Elizabeth Lynn Casey - Southern Sewing Circle 10 - Wedding Duress (21 page)

“Then please know that I’m not trying to rub salt in your wounds by revisiting the subject now.”

“What is there to revisit, Leona?”

“Milo wasn’t the only one who was duped, dear.”

She stopped, mid-sigh, and forced herself to absorb
what her friend was saying. “What are you talking about, Leona?”

“Debbie stopped by today.”

“Oh?”

“And it wasn’t to yell at me, either.”

“Okay . . .”

“She wanted to talk about the tests I did with your ring last night.”

A brief potpourri of sounds in her ear was quickly followed by a short-lived whisper. “If I were in the market for a new career, dear, I would open a caregiver agency. And I would actually make sure my employees like taking care of people.” Then bringing her voice back to a more normal volume, Leona continued, “Turns out, the ring Debbie got from Colby for their fifteen-year anniversary over the summer is fake, too.”

“Are you sure?” she asked as she recovered her breath. “Is Debbie upset?”

She could almost sense Margaret Louise’s ears perking from the backseat, but her focus remained on Leona.

“She’s angry. Or as angry as Debbie gets about anything. But I’m not calling to discuss her reaction, dear. I’m calling to inform you of the jewelry shop from which Colby purchased the ring.”

Suddenly, Tori didn’t need Leona to say another word. The reason her friend was calling was crystal clear. What the information meant in terms of the bigger picture, though, was still a bit fuzzy.

“Thanks for the call, Leona. I’ll take it from here.”

She could feel Margaret Louise’s frustration as she shifted the car into park outside the home Cynthia Marland shared with her parents. Sure, she knew her friend didn’t handle being left out of things very well, but at that moment, Tori was on information overload. The realization that Brady’s Jewelry was selling fake gems needed to sit on the back burner and simmer for a little while.

“You know, after livin’ a lifetime bein’ my sister’s twin, I’ve got a keen sense when it comes to her motivations for sayin’ and doin’ things.”

When Tori didn’t take the bait, Margaret Louise addressed her speech to the occupant of the passenger seat. “Why, I remember a time not all that long ago when Leona was spoutin’ ’bout somethin’ she ate at the diner. Someone at the next table thought she was complainin’ but she wasn’t.”

When Charles said nothing, Margaret Louise took it a step further. “I was able to do the decipherin’ and make things right.”

Tori shook off the troubling thoughts knocking around in her subconscious and tried her best to focus on the weathered shack-like structure on the other side of the road. It was hard to believe a street with such beaten-down homes fell inside Sweet Briar’s town limits. Especially when families that were wealthy enough to employ nannies lived less than three miles away . . .

“Are we ready?” she asked as she took in the presence of a single light in the front left window of the house. “Let’s get this over with.”

She pushed open her car door and then met Margaret Louise and Charles for the trip across the road. As they approached the house, Charles stopped. “Why are we asking these questions?”

“I saw her sneaking around outside the Bradys’ home a couple of days after Miss Gracie’s fall, remember?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. What are you going to say to explain why we’re here, at her house, asking questions we have no business asking?”

“I’ll figure something out. Just roll with it, okay?”

“Oh, I can roll with it, sweetheart.” Charles ran to catch up with Tori and Margaret Louise as they stepped onto the rotting front porch.

“Of that, I have no doubt.” She allowed herself the momentary reprieve the lighthearted exchange provided, then reached out and rapped the front door with her fist.

When there was no response, Margaret Louise knocked harder. “You gotta put some elbow grease on it, Victoria.”

Sure enough, the door opened to reveal a close-up view of the young woman Tori had seen only twice before—once from across the park, and once from the front seat of her car as Cynthia snuck out of the Bradys’ home and into her boyfriend’s car.

Cynthia pushed open the door and eyed them curiously. “Yeah?”

“Cynthia, my name is Victoria Sinclair.”

“She’s the head librarian at the library in town,” Margaret Louise added. “She’s real smart with books. And I’m Margaret Louise Davis—my son Jake owns the garage in town that your friend’s brother tried to rip off.”

Tori glared at Margaret Louise as Charles stepped forward. “And I’m Charles. I’m visiting from New York City.”

The faintest hint of a sparkle lit Cynthia’s eyes as she shifted her attention completely in Charles’s direction. “I’ve seen pictures of that place.”

“The pictures don’t do it justice,” Charles gushed. “You really ought to come visit one day. You’d love it.”

“That’s what I was saving for before I blew it with that form for Reenie’s school and she ended up having that seizure.”

Bingo . . .

“People make mistakes, Cynthia. We all do.”

