Some Like It Haute: A Humorous Fashion Mystery (Style & Error Book 4) (4 page)

The next model started down the runway. She wore a black leather corset over a silver pantsuit. Her orange wig was pulled back into a chignon, secured with silver chopsticks.

The third girl stomped down the runway in a red Lycra halter dress. Her wig was yellow.

By the time the fifth model paraded down the catwalk, it was clear that the audience was sitting up and taking notice of what Amanda was showing. Did it matter that her choice of venue was a downtown warehouse in Ribbon? Who was to say. More and more designers who had neither the money nor the connections to pull off a major event in New York City were orchestrating pop-up fashion shows, inviting as many industry insiders as they knew, and hoping for the best.

But this was not Amanda’s first rodeo. She’d spent years interning for a famous designer before parting ways and taking a job with a local department store. On the side, she focused on her own collection, slowly building a name for herself by reinventing the classics. What I saw tonight was more than just a departure from the styles that had originally gotten her noticed. But what was fashion without risk? And who ever said that a futuristic silver jumpsuit wouldn’t one day be a classic?

A familiar figure stepped onto the stage. It was Harper, the reticent model in the ill-fitting kimono. Her silver wig was cut in a blunt bob like the first model. Her lips, painted tomato-red, were shaped in a pout. The kimono still didn’t fit, but tonight Harper showed she was the professional they’d wanted. Her sleeves hung down to the floor, making her look like a child playing dress up. She sashayed down the platform, hips swinging from side to side, creating the illusion of sex appeal even though I knew her to be mostly skin and bones.

A smattering of applause filled the auditorium as if what we were watching was part of the show. But something wasn’t right. A thin orange stripe appeared to hover just above the rose petals that scattered over the ground as Harper walked. First one, then another of the rose petals ignited like small bursts of glowing light. And then a whole bunch of the petals caught fire in a path that followed Harper.

And then suddenly, her kimono erupted in flames.

5

The house lights came on. The sudden change of illumination temporarily blinded me. Someone screamed. As my eyes adjusted, I followed the screaming to Harper, on stage. She fumbled with the sash on the kimono. Flames climbed the sleeves from the ground up and wrapped her like a special effect in a movie. She clawed at the fabric. Smoke filled the air, compromising visibility.

Nick appeared from behind the screen where Amanda’s name was printed. He ran toward Harper and yanked the kimono from her shoulders. She left it in a burning pile and ran toward an exit. The flames caught onto the rest of the rose petals that covered the runway. More screams , now from the crowd. People stampeded toward the exits, bottlenecking the doorways with bodies trying to get outside. The fire grew, feeding off the fabric and oxygen in the room. I lost sight of Nick.

Dante tugged me the opposite direction of the crowd. “This way,” he said.

I took his hand and barely kept up as we weaved past the frantic audience. We stumbled over flipped chairs and discarded drinks that now littered the floor. The fire had flashed over, climbing the walls and the ceiling. Sweat dripped from my hairline despite the cold night air. Within seconds, sprays of water shot out of the sprinkler system. We reached a set of double doors. He stepped back and pushed me forward, through them.

We made it to the exit and fell outside. Fire trucks flooded the parking lot, sirens blaring. Professionals went to work on the fire. In the pandemonium, Dante took his keys from the valet booth. He scooped me up, one arm behind my head, the other under my knees, carried me to his car, and set me in the passenger seat. I closed my eyes while he drove us away from the scene. It wasn’t until I heard the engine turn off that I opened them and saw that he hadn’t taken me home.

We were parked in a vacant lot that overlooked a spectacular view of Ribbon. Lights from the streetlamps that illuminated the grid of downtown created a dense glow that slowly expanded into less and less, until it became the nothingness of the neighboring towns. We called this Makeout Point in high school.

“You want to tell me why your ex-boyfriend said you shouldn’t have gone to the show?”

“He was worried about me, that’s all.”

“Does he have a reason to worry?”

I played with the gold bracelets on my wrist. “I had an incident yesterday.”

“Samantha, don’t beat around the bush with me.”

