Tulle Death Do Us Part (21 page)

“Shut! Up!”

I looked up from my perusal of the seventies formals.

“Little Wiener, you called him. So? Is he?”

I tried to look stern. Crossed my arms, firmed my lips, tapped a pointy-toed René Mancini sheer zip bootee, but I couldn’t hold my laughter. “That was a pre-psychic call. Huge mistake. Huge!” I stressed.

“I knew it! You lucky—I miss Kyle.”

I chuckled. “For tonight, you sleep at my house. We’ll play some loud concert on TV that’ll send Dad and Fiona
to her house. Alex hasn’t moved in yet, so we’ll have the place to ourselves.”

“You’re an everything-turns-to-gold brat.”

“Go tell my mother that. Listen, we’ve got to be ready to roll at midnight, and it’ll be easier to leave an empty house.”

“What do you two have your heads together over?” Dolly asked, coming into the area behind the back-walled checkout counter. Good thing she was deaf. “You look like you’re up to no good,” she said.

“You should know,” I responded, and her cackle improved everybody’s spirits, even Dante’s—my spirit’s spirits.

Eve shrugged as she put her father’s army coat in the closet. “I can’t believe Mad left the shop in the middle of the afternoon yesterday and stayed away for an entire twenty-four hours,” she griped, laying it on to take them off the sleuthing scent, “just because she and Werner are a couple.”

I couldn’t help smiling or remembering the romance of our time together. “He is a charmer,” I said, remembering our short but powerful night.

“Oh, barf,” Eve said, watching me.

Dolly wagged a finger and gave her a “Tut tut tut. What’s wrong with you, Eve Meyers? Have you lost all sense of romance? Where’s that nice Kyle DeLong these days?”

“He’s running the Parisian arm of DeLong Enterprises,” Eve said on a sigh.

“We need to find you a man.”

Eve grumped. “No offense, Dolly, but could you find me one about seventy-five years younger than you are?”

I thought Dolly would laugh up a lung. She had a charming laugh, if you weren’t afraid she’d kill herself using it, but I still got a peek at the girl Dante had fallen for. Heck, I’d once worn the body of the girl Dante had fallen for. It was a scary but romantic minute, and I got out just in time. Dante showed himself now just to watch her. He had no concern for her health; she’d be his when her life ended. He stood, arms crossed, his grin pretty darned deadly. I could tell by the look on his face that it wouldn’t be long before Dolly disappeared from our work area.

I hadn’t thought about the case or the formal entries since yesterday, when I’d left to spend time with Lytton.

Problem was, I was dying to find out how the case was going, but we just hadn’t found time to talk about it. “We need more hangers,” I said. “I’ll go get some.”

When I got to my second-floor workroom, I speed-dialed Werner. “Hey, how did it go with the O’Dowds yesterday? Did you learn anything about Robin? I can’t believe we didn’t talk about this last night.”

“If you want to talk anytime soon, we’ll have to sit outside in a park where I can’t ravish you.”

I sighed, remembering.

“Truth is, as soon as I mentioned Wayne’s dead sister, Wynona zipped it. I get to question them Friday morning at nine with their lawyer present.”

“Darn. Anything else new? What about Bambi-Jo?”

“I thought I’d question her after I finished going through the boxes of info I got from the country club.”

“Ooh, wish I could go through them with you. Can I come by after work?”

“No, because I’ve got a suspect coming in, and I don’t want him to see you.”

“What? Who?”

“Zavier McDowell.”

“Oh, that’s not fair. You wouldn’t know him if he hadn’t waved us down. Be nice to him. Life hasn’t been.”

“You told me you found out about him from an anonymous tip.”

Maybe confessing my abilities had muddied the waters. Too late to worry about. “That was true. That wasn’t a vision. I got a tip about the key and some vague person who might have hidden the stuff in a drainpipe. No names were given to me.” Zavier was also probably the person who’d hidden the brass box in my attic, but I wanted to approach Zavier about that so he wouldn’t be afraid.

“But was the tip anonymous?”

As anonymous as a ghost could get. “Absolutely.”

“Our perp could as easily have been Zavier’s brother, the councilman. We got a search warrant to search Bradenton Cove, especially Zavier’s room, but we didn’t find any of the scavenged items, not even the cane we saw him using.”

I tried to defend Zavier. Something told me he wasn’t guilty.

“He’s prone to telling everything he knows, and his name’s on the guest list for that night. Plus, he has a history of sexual harassment,” Werner countered.

“Say what?”

“Three times. His family always made it go away. The victims all declined to press charges. He very well might
have scared Robin into jumping in the ocean that night. I’m just bringing him in for questioning, Mad.”

All the more reason why I had to step up my sleuthing. “I forgive you. You’re simply doing your job.”

“Thanks loads. I’m sorry I won’t see you tonight.”

“Thanks for yesterday. It was—”

“Incredible.” He cleared his throat. “To set the record straight,” he said, just short of a whisper, “I love sharing supper and breakfast with you, and I especially love our time in between.”

“My knees are weak. Who would’ve thought, back in third grade?”

“The Wiener and the Glamazon? No way.” I loved the smile in his voice as I hung up.

A bit dazed—doubly so, between the upper of remembering last night and the downer of learning about Zavier’s background—I grabbed an armful of hangers and went back downstairs.

“Okay,” I said, returning to the racks of formals. “Time to get back to work.”

“Don’t act like we’re the slackers,” Eve said. “You played hooky yesterday, and now, stalling tactics?”

