Elizabeth Lynn Casey - Southern Sewing Circle 10 - Wedding Duress (5 page)

She watched as Beatrice crumbled the tissue inside her hand and then turned surprisingly dry eyes in Tori’s direction. “And if it wasn’t an accident?”

It took everything in her power not to throw her hands
up in frustration over her friend’s inability to hear her words, but she managed to keep it in check. Beatrice was still in shock, still mourning.

“I know what you’re thinking, Victoria, but you’re wrong. I know what I’m saying.”

Tori took a seat at her desk. “Beatrice, please. None of this is your fault.”

Pushing off the chair, Beatrice rose to her feet and wandered over to the window that overlooked the library grounds and their hundred-year-old moss-draped trees. “Miss Gracie came here because of me. There’s no rowing about that. But
I’m
not the one responsible for her fall.”

Relief pushed a sigh through her lips as she, too, stood. “I’m glad to finally hear you say—”

“Someone else is,” Beatrice whispered fiercely.

She forced her jaw back into place and tried to absorb her friend’s words. “Wait. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I need your help, Victoria.” Beatrice turned back to Tori, her eyes wide, yet strangely hooded, too.

“My help?” she echoed in confusion. “My help with what?”

“Figuring out who pushed Miss Gracie to her death, and why.”

Try as she might, Tori simply couldn’t get Beatrice’s words out of her head. She heard them when she was picking through patron suggestion cards and sending e-mails to local authors, she heard them as two more attempts to reach Leona went straight to voice mail, and she heard them as Margaret Louise answered her inquiry about Leona with little more than an audible shrug.

Yet no matter how many times she tried Beatrice’s words on for size, they still didn’t fit.

Miss Gracie had been at the Bradys’ home for just shy of thirty-six hours before her tumble—thirty-six hours that had been spent with three children under the age of nine. Unless one of them was a psychopath in training, the notion that someone had pushed the British nanny to her death was nothing short of preposterous.

Then again, grief had a way of playing tricks on a
person’s mind and heart. She knew that as well as anyone every time Rose entered a room and Tori thought, for a split second, it was her great-grandmother.

Sometimes, the heart just didn’t want to accept what the mind knew. People on the outside looking in would say her deceased great-grandmother bore absolutely no resemblance to the sewing circle’s matriarch and they’d be right. But her heart said something completely different, time and time again.

It was why she’d resisted the knee-jerk urge to wave aside Beatrice’s version of Miss Gracie’s fall. Instead, knowing what the nanny was going through, she simply insisted Beatrice go home and get some sleep. Arguing with the heart didn’t do any good until the heart was better prepared to listen.

Pulling the key from the library’s back door, Tori dropped it into her bag and reveled in the feel of the fading sun on the back of her neck. The workday was finally over. At times, she hadn’t been sure it would ever happen, but thankfully, mercifully, it had.

Nina, of course, had been a godsend, her expertise with the patrons and the daily closing procedures making it so Tori could finalize the program calendar and attend to a few of the pre-honeymoon tasks that had to be done before it was time to call it quits for the day. Now, as she headed down the library’s back steps and toward Main Street, Tori could put aside all thoughts of the upcoming board meeting and concentrate on her wedding list.

She headed east toward the town square and the handful of shop windows that were still lit despite the six o’clock hour. The pull to veer toward the south for a hot chocolate and a brownie was at moments overwhelming
in light of her missed lunch, but still, she pressed on, the notion of securing the rings that would signal her marriage to Milo adding purpose to her gait.

Shop by shop, she made her way toward the silver-rimmed sign at the end of the block, each store that she passed earning little more than a passing glance—Calamity Books, Bud’s Brew Shack, Shelby’s Sweet Shoppe, Elkin Antiques, and—

She paused for a moment outside Leona’s antique and collectible shop and peered through the glass, the darkened interior all but confirming what she knew to be true based on the hour anyway.

If Leona had gone into the shop at all that day, she, along with her slate of employees, had hightailed it home for dinner. Why she wasn’t returning Tori’s call, though, was the real question. Especially when it was Leona who had reached out first.

