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Nightmare in Shining Armor
Chapter One
It isn't every day that a headless woman rings my doorbell. You can be sure, therefore, that I examined this one closely. She was about five feet, six inches tall, sans head, which she held in her right hand. Her severed neck was abnormally large, especially considering the fact that there was a bit of it still attached to her noggin. I peered harder. Yup, there were two eyeholes about five inches down.
"Wynnell!" I cried delightedly. "I'm so glad you're early. I can use all the help I can get. The caterer got sick at the last minute, and although I have all the food, it needs assembling."
The bloody stump blinked. "How did you know it was me?"
"Because you're my best friend. I'd recognize you no matter what you wore." It would not have been kind of me to mention that it was Wynnell's bushy eyebrows poking through the vision slits that had tipped me off.
My buddy sighed and stepped over the threshold. Then, really seeing me for the first time, she gasped.
"Abby! How did you do it?"
"Do what?" I said with a coy smile.
"You're a foot taller. At least!"
"Am I?" I smoothed a portion of my antebellum skirt, which, suspended as it was by hoops and crinolines, puffed in all directions like an organza igloo. Incidentally, I wasn't alone under all that material. My yellow tomcat, Dmitri, had been tickling my ankles with his tail ever since I'd gotten dressed.
"Abby, tell me, or I'm going to peek."
"No need," I said and hoisted my hemline.
Dmitri took one look at my headless visitor, hissed, and shot out of the room like there was a pack of dogs in pursuit.
Wynnelllaughed and peered more closely. "Stilts?"
"Greg made them. I've been practicing all week."
Perhaps I should explain that I am normally only four feet, nine inches tall. My fiancé, Greg, is just over six feet. We would have made an odd Scarlett and Rhett without my wooden appendages. This not to say we make an odd couple in real life, but you know what I mean. Besides, if the hooped skirt gave me the opportunity to experience the rarefied strata to which the rest of you folks are accustomed, why not go for it?
"How do you manage to keep your balance?" Wynnell asked, as she bumped against the hall console.
"I don't always," I said, remembering my bruised right knee. "I can balance about as well as you can see. But I can't walk at all in this dress without the stilts, so I'm stuck until the party's over. You, however, are another story. Why don't set your head down on that console, take off your mask, and help me in the kitchen?"
"Be glad to." Wynnell whipped off her rubber neck. "You'd be surprised how hot it is under here."
I patted my voluminous skirt. "Fifteen yards of fabric is no cool breeze."
Wynnell nodded. Her hair was damp with dew—we Southern women do not sweat—and her face the color of a radish.
"So what do you want me to do first?"
"Stir the punch. And taste the bowl on the left to see if it needs more pizzazz."
"Champagne?"
"Vodka. I want this party to rock."
"Abby, you're so bad. What will your mama say?"
"She gave me the recipe."
"Speaking of her, did you find out what she plans to wear tonight?"
I shook my head. "Her lips are sealed tighter than a clam at low tide. All she would say is that I was in for a big surprise."
Wynnell frowned, her damp brows fusing like giant spiders. "Doesn't that make you nervous?"
"You bet it does. Last year she came as Mother Teresa—but that was during her nun craze."
Wynnell, having tasted the bowl of spiked punch, decided it need an extra wallop. She added enough imported spirits to keep Kiev humming for a month. And this from a Baptist!
"What does she want to be now?"
"A jockey."
"A disc jockey?"
"The kind that ride horses. Her goal is to win the Kentucky Derby before her eightieth birthday."
"Which is how far away?" Wynnell asked cagily. We Southern women would rather sweat than reveal our ages.
"She's seventy-eight."
"Then she could make it. I wouldn't put anything past your mama."
"Me, either!" I wailed. "That's just what I'm afraid of. She's liable to show up tonight at my Halloween party dressed as a jockey. A woman her age shouldn't wear those tight pants if you ask me."
"Your mama's in good shape, Abby."
"I know." I clomped over to my new oven to take a peek at the lasagna. It was ready to come out. "But she's so embarrassing. If I know her, she'll bring a real jockey with her as her date. Then who knows what the two of them will do. At least last year, when she was a nun, that wasn't a problem."
"That's only because the priest she brought with her was gay. At any rate, you're lucky to have her, Abby. Both my parents are dead."
"I know," I mumbled, "I'm a very lucky woman. I've been telling myself that all day."
And I was a very lucky woman. I, Abigail Louise Timberlake, had not only survived my divorcefrom Buford the Timber Snake, but I was now engaged to Greg Washburn, the sexiest detective on the Charlotte police force, if not the sexiest man in the entire city. My business, the Den of Antiquity, was doing gangbusters, allowing me to buy a brand-new home in the exclusive neighborhood of Piper Glen.
Nightmare in Shining Armor. Copyright © by Tamar Myers. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