I winked. “Jealous?”

My BFF stuck her tongue out at me.

“Girls, girls, you’re both pretty,” Aunt Fiona said, entering the room. “Cut the squabbling and get to work. We have a lot to do, and I’ll be in panic mode until it’s done.”

I kissed her cheek and looked around. “Yes, ma’am. Okay, I already see a few bloopers. The Bob Mackies; there are three on the label rack, am I correct? Mackie
designed for Cher in the seventies. He didn’t start his label line until 1982. Pull them aside to be returned. They weren’t worn to the country club’s fiftieth, not unless somebody borrowed them from Judy Garland or Cher.”

“My stars,” Dolly said. “You do know your stuff, Madeira.”

“Thank you, Dolly.” I looked at the single formal I’d chosen. “Hang the peach crepe silk with the chevron-striped apron and tulle petticoats beside the airman’s uniform.” I was being forced to pick Vainglory’s dress for a reading with her wearing it. Much more powerful. I hated to give Deborah VanCortland the satisfaction, but maybe I’d find a way to use the pair of antique shoe-shaped ink bottles her son and my sister gave me as a maid-of-honor gift to out her as being part of the scavenger hunt.

Dolly tittered, and she wasn’t looking at us. “Oh, I think I need to go work in Paris when it Sizzles,” she said, distracted.

My resident ghost, her former lover, must have appeared just beyond the counter wall and waved her his way.

I could have used Dolly’s help, but at 106, the old girl deserved to have some fun.

“Go ahead, but while you’re in there, pray that we find out who put that cash box in my attic and when. You hear me? It’s important that I know the answer, and praying, no matter how loud, doesn’t seem to be working for me. I can’t seem to connect with the big guy, if you get my drift.”

Dolly laughed a little hard for a private joke, but Eve didn’t seem to think anything of it. Well, Dolly was Dolly.

My head came up at that. I sure hoped it wasn’t Dolly who’d put the box in the attic. Oh, heck no. Forty years ago,
she would have been in her late sixties and never would have been a member of that clique. Silly me. Which begged the obvious question: Why was Dante protecting Zavier?

“Look at this gown,” Fiona said. “I think I have a picture of it.”

The picture hadn’t done Vainglory’s dress justice. I knew that because I’d seen her take off her petticoat from beneath it and tear it into the pieces that would be used to hide the evidence.

“That’s the one.”

I wouldn’t know, without a doubt, who the real owner was until the first fitting. Deborah might have sold it after Cort divorced her. I did hope, however, that it would be the same poor little rich girl. Thank the stars that Sherry’s Kathleen and Riley would have Fiona as a second grandmother.

“Fiona, can you lift the skirt?”

She did.

“Darn, the petticoats are missing. There should be at least four, all made of tulle, and a crinoline.”

Not to mention the torn petticoat which just might hold the key to a murder.

As I predicted, dad found it necessary to go and help Fiona with some handiwork—bad choice of words, Dad—around nine, the minute the rock concert started on television.

“We’ll see you tomorrow,” she mouthed before he dragged her out the door.

After they drove away, Eve and I high-fived each other and turned the blaring thing off. I checked my watch. “What say we get a few hours’ sleep and plan to sneak down to the old docks around one?”

“Are we setting our alarms for midnight or one?” she asked, with her hand on the doorknob to Sherry’s old room.

“Alarm for one, we’ll be there by half past.”

“Gotcha.”

I thought about what I’d take for protection and decided the Taser gun, pepper spray, and a hammer would do, all of
which were already in my Coach bag. But I needed a less expensive carryall for our foray into the world of greasy old mills.

Three and a half hours later, my alarm clock rang. Two seconds later, my door slammed open. “Ugh,” Eve said.

“Yep.” We were both still dressed. “I left the coffee on. Let’s grab a cup and hit the road.”

By one twenty, we had hit the mill section, where I hoped to find the warehouse/belly of the whale/whatever, where more clues were hidden in a makeshift pipe handrail and where I believed the scavenger hunters had gathered in the wee hours of the morning in question.

We left Eve’s car and started with the farthest mill so we could work our way back to the car.

I flashed my light around the first. It had ceilings like a Vanderbilt mansion. “This sure isn’t it.”

We left and checked a second that looked more like a center walkway between two floors of offices. “Not this one, either.” Though both of them were decrepit, neither had brick walls, inside or out.

The third was in the worst condition by far—read: skittering squealing rats with debris and dust at every step. The place frankly shivered me to my bones. I ran the flashlight along the inside walls as I’d done in the first two, and there it was, plain as day: The word “steam,” barely visible on the disintegrating brick wall. I wouldn’t have been able to read it, if I didn’t already know what it said.

I turned toward the center of the room, but there was no more stairway. Gone, except for the top step hanging in the air off the floor above, a floor that could probably fall on our heads any minute.

Beneath the former stairs, scattered on the ground and across the room, I spotted the kind of fat plumbing pipes I remembered and sought now, some still jointed, some not.

“We have to look inside pipes like that.” I circled a group with my flashlight. “Start with the ones on the floor around where the stairway used to be.”

Eve gave a whole-body shiver with an accompanying whine of a sound, like something evil had just passed through her. “You jest.”

“’Fraid not.”

“Where the stairway
used
to be. I wasn’t in your vision.”

I flashed my light in a circle beneath the opening in the ceiling.

“Oh,” she said.

I flashed my light into open-ended pipes first.