel is the weight of that cell phone in my pocket. The one everyone let me take from Fred, the one we’re all pretending doesn’t exist.
Fred has a burner phone like a drug dealer.
What does that mean?
I almost don’t want to check, but let’s be honest, you know I’m going to.
In a minute.
“What am I going to do?” Shawna says, twisting her hands in front of her. “Everything’s all arranged. We need to rehearse.”
“Hey, now, don’t worry,” Harper says, putting her arm around Shawna’s shoulders and hugging her close. “We can think of something.”
“But the photographer from People , and everyone...We need to do a dress.”
Harper gets a look on her face I don’t like. “Could we use stand-ins? Like on set. When they’re setting up a shot. We could even use Ken—that would work, wouldn’t it?”
“I guess?” Shawna says.
“But who’s playing Emma?” I ask, but I know who it’s going to be.
Me.
I have foresight like that sometimes.
Sounds cool, right?
It isn’t.
“I think we all know who’s playing Emma,” Harper says.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I can’t do a fake wedding ceremony with someone who looks that much like Connor. Not in front of Oliver.”
“He doesn’t look that much like him, does he?”
“Yeah, he does. I mean, look at them.”
Our heads swivel to where Ken and Connor are standing at the bar, ordering drinks. They’re both wearing jackets and dress pants, and their hair is cut the same.
They’d struck up a bit of a friendship on set, which I chalked up to Connor’s ego. Because, let’s be honest, who wants to be close friends with someone who looks enough like you that they can be confused for you?
A narcissist, that’s who.
But we all see it: From behind, they’re nearly identical. Same broad shoulders, sandy hair, and an agility that might be athletic but might also be from years of training as a cat burglar.
“It’s for Emma,” Harper says. “Your best friend.”
“Why do you care if the dress rehearsal happens or not?”
Harper nods slightly toward Shawna. “She needs your help.”
“You’d be doing me a huge solid, Eleanor,” Shawna says with a note of desperation in her voice.
“I mean...”
“Oliver will be fine with it,” Harper says.
“There’s no way he’s going to be fine with it.”
“Have a little faith.”
I should have faith. But I lost that a long time ago.
I search out Oliver in the crowd. He’s standing off to the side, glaring at Connor. Or at least that’s what it looks like to me. The girl who definitely doesn’t want to be pretending to marry a man who looks like Connor.
But that’s what I end up doing. The collective guilt trip from my sister and Emma and even Shawna finds me, twenty minutes later, walking down the aisle with a bouquet of fake flowers in my hands while Ken stands in for Fred. The cast and crew watch us from either side of the aisle, as I do that old half-step advance to “Here Comes the Bride.”
You’re allowed to laugh at this image.
I want to cry.
But it’s fine. FINE.
Oliver won’t look me in the eye, though.
Bad enough that the cover for this whole weekend was a fake wedding between Connor and Cecilia. To see it enacted out in front of him is a lot to ask.
I hope not too much.
I get to the head of the aisle, and it’s then that I realize who’s “marrying” us.
Inspector Tucci.
“Shawna, what the hell?”
“The minister couldn’t make it because of the—”
“Storm, okay, I get it, but him?”
Inspector Tucci glares at me. “I’m an ordained minister.”
“Come on.”
“He has one of those certificates to marry people in California you can get on the internet,” Shawna says.
“Why?”
“Something to do in between gigs, I assume.”
“I’ll have you know—”
“ Stai zitto , Tucci!” Shawna says with more aggression than I thought she had in her.
“No need to take that tone with me.”
Shawna turns to me. “Just go with it, okay? Five more minutes.”
I nod and step to Ken. He’s a nice guy who wanted more out of his acting life than being the stand-in. But he’s good-natured about it. He makes a nice living.
And sure, maybe sometimes people mistake him for Fred and he gets seats at restaurants he wouldn’t normally be able to get into.
You’d say yes to that, too.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are, as we say, gathered here today for the union of Emma Wood and Fred Winter.”
Someone in the audience laughs, and it’s contagious, spreading through the room like a yawn. Even I laugh as I turn to look at the audience and make eye contact with Oliver. His smile is strained, but he gives me a return smile nonetheless.
I gaze into his eyes, trying to let him know everything that’s in my heart in this moment.
That I love him.
That I don’t want to be walking down this aisle with anyone but him.
That I’m not wishing this was my real wedding to Connor, despite the appearances.
I think he gets it.
But it’s hard for me to know because as the laughter ripples through the room and then starts to die like a wave on the shore, the photographer from People stands in front of me and snaps a series of pictures with a flash that almost blinds me.
I blink the flashes away.
And when I can see properly again, Oliver’s gone.
57 Catalina Island has a small contingent of police, but no real detectives. Which seems like a mistake given all of the tourists and wealthy visitors. I mean, it’s just setting itself up as a murder location, isn’t it?