Prom Date (2 page)

When Stephanie brought her red dress to the counter to pay for it, Jeannine and Lacey were lounging nearby, waiting for a chance to talk to Margaret, "So," Stephanie asked them in a perfectly friendly voice, "did you two come to see what everyone's wearing to the prom? I guess this will be your only chance, since you won't be there."

Lacey, who was short and stocky, her bright blond hair cut in a Dutch-boy bob, flushed angrily and said, "You don't know that, Stephanie. Maybe all of us are going."

Stephanie laughed. "Right. Well, good, if you are, because then you'll get to see me crowned queen."

Jeannine, as tall and thin as a stick, red hair

frizzed around a narrow face, muttered, "Fd be happy to crown you myself, Stephanie, right here and now," but Stephanie had already turned back to Margaret to hand her a slice of plastic.

As Margaret slid the credit card through the machine, Stephanie smiled a smile as plastic as the card and said, "It must be hard selling all these beautiful dresses when youVe not going to be wearing one yourself. Poor Margaret." She glanced over at Caroline, fastening "sold" tags on the dresses, and added, "I guess you won't be going, either, am I right, Caroline?"

Caroline winced and blanched. Margaret Dunne, who had never physically hurt another human being in her entire life, found herself thinking how satisfying it would be to reach out with the scissors at her elbow and whack off every strand of Stephanie's silken dark locks, leaving her virtually bald. Instead, she said softly, "Stephanie, is that a zit I see right smack in the middle of your forehead?"

And even though there wasn't a blemish anywhere on that perfect porcelain skin, Margaret felt a wickedly satisfying surge of triumph when Stephanie went as white as Caroline had and her right hand flew up to explore her face in alarm. Even when her fingers felt

nothing, she was compelled to sidestep over to the nearest mirror and peer in anxiously, just to be certain.

When she was satisfied, she said angrily, "That wasn't funny, Margaret."

"Oh, yeah, it was,'' Lacey said. "If you could have seen your face, Stephanie!"

Margaret didn't even care when, after the store had emptied, Adrienne scolded her for teasing Stephanie. It wasn't much of a reprimand, and Margaret could see that her mother was trying to restrain a smile.

It was Margaret's turn to close the store. Caroline was off to the library to meet Scott, and Adrienne had a dinner date. Jeannine and Lacey had evening baby-sitting jobs. Margaret liked closing. It was so quiet in the store when everyone else had gone. No more Pops yapping like puppies over this dress and that dress. And for Margaret, no more feeling like she had two front teeth missing and a bad facial rash in the midst of all that perky perfection.

It was so much easier to be content with who she was when no one else was around.

She was halfway home when she remembered that she'd taken her chem book to the shop with her that morning, thinking she might slip in some study time. She hadn't, and finals were almost upon her. She was going to need

that book. Might as well go back and get it tonight, since she was only halfway home.

Margaret pulled the van into the alley near Quartet's side door. The courtyard was empty, the office building next door only dimly lit. Too early for dinner patrons to be arriving at Impeccable Tastes, the upscale restaurant on the ground floor of the office building.

She was almost to the store's side entrance when something lying on the cement just outside the door caught her eye. There shouldn't have been anything there. She had swept around the door just before closing, as she always did, and fed a stray cat a saucer of milk, something her mother had expressly forbidden her to do. "Feed them," Adrienne said, "and they'll never leave. They can take care of themselves, Margaret."

There hadn't been anything in the alley when Margaret fed the cat.

But now there was something. A bundle of something lying in a puddle left over from the rain the night before. Wet newspapers, maybe.

Margaret moved closer. It wasn't newspaper, she realized as she arrived at the puddle and looked down. It was . . . clothing. Crumpled and soaking wet with oily, muddy water. What looked like black tire tracks waved

across the top layer like canceled postage stamp marks.

Margaret crouched to investigate the sodden mess.

Red ... a red silk dress with spaghetti straps, one of them ripped away now, the dress so soaked with mud, the bright red had become dark brown. Beneath that, a black dress, strapless, its bouffant skirt flattened into a thick pancake by car tires. And on the bottom in the fouled mess, something pale blue . . .

