Deadly Patterns (15 page)

I could hear Meemaw’s voice in my head.
True love, Harlow. It’s magical, and without it, you don’t have anything
. My great-grandmother’s charm had always been foolproof. What Meemaw wanted, Meemaw got.

She’d wanted me home in Bliss. Check.

Wanted Gracie Flores in my life. Check.

I was pretty sure she wanted Will and me to settle down together and make a passel of Cassidy-Flores babies.

And I wanted . . . him, too.

Love. Since discovering my Cassidy charm, I’d been afraid that realizing one of my own dreams, namely falling in love, would mess with my gift. It was another reason I was so hesitant about telling Will about my charm. He might balk and leave, but what if he didn’t? What if he stuck around, we fell head over heels in love, and my Cassidy blessing flitted away?

I tamped down the fluttering in the pit of my stomach. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I said coyly. I disentangled myself from his oh so warm and cozy lap and ducked my head to hide the heat that had risen to my cheeks.

Madelyn glanced up from the digital screen of her camera. “Ready?” she asked after I’d moved out of the way.

“As I’ll ever be,” Will said.

I couldn’t see his lips through the silk of his snowy beard, but I sensed his smile. Sensed that what he wanted for Christmas was me.

Madelyn snapped away, taking a series of pictures, directing Will on how to sit, which way to look, where to put his arms, and every other nuance of his position she could think of. “Bugger,” she said, half under her breath.

“What?” Mrs. Abernathy asked.

“I want to try it without the backdrop. To capture the mood of the house, you know?”

“I thought we agreed—”

Madelyn held up her hand, stopping Mrs. Abernathy’s words on her pursed lips. “You said you wanted the backdrop, but it’s not working. There’s no . . .” She paused, as if she were searching for just the right word. “Life,” she finally finished. “The pictures are flat.”

The wallpaper in the small central room was alive with color. The old-fashioned brown, green, gold, and copper tea rose pattern climbed up an ivory background. No question, it would give the photos character that black backdrop didn’t.

But Mrs. Abernathy didn’t agree. She shook her head. “The house isn’t alive. It doesn’t have a mood. We’ll work with what you have.”

But Madelyn stood firm. Photography to her was like dressmaking to me. It was her passion, even if it wasn’t the thing she made a living doing. She had an eye for telling stories through pictures. Every now and then, she placed a picture or an article in
D Magazine
or
Texas Monthly
. She’d done one recently on women entrepreneurs and had included me in it.

She shrugged her shoulders back, straightening up to meet Mrs. Abernathy’s steady gaze. “Every house tells a story,” she said matter-of-factly, “just like every outfit Harlow makes for someone becomes part of that person’s story.”

“That’s true.” I’d made Madelyn several outfits. Each had enhanced a part of her character that had been buried. She’d blossomed, become more confident, but really I thought she’d become more . . . Madelyn. An enriched version of herself.

Will spoke from his throne. “It’s the same for a house. For a building of any kind, but especially for something as old as this place. Hidden nooks and crannies, secret passageways, scars on the wood, handprints in paint on the porch. Every corner has a story to tell.”

I snuck a glance at Mrs. Abernathy. Was there something hidden in a nook or cranny here that she and Dan Lee had both known about?

But her gaze remained steady, her foot had stopped tapping, and I chased away my suspicions. The woman was part of Bliss’s old guard. She couldn’t be involved in anything as sordid as murder.

“Clothes are clothes,” she said. “And a house is a house. The people who came before don’t stay behind.”

Maybe not in her world, but she didn’t know about Loretta Mae, or the fact that all the Cassidy women apparently hung around 2112 Mockingbird Lane after they’d crossed to the hereafter.

Madelyn had already started taking down the backdrop. Will maneuvered around his belly to help her. I moved the light stands and before long she was snapping pictures of Will again. She paused to look at the camera’s digital screen. “Much better,” she said. “Now lift your chin, Will. There you go. And look left, uh-huh . . .” She peered through the viewfinder and snapped away.

Ten minutes later, she suddenly tucked her camera into her bag, straightened up, and announced, “Done.”

