When Keisha married Ruben, she planned the perfect wedding—and the perfect wedding cake. But when an uninvited guest ruins the reception, it unravels not only Keisha and Ruben’s perfect day, but everything about their relationship.
Keisha’s mother always said Keisha led a cursed life, but she never believed in magic. So, when an unexpected event brings Keisha and Ruben back together again, Keisha must make a choice: hold on to her beliefs or place her trust in Ruben once and for all.
“After the Wedding,” by New York Times bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is part of the Happily Ever Afters Uncollected Anthology and is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook through various online retailers here. To read Kris’ latest Uncollected Anthology story, check out Helmie, part of Bewitching Love.
After the Wedding
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
It all went sour one hour after Keisha and Ruben finished their vows. Triumphant photographs taken, family organized in a tight groups, candles placed nearby for mood lighting, even the good Reverend Fisher smiling as if he had done something right.
Maybe he had. The day was beautiful. The sky so blue it looked like a painting, the sun warm but not too bright. Drops of rain remained on the newly bloomed pink heritage roses in the church’s two-acre garden. The caterer didn’t even think they needed the white tent that Keisha had reserved, although when she saw it wasn’t there, she had her mother request it be put up anyway.
And that was when they all heard the scream.
Keisha gathered her organza gown over her knees, kicked off her ridiculously tall, thin, and expensive heels, and ran barefoot across the newly mowed grass—once a cop, always a cop, she reflected later—butting guests aside to get to the woman in distress.
The screams were high and piercing, terrified and out of control. As she got closer, she saw some of the guests (groom’s side, sharing his dark brown skin and his square shoulders) standing, with hands clapped over their mouths.
She plowed through them as well, hands grabbing at her, trying to stop her from going any farther. But there was no stopping her, so the crowd parted, revealing the cake.
The cake. The one thing she had truly splurged on. Keisha believed that weddings were the point of the event, not the reception afterward, although she wanted to show her friends her appreciation. She believed in vows and marriage and happily ever after.
Not some drunken asshole, crushing her six-foot-tall chocolate, white, strawberry, and caramel layer cake, perfectly divided up so that friends could have a piece with just one flavor or with all the flavors mixed in.
She had spent weeks contemplating that cake, and now a man in a cheap suit sprawled on top of it, compacting all six feet down to two feet, the little bride and groom, sculpted by one of Ruben’s friends into perfect replicas of Ruben and Keisha, in pieces on the wooden platform the caterer had placed over the uneven ground.
Keisha stomped around the table, covered with ruined bits of cake. That asshole, whoever he was, owed her $2,000 for the cake. Maybe he owed her $4,000 if she added in pain and suffering. Maybe he owed her $8,000 if she counted the loss of one of her childhood dreams. When she’d been a starry-eyed little girl, she’d never imagined the reception after the wedding. She’d imagined walking down the aisle in the world’s most beautiful dress (check) to meet the world’s most handsome man (check) for the world’s most beautiful ceremony (check). Afterwards, she’d serve her friends the most marvelous cake ever.
Ever.
Dammit.
She reached the man’s side, about to grab him, pull him backwards and slap him so hard that he would both wake up and know she meant business, when she saw the knife hilt sticking out of his back. She knew from the location and the size of the hilt that this man was really and truly dead.
Not to mention the fact that he had face-planted into the cake and had been there long enough for her to run across the church yard, which meant that he might have suffocated in chocolate, white, and caramel frosting.
“Well, that didn’t work,” Ruben said from beside her. His bass voice, with hints of Georgia mixed with just a bit of the Paris of his school years, usually sent shivers through her. At this moment, it just made her mad.
She waved her hand at the woman who made the cake, a woman who eschewed the word “baker” for the name “cake artist.”
“Have you called 911?” Keisha asked in her take-no-prisoners cop tone.
The cake artist burst into tears. Keisha’s eyes narrowed. Shouldn’t she be the one sobbing right now? She was the bride, and this was her dream wedding, and she had planned for this idiot day for over a year.
But she didn’t sob. She looked past the cake artist, and found her friend Joseph, his eyes wide.
“Call 911,” she said.
He nodded, and with shaking hands, pulled out his cell phone.
Was she the only calm person here?
“No one leaves,” she said. “Make sure your friends and neighbors stay.”
She looked at one of the pimply faced ushers—some cousin of Ruben’s.
“You,” she said, “go to the valets and tell them no cars are allowed to leave. Don’t tell them why.”
The kid nodded.
She would secure the crime scene as best she could. The reception, clearly, was ruined.
Now, she gave Ruben the glare she’d been holding back. He still looked magnificent in his tux. It accented his dark dark skin. She loved that skin, its shine and its smoothness. She loved his high cheekbones and almost-black eyes.
Except right now.
“What do you mean, that didn’t work?” she asked, keeping her voice low.
He clearly heard the anger in it, because he raised his eyebrows. “The church,” he said. “Your mother had insisted on the church. Nothing goes wrong in a church, she said.”
