Suede to Rest (13 page)

I was startled by a sharp rap on the window. I looked up, expecting to see Charlie. Instead, the man in the red-and-black checkered shirt stood next to the car, holding his cue stick in both hands. I rolled the window down about three inches and hit the locks at the same time.

“I don't know what you think you're going to gain by asking questions, but you might want to mind your own business,” he said.

“I am minding my own business,” I said.

“Pickers owed people money. How's that your business?”

“Those debts are a decade old. If Duke can wipe the slate clean, maybe you should, too. Besides, he was killed at the fabric store. That's my business.”

“Not for long, it's not, Polyester.”

Heat snaked its way down the base of my neck at the mention of my name. I hadn't introduced myself to this man. He either knew who I was when I entered the bar, or he'd been paying attention while I talked to Duke.

“Take my advice and go back to where you came from. Maybe Duke was willing to forgive and forget but a lot of other people aren't. Pickers wasn't no saint. He owed a lot of people money and didn't make good. The old man got what he deserved.”

My heart pounded
like a bass drum marking time for a parade. I threw the car into gear and backed out of the alley. I turned left, drove three blocks, then turned right and headed to the fabric store via the alley. I parked the car in the back and carried the box of kittens inside. Carson was going to be mad, but I didn't care. I had a lot to think about and I didn't need him clouding my judgment.

My visit with Duke had given me some background info about Mr. Pickers. Discovering his dark days and his subsequent new leaf would have been enough, but it wasn't. The man at Duke's wearing the flannel shirt had given me the impression that Mr. Pickers's debts ran deeper than those to Duke. Who else had Mr. Pickers owed money to? Were they new debts? And had they factored into his murder? Or had the whole story been fabricated for my benefit to distract me from the connection between Mr. Pickers and my great-aunt? I reached my hand into my pocket and pulled out the charm Adelaide Brooks had given me. What if the rest of the bracelet really was still in the store? Did that mean the men who had been arrested for the crime had been telling the truth? Was someone else responsible for that crime—someone who was scared that their secret would come out if I reopened the store?

I cut a length of quarter-inch-wide black faille ribbon and fed it through the loop on the end of the charm. I tied it into a knot, slipped it over my head, and tucked it under the neckline of the black tunic.

I collected an assortment of envelopes and grocery store circulars that had been shoved through the gate of the fabric store, set them inside the carton with the kittens, and climbed the stairs to the apartment. This time I wasn't running for my life from an unidentified threat in the alley and I wasn't distracted by a scrapbook filled with news of my great-aunt's murder. I wanted to take my time, to really see the place.

I set the carton on the floor and scooped out the kittens, letting them sniff the hardwood floor and swat at the fringe on the end of the carpet. There was no place they could go, and it seemed the perfect time to let cats give in to their natural curiosity. As they walked tentatively into the living room, I wandered down the hallway and looked into the rooms. There was a bathroom. A guest room. And my aunt and uncle's bedroom.

Like the living room, white sheets had been thrown over the furniture. Upon closer inspection I realized they weren't sheets but yards and yards of a thin gauzy cotton. I gathered the fabric in my hands, exposing an ivory damask bedspread with tiny pink and blue flowers woven into the print. Small rectangular pillows, white velvet with pale blue flower buds that seemed to be growing from within them, were nestled on the bed by the headboard. I picked one up and flipped it over in my hands. The nap on the white velvet had crushed into an abstract pattern on the underside. I rubbed my fingertips over the fabric a few times, trying to smooth it out, and set it back on the bed.

The walls matched the ivory spread and the molding, stained the same dark wood as the floor, drew my eye to the ceiling. A large oak headboard stood behind the bed, flanked on either side with small white decorative columns. A piece of marble covered each of the columns, creating makeshift tabletops. On one side rested a white lamp with a white milk-glass shade. The other held a newspaper, a book, and a pair of glasses.

It pained me to think that Uncle Marius had left so abruptly that he hadn't even taken his glasses with him. I wondered if he knew at the time that he would never come back into the store or the apartment, or if he'd ever thought to ask someone to bring him some of his belongings. But if he had thought of it, who would he ask? Not my parents. He had shut them out, like the rest of the family. I knew Mom and Dad had volunteered to help him. I had overheard them talking about it one night after my graduation. But Uncle Marius hadn't returned their calls.

