A Fitting End: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery (10 page)

“Completely.”

“Oh, I understand,” I said, nodding. “But there’s no need to worry. The runway’s gone.”

“How are the rehearsals coming along?” Trudy sounded almost giddy. “I’ve been dying to poke my head in and check them out, but Fern doesn’t think that’s a good idea. Better that I stay out of Zinnia’s way, but we used to be such good friends. I made her gown, you know. Just like I made your grandmother’s—”

“Wh-what?” You could have knocked me over with a feather. They’d made my grandmother’s Margaret gown? I thought Meemaw had made it. “Was it yellow?”

“Oh, yes. Coleta’s was like a gauze-covered sun and Zinnia’s was sky blue.”

“We were just learning back then—”

“Like you are now,” Fern muttered, shooting daggers at me.

“—so it took us months to make a single dress.” She slipped into a dreamy recollection. “We got to where we could make a dress in mere weeks. Satins, silks, and velvets. Every girl wears a corset and bloomer—did you
know that? Oh, yes, of course you know that. You’re makin’ two dresses, is that right?”

“Four, actually,” I said, counting Gracie’s into the mix, still shocked that Loretta Mae hadn’t made the dresses I’d found in the armoire.

“That’s just dandy for you. We’ve made… how many, Ferny?”

“Thirteen.”

“Of course. Lucky thirteen,” she said, chuckling nervously, a little vibrato in her voice, which told me she thought thirteen was actually
un
lucky. “And one more to finish.”

“Wait. There are only seventeen girls. I saw the list,” Fern said. “Who’s the last dress for?”

There was no fooling Fern; she was sharp as a tack. “That’s actually one of the things I need to talk with you about. There’s been an addition to the Margaret lineup.” I had a flash of my former life in New York. Ah, if the gang at Maximilian could see me now, talking about Sam Houston’s wife, corsets and bloomers, they’d be having full-blown conniption fits. “There was a last-minute addition. Mrs. James was going to help me write the… um…”

“The pedigree?” Trudy prompted.

“Yes, but the whole thing with Macon Vance… Did you hear about that?”

Fern nodded gravely, pointing to the newspaper on the coffee table. Right there on the front page was a picture of Macon Vance, the mischievous hint of a dimple in his left cheek belying the fact that he was dead, with the headline:
BLISS GOLF PRO STABBED WITH DRESSMAKER’S SHEARS
.

My face turned hot and I looked down at my feet.

“They were your scissors, then?” Trudy asked.

I sort of half nodded, half shook my head, hoping we could get off the topic of murder and back to the festival. I took a sip of my iced tea, cleared my throat, and kept on. “I’m not quite sure how to write it, so I thought maybe…”

Trudy seemed to get that I didn’t want to talk about my scissors and Macon Vance. She tilted her head to one side, her sad frown reaching from her eyebrows to her mouth. “You were never a Margaret, were you dear?”

“No,” I said, clenching my hands together underneath my journal.

“Of course we’ll help you,” Trudy said brightly. I thought I heard Fern growl under her breath. She was a good bit less enthusiastic. “Who’s the new Margaret? I wonder if we know the family.”

“Certainly not, or they would have come to us to make the dress.” Fern chastised Trudy as if she were speaking to a child. “Honestly, Trudy. After Zinnia stabbed us in the back like she did—” She trailed off, her eyes opening wide.

Trudy’s hand flew to her mouth, her fingers fluttering. “Oh, Ferny, you don’t think…”

I looked from one to the other and back again, realizing what they were thinking. “Oh no. No, no.” I didn’t want to believe it could be true, and I certainly couldn’t leave here letting the Lafayette sisters think it was possible. “Mrs. James did not stab Macon Vance.”

Neither one of them looked convinced. “When Zinnia sets her mind to something, nothing gets in her way,” Fern said.

“Right.” Trudy’s back went ramrod straight. “Look at your own grandmother. Why Zinnia nearly broke Coleta and Dalton up more than once.”

I stared at the nodding sisters. Mrs. James had told me how she and my grandmother had been in love with the same man—my grandfather—and that Nana had won his heart the night of the Margaret Ball. She hadn’t mentioned any other love triangle incidents. “She did?”

“Goodness, yes,” Trudy said. She patted her wild updo, as if a single touch could tame the silvery flyaways.

“Before my grandparents were married, you mean.”

