Aefle & Giesla Read online

  ***

  DeeDee McGowan sat in the bride’s room off the vestibule patting the sweat from her nose with a soft powder puff, her porcelain face and blue eyes a mask of serenity. But inside-- a battlefield, rage outpacing anger, vengeance galloping ahead of wrath, fury body-checking spite so viciously the referee of reasonableness dropped her whistle and quietly backed away.

  “Church looks real pretty,” said her only attendant, and best friend, Kelly Danforth. “And everybody’s here. We can start any time now.”

  Without betraying a shred of anxiety, DeeDee looked in the mirror and fixed a tendril of her white-blond hair under the frothy veil. “Is Buck here?” she asked, her voice a low murmur.

  “Sure thing. I saw him and the fellows pull up a few minutes ago.” Kelly smiled and stepped to the door, a bouquet of pink roses quivering in her hands. She was the nervous one. “I can check, though.”

  She didn’t need to. A soft knock at the door, followed by a man’s voice-- Kelly’s husband, Ron-- saying “We’re ready when you are,” gave them their answer.

  Kelly grinned, came over to her friend and, after placing her own bouquet on the vanity, helped DeeDee pull the sheer veil over her face. She then handed DeeDee a bouquet of white lilies and asked her to stand.

  “Oh, my, Dee,” Kelly said, tears welling in her eyes. “If your dad could see you…”

  Dee looked down, not liking to think of her late father. She wasn’t sure at all he’d approve of what she was about to do.

  “Could I have a moment?” Dee asked, swallowing.

  “Sure, honey. I’ll be right outside, ready to go whenever you are. You just say when.” Kelly sounded unsure, as if she knew now that something wasn’t quite right in DeeDee’s heart.

  ***

  Thomas really didn’t know why the couple in front of him insisted on glaring when he burped a third time. He’d excused himself each time. Quite profusely, in fact.

  “I’m truly, truly sorry,” he said, this time with a slight British accent. There, that should add an extra level of sincerity to my apology.

  When was this show going to get on the road? And where was his sister Megan? She’d told him she’d meet him here. Of course, he had trouble making out anybody without his glasses. The whole church was awash in colorful blobs, like something from an Impressionist’s painting. He squinted, trying to locate her golden brown hair amongst all the brown blobs. No luck.

  Someone was playing wretched music, and a woman was singing something about a rose. God almighty, it made his head pound. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.

  No, no, no. He was here. And he would slay Timid Tommy forever, if it was the last thing he did.

  ***

  After she’d left the ladies room last night, DeeDee had gone back to her party pleading a migraine and thanking everyone for coming. She’d gathered up the joke gifts and Victoria’s Secret presents they’d given her and then sat in her SUV in the blue twilight wondering what to do.

  Damn Buck.

  One of the reasons she’d broken up with Buck numerous times was his inability to stay true. She’d figured that he was past those wandering ways now that they were both in their thirties, but obviously, she’d been wrong. Once a cheater, always a cheater.

  With her lips pressed tight, she’d started her engine and headed for the subdivision of prefab homes where Gretchen Waters lived. Buck’s bachelor party had been the night before. He would have been at loose ends during her bachelorette shindig.

  Not so loose, she’d discovered. Pretty damn tight, in fact, with a certain Oyster Point shampoo girl. DeeDee had stood on the pathway outside the house and heard their moans through the window open to spring breezes.

  A final fling, perhaps.

  Did it matter if it was final?

  The man was a cheater.

  She’d felt like a fool. Here she’d been wrestling with her conscience about whether she’d led Buck on when she’d not really loved him… and he’d been double-crossing her the whole time.

  As she’d stood in the dark shadows, she’d considered doing something like slashing his tires or banging on the door to confront him in flagrante.

  Before DeeDee could have acted, a neighbor had opened his door to let his dog out.

  Not wanting a witness to her revenge, DeeDee had left.

  Driving home, however, she’d decided that witnesses weren’t a bad idea at all.

  “Sorry, Dad,” she whispered to the empty bride’s room now. “But a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do.”

