The Bride's Escape

I woke up on my twenty-ninth birthday to a text from my ex-wife that said only "happy bday, hope you're well." That was it, no punctuation, no emoji. I lay there a while deciding whether that counted as kind or lazy, and I was still deciding when somebody knocked on my door hard enough to rattle the chain.

It was Inez, holding two coffees. We'd been neighbors for two years, since I moved into the flat next to hers after the divorce, and in that time she had fixed my toilet, borrowed my car twice, and never once knocked before nine on a Saturday.

"You're up," she said, shoving a cup at me.

"I'm up because you're trying to break my door down."

"Happy birthday, by the way. You're twenty-nine, right?"

"Twenty-nine as of midnight. Thanks for the coffee."

She stepped past me into the flat like she owned it, which after the toilet incident I suppose she partly did. She was twenty-eight, a physical therapist, and she had the kind of face that looked fresh even when she was annoyed. This morning she did not look fresh. She looked like she'd slept in her clothes.

"Okay," she said. "I need a favor."

"It's my birthday."

"That's why I brought coffee. I need you to drive me to the Cotswolds. Today. This morning, ideally."

"Where in the Cotswolds?"

"There's a sheepdog trial field near a place called Guiting Power. Do you know it?"

"I know a pub near it. Why does a sheepdog field need you today, of all days?"

She sat down on my only decent chair and drank from her own cup. "Because there's a wedding at a barn near that field today, and something's happening at the field, and I need to be there before the ceremony."

"Whose wedding?"

"A friend of mine. Joe Furlong. You don't know him."

"Clearly. And what's happening at the field?"

"Nothing, probably. I hope nothing. But I need to check, and I don't drive, and taxis out there cost more than my rent."

"Inez. You're a terrible liar and you're doing it right now, in my kitchen, on my birthday."

She looked at me the way she looks at patients who claim they've been doing their exercises. "I'll make it up to you. Dinner, on me, whenever you like. Come on, Adrian. I never ask you for anything."

"You ask me for things constantly. You asked me for a screwdriver on Tuesday."

"A different kind of anything." She stood up. "Get dressed. Wear boots. It's been raining all week and that field is going to be a bog."

I got dressed. That's the amount of willpower I have on my birthday when a woman brings me coffee and says please.

---

Her directions took us out of the city and onto lanes that got narrower the prettier the countryside got. Stone walls everywhere, sheep looking at the car like we owed them money. Inez was quiet for the first half hour, watching the fields go by, and I used the time to study her sideways.

She's half Goan on her mother's side, got her father's height and her mother's eyes, and today both of those eyes had bags under them. Her hair was in a knot that had given up sometime in the night. She kept her phone in her hand, screen down on her thigh, and checked it face-up every few minutes like she was waiting for bad news.

"Whoever you keep looking at," I said, "they're not texting back."

"They're texting. Just not the right things."

"Who is it? Joe, the groom?"

She didn't answer for a full minute. Then she said, "There's a time capsule."

"A what?"

"A time capsule. Lucille and I buried one, at that field, five years ago. She was my friend in college. We buried a box out there with a bunch of stupid stuff in it, letters, a bottle cap, a photo of a dog we both loved. When Joe proposed to her two years ago she said she wanted to dig it up before her wedding and read the letters. Tradition, she called it."

"Okay. So dig it up."

"That's the thing. Joe was supposed to do it. This morning, before everything kicked off. He knows roughly where it is, I showed him on a map in January, and he said he'd handle it as a surprise for her. He texted me yesterday all excited, said he'd worked out the exact spot and he'd have it on the table at the reception."

"And?"

"And nothing. He hasn't texted since nine last night. Lucille's been calling me since six this morning. His phone's going straight to voicemail."

"The groom's missing?"

"The groom is not missing. The groom is probably somewhere without signal, being irresponsible, and everything is fine, and I just need to check that field before sixty people sit down to dinner." She said all of this very fast, facing the window.

"Right," I said. "Everything's fine."

"Stop the car a second, I'm going to be sick."

I stopped the car. She got out, stood at the wall, and didn't be sick. She came back after two minutes looking worse.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I've been up since five. I'll be normal now."

"You don't have to be normal. You have to tell me the truth eventually, but you don't have to be normal first."

She laughed, which surprised both of us. "Drive, chef. It's another ten minutes."

---

The field was easy to find because of the cars. Maybe forty of them, parked on a grass verge next to a barn wearing fairy lights in broad daylight, which always looks faintly stupid at noon. Behind the barn, the trial field proper, all portable fences and a judge's booth and a karaoke tent that somebody had clearly paid extra for.

A woman came across the mud toward us at a half run before we'd even shut the car doors. She was twenty-eight, tall, in jeans and a cardigan over what I guessed was the wedding dress situation being kept elsewhere, and her face was a mess of crying that had stopped and started several times.

"Inez, thank God." She grabbed Inez by both arms. "Is he with you? Please tell me he's with you."