“Heavens, no,” Trudy said. “The way I heard the story, your mama was just a babe—”

Fern interrupted, picking up the story as if she and Trudy were one person telling it. “Zinnia and Jeb were havin’ trouble in the baby-making department—”

“Not like their daughter,” Trudy said under her breath.

“—and people around town said she was plumb sure it was Jeb’s fault.”

“Zinnia wanted to have a baby more than anything, so she went to Dalton—”

“Your grandfather,” Fern clarified, in case I didn’t know who she was talking about.

“—and propositioned him. She wanted
him
to father her child.”

“Shockin’,” Fern said.

“Utterly and completely,” Trudy agreed.

“But they didn’t… He didn’t…” My heart had stopped. Surely my grandfather, with his blue plaid shirts and belly hanging over his belt, hadn’t cheated on Nana. “They didn’t…”

Fern shook her head, looking at me like I’d gone cuckoo. “Heavens, no. Have you seen their daughter, Sandra? She’s the spitting image of Jeb.”

Fern piped up. “They’re just rumors. Probably not
even true, but you see why there’s no love lost between Zinnia and your grandmother.”

The rift between the two women was like a boulder in my stomach, but I reminded myself that fighting over a man, and even trying to steal him away from another, was not at all the same thing as murder. Mrs. James could be guilty of loving my grandfather, but that didn’t make her a killer.

After Trudy and Fern finished filling me in on the final dress rehearsal, Trudy stood up. “Would you like to see our atelier?”

Like any dressmaker worth her salt, my pulse skittered and I practically flew off the sofa. Seeing another seamstress’s workshop was like crack to an addict. And the Lafayette sisters? From what I knew, they didn’t let anyone into their studio who wasn’t having a Victorian dress made. “I’d love to.”

Trudy’s step suddenly had bounce to it and even the tension Fern had been holding seemed to roll off her as we sidled through the kitchen, into the backyard, across a gravel path, and into a separate building faced with the same pink bricks as the main house. We walked through the sliding glass door and into a dressmaker’s wonderland. Victorian gowns, their hoops making the skirts as wide around as Christmas trees, hung on headless mannequins. “Resplendent” had been one of Maximilian’s favorite words. If he uttered it in your presence about a project you were working on, you could live on the praise for months and months. It was the only word that came to mind as I stared at the array of nearly finished dresses. Fourteen of them.

It felt like a dream room decked out in silks, satins, and velvets. Trains and ruffling, lace and ribbon, beads
and sequins. Each gown was a work of art. Inwardly, I gave a huge sigh of relief. The first two dresses I’d been commissioned to make were just as ornate and showstopping as these. Libby’s was simpler. The dress, after all, had to fit the wearer. And Gracie’s? I still hadn’t decided what to do for her. But seeing the Lafayette sisters’ atelier and the presentation of gowns was filling my creative well with bolts of ideas.

“You do it all by hand?” I asked, my fingers floating over a pale rose-colored silk gown.

“Hand-done, each and every one.” Fern pointed to an ivory dress with tulle artfully draped along the bodice line. “You won’t see this attention to detail anywhere else in the country,” she said, exhibiting a wash of beading on one of the gowns. “Each bead is done one by one.”

“Corsets and petticoats?” I asked, although I knew the answer to every question in my mind. Yes, corsets, petticoats for the traditionalists, but crinoline for those who weren’t sticklers. A dress could weigh up to eighty pounds if it was heavy on the beading and had layers of petticoats. Wearing one would be like lugging around barbells, and that was one more reason I was glad I was well past the age of being a Margaret. At least that’s what I told myself.

“Ms. Cassidy?” Fern snapped her fingers in my face.

“Oh!” I blinked, lurching back a step. “I’m sorry. What were you saying?”

The look she gave me sent a shiver down my spine. Suspicious. Distrustful. As if she thought I were somehow secretly photographing the workshop so I could go back to Buttons & Bows and duplicate them all. “Who’s the girl you’ve added to the Margaret lineup?” she finally repeated.

Oh! They’d asked earlier, but we’d gotten sidetracked.
“Her name’s Gracie Flores. She’s just the sweetest girl,” I gushed. “She’s become my right hand at my shop, you know. She already says she wants to go into fashion…” I trailed off when their mouths drooped to pronounced frowns. “What’s wrong?”

“Zinnia is okay with her being a Margaret?”