Keisha raised her chin slightly.
They weren’t in the church. They were in the church yard.
His idea. He wanted the reception outside, weather permitting.
I can’t ask my momma to celebrate her only boy’s wedding in a dingy church basement, babe.
It was a compromise. One she had made for him. One she hadn’t thought through.
She turned away from him, saw her best friend Mattie, looking radiant in the mauve maid of honor dress she had picked out herself.
“Know any cake places that deliver?” she asked Mattie, because if anyone knew, Mattie would. She liked eating in more than she liked dining out.
Mattie tilted her head slightly sideways. “You want cake?”
“Everyone’s going to be here a few hours longer than expected,” Keisha said. “We might as well feed them.”
“The show must go on,” Ruben said quietly. But his deep voice was loud enough for the people closest to the table to hear.
She wished she still had her spiky heels. She’d stomp one on his ridiculously expensive Italian leather shoes.
“It’s not a show,” she snapped. “It’s a crime scene.”
In more ways than one.
***
It wasn’t that she didn’t care about the dead guy. She’d seen enough bodies in her career that she immediately snapped into professional mode.
Apparently, she should have sobbed and fallen into her new husband’s arms. Because, when everything settled down, Ruben called her cold, businesslike, unfeeling. She called him insensitive and unsympathetic. He called her an ice princess. She called him a horn dog. He called her frigid. She called him a sex addict.
They stopped speaking. They stopped frequenting their favorite restaurants.
They got a divorce, before they even had a marriage.
He got the condo they were going to live in together. She got the apartment they had lived in. He got the old bedroom set. She got the new one, untouched and pristine, waiting for the wedding night that never happened.
The marriage receded so far into the past that most of her friends had no idea she’d been married. They tried to hook her up with gorgeous men, or nice men, or men who happened to be both. She turned down all offers. She hadn’t gone on a date since her first date with Ruben years before.
If anyone asked why, she said she was unlucky in love.
But if her close friends commented on it, she snapped at them.
I’m cursed, she’d say. Let’s leave it at that.
***
The dead guy was one Maximo Severinus Cosima. She’d never met him. No one that she knew had ever met him, at least while he was alive. Ruben’s family seemed to have no ties to him either. The caterer hadn’t seen him before. The cake artist—who left the business after all of this—had never heard of him.
Apparently, he had wandered into the church yard, saw the gigantic cake, and died—added, of course, by the knife in the back.
There was no security footage, no one had recorded any video on their phones. The wedding photographers and videographers were inside the church, the caterer in the kitchen, the guests waiting in the lovely sunshine.
Maximo Severinus Cosima had simply stumbled in from nowhere, his last act on Earth ruining the happiest day of a couple’s life.
And yes, Keisha knew she was blaming the victim. She really didn’t care. She couldn’t blame the victim in most of the cases she handled. Victims were generally victims, often of random crimes or their own bad taste in lovers.
But this guy seemed to attract haters from every walk of life, and as the ranking detective on the case said, it was a miracle that someone hadn’t murdered Maximo Severinus Cosima before that particular day.
Keisha waved off most discussions of Cosima. She didn’t want to think about him. The man had crushed a cake as he died, and revealed all the fractures in a relationship that she had thought perfect. Stupid fractures in hindsight. Fractures that shouldn’t have caused a divorce.
She didn’t like reminders that she had done something wrong.
So she didn’t think about Ruben or Cosima or cake for ten years.
Not until the death of Jolene DuPrix.
***
Jolene DuPrix, all around gadfly and major pain in the ass. She’d been difficult in high school, always complaining in that nasal voice of hers that she had been wronged somehow. Her Bs in pre-Calculus came because Mr. Gyleen didn’t like her. Her failure to make the varsity cheerleading squad sophomore year was because she wasn’t allowed to be the top of the cheer pyramid.
She whined and bitched and bullied her way through everything, damn near getting voted homecoming queen just because everyone was afraid of hearing her bitch if she lost. (She still lost; she bitched.)
Keisha wasn’t her only friend because Keisha didn’t consider herself a friend. But Keisha, at least, talked to her. And continued to talk to her whenever Jolene called.
Jolene stayed in their small hometown when Keisha moved north for college. Jolene got a job at the old Andrew Carnegie library when Keisha got a masters in criminal justice. Jolene never became head librarian because she never got a degree. Keisha became one of the most educated new officers in the expanded Danica, Illinois, police department—big city police, because they were just south of Chicago.
Diversity hire, Jolene had sneered on Keisha’s Facebook post announcing her new job. Keisha hadn’t unfriended her, not after that, but she had asked not to see any of Jolene’s posts any longer.
And that, Keisha thought, was that.
Until Jolene died alone in her book-filled two-bedroom house, not even a cat to keep her company.
Jolene, who left everything to her “best friend,” Keisha Summers.
