Engaged in Death (A Wedding Planner Mystery) Read Online Free

jammies, the flannel magenta ones with the penguin-and-Christmas-tree pattern. My eyes were red and rheumy, my frizzy hair a rat’s nest.
    “It’s July. Why are you wearing these?” Rachel held me out at arm’s length, assessing me with her keen green eyes, her treacly fruit perfume nearly knocking me out. “You look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”
    “I didn’t have time to pack season-appropriate clothing.” I pulled back and gazed at my sister, aided by the mirror behind the front desk. Like she had any right to critique my outfit.
    Rachel was seven years younger and nine inches taller. For her flight from Florida, she’d worn pink velour sweats with PUSSY CAT written across her shapely rear in cursive and a silver tank top that showed a healthy amount of midriff below and her round breasts above. A microscopic hoody tied around her narrow waist completed the outfit.
    If you squinted hard enough, you could discern we were sisters, but we were very different. Rachel was tall and I was five-one. Rachel got the pretty almond-shaped green eyes; mine were big and brown. Rachel had wavy, honey-kissed hair, and mine was a nondescript sandy brown and impossibly curly when I didn’t flat-iron it into submission. I alternated between slight and chubby, but Rachel had had the physique of a Victoria’s Secret model since she’d turned fourteen.
    We had the same raucous laugh and the same freckles, but that was about it. I was a people pleaser, having become an attorney to fulfill my mom’s edict that one of us be a doctor or lawyer. I’d graduated from Carnegie Mellon a year early and gone straight through to law school at Georgetown. Rachel was a rabble-rouser, failing out of school and sporadically returning, doing whatever she pleased, showing up wherever the wind blew her, living her life with the greatest amount of chaos and consternation for our mother and stepdad as possible.
    “Keith is a rat, but you’re better off. Mom and Doug send their love.” Rachel appeared genuinely concerned.
    I’d managed to convince my parents not to fly up by promising I’d come to Pensacola in a few weeks to heal. I’d asked my mom to tell Rachel not to come either, but she must not have gotten the memo.
    “It’s okay. Well, it’s not okay, but someday it will be. Let’s go to my room.”
    The desk clerk, a pimply kid of about twenty, was staring open-mouthed at my sister. In a minute, strings of saliva would be hanging down his chin.
    “Could you help us?” Rachel cooed, gesturing to a pile of zebra-patterned luggage waiting by the entrance.
    “I don’t think he’s a bellhop, Rach. Besides, how much stuff do you have?” I glanced back over to the automatic door for a closer look and did a double take.
    “That’s all yours?”
    Rachel shrugged as the poor clerk snapped to attention. He loaded her gear onto a flimsy metal luggage cart, where it wavered and threatened to topple over, laden as it was with garish garment bags and suitcases. There was even a hatbox. A hatbox?
    My sister wears hats?
    With a flick of her purple fingernail, he followed us to the elevator and on to my room.
    “Do you have any cash for a tip?” I don’t know why I bothered to ask her.
    She gazed at me, batting her eyelashes in contrition.
    “Hold on.” I fished a crumpled fiver out of my PJ pocket. “Here you go.”
    The clerk was still staring at Rachel as I shoved the cart into the hall and shut the door.
    “He wasn’t very helpful when I arrived here, as I recall.”
    Rachel slipped off her bejeweled platform flip-flops and plopped down onto the middle of the bed, stretching luxuriously like a cat.
    “I’ve been calling your cell, but you didn’t pick up. Now I know why.” She leaned over and turned on my phone, which lit up with dozens of unheard messages.
    “Give me that!” I quickly deleted the new messages from Keith and Helene.
    Rachel grabbed the phone back and hit play.
    “Ms. Shepard? This is Garrett Davies.