The Bracelet Read online

  Piper knew she’d better learn something from this. She silently resolved to be nicer to Zara, be more patient and give her the benefit of the doubt. At the same time, Piper was profoundly grateful and that she hadn’t verbalized her suspicions to anyone else. Nobody had really been hurt. Not her brother, not her parents and, most of all, not Zara.

  As they pushed through the heavy revolving door that led from the hospital lobby to the parking lot, Piper saw a young woman hurrying in from the other side. The woman looked through the glass panel at Piper and, for an instant, their eyes locked. Piper recognized her as the tenant in the apartment next to Poppy’s. The woman smiled and lifted her arm to wave, a pair of glasses in her hand. She was wearing a purple ski jacket.

  Read on for more mystery and mayhem

  and weddings with Piper Donovan

  from Mary Jane Clark

  An Excerpt from

  To Have and to Kill

  An Excerpt from

  The Look of Love

  An Excerpt from

  TO HAVE AND TO KILL

  PROLOGUE

  He took her hand and squeezed it in the darkness. She held on tight as the giant dome above them filled with bright stars, flaring, exploding, and spraying the sky with colors. Listening to the explanation of what the heavenly bodies meant to mankind, the couple felt the stars rushing past them faster and faster, as if they themselves were careening through the Milky Way.

  He leaned over and whispered close to her ear: “Make a wish on one of those stars.”

  She closed her eyes and did as she was told.

  When the planetarium show was over, she started to get up from her seat. “That was fantastic,” she said. “There was so much of that I didn’t know. I sometimes forget that the sun is a star and that, without it, we wouldn’t be alive.” She gently pulled at him to get up.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Sit down again.”

  Usually, as one group filed out of the theater, the next filed in. He had deliberately chosen the last show of the day so they would be left unrushed and alone.

  “I made a wish on one of those stars, too,” he said. “I wished that you’d say yes.”

  She looked at him, her eyes widening.

  “I’m asking you to marry me, sweetheart,” he said, taking both of her hands in his. “I couldn’t think of a better place to ask you than here among the stars where you belong.”

  She inhaled deeply, pausing for just a moment as she remembered the disturbing letter hidden at the back of her desk drawer.

  His eyes searched her face. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she answered, trying to ignore her apprehension. “Of course I’ll marry you. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  Tears welling up in her eyes, she threw her arms around his neck and they held on tight to each other.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” he said, pulling back and reaching into his coat pocket. He took out a little red box and opened it. Inside was a large, clear diamond solitaire set in platinum.

  Her left hand trembled as she held it out and he slipped the ring on her finger. This is what she had wanted, what she had hoped would happen. But as she kissed him with joy, something else was nagging at her, leaving her feeling unsettled. For some reason, a portion of the star show they had just seen was repeating itself in her mind. What the narrator said had hit a nerve somewhere deep inside her and somehow felt like a warning.

  She smiled at her fiancé but shivered as she recalled what she had just learned. Explosions ended some stars’ cosmic lives. There were stars that burned hot, lived fast, and died young.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sunday, November 28 . . . Twenty-six days until the wedding

  Mother and daughter worked, side by side, in the kitchen of The Icing on the Cupcake. Piper Donovan mixed buttercream while her mother poured smooth batter into round baking pans. The front of the store was closed, the shelves emptied of the rolls, Danishes, and coffee cakes eagerly purchased by the morning’s many customers. The ever-present aroma of sweet delights wafted throughout the building.

  With her long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, Piper stood at the table laden with bricks of butter, cartons of eggs, and bags of flour and sugar. She picked up a flower nail—a thin, two-inch-long metal rod with a small, round platform affixed to the end—and secured a square of parchment paper to it. Holding the flower nail in one hand, she applied firm and steady pressure to the plump bag she held with the other. Piper concentrated on the stream of stiff buttercream icing that oozed out from the piping tip and fashioned it into an acorn shape on top of the parchment. Then, picking up another decorating bag, with a different tip, she piped a wide strip as she turned the nail, cloaking the top of the acorn completely. Piper slowly spun the nail, making longer petals that overlapped again and again. When she reached the bottom, she had created a perfect yellow rose.

  She repeated the process over and over, gently sliding the parchment squares with the finished roses onto baking sheets before storing them in the refrigerator.

  “You’ve gotten so good at it, Piper,” said her mother as she leaned forward to get a closer look at the flowers.

  Piper shrugged and smiled mischievously. “And all those years you complained I never paid attention to you,” she said.

  “I really appreciate you taking the time to do this, honey,” said Terri Donovan. “It’s getting so I can’t keep up with everything. I hated to do it, but I even had to turn down three wedding cake orders. Having these flowers made in advance will really help me at the end of the week when I have to make the cake I did promise to do.”

  “It’s no big deal. I had to come out again anyway with more of my stuff. Might as well do these while I’m here.” But it is a big deal if my mother’s turning down wedding cake orders, she thought.

  “Do you have much more to bring back?” asked Terri as she sifted confectioners’ sugar into a mixing bowl.