***
Keisha could have refused the inheritance. She knew how. She’d heard some of her lawyer friends complain about the vagaries of estates in the past.
But Jolene’s lawyer sweetened the pie with talk of collectibles and hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank.
Keisha didn’t care about the money or the stuff. She was going to turn the proceeds over to one of the police department charities after all. She had planned on giving it to Jolene’s library, but it had closed two years before due to state budget cuts.
She wasn’t exactly sure why she had accepted the inheritance, except that it felt wrong to turn the inheritance down. Keisha joked that the people who had known Jolene knew that the only reason she had accepted the estate was because Keisha was afraid Jolene would haunt her, whining for all eternity. But in reality, Jolene DuPrix had had a strange and lonely life, and the last thing Keisha wanted to do was reject the poor woman one final time in death.
Keisha hired an auction firm to clean out Jolene’s house for a percentage of the sales. She hadn’t expected to hear from the company until the auction was over.
But the company’s owner called her one rainy afternoon, asking her if she could come to town for just one day. He had found some strange things he felt she needed to see.
She went, and it changed her life forever.
***
The room looked like something out of one of those creepy (and usually wrong) serial killer TV shows. Blocked-off windows, photographs glued to butcher paper on the wall, bits of yarn between the images. All of the images revolved around Keisha, and had from childhood. There was even a photograph of a wedding cake, with Keisha’s little girl handwriting on it: Imagine this at your wedding!
The images were too much to take in all at once, but she saw pictures of Ruben, pictures of Ruben and Keisha back when they were happy, even pictures of Cosima, when he had been alive.
She photographed it all with her smart phone, then called the Danica police department, asking for one of the detectives who had been on the wedding case. Of course, he was retired. It took three different transfers and a conversation with the chief of police before she discovered that the Cosima murder had gone so cold as to be forgotten.
Only one of the detectives was still on the case. She sent him a copy of the photographs, told him the estate was moving apace, and he needed to get down here immediately. He texted he’d get to it eventually, so she called the chief back, and magically, she got another text. The detective and his new team would be there in two days.
She wasn’t going to wait around. She couldn’t be involved, since the death had happened at the wedding she wanted to forget. And now there were other ties, ties that if she were the investigating detective, she would be looking at closely.
The auctioneer wanted to know what to do. She told him that he had to leave everything in place and postpone the auction for one month. She paid him a little extra for the inconvenience, cursing the fact that she was dealing with yet another personal crime scene.
Then she went home, and called Ruben.
***
They hadn’t spoken since the day the divorce was finalized. Ten years and change. She expected his phone number to be different. She expected to use the police department database to track him down. She expected a woman to answer the landline when she finally figured out where he was.
Instead, she got Ruben: that bass voice still had hints of Georgia mixed with just a bit of the Paris of his school years, and it made her shiver. She even knew what the tone meant, just from his hello. He was confused.
“Ruben,” she said, surprised her own voice sounded so calm. “I didn’t mean to surprise you, but I thought you needed to know. They finally found a link between us and Maximo Severinus Cosima.”
She half expected Ruben to ask who Cosima was. It had been ten years. The name had haunted her, but it probably hadn’t haunted Ruben.
She expected him to ask what the link was. Instead, he asked, “You have time to tell me in person?” and her stomach clenched.
She hadn’t thought of that. The phone contact didn’t bother her, but in person? She hadn’t planned for it. And except for events that occurred while she was on the job, she planned for everything.
“Sure,” she said, surprised once again that her voice could sound so calm. “Where do you want to meet?”
“The usual spot?” he asked.
The usual spot had been a trattoria and bakery a block from the condo they eventually bought together.
“It’s still open?” she asked.
He chuckled, a deep rich sound that she had missed on a visceral level. “Open and growing. You won’t recognize it, Keesh.”
No one else had ever called her Keesh. When he had first done it, she had said that she wasn’t a food item. But he persisted, and she had found it endearing.
Until it hadn’t been.
That memory sent a chill through her. She didn’t want to be that woman, the one who visited with her ex, remembered what she loved about him and forgot what she had hated.
She almost said no, let’s talk on the phone. But it would be easier to show him the photographs than it would be to either text them or to describe them.
And, she had to admit, she was curious about his life. She had purposely refrained from searching for him on the web or seeing if he had a Facebook account or using her department resources to track him.
She hadn’t wanted to be that woman either.
“Tomorrow?” she asked. “Maybe six o’clock.”
“I’ll be there with bells on,” he said, and laughed.
***
He actually did wear bells, on the end of a little striped fool’s cap. It was red and white, probably a Christmas elf cap, and it did give his face an elfin look—even though he was over six feet and nothing about him was tiny.
That thought made heat rise in her cheeks.
The trattoria had grown. It had wings, where the owners had bought out nearby businesses. The bakery now had a separate entrance.
She had entered that way, and ended up—as she often did—averting her eyes from the large and decorative cakes. Even the cookies looked soft and doughy, with frosting covering them—all of it cakelike, except the actual Italian desserts lining one wall. Even the cannoli were pretty.