Thinking about it now, after all those years, I knew my parents wouldn't have let it go at that. Uncle Marius was family, my grandfather's brother. My dad's father had died during my childhood and I didn't remember having a relationship with him, but Uncle Marius and Aunt Millie were different. They had always been there for my family, for me, until one day they weren't.

I wandered into the kitchen. The counters were spotless, as was the sink. An empty turquoise CorningWare dish sat in the sink, clean. The sight of it triggered a memory from my childhood. I knew that piece of CorningWare, and I knew who it had belonged to. Not Uncle Marius. My parents.

I checked my phone; it was a couple of minutes after four. I called my parents in Burbank and my mom answered.

“Mom, it's Poly. Do you have time to talk?”

“Of course. Is everything okay? Are you at work?”

“I'm still in San Ladrón.”

“I didn't realize you were taking vacation time. How long did your boss give you?”

I weighed the pros and cons of telling Mom that I hadn't actually taken vacation. As of tomorrow, eight
AM
, Giovanni expected me back at work, and I was fairly certain I wasn't going to be there. I didn't know how I was going to get around that other than faking the flu, and I wasn't ready to deal with the guilt of confessing that to my mother.

“A couple of days,” I said. “Mom, when's the last time you were in the fabric store? Or the apartment?”

“Oh, geez. It's been a while. Longer than I remember. Why?”

“I'm there now and the furniture has all been covered up. Do you know who did that?”

She hesitated. “I didn't realize Marius had asked anybody to do that. I don't know why, but I always thought of that beautiful turn-of-the-century furniture collecting a decade's worth of dust.”

“Would Dad know?”

“I doubt it. Marius pulled away from us after Millie's death. It was a shame, really, that he didn't turn to family to comfort him, but I think we were all too tied to his memories of her.”

“Mom, I know you and Dad didn't just leave him alone. Our CorningWare bowl is in the sink, and that afghan you were knitting when I was at the Fashion Institute is draped over the back of a rocking chair in the living room. There's no way those things would be here if you'd cut all ties.”

The silence on the other end of the phone was enough to confirm my suspicions. My parents, who always claimed that the murder had torn the family apart, had kept in touch with my uncle and I had never known it. I was hurt, because Uncle Marius had been a part of my life, too, and nobody had bothered to let me know what was going on.

“Poly, listen to me. Your uncle Marius was destroyed when Aunt Millie was murdered. He didn't want to talk to anybody about it, but he didn't want to move on. One day your father and I went to see him, unannounced. We found him in the bedroom, sitting in front of her closet, staring at her clothes. He was a wreck. He hadn't been eating. We took him to a hospital, where your father stayed in the waiting room while they made sure he was okay. When he was released, we thought we'd help him leave the apartment behind and find a new place to live, but he didn't. Several months later a letter arrived from him, thanking us for helping him through a hard time. He wrote that he knew it was time for him to move on, but that he knew he couldn't go back. He told us that he had made arrangements for the apartment and the store, and asked that we keep him informed about your life. He apologized to us in advance for dropping out of our lives but asked that we respect his wishes.”

“So he told you? He told you what he was doing and you never told me?” I asked. Tears stung my eyes. It was such a huge thing, them keeping a secret of this magnitude from me, refusing to talk about Uncle Marius and Aunt Millie every time I tried to bring them up.

“Poly, I'm so sorry. Maybe we should have told you, but Marius asked us not to. He knew he was retreating into a solitary life; it was the only way he could imagine going on living. But you were the one person he kept tabs on. We wrote him letters frequently, telling him about your job, your apartment, and your boyfriend. I sent him sketches from the first collection you designed for To The Nines.”

“But how do you know he ever got anything? Why would he not react?”

“Every time I sent something, a week later I received a blank thank-you note postmarked in San Ladrón. He never signed them, but he was the only person who could have sent them.”

