A Fitting End: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery (7 page)

“Not yet,” I said, secretly praying Mrs. James and I would steered clear of the county jailhouse.

She sucked in a deep breath, recovering her nineteen-year-old composure. Death was hard to take, I thought, no matter the age. “A lot of suspects, I bet.”

I blinked. “You think?”

Instead of answering, she waved another clerk over. “I’m gonna take five. Can y’all cover for me?”

The teenage boy smirked. “Yeah, Gina, I think I can handle the crowd.”

Right, since the crowd was all still at the country club.

Gina rolled her eyes as she came around the end of the glass pastry-case counter. She grabbed my arm and dragged me to a little round table in front of the café.
She snuck another look around the bakery before focusing on me. “You never heard the gossip about him?”

I shook my head. I’d been back in Bliss for a few months, but it took more time than that to get caught up on the rumor mill.

One side of her mouth angled down in a lopsided frown. “The way I hear it around here is that he makes—I mean, made—a lot of lonely housewives happy and a lot of absent husbands less missed.”

“Ah,” I said, a lightbulb going on above my head. “So Macon Vance was a golf pro in the”—I cleared my throat—“tennis pro sense. Got it.”

“Everyone knows
it
.”

I looked around the shop. Did they all know about Macon Vance’s extracurricular activities? And if they did, why hadn’t he been run outta town on a rail?

There were a few familiar faces, some of whom I’d seen at the Kincaids’ big fund-raising gala a few months back. I recognized Mrs. Eleanor Mcafferty, streaks of blond highlights prominent in her severely pulled back hair, sipping a frothy coffee drink with the über pulled-together Mrs. Helen Abernathy and a third woman I’d never seen before. A man and a woman whispered together in the corner. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her. A group of men I recognized from the golf club this morning stood on the sidewalk outside the shop’s front window, but I couldn’t put names to their faces. A few sprite teens, up mighty early for a summer day and looking awfully distraught about it, sat at a round top, a plate of croissants between them.

“Everyone?” I asked.

She nodded her head, brows pulled together into a V. “Everyone. I can’t believe y’all hadn’t heard that.”

“I’ve been holed up making clothes.”

“Right. For the Margaret Ball, I hear.” She waved her hands. “Not my thing.”

I smiled. “Wasn’t mine, either, but the gowns are beautiful. Is there anything you don’t hear, Gina?”

“Nope.” I would have expected a little smile from her. Instead, her already thin lips drew into an even thinner line. “So they really don’t know who did it?”

I didn’t blame her for feeling anxious. A murderer was on the loose—not a comforting thought. But I sensed there was something else Gina wanted to say. I put both my palms against the tabletop. “What’s wrong?”

She paled again, looking downright pasty. “I was just wondering if…” She trailed off.

“Wondering what?”

After a glance over her shoulder, she leaned closer and whispered, “He was in here yesterday, talking on his cell phone.”

“Uh huh,” I said, knowing there had to be more.

“Not talking, exactly,” she said. “More like arguing. Really loud. It didn’t sound good.
He
didn’t sound good.”

“Do you think it might have something to do with the murder?” I asked.

She shrugged her bony shoulders. “I guess I don’t really know. Sh-should I, like, talk to someone?”

“If you think you know something…”

She made a face. “Like the sheriff? He doesn’t like me, not since I rammed a bunch of mailboxes when I was, like, sixteen. He holds a grudge.”

Been there and done that.

Gavin McClaine’s smug face popped into my head. “There’s a new deputy in town,” I said, sounding like I was quoting a line from a Western movie. Not that he’d
be much better than Hoss McClaine, but I kept that thought to myself. Gavin and his dad were both single-minded, passionate, and direct to the point of being rude, but Hoss McClaine was good at what he did, and the apple doesn’t usually fall far from the tree. I was betting Gavin was a fine deputy, just like his daddy.

“How ’bout I tell y’all and you decide if it’s worth sharing?”

My hands pressed harder against the table. I couldn’t believe I was getting sucked into another murder. Did Meemaw curse me? When she was alive, whatever she wanted, she got. That had been her Cassidy charm. Had she wanted me thoroughly wrapped up in Bliss’s small-town dramas? Was that why, for the second time since I’d been back home, I found myself in the thick of a murder investigation?