Her stomach growled as she found her way into the restaurant, worried that she wouldn’t be able to recognize Ruben after all this time.
And then there he was, fool’s cap, bells, and goofy grin. The man she had fallen in love with when she was twenty-five years old.
He stood when he saw her, and his movements weren’t quite as fluid as they had been back in the day. He was just a little heavier. The weight didn’t gather in any one place. It had thickened him slightly, as if someone had taken his skin and put an extra layer of fabric under every part of it.
She didn’t look the same either. Her hair was short now with a silver layer like glitter thread. Usually she liked the effect, along with the lines that had formed around her mouth and eyes. They made her older, more serious, not the kind of woman that anyone would ever mistake for a girl.
Now, though, she felt self-conscious about it. She drew her coat tighter, and stepped into the restaurant, glad that this section opted for dark wood paneling and somewhat dim lighting, except for the little lamps on every table.
Ruben stood, jingling the bell, and grinning, then he peeled off the cap revealing a perfectly shaped, perfectly bald skull. Her breath caught. His hair had been tight and curly, but thin, even ten years ago, but she had never expected this.
Part of her—the older, more realistic part—loved it. The young woman who still had the world’s most handsome man in her mind was just a little appalled.
She smiled at him as she came closer. He stepped to the other side of the table and pulled her chair back, still the perfect gentleman, the one who used to annoy her and charm her at the same time.
I’m a cop, Ruben, she used to say. I can handle my own chairs.
She didn’t say that now. Instead, she nodded, and was about to slip into the chair when she felt his hands beside her.
“Coat?” he asked.
She would have given him crap about that too, back in the day. Now, she unbuttoned it, letting him ease it from her shoulders and down her arms. He hung it on the back of her chair, then went back to his side of the table.
She almost said, Nice to see nothing’s changed, but everything had.
“You look good,” she said.
“You look even more beautiful than I remember,” he said.
Her cheeks grew even warmer. She hoped he couldn’t see the flush in the dim light.
A waiter stopped beside them and handed out menus, explaining a few specials. Ruben listened attentively, but didn’t open his menu. Keisha opened hers as her stomach growled.
She hadn’t expected to be this hungry. She had actually envisioned ordering a cup of coffee and fleeing before everything became unbearable.
That was probably the more sensible plan, but she was tired of being sensible.
She ordered a Caprese salad and some calamari. He ordered linguini with clam sauce. She had forgotten that was one of his favorite meals.
“All right,” Ruben said after the waiter took the menus. “Let’s do the dance. Married?”
“No,” she said. “You?”
“Only the once,” he said. “Boyfriend?”
“No,” she said. “You?”
A smile touched his lips. “I don’t swing that way.”
“You know what I mean,” she said.
“Yeah.” His voice had softened. “And no, no girlfriend, not for a long time.”
“You still live in the condo,” she said.
He nodded.
“I moved out of the apartment,” she said. She had a condo of her own now, not as pretty as the one they had bought, but functional.
“Still on the job?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I work major crimes now, hand-in-glove with the prosecutor’s office.”
Because she had a master’s in criminal justice and an interest in the law. And a closure rate five times higher than anyone else in the department.
“You?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Went back, got another degree. I teach now.”
“What?” she asked. “Business education?”
“First-graders,” he said, and gazed at her for her reaction. Which, considering his growing smile, must have been to his satisfaction.
She hadn’t expected that. Nor had she expected the ease of the conversation, as if they had just seen each other that morning.
The very thought made her uncomfortable. The waiter brought her salad—if a large slab of mozzarella, beautiful sliced tomatoes and fresh basil could be considered a real salad.
She put it in the center of the table and indicated that Ruben should share it.
“You okay if we talk about Cosima now?” she asked.
His smile faded. “I would love to pretend that Cosima never existed. They ever figure out why that bastard ruined our wedding?”
“No,” she said, “but at least they have a connection now.”
And then she explained it. She had to tell him about Jolene, although nothing could quite convey that the grating annoyance everyone felt around her. Then Keisha told him about the inheritance and stopped him from asking questions about it. She still didn’t want to examine her entire motivation, not yet.
Finally, she got to that strange room, and all of the photographs.
She showed him the pictures she had taken on her cell phone, but they didn’t convey the creep factor quite the way she wanted them to.
Even so, he had gone gray.
“She stalked you,” he said.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Keisha said. “She never left our hometown.”
“Not all of these look like they came from online,” he said. “Particularly the photos of us. I’ve never seen some of them.”
“Well, you are looking at a photo of photos,” Keisha said, trying to keep her tone light.
But he was having none of it. He shook his head. “These are candid shots, babe,” he said. “Someone was following us. Whether it was her or she paid them, I don’t know. But there’s no way—”
“She’s dead now, Ruben,” Keisha said. “It doesn’t really matter.”
He set Keisha’s phone down.
