A Killing Notion: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery (20 page)

One by one, we went through them. In each photo, someone blinked or made a strange face or looked away. In most of the early group shots, Shane and Gracie looked tortured. Madelyn kept cycling through the shots. After another few, something changed. The group started to split apart. Bodies turned toward Shane. Madelyn moved through the frames quickly, as if she was operating the camera in sport mode.

She moved backward through the frames. The kids lurched awkwardly. I couldn’t help but laugh. It made the moment when Miss Reba stepped into the frame to announce her news about Mrs. Blake’s confession all the sweeter.

Madelyn went backward and forward a few more times before stopping on one of the earlier group photos.
“Look at each person’s face. That’s the only way to start eliminating.”

I did, moving my attention from face to face to face. Everyone except Gracie and Shane looked perfect, if slightly sad. In this early picture, they each still carried the weight of their burden. “Not that one,” I said.

She didn’t delete it, but moved it to a maybe file. The next one popped up on the screen. It was the same setup. Leslie’s expression was off, and Gracie and Shane were still doused with sadness. “Nope,” she said, before I had the chance.

The next several were crossed off for the same reason. The next one showed Miss Reba’s shoulder, Shane’s jaw dropped open, and Gracie turned toward her. The rest of the group was unaware, still smiling away.

“Delete,” Madelyn said, but I stopped her.

“Wait. Go to the next one.”

This time, Miss Reba was completely in the frame, her back to the camera. Shane was smiling, and Gracie’s mouth was drawn into a circle. I scanned the rest of the group. They all looked stunned, and I imagined them hearing the news.
The other wife confessed! Shane, everything’s going to be okay!

Okay, she hadn’t said it with quite so much enthusiasm, but the sentiment was there. The murderer was behind bars.

“Here’s the next one,” Madelyn said. She had shifted the angle of her camera so it captured only half the group. Gracie and Shane were in focus, their embrace captured by Madelyn. The rest of the visible kids were blurred in the background.

I scanned them, expecting to see relief and true smiles
lighting up their faces. On most of the kids, that’s exactly what I saw. Except . . .

I stared at the photo. Looked at the expression and tried to make sense of it. A hundred tidbits of information careened around in my head suddenly, pieces that hadn’t stood out as significant before now. My heart dropped.

I looked at the photo again, hating the direction of my thoughts, but I couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t prevent the truth from barreling into my mind and taking hold with clamps that wouldn’t let go.

I suddenly knew that Barbara Ann Blake hadn’t killed her husband, Eddy, or tried to kill Otis Levon.

And I suddenly knew who the real culprit might be.

“Are you sure?” Madelyn asked from her shotgun seat in Buttercup.

“Not one hundred percent,” I said, “which is why we need to talk to her.”

“And you’re just as sure that this Barbara Ann Blake woman didn’t do it, then?”

I’d been going over it all in my head, and the more ways I twisted and turned it, the more certain I was that Barbara Ann was as innocent of killing Eddy Blake and hurting Otis Levon as I was. “Yes.”

“And you brought me along as, what, your bodyguard?” There was a lilt in her voice, so I knew she wasn’t serious. In conjunction with her photography, she wanted to be an investigative journalist and had even written an article on women in business, which had included me. She was also writing a book on the historic homes in Bliss, which also included my little yellow and redbrick farmhouse.

“I brought you along because you wouldn’t have
stayed away for anything,” I said, chiding her. “In fact, didn’t you practically hurl yourself into the truck because you thought I was leaving without you?”

“You are prone to exaggeration, Harlow,” she said, the indignation as manufactured as the boots on her feet.

“Maybe, yet here you are.”

I parked in the driveway and ten seconds later, Sally Levon was letting us into her house. From the look of things, plenty of people had been around in the last few hours. A few bouquets of flowers sat in green glass vases amongst the casserole dishes lined up on the kitchen counter. Her fingers dusted the flower petals. If it had been Mama touching them after the ordeal she’d just gone through, the flowers would have withered and died on the spot. But for Sally, they bounced back from her touch, as colorful and uplifting as ever.

“This is the first time I’ve gotten flowers,” she said with a sad smile. “I don’t think it ever crossed Otis’s mind to get them for me. Not even on Valentine’s Day. But you know what he
would
do?”