I shook my head. “Gina, I’m just a dressmaker—”

“But the scuttlebutt around town is that you helped figure out what happened to Nell Gellen.” She threw another glance around the bakery. The line at the counter had grown and the buzz of conversation had grown right alongside it. “Dang it all. I gotta get back.”

“Okay—”

She raised one hand, and just like that, I stopped. “Just listen,” she rushed on. “I know who Mr. Vance was talking to.”

“You mean arguing with?” I asked.

“Right. On his cell phone. Look—you know I’m adopted, right?”

I nodded. I had heard the story about her adoption from my mother. Gina’s biological parents had made an arrangement with her adoptive parents before she was born. They’d already had four children, and Gina was
just one too many. If she drove a few towns over, she had four siblings who
hadn’t
been given away. Poor thing.

The women sitting across from us threw their heads back and giggled, their high-pitched laughter just a little bit grating this early in the morning, especially in light of the murder; though in their defense, they might well be ignorant about Macon Vance. It wasn’t just me. One or two of the teenaged boys looked just as aggravated by the laughter.

“That’s why it struck me,” Gina was saying. “He kept repeating that his daughter had a right to know who her father is. Boy, I know what that feels like.”

“Wait.” My mind whirled as I connected the dots. “He has a kid who doesn’t know he’s the father?”

She shrugged, but she didn’t look unsure. “That’s what it sounded like.”

“Do you know who it is?” I prompted when she didn’t offer anything else, but she shook her head. I paused, then asked the big question. “Who’s the mother?”

She snorted. “Take your pick.”

Right. The golf pro who got around.

After a minute, Gina lowered her chin. “You look like you have an idea,” Gina said, her chin lowered, lips pouty.

I pressed my fingertips between my tense eyebrows. “I do?”

“Yeah, you do.”

“I don’t. No ideas.” But as she scraped her chair back and started to stand, I decided to share my suspicion. “Unless…”

She plopped back down. “Unless what?”

“You said he made lots of unhappy housewives happy, right?”

“Right.”

“So what if he had an affair with a married woman and she got pregnant. That’s a pretty good reason to be kept out of the child’s life, right?”

A dollop of color returned to Gina’s cheeks. “Hey, Harlow, that’s pretty good.” She sat up straight, looked off to the side like she was giving my idea considerable thought, but then she shook her head. “So then some angry woman, the mother of his child, stabbed him?”

“I don’t know…” Unless a woman was particularly strong or had the element of surprise, it seemed unlikely that stabbing by scissors would be the method chosen for murder. Which meant…

“The husband,” we both said at the same time.

“If only we knew who his daughter is—
was?
No, is—,” Gina said, “we’d know who the pretend father is, and
voila
! We’d catch a murderer.”

If only it were that easy.

“I gotta get back,” she said. She scooted behind the counter and made my iced coffee. Moments later I waved, heading back into the heat. I had Margaret gowns to work on, Gracie’s pedigree to write, and family history to sort out.

What I did not have was a murder to solve.

Somehow it consumed my thoughts anyway.

My old farmhouse has been in the Cassidy family since Meemaw was a little girl. Now here I was, back in Bliss after a long, grueling stint as a minion in a New York City fashion empire. Just driving up Mockingbird Lane from the square sent a wave of comfort through me.

The driveway ran along the left side of the house. I parked Meemaw’s beat-up old truck under the row of possumwood trees, climbed the back porch, iced coffee in hand, and entered the house through the kitchen. The Dutch door, along with the buttercup retro-styled appliances, were my favorite features of the house. Meemaw had had an eye for style and she’d always known what she wanted. The vintage stamped metal bodies of the stove, dishwasher, and refrigerator made the kitchen the most welcoming room in the house. Next to my sewing workroom, I spent most of my time right here.

But not today. Instead I headed straight for the workroom, but as I passed the staircase, I heard a series of grunting sounds, followed by a loud thump, that echoed through the house. I stopped short. My first thought was that Meemaw was up to no good, rattling the pipes or some other such ghostly activity, but the sounds came
again and the hair on the back of my neck rose. Men. My heartbeat revved. There were
men
in my house.