“It does matter,” he said. “That woman ruined our lives.”
That was the feeling Keisha had been trying to suppress. An anger at the woman who had tied them, somehow, to Maximo Severinus Cosima. And probably instigated something that led to his death at their wedding.
“That’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?” Keisha asked, mostly because she didn’t like how she was feeling.
“No,” he said quietly. “Maybe she didn’t ruin your life. But that day, that beautiful horrible day, I’ve never recovered from it, Keesh. So maybe I was wrong. Maybe your life is just fine. But mine, mine will never be the same.”
Keisha nodded, not trusting her voice. Then she swallowed hard. “It’s in the past now, Ruben,” she said.
“Maybe for you,” he said. “Maybe for you.”
***
They didn’t talk much more during the meal. She didn’t know how to respond to Ruben’s declaration. It was in the past, and it was tragic—not just a man’s death, but their reaction to it. They had been young, and they hadn’t handled a weird occurrence on their day well at all.
It had split them apart. There was no reason something like that should have ended their marriage, and yet it had.
Ruben finished his clam linguini before she finished her calamari. He pushed the plate aside. She expected him to make apologies, get up, and leave.
Instead, he folded his large hands together and leaned forward. “Did your detectives ever investigate the church?”
“They’re not my detectives,” she said and immediately wished she could take back. She sounded just like the surly girl who had appeared at the ruined reception. “I mean, I could never work with those detectives. I was involved in the case. They actually had to clear me.”
He nodded. “I remember, babe,” he said. “I’m sorry. I phrased that badly. Did anyone ever look into the church?”
“Why?” she asked.
He shrugged, but she knew that gesture. It was a pretend-casual gesture, when in reality he wasn’t being casual at all.
“I just thought about it occasionally over the years. It wasn’t our church. We didn’t know anyone involved until we chose it. Your mom didn’t know anyone either, right?”
Keisha’s mother had given them a list of churches. She had starred that one because it was one of the oldest in the city. It had been cleared repeatedly by her mother’s friends.
Keisha shook her head. “She didn’t know anyone.”
There was a lot of weight behind her words—and they both knew it. Her mother had been extremely superstitious. She had always believed Keisha was cursed, something Keisha loathed.
The wedding, her mother used to say, proved her point. Things like that only happened to cursed people. The divorce, her mother used to say, was no surprise—not because Keisha and Ruben didn’t love each other, but because cursed people could never be happy.
Keisha had stopped speaking to her mother after the wedding debacle. Her mother died a few years after that, and Keisha hadn’t even gone to the funeral.
And yet now, there was evidence that Keisha had had a stalker, and had had one her entire life. In her mother’s old-fashioned world—then Keisha shook her head. She might as well be honest about it. In her mother’s world, where witchcraft was real, the actions of a stalker could easily be seen as a curse.
“What?” Ruben asked. Apparently he could still read her expressions as well.
Keisha lightly tapped the side of her phone, careful not to turn it back on.
She said angrily, “It fucking looks like Mom was right.”
***
Keisha had resolutely not believed in curses. Or magic. She had repeatedly told her mother that she only believed in human agents causing human mayhem.
Her mother always countered with the fact that witches were human, and they sometimes used the magic for human mayhem.
As she got older, Keisha would claim she had never seen a magical spell that would be provable in court.
Her mother claimed there was more than one kind of court.
And then there was the blow-up fight, not long after she split with Ruben.
You say I’m cursed, Mother, Keisha had shouted, because you don’t like me. You never have. You never saw my successes, only my failures. And those you blamed on an outside agency rather than helping me through them. I’m not cursed. Maybe you consider yourself cursed because you had me.
Keisha hadn’t waited for the answer to that. She hadn’t wanted to hear it.
And those words were the last she had ever spoken to her mother—at least face to face.
“The church,” Ruben said into the long silence, “was supposed to protect us, like holy water against vampires or something.”
Keisha nodded. “Mom said we screwed up by being outside. We should have stayed in the basement. The reception was in the open, a place where magic could sneak in, and did.”
“Magic,” he said softly. “Do you believe that?”
“I believe Mom believed it,” Keisha said. “And I had a stalker, clearly I did. Mom told me in the only way she knew how, and I couldn’t hear her.”
“So you didn’t answer my question,” Ruben said. “Did anyone investigate the church?”
“In what way?” Keisha asked.
“Cosima’s connection to it, for one thing,” Ruben said. “He’s kind of the lost detail here. I never really got a sense of him.”
Keisha frowned. “Neither did I.”
***
Somehow they ended up in her condo. The excuse was that she had her department laptop there, and she had set up her Internet connection with several layers of encryption (with the help of the department techs) so she could sometimes work at home.
But, as they took a cab from the trattoria, she wondered if that had been some kind of excuse. Maybe they should have gone to the department, talking to the one cop still on the case, and given him the details of their suspicions.