I heaved a relieved sigh. Now I’d be able to skedaddle back to Buttons & Bows and get back to the fashion show garments—

“Harlow, when will you have the newsletter ready?”

I gaped at Mrs. James. “Wh-what?”

She frowned at me, the faint outline of blue veins visible under her papery skin. “Helen said you’d take the pictures and create a newsletter—”

“She did?”

We both turned to Mrs. Abernathy. Mrs. James was looking for confirmation and I wanted an explanation.

But Mrs. Abernathy wasn’t behind us. I peeked into the parlor. She wasn’t there. I looked in the kitchen. Not there either.

“Where’d she go? Mrs. Abernathy!”

“I’m right here, Harlow, for heaven’s sake.”

She glided across the hardwood floor from the other side of the staircase. She’d come from an odd nook, tucked under the incline of the stairs, a tiny powder room with a sloped ceiling.

I hesitated, my polite Southern roots making me want to hem and haw around the question burning in my mouth, namely, had she been searching for something? But of course that didn’t make sense. She’d had plenty of opportunity over the last six months to scour the house for hidden treasures. “I’m making a newsletter?”

“Well, of course,” she said, as if there were no other possibility and how thick was I to not understand that? “And some flyers to post in the businesses on and off the square.”

“You never—”

“What did you think needed to happen after these PR photos?” She leveled her steely gaze at me, and not for the first time I wondered why she disliked me so. “Are you, or are you not, in charge of this part of the event?”

“Well, yes, but—”

She flicked her hand toward Madelyn and Will. “You do it, or have one of them do it. I don’t care. I just need it e-mailed to me as soon as possible so it can go out to our mailing list.”

“But the fashion show—”

She stopped me with another wave of her hand. “Without a Santa, the kids won’t want to come. And without the kids, parents won’t come. And all our effort will have been for naught.”

“We’ve sold a hundred tickets already,” I reminded her. We weren’t completely dependent on Santa Claus for people to show up.

“A hundred is good, but we were counting on the additional people to support the vendors. Your grandmother is one of those. Goat lotion, or something.”

Mrs. James refolded the quilt, taking it back to the parlor. “If we’re to make this an annual event, we need it to be a success, Harlow,” she said, coming back to the entry room.

“I’d do it, love, but Billy’s home from Austin and we have a holiday dinner at the university tonight,” Madelyn said. She pulled the memory card from the camera and handed it to me.

I tucked it into my pants pocket. It seemed I was facing an evening at the computer instead of at the sewing machine. Not what I’d had planned.

Time was running out. It was going to be a long night. My eyesight would be strained by the time I was finished trying to design the perfect outfit for Josie, threading needles, getting set up for tomorrow’s Santa dollmaking class, and sewing straight seams. At the rate I was wearing out my eyes, come the new year, I’d need to visit the eye doctor, update my exam, and get a new pair of glasses.

And all this just when I felt like I was on the right track with figuring out what had happened to Dan Lee Chrisson.

Chapter 21

I sat in my old yellow truck, dug my sketchbook out of my bag, and started to jot down the thoughts rattling around in my mind, competing for my attention. If I got them on paper, maybe my head would clear and I’d be able to think straight. That had always been Meemaw’s philosophy. She called it a trigger list. “Hit the main points, Harlow,” she’d told me over and over again, “and the rest will fall into place. It’s like piecing together a quilt, one scrap at a time.”

I wrote down what I knew, which, as it turned out, wasn’t much.

Raylene and Dan Lee divorced, but not so amicably

Maggie Pagonis stole Boone

Loose railing on the widow’s walk

Hattie protecting her sister?

Mrs. Abernathy: Dan Lee had no business nosing around that house

Why were the bolts loose in the first place and who could have done it?

This last question stuck out like a prairie dress would at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. The same people circled in my mind. The Barnetts, Raylene, and Mrs. Abernathy. They all had keys to the house, and any one of them could have loosened those screws. Plus there was Mrs. James’s missing key to consider.

I added one more thing to my list.

Dan Lee Chrisson had been born as Charles Denison. Why had his family hidden who they really were, and was he after something at the Denison mansion?

