Mama Gets Hitched: A Mace Bauer Mystery © 2010 by Deborah Sharp.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

First e-book edition © 2010

E-book ISBN: 9780738726519

Book design and format by Donna Burch

Cover design by Lisa Novak

Cover illustration © Rick Lovell

Editing by Connie Hill

Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Midnight Ink does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to current author websites.

Midnight Ink

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.midnightink.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Charlene and Nancy, who love me despite the

cranberry-colored taffeta with humongous bows

I made them wear as bridesmaids;

and to Abbie, our fourth sister of the heart.

Acknowledgments

I owe a debt to friends and family members who’ve invited me to their weddings—in some cases, multiple times. All your ceremonies were in excellent taste. I never witnessed a single tacky moment, or anything remotely resembling the fictional mayhem, not to mention murder, that mars Mama’s Special Day. On the other hand, there had to be some payback for making me shoehorn my bridesmaid-self into that strapless Scarlett O’Hara number. (You know who you are, Miss Bride!)

As always, I want to thank the world’s greatest husband, Kerry Sanders, for unfailing love; and the world’s greatest mama, Marion Sharp, for inspiration.

I’m grateful to my fabulous agent, Whitney Lee, and to the talented staff at Midnight Ink. Connie Hill’s editing prowess saves me; Courtney Colton spreads the news about my books; and Lisa Novak’s genius makes the cover designs pop.

Thanks to Deborah “Dab” Holt, who bid in a charity auction for the chance to have a character named after her in Mama Gets Hitched. Always a good girl, she confessed she wanted her character to be bad. I pray she didn’t get more than she bargained for.

Thanks, again, to the town of Okeechobee, Florida, the real-life inspiration for fictional Himmarshee.

Finally, I’m indebted to those I’ve named, to anyone I missed, and especially to you, for reading.

Small, silver-trimmed circles of tulle covered the tabletop. Mama held up what looked like two identical pieces of the fabric, one in each hand.

“Don’t tell me you can’t see the difference, Mace.” She thrust the first circle under my nose. “This is celadon.” She shook it for emphasis. The fluorescent lights of the VFW hall gave the green tulle a dull gleam. “And this,” she waved the second circle within inches of my eyes, “is honeydew.”

I batted away her hand. “Like I told you, Mama, they look exactly the same. Light green.”

She rolled her eyes and sighed heavily, as if she couldn’t stand to deal for one more minute with poor dumb trash who couldn’t tell the difference between subtle shadings of tulle. I decided I’d had just about enough of her Bridezilla routine.

“Wouldn’t you say you’re going a little nuts, Mama? Does it really matter whether every square centimeter of tulle is dyed exactly the same shade as the next? All this whoop-de-doo is kind of tacky, anyway. After all, this is your fifth trip down the aisle.”

Mama looked wounded. “You know I’ve never had a real wedding, Mace. I eloped with your daddy. And when I got married after he died … well, you know all about Husband No. 2. After that nightmare, I thought I might jinx my third try by making a big to-do. Turned out that one didn’t take either, big wedding or small. And then No. 4 and I met on that cruise and decided to have the ship’s captain tie the knot.”

I remembered. My sisters and I were horrified when Mama came home with a new husband, twenty years her junior. We also got souvenirs that said My Mother Went to Cancun and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.

“Poor No. 4,” Mama said. “He didn’t seem as good a choice on dry land as he had on the high seas. Maybe I shouldn’t have mixed champagne with Dramamine. Anyway, Mace, Sally is the first man I’ve really loved since your daddy. I want this wedding to be perfect.”

Mama was marrying Salvatore Provenza—Sally—in less than a week. Under the pressure of pulling off the Ceremony of the Century in Himmarshee, Florida, she’d mutated into someone my sisters and I barely recognized. She was driving us crazy, which wasn’t the unusual part. She’s always done that. But we’d never seen Mama so obsessed over the inconsequential.

Here’s a woman who nearly landed in prison after a corpse turned up in her turquoise convertible. Then, she found an old beau keeled over dead in his Cow Hunter Chili. She’s tangled with a gator, and was nearly trampled to death during a week-long horse ride through Florida’s cattle country. And that’s just what Mama’s survived in the past year.

Now, tulle had her in a tizzy. I was ready to head out into the swamp to escape. And my sisters, Maddie and Marty, were almost willing to brave the gators and the snakes to come with me. But I knew I had to give her the customary daughterly pep talk.

“Take a deep breath, Mama,” I recited. “Everything’s going to be fine. The wedding will be incredible. You’ll be the prettiest bride ever.”