A Fitting End: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery (24 page)

A visible shiver went through Gracie. Like someone had scraped their fingernails down a chalkboard. She suddenly backed up, throwing up her hands like she was trying to block something.

“Gracie?” Will was by her side in a flash.

The color had drained from her cheeks and she shivered. “It’s c-cold.”

“No, it’s not,” he said, but he lay the back of his hand on her forehead. “You don’t feel feverish. It’s late. I’m sure you’re just tired, and dressed like that, with your hair all done up, your imagination’s taking over is all.”

Madelyn and I looked at each other, another silent message floating between us. I hadn’t told her what I’d learned, but I could tell she didn’t need all the details to believe that something magical was floating around the old farmhouse—literally.

“Your dad’s probably right,” I said. “Honey, why don’t you get out of that dress and get some sleep. The rehearsal starts first thing in the morning, then the pageant. It’s gonna be a long day.”

I unbuttoned her dress for her, my fingers moving slowly. The history of the dress worked its way through
me, drifting into my mind, mixing with the current image of Gracie in the gown, her hair done up, the highlights in her hair shimmering almost effervescently.

One thing became crystal clear. The secrets Nana and her friends had worked to keep under wraps for so long were bursting forth at the seams.

It was only ten o’clock, too early to go to bed, but I was exhausted. I slipped into my blue-and-white-striped cotton pajama pants and a navy cami, brushed my teeth and the tangles out of my hair, and climbed into bed, but apparently sleep was the last thing my body actually wanted to do.

I was antsy. My toes tingled, my arms itched, and a million thoughts raced through my mind. They were like fireflies, zipping between Gracie and Libby, and all the details of the pageant that I still had to take care of. I’d tried to get an update on Mrs. James, but I hadn’t heard a thing from her.

Finally, after thirty minutes of tossing and turning, I put my glasses back on and got out of bed. If I couldn’t sleep, I might as well be productive.

I spent two hours finishing Mrs. James’s dress. I’d already pieced the sections together. By the time I got to the zipper, the last thing I had to finish, exhaustion had made me loopy. The room grew soft around the edges, like a photographer had blurred the lines. If you discounted the scattered thread, fabric scraps, and pieces of pattern paper, my workroom had a dreamy quality to it.

Sleepiness was finally settling in, but it hadn’t taken hold yet. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Three a.m. At this rate, I was going to be holding my eyelids open with toothpicks at the dress rehearsal. I finished the zipper and took Mrs. James’s dress into the dining room, slipping it onto a dress form I’d moved into the far corner, then headed to the front room to lie down on the settee. I might as well not have bothered. Soon I was tossing and turning. Meemaw’s decision to cover it in velvet was great on a blustery cold day, but not when it was still close to ninety degrees and the humidity had crept up to ninety percent.

I heaved a frustrated sigh before I decided to direct my attention to my new dressmaking project. Planning a design for Anna Hughes’s
Wow!
dress. I shuffled back to the dining room and sat at the little antique table tucked into the corner. I turned on the computer and waited while it booted up. Even dress designers used the Web for research.

I’d pictured Anna in a black taffeta dress with flowers on one strap, but before I got too far in my sketches, I wanted to get some intel on her sister’s wedding. If it was going to be a luau, for example, then the fun but sophisticated number I had in mind wouldn’t work.

My fingers curled above the home row, hovering, antsy to type something… anything… and to hit the
ENTER
key. One problem. I didn’t know Anna Hughes’s sister’s first name, maiden name, or either of her two previous married surnames. Which meant I couldn’t just search her online.

What to do? What to do? Finally, my sleep-deprived brain figured it out and my fingers jarred into motion. I typed Anna and Buckley Hughes into the search bar
and hit
ENTER
. This would bring up something about them or
their
wedding, which in turn should mention some of the family and guests. Anna may not have been in her sister’s wedding, but maybe her sister had been in
hers
.

While Google did its thing, I closed my eyes. Working into the wee hours of the morning had given me too much time to think. The different complications from the past few days began melding together in my mind. Bliss, Texas, it seemed, was coming apart with deception.

Dark circles spiraled behind my eyes and my limbs grew heavy. After Josie’s wedding fiasco, I’d realized that everyone had secrets. Some people pretended they didn’t exist—like Mrs. James. Some people fought over them—like Nana, Mrs. James, and Eleanor had fought the night of their Margaret pageant. And some people killed over them—like whoever had gone after Macon Vance.