While she set up her laptop on the kitchen table, Ruben walked around the condo’s living area. It was L-shaped, flowing from the small living room to the dining area (right next to the windows with a real city view) to the kitchen.
Fortunately, she had left it somewhat clean. She never used the living room, so there was space to sit on the soft couch, and very little clutter on the end tables. The dining room table was another matter. Stacked with everything from mail to books she meant to read, there was only one small area where she sat down to eat.
The gigantic TV, which pivoted so it could be viewed from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen spoke of a single woman who spent most of her time alone.
She hadn’t really realized how small the condo was until Ruben entered it. He looked like a giant in a hobbit village, moving cautiously around the tiny things. He would bump a shelf, then catch something that started to fall with his fingers, his movements elegant.
Maybe she had rented this place because she had known, subconsciously, that it was too small to contain him. Maybe it had been too small to handle her memories of him as well.
She didn’t like that thought, so she looked at the computer instead. She entered her badge number and logged into the system. The old case file was new enough to be computerized. It had photos of the body on the crushed cake, which made her stomach turn.
She looked at the access log and saw that no one had looked at the file since her call the day before. That didn’t mean anything: Most detective divisions still kept a paper murder book for each homicide, so the detectives could have looked at that. But the online file was better: It was actually searchable, even old ones like this, and most of the younger detectives preferred that.
If the remaining detective had assigned a new team to this, more likely it was that they would log on to read the murder book, rather than read the paper version.
She sighed and made a mental note to call the auctioneer. She would have him check on the house, to make sure the detectives actually showed up to the detect like they had promised.
They would complain that she looked at the file, especially since hers was the only access the file had had in ten years. She didn’t like that either: this case—this event— (God, she almost thought, had ruined her life. Did she believe that or had Ruben put that thought into her head?) had changed her life, and no one considered it worth their time to investigate? That broke her heart.
She glanced up at Ruben. He looked at her at the same time, as if there was some kind of rule that their gazes had to meet. Her heart leapt as she looked at him, and she wanted to slap it down. Traitor. She shouldn’t feel like a giddy young girl just being around him again. She wasn’t a giddy young girl. Besides, they didn’t know each other at all any more. They had grown apart, if they had ever been together.
Still, she gave him an awkward little smile, and went back to digging.
The detectives had done a cursory job on Cosima. He had been a neighborhood regular. He was considered crazy, the kind of man who walked around, shouting his own name and banging himself on the chest as he did so, as if reaffirming his own identity.
They assumed he was homeless at the time of his death (because he usually was homeless) and that he had been drawn to the wedding reception because of the food. The butcher knife belonged to the caterer, so the detectives assumed that someone had seen him too close to the food, gotten in an altercation with him, and stabbed him, probably because they felt threatened.
All of the catering staff and the cake artist herself had been examined closely by the detectives and the forensic team, even checked with ultraviolet light to see if they had washed off any recent blood. Some of them had old blood on their clothing, particularly the head caterer, because she worked with knives a lot.
But nothing had tied them, or anyone else at the wedding, to Cosima.
“They never checked,” she muttered.
“What?” Ruben had been staring at the books on her living room shelves, clasped behind his back so that he didn’t knock anything loose.
“The detectives. They didn’t really delve into Cosima’s life, and they never examined whether or not he had a connection to the church.” She scrolled through the files. “And they didn’t interview the good Reverend Fisher either.”
Ruben shuddered visibly. “I didn’t like that man.”
“So you said at the time.” She kept her gaze on the laptop. Ruben’s strong dislike of Reverend Fisher had been one of the few points of contention before the wedding.
Shouldn’t we be married by someone we like? he asked more than once.
When did liking an official become a prerequisite for marriage? Keisha had said in response.
“Is he still at the church?” Ruben asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. She opened a new window on her browser and Googled the church name. It showed up as an active listing in three other communities, but not this one. So she refined the search to this city only and tried again.
She got several hits, all of them from the media, some of them concerning the death at her wedding. One of the listings at the bottom of the first page was from website about abandoned, forgotten, and decommissioned church buildings.
She swore softly.
“What?” Ruben asked again. This time, he pushed his way over to her spot at the table, and managed to squeeze himself in the small space behind her.
She clicked on that website. It was garish, with scary jagged font, and as she read the first page, explaining that she was about to go where no human should go, the words started dripping fake blood.
“Nice,” Ruben said sarcastically. “Why are we on this site?”
She didn’t answer him. Instead, she typed the name of the church in the website search function. The site gave her a sub link, which she clicked on, and she found herself staring at a photograph of the church.
Its stained glass windows were boarded up and there was a lock on the door. Even though the photograph had been taken on a bright sunny day, the church itself had been in shadow.
“That photograph is twenty years old,” Ruben said.
Keisha leaned toward the image. He was right. The church looked ready for teardown ten years before they used it.
She clicked through the write-up about the church.