I didn’t have anything valuable except a legendary and elusive trinket Butch Cassidy had supposedly sent to Texana Harlow, my great-great-great-grandmother, but no one had ever seen hide nor hair of it, so who knew if it even existed.

Panic raised goose bumps on every ounce of my flesh. Frantic, I searched for a weapon, trying to stay calm, but this was Bliss. I dealt with armadillos, snakes, and goats—not intruders. Maybe Bliss wasn’t as insulated as I’d thought.

I spotted my collapsible umbrella in the corner by the front door. That was as good as it was going to get. I snatched it up, flourishing it in front of me as I tiptoed up the stairs. Stopping at the landing, I peered up. A man’s back came into view. I caught my breath. I had nothing valuable to steal—unless you were a seamstress—but from the heaving and groaning, whoever was up there had his eyes on a big ticket item.

I wielded the closed umbrella, wishing Meemaw would somehow provide me with something slightly more threatening. Instead I heard the faint
squeak
,
squeak
,
bang
of the gate out front as it whipped open, then slammed against the latch. It sounded almost like a… laugh. Meemaw?

“The sheriff,” I muttered. As much as I didn’t want to talk to the man right now, what with Gavin McClaine’s thinly veiled suspicion about the presence of my sewing bag and scissors at the crime scene, calling him was my best option for rescue. I turned to race for the phone, but it was too late to make a call. The man at the top of the stairs came fully into view. There was something about him…

He turned and saw me, his surprise instantly morphing into wry mirth as his gaze zeroed in on my umbrella.

“Will Flores,” I said with as much indignation as I could muster, jamming one hand on my hip. “What are you doing here?”

I had my answer the next second as his burden came into view. Meemaw’s armoire! “Moving this for you,” he said, straining under the weight. “I told you I’d come by today.”

What with the summons by Mrs. James and the murder, I’d completely forgotten I’d asked him. He took the deal he’d made with Meemaw seriously, coming by nearly every day to tackle something on my to-do list.

I knocked my forehead with the heel of my hand. “Right! Sorry—”

He set his end of the armoire down, carefully turning it so it could be maneuvered down the stairs. He notched his chin at the umbrella I still wielded like a sword. “What are you planning to do with that?”

I looked from him to the umbrella and back to him, a sheepish grin on my face. In one lightning quick move, I tossed it down the stairs. It landed with a thump by the olive-green-painted antique dining table. “You know Texas weather. Wait five minutes and it’ll change. You never know when the rain’ll hit.”

“I guess you don’t,” he said, barely stifling a laugh.

“We doing this, or what?” someone said, and on the count of three, the armoire was up and being moved again.

“Oh,” I screeched, backing down the stairs. My feet, tucked snugly in my burnt red Frye harness cowboy boots, tangled under me. I stumbled, catching myself on the banister.

Will, a navy bandana wrapped around his head, shot me a look over his shoulder. “You okay?”

Besides the fact that he and his homies had nearly given me a heart attack, I was peachy. “’Course. I just didn’t expect to find you here—”

The antique armoire banged against the wall, knocking down the picture of Butch Cassidy and his gang. It crashed, the glass from the frame shattering against the hard wood of the stairs.

Will lurched back, slamming his back against the wall, his muscles straining as he somehow managed to stabilize the armoire. “They were available early,” he said through his teeth, “so we came over. I tried to call you—”

One of the men held tight to the right side of the piece, but growled. “Jesus, Buck. You got it now?”

“It slipped. Sorry ’bout that.”

“That’s George Taylor,” Will said, his neck still straining as he nodded toward the man on his right. “And that’s Buckley Hughes.”

They grunted at me as they started back down the stairs. “Oh!” I backed up. “Watch your step. You’re almost to the landing. That’s right.” I took another step backward. “Two more. One more—”

“Harlow.” Will followed up the warning with another low guttural sound. He rarely used my first name, and truth be told, it sounded strange when he did.

My turn to say sorry. “Just be careful,” I pleaded, my arms outstretched. As if
I
could catch the armoire the three men were maneuvering down the stairs if they happened to lose their balance—again—and drop the monstrous antique.

Not without a little otherworldly help.

Buckley, better known as the town’s dermatologist and Will’s neighbor, cursed under his breath.