Stephanie's red prom dress. Liza's black one. Beth's blue gown. Ruined, all of them, ruined beyond repair.

Margaret knelt then, gingerly picking up the garments, holding the edges in her hands. No amount of steam cleaning or soaking or ironing would make them wearable again. They were beyond salvaging.

The ruined clothing clung to Margaret's fingertips as if the dresses expected her to somehow, miraculously, restore them to their former glory. Frowning, Margaret sank back on her heels.

What, exactly, had happened here?

Margaret had no idea how long she sat there on the warm, moist cement, holding the remains of the slaughtered dresses in her hands. The sudden slam of a car door brought her head up. Glancing around the alley in search of someone who might look as if they had a psychotic hatred of fashion, she saw only a middle-aged couple heading toward Impeccable Tastes, the restaurant located directly ahead of Margaret. She became aware of the tantalizing odor of heavily seasoned Italian food. Her stomach smelled it, too, and growled angrily.

I have to get up, Margaret thought, her mind still foggy with shock. I have to get up and I have to do something about this mess. But she couldn't think what.

When she tried to swallow, her throat closed and she gagged.

It wasn't just the dresses that brought bile up into her throat. Aside from the long hours her mother had put into making them, Margaret didn't care about the garments. They were, after all, just dresses. And look who had purchased them: three girls who wouldn't lend you a shirt if you were standing naked in a snowstorm. Well, Beth or Liza might. If Stephanie didn't talk them out of it.

It wasn't the dresses. It was the raw violence of the act that made Margaret gag and sent her fingernails digging into the flesh of her palms. It was the stupid, needless, vicious act itself. The dresses hadn't arrived in the alley on their own. They'd been brought to the puddle by someone bent on destruction. Why would someone attack and drown three pretty prom dresses and then, just in case they might still be salvageable, flatten their corpses into fashion oblivion by grinding them into the mud like insects under a heavy boot heel?

It made no sense. But the anger of the acts, the fury represented by the ruined garments, made Margaret's hands shake.

I have to get out of here, she told herself again. This time, she scrambled to her feet, dragging the dresses behind her with one hand. She headed first for the Dumpster to her right, then changed her mind and aimed

for the van instead. She wouldn't toss them. Not yet. Impossible to describe to her mother the condition in which she'd found the three dresses. The only way anyone would believe such a thing would be to see it with their own eyes. She had to take the murdered dresses home with her.

Margaret hated the idea. She couldn't bear the thought of how her mother's eyes would look when she saw the remains of three of her loveliest creations.

I can't do this alone, she decided as she started the engine. I can't! Remembering then that her mother had had dinner plans and wouldn't be home yet, anyway, Margaret drove straight to the public library to find Caroline and Scott.

When they had finally accepted as reality the disgusting sight presented to them in the back of the van, Caroline turned away from the muddy mess and said, "Whose are they? I can't even tell what color they are... were."

Margaret told her who had bought the dresses.

Caroline's eyes and mouth opened wide. "The Pops? These dresses belong to the Pops?" A slow, satisfied grin spread across her face. "Oh, this is cool, this is just too cool! I don't believe this!"

"Caroline," Margaret said as she slammed shut the van's back door, "quit rejoicing and think about my mother, okay? She worked really hard on those dresses. This is going to make her even sicker than it made me. You guys have to come with me. I can't face her with this alone."

Caroline's grin disappeared. Margaret's remark had wiped every last trace of exultation from her face. "Oh, no, you're right! I'm sorry! I wasn't even thinking about Adrienne. How are you ever going to tell her?"

"I'm not going to tell her anything. I'm just going to show her. I don't want to, but I have to. Those dresses are paid for. She'll have to do something about this. Get in. You're coming with me."

"Why would someone do this?" Adrienne cried, whirling to face Margaret, Scott, and Caroline. "It's so . . . it's so . . . violent!"

"My thoughts exactly," Margaret said grimly.

Then the businesswoman in Adrienne took over again. "Was the store broken into? How did those dresses get outside? Was any money taken?"