  “A few more cartons and the rug,” said Piper, squeezing out a final delicate yellow flower. “I sold pretty much all the furniture and the kitchen things to the guy who is taking over my apartment.”

  “Good,” said Terri. “None of it owes you anything. We found most of it at tag sales and, when the time comes for you to get another place, we’ll be able to find more.”

  As she brought the decorating utensils to the sink and began washing them, Piper was thinking about getting back to the city and the audition she had in the morning.

  Terri reached out and touched her daughter’s arm. “It’s going to be great having you back home, Piper,” she said softly.

  As Terri spoke, her eyes were trained over Piper’s shoulder.

  Piper turned around to see whom her mother was looking at. There was nobody else in the kitchen. “What are you looking at, Mom?”

  “I’m looking at you, honey.”

  “Uh, no. No, you’re not. You were looking at something behind me.”

  “I was not,” insisted Terri. She nodded in the direction of the cleaned piping tips. “Make sure you put everything back exactly where you found it.”

  “Got it, Mom.”

  Strange. Was her mother losing it? Usually she was pretty laid-back, but recently she had become almost maniacal about having everything in its place. And there were other things Piper had noticed. On Thanksgiving, her mother missed a few of the glasses when she poured the apple cider. She had ruined the gravy, stirring in confectioners’ sugar instead of flour. And when a customer handed Terri a $10 bill this morning, she pulled change for $20 from the register. Thank goodness they had honest customers.

  Piper hadn’t really thought much about each individual event, but now, as she concentrated on the decorating, she realized something was up. “Mom, is something wrong?” she asked gently.

  Piper observed that her mother’s jaw tightened as she shook her head.

  “No, nothing’s wrong, Piper. Just too much to do and not enough time to do it. I guess I’m a little tense, and when y
ou’re tense, you make mistakes.”

  Piper didn’t buy it, but she kept silent. She knew she was on the brink of having to set major boundaries with her parents about her own privacy. So it was only fair that she gave her mother hers.

  As she carefully arranged the piping tips in their container, Piper knew that, soon enough, she would figure out what was going on with her mother. When you lived in the same house with someone, there was no place to hide.

  Unfortunately, that worked both ways.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Monday, November 29 . . . Twenty-five days until the wedding

  Some people were named for beloved relatives, honored historical figures, favorite characters in fiction, or admired movie stars. Piper was named after her mother’s passion: Terri Donovan was never happier than when she was piping sweet icing on a wedding cake.

  Pacing back and forth in the hallway of the rehearsal studio on Manhattan’s West Side, Piper found her mind wandering. Based on her mother’s criteria, if Piper were to have a daughter, what would she name her? Encore? Brava? Ovation?

  The door to the audition room opened, and a young woman emerged. She looked very similar to Piper and the other four girls waiting in the hallway. Piper braced herself, knowing she was next on the list. Her heart pounded.

  “Piper Donovan?”

  Breathe, she told herself, wondering how she had survived all twenty-seven years of her life, even though everyone thought she didn’t breathe well enough. Her acting teachers, her karate, yoga, and Pilates instructors, her mother and father were always reminding her: “Just take a deep breath, Piper.”

  Entering the audition room, Piper studied the man sitting behind the long table. The casting director would size her up within just a few seconds and determine if she was right for the role. His laptop computer was open as he finished tapping in his notations about the previous actress.

  The man turned his attention to the pile of photographs on the table and picked up Piper’s head shot. “Good morning, Piper. I see here you spent a couple of seasons on A Little Rain Must Fall,” he said as he scanned the information printed on the back.

  Piper nodded. “Until they killed me—uh, I mean, until they killed off my character.”

  “Tell me about your character.”

  “I played Maggie Lane’s long-lost younger sister, Mariah, who was always wreaking havoc. Neither of our characters was aware that we weren’t actually related, but, you know how the soaps are, the viewing audience knew that we weren’t really sisters. Glenna Brooks, who plays Maggie, is, like, über-tiny, brown-eyed, and dark-haired. I’m obviously tall, with the whole ‘green-eyes-and-blond-hair’ thing. They had me dye it platinum for the role. I was into it, so I kept it that way.”

  “How did you die?”

  “DWI. The writers wanted a cautionary tale.”

  “Big deathbed scene?”

  “Yeah—eleven days! It’s a soap; you die in installments.”

  The director smiled. “And I see you did a shampoo commercial,” he said, glancing at the head shot again. “That’s where I know you from! You’re the girl on the horse with the mane of golden hair. That commercial used to be on during the first season of Glee.”

  Piper nodded. “I wish it was still running in prime time. Miss the residuals.”

  The director returned to the information on the back of the photograph. “So what have you been doing lately?”

  Um, giving myself pep talks, thought Piper, but she answered with the standard “Oh, you know. Reading a lot of new scripts.”

  “How are you paying the rent?”

  Piper shrugged. “I waitress.”

  “Where?”

  “The Sidecar above P. J. Clarke’s.”

  “Which P. J. Clarke’s?”

  “The original one at Fifty-fifth and Third.”

  “There’s a restaurant above there?”

  “Yeah, it has a separate entrance with a doorbell and a more sophisticated menu, but they still have the burgers.”

