A Killing Notion: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery (7 page)

She shrugged. “Like who’d want to drive him off the road. Maybe Dad was a drug dealer or something and we didn’t even really know him.”

Oh boy. Teagen had been watching too much TV. I sure didn’t see Chris Montgomery as a secret crystal meth cooker, dealer, or anything else remotely similar. Then again, people did have secrets, and he had spent a lot of nights away from home. Anything was possible. . . .

I scrolled through the contacts on the phone looking for Eddy Blake’s home number so I could call Mrs. Blake and let her know I’d bring the phone back. When I found it, I pulled my own phone out and dialed, but I looked up as Teagen cleared her throat. The house phone rang, but she didn’t make a move to go answer it.

“If you’re calling Mr. Blake, it’s the wrong number,” she said, the phone still ringing somewhere outside her bedroom.

I pressed
END
. “What?”

She moved back to the door, held it open, and lifted her chin slightly. “It stopped.”

“What stopped?”

She turned back to me. “The phone.” She flicked her head back, looking at the cell phone in my hand. “It’s programmed wrong. Mr. Blake’s home phone rings here instead of wherever his house in Granbury is. I bet my dad did it for a joke. He would have thought that was hilarious.”

When I’d ended the call, the Montgomery phone had stopped, but to test it again, I dialed
HOME
from the cell phone. Sure enough, the house phone rang again until I ended the call. “Wonder if he changed anything else,” I said, going back to the contact list. Of course there was no way to tell. I ran through the list anyway, looking for anything that might jump out. Reba Montgomery was there under M. Teagen and Shane were both listed, too. Under S was Sue—his missing daughter, I remembered. I could only imagine how awful it had to be to see her name there every day. The only thing more painful would be to actually remove it from the list. Doing so would give her loss a permanence that had to be impossible for a parent to cope with.

“Do you have your dad’s phone?” I asked, thinking that if Mr. Blake had Chris’s emergency numbers, Mr. Montgomery probably had his partner’s numbers, too.

But Teagen shook her head. “He had it with him. The sheriff said it was melted.”

The heaviness of the statement hung between us. Neither one of us spoke for about thirty seconds. Finally, I tucked Mr. Blake’s phone in my bag and headed down the hallway toward the stairs. “Hang in there, Teagen. I promise, it’ll get better. You have to give it some time.”

“Ms. Cassidy,” she said.

I paused at the door, turning around.

“I heard you’re, um, making homecoming mums.”

I nodded. “You should see my shop. It’s mum city in there.”

“You’re making one for Shane?”

“And Gracie.”

“Is he . . .” Her eyes welled with tears and her lower lip quivered. “Will he be able to go to homecoming? Is he going to be”—her voice hitched as she finished—“arrested?”

Her words felt like a vise around my heart. “I’m making the mums so he and Gracie can wear them. The sheriff is trying to find the truth,” I said. “And so am I.”

“Do you have time . . . could you . . . I’d really like a . . .”

She stumbled with her words, but I read between the lines. “I would love to make you a mum, Teagen.”

Anything to get a little time back at Buttons & Bows, where I could think and weave together the mess of threads of Bliss’s latest mystery.

Quiet time at Buttons & Bows to make a mum for Teagen was not to be. Before I’d even had a chance to start up Buttercup, my cell phone rang.

“We have a problem, Cassidy,” Will said when I answered.

I gripped the steering wheel, knowing that Will calling about a problem was no small thing. He wasn’t a cry-wolf kind of man, so if he thought something was wrong, something was probably very wrong.

“What is it?” I didn’t know which way to drive, so I stayed put in front of the Montgomery house, the truck in idle.

“Gracie called from school. There was an anonymous tip about Shane. Gavin came and searched his locker. They found a flask of vodka, instructions on how to sever the steering linkage in a car, and a shirt they say might be the one he was wearing the day his dad died.”

My head spun as he rattled off the evidence piling up against Shane. “How can they be sure it’s the shirt he
was wearing? And what does that matter, anyway?” I added, trying to gather up the pieces Will had just tossed up into the air.

“The school has surveillance tapes. Apparently the sheriff’s office has been going through them all. They saw Shane on Friday’s tape. When they found the shirt, they put together that it was the same one.”

“But why does that matter?” I asked again.

He hesitated. “There’s oil on the sleeve.”

I suddenly pictured Otis from Bubba’s rubbing his greasy hands on a dirty blue cloth. “Oh no.”

I threw the truck into drive and headed toward Bliss High School. The nerves in my gut seized. No matter how I tried to spin it, this didn’t look good for Shane.