Cynthia stepped all the way out onto the porch and let the door snap closed behind her. “That’s what I tried to tell Mrs. Brady, but she was so mad.”

“Did you like looking after those youngin’s?”

Cynthia shrugged at Margaret Louise’s question. “It was hard work, that’s for sure. I mean, they were nice
kids and all and it was fun living like that for a while, but the same kind of money to do nothing is way better.”

“Did you apologize to Mrs. Brady?”

“A trillion times. But she didn’t listen to me, or Tara, or Mr. Brady. She said she wasn’t going to give me a second chance to kill her kid.” Cynthia slumped against the wall of her house, shaking her head as she did. “I didn’t try to hurt Reenie. I really didn’t. I just didn’t spend too much time filling out those forms I said I’d do.”

“Mr. Brady and Tara wanted you to stay on?” Charles asked.

“D-uh. Of course. Family is supposed to look out for family, right?”

“So when you were fired, you had to pack your stuff and move out?” Tori sidestepped her way over to a rocking chair and perched on the edge while she waited for the girl’s answer.

“That very day.”

“Did you ever go back again?”

Two matching splashes of crimson appeared in Cynthia’s cheeks as she stood tall. “Twice. I wanted Tara to give me another shot.”

“You wanted
Tara
to give you another shot?”

“Of course. I figured I could just get back on the books again and keep saving for my ticket out, but she said I blew it. For everybody.”

Charles clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth and rotated his head around his neck a few times. “Nuh-uh. One nanny does not an agency make.”

“Well, in Tara’s case, she had three of us with a brain in our head—Amanda, me, and Wendy. None of us really
like kids, but we like money enough to put up with them. Jeanine, on the other hand, actually likes them, but she’s kind of awkward and not exactly the face Tara wants to put out there for people to see. If I’d thought about it sooner, I should have played the dumb route. If I had, my Get-Out-of-Sweet-Briar fund would still be growing.”

Tori gave a peek at both Charles and Margaret Louise to see if they were following everything Cynthia was saying, but the confusion she saw on their faces proved they were all in the same boat.

“And when you went back that first time to ask Tara to give you another shot, I take it she said no?”

Cynthia snorted. Loudly. “She
said
no. She
yelled
no. And she blamed me for ruining her life.”

“Well,
that’s
a little extreme.” Charles crossed his arms in an almost over-the-top show of solidarity with the subject of Tori’s questions. But for whatever reason, it worked, prompting Cynthia to return the gesture with a knowing nod.

“Isn’t it, though? I mean, I made a mistake. If the other families go all psycho and start demanding better nannies simply because I messed up, that’s saying something about
their
nannies, not me. And besides, you get what you pay for, you know?”

“Ain’t that the truth, sister.”

Tori avoided looking at Charles to keep from laughing and instead asked the question spawned by Cynthia’s latest statement.

“The Bradys didn’t pay well?”

“They paid pretty good, compared to the other families. But for the other actual placements, if you removed
the chance to live in a fancy house, staying home and watching TV was a better bet. Virtually the same amount of money for a lot less headaches.”

“So Tara was angry because she lost a commission on you?”

“Tara was angry she’d lose everything because of me.” Cynthia’s voice became more high-pitched, yet also whisper-like. “‘I’m telling you, Cynthia, if I lose everything to a car wash, I will make your life a living hell.’”

Tori toed the ground to stop the chair’s subtle rocking motion. “So she wasn’t telling
you
you’d have to wash cars?”

“Uh, no. Though if he ends up opening a car wash and I get a”—Cynthia hooked both her index fingers in the air to simulate air quotes—“
job
there, that would really tick her off, wouldn’t it? Ha!”

Tori hated to admit it even to herself, but she was lost. She had absolutely no idea what the former Nanny Go Round employee was talking about. So instead of becoming even more confused, she moved on to the question that had led her to the girl’s doorstep in the first place.

“You said you went back to the Bradys’ house a second time after you were fired. Why was that?”

“Because I left the macaroni necklace Sophie made me in a drawer in my old room. I figured no one was sleeping in there on account of my replacement being dead, so my boyfriend drove me back there on a night the Bradys always go out to dinner. He waited in the car while I snuck back in, grabbed the necklace, and snuck back out.”

“You went back for a macaroni necklace?”

Cynthia turned her head to the side but not before Tori
caught a hint of misting in the young woman’s eyes. “Yeah. So what? No one ever made anything like that for me before.”

*   *   *

They were almost at the park when Charles finally broke the silence, his normally confident voice sounding rather battered.

“That girl made my head hurt.”