One of my biggest questions was whether or not the Cassidy magic had passed through Senator Jeb James into his daughter, Sandra, and granddaughter Libby. Or was the power of the magical wish diluted through the male descendants? My brother, Red, didn’t have even a smidgeon of magic in him, and neither, it seemed, did his boys, Cullen and Clay. But if he had a daughter, would she be charmed?

Too many questions stemming from the past, and no way to answer them.

I sank deeper in my chair. For the first time that night, sleep didn’t seem so far off. A warmth settled over me and my head lolled to the side. My thoughts grew dreamy, shifting to Libby. She had the burden of two secrets on her, and she knew nothing about either of them.
Poor girl. She was like the common denominator between the two mysteries going on in Bliss.

The common denominator.

The words repeated in my head like a mantra until… “Oh my.” What if Macon Vance knew more than just the lineage of Butch Cassidy’s descendants? What if he somehow knew about his
wish
and that the James women were charmed?

I closed my eyes for a quick second, and when I opened them again, it was morning. The sun was throwing dappled light through the window, and the crick in my neck radiated pain down my spine. I pushed myself up, wrangled my crooked glasses from my face, straightened them on my nose, and looked at the clock.

Slowly, it came into focus. Eight thirty. I shot out of the chair. The dress rehearsal!

Eighteen girls milled around the stage, hair and makeup done, shifting their weight from foot to foot and glancing around nervously when they stopped pacing. Only four of them—Amanda Blankenship, Julie Plankerton, Libby Allen, and Gracie Flores—had their gowns on. The rest milled around aimlessly, a rising hysteria in their voices. They stared at the racks of nineteenth-century style gowns, but none of them went near the dresses.

Josie stood with a group of girls. I couldn’t hear her voice over the prattle of debutantes, but from the way she patted the air in front of her—like she was trying to get them all to simmer down—I got that they were agitated to a boiling point.

I hurried up next to Josie, acting as nonchalant as I could muster. “What’s going on?”

Josie’s face contorted as she gave an exaggerated glance at her watch, then gave me the stink eye. “Late night?” she asked.

I tilted my head to the side, smiling slightly. “Actually, yes.” She gave me a wicked little grin, but I threw my palm up, stopping her. “Sewing,” I said. “Finishing Mrs. James’s dress.”

The excited light in her eyes dimmed and her smile faded. “Oh. Well, that’s no fun.”

I turned to the aimless girls surrounding us. “We’re so behind schedule.”

“You’re late,” Josie said.

“You sure none of you remember your dresses?” I said to them.

They all shook their heads.

I didn’t blame them. The Margaret gowns weren’t something these girls would be caught dead in under normal circumstances. Gracie had an appreciation for fabric and design, but from the look of things, she was an anomaly. I suspected that a good many of the girls here would rather be hanging out at the nice air-conditioned mall in Fort Worth, or tubing on Lake Bliss. Getting up early on a hundred-degree summer day, wearing a heavy dress, and dancing a waltz with a beau were not a modern teenager’s idea of fun. Who cared that their parents had paid thousands upon thousands of dollars for the custom frocks.

“Come on. We have to blaze through this. Where’s the book?”

I felt under my arm, where I normally would have stuck it. Not there. I still hadn’t gotten my sewing bag back from the sheriff, so I’d been using a Michael Kors tiger print canvas bag instead. The rope handles weren’t as sturdy and it didn’t have the interior pockets that my Dena Rooney-Berg bag did, but it would do the job for now until I got my sewing bag back.

I dug my hand inside, knowing that I’d tucked the book right on top. I gulped. Only it wasn’t there. Crouching down to dig deeper into the bag, I had a déjà vu moment. Only days ago, I’d stood right here. And if I hadn’t
forgotten my sewing bag, my shears wouldn’t have been readily available to a murderer. And if they hadn’t been right there, an orange-handled beacon to whoever had been with the golf pro in his last minutes, would Macon Vance still be alive?

“Stop.” I chastised myself. There was absolutely no point in saying
what if
. Macon Vance was dead, and nothing could change that.

“Harlow, the book?”