Digging into her bag, she fished her cell phone from its depths and checked the screen for a missed call icon.

No, it was official. Leona was dodging her calls.

She shook her head and resumed her journey, the remaining shops still standing between her and her destination disappearing rapidly. Her offer to pick up her ring at the same time as Milo’s had been debated at first, but in the end, Milo had seen the benefit. He, too, had a list of tasks to get through before the big day, and anything that could be crossed off easily was a good thing.

The front door of Brady’s Jewelry opened and closed, spitting out a man in his mid to late forties with a mile-wide smile on his face. His euphoric expression told her he’d been shopping for someone special, while the silver and lavender bag in his hand told her he’d met with success.

“Good evening,” he said, tipping his head ever so slightly.

“Good evening.” She took the last two steps quickly and pulled open the shop’s door, the jingle overhead greeting her at the same time as the clerk behind the counter.

“Welcome to Brady’s Jewelry, my name is Ryan and I’m happy to assist you in any way I can. And if you’re so inclined to drop a comment card about my friendly service in that drop box by the door when we’re done, I’d be most appreciative.”

She returned the clerk’s smile with one of her own and stepped over to the counter. “I’m Victoria Sinclair. I’m here to pick up a pair of wedding rings my fiancé and I purchased a few weeks ago. You engraved them for us.”

“Sinclair . . . Sinclair . . .” he repeated beneath his breath as he unlocked and opened a drawer just out of her line of vision.

“Actually,” she corrected herself, “they could be under Wentworth, too.” Hiking her bag onto the glass-topped counter, she reached inside and pulled out the receipt. A quick look at the handwritten portion confirmed her change. “Yes, it’s under my fiancé’s name, Wentworth.”

His fingers moved farther back in the drawer to the index tab reserved for names that began with
W
. Seconds later he pulled out a small lavender and silver envelope. “Here we go.”

She swapped the receipt for the envelope and slid her index finger underneath its seal, the excitement over its contents making her trembling hands virtually useless. “It’s really happening, isn’t it?”

Ryan smiled. “If you’re buying rings, then yes it is. Congratulations.” He took the envelope back and gently
poured the rings into his hand, holding out the smaller one for her inspection. “I think it’s safe to say this one is yours? Would you like to try it on and make sure it fits?”

She extended her ring finger toward the man and then pulled it back, shaking her head as she did. “Actually, I know it fits and I want my fiancé to be the one who puts it on my finger next.”

“Would you like to see the inscription?”

Again, she shook her head. “Would you please check it to make sure it says whatever he requested? I’d rather wait until the wedding to see it for myself.”

“Of course. I’d be happy to.” Ryan looked from the paperwork to the ring and back again, slowly nodding as he did. “Yep, it says exactly what it’s supposed to say.”

She picked up Milo’s ring and took a peek inside the band, the simple yet powerful inscription intensifying her excitement. “As does this one. Whoever did this did a great job.”

“That’s our goal. Now, normally I wouldn’t let you leave until Mr. Brady had a chance to come out and thank you for your business himself, but he didn’t come in today.” Taking Milo’s ring from her outstretched hand, he placed it on the counter alongside Tori’s and then set about the task of polishing away any fingerprints before transferring them to the velvet-lined ring boxes he secured from a nearby cabinet. “There was an accident at his home shortly after we closed last night and he hasn’t been back since.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I hope Mr. Brady and his family are . . .” The words trailed from her mouth as the name, coupled with Ryan’s comment, came together in one clarifying instant. “Wait. The Brady of Brady’s Jewelry is the same as the family whose nanny just died?”

Ryan placed the boxes inside a shiny silver bag and slid it across the counter toward Tori. “His
new
nanny, yes. She lost her footing and fell down a flight of steps, which seems kind of ironic if you ask me.”

“Ironic?” she repeated, her curiosity aroused.

“The whole reason Mr. Brady shipped this new nanny across the ocean was because his wife insisted they needed someone more responsible, more aware. Yet it’s this new one who falls down something as routine as a flight of stairs. If you ask me, it doesn’t sound like bucking tradition and securing a nanny outside of this area worked all that well for them.”