Margaret had to confess that she didn't know. "I found them in the alley and brought

them here," she said, feeling stupid for failing to check the store's doors and windows. Hadn't checked inside, either, to see if the culprit was still lurking within. "I guess I freaked. I never even thought about the store."

"Fd better get down there," her mother said, grabbing a denim jacket from the hall closet. "I can't call the police until I've checked out the shop. I'll call from there."

"You should call them first," Scott suggested. "If there was someone in the store, you can't be sure they're gone. You don't want to go walking in there alone."

Adrienne hesitated in the doorway. But after a moment, she shook her head. "I can't call the police and say that three prom dresses were ruined. We'll just go down and see if there's any sign of a broken lock or window. If there is, we won't go in, okay? We'll go next door and call the police from the restaurant."

"We?" Caroline asked nervously, her eyes wide.

"She said we won't go inside." Margaret glared at Caroline. "Besides, we don't have to worry. We're not prom dresses. We don't even own prom dresses. So relax!" But even as she said it, she knew relaxing, for any of them, was impossible. It seemed amazing to her that

they were walking and talking like normal people who hadn't seen what they had.

Because neither the front nor side door locks had been tampered with, they did go inside the store. But they went slowly, cautiously, Adrienne leading the way with a flashlight until she reached the main light switch behind the counter.

Nothing seemed out of place. There was no pile of shredded garments lying on the floor, (something Margaret had dreaded), no money missing, and nothing, inside the store, as far as they could tell, had been broken or stolen.

Until they went upstairs to the sewing room they called the Sweatbox because it had no air-conditioning, and Margaret discovered that the lock on the window leading from the fire escape was broken. "It was okay earlier today," she announced. "I know, because I closed and locked the window when I came back in after my break.''

The Sweatbox was a long, narrow room cluttered from ceiling to floor with bolts of fabric, sewing materials, large pink dress boxes, smaller pink boxes for blouses and tops and sweaters, thick packages of folded pale pink tissue paper, a huge cardboard box filled to overflowing with satin padded hangers, another filled with clear plastic hangers.

Half-finished dresses hung on armless plastic mannequins. An antique sewing machine inherited by Adrienne from the grandmother who had taught her how to design patterns and sew, stood against one wall. An old ironing board, part of the same inheritance, stood in the center of the room. The board, its wooden legs old and wobbly, was constantly collapsing, but Adrienne refused to give it up. "It was my grandmother's,'' she insisted. "Without my grandmother, we wouldn't have the shop. I'd still be clerking in an office by day and wait-ressing at night, like I did for eight very long years after your father raced that train at the crossing and lost. The ironing board stays."

There were two tall, narrow windows in the atticlike room, one overlooking a driveway, the other opening onto a black metal fire escape that rose above the cement courtyard fronting the office building and restaurant.

That afternoon, when Margaret had taken her break and stepped out onto the fire escape to gulp in a few breaths of firesh air, her eyes had moved down to the restaurant and she had thought. People will be going there for their pre-prom dinner. The Pops would, in the beautiful dresses that Adrienne had created. But not Adrienne's own daughter.

And she had thought that if she were going,

she knew exactly which dress she would want to wear. Not black, like Liza. Black was for funerals. The dress she had fallen in love with when Adrienne was still creating it, was blue. The brilliant blue of an October sky at that time of the year when the nights turn crisp and the leaves turn orange and yellow and scarlet. Such a vivid shade of blue could turn even plain brown hair as glossy and smooth as a chestnut, give brown eyes a shining, golden glow. Margaret was as sure the dress was miraculous as she was that she would never be wearing it. Not to the prom, and not anywhere else.

The thought had brought a sudden stab of pain to her chest, as if her mother had accidentally stabbed her with a sharp straight pin. The pain had made Margaret angry, and thoroughly disgusted with herself. She hadn't realized, until that moment, just how much she wanted to go to her own senior prom.

And she'd suddenly been afraid that she was turning into one of those weepy, whining females who put dances at the top of her priority list. She hadn't attended a single prom in high school. And so far, she'd lived through every one of them, coming out on the other side of the weekend with all of her faculties intact and no visible serious damage.