The girls had wandered off, and Josie bent down next to me. Stage mothers whispered, sending annoyed looks our way. I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose, catching a glimpse of Sandra and Steven Allen. Even though I was preoccupied with the missing notebook, I couldn’t help remembering how distraught Sandra had been the night of Buckley Hughes’s party. She hadn’t wanted to attend. But Steven had said he’d made her. “Why would Steven insist that Sandra go out when Mrs. James was being held for suspicion of murder?” I asked Josie. “Don’t you think that’s strange?”

Josie sat on the stage, flattened her palms on the floor and kicked her legs out from under her, crisscrossing them into a half lotus position. “People lie, Harlow. Maybe he didn’t make her go anywhere. Maybe she went on her own, and he wanted to bring her back home.” She gave another pointed look at my bag again. “The book?”

“Right.” My mind swirled with thoughts as I dug through my bag. I felt like I had all the pieces cut for a quilt, but I couldn’t figure out what pattern to use so they’d all go together. Josie’s words played in a continual loop in my head.
People lie.
My shoulders slumped, as much from knowing that Josie was right as from the
fact that I stopped looking, empty-handed. Trudy’s book was not in my canvas bag.

“It’s not here.” I dug through again, hoping I’d just missed it, but I still came up empty-handed.

“You had it when you left last night,” Josie said, but we still spent ten minutes scouring the stage and the makeshift changing room in case we were both wrong and I’d dropped it at the club.

I grabbed my keys, flung the bag over my shoulder, and headed toward the door. “It’s got to be at home,” I said, but twenty-five minutes later, I spun around in my workroom, hands clasped on top of my head, panic rising in me like a wave in the Gulf of Mexico’s dirty water. Trudy’s book was nowhere to be found, and without it, we’d never get the right dresses with the right girls.

“Where is it?” I muttered. I’d already searched the boutique area of Buttons & Bows, upstairs, the kitchen… It wasn’t anywhere. There was no sign of Trudy’s notebook. And I hadn’t a clue how to organize the pageant without her notes.

I thought I’d brought it into the house, but if I had, it wasn’t here now. I’d checked Meemaw’s old truck to no avail. It was just…
gone
.

The
click
,
click
,
click
of the ceiling fan berated me. The repetitive sound started to morph in my head until it sounded like
tsk
,
tsk
,
tsk
. Was Meemaw taunting me? I dropped my arms and searched the room for any sign of a ghostly presence.

“Meemaw, did you hide Trudy’s book from me?” My voice sounded loud in the empty room, but I cleared my throat and kept going. “Eighteen girls are back at the country club, waiting on me to get them into their dresses and start the rehearsal. And the pageant!”

I paused, cocking my head to the side to listen for a change in the fan’s clicking, or for some other sign that Meemaw heard me. The
tsk
,
tsk
,
tsk
I’d imagined a minute ago was back to a steady
click
. The rotation of the fan’s blades sent the air whooshing down, ruffling the hair that had slipped out of my two low ponytails. I tucked a wayward strand behind my ear, impatiently adjusted my glasses, and did a clumsy pirouette as I searched the room again.

Still no sign of my ghostly great-grandmother. Great. When I needed her, she was nowhere to be found. “This is getting aggravating, Meemaw,” I grumbled, “and I don’t have time for it.” Trudy and Fern had put their trust in me to take over their final fittings. Mrs. James had come to me to take over her role as the pageant’s coordinator.

I hoped that Meemaw might take pity on me and show herself. No such luck. I was still alone, and completely at a loss. My thoughts ran a little wild as I started my search again.

The Art Nouveau–style magazine rack I’d brought back with me from my one trip to France caught my eye. It sat next to the plush red velvet settee, hand-painted flowers cascading down the avocado green front. I flipped through the fashion and home decor magazines standing upright between the wrought-iron frame. I hadn’t put the notebook in the rack, but maybe Meemaw was playing games and had slipped it between the glossies.

One look proved that she hadn’t.

The rumble of an engine came from out front. I pulled back the sheers to see Hoss McClaine’s black SUV,
HOOD COUNTY SHERIFF
emblazoned on the side, pull up in
front of the house. Mama popped out of the passenger side before Hoss could amble around to open her door for her. Mama was not one for pretense or social expectation. Her voice carried through the screen door. “I’m perfectly capable of openin’ my own door, Hoss McClaine, thank you very much.”