“Why wouldn’t she be?” I bristled, instantly reminded of why I hadn’t participated in the pageant when I was sixteen. Whoever was in charge wouldn’t have been okay with me.
I
wasn’t Margaret material because my grandmother and mother had turned their backs on the town tradition. “Gracie’s probably got more strength than Margaret Moffette Lea ever did,” I said, not knowing how much gumption the original Margaret had had. Probably quite a lot considering she’d married and sort of tamed Sam Houston, Texas’s most radical historical figure. “But yes, Mrs. James was—is—fine with adding Gracie. Like I said, we were going to write the pedigree—”

“No reason, dear,” Trudy said, steering me toward a row of sewing machines and sergers.

“Two without,” Fern mumbled behind me.

She had a bad habit of talking under her breath and it was beginning to get on my nerves. I bit my tongue, barely stopping myself from blurting out something I’d regret. They didn’t even know Gracie. I couldn’t hardly stand them judging her. The gowns on the headless mannequins suddenly felt like fashionable nineteenth-century female soldiers closing in. “Two what?” I asked, heavy on the accent, my tone somehow light and friendly.

Trudy shot her sister a hush up look, then said, “Just that Margarets usually come from more… established families, shall we say? Families like the Kincaids—”

“The Kincaids?” I said with a scoff.
They’d
been
wrapped up in a murder not that long ago. They weren’t all that upstanding anymore.

“Gracie Flores isn’t your typical Margaret, is all,” Fern said, backtracking.

“But then again, Ferny, are there any typical girls, anymore?” In perfect sync, they both bowed their heads for a moment of silence over the lack of perfect Margarets.

As they raised their gazes again, I could suddenly picture Gracie in my mind, clear as a bell, dressed and primped in the sage green gown from Meemaw’s armoire. That would be her Margaret dress, I decided. No matter who it had once belonged to, it was going to have its second coming with Gracie Flores.

The second I stepped through the flower-covered archway into my front yard, the scent of homemade cinnamon rolls encircled me. I closed my eyes, breathing in the ribbon of sweetness, letting it nearly lift me up and carry me up the porch steps. Nana must have let herself in, I realized as I took the little handmade sign saying I’d be back at eleven o’clock off the hook to the right of the door. Buttons & Bows wasn’t the type of shop scads of people happened by. It was a destination shop, a place you came if you wanted a custom dress made, or were hoping for a designer off-the-rack outfit. Closing every now and then to run errands wasn’t going to put me out of business.

I followed the cinnamon aroma through the dining room, stopping short in the kitchen. “Nana?”

My grandmother was not there baking pastries. “Mama?” I peeked through the door next to the butter yellow refrigerator. The washer and dryer sat just beyond the kitchen. The clothes that I’d moved into the dryer that morning were now neatly folded in a wicker laundry basket sitting just outside the utility room. “Mama?” Coming in and finishing my laundry wasn’t
something my cowgirl mother, Tessa, tended to do, but was something Nana would do. But Nana’s Nubian goats followed her everywhere, a definite drawback to her charm. And they took the majority of her time. I didn’t think she’d take time from her new goat milk pomegranate moisturizer lotions to fold my wash and make cinnamon rolls.

No, the kitchen was empty, but the sweet smell lingered. As I shut the mudroom door, the sweet smell of the cinnamon rolls quickly hit a high note and then, as if someone had snapped their fingers, it simply vanished.

“Meemaw,” I whispered under my breath. Of course.

The faint whisper of a laugh floated in the room.

“I went to see the Lafayette sisters today,” I said to the empty room. I had taken to chatting with my great-grandmother, filling her in on my days. Meemaw was my secret, but one I’d have to share with Mama and Nana before too long. A thread of guilt wound through me each time I saw them and didn’t reveal that Loretta Mae wasn’t quite as dearly departed as they thought.

The soft sound of whispered words came to me, but dissolved into the air before I could make them out. She was trying to communicate with me… or maybe it was me that hadn’t figured out how to hear her. Either way, our interaction was more one-sided than I liked. I talked. She listened. And flung clothes out of the closet, moved my sewing notions, and flipped pages of books and magazines to communicate what she wanted with me.

“Mrs. James asked me to help her with the pageant,” I continued as I pulled a container of Nana’s goat cheese from the refrigerator, a box of crackers from the cupboard, and poured myself a tall glass of sweet tea. “Have you ever seen their atelier? Fourteen gowns, and they
were all spectacular. It was like walking into a showroom. They do all the beading by hand. Did you know people get on their schedule when their daughters are newborns? They’d have to. All that handwork is so time-consuming, but you know, I could feel their love for it all. And I found out they made Nana’s Margaret gown—”