Chapter 1 #3
He narrowed it down to a Mexican place, a Greek restaurant, and a spot that seemed to specialize in Cornish pasties, and figured he’d let Delia choose from those options. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t really care where they went as long as it meant they were going out and exploring.
Just as he was returning his phone to his pocket, she came back to the kitchen, now wearing skinny jeans, some leather thongs, and a sleeveless embroidered top that looked vaguely ethnic to him.
A pair of silver hoops hung from her ears, and again, he couldn’t help being struck by how absolutely gorgeous she was.
“Ever had a Cornish pasty?” he asked, and she blinked.
“No,” she replied. “Are pasties in our future?”
“They can be,” he said. “There’s a place about a five-minute walk from the chapel. Or there’s also a Greek and a Mexican restaurant nearby if that’s more your speed.”
“Pasties sound good,” she said at once. “Might as well do something different, right?”
Yet another thing he loved about her. She was almost always up for an adventure, and she never seemed to complain or try to poke holes in his ideas.
Sure, if she disagreed with one of his suggestions, she’d tell him exactly why — and could produce the charts and graphs to prove her point — but she was one of the least “my way or the highway” people he’d ever met.
“Then let’s go check it out.”
He drove while she played navigator from the passenger seat.
The Mercedes had a perfectly adequate navigation system, but Caleb still preferred to have Delia guide them in.
She was the Las Vegas native, after all, and although she’d told him the Angel’s Dream chapel was fairly new and not a landmark like some of the other wedding venues in town, she still knew exactly where they were going.
There had always been the possibility that someone would be getting married right then, since weddings happened every day of the week and pretty much twenty-four hours a day in Las Vegas, but the parking lot looked relatively empty when they arrived.
He had to admit the place seemed fairly low-key in person compared to the neon-lit kitsch his mind had conjured up, and was instead a simple, pretty building, all white with a small steeple and a cross on top.
The website had said the chapel was open from nine in the morning until nine at night, and in fact, the door to the lobby stood open to the warm evening air as they got out of the car.
“We’ll just peek inside,” he told Delia.
“Don’t you think the people working there will want to know why we’re doing that?” she asked.
“Probably,” he responded, choosing to ignore the dubious expression she continued to wear. “But that’s simple enough. You can just explain that Olivia is your cousin and she asked you to stop by and take a look at the venue in person for her since she’s doing all this remotely from Chicago.”
This utter lie made Delia’s lips pull into a reluctant smile. “You think of everything, don’t you?”
He could only grin in reply. “Just call me the king of bullshit.”
She chuckled then, although she appeared serious enough once they reached the front door and stepped inside. Cool air surrounded them, doing its best to combat the warm breeze coming in from the parking lot.
Once again, he was surprised to see that there didn’t seem to be anything overtly “Las Vegas” and over the top inside.
Pale travertine beneath his feet, an electric fireplace surrounded by off-white stacked stone on the other side of the lobby, a couple of tastefully spare crystal chandeliers overhead.
A woman who’d been sitting on the other side of a white wooden reception desk near the front door stood as soon as they entered.
“Can I help you?” she asked. She didn’t seem too surprised to have a couple of strangers come in off the street, and Caleb reminded himself that a lot of chapels in Vegas allowed walk-ins, even though he wasn’t sure if Angel’s Dream was one of them.
“Are you interested in having a wedding here?”
“Oh, no,” Delia said hastily, then paused and sent an apologetic glance over at Caleb, as if realizing that she might have offended him by sounding so opposed to marriage.
“That is, my cousin, Olivia Gunderson, is getting married here on the thirtieth. She asked me to stop by and check out a few things in person, since I live here in Las Vegas.”
“Of course,” the woman said. “We have a wedding scheduled for eight o’clock, but the chapel is empty right now. Go ahead and take a look around — just make sure you don’t take too long, since the wedding party for that group should be arriving in about twenty minutes or so.”
“We won’t take long at all,” Delia assured the woman. “Thank you.”
And then she looped her arm around Caleb’s and guided him out of the office/reception area and into the chapel itself.