No matter how I cut the fabric, the pieces of this mystery quilt didn’t fit together right. No, something was missing. But as I pulled up to 2112 Mockingbird Lane in my rumbly pickup, a movement from the porch caught my eye and the question left my head. “Thelma Louise, if you’re causing trouble again, so help me . . .” I muttered under my breath, yanking the steering wheel to the right and angling the truck alongside the curb.

In seconds flat, I was out of the cab, coat pulled tight to ward off the chill, and charging through the arbor and gate leading to the front yard. I hurried up the flagstone pathway, taking inventory of the lush winter growth in the yard—a peculiarity, given how cold it had been. Pansies lined the path, bluebonnets sprouted from the icy ground, and even the wisteria was going through a blooming cycle. Mama had a way with plants, and she spread her charm all around, whether she wanted to or not.

And it all looked just fine. Better than fine. I slowed down. In fact, it looked abnormally perfect, which meant . . .

“Harlow, what in heaven’s name are you doing standing there like that? Come on up here and let us in the house.”

Mama. She stood on the porch, tapping her booted foot, her lips pursed in exasperation. “Meemaw never locked the door, you know,” she said. “Here I thought I could help you with some of your sewing for a spell, but—”

“Things around Bliss have changed,” I told her. The murder of a bridesmaid in my front yard was evidence of that. A dead Santa was proof. “But I would have left it open if I’d known you were coming by,” I added, walking toward the porch steps.

The rocking chair creaked, and from the corner of my eye, I saw it moving back and forth. “Meemaw—” At the top of the steps, I turned, expecting to see the misty ghost of my great-grandmother. But I stopped short. Raylene Lewis sat on the old wooden rocker cradling and cooing to her baby.

Oh! I’d plum forgotten that I’d left her a message and asked her to come over. “I didn’t see you!” I said, hurrying to the front door and plunging the key into the lock. The temperature had dropped to thirty-three degrees, a good mite too cold for a mother and her swaddled babe. A good mite too cold for anyone to be out.

I held the door for them, closing it against the biting chill once they were inside. The faint scent of evergreen—as much as a mostly fresh five-foot tree from the hardware store could emit—floated in the air. Buttons & Bows didn’t have the ambience of the Denison mansion, but it was home.

Mama whirled around, whipping her Longhorns cap off her head and hanging it on the coat tree next to the front door. No matter how old she was, she would always be a down-home country girl at heart. No pretense, no gussying herself up beyond her Wranglers and UT clothes (which she wore on account of Red and me both graduating from the Austin university), and no lollygagging around the bramble bush. “Where in tarnation have you been?” she demanded.

Mama’s temper flare-up didn’t faze me. I hadn’t inherited that tendency, but she’d been this way since I was a tiny thing, and I imagined she always would be. In ten seconds flat, she’d simmer down and be back to normal. “Doing a photo shoot of Santa Claus,” I said, trying my darnedest to ignore the sudden image I had of her in a calf-length, scarf-hemmed lacy white wedding dress, a veil attached to the white cowgirl hat on her head. Oh Lord. It was cheesy—but completely her.

The baby’s gurgling drew my attention away from the realization that Mama and Hoss might well get hitched before too long, and that in all likelihood I’d be designing a dress that would have made Annie Oakley proud.

Boone’s tiny fingers curled around the flannel blanket he was wrapped up in and the tip of his pink nose peeked out from under the knit hat on his head. “He’s adorable, Raylene,” I said, tossing my portable sewing bag on the sofa.

I held my finger out and he gripped it with more strength than I’d thought possible. His eyes were cornflower blue. He looked at me with such intensity, I had an inkling that he could see everything about me. “Can I hold him?”

She handed Boone over, making sure I had a good grip on him before she let go. “I still can’t believe he’s really here,” she said as she brushed the back of her finger to the side of his face just like I had. There was something about the pudgy cheeks of an infant that just begged to be touched. “I thought I’d lost him for good. I owe you, Harlow.”

Mama’s foot stopped tapping and her shoulders relaxed. She moved to Raylene’s side and slung her arm around her shoulder. “You won’t never have to worry about that happening again,” she said.