  ***

  “Aefle the Minuscule,” Thomas was explaining to the couple in front of him just as he had to his party pals the night before, “wrote sacred and secular poetry in a time-- the twelfth century, to be exact-- when poetry was hardly a concept. Now, it’s not particularly good poetry, mind you. But it tells us a great deal about life during that period-- what people ate, how they dressed, and how annoying it was to be constantly in the shadow of Aefle the Greater.” Ah, how he enjoyed enlightening the masses. He burped and smiled. No need for apologies now.

  The couple got up and moved to another pew.

  “Really,” Thomas muttered. “That's Oyster Point for you.”

  He rubbed his head, which was beginning to feel like someone was slowly tightening a vise around it. He imagined a medieval torture device and shivered.

  Another couple on the other side of him moved away, too.

  He shrugged and sat up straighter as the vocalist started in on something about love being… there.

  He didn’t need to justify himself to these people, he thought. He was respected by his colleagues, not just at the university, but around the world. He’d done groundbreaking research, finding this Aefle the Miniscule’s personal journals hidden in the flyleaves of old manuscripts from the same monastery collection. He’d rocketed to academic fame right after his dissertation and landed the job at a prestigious private university as a mere pup in his field.

  He’d authored a paper “(Two Aefles: Identity and Contextuality in 1106 AD”) that had earned him worldwide acclaim. He’d written a monograph (“My Heart Is a Turnip in God’s Cellar: Platonic Romance in Aefle’s Monastery”) that experts had praised, and was now hard at work on a presentation for the next International Medieval Manuscript Scholars’ Conference (“Reading Between the Pages: Space, Place and Boundaries in Eighth-Century Bookbinding; A Study of Textual Violation.”) He was on his way, godammit, even if these bohunks couldn’t see it. He was but a hair’s breadth and committee meeting’s report away from full-blown tenure.

  God, his head ached to think of all this stuff!

  What was that? The music had stopped. The blobs had hushed. The blobs were turning.

  The organ was starting Wagner’s Bridal Chorus. Here Comes the Bride, Thomas thought to himself, squinting at the center aisle where some pink blob had sailed past and now a very curvy white blob was gliding into view. Why, that must be Wendy.

  Hmm… he’d remembered her as a bit… plumper.

  Well, good for you, Wendy, for trimming down.

  But there was something else about this white blob that jarred with his memory. He shook his head. Ouch. A mistake.

  He turned with the crowd of blobs to the front. That must be Corey up there. Ah yes, linebacker Corey. Big shoulders on that blob. Of course, that blob looked bald and Corey had quite a bushy head of hair… had he shaved it overnight? Had someone dared Corey to do that? Why hadn’t they dared him, Thomas, to do it? Oh, right, because he was already on a dare.

  Thomas couldn’t help himself. He snickered at the thought of what he was about to do.

  A blob shushed him.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he muttered, unable to suppress the chuckle in his voice. Oh, they all would be so surprised. Joke’s on you, he thought to himself. You villagers shall have to pay… with your silence. No more Timid Tommy! No more marketplace chortling!

  It gurgled up inside of him like a geyser about to blow. All through the op
ening prayers and the thises and thatses and the imploring the Almighty for peace in our time or whatever the ritual was, Thomas kept thinking of his eloquent speech before the crowd the evening before. At least, he thought it had been eloquent.

  Thomas giggled.

  “If there is anyone here…” the minister intoned.

  Thomas chuckled.

  “Shh!”

  “…who objects to this union…”

  Thomas laughed.

  “Cut it out, buster!”

  “….speak now, or forever…”

  Thomas guffawed.

  “…hold your peace…”

  Thomas shot up like a missile launched from the shores of North Korea into the Sea of Japan.

  “I object!” He waited, expecting to hear the Corey-blob give him a big congratulatory acknowledgement. “I most strenuously object!”

  Still nothing. Shouldn’t someone be saying something? Something like, “Well done, Thomas. You won!”

  Thomas cleared his throat. “Ha, ha… no more Timid Tommy, eh, Corey?”