Decommissioned in 1880, the church has been the focus of several strange incidents in the past two centuries. Most of the incidents are the standard moving lights in a boarded-up building, although some witnesses have claimed to see the church at its height, a congregation inside, worshipping and singing hymns.
Some of the incidents come from the church’s reputation, including rituals gone awry. And some come from the fact that the authorities can’t keep the homeless out of the church, particularly on cold winter nights.
The church has been slated for demolition dozens of times since its decommissioning, but something has always prevented the teardown. Several owners have bought and sold the place over the years, the most recent a paranormal activities company (see sidebar) that hired the church for ceremonies.
The company came under scrutiny after a man died at a pagan wedding—
“Look at the date.” Ruben’s fingertip touched the very part of the window Keisha had just been reading. “That’s our wedding. It wasn’t a pagan ceremony.”
She let out a small breath and slid the chair back. “Well,” she said. “It kind of was.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “Your mother.”
Keisha put her hand on the lid of the laptop, closed it without logging off, and kicked the chair opposite her out, to indicate that Ruben should sit down.
He did, his jaw clenched.
“My mother wanted us in a church to protect us from evil spirits,” Keisha said. “I told her I wasn’t religious—”
“I remember,” Ruben said.
“—and she said not to worry, she would handle it. That’s when she gave us—”
“The list,” Ruben said. “And we drove by. But the church we saw looked nothing like the photographs online here.”
Keisha nodded, not liking the floaty feeling in her head. She’d had a similar feeling in Jolene’s house, looking at the strange room.
“And it was nice inside,” Ruben said, but his voice rose slightly.
“It was,” Keisha said, “but remember how everyone said they were surprised by the interior?”
“Yeah.” He barely moved his lips as he said that word. He was coming to the same conclusion she was.
Or was he? He hadn’t grown up with a mother who claimed she was a witch.
“Maybe we didn’t see the exterior as it was,” Keisha said. “Maybe…”
“That’s not possible,” Ruben said forcefully. Then he took a deep breath. “Is it?”
Keisha squared her shoulders and opened the laptop.
“Time to find out,” she said.
***
Most of the police photographs of the crime scene were of the cake and the catering area. As Keisha looked at them, she remembered the caterers complaining about the primitive kitchen, the horrid facility, the lack of cleanliness. That was why they insisted on having the food outside if possible. That way, they could use their own equipment, the equipment they brought to outside weddings away from any regular kitchen.
Keisha had thought nothing of it, just as she had thought nothing of the cake artist’s comment that she couldn’t handle the gloom. Keisha thought anyone who called herself a “cake artist” was by definition a flake, even if she created the best cakes Keisha had ever tasted.
Only one of the crime scene photos was an exterior shot and it was of the back. The windows that Keisha remembered as plain, leading into the kitchen, were boarded up.
She frowned.
“Do you remember this?” she asked, tapping that photo.
He shook his head. “Those windows were open. Because of the heat in the kitchen. Remember?”
She nodded.
Then she opened another new browser window and did something she had never done before: she Googled the media coverage from her wedding day.
Article after article appeared. She clicked on the first listing, saw the photograph, and put her hand over her eyes. The church looked just like the church on the website, windows boarded up, door hung crookedly.
And sure enough, the headline was excruciating.
Man Dies at Pagan Wedding
No wonder the police weren’t investigating this the way they would investigate a random death at a wedding. They were looking at it as if a ritual had gone wrong.
And when they found nothing, they were ready to move onto something else.
Ruben’s hand covered hers. His skin was warm, dry, and slightly callused.
When she didn’t move, he scooted his chair across the wooden floor, and put his arms around her. She rested her head on his shoulder. She had missed that. She had missed being held. She had missed being held by him.
“My mother was right,” Keisha said into his shirt. “Our wedding was cursed.”
“By her, maybe,” Ruben said.
Keisha shook her head slightly. Finally something made sense. Her mother hated organized religion. The fact that she had insisted on a church wedding had made no sense to Keisha.
But a wedding in a decommissioned church would allow some of the religious protections mixed with pagan ones. Pagan and Christian rituals often intermingled. Keisha’s mother had explained that a thousand times.
She must have thought that the intermingling would guarantee strength—and maybe it had.
For Jolene.
“Keesh, look.” Ruben stroked her hair, then moved slightly. She raised her head, and looked at the screen.
He touched part of the article.
…murder of Gerald Rossi, a homeless man who went by the name Maximo Severinus Cosima. Despite neighborhood attempts to roust him, Rossi saw the church as his home and would fight with anyone who came inside. No one reported seeing him at the wedding ceremony, however, although neighbors wondered how everyone managed to avoid him…
There it was in black and white. Cosima’s connection to the church. The wedding party had invaded his home.
“Someone didn’t want us to get married,” Ruben said. “Your mother?”
Keisha shook her head. “If Mom didn’t want us to be married, she could have stopped it a lot of other ways. This wasn’t about us failing to get married. This was about ruining the marriage.”
Ruining her life. And his.
She leaned against him, and he put his arm around her.