“I’ve been helping Amanda with her show. Yesterday there was a fire outside of Warehouse Five. I don’t know how it started. It came right to me across the parking lot to where I was standing and I caught on fire. I dropped and rolled to put out the fire, and while I was down someone approached me. They were bundled up in an oversized coat, and from my spot on the ground, they looked humungous. Whoever it was told me to stay out of it, but I don’t know what ‘it” is. And then they beat me with a sack of fruit and set me on fire.”

“What kind of fruit?”

“Oranges, tangelos, and clementines. When Amanda found me curled up in the parking lot, they were scattered around me.”

“What happened after that?”

“I spent the night in the hospital.”

“Why did you call me?”

I looked down at my hands. I didn’t want to make eye contact when I said this part. “Everybody else told me to stay home. They thought it was too dangerous for me to come here tonight.”

He sat quietly. I snuck a peek at his face but couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“Do you know who attacked you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Someone involved with the show?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Are you in pain right now?”

“Not really.” It was the first lie I’d told him.

He started up the car. “I’m taking you home.”

“No. My car is still at the warehouse,” I said. “Take me back there. Please.” It had been too much activity for one day. My ribs ached, and I couldn’t breathe. I needed to sit down, lay down, rest, sleep. My internal injuries throbbed, and even if the hospital had determined that none of them were serious, they hurt. Badly.

Dante reached for my handbag and found my pain medication inside. He shook one into his palm and handed it to me.

“You’re in pain. Take this.” He handed me a bottle of water from the cup holder.

I swallowed the pill and sank back against his bucket seats, trying to keep the seatbelt from digging into my midsection. The tension from the runway show, the medication for the pain, and the overall exhaustion of my life combined, and the world went dark as I fell asleep in the car.

* * *

Breakup Rule #3: Don’t wake up in another man’s bed.

The bed was comfortable enough, but it wasn’t mine. It took me a second to recognize whose bed it was. Dante’s.

Dante lived in a studio apartment on Duryea Drive, on the side of a mountain off the beaten path of Ribbon. He’d once explained it as the place he kept here when not living in Philadelphia. I’d been here before, but never on a sleepover.

Being a studio apartment, the interior wasn’t divided up into separate rooms. It was one large room that split off to the right into a modest kitchen, and to the left into a modest bathroom and makeshift closet. The bed that I currently occupied was of the futon variety. Which meant there wasn’t any place else to sleep, which meant even though I was alone now, I probably hadn’t been last night.

Not sure how I felt about that.

There was a tap on the front door, and then Dante entered. He carried a bag from the grocery store. I pulled the comforter up around me.

“You’re awake,” he said.

“So I am.”

“Are you hungry?” he asked. “I’ll make breakfast.” He held up the shopping bag. “Eggs and bacon okay with you?”

“Sure.” Things were getting curiouser and curiouser. But I was already slightly down the rabbit hole. Why not get some bacon while I was there?

I peeked under the sheet and saw that I’d slept in a T-shirt and sweatpants, neither of which were mine. I stood up and hopped across the cold hardwood floor to the bathroom. My dress, smelling faintly of wet ash, hung over the curtain rod. I found an empty hanger in Dante’s closet and hung the dress up, did other bathroom-type things, and rejoined him.

The futon had been folded up, and a small table with a large plate of bacon and eggs sat on a table in front of it. There were forks poised on either side of the plate. Dante patted the seat next to him. Rocky and Bullwinkle filled the screen. I pinched a piece of bacon and ate it before sitting.

“You should have told me about the attack,” he said.

I figured we’d get around to this sooner or later. “I don’t always make the best decisions.”

“That’s a very mature thing to admit.”

I shrugged. I couldn’t really say anything else. My mouth was full.

“I talked to my sister this morning.”

“How is Cat?”

“She’s great. She’s in Paris on a buying trip.” He continued. “She filled me in on your recent history. Helps explain last night.”

Dante’s sister, Cat, traveled in the same fashion circles that I did. Our initial antagonistic relationship had morphed first into acquaintances and then into friendship. She knew about my employment issues since moving to Ribbon, about my frequent run-ins with the law, and about my recent breakup with Nick. If you needed gossip on me, she could give you the Cliff Notes version.

“I don’t question the fact that you wanted to go to the show. It seems as though your ex and I have very different ideas on letting you live your life, regardless of what appears to be questionable judgment. But like I said, you should have told me.”