“Right.”

“I’m on my way,” I said. Less than eight minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot of the school, tucked the truck into a visitor parking space, and speed walked toward the front office.

I approached the double glass doors and saw that Gavin was there, along with a female deputy named Kate O’Brian. She’d come in to Buttons & Bows several times as a potential customer, but she’d yet to pull the trigger on having me design something for her. Behind the law enforcement officers, Will stood with Gracie, speaking softly and convincing her she needed to go back to class.

My head felt light, as if all the blood was draining from it and pooling in my gut. Between the deputies, hands cuffed behind his back, was Shane. He looked as pale and drawn as I felt, his eyes cast down, his chin slack, a look of disbelief on his face.

“Shane,” I said, but my words stopped on my lips. I had a vision of him in a white wide-pin-striped suit, a throwback from the 1920s, looking dapper and irreverent. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever made, but that didn’t mean it was outside the realm of possibility.

He lifted his gaze to mine, his brown eyes skittish and scared. He was a sixteen-year-old boy, but he looked like a terrified child who was lost in a crowd. “I didn’t do it,” he said, his voice scarcely above a whisper. “I didn’t kill my dad.”

Gavin looked at me, his face grim, his lips pressed into a thin line. He shook his head, just barely, and after he’d done it I wasn’t entirely sure I’d seen it—or that I’d interpreted it correctly. The message I’d gotten was that he didn’t think Shane had done it, either. Maybe I was delusional. Or too close to the situation.

“Let’s go,” he said to Shane, no bark to his words.

Gavin and I didn’t see eye to eye, but like his father, my stepdaddy, Hoss McClaine, he was a fair man and he certainly didn’t want to arrest anyone who wasn’t actually guilty.

He flattened his palm on the top of Shane’s head, guiding him into the back of his cruiser. A minute later, Will and I stood at the curb staring after the disappearing taillights of the car.

Will slipped his arm around me, pulling me close. “I believe him,” he said, his gaze still straight ahead on the empty road.

“What did he say about the vodka?” I asked.

“That it’s not his.”

Of course—what else would he say?

The shirt seemed irrefutable, so I left that one alone,
although there had to be an explanation. The third item found in Shane’s locker bothered me the most. “Shane worked at Bubba’s. Why would he need instructions on how to cause damage to a car? That doesn’t make sense, does it? Wouldn’t he know?”

It would be akin to me needing instructions on how to add pleats to a bodice, or how to gather a skirt. It just felt wrong.

“That’s just what I was thinking,” Will said. “He wouldn’t, which means—”

“Someone’s trying to frame him,” I finished, the words bitter in my mouth. In my mind’s eye, I saw the crushed expression on Gracie’s face as she stood with her father watching Gavin and Deputy O’Brian lead Shane away. My resolve to help her—to help them both—strengthened. I took out my cell phone and dialed Miss Reba.

“I just heard. I’m on my way to the sheriff’s office,” she said when she answered.

“He’s scared,” I said, not wanting to upset her, but not sugarcoating it, either. “The deputy found some things in his locker.”

“What’s happening, Harlow? Shane didn’t do this. He didn’t do this!”

“I know, Miss Reba,” I said. I just hoped I could figure out why someone was trying to make it look like he had.

*   *   *

Will and I hung around outside the campus until the bell rang and the students were dismissed. A steady stream of kids filed through the front doors. We caught snippets of conversation, some about homecoming, the football game Friday night, and the new restaurant opening in town where half the student population was hoping to
get part-time work. The rest centered around the arrest of Shane Montgomery, the discoveries in his locker, and the utter disbelief that he could have killed his father.

“He’s, like, the nicest guy,” one girl said, wiping a tear from her cheek.

“Doesn’t he have an alibi?” the boy with her asked.

“It’s not like he was right there when the car crashed. It was tampered with before the accident,” another guy said.

“No, but I heard they played chicken . . . and Shane’s dad lost.”

“Shane. A killer.” A group of girls shook their heads in unison as one of them said, “I just can’t believe all his bad luck.”

They walked off before we could hear any more. “What bad luck?” Will asked.

We moved to the stone half wall and perched while we waited for Gracie. “They had a break-in a few weeks ago,” I said, answering his question. “Nothing major was stolen except for Teagen’s iPod and Shane’s jacket, but some random stuff was taken. Then Miss Reba woke up to the intruder standing over their bed.”

“I did hear about that.” He went on to say something about there not being any other home invasions or robberies, but my mind slipped back to something Otis had said at Bubba’s.

