Veiled Revenge (5 page)

Brooke laughed. She was clearly thrilled by the thought of a Killer Shawl carrying an ancient curse
.

“How long do you think it will take her to call Damon?” Stella whispered.

Lacey covered the phone with her hand. “She’s probably texting him as we speak.”

“That’s just what we need.” Miguel groaned. “Leonardo was killed by aliens. Or the CIA. Or Elvis in his blue suede shoes.”

Lacey blew out the deep breath she was holding. Damon, the mad genius behind the popular Conspiracy Clearinghouse Web site—also known as DeadFed dot com—was Brooke’s boyfriend and soul mate. Together they sought to uncover the mysteries of the universe, most of them apparently dark conspiracies controlled by criminal masterminds. She could imagine Damon’s Web headline: H
AUNTED
R
USSIAN
S
HAWL
S
TALKS
W
ASHINGTON!
L
EAVES
C
ORPSES IN
W
AKE!
CIA
S
TONEWALLS!

Lacey shook her head to clear it. In a town where Congress made laws no one read, where hidden secret bunkers really existed, where every sixth person was said to be a spy, it was easy to believe that a conspiracy lurked behind every cherry blossom. And her friend Brooke Barton was always quick to jump into the nearest bizarre conspiracy theory with both feet. Brooke, Lacey reflected, was a lot like Harlan Wiedemeyer. The difference was that Harlan simply thought Bigfoot and exploding toads were
fun
. Brooke believed they were a matter of
national security.

“Well, if you’re not interested in getting to the bottom of this, there’s
someone
I can talk to,” Brooke said.

“No, Brooke, wait! Not Damon. Not DeadFed.”

Brooke laughed and clicked off.

“Lacey, are you listening to me?” Stella demanded. “This is only the beginning.”

“We can’t know that. This has nothing to do with the shawl,”
Lacey said.

“Don’t forget, Marie fainted.
Fainted
. That’s bad, Lace. Very bad. That shawl is haunted and we were all there to witness the mocking. It’s not through with us. I got a bad feeling, a very, very bad feeling.”

“What you have, Stella darling, is a bad case of bridal jitters,” Miguel said.

“That’s right,” Lacey added. “Shawls do not kill people. And clothes are not haunted.”

Or are they?

Chapter 6

The question of whether clothes really could be cursed lodged in Lacey’s head like a virus and followed her back to the office. Maybe “haunted clothing” could at least inspire an idea for a Fashion Bite. She was on deadline and she was willing to take any idea the world handed her, even a crazy ghost of an idea.

First, Lacey called Marie Largesse, the fainting psychic. The new girl at the shop said Marie hadn’t come in yet, and Marie wasn’t answering her home phone or her cell. And Marie had said she was going to be sleeping late.

The newsroom was quiet in the late morning. Reporters were out covering the Hill or interviewing sources over the phone. Or they were busy with pre-story procrastination: surfing the Web, reading e-mail, playing computer solitaire, drinking coffee, gathering their thoughts. They weren’t paying any attention to the fashion reporter in the room. It was as if Lacey worked in a different universe. And luckily the writers most interested in keeping an eye on her weren’t around. She didn’t even see Wiedemeyer, or her editor, Mac Jones, or her sometimes-rival, Tony Trujillo.

Just the way I like it.

Lacey found very little literature about “ghostly garments” or “haunted clothes” or “cursed couture”on the Web. She tried every promising search string. A few pieces of fiction turned up, including a story called “Furisode,” by Lafcadio Hearn, about a haunted kimono in Japan that sickened and killed everyone who wore it. There were several blog posts too, but none that explained why or how a particular item was allegedly haunted. A tantalizing story about a haunted wedding gown in a museum, supposedly observed moving its sleeves, eventually was attributed to people walking on loose floorboards near the display case, which caused the mannequin wearing the gown to wobble.

Brooke would be so disappointed
.

There was one more place to try. Lacey had a source in the massive costume collection in the Nation’s Attic: the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She’d been lucky enough to snag a recent interview with the woman and a behind-the-scenes tour to view some of the historic wedding dresses and other garments that had been donated through the years. Yet she had learned so much more. Every item told a story, and the Smithsonian Institution had documented thousands of those stories.

There were more than thirty thousand items in the collection, including every kind of garment that could be worn on the human body, underwear to outerwear, from shoes and hats to jewelry and costume jewelry, along with makeup, combs, and brushes. The oldest item was a dress dating from the late seventeenth century. But not everything related to clothing was in the costume collection.

The First Ladies’ gowns constituted their own collection, and the famous (and allegedly cursed) Hope Diamond resided in the Department of Mineral Sciences at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

If
The
Smithsonian had no knowledge of suspected “hauntings” associated with its immense collection of historic apparel and wearables, one Lacey Smithsonian was pretty sure no one else did either. It was time to test that theory.

Lacey left a voice mail with her source, a charming woman named Noël, who had not only a deep knowledge but also an abiding love for the collection. Noël called her back shortly, but had no stories to offer about demon-possessed or ghost-inhabited clothing. Not exactly.

“Some of our interns report feeling depressed whenever they handle clothes that belonged to Clover Adams,” Noël told her.

Clover Adams might bring anyone down
,
Lacey thought. Clover was celebrated as a dazzling nineteenth-century Washington hostess; her devoted husband was Henry Adams, the grandson and great-grandson of presidents. Clover Adams fell into a deep depression after her father’s death, and in 1885 she killed herself with potassium cyanide. Many Washingtonians (and many tourists) knew her name by way of the famous hooded statue that guarded her grave at Rock Creek Cemetery. Neither explicitly male nor female, the ambiguous and haunting monument had been commissioned from the