  Sound was sucked out of that church so fast it was as if God had just used the great big Sweater Keeper in the Sky on the building. No pins dropped. No blobs moved. No organs wheezed.

  Thomas knew in that instant that something was wrong.

  He ran his fingers through his wavy brown hair to neaten it, surprised to find a few twigs of boxwood there. He swallowed. He decided this might be a good time to leave.

  “Uh… catch you at the reception…” he mumbled, stumbling toward the side of the church.

  But just as he made the aisle, he heard a woman speak behind him, cutting through the icy silence like an angel’s voice from on high.

  “Wait! I’m glad you objected, darling! I’m coming with you!”

  And the next thing he knew, Thomas had a phenomenally beautiful bride clinging to his arm-- a bride, he now realized, who was not his cousin Wendy at all but someone far better, someone he knew-- rushing him out of the church so fast his feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “YOU’RE… NOT…” Thomas managed to sputter as the bride dragged him into the sunshine, her hand clasping his arm as if it were a life preserver. Not Wendy, his cousin.

  She wasn’t paying attention to what he was saying. She was looking both ways, up and down the street, as if expecting a taxi to come by.

  She glanced at him now, her face a blur of pale skin and blond hair with the most intense blue eyes locking on him.

  “Can’t see,” he mumbled. “Glasses…”

  She reached over and pulled something out of his shirt’s breast pocket. “You mean these, Tom?”

  He grabbed his spectacles and jammed them on, blinking fast as his eyesight adjusted.

  “DeeDee,” he murmured, then swallowed hard. Of all the churches in all the towns in all the world, how’d he end up in this one? His father’s gossip came back to him from the night before. “That DeeDee McGowan girl’s getting married, you know. I liked her,” he’d growled, as if Thomas had ruined his father’s life when he and DeeDee had broken up after a fling years ago.

  A vision appeared before him, a goddess in white beaded dress, showing a generous cleavage and creamy shoulders, a childlike face framed by waves of white-gold hair. Good God but he had lucked out-- DeeDee had left the altar for him! Who cared about Wendy and Corey Bainbridge when he could have DeeDee McGowan, a woman who’d once stirred his heart and inflamed his passion?

  What a man he was -- he had merely to stand up and voice an objection, and she was ready to fall into his arms. The sting of hearing she’d been about to marry was now replaced by soaring euphoria. He hadn’t realized he wasn’t over her until last night, and then to have wandered into her wedding to discover that she, too, still pined for him-- this was kismet at its apex! He felt as if he’d won the Lottery of Life.

  “They’re going to be coming after us soon,” she said, still looking at the street as if deciding where to go.

  “At your service,” he said, bending over to bow. Not a good idea. Stomach started to flip over, too, and head was spinning. But then he glanced behind them and saw those blobs at the altar were, in fact, well-muscled men who were, in fact, heading toward them. His eyes widened, and his faced drained.

  She noticed. “Timid Tommy,” she breathed out on a sigh.

  “I am not Timid Tommy! I just proved that!”

  No, wait. The dare had rested on Tom stopping Corey’s wedding. Where was Corey’s wedding? Had it been canceled? Had Corey changed brides? Dad had said DeeDee was marrying… who? He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t think. He could barely breathe, his stomach and head now in open rebellion against consciousness.

  “I think we should be going,” he whispered to the air.

  But before he could finish his utterance, he was drowned out by a surprisingly lifelike bear growl, as the bald blob who'd stood at the altar lunged toward them.

  “You son of a bitch! What the hell do you think you’re doing taking my DeeDee from me?”

  “Oh, shut the fuck up, Buck!” DeeDee yelled back. “He’s not taking me away from you, you rotten double-timer. I’m taking myself away from you!”

  Thomas chuckled, remembering DeeDee’s fluency with blue language.

  “Why, you… ” Buck stepped forward toward Tom, landing a foot on DeeDee’s veil which trailed behind her. She gave it a good yank, sending him on his ass on the stone steps.

  “Come on,” she shouted at Thomas. “We better get out of here.”