  “Huh. I’ll have to check it out.”

  “You should.”

  She wondered how this happened so often. How did she end up spending more time on the merits of P. J. Clarke’s than on her actual audition? Mind-blowing.

  As if he were reading her mind, the director asked, “What do you like about this role?”

  Piper hesitated. The fact was, there wasn’t much she liked about the role. It was too close. She was coming off her own epic romantic failure, and playing a woman with a broken heart night after night would really just be masochistic. But Gabe, her agent, insisted she was perfect for it. Gabe, love bug that he was, thought she was right for every role. Bummer that Gabe wasn’t a casting director.

  When the audition was over, Piper couldn’t even remember what words she had strung together in response to the question. She hoped they were coherent. All she knew was that before she got halfway through her monologue, the casting director turned his attention away from her and back to his laptop. When she was done, he thanked her but made no further comments. Piper knew she wasn’t going to get the part.

  Still, as she gathered up her coat and scarf in the hallway outside the audition room, she allowed herself to hope that maybe she was wrong. For Piper, hope was everything.

  As she made her way toward the exit, Piper pulled out her BlackBerry and switched the ringtone from silent to normal.

  “Ohmigod! It’s Mariah Lane!” The squeal came from a pair of young women exiting the Starbucks a few yards away.

  “It totally is!” cried one of them in a stage whisper. “She was the best part of A Little Rain Must Fall.”

  Both women made a beeline to the target of their enthusiasm.

  “Hi, I’m Piper Donovan.” She held out her hand.

  “Oh, we know who you are. We love you!” said one of them, giggling. “We hated when they got rid of you.”

  “We follow you on Twitter and we’re friends on Facebook,” said the other.

  “Good one! I’m actually just about to send out a tweet,” said Piper. “Why shouldn’t it be about the two of you? What are your names?”

  “Oh, awesome. I’m Heather and this is Nina.”

  Piper tapped out the letters with her thumbs:

  JUST MET NINA AND HEATHER WHO SAY THEY LOVE ME.

  LOVE THEM !

  The girls didn’t have any paper, so they insisted Piper sign their Starbucks cups. As Piper used the blue highlighter that she kept in her bag for marking scripts, to scribble her autograph on the still-warm cups, she had to laugh. Was it pathetic that this was totally making her day?

  Still, Piper felt grateful that she had been given a sign. She wasn’t forgotten and she was on the right path.

  Her luck was going to change.

  CHAPTER THREE

  There was a giant window on each side of the entry to The Icing on the Cupcake. One offered a view of tempting layer cakes, brownies, cookies, and pastries displayed on colorful hand-painted plates resting on glass shelves and pedestals. The other allowed people on the sidewalk to watch Terri Donovan decorate her beautiful cakes.

  Nothing gave Terri more pleasure than seeing the delight on the faces of family, friends, and customers as they admired her creations. She was expert in squeezing out buttercream stars, shells, flowers, hearts, vines, dots, and bows in every conceivable configuration. Equally important, she had a wonderful eye for color. The combination of her skill and imagination added up to culinary works of art.

  The Icing on the Cupcake was Terri’s dream come true. When her children were very young, years before she actually had her own bakery, Terri had dreamed of what she wanted her place to be. It wouldn’t be large, and the variety of baked goods might be limited, but everything for sale would be luscious and almost sinfully pleasurable—the types of desserts that made people take a bite, close their eyes, and groan with pleasure.

  Terri was determined that presentation would count at her establishment. Her cakes weren’t going to be
sold on circles of cardboard. They would be purchased and served at home on a pretty piece of flowered porcelain or painted pottery. The plate would be Terri’s gift to her customer. Season after season, Terri purchased odd pieces and partial sets of china at tag sales and thrift shops, storing them in the basement of her split-level home, to the point where she could barely make her way to the washing machine, and her husband couldn’t get to his tool bench and the rest of his “man cave.”

  Now, The Icing on the Cupcake was in its fifteenth year, and the stacks of plates in the Donovans’ basement had long since been depleted. But Terri and her friend Cathy still trawled the garage sales to replenish their stock. Customers, too, came in carrying plates they had received with past purchases, recycling them, and always buying another cake on another plate before they left.

  The idea to decorate her cakes in the window for all the world to see came to Terri when she, Vin, and the kids took a rare vacation to visit relatives in Sarasota, Florida. The sidewalk in front of a local fudge shop was always crowded with people craning their necks to watch as the molten mixtures of chocolate, sugar, milk, and butter were poured from shiny copper pots onto huge white marble slabs. The fudge maker, clad in an immaculate uniform, folded and spread the mixture back and forth, back and forth, as it gradually cooled and was shaped into long bars of candy. Viewers were mesmerized, and Terri noticed most of them ended up going into the shop to buy. Terri added the picture window to her plan.

  When Piper and Robert were both in school full-time, Terri got a job at the Hillwood Bakery. She worked the counter for eight years while perfecting her skills. When the owner decided he wanted to retire, Terri and Vin Donovan took out a loan, purchased the business, and Terri got her chance to implement her long list of ideas.