Page 102 of A Dead End Wedding

I had to call Jake. Except everything in me rebelled against the idea, after what a buffoon I'd been around him. So I did the next best thing.

I called the cavalry.

"My baby! How have you been? How can you possibly justify not calling us last night? Your uncle has been a nervous WRECK worrying about you!" Aunt Celia jumped out of Uncle Nathan's Caddy before he'd even come to a complete stop. Then she ran over and hugged me so hard she nearly broke my ribs. "Isn't that right, Nathan?"

Nathan climbed out of the car at a more sedate pace. "Wreck," he agreed, grinning at me.

"Why, after we saw that the paper printed such outrageous lies about you, I marched right down to. Selma Macarbee andtold her that her husband was a doddering old fool, and that nobody had ever liked her peach cobbler. It is entirely too dry, isn't it, Nathan?"

"Dry," he said, walking toward us.

"Um, Aunt Celia," I said, peeling her arms off of me. "Thank you for defending me, but what does peach cobbler have to do with the article?"

"Why, Toby Macarbee is the managing editor of the Post-Union and has been for the past eighteen years, since the prostate trouble took that dear Mr. Ollo, hasn't he, Nathan?"

"Prostate," he said, giving me a big hug.

"And his wife always brags about her important husband, but she makes the driest cobbler in Claymore County, of course," she huffed.

"Of course," I muttered, looking to Uncle Nathan to bail me out.

He looked everywhere but at me, conveying "you're on your own, kid" pretty clearly.

Traitor.

"Well, don't just stand there and babble at the child, Nathan. Let's get her to work to find out what that old toad Brill is complaining about. I never did like him. He did that work on Margaret, and her gums have never been the same since, have they Nathan?"

He shook his head, then went to hold the door open for her. "Never the same since, dear."

Celia chattered all the way to my office, but I only listened with half an ear as I thought about my stalker. I really needed to call Jake and find out if he'd talked to Gina. It seemed a little weird that she would enlist a man's help to make that threatening phone call, but the way she looked, I had the feeling that she could get men to do almost anything she wanted.

Must be nice.

As we rounded the corner and pulled into my office parking lot, Uncle Nathan finally spoke in a complete sentence. "That's a big truck."

My jaw dropped open as I stared at the enormous gray and white truck blocking most of the parking lot. No wonder Brill had been upset. His patients had to park clear over by the eye doctor's office and squeeze past the big, burly men unloading . . .

"What the heck? That looks like hundreds of document boxes! I was hoping it was finally myfurniturethat had somehow shown up in the wrong place, but that is definitely not my furniture," I said.

As soon as the car stopped, I jumped out and ran over to talk to the men. "Excuse me. I'm December Vaughn. What is all of this?"

One of them swiped sweat off his red face with his beefy arm. "Lady, it's about time you got here. Although, signature or no signature, there's no way we're putting these boxes back in the truck. Gotta be seven hundred frigging degrees this morning."

I folded my arms. "Yes, it's hot. Now, as I asked, whatisall of this?"

He scowled at me. "Delivery from Langley Cowan is all I know. What do I care what you lawyers send to each other? Bunch of tree killers, every one of you."

Nathan and Celia walked up next to me and stared at the piles and piles of boxes. Nathan looked the surly delivery guy in the eye. "That's my niece you're addressing, sir. I'll thank you for keeping a civil tongue in your head."

The man narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth, then seemed to change his mind and offered a sheepish grin. "Sorry, man. The heat is just getting to us," he said.

Uncle Nathan nodded. "I don't doubt it. Celia, why don't you go inside and sit in the air conditioning and make some phonecalls? I'm going to run to the store and buy some cold drinks for these men."

All three of the moving men perked up a little at that. "We'd sure appreciate that. We're almost done here. We've already unloaded sixty-seven boxes and only have twenty-nine to go," the red-faced guy, who was apparently in charge, said.

"What? That's . . . seven and nine . . . ninety-six boxes! Is he insane?" I said. Then I remembered Addison's strange phone call to Max about "if we could handle it," and I got really ticked off.

"Thank you for your hard work," I said. "I'm going to make a few phone calls myself. Uncle Nathan, let me give you some money for those drinks, please."

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