“What did you expect me to say? Somebody put me in the hospital at a fashion show setup and now I need help figuring out who it was? You were going to pretend that was normal?”

“You think asking me out on a date was normal?”

“What’s so abnormal about that?”

“You were set on fire outside of the show and there was a fire at the show tonight. Somebody put a lot of people in jeopardy. If you hadn’t been attacked, it might have seemed like an accident. But connect the two, and there’s forethought. Somebody intended to hit that show. That same somebody thinks you’re a threat.”

It was true. Hearing him spell it out made it all the more real and all the more scary. I couldn’t pretend that everything was okay. I set the bacon back on the plate.

“I keep trying to figure out what I know. Somebody attacked me. Me. Not anybody else connected to that show. All I’ve been doing for the past month is showing up at Warehouse Five to help Amanda get the show ready. I agreed to do it for reasons I don’t want to get into, it was important to me to fulfill my obligation and protect my reputation. I didn’t threaten anybody, I didn’t see anything shady, I didn’t have any confrontations. I was the perfect employee. And if you must know, Amanda basically fired me before I was attacked.”

“That may all be true, but somebody still set the show on fire. What else do you remember about what happened?”

“The warning. ‘Stay out of it’ What is ‘it?’ How can I stay out of ‘it’ if I don’t know what ‘it’ is?” I tried to stand, but doubled over as a flash of pain shot through my torso.

“Slow down, Samantha. You might not be in the hospital anymore, but it’s going to take time for you to heal. For now, you’ll have to rely on me for whatever you need.”

“I’m not moving in with you.”

“Don’t worry. It’s temporary. And I’m not the babysitting type. Can you drive a motorcycle?”

“No.”

He tossed me a set of keys. The key fob was shaped like a flame. “Looks like the Stingray is your ride for the next couple of days, but for the record, I think it’s best that you stay away from the places you usually go.”            

“Why?”

“You don’t know who attacked you or why. You might be able to explain it away as a wrong place/wrong time kind of thing, but I’m not a big believer in coincidence.”

“You think someone might still be after me?”

He nodded once. The thought, now verbalized, was scary. I wanted to discount his theory but at my core, I agreed with him.

After breakfast was finished, Dante shrugged into his black leather jacket and left the house. As soon as his motorcycle disappeared around the curve of Duryea Drive, I tossed the dirty dishes in the sink and changed the channel to the local news. I’d expected the fire to be the top story. It wasn’t.

In typical obsessed-with-celebrity nature, the top story was about how the rising star in the modeling world had been spotted on a plane that landed in Mexico last night.

Somehow, in the middle of all of the chaos, Harper had managed to skip town.

6

Grainy footage of Harper stepping off of the plane filled the screen. The clip was only a few seconds long and seemed to have been filmed from someone’s cell phone. Harper’s hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore an oversized black topcoat and jeans. A duffle bag hung over one shoulder, the only luggage she appeared to have with her. She looked directly at the person filming her, hoisted the duffle bag strap higher, and hustled the other direction. The clip repeated as the reporter spoke.

“A vacationer headed to Cancun captured this footage after recognizing Harper Ashton when she boarded the plane. He said she arrived in full make-up, but removed it during the flight. Ms. Ashton had left the ill-fated runway show of designer Amanda Ries. I believe we have a report on that show as well.”

The grainy footage switched to the view of Warehouse Five. An investigative reporter stood about a hundred feet in front of the now abandoned warehouse. Fire had ravaged the building, leaving black stains on the outer edge of doorways and windows, like fake eyelashes that had clumped. The camera panned the exterior of the building while the reporter spoke.

“Last night a fire at Warehouse Five threatened to take the lives of many fashion insiders. The city of Ribbon has been offering tax incentives to local businesses, and Amanda Ries, local designer, had taken them up on that. Her runway show had been widely publicized from here to New York City, drawing buyers of major department stores who were eager to see this new collection. Touted as “Godzilla on the Moon,” Ries’ show promised a departure from her early classic style. Only six looks walked the runway before an unexpected fire broke out, causing the warehouse to be evacuated. We have not been able to reach a representative from Amanda Ries’ studio for comment.”