He would be the first to admit that churches weren’t really his thing, but a wedding venue like this didn’t have any overtly Christian iconography in its decor, just a few tall, stained-glass windows depicting stylized angels done in subtle pastels.
Once they were alone, Delia glanced around and then back over at him. “So…what exactly are we looking for?”
“Nothing in particular,” he said. “I just wanted to get the vibe of the place. It’s definitely not all Elvisified, so I guess I don’t have to worry about dressing like the King or anything.”
“No,” Delia replied, lips now twitching in amusement. “I think a nice suit should be fine. You might not need to wear a tie, though.”
That would be good. Temperatures had been inching up, and although they hadn’t hit triple digits yet, he was sure the local weather would be kissing the nineties in a few days. Not being strangled by a tie could only be a good thing.
“I wonder why they chose this place,” he commented, and Delia shrugged.
“It’s pretty,” she said. “And that part of the extended family is big. I think Olivia probably wanted to have her wedding someplace that was classy enough that it wouldn’t upset my Aunt Vicky, but was also out of the way enough that she wouldn’t have to worry about inviting the entire family.
Otherwise, she would’ve probably had at least three hundred people attending. ”
Caleb had to admit that sounded like a pretty big crowd.
No wonder Olivia wanted to duck out and have a destination wedding.
Sure, some of the family would be there — it looked as if the chapel could hold about a hundred guests — but having the ceremony here in Las Vegas seemed to guarantee that she wouldn’t have to worry about pissing off Great-Aunt Edna or long-lost cousin Eddie if they were somehow not included in the guest list.
While he and Delia were talking, they’d been slowly moving down one of the outer aisles toward the dais at the front, which held a white lectern and several white wooden planters filled with white rose trees.
Although nothing about the setup looked at all out of the ordinary, a certain tension began to grow in Caleb’s midsection, a knowing without understanding how he knew that something wasn’t quite right about this place.
Just as they reached the dais, the temperature in the room seemed to drop at least ten degrees. He looked up, wondering if they’d just paused under an especially industrial-sized air conditioning vent, and that was the reason for the suddenly icy breeze that seemed to blow past his face.
However, no vent was anywhere close to the spot where they stood.
Caleb had grown up with cold weather, but the skin along his forearms prickled anyway. He looked over at Delia, whose expression seemed serene enough.
It sure didn’t look to him as if she’d felt the odd shift in temperature.
And then the whispers began, at first so soft that again he wondered if they came from the ventilation system, just like the frigid air that seemed to have descended on him. They grew louder, though, surrounding him in waves of sibilant sound, of words he couldn’t quite catch.
In that same moment, Delia reached over and took his hand, fingers tight on his. “Do you hear that?” she murmured.
So he wasn’t imagining things. “Yes,” he said in a similar undertone, even as he kept his hand firmly wrapped around hers, making sure she knew he was there for her no matter what was going on. “Can you understand anything of what they’re saying?”
Face paler than it had been a moment earlier, she stood quietly and appeared to listen to the whispery voices surrounding them. “No,” she said after a moment or two. “Every once in a while, I’m able to catch just a syllable here and there, but none of it makes any sense.”
“Whatever it is, it’s not natural,” Caleb replied, and she nodded, fingers still clinging to his.
“No,” she said. Voice more strained than ever, she added, “Can we please get out of here?”
He didn’t even have to pause to consider her question. “Absolutely.”
Still holding hands, they walked away from the dais and toward the entrance to the chapel. As they went, the whispers died down and had dwindled to nothing by the time they stepped out into the lobby.
What the hell was going on here?
The woman behind the desk gave them a pleasant nod, but since she was on the phone with someone, it didn’t seem as if she was inclined to engage them in conversation.
Good thing, too. Caleb really didn’t want to try explaining to her that her chapel might be haunted.
He and Delia emerged into the warm evening air. The sun hadn’t quite set and cast a baleful orange light across the city’s hotels and casinos, their many windows glowing like charged citrine.
By some unspoken agreement, neither of them said anything until they were safely inside his Mercedes and he’d begun to back out of his parking space. Once they were out on Las Vegas Boulevard and heading south toward the Cornish Pasty, though, Delia looked over at him, wide-eyed.
“Just what the hell was that?”