Raylene sucked in a few deep breaths, gathering up her composure as she blew them out. “No, I guess I won’t.”

Her voice trembled, just a touch but enough that I took notice. Was it relief that she had her baby boy back safe and sound, or—

My mind zipped back to the thought I’d had when I’d first met Raylene. Had she come to see where Dan Lee had died, or to revisit the scene of her crime?

Boone squirmed. He threw himself backward, catching me off guard.

“Watch him!” Raylene cried.

I slid my hand up to brace his neck and head, holding him in front of me. “What are you doing, little guy?”

His eyes were like saucers as he looked at me and his feet, wrapped in the flannel blanket, pressed against my stomach. I turned my head away, whipping it back around to face him and making an “O” with my mouth.

I’d been hoping for a laugh, but instead his lower lip quivered. “Don’t cry,” I said quietly. “It’s okay. I’m the one who found you in the stable, remember?” I smiled, but Boone didn’t blink. Didn’t smile. Didn’t look like he trusted me. It was as if he knew I was wondering about his mother and if she could have been the one to push his father to his death.

I looked to Mama for a split second, and in that moment, Boone let out an earsplitting cry.

Raylene surged forward, gripping Boone’s swaddled body and pulling him away from me. “Come to Mama,” she said, turning him around and snuggling him against her chest. “I won’t let anythin’ happen to you.”

A shiver danced up my spine as she stroked his back and cooed, soothing him until he stopped crying. I didn’t know what to believe. Was saving Boone from his father on her list of things she’d do to protect the child, even if it meant shoving him off a balcony?

My head felt full of cotton. Raylene sank onto the sofa and Mama scooted into the workroom and took up hemming one of the dresses hanging on a dress form. I grabbed my sewing bag, pulled out my cloth-covered sketchbook, and flipped to the back. “What did you want to talk to me about, Harlow?” Raylene asked as she draped a second receiving blanket over her shoulder, covering Boone’s head as she nursed him.

I’d spent the last hour thinking that Helen Abernathy might well be behind Dan Lee’s death, but now that Raylene was in front of me, I was back to the most obvious answer. With Mrs. Abernathy, it was all a big blank theory that Dan Lee had been searching for something in the house, but with Raylene and Hattie, the motive was much clearer.

My stomach churned. And if it were true that she’d pushed Dan Lee off the widow’s walk, then a murderess was sitting on my sofa, nursing a baby, and that was more twisted than an Oklahoma tornado.

“Raylene,” I said, sitting across from her on the love seat. “I was at the Denison mansion when Dan Lee died.”

She looked at me, eyes wide. Her lower lip quivered, but she held it together. “I know. I can’t believe you’re okay after that fall.”

That made two of us. “Hattie was there too.”

Boone gurgled, pulling away from her. She stroked his head, helping him latch on again. “I was, too,” she said. “We came together, but when I saw Dan Lee’s truck, I couldn’t go in. I started to, but I . . . I just couldn’t,” she said, her voice beginning to crack with emotion. “So I waited in the car.”

I stared at her, my mind a jumble. She hadn’t tried to hide the fact that she’d been right outside when her ex-husband had been killed. She didn’t lie to give herself an alibi. And I wanted to believe her.

We were silent for a few seconds before Mama scooted out of the workroom, the dress she was hemming for me draped over her arm. “Did you kill him, Raylene? Tell us the truth, now. Did you sneak in, climb those stairs, and push him off the widow’s walk?”

I gaped at her, speechless.

Mama just popped her eyebrows up and shrugged at me. “Well? It’s what you’re beatin’ around the bush about, ain’t it?”

Boone suddenly lurched, pulling free of Raylene again. His back arched, he sucked in a deep, quiet breath, and then let loose a raucous cry.

Raylene had gone pale, but she cooed, trying to calm Boone down. “Shush now.”

“Mama!” I said, finally finding my voice.

But Raylene raised her sad gaze to me before I could chastise my mother any more. “I didn’t do it,” she said quietly. “I didn’t want Dan Lee dead.”