At first she looked like a mountainous mound of meringue, and perhaps someone might have taken a spoon to her if it weren't for two things: 1) Why would a mountain of meringue lay in the middle of the lodge's ballroom and 2) What, exactly, was the pool of red next to it? The pool (in the shape of a Jurassic-size squashed bug) certainly didn't look like raspberry sauce. It looked more like (and was) blood.
Pepper Wellington pointed her purple shoe and fluffed the meringue. "There's a woman in there somewhere, I'm sure of it," she said to her daughter.
Her daughter, though twenty-nine and counting, immediately began to cry.
"Oh, she's dead all right," continued Pepper. "Really, really dead. That's a sad thing, isn't it?"
"And not only that," her daughter sniffled. "She's wearing my dress."
"That's your wedding dress?" Pepper questioned. "Really, sweetie, that's a bit over the top. You should have gone with something a little more understated. I mean all this tulle is really too much. But it does look smashing on a corpse."
They studied the corpse for a moment. She was, underneath the fluff, indeed smashing. Thin, tall, blonde. Pepper grabbed her daughter's elbow. It was awkward but necessary. "Well, it looks as if we should go."
"Shouldn't we call the police?"
"No. I'm thinking we should probably make a run for it first."
"But, Mummy, shouldn't we do something? I mean she's dead. And she's wearing my wedding dress and I don't understand any of this. Peter is going to be so upset. The timing of everything will be way off!"
"No, I think maybe we ought to make a run for it now."
"But why?"
"Because, my love, of the blood on your hands."
Pepper turned her daughter's hands over to reveal that they were slick and red. The blood just beginning to dry.
"Oh, no," her daughter said. "Oh, no! This is all your fault, Mummy! All your fault!"
Pepper nodded. Somehow, it probably was.
)
