Buried In Buttercream

everybody else home.”
    “Again.” He sounded as sad and defeated as she felt.
    “Yes, darlin’. Again.”

    “Who else has been in here?” Dr. Jennifer Liu asked as she looked around the luxury suite that was to have been Savannah and Dirk’s private haven, but was now the scene of a gruesome crime.
    Savannah stood on the opposite side of the corpse with Dirk, surveying the sad situation. Nothing looked out of the ordinary ... except the dead woman sprawled on the tile between them.
    “To my knowledge, just Madeline and myself,” Savannah said. “Maybe a maid. The bed had been turned back since I saw it earlier ... when I was in here, changing into my gown.”
    Savannah resisted the urge to look into the room, at the open closet, where her gown lay in a crumpled mess of satin, lace, pool water, and blood.
    “And, of course,” Dirk said, “the killer.”
    Dr. Liu stood, rising to well over six feet tall in her fashionable ultra-high pumps. She pulled a red silk scarf from around her neck and tied her long, silky black hair back into a ponytail. Her beautiful face registered the transformation from casual, carefree wedding guest to county coroner at the scene of a homicide.
    “Those are stab wounds, no doubt about it,” she said, pointing to the three wounds on Madeline Aberson’s back. “Those are relatively small lacerations. Not large enough for a knife, even taking into account the skin gaping.”
    “An ice pick?” Savannah asked.
    Dr. Liu nodded. “Something like that.”
    Dirk pointed to the pool with its water lilies, candles ... and gruesome red staining. “It doesn’t look like there’s a whole lot of blood in the water there,” he said. “Not enough for a person to have bled out, I wouldn’t think.”
    “Me either,” the doctor said. “But with that sort of a penetration wound, the fatal bleeding could be mostly internal. Depending on the trajectory, at least one of those looks like it could have pierced the heart itself. Wouldn’t have taken long if that were the case.”
    “It couldn’t have taken very long,” Savannah told them as she sat on a nearby patio chair. She was feeling far more weak and shaky than she would have admitted to either of them. “She left me there in the reception room to come back here and tidy up a bit. It wasn’t more than about six or seven minutes later when I came up here to get Grandpa Reid’s ring.”
    “That’s not much time for the killer to get his business done,” Dirk said.
    “And she was dead when you got here?” Dr. Liu asked Savannah.
    “Absolutely. I pulled her out of the water, flipped her on her back, and did some CPR. But it was obvious to me right away that she was past helping.”
    “What are the odds she drowned?” Dirk asked. “After all, if she was facedown in the water ...”
    “It’s possible,” Dr. Liu said. “I’ll know once I get her on the table and check the lungs.”
    Dirk left the patio and walked back inside. Savannah followed him.
    She saw a look of sadness cross his face as he glanced over at the bed with its carefully turned-down covers and heart-shaped candies wrapped in pink and blue foil on the pillows, along with a card that read, “Congratulations to the Bride and Groom.”
    He turned toward her and caught sight of the bloodied gown she had left in the closet when she’d changed back into her street clothes.
    She wished she’d thought to close the closet door.
    He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her to his side. “Dammit, babe, I can’t believe this happened to us again. The fire, the mud slide, and now this? What the hell’s goin’ on?”
    She looked up at him and read her own thought there in his eyes. Maybe it isn’t meant to be.
    But just as quickly, she pushed the dark idea away.
    “No,” she told him. “Don’t go there. We are meant to be together. We are ! We’ve just got some world-class stink-o wedding luck.”
    He laughed, but there wasn’t a lot of mirth in the sound. He kissed her on the forehead. “Fire, mud, and murder ... You think?”

    As Savannah stood on the sweeping lawn, watching her guests leave the country club premises—once again, not having viewed her nuptial vows—she couldn’t help uttering a couple of unladylike curses under her breath.
    Under her breath, because her grandmother was six feet away.
    Then she added, a bit louder, “You’d think that with a couple dozen of San Carmelita’s finest on the property, somebody would’ve