Death by Diamonds

One

Women dress alike all over the world: they dress to be annoying to other women.

—ELSA SCHIAPARELLI

As I drove to work that morning, I remembered the dream I’d had last night: Me as a toddler being passed between my mother and Aunt Fiona, the two of them dancing and chanting in rhyme beside the Mystic River beneath a full and magical moon. Not a new dream, but an omen. Something in my life was about to change, possibly for the better.

I bit my lip, until from the top of the hill I saw the gorgeous weather vane atop my building, a ship with a mellow copper-green patina, sailing in the wind in whatever direction the universe determined.

The sight never failed to add to my sense of destiny.

No wonder I always arrived jazzed. After all, wearing designer vintage fashions is practically a requirement for a vintage dress shop owner. Every delightful day. I mean, how lucky can a girl get? I was home again. No more designing clothes for Faline in New York City. Faline, who took credit for everyone’s designs. She who must be loved and obeyed and agreed with, ad nauseum.

But that was the past. Today, I was looking toward the future. In deference to my dream, feeling the need to be ready for anything, I’d chosen an eighties Jean Muir “perfect suit” with a flare at the waist and a red that brought ripe raspberries to mind. Given the snow, I wore sturdy boots and carried my fifties Ferragamos with spool heels and gloved-suede arches in the same red.

To add whimsy to classic perfection, I picked a Lulu Guinness “mansion” bag that looked like a handbag shop with a black-and-white-striped awning and a scattering of red and pink purses in the windows.

As I turned from Main to Bank Street, the architectural beauty and eye-pleasing colors of my shop—sage, eggplant, and lavender—filled me with joy.

I revel in every assurance that my restoration of the former morgue-cum-funeral chapel carriage house adds a certain cachet to the charm of historic downtown Mystic. I believe it and I wallow in it. I attempt to endow the luxurious enchantment of that confidence into the original fashions I design under my own Mad Magic label. You see, I’m a recent escapee from the highest levels of the New York fashion industry. You can call me Mad, or Maddie, unless you’re my father, Professor Harry Cutler, in which case you will call me Madeira, whether I want you to or not.

As for the magic halves of my shop and label, I’m also my mother’s daughter, not a witch, precisely, but I have this whole psychic thing going on, which I apparently inherited from her. I can’t ask her to confirm Aunt Fiona’s assertion. Mom died when I was ten, though she still watches out for me, especially since I came back to Connecticut. Mom was a first-class chocoholic, so the sudden scent of chocolate, with no one in sight, is a—you’ll excuse the pun—dead giveaway.

Compared to Mom, I’m merely fudging my way up the sweet-tooth ranks. Besides chocolate, I’m into seeking and selling delectable retro fashions and spreading the joy of the classic lines.

My life seems perfect, doesn’t it, but there’s one drawback: Certain vintage clothes speak to me, in more ways than the norm and often about dead people. I not only “hear” what they have to say, the outfits I touch give me visions, during which I often zone out to view and hear snippets of greed, jealousy, hate, vengeance, secrets, all of which often translate into: means, motive, and opportunity, vintage style.

But since everything’s been quiet on the psychometric front for several months now, I’m hoping that was only a phase.

I pulled into my plowed parking lot rimmed in mounded snow, where a Wings Special Delivery truck sat beside my best friend Eve’s Mini Cooper. Eve, aka the dress-in-black-to-please-myself man magnet, had already taken to charming the driver’s khaki winter socks off.

“Hey,” I said, joining them. “Am I late?”

“No, I’m early as usual,” Eve said, “and glad of it.”

I had in one hand a clear glass vase overflowing with red and white carnations as she filled the other with a mint mocha chip Frappuccino topped with chocolate whipped cream, my newest vice, while she shoved the morning paper between my purse straps and my arm. With her hands now free, she signed for and accepted the box from the driver before she slipped her business card into Tall, Tan, and Do Me’s pocket. “Later,” she told him with a wink.

I don’t know if he winked back. The fur trim at the top front of his leather aviator hat—earflaps down—tilted a bit too far forward, and his jacket’s knit turtleneck stood zipped straight up to his goggles, presumably to protect him from snow glare . . . at thirty thousand feet, maybe.

