The Christmas Wedding - James Patterson [36]
“No tears!” Mike said in a booming voice. “This isn’t about my bad luck. This is about your fabulous luck.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said. “Tears are for wusses.”
Suddenly Lizzie exclaimed: “Oh, sweet Lord, will you look at that!”
Both Mike and I turned to where Lizzie was staring.
I laughed. “Jacob told me he was bringing a ‘friend’ with him tonight,” I said. “I just didn’t expect his friend to be breathtakingly beautiful and about half his age. He’s trying to make me jealous. And it’s working.”
“Not the rabbi and the hottie,” Lizzie said. “Look at Seth and Andie!”
Sure enough, when I shifted my gaze a little to the right of Jacob, there was Andie with huge plastic antlers on her head, small furry velvet ears, and a huge red nose that lit up. That wasn’t all. She wore a brown-and-white sack that made her look like the front half of a reindeer. It came complete with hooves.
As for Seth, red suspenders held up a costume that replicated the rear end of a reindeer. He too had huge brown hooves.
“So, what do you think?” Andie said as she walked, or rather pranced, toward us.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Seth said. “We’re such dears, aren’t we?”
“Well, as for Seth as the rear end, I’d say it’s typecasting,” Mike said. “And that’s not the last time you’ll hear that tonight. Very creative of our star writer and artist from Beantown.”
“Lizzie, help me get under here,” Seth said. Then he began burrowing under Andie’s part of the costume.
“This seems sort of pornographic,” Lizzie said as she pulled the front part of the costume up and over Seth’s head. We were now looking at a very lumpy reindeer.
About a dozen friends had gathered around them, and the three-piece band broke into “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
Andie and Seth began dancing immediately, their hooves tapping in nearly perfect unison.
The onlookers broke into applause. I turned to Lizzie and said, “I am so happy I don’t have normal children.”
Chapter 42
THE PLOT THICKENED very nicely as the night before Christmas continued.
“I think that Jacob brought this young chick to throw us off the scent,” Claire said. All eyes at our table turned to the quite beautiful Amy Stern, Jacob’s surprise companion for the evening.
Tom nodded agreement. “Think about it. The very sly rabbi shows up with a date—a fabulous-looking date. So everyone thinks, aha. Let’s eliminate him from the list of marriage partners. He’s got a girlfriend.”
“You think Gaby’s so diabolical that she’d go to all that trouble to confuse the situation?” Seth asked. “You think my mom would do that?”
“I do,” said Andie, who had removed her costume’s red nose, thus eliminating the possibility of electrocuting herself during the soup course.
“Unless, of course,” Marty said. “Unless Ms. Stern really is Jacob’s date. Then that would mean that someone else—like Tom or me or even someone we haven’t thought of—is actually going to marry our Gaby.”
“Uh, excuse me, please,” I broke in. “If you don’t mind, this woman in the red silk dress and sapphire necklace is the person you’re all talking about.”
There was laughter at the table, but there was also a sense of “This case has to be solved, Sherlock, and we must do it soon.”
I caught Gus rolling his eyes. When he noticed me noticing him, he did a startlingly accurate imitation of my voice: “Don’t let your first time at the grown-ups’ table become your last time.” He got the inflection, the tone, the style completely right. He had a future, that boy.
While we were laughing, while the soup bowls were being cleared, while a very nice crisp Sancerre was being poured, two missing diners showed up. Full of apologies, only slightly frantic, Emily and Dr. Perfect made their way through the crowd to our table.
“I am so sorry, Mom,” Emily said as she kissed me. “We are such idiots.”
“Really, we are. We heard everybody leaving the house,” Bart said. “And we were all set to go. I was tying my tie, and then…I don’t know…” His voice trailed off.
“I bet I know what happened,