“You and me both,” Tori mumbled as she pulled into the lot beside the park and rolled to a stop beside Margaret Louise’s station wagon. “But I got what I wanted, I suppose.”

“You still thinkin’ ’bout callin’ the chief and pointin’ the finger at Amanda Willey?”

She tipped her head back against the seat rest and stared up at the ceiling of her car. “I think there’s very good reason to suspect Miss Gracie was pushed. And Amanda seems a likely suspect. But somethin’ doesn’t seem right yet.”

“Maybe Tara did it.”

She let Charles’s words loose in her thoughts and realized they matched with a feeling that had been building in her head ever since Cynthia started talking. All along she suspected Miss Gracie’s murder was tied to the interest being shown toward British nannies in Julie Brady’s kitchen that fateful evening. It was why she’d narrowed her focus on Amanda. But Amanda was young; she could find another job if the Whitehalls went elsewhere. Maybe that new job wouldn’t come with car keys and a suite in an almost-mansion, but Amanda was one who would get where she was going in life one way or the other.

Tara, on the other hand, was an adult. The Nanny Go Round Agency was her livelihood in a way it wasn’t for a young twenty-year-old who still had her parents to fall back on. Losing clients to an overseas agency stood to be a far bigger blow to the agency’s owner than any of its employees.

“Before I get out of this car, are you goin’ to tell me what my twin was callin’ ’bout earlier?”

To continue resisting required an energy level Tori simply didn’t have at that moment. Instead, she let her eyes drift closed while her mouth did the hard work.

“The diamond anniversary ring Colby gave Debbie over the summer appears to be fake, just like mine.”

She heard Charles’s gasp, even marveled at the way it harmonized almost perfectly with Margaret Louise’s, but she had nothing else to say.

“Did he buy it at the same place?” Charles asked.

“He sure did.”

“What on earth is Jim Brady doin’ over at that shop? And who keeps pullin’ the wool over his eyes?”

An odd sound from the other side of the car had her sitting up tall and waiting for Charles to explain himself.

“Mmm . . . hmmm . . . Maybe it’s because I’m not from Sweet Briar and I don’t know anyone here except my honorary sewing sisters, but I have to tell you I’m seeing this in a different way.”

“Seeing what in a different way?”

“Now don’t get me wrong,” Charles said, waving his hands in almost surrender-like fashion. “This man might be positively lovely. But if you ask me, the only person I see pulling any wool is Mr. Brady himself.”

For as long as Tori could remember, the act of organizing her sewing box had always been a calming task. Something about seeing all of her colored threads lined up across a table alongside her collection of buttons, pin cushion, measuring tape, and scissors made her feel as if all would be well. It was almost as if by making sense of her sewing box, she was making sense of her thoughts and emotions.

At least that’s the way it had always worked until that moment.

Now, no matter how many different ways she regrouped colors or rearranged the pins in her great-grandmother’s pin cushion, the jumbled mess inside her head showed absolutely no sign of clearing.

“Think you’d feel better if you told me what’s bothering you?”

She looked up from the various blue threads she’d accumulated over the past few years and did her best to feign surprise for the man she was set to marry in four days. “Bothering me? Nothing’s bothering me.”

“So you’ve switched royal blue with sky blue thirty times just for the heck of it? Come on, baby, I know something’s up. Did something happen at work today? Or at your surprise shower last night?”

It was no use.

She could either keep staring at the contents of her sewing box in the hope they arranged themselves in a way that decoded her thoughts, or she could come clean with Milo about everything. Pushing her hand forward, she knocked four of the blue spools onto their side and watched as they rolled across the coffee table and onto the area rug that covered all but a one-foot section around the entire living room. “If I tell you something, will you promise not to let it ruin our wedding? Because there’s not a
thing
on the face of this earth that’s worth ruining that, right?”

He balanced the sports section on the arm of the plaid chair and moved onto the couch beside her instead. “Having trouble getting the vows just the way you want?”

Reaching out, she gathered the scissors, measuring tape, and pin cushion into her hands and transferred them to the same compartment in her sewing box they’d inhabited when she started. “No. They say everything I want them to say. The only catch will be whether I can say them without crying.”

“Did something go wrong with the florist? Or the deejay?”

“Nope. They’re all good to go. In fact,
everything
is set to go.”

“Okay, leave the box alone.” He leaned forward, took the handful of spools she’d managed to pick up, and deposited them back on the table. When that was done, he hooked a finger underneath her chin and turned her face until their eyes were focused on each other. “I’ve thought of little else except our wedding since the day you accepted my proposal. I’d be a fool to let anything ruin our day.”

