One Bride Too Many: One Bride Too Many / One Groom To Go

“Here’s the baby-wipes warmer!” she said enthusiastically, her voice amplified and made lyrical by the silent vastness of the lab.

He walked over and watched her pick it up. A little beeping sound went off and didn’t stop when she put it down.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“The timer on my watch. Time to enter the code. It will just take a sec.”

He had thirty seconds. No sweat. He went to the wall panel in the lab, trying to recall the code—three-seven-five-eight-nine, or was it six? Marsh had deliberately made it as random as possible. Why couldn’t he use some significant sequence like family birth dates? The system was supposed to keep out thieves, not grandsons. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and took out his billfold, where he’d stashed the code, counting seconds and pretty sure he was running out of time.

The dull thud he heard wasn’t reassuring.

“What was that?” Tess asked.

“The locks engaged.”

He punched in the code his mother had given him, but nothing happened. The door wouldn’t open. He tried again in case he’d made a mistake. Still no results.

“Can’t you open the door?”

“No.” He tried a third time, but it was futile. He should have set his watch to allow extra time, but thirty seconds had seemed plenty long enough to punch in the code even if he had to look at the paper. Why did Marsh have such an elaborate system? Any thief who knew enough technology to get into the building could probably figure out a way to get out, but here they were, trapped in the lab. Unfortunately he wasn’t a professional burglar and anything he might try could result in costly damage to the system.

“There has to be a way out,” she said.

“Not if Marsh’s damn anti-spy gadgetry works. I wish his James Bond DVD collection would self-destruct!”

“Do industrial spies really steal plans for baby stuff?” She sounded more curious than panicked.

“How would I know? I haven’t had anything to do with the business since Zack and I gave each other haircuts to get out of posing for the catalog.”

“What do we do now?”

“Wait for the baby police, I guess.”

She laughed. He glowered at her.

“I don’t suppose you have a cell phone in your purse?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No, but isn’t that a phone over there?”

He walked over, annoyed because he’d been too rattled to notice it. It was dead.

“The phone service must cut off when the doors lock,” he said.

“Why?”

If this were a spy thriller on the big screen, the heroine would be clinging to him like spandex. He could imagine Tess in a role like that, unlikely as it seemed.

“Probably so anyone trying to steal the butt warmer can’t call a cohort to pass on the secret design,” he said in a husky whisper. He had an odd notion he wanted to hear her laugh again.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“Good question. Let me see if I can short out the system.” Nuts to Marsh. If he ruined something, it wasn’t his fault.

This was a lab. There had to be tools. He opened one of the cupboards under every workstation and found a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.

“Isn’t there a night watchman or something?” she asked, hovering behind him as he removed the casing from the control panel on the wall.

“There’s a whole crew of security people, but I’d rather get out of here before anyone comes.”

“You said we weren’t sneaking in.”

“We weren’t.” He didn’t want to look like a dope for getting the code sequence wrong, but the jumble of bunched wires was a puzzle with no solution.

“Look at all the colored wires. Just like a movie where the right one will deactivate a bomb and the wrong one will—”

“It’s not a bomb,” he grumbled.

“Can I pick the color?”

“Why not?”

“Yellow, pull out a yellow.”

“Yellow as in no parking, no passing and crime-scene tape.”

“Good point. So do you want to try the green as in go?”

He caught a green wire snaking through a bunch of other colors and yanked with the tip of the pliers. A shrill alarm sounded on the other side of the door.

“Wrong wire.”

She shrugged with a nonchalance he didn’t feel. He didn’t relish being known as the idiot grandson.

“Try the blue,” she suggested. “We’re locked in with all that racket in the hall. What else can happen?”

“The walls could move in and crush us.”

“Like Poe’s ‘Pit and the Pendulum.’ You remember that story,” she said enthusiastically.

He’d never read it, but then, he hadn’t had Tess as a tutor that year. She’d read Macbeth aloud, scene by endless scene, then made him admit some of it was exciting.

He ripped out the blue wire. Nothing happened as far as he could tell. The door was still bolted shut.

“Cole, does it seem a little chilly in here?”

She hugged her arms across her chest.

“Yeah, it does.”