"Lucille. Breathe. He's not with me, no."

"He's gone. He's just gone." Lucille's voice cracked on the last word. "He left the hotel last night at eleven, the night porter saw him go, and nobody's seen him since. His phone's off. His suit's still in the room, Inez. His suit is hanging in the room and he's not in it."

"Okay. Okay. Sit down. No, stand, sit down, whichever. When did you last talk to him?"

"Seven, yesterday evening. He said he had one last thing to sort out and then he'd be mine all weekend. I thought he meant the buttonholes. Inez, what thing? What thing takes all night?"

Inez looked at me. It was a quick look, the kind you give someone when you're hoping they'll lie for you, and I looked back at her hoping she wouldn't ask me to.

"There's something Joe was doing for me," Inez said carefully. "A favor. For the wedding. Did he say anything about the field? The trial field itself?"

"The field? No. Why would he be at the field, the wedding's at the barn."

"Right. Why would he be at the field." Inez turned to look at it, and I turned with her.

The ground was churned to porridge from the week's rain. The trial fences sat in their lines like they were waiting. Between us and the judge's booth, the mud told its whole story if you bothered to read it, and I bother to read things, it's the chef in me, you learn to read a station by what's out of place.

"Lucille," I said. "Has anyone walked out on the field this morning?"

"What? No. Why?"

"Because there's one set of boot prints going from the gate out toward the far corner. Deep prints, fresh, big fella by the size. They go out there and they don't come back this way. And there's a spade leaning against the fence by the gate that I'd bet money was not there when the trial folks packed up yesterday."

Inez had gone very still beside me.

"There's a spade?" she said.

"There's a spade. And boot prints going to the far corner, where I'd guess a man who didn't know exactly where a box was buried might start digging around." I looked at her. "And there's a second set of prints near the booth, smaller, going toward the barn."

"Someone came back," Inez said.

"Someone came back with a spade's worth of company, or someone followed him. Either way, your missing groom walked out to that corner last night with a spade and hasn't walked back."

Lucille made a small sound and put her hand over her mouth.

"There's a bar in the barn," I said. "Somebody should get her a chair."

We got Lucille into the barn and onto a chair, which was harder than it sounds because she kept trying to stand up again. Somebody had left coffee urns plugged in and a tower of folding chairs against the wall, and the fairy lights were still on, humming faintly, doing their useless romantic work in daylight.

"Right," Inez said. "You stay here. Adrian and I are going to look at the booth."

"Look at the what?"

"The judge's booth. There were prints going from it toward the barn. I want to see the booth before anyone else tramples it."

"Why the booth?"

"Because it's the only other thing on this field worth walking to," Inez said, and it came out smooth, and I noticed it was smooth, which is its own kind of tell.

We left Lucille with a coffee and a bridesmaid named Keisha who had arrived at a sprint and clearly wanted instructions. Outside, the mud grabbed at our shoes. Inez walked fast with her hands in her pockets and didn't say anything, and I let her not say anything for most of the way.

"You're going to make me ask," she finally said.

"I'm going to let you not lie to me. Those are different jobs."

"Chef, this is not your problem."

"Neither was my toilet, and yet you fixed it, and here we are, up to our knees in each other's business."

She almost laughed at that. Almost. Then the booth was in front of us, a wooden shed on stilts with a ramp and a window facing the trial lines. The second set of prints, the smaller ones, came up the ramp and stopped at the door. The door was shut. Not locked, just shut, which in April in the Cotswolds means somebody bothered.

Inez opened it. Inside was a folding table, a thermos, a mug with a sheep on it, and a hay bale somebody had dragged in. On the hay bale lay a phone, screen up, and a piece of paper torn in half.

"That's Joe's phone," Inez said. She picked it up and turned it over like it might be hot. "Case is wrong. He has a green case. This is black."

"Maybe he swapped cases."

"Nobody swaps cases. Chef, nobody swaps cases." She read the paper. Her hands were shaking, actually shaking, and she had to hold it with both of them, and I watched a physical therapist whose whole job is steady hands fail to hold a piece of paper.

"It's about a debt," she said. "Four hundred and eighty pounds. It's from a bookie. It says if he wants more time he knows where to find him."

"Is that Joe's handwriting?"

"No. That's the point. That's why I know it's not Joe's."

"Whose is it?"

"I don't know his real name. He was around in college. He took bets on football and he was small and mean about it." She sat down on the hay bale, which flattened it. "Joe owed him money. Not much, honestly, four hundred and eighty is nothing, it's embarrassing more than anything. Joe's been paying it back in dribs since autumn."

"When were you going to mention any of this?"

"Never. I was going to handle it." She looked up at me. "I owe you an explanation and you're going to hate it."

"Try me."

"Joe and I slept together. In college. Before he ever met Lucille. It lasted about six weeks and it ended fine and it meant nothing and I have