I wandered back to the bedroom and sat on the ivory damask bedspread. It was what I wanted to know, only it was information that came so much later than I wished. My uncle hadn't shut me out of his life. Those ten years, he'd been keeping track of me. Just like I felt a connection to him, he felt a connection to me. Leaving me the store was more than a bequest, it was an apology.

“Mom, what do you think he expected me to do with the store?”

“None of us know the answer to that, Poly. But it's yours now, and it's up to you to decide what happens to it.”

I ended the call, then opened the closet at the end of the bed and exposed several dark suits hanging on heavy wooden hangers. I could tell from the style of them that they had been bought in the fifties. The narrow lapels, the long rise, the narrow legs. Uncle Marius's suits, from before he left. Next to them were my great-aunt Millie's dresses. I remembered her glamour almost as much as I remembered her. No matter what she did, whether she was running the store, or going out to buy groceries, she was always dressed beyond what the occasion called for. When I was little, I used to play dress-up in her closet, sometimes even wearing one of her long silken nightgowns to the dinner table with a feather boa over my shoulders. There was a picture of that in a family photo album, somewhere. At the time, I was ten years old. I didn't know what was so funny, but I had loved the attention those fabulous clothes had given me.

It had been a long time since I stopped and thought about the impact Great-Aunt Millie had on me when I was growing up. Not only the time I spent in the store, but being around her, in her silks, cashmeres, wool challis, and feathers. She always loved feathers. And rhinestones. And gold. She taught me that you didn't have to buy the newest fashions to have style. She showed me a closet of clothes she'd made from fabrics in the store. Styles from decades earlier, copied from old vintage dresses she found during her travels around the world. Even though they were far from what had been featured in fashion magazines in the fifties, Millie had made them her own. I suspected she was the center of attention at any party she attended.

She wouldn't have recognized me in the uniform of black that got me through my life, but she would have been the one person to understand what I was trying to do with my job as senior concept designer at To The Nines. She'd take a look at the sketches and recognize designs of the twenties and thirties, clothes suited more for a Mae West movie than a bare-bones dress shop in downtown Los Angeles. I wondered about the girls who came into the store looking for their prom dress or homecoming gown. Giovanni kept our overhead low with cheap materials, but he took a healthy markup on the inventory. When a particular dress didn't sell, he could call someone related to the pageant circuit and move the stock at a discount.

I ran the back of my hand over delicate fabrics in Aunt Millie's closet, then gently fingered the beadwork on her many gowns. Uncle Marius and Aunt Millie used to tell me stories about the lifestyle they led before my parents were born, and these clothes were the kind that would have been worn by someone in a high social circle. I wished I could see them, that I could have been a fly on the wall of that social life. But just like everything else about the store and the town, it was different now. I could pull from the past and use it in the present if I wanted. If I did reopen the store, I could let my family's legacy continue in a new way.

I moved to the kitchen table and flipped through the stack of mail that had accumulated over the past few days. Most of the envelopes were addressed to
Resident
. One catalog of home products advertised a sale on fans and air conditioners. A folded-over grocery store flyer and discount furniture ads rounded out the stack. I carried it all to the garbage. I guess the news was getting out: the store was no longer vacant.

A document-sized white envelope slipped from between the grocery store ads and fell by my feet. I picked it up and scanned the official-looking printed address:
Attn: Carson Cole, c/o Land of a Thousand Fabrics.
That was a first. I checked the return address:
McMichael Development and Investments.

I stood rooted to the spot. My hands shook as I plunged my index finger under the end of the envelope and tore through it. I reached inside and pulled out a letter typed on crisp white stationery. It was addressed to Carson, and confirmed his meeting with Mr. McMichael today at five o'clock.

I threw the stack of paper to the floor. Sheets scattered across the tile, some floating under the table, others getting lost by the dishwasher. Carson had told me about his meeting with Mr. McMichael, but I hadn't thought he'd go through with it once he knew how I felt. As soon as the paper left my hand I knew throwing things wasn't the answer. I dropped to my hands and knees and corralled the pages back together. I typed the address into the GPS on my phone and studied the directions.

Without a car, Carson couldn't make his appointment, but I could. It was time for me to pay Mr. McMichael a visit and tell him face-to-face what I thought of his offer.