Happily Never After. Kathleen O'Brien

she wasn’t paying any attention to the freshly cut pieces, which were ready to be burnished with foil. Instead, she was listening to the ringing telephone crooked between her ear and her shoulder, and staring at a photograph she held awkwardly in her newly bandaged fingers.

      She hardly noticed the bandages. She always sliced or burned herself while she was cutting and grinding small pieces. If nothing required stitches, she considered it a good day’s work.

      Besides, the picture held all her attention. She hadn’t looked at it in years. It had been tucked carefully away in the pages of an old scrapbook. It was a picture of Sophie’s wedding party, taken the night of the rehearsal dinner.

      No wonder she’d been reluctant to keep it where she could see it. It was as potent as an uncorked vial of magic smoke. Kelly found that she could remember every moment of that night, as if it had been yesterday.

      Such vivid memories… The scratchy seams of her green dress, which had been a little too tight. The way they’d all laughed because the cello player was out of tune. The time Lillith had sprayed champagne through her nose when Kent Snyder told a vulgar joke.

      She remembered it all, every emotion, right down to the deep, scraping ache in the hollow of her heart.

      While the others had been laughing and drinking and playing silly games, Kelly had been counting the hours until Tom officially belonged to Sophie. Twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two…

      By the time the wedding party corralled a waiter and asked him to take this picture with Kelly’s disposable camera, it was one in the morning. Only seventeen hours until the wedding.

      Looking down at those faces now, with all the bitter knowledge of hindsight, Kelly thought maybe she could detect the turmoil seething under the surface smiles.

      Against her ear, the phone was still ringing. She hung up and dialed a second time, in case she’d made a mistake. As it began to ring again, she tilted the picture, to better catch the light.

      Nine young people. It should have been ten, but Samantha, the maid of honor, had been only seventeen, too young to drink and dance and giggle the night away with the others. She’d been sent home with her parents hours before the picture was taken.

      Which left just nine. Sophie and Tom, the bride and the groom. Sebastian, who was the best man. Three ushers— Kent Snyder, Bill Gaskins and Alex VanCamp. Three bridesmaids—Dolly, whose last name was now Tammaro, Lillith, and Kelly herself.

      All young. All smiling. But how many of them, Kelly wondered, had been hiding something that night?

      Kelly’s own sick guilt was fairly obvious, she thought. Her eyes looked shadowed, and she had her hands clasped in front of her, white-knuckled, almost as if the camera were a harsh deity from which she begged forgiveness.

      Sebastian’s head was turned away from the camera, but his jaw was set at a stiff angle, and his shoulders were oddly braced. It was impossible to tell whether he was staring at Sophie or Tom.

      Sophie looked gorgeous, of course, in her ice-blue party dress. But her smile was too bright, too fake, as if she were dramatically intoxicated, though Kelly remembered that Sophie had hardly touched her wine that night.

      Dark-haired Lillith was making a kissy face, just as energetic and full of spunk then as she had been until the night she died.

      Kelly shut her eyes briefly, unable to look at Lillith very long.

      They were standing just as they had planned to stand the next day, lined up by height. Dolly, the shortest of the bridesmaids, was on the very end, holding up her dress, because she’d just caught her hem in her high heel and torn it. She was glaring over at Kent Snyder, who, Kelly remembered, had just made a rude joke about Dolly, the clumsy cow.

      Kent had been very drunk. The photographer had caught him sticking his tongue out and holding up two fingers to make devil horns behind Bill Gaskins’s head.

      Alex VanCamp looked bored. None of them had known Alex very well. He’d been a special friend of Sebastian’s from college, and he’d seemed as if he could have been interestingly dangerous, if he’d found them worth the trouble of leading astray. Dolly had flirted with him, to no avail.

      Kelly remembered thinking how peculiar it was that no one in the wedding party seemed to be connected to Tom, not even his groomsmen. Should that have tipped them off? He had seemed like a stranger at his own wedding.

      Which brought her, finally, to Tom’s handsome face.

      This was the one face that should tell the whole story, and yet, even now, it didn’t. Gorgeous in his tux, he was smiling that familiar lopsided smile, and one of his eyebrows was arched, as if he found the whole thing entertaining, but unimportant.

      He seemed unaware of Kelly, of course, though just thirty minutes before she’d been with him in a corner, crying, touching his face one last time. But then, in a weird way he seemed unaware of all of them, as if he were alone in the picture.

      Sophie clung to his arm, her whole body yearning toward him. But his body wasn’t responding. Not a single muscle bent in her direction even a fraction of an inch.

      Still, though any stranger could look at this picture and see that the bride was more in love than the groom, Kelly didn’t think anyone would guess that, less than seventeen hours later, the groom would disappear.

      “Hello?”

      Kelly dropped the photo, shocked to realize that someone had answered the telephone. It was a woman.

      “Hi. My name is Kelly Ralston. I’m trying to locate Kent Snyder. Do you know if I have the right number?”

      A pause stretched oddly. “Yes,” the woman said finally. “This is the right number.”

      Kelly couldn’t believe her luck. She’d been trying all morning to reach any of the other members of the wedding party. She wasn’t sure why—just a vague sense that one of them might know something about the wedding lace she’d found on the roadside marker, whether it really was a match for Sophie’s gown.

      But they’d all moved away. Only she and Lily had stayed in touch. Tracking even one of the others down had proved more difficult than Kelly had imagined.

      Kelly wouldn’t have chosen to start her inquiries with the hard-drinking, slightly vulgar Kent Snyder. But she’d take what she could get. Though she’d left messages several places, this was her first breakthrough.

      “Oh, good. I’m sorry to bother you, but Kent and I—” What could she say? They hadn’t been friends, exactly. She’d spent a lot of time with him for the week of wedding festivities, and then she’d never seen him again.

      “Some years ago we were in a wedding together. I needed to get some information, and I thought perhaps he could help me. Is he there?”

      “No,” the woman said. “Look, what did you say your name was?”

      “Kelly Ralston.” Kelly thought the woman sounded edgy. Darn it. Kelly hoped she hadn’t stumbled into some kind of divorce tangle. “I was Kelly Carpenter at the time. We were both in Sophie Mellon’s wedding, ten years ago, in Cathedral Cove.”

      “Well, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you, Kelly, but Kent is dead.”

      Kelly was so surprised she couldn’t speak for a moment. Her glance fell on Kent’s picture. He had been a good-looking young man, in a thick-neck, not-very-bright sort of way. He’d been putting on weight even in his early twenties. His shirt was too tight, the buttons threatening to burst. And his face was already too red, flushed by alcohol.

      “Kelly?” The woman on the telephone softened her voice, though she still sounded edgy. “I’m sorry. I know it’s a shock. It was to us, too. It was an accident. Two weeks ago.”

      Kelly’s voice felt rusty, as if she’d been mute for hours, not seconds. “He had an accident? A car accident?”

      “No,