All of her life, she had denied the existence of magic. She had believed in reality, a dry, harsh reality with no magic at all.
But if she had been honest with herself, the first time she ever saw magic had been when she met Ruben. Not because he had any. But because of the way they felt together.
He reached around her and clicked the back button on the computer. It took them to Google again, and he clicked on another article. There the Reverend Fisher’s picture showed up, not as a reverend at all, but as the man who owned the church.
Head of the Society of Paranormal Properties, Reginald Fisher, said he had no idea that the wedding—which he officiated—would end so badly…
Keisha let out a small sigh. “It was all here. I just hadn’t wanted to look. I cut off my mother because she said I was cursed—”
“From birth,” Ruben said. “She was a nasty woman, Keesh. I never wanted to tell you that, but she was. That’s why I thought she had cursed us.”
Keisha shook her head again. “Jolene did. You never knew her. But her mother was part of a coven my mother refused to acknowledge. My mother said they used their magic for the wrong things.”
“Your mother used hers to make sure we thought we were in a real church,” Ruben said.
Keisha looked up at the side of his face. He was still staring at the screen, clicking through.
“I didn’t think you believed in magic,” she said.
“Your mother talked to me about it,” he said. “She showed me a few things. After a while, I believed her. I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“I didn’t want her infecting you,” Keisha said.
“She didn’t,” Ruben said. “I’m glad she told me. I understand this now. You don’t have to convince me.”
“But I have to convince me,” Keisha said. “We have to look at everything, detail by detail.”
And so they did.
***
She took the first leave of absence from her job that she had ever taken. She claimed bereavement leave, because of inheriting Jolene’s estate. The chief questioned her, asking if she had cared for Jolene.
“No,” Keisha said. “I just have to process what she was doing, and why she left everything to me.”
Even though that was a lie. She knew why Jolene had left her everything. It was the ultimate fuck-you. Keisha hadn’t figured out that Jolene and her mother had wormed their way into the Society of Paranormal Properties. Keisha hadn’t seen any of the dark magic spells that Jolene had done, the curses large and small, starting from the moment they were in kindergarten together.
Jolene’s mother had picked Keisha for Jolene to practice her spells on, and Jolene had done so with a vengeance. Which explained some of the whining. Keisha often succeeded despite the curses. She liked to think she had done that on her own, but her mother might have had some involvement.
Or maybe not.
It was too late to know what changes in Keisha’s life were because of curses or because of counter spells. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
She mentioned that to Ruben one afternoon as they finished going through yet another pile of documents found in Jolene’s home. Spell after spell, curses from a variety of magical cultures, some of them in the form of dolls and some of them in the form of spices.
“I hate thinking that we could have stayed together if I had just listened to my mother about being cursed,” Keisha had said.
They were sitting at her dining room table again. They did their research in her condo, but they had started spending their nights in his.
Ruben put his hand on the papers. “Your mom said the same thing to me, Keesh. And I thought about it a lot over the years. And I think the curse is just one small part of what happened at that wedding.”
She put her hand on top of his, then threaded her fingers through his.
“I think,” he said, “the curses only go so far.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Aren’t you afraid of starting this relationship again?” he asked. It was the first time either of them had mentioned the fact that they had slipped into old patterns. Blissfully slipped into them. And they were as good now as they had been in the beginning, before the wedding.
“No,” she said.
“You’re not afraid the curse will start up again?” he asked.
“She’s dead,” Keisha said.
“Curses don’t always die with the person who cast the spell,” he said.
Keisha shrugged one shoulder.
“Then we don’t have to try to marry again,” she said, startling herself. She was amazed that part of her had been thinking about trying again.
“We can just live together?” he asked, with a half-smile.
“It worked before,” she said.
“And that’s my point,” he said. “Jolene had been watching us, even then. We’d had some hard times. Other relationships of yours had ended in the hard times, but ours hadn’t.”
“Until the wedding,” Keisha said.
“Until the wedding,” he agreed. “And what happened afterwards.”
“The curse,” she said.
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
She looked at him. His dark eyes were so sincere. “What do you mean?”
“Those harsh words? Those were us,” he said. “We were stupid. We broke up for the dumbest of reasons.”
Her cheeks warmed. “Ruben—”
“Think about it, Keesh. You’ve been cursed your whole life. Yet you managed to graduate from high school with straight As. You got into the college of your choice, got into the MBA program, became one of the fastest rising detectives in the police department. You designed your own job, for heaven’s sake, despite setbacks. You did that. The curses were just another bump in the road.”
She swallowed hard. “Everyone has bumps.”
“Yes,” he said. “And they defeat most people. You told me that Jolene whined every time she had a setback.”
“Maybe her curses weren’t that powerful,” Keisha said.
“Maybe not,” Ruben said. “Or maybe you did have some protections.”
“Thanks to my mother?” Keisha asked.
He shrugged. “Or maybe your own innate strength,” he said.
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