Madelyn and I both shook our heads. She needed to talk. To share. And we’d let her do just that.

“When I worked late at the dry cleaner’s, he’d keep my dinner warmed up on a plate in the oven. Sure, it dried out the chicken, or whatever we were havin’, but he thought about me. Thought about the fact that I’d be hungry when I got home.”

“Very sweet of him,” I said, trying to merge the rough and rugged Otis Levon I’d met with the thoughtful husband he tried to be.

She offered us a seat at the kitchen table, pouring us each a cup of coffee and offering cream and sugar. “Help
yourself,” she said, taking a seat and wrapping her hands around her mug. She shivered, the warmth of the ceramic not doing much to warm her.

“We’re so sorry about Otis,” I began.

She nodded, biting back tears. “The doctors think he’ll make a full recovery. I’m praying.”

I couldn’t help but heave a relieved sigh. “Sally, that’s great news.”

She clamped her lower lip to stop it from quivering and nodded. “It’s a miracle. You’re the one who found him?”

I spread my fingers on the table, then intertwined them. Being the bearer of bad news wasn’t something I liked. “Yes.”

“Was he . . . was it horrible?” Her voice cracked with emotion, but she swallowed and kept herself together. “Did he suffer?”

I was certain he had. He’d been rammed with a car, pinned to the back wall before crumbling to the ground, and left for dead. I couldn’t tell her that, though. Instead, I reached my hand across the table and laid it on top of hers. “Try not to think about it, Sally. Hold on to the fact that he’ll be back here with you before too long.”

She pulled her hands away, burying her face in them. “We made it through,” she said through her sobs. “The kids . . . they’re devastated. I made Carrie go to the dance tonight. Forced her. She put up a fight, but finally she went.” She looked at us, her face streaked with her tears. “Was that wrong? Maybe I should have kept her home.”

I could imagine the range of emotions Carrie was
experiencing. Someone had tried to kill her father, she was homecoming princess, and she was barely keeping it together.

Sally’s sobs started again, her body racked with her grief.

“He’s going to make it,” Madelyn said, her British accent strong and authoritative. She stood, coming to stand beside Sally. “You’re the rock in this family. You’ll help them all get through.”

Sally wiped her eyes and looked up at Madelyn, nodding. “I will.” She trained her eyes on me. “He’s a good man.”

Tears pricked my eyes, and Madelyn’s glassed over. This poor family. I couldn’t begin to imagine their pain. “Yes, he is. And he told me, that first day I met him, what a good woman you are and how lucky he and the kids were to have you. You need to hold on to that, Sally.”

She sucked in a deep breath. “What did you need to talk about?” she asked, getting to the point of our late-night visit.

“Your husband showed me a picture of your children. Carrie looks so different now.”

“When we moved from Granbury to Bliss, she wanted a new look to go with the new town. She cut her hair, bleached it, and it was like she was a different person. She’s still shy, but she’s made friends. Gracie, Libby, Holly, Danica, and Leslie. I’ve never seen her so happy. She was voted homecoming princess for the sophomore class, for heaven’s sake. That never would have happened in Granbury. It’s like she’s discovered something strong and solid inside herself.”

She’d undergone a major transformation. The realization of this when I’d put together who she was, opened up another thought process in my mind, which led to a question I hadn’t specifically asked.

I took the pictures Madelyn had printed and slid them to Sally. “Madelyn took these before the dance at Gracie’s.”

She nodded. “I dropped her off, but I just couldn’t stay.”

So it
had
been her I’d passed on the way to Will’s house.

“I’ll get you copies of everything,” Madelyn said. “You just give me your e-mail, and I’ll send them. I have some wonderful shots of Carrie.”

But Sally shook her head. “I don’t know if we want to remember today. Looking at the pictures of homecoming’ll always be a reminder to her of what was done to her dad, won’t it?”

“It might,” I said, “but a reminder isn’t always a bad thing.” I said it, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. I had the luxury of remembering Meemaw on a daily basis. If someone I’d loved had been horribly hurt, wouldn’t I want to forget that day?

My mind circled back to my question. “Do you recognize any of these kids?” I asked Sally.

She stood up and got a pair of reading glasses from a drawer, giving a sheepish, halfhearted smile. “Need these now.”

I automatically pushed my own glasses into place. “Me, too.”