She wrapped her fingers around the handle of the bag yet left it in place as she digested his words against the backdrop of limited information she knew about Miss Gracie’s predecessor. “The previous nanny was Cynthia, right? Cynthia . . . Martin?”

“Marland,” Ryan corrected. “Yeah . . . why? Did you know Cindy?”

Something about the flash of surprise in the clerk’s eyes made her wish Beatrice and Luke had lingered at the playground Saturday evening rather than rushing back home to play ship. If they had, she might be able to throw out a few more facts that made her sound as if she were more in the know than she really was. Yet as she noted the ongoing energy shift in the clerk, she realized she didn’t really need more details.

Those, she could find on her own from a young man who obviously knew more about his employer’s nanny than just her name and the reasons behind her job loss . . .

“I saw her the other night at the park.” She stopped, took a deep breath, and hoped her blabbering sounded
even semi-intelligent. The fact that she was taking liberties with the truth, however, certainly called for a little self-examination in the very near future. “She seemed . . . upset. Maybe even a little mad.”

Ryan stopped wiping down the counter long enough to offer a show of solidarity for Cynthia Marland. “Wouldn’t
you
be mad if you were removed from your job because the people around you believed the sky was falling when it wasn’t?”

“You think she was a good nanny?” she asked.

“She was never late, and she never left before the parents were home.” Ryan returned to his task, wiping at a particularly stubborn fingerprint with a vengeance. “She made sure they ate, too. Beyond that, what else is there?”

“Making sure they’re safe at all times, for one.”

“Cindy did pretty good at that. Forgetting to tell the one kid’s school about her seizure meds could’ve happened to anyone if you think about it.”

Not someone hired specifically to take care of a child’s every needs, she thought. To Ryan, though, she merely nodded and hoped the simple gesture came across as commiseration for Cynthia’s plight. “You two are friends, I take it.”

“We date from time to time.” With the last of the fingerprints finally off the glass countertop, Ryan tossed the cloth into a box behind his feet and eyed the clock above the door, his sales floor smile morphing into one befitting someone who was ten minutes away from bidding his workday good-bye.

“Was she angry when the Bradys let her go?”

“She was livid. In fact, when she called to tell me, she cursed so much one of my friends—who could hear her
on the phone with me from the opposite side of my living room—asked if I could find a truck driver for him to date, too.” Ryan laughed at the memory and then scooted Tori’s bag to the edge of the counter in preparation for the shop’s pending closure. “But then, when she was still harping on it a week later with every bit as much intensity, he told me not to bother.”

“She was that angry, huh?” She didn’t bother to see if he nodded, her mind already on to the next question her mouth was reluctant to utter. Instead, she went for a more mundane way of getting the kind of information that could prove useful in regards to Beatrice’s claim. “Why didn’t she just get another nanny job?”

“This is Sweet Briar we’re talking about, yes? There’s only so many families looking for nannies at any given time. Add in the fact that my boss’s wife was telling everyone in her circle that Cindy was inept, and you can understand the problem.”

“That makes sense, I guess.” Gathering her bag and her purse together, she backed away from the counter, her desire to learn more about the Bradys’ former nanny losing out over the pull to get home and check in on Rose, Beatrice, and even Leona. “I imagine you want to get home so I better head out. Thanks for your help with the rings. They look great.”

He reached underneath the counter, extracted a slip of paper, and slid it—along with a pencil—in Tori’s direction. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’m kind of hoping a few of these in the box might convince Mr. Brady to give me a raise.”

She retrieved the pencil from atop the paper, checked off the appropriate boxes for the service Ryan had provided, folded it in two, and then carried it over to the box
beside the shop’s front door. “Good luck with your raise, I hope you get it.”

“So do I.” His smile stretched wide across his narrow face as she pushed the comment card through the narrow opening on the top of the box and yanked the door open. “Good luck with the wedding, I hope you and your lucky guy are real happy together.”

“We are.” Stepping onto the top step, she glanced back over her shoulder as Ryan came around the counter to lock the door in her wake. “And I hope your sometimes girlfriend finds a job again real soon.”

“If she lays low and lets the talk die out, she’ll be fine.”