He’d said that Shane and his dad had fought. Maybe he and his dad didn’t get along as well as people seemed to think. Otis had thought it was possible Shane had simply snapped. Who was right? Otis, or the kids at school who thought Shane was incapable of hurting anyone, let alone his father?

“Woolgathering?”

“What?”

“You’re at it again, Cassidy. Lost in thought, your mind miles and miles away.”

I looked up at him sheepishly. “Just trying to make sense of what happened.”

We looked up to see Danica and Leslie next to us. Their expressions were somber.

“Girls,” I asked them, “did you hear about the burglary at the Montgomery’s a few weeks back?”

“Sure,” Danica said. “I heard that Mr. Montgomery chased whoever it was down the street, but I don’t think they ever found out who broke in.”

Leslie shook her head, her brows pulled together. “Pretty scary. Someone just waltzed right in like they owned the place and, from what I heard, scared the bejesus out of Shane’s mom.”

“Not as scary as murder.” Danica looked back at Will and me. “Everyone’s saying the sheriff came and arrested Shane. Is he okay?”

Leslie knocked the back of her hand against Danica’s arm. “Really? Do you
think
he’s okay?”

Danica’s eyes flew open wide, the reality of Shane’s situation looking like it was hitting her in earnest. She clutched her jacket and fiddled with the strap of her backpack. “No, of course he’s not okay. I didn’t mean . . . I was just . . .” She gulped, regrouping. “How’s Gracie taking it?”

“He’s innocent.”

This time we all turned, startled by the force of Gracie’s voice. She came up on the other side of Will and me, her best friend, Holly Kincaid, by her side.

“Of course he is,” Leslie said, while Danica added, “It’ll all work out. It has to.”

“Shane’s mom’ll get him a lawyer,” Gracie said. Her gaze skittered over each of us and she nodded. “She’ll get him the best, and the sheriff’ll realize his mistake, and you’ll figure out the truth,” she said to me, “and it’ll all be okay. You’ll see.”

Will squeezed Gracie’s hand. “We’ll do what we can to help, sweetheart.”

Gracie nodded, but instead of falling apart or looking to her dad for more reassurance, she turned to me, her eyes fiery. “I want to go work on our homecoming mums; is that okay, Harlow? Can I go to Buttons and Bows?”

“Gracie,” I said, “are you sure—”

“You don’t have to come. I can do it alone,” she said quickly. Her eyes glazed over and she dipped her chin, her strength wavering. “Please, Harlow.”

“I want to work on mine, too,” Leslie said quickly. “And I’d love to see my dress again.”

Danica nodded. “Me, too. We can order some pizza and get not
plumb
crazy, but
mum
crazy.”

The girls all looked at Danica like she was from Neptune; then they each grinned. It was a silly joke, but it had done the trick of lightening the moment. Even for Gracie.

Holly had her cell phone out, her thumb poised and ready to dial. They all looked at me, their fearless mum leader, to give the okay. At some point, I would trek out to Granbury and return Mr. Blake’s phone to his wife, but right now, I wanted to do whatever Gracie needed me to do to help her feel better, and I had to make Teagen her mum. Those two things were more important than anything else.

“Let’s go,” I said.

An almost enthusiastic cheer went up from the girls, and Holly dialed, stepping aside as she placed a delivery order. The girls split up, each walking to their respective cars. Gracie went with Holly in her Jeep, Danica drove off in her old vintage car, and Leslie walked toward the road. Danica stopped and said something to Leslie through the open passenger window. Leslie nodded and climbed in, the engine revved, and they were off.

A little piece of my heart swelled at the budding of the friendship between the two girls. They’d met because of Zinnia James and her charity, but now they were becoming closer, and that was worth all the dresses in the world.

Will walked me to my truck. “You sure you can handle four teenage girls?”

I laughed. “If I can handle Loretta Mae, I can handle them.”

A short while later we were settled around the dining table at Buttons & Bows. I’d already had a base put together, so I spent the first twenty minutes tying on charms, bells, and plastic decorations, including a sparkly pink cell phone.

“For Teagen,” I said when the girls asked who it was for.

They nodded in unison, each of them silently acknowledging that, bless her heart, Teagen needed a great mum to help her in her time of need.

It was smaller than the others because she was in middle school, but the way I saw it, she had plenty of time to grow into the enormous creations as she worked through her high school career. Kids had to have something to look forward to, after all.

They kept working on their creations, but I moved on to Danica’s dress. There was nothing like working with fabric to help ease my mind and calm my thoughts. But more than anything, what I wanted was inspiration about how to help Shane get out of the shackles he was currently in.