Eve and I watched until his truck turned east on Main and disappeared, and I realized that I’d never heard his voice. “You’re my hero,” I said, eyeing Eve’s overall getup. “So, Boobs McCleavage, is that a corset top pushing your assets up and out there? Are you going psychic on me? You’re dressed like you knew a new hunk was coming into your life.”

“Nah, it’s part of my new look. Do you like it?”

“I love it. It’s so not you.”

“Gee, thanks, she who stuffs her A cup.”

I chuckled. “A and a half,” I said correcting her. “Did the guy join your stud-of-the-month club or what?”

Eve shivered, winked, and zipped up her black military jacket to protect her slightly ruffled, goose-pimply cleavage from the snow-swirling elements. “He will.”

Two

After breathing, eating and sleeping—and excluding a couple of delicious optional extras—one of the fundamental pleasures of the human body is to clothe it.

—LINDA WATSON, TWENTIETH CENTURY FASHION

I took Chakra, my guard kitty, from between my Honda Element’s two front seats, where her new cat carrier fit perfectly. I’d designed it for winter or summer. Right now, it was double snuggly with its removable sherpa lambs’ wool cashmere lining—printed with black paws on taupe. An adapter for the also-removable warming pad beneath her plugged into my dashboard.

“Boy, Chakra rides in style,” Eve said. “You gonna sell those carriers in your shop?”

“Maybe,” I said, “though they might be a bit too modern for a vintage dress shop.”

“Yeah, the moonroof’s a dead giveaway.”

“Hey,” I said. “For summer, it has a zip-on Florida room. Highly sought after.”

“What, no pool?”

I elbowed Eve as I unlocked my shop’s lavender door and the bells in my wreath made of handmade purple and magenta hearts—no two alike—tinkled.

Inside, Dante Underhill, former undertaker and hunky housebound ghost, waited for our usual morning chat. He even saluted when Chakra, at the sight of his ghostly self, banshee-howled “Ma-dei-ra,” as always, at the top of her overdeveloped kitty lungs, her version of my name never failing to make Dante smile and shake his head. I opened Chakra’s carrier so she could begin her morning rounds.

Dante had seventy years’ worth of juicy gossip to share and tended to serve it to me in detailed, breakfast-sized portions that set me up for the day. I had never enjoyed gossip more, mostly because I knew some of the aging players, or at least I’d heard of them from their descendents. Mild-mannered neighbors, or their ancestors, with checkered pasts. Who’d a thunk it?

Today, however, Dante saw Eve, saluted, and disappeared. Eve didn’t often join me at the shop mornings, because she taught computer science at UConn, but when she came, she stuck around for a while.

Eve didn’t know Dante existed, and since she got a bit edgy where ghosts and magic were concerned, I’d never mentioned my ghostly Cary Grant clone.

None the wiser, she relaxed in what I thought of as Dante’s chair to read the morning paper, and before long, after I’d traded my boots for my Ferragamos and hung my coat, Chakra curled up on Eve’s lap.

First order of business, find a vintage purse in unsaleable condition to decorate my counter. Today it was a Badgley Mischka crocodile in jungle red into which I set my overflowing vase of red and white carnations and baby’s breath. Gorgeous. A yummy conversation piece, vintage style.

Basically, I tortured myself every few days by breaking my heart over what people did to classic vintage purses but I consoled myself by using them as Vintage Magic bouquet holders.

Chakra jumped to the counter to sniff, circle, and generally check it out before she meowed her approval, hopped to the floor, and strolled over to catapult into Eve’s embrace. After I turned the sign to Open, I took a pair of scissors to the package delivered by a man dressed like a flying squirrel.

Leery about touching a potential vintage clothing item I knew nothing about, because of my visions and the unsolved murders they’d dragged me into, I carefully parted tissue layers, touching only the paper.