When she said nothing, he leaned forward, planted a gentle kiss on her lips, and then pulled her into the crook of his arm. “The only thing that can ruin our day is thinking you can’t share things with me.”

Milo was right.

She needed to come clean with what she knew.

Inhaling deeply, she gave herself a quick mental pep talk and then held her left hand out for his inspection. “The diamond is fake.”

“Ha! Ha!” he joked. “Nice try.”

“Milo, I’m not kidding.”

This time his laugh was so deep, and so hearty, her head bobbed against his shoulder. “My bank account says otherwise.”

“I’m sure it does. So does Colby’s.”

Her head stopped moving. “Colby? What does Colby have to do with this?”

She sat forward and then turned to look straight at her fiancé, the dimples she loved so much hovering in his cheeks, waiting for a punch line that wasn’t going to come. “Last night, at my shower, Leona happened to notice that my diamond”—she turned her left hand and wiggled her fourth finger—“is a fake.”

A flash of something that looked like anger erased
away his dimples and his smile. Raking his hand across his face, he released a frustrated sigh. “You know, I try to give that woman the benefit of the doubt most times, but this is over the top. What the heck is she trying to do?”

“Debbie went home and looked up the tests Leona did to determine the diamond is fake—”

“It’s not fake,” he protested.

She pressed her hand to his chest and pleaded with him to hear her out. When he quieted down, she continued. “So Debbie tried the test with her engagement ring and the diamond ring Colby gave her over the summer for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. The anniversary band failed.”

“So these tests are crazy. I bought that ring at Brady’s and I’ve got the papers to prove its authenticity in my safe at the bank.”

“Colby bought Debbie’s ring at Brady’s, too. And he has the same papers.”

“Then I don’t understand. They can’t be fake.”

Oh, how she wished he was right.

But he wasn’t.

“Debbie drove into Tom’s Creek after Leona called me today and brought both of her rings into a jewelry store there. Sure enough, the jeweler confirmed her engagement ring is real, and the anniversary ring Colby bought at Brady’s is not.”

“But the papers . . .”

“When Debbie called me a little while ago, she said that the Tom’s Creek guy looked at the ones for the fake ring and said they were doctored.”

“But I paid for a real one!”

“Then someone made out like a bandit on that sale.”

“Come on, Tori, a discrepancy like that—especially if it happened to more than just me—couldn’t go unnoticed. Money like that adds up.”

She sat up tall as bits and pieces of various conversations began arranging themselves inside her thoughts.

“Well, then maybe she can be a teacher on paper, too. After all, the money doesn’t change much if you actually do it, so why bother.”

And . . .

“But for the other actual placements, if you removed the chance to live in a fancy house, staying home and watching TV was a better bet. Virtually the same amount of money for a lot less headaches.”

And . . .

“I figured I could just get back on the books again and keep saving for my ticket out, but she said I blew it.”

“Unless it’s hidden really well,” she finally responded. “Like in another business . . .”

He stared at her, confusion pushing anger from his face momentarily. “You mean like money laundering?”

“I guess, yeah.”

“But money launderers usually open up heavy cash businesses like Laundromat or car wash—”

They stared at each other as yet another piece of the puzzle drifted slowly into place. But even in position, it was hard to accept.

“But there
was
no car wash, no Laundromats,” Milo said.

“True. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a business . . .”

“Oh man, you’re right. His sister, Tara, has a business in town . . .” Milo pushed off the couch and wandered around the room, his feet moving in no specific direction.
When he reached the dining room, he turned around, clearly torn. “I can’t say I know Jim Brady terribly well, but we’ve crossed paths in town—at the school, volunteering, when I bought your ring, that sort of thing. Granted those encounters don’t make me an expert on the guy, but I don’t think he’s all that tight with his sister. I mean, he’s been a successful business owner in this town for years. Tara’s really didn’t get that way until about a year and a half ago. And looking back, whenever they’re both at something, they’re rarely hanging out together.”

She glanced down at her ring and allowed herself a moment to remember Milo slipping it onto her finger for the first time. “You bought this ring within the past eighteen months . . .”

Bypassing the couch, Milo continued across the room to the window that overlooked the cottage next to Tori’s. He stood there for several long moments, saying nothing. When he finally turned back to her, she saw only resignation in his eyes. “Assuming you’re right with this, the fact that his own wife was passing out business cards for a British nanny agency had to send him over the edge.”

“Or make him send
Miss Gracie
over the edge . . .”

She hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t even realized she was thinking it. But now that it was out, it made perfect sense. “Milo,” she half whispered, half gasped. “Do you think it’s possible?”