  She was right. As they vamoosed down the steps and across Main Street, Buck’s posse of groomsmen exited the church doors, helping their hero to his feet and making ready to chase.

  “Get them!” Buck cried, pointing their way.

  “Shit,” DeeDee muttered, hiking up her skirt and dragging Thomas with her.

  “Look, I’m sorry about this,” Thomas panted, “I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding. Maybe I should explain to Buck ...”

  “No, sir, you will not explain anything to Buck. Not right now. I owe you an escape at least.”

  She paused at a corner and ditched her heels, then tossed her bouquet and the shoes, one at a time, at the crowd beginning to follow them, delaying their pursuers as they ducked to avoid the wardrobe bombs.

  “C’mon! I know this town better than you ever did.”

  And she did. She took them around a sharp right, through a narrow breezeway separating the Adult Film Store from the Christian Science Reading Room, into a scruffy parking lot, through a loose fence board, down an alley and past the hotel parking lot. She paused only once to get her bearings before heading off again, this time into a residential neighborhood of closely built houses in various stages of renovation.

  In the distance, they could hear Buck and the crowd calling her name, but she didn’t stop once until she finally came upon an old Victorian home with porch swing and neat flowerbeds, one Thomas recognized with a bittersweet tug. The house she’d grown up in. The house upon whose swing they’d sat together years ago.

  No time for remembrance. She dragged Thomas down her driveway to the separate old car barn in the back and gave a mighty push to open the sliding doors, revealing a gleaming black gas-hogging SUV.

  “Oh, sorry, don’t ride in SUVs,” he said. He’d signed a pledge at the university against the gas guzzlers. He was still working on what to do about the one he occasionally drove, his father’s big Jeep Cherokee. Megan had insisted he take over its care. At least he’d put a “Greed Kills” bumper sticker on it.

  “Like hell you don’t,” DeeDee said, pulling him to the vehicle and practically cramming him into the passenger side while she ran around to the driver’s seat. “I won’t let Buck Bewley tear you limb from limb, buster, even if you don’t know what you’re risking.” As she helped him with his seat belt, she asked, “Did you try calling me last night? I was at my bachelorette party.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” he mumbled, a vague memory o
f that particular dare coming back and not sure of his capacity for speech at the moment.

  Once in her seat, she grabbed the steering wheel and then let out a string of curses that had Thomas’s eyebrows shooting up, though his lips quirked. Ah, yes, the DeeDee he remembered.

  “Dammit, my keys are at the church.” She started fiddling with something beneath the wheel, though, bending over to rub wires together or do something that looked to Thomas as if it qualified as illegal. Another surge of admiration zinged him. DeeDee, the rebel. What a woman! And he had her. There was a God. He’d had no idea she’d carried the torch for so long. If he’d known, why, he would have …

  The engine roared to life, and she was pulling out of the driveway so fast he was thrown back against the headrest and wondering if he had suffered whiplash.

  ***

  DeeDee might have been able to lose her fiancé on the byways of Oyster Point-- she’d been a tomboy as a kid and knew all the hiding places in town and then some-- but there was only one big highway out of town, so she had to decide fast which way to go or Buck would be on her tail in his Corvette faster than she could say “runaway bride.” She knew he could outrace her in that thing. Speed was never her goal with a vehicle. Workmanship and durability were.

  “Where you live now? Same place?” she shouted over at Thomas, who was leaning against the window, eyes closed, hands clasping his stomach. “And if you need to york, could you roll down the window?”

  “Bal’mer,” he managed to mumble, his face a greenish hue.

  “Oh, crap,” she said, glancing at him as she squealed around a corner out of town. He was about to blow! She pressed the button to open his window just in time. A trip to the Eastern Winds car wash was in her future.

  As she headed up the road, she hitched up her skirt and pulled a delicate lace hanky-- “something blue”-- from her garter and handed it to him. He accepted gratefully.

  After skidding through a yellow light, she used her right hand to fumble through the seat divider container, quickly finding a bottle of hand sanitizer and a roll of mints. She tossed those at him, too.