I recognized the dress immediately but could hardly wrap my brain around having it in my shop. About ten years ago, while in fashion school, I won the opportunity to design this awesome seafoam gown, trimmed in pricey cubic zirconias, for a Broadway actress, now a dear friend. But since she, too, collected designer vintage and one-of-a-kind originals, I couldn’t imagine why she would have sent a dress we both loved back to me. Dominique DeLong had always been a die-hard note writer and wouldn’t send an email if her life depended on it. So I fished through the tissue, careful not to touch the dress, and finally found the familiar embossed parchment envelope that could not have slipped to the bottom of the box, since it was taped—aka hidden?—between layers and layers of tissue. Keeping my itchy fingers away from the dress in the box, I opened the envelope carefully and tried to shrug off the shivering heebie-jeebies raising the hair along my nape and arms. Mad, sweetie, Dominique had written. I always wanted you to have this. I hoped someday to give it to you, in person. If you have it, and not from my hand, I’m dead. I wanted to get it to you before it was too late. At any rate, “Tag. You’re it. Run, do not walk, to the nearest exit.”

Use your talents wisely. Love, Dom.

Three

Design is a revelation to me. It’s like taking something that is not alive and giving it form, shape, substance, and life.

—GEOFFREY BEENE

“Is this some kind of sick joke?” I snapped, denial beating in my chest. “Dominique DeLong is dead?”

“I’ll say.” Eve sat forward, waking Chakra so the kitten stretched and teased the newspaper into playing with her. “It’s all over the Times,” Eve said, holding the paper from Chakra’s reach. “It says here that the actress collapsed during an off-Broadway musical performance of Diamond Sands.”

“I don’t believe you.” I’d tried to speak emphatically, but my words trailed off in a telltale whisper.

Denial. Worry. Despair.

The sound of Chakra pouncing on the newspaper like a baby kangaroo as Eve turned the headlines my way woke me to the truth and tore at my subconscious denial, until I focused on the visual: The headlines proclaiming her death and the picture of Dom at her most glamorous broke me.

For once the newspapers weren’t touting Dominique DeLong’s downward-spiraling career. The fact that they printed such a great picture told the story. The first rule of journalism: The skank cat you clawed yesterday is today’s Saint Feline, if she’s dead. Dominique DeLong was indeed . . . gone.

I bit my lip, willed my tight chest to ease and my rising tears to recede. My trembling legs made it necessary for me to lower myself to my tapestried fainting couch. “Dom would rather have died on Broadway than off,” I said, more to myself than Eve, aware I was in shock.

“At least there were witnesses,” Eve said. “Hundreds of them, according to the papers.”

My stomach flipped, and while I hadn’t been aware that I shivered, Dominique’s note trembled in my hand. “Witnesses?” Until that moment, I hadn’t acknowledged the need, but the word in print surely implied suspicion and the need for witnesses. On the other hand, it was a damned crying crime that Dom passed away in her forties with scads of untapped talent and star potential gone to waste.

No real crime had been categorically stated. It was the embryonic sleuth in me that grasped suspicion and looked for someone to blame. Wasn’t it?

Chakra sensed my panic, jumped ship, left Eve, and leapt into my lap, curling against me. My kitten had the ability to physically soothe the angst in my solar plexus chakra—hence her name.

It wasn’t long before her uncanny ability to ease the clutch in my gut had the desired effect. Not that my sorrow dissipated, but my intention to live reestablished itself. I sighed and ran my hand down my baby cat’s soft fur. “Chakra’s grown less yellow with age. Have you noticed?” I asked Eve, who looked back at me with silent understanding and soul-mate commiseration.

“She’s more cream now with this hint of a gold-tan in her forming stripes.” Eve’s interest said she understood that concentrating on Chakra soothed me like nothing else could. Well, Nick could, in his own way, but he was another story.

Eve looked down at her paper and continued reading, then she gasped and sat forward.

“You know the infamous diamonds that Dominique wore around her eyes like a super bling eye mask during the finale of each show?”

“The ones she wore while she sang ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’?” I confirmed. “The priceless gems loaned to the production by its sponsor, Pierpont Diamonds, as a publicity stunt?” I asked, trying to follow the weird change of topic.