She picked up the picture and studied each face. “I haven’t met all of these kids. Carrie’s really blossomed this year, but she doesn’t bring a lot of kids home.”

Her lips quivered as if she were fast-forwarding to see her daughter in a backward slide, closing in upon herself after the blow of what had happened to her father. “Sally,” I said, “you heard that Mrs. Blake confessed to killing Eddy and hurting your husband?”

She nodded, tears pooling in her eyes, hovering there but not spilling over.

“I don’t think she did it. I think she’s protecting someone.”

She drew back. “Protecting who?”

I finally asked the question I’d been mulling over for the last several hours. Since I’d first met Barbara Ann, and then when I’d read the letters she’d written to her husband, I’d assumed that her daughter was dead, but what if she’d simply left. Run away and, like Carrie, transformed herself? “Did Mrs. Blake’s daughter—”

“Sue?”

“Yes, Sue. Did she die?”

She sputtered. “Did she die? Good grief, I don’t think so.”

And there it was. A shift in everything I’d thought so far. Sue Blake wasn’t dead. She was very much alive, and I was one hundred percent sure she was living in Bliss. And I was pretty sure I knew who she was.

“Carrie wasn’t friends with her,” Sally continued, “but I do remember that something happened. Rumors were that there was trouble at home, but no one ever really knew. She just vanished one day. Left some sort of a note and ran away.”

A note that said,
I know the truth,
I thought, remembering the card in the box of letters from Mrs.
Montgomery. A thought crashed into my head. The handwriting. I could picture it—how distinct it was and how I’d seen it somewhere else.

The next second, it came to me. I’d seen the same handwriting on one of the cards from the Helping Hands luncheon. I racked my brain to remember the details. All I could think of was the no-dairy designation and then coconut milk came to my mind.

Barbara Ann Blake had had coconut milk at her house. Because her daughter didn’t eat dairy, and old habits died hard. Another series of thoughts careened into my head and a chill wound through me. Oh my God, could it really be her?

My skin went cold. I touched the edge of the photograph. “Are any of these girls Sue Blake?”

Sally dropped her gaze again. She puckered her lips, but after a long minute, she shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. She has long red hair. She was on the chunky side, if I’m remembering right.”

I came around next to her and pointed to the girl I suddenly suspected was Sue Blake. “Imagine her with longer hair and in jeans. Maybe a little heavier.”

Sally’s face tightened as she thought. “Maybe,” she finally said.

She stood suddenly, walked briskly from the kitchen, and returned a minute later carrying a thin hardcover book. “Carrie’s yearbook from Granbury,” she said, flipping it open and turning the pages. She stood up straighter, confidence pouring into her. When she found what she was looking for, she turned the book and pointed. “That’s Sue Blake. You think it’s the same girl?”

I studied the faces, first of the yearbook picture, then one of the shots from Madelyn’s prints. “No, I don’t think so,” I said. Upsetting Sally further was the last thing I wanted to do, but in my mind, I was sure the girl in the pictures was Sue Blake, the person who’d driven her car into Bubba’s and rammed Otis until he nearly died. The girl whose mother had confessed to protect her. The person who was most likely guilty of killing Chris Montgomery.

Would I have done the same thing? Would I have lied to protect my child if my child was a killer? I closed my eyes for a beat, but I couldn’t answer that question. All I knew was that people went to great lengths to protect their children. I felt protective of my nephews, and Gracie. In his own twisted way, Eddy Blake had tried to protect his children by keeping their worlds separate. But it had backfired when his daughter Sue had somehow discovered the truth.

My concern at the moment, however, was figuring out how to intercept the kids. I hadn’t been able to define the look I’d seen on Carrie’s face in the picture after Miss Reba announced Barbara Ann’s confession. But now I understood it. She knew the truth. She knew who’d hurt her father, which meant Sue Blake’s secrets were in the hands of someone else.

Sally’s house phone rang. She picked up and barely said hello before whoever was on the other end interrupted her. Her eyes grew wide and turned to stare at me as she continued to listen.

“Okay, baby, calm down,” she said after another few seconds. “Tell me what happened.”

She fell silent again, but mouthed to me,
Carrie
.

Carrie was upset and calling her from the homecoming dance. Sue Blake had already killed. And now, every fiber of my being told me that Carrie Levon was in horrible danger of becoming another victim.