Wisconsin Wedding. Carla Neggers

upsetting Cliff wasn’t Byron’s biggest fear. They were brothers. Cliff had gone away because of his love for and his loyalty to his family. That much Byron understood.

      No, his biggest fear was of a slim, tawny-haired Tylerite who’d fancied herself a grand Victorian old maid at thirty, in an era when nobody believed in old maids. What would proper, pretty Nora Gates do if he showed up in her hometown again?

      Byron sat up straight. “She’d come after you, my man.” He fired his dart. “With a blowtorch.”

      The pointed tip of the dart penetrated the polished mahogany paneling with a loud thwack, missing Henry Murrow’s nose by a good eight inches.

      The Nora Gates effect.

      He was probably the only man on earth who knew that she wasn’t anything like the refined, soft-spoken spinster lady she pretended she was. For that, she hated his guts. Her parting words to him three years ago had been, “Then leave, you despicable cad.”

      Only Nora.

      But even worse, he suspected he was the only man who’d ever lied to her and gotten away with it. At least so far. When he’d left Tyler three years ago, Nora hadn’t realized he’d lied. And since she hadn’t come after him with a bucket of hot tar, he assumed she still didn’t realize he had.

      If he returned to Tyler, however, she’d know for sure.

      And then what?

      * * *

      “MISS GATES?”

      Nora recognized the voice on the telephone—it was that of Mrs. Mickelson in china and housewares, around the corner from Nora’s office on the third floor. For a few months after Aunt Ellie’s death three years ago, the staff at Gates Department Store hadn’t quite known how to address the young Eleanora Gates. Most had been calling her Nora for years, but now that she was their boss that just wouldn’t do. And “Ms. Gates” simply didn’t sound right. So they settled, without any discussion that Nora knew about, on Miss Gates—the same thing they’d called her aunt. It was as if nothing had changed. And in many ways, nothing had.

      “I have Liza Baron here,” Mrs. Mickelson said.

      Nora settled back in the rosewood chair Aunt Ellie had bought in Milwaukee in 1925. “Oh?”

      “She’s here to fill out her bridal registry, but…well, you know Miss Baron. She’s grumbling about feudalistic rituals. I’m afraid I just don’t know what to say.”

      “Send her into my office,” Nora said, stifling a laugh. Despite her years away from Tyler, Liza Baron obviously hadn’t changed. “I’ll be glad to handle this one for you.”

      Claudia Mickelson made no secret of her relief as she hung up. It wasn’t that Nora was any better equipped for the task of keeping Liza Baron happy. It was, simply, that should Liza screech out of town in a blue funk and get Cliff Forrester to elope with her, thus denying its grandest wedding since Chicago socialite Margaret Lindstrom married Tyler’s own Judson Ingalls some fifty years before, it would be on Nora’s head.

      Five minutes later, Mrs. Mickelson and the unlikely bride burst into Nora’s sedate office. Mrs. Mickelson surrendered catalogs and the bridal registry book, wished Liza well and retreated. Liza plopped down on the caned chair in front of the elegant but functional rosewood desk. Wearing a multicolored serape over a bright orange oversize top and skinny black leggings, Liza Baron was as stunning and outrageous and completely herself as Nora remembered. That she’d fallen head over heels in love with the town’s recluse didn’t surprise Nora in the least. Liza Baron had always had a mind of her own. Anyway, love was like that. It was an emotion Nora didn’t necessarily trust.

      “This was all my mother’s idea,” Liza announced.

      “It usually is.” Nora, a veteran calmer of bridal jitters, smiled. “A bridal register makes life much easier for the mother of the bride. Otherwise, people continually call and ask her for suggestions of what to buy as a wedding gift. It gets tiresome, and if she gives the wrong advice, it’s all too easy for her to be blamed.”

      Liza scowled. There was talk around town—not that Nora was one to give credence to talk—that Liza just might hop into her little white car and blow out of town as fast and suddenly as she’d blown in. Not because she didn’t love Cliff Forrester, but because she so obviously did. Only this morning Nora had overheard two members of her staff speculating on the potential effects on Liza’s unusual fiancé of a big wedding and marrying into one of Tyler’s first families. Would he be able to tolerate all the attention? Would he bolt? Would he go off the deep end?

      “Well,” Liza said, “the whole thing strikes me as sexist and mercenary.”

      Liza Baron had always been one to speak her mind, something Nora admired. She herself also valued directness, even if her own manner was somewhat more diplomatic. “You have a point, but I don’t think that’s the intent.”

      “You don’t see anybody dragging Cliff down here to pick out china patterns, do you?”

      “No, that wouldn’t be the custom.”

      It was enough of a shock, Nora thought, to see Liza Baron with a catalog of Wedgwood designs in front of her. But if Liza was somewhat nontraditional, Cliff Forrester—Well, for years townspeople had wondered if they ought to fetch an expert in posttraumatic stress disorder from Milwaukee to have a look at him, make sure his gray matter was what it should be. He’d lived alone at Timberlake Lodge for at least five years, maybe longer. He’d kept to himself for the most part and, as far as anyone knew, had never hurt anyone. Nora had long ago decided that most of the talk about him was just that: talk. She figured he was a modern-day hermit pretty much as she was a modern-day spinster—by choice. It didn’t mean either of them had a screw loose. Cliff, of course, had met Liza Baron and chosen to end his isolation. Nora had no intention of ending hers.

      “If I were in your place,” she went on, “I’d consider this a matter of practicality. Do you want to end up with three silver tea services?”

      Liza shuddered. “I don’t want one silver tea service.”

      Nora marked that down. “When people don’t know what the bride and groom want, they tend to buy what they would want. It’s human nature. It’s to be a big wedding, isn’t it?”

      “Mother’s doing. She’s got half of Tyler coming. Cliff and I would have been happy getting married by a justice of the peace without any fanfare.”

      That, Nora felt, wasn’t entirely true. Cliff no doubt dreaded facing a crowd, but would do it for Liza—and for her mother, too, who’d been his only real friend for years. But in Nora’s estimation, Liza Baron relished being the center of attention again in Tyler. It wasn’t that she was spoiled or snobby; she was still getting used to having finally come home to Tyler at all, never mind planning to marry and stay there. It was more that she wasn’t sure how she was supposed to act now that she was home again. She needed to find a way to weave herself into the fabric of the community on her own terms. The wedding was, in part, beautiful vivacious Liza’s way of welcoming the people of her small hometown back into her life. As far as Nora was concerned, it was perfectly natural that occasionally Liza would seem ambivalent, even hostile. In addition to the stress of a big church wedding, she was also coping with her once-tattered relationship with her mother, and all the gossip about the Ingalls and Baron families.

      And that included the body that had turned up at the lake. But Nora wasn’t about to bring up that particular tidbit.

      She discreetly glanced at the antique grandfather clock that occupied the corner behind Liza. Of the office furnishings, only the calendar, featuring birds of Wisconsin, had changed since Aunt Ellie’s day.

      “Oh, all right,” Liza said with great drama, “I’m here. Let’s do this thing. The prospect of coping with stacks of plastic place mats with scenes of Wisconsin and a dozen gravy boats does give one pause.”

      Gates carried both items Liza considered