Suede to Rest (7 page)

I wasn't inclined to panicking, but the deputy sheriff's matter-of-fact tone, the rational explanation of events, and the routine manner in which he was treating me made me wonder if maybe I was tired, if maybe I'd made more out of my brush with death than there was. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was quarter to nine but it felt like it was after midnight.

“Ms. Monroe, here's my card. Call me if you need me.”

I unplugged my cell phone and held the cord out to the deputy sheriff.

He waved it away. “Keep it. We got a ton of them lying around here. You need anything else? A ride somewhere?”

“No, I can walk.” I stood up and pushed the chair in under the front of the desk. “There is one thing you can give me. Mr. McMichael's phone number?”

“You're going to sell to him?”

“I haven't decided about that yet. I wanted to say thank you.”

“For what?”

“For showing up when he did. He's the one who found me.”

Deputy Sheriff Clark stared at me blankly.

“He's the one who called you,” I added.

“I don't know what you're talking about. My call came in from the Senior Patrol.”

“But Mr. Pickers
is—” I cut myself off before finishing my sentence.

“Mr. Pickers wasn't the only member of the Senior Patrol.”

“Why would the Senior Patrol be behind Charlie's auto shop? It's not like someone could have seen me from the street.”

The deputy sheriff leaned back in his chair and took another drink from his mug. “Maybe you're right. Maybe the Senior Patrol thinks it's a good idea to keep an eye on you.”

“Why? Because I'm not from around here? Or because I don't want to sell the store?”

“Maybe because their founding member was found murdered on your property and a piece of fabric from your store was tied around his head.”

“I didn't have anything to do with that.”

Deputy Sheriff Clark held my stare for a couple of beats while my proclamation hung in the air, unchallenged. The longer I waited for him to speak, the more aware I became of the possibility that he didn't believe me. I fought the urge to repeat myself for fear too much protesting would add to his all but stated suspicion of guilt.

“May I leave, Sheriff?”

He nodded once. I thanked him for the hot chocolate and headed back to the fabric store.

Something wasn't right. It had started yesterday, when my car was vandalized. In less than twenty-four hours the police had shown up assuming I was squatting on the property, I'd found the body of a neighborhood patroller in my new backyard, and I'd been trapped in Charlie's shower unit. Worst of all, I was being treated like I'd staged things to make me look like a victim, too. Coupled with Sheriff Clark's request that I not leave town, I suspected the recent acts of vandalism did more to incriminate than exonerate me. If the people of San Ladrón wanted to turn gossip into an Olympic sport, I was providing ample gear for the playing field.

It was dark as I crossed the street. I looked to the left, past the hair salon and the consignment shop, to the tea store. The faded floral curtains were drawn, but a faint glow came from the windows. I wondered how late a tea shop stayed open in a town like San Ladrón, and whether or not Genevieve's friendliness would go the way of the deputy sheriff's if I stayed much longer.

I crossed San Ladrón Avenue, and then crossed Bonita, heading back to Charlie's. The rest of the businesses on the street were dark, long past closing time. The last thing I wanted was to return to Charlie's garage, but I knew I owed her some kind of explanation. I tore a sheet of paper out of the notebook in my bag and scribbled a quick note in pencil.
I'm sorry about the shower. Call me and I'll explain.
I thought about including a line about ignoring gossip, but from what I already knew about Charlie, that probably went without saying. I folded the note in half and stuck it in the crack between her door and the molding, right above the knob.

I returned to the fabric store and entered through the front, this time pulling the gate shut behind me. Safety first, I thought. Freak accident or not, I was alone, a stranger in a small, insular community. Whether or not anybody wanted to come out and say it, it seemed they weren't welcoming me with open arms. At least one thing was certain: The Senior Patrol was keeping an eye on me. The fact offered little solace.

Once inside, I found the kittens back in their box. The orange one stretched a paw out and yawned. I scooped each up and kissed their heads, then set them on top of the cutting table. The tabby had clear blue eyes and a tiny pink nose. The other was his twin except in shades of gray, as if someone had printed a photo from a printer that was low on toner.

I left them on top of the cutting station and stripped off the motor oil–stained clothes I'd been wearing. They were destined for the trash. I would have loved to bundle up in flannel pajamas and a thick terry-cloth robe, but my shopping priorities earlier that day had been less about warmth and more about style. I pulled the black silk nightgown over my head and slipped my arms into the sleeves of a matching duster. Not warm enough. I tore the tags off of the black sweatshirt and zipped myself into it. Next I withdrew the other damp purchases from the shopping bag. With a length of ribbon from the wall of trims and buttons, I created a makeshift clothesline and hung the rest of my purchases: a pair of black pants, a pair of black skinny jeans, one black tube skirt, one black turtleneck, one black tunic. Surrounded by the most exotic fabrics in the most unusual colors, my wardrobe of cheap black garments looked as though the life had been sucked out of them. I remembered what Charlie had said earlier when I'd asked her where I could get some clothes.
You're asking the wrong questions.
Maybe she was right. Maybe I was.

I flipped to a blank page at the back of Aunt Millie's sales ledger, found a stubby pencil in the drawer of the wrap stand, and scribbled
Mr. Pickers/Senior Patrol/fabric store/connection?
I chewed on the eraser of the pencil as I stared at the page. Why had the murderer tied the blue suede around Mr. Pickers's head? To incriminate me, or to send a message that the murder was connected to the store? I didn't know enough about any of the things I'd written down to know what to make of them, and it was frustrating. Somebody around here had to have answers, and I was going to find them.

I flipped a few pages forward to another blank page and doodled a random circular pattern that matched my swirling thoughts. Before long, I sketched around it, a shoulder, a sleeve, a dress.

Drawing clothes came easily to me, easier than it was to create a pattern and turn the sketch into a real live garment. I simply pictured one element and built a dress around it. That's one of the reasons I was the concept designer at To The Nines. I had the ideas needed to conceive our collection each season, even if the collection was a batch of brightly colored dresses with gaudy embellishments, perfect for beauty pageants and proms. Someone else took my sketches to make patterns so the sewing team could turn them into reality.

People had always liked to watch me sketch, to tweak a line here, add a feather or a brooch, color it in with accents of gold, silver, or an array of brightly imagined stones. When I first imagined a concept, I escaped into a fantasy world of art deco inspiration. I could close my eyes and see the world that existed in the movies I loved from the thirties, then add them to my drawing.

As much as people were impressed with my talent, I was equally impressed when the sewing team blocked out a pattern on a bust form with flexible tape or draped a mannequin with fabric and turned it into what it was that I'd drawn. It was Giovanni who dumbed down my designs, claiming that they would cost too much in production. “That's nice, but this isn't the postwar thirties. Use half as much fabric and lose the buttons. Zippers are cheaper.”

Once, when I picked up a bolt of blue sateen from our supplier, he told me to get a bigger discount because of a defect to the fabric. I hung the bolt on a fabric roller and pulled five yards out. When I asked him to show me the defect, he took a needle to the fabric, lifted a thread from the center, and pulled it across the width of the garment. “There's your defect. Now go get that discount.” When I refused, he sent me home without pay. I didn't return for a week, and five dresses in the blue fabric were in various stages of completion on our small army of bust forms when I finally did go back. I covered the visible flaw with a carefully placed trim of tiny blue sequins that cost twice as much as the fabric, paying the invoice the day we received it. Giovanni never said a word, and I never really knew which one of us won the battle of wills.

Tonight, I lost myself in the sketch. Though I only had the blunt pencil to work with, I imagined a woman with brilliant platinum hair parted on the side, in a gold gown with a sweetheart neckline, embellished on the shoulders with spirals of matte gold and silver sequins. The gown, fitted at the waist, accentuated an hourglass figure: snug around the hips, cascading to the floor in a pool of fabric. It was the kind of dress that would give a store like Land of a Thousand Fabrics a great reputation again, for having the kind of materials you couldn't find at the smaller fabric stores. It was the kind of dress that would have looked good on me if I lived the kind of life that let me dress up in fancy clothes instead of worrying about the damage a glue gun could do to cashmere.

Giovanni would never approve such a gown. He could cut four cocktail dresses from the same amount of fabric, and the amount of time it would take to hand-sew the sequins on in the elaborate decoration I'd designed would shut the workroom down for a week. It was a special dress, inspired by the ones hanging in the back of my closet in Los Angeles that had never been worn.

A sound by the back door tore me away from the sketch. The kittens, standing at the edge of the table, both looked up as well. One of them let out a tiny squeak. I ran to them, scooping each up under her belly, and set them inside the nest of fur. I moved the box to the floor inside the register stand and crouched next to it.

There was a light tapping on the back door, then a voice. “Poly, are you in there? It's Vaughn McMichael. I just heard about tonight.” There was a stretch of silence. “If you're in there, can you open the door and let me in? I feel a little silly talking to a door.”

I giggled under my breath, but waited another moment.

“I don't suppose it matters or not, but I have food,” he said. “And wine. And I can't be sure, but the Senior Patrol might be in the neighborhood and I'm not sure how my standing here is going to look on their report.”

At the mention of the Senior Patrol I straightened up. I pushed the ledger back into the drawer of the wrap stand and walked to the back door, lifting the bar lock that slid into place and unlocking the dead bolt. It took a couple of minutes until I got it all open, but when I did, Vaughn stood on the other side of the door, a take-out bag from the Waverly House in one hand, a shopping bag from the grocery store in the other, and a flat blue box, wrapped in soft ivory paper with a white ribbon around it, tucked under his arm. His eyes dropped to my body, clothed in the bulky black zip-front hoodie over the slinky black nightgown, and back to my face.

“I wasn't sure if I would find you here, but I didn't know where else to look. May I come in?”

I stepped back and let him pass, then closed and locked the door.

“You're practically moved in, aren't you?” he asked as he looked at the clothes hanging across the store.

“It's been a rough night. I didn't plan to come back here, but I didn't know where else to go.”

“I heard.”

“Who told you?” I asked, wondering which version he knew.

“Word gets around,” he said. “When the hostess came over to tell me you canceled, the couple at the table next to me said they heard somebody named Polyester was taken to the police station.”

“That's what people are saying?”

He smiled. “It's true, isn't it?”

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“I called Officer Clark. He told me what happened and said you walked back here.” He shrugged like it was the most normal turn of events he'd heard. “Now, since you're obviously dressed for dinner,” he said, pausing to glance back down at my sweatshirt, “the only thing left is for me to set the table and serve it.”

“Trust me. This is a vast improvement over what I was wearing two hours ago. Follow me,” I said, turning away from him.

Now, where to eat? I'd spent the previous night in the apartment upstairs and while I knew the polite thing to do would be to invite Vaughn up and eat at a table like civilized people, I wasn't ready to let him into my personal space just yet. But for all the fabric and trim that the store housed, it was short on chairs. I hadn't entirely recovered from the cold-shower incident and had little desire to sit on the concrete floor, even if we covered it with fabric.

I tapped my palm on the top of the cutting table. “How's this?” I asked.

“Looks good to me.” He set his bags down and pulled a white eyelet tablecloth from inside one of them, then spread it out over the top of the laminate counter. Next, he pulled out two candleholders and fitted them with long tapers. I found a pack of matches in the drawer under the register and worked my way through half of the pack before one of the matches caught. I lit the tapers while Vaughn set out a small basket of bread, salt and pepper shakers, and a bottle of wine.

“Where did all of this come from?” I asked.

“I asked you to dinner at the Waverly House. Since you couldn't get to the restaurant, I brought the restaurant to you.” He withdrew two plates, then three containers that were definitely not disposable. “It's a silly dinner. Truffle mac and cheese, pommes frites, spinach artichoke dip, and calamari.”

“No steaks?” I asked with a smile.

“I didn't know if you were a vegetarian and figured I'd play it safe. Besides, the kitchen was closing and this was the best they could do. I hope it's okay.”

“It's okay,” I said. Understatement of the year, I thought to myself. According to Carson, a person could not live on appetizers alone, though if given the chance I'd prove him wrong.

Vaughn poured red wine into two stemmed glasses and handed me one. I wondered exactly how much influence the McMichael family had in San Ladrón that something like this was doable on short notice?

As we sat across from each other, cross-legged, plates on our laps, eating a meal that might have come from the kids' menu, I realized that this was the first time since I'd arrived that I had dropped my guard and was enjoying myself.

“How are the kittens?” he asked between bites.

“Good. They got dinner before you arrived. I should consider myself lucky. I forgot to eat all day and the only thing here is a few more cans of Fancy Feast.”

“You remembered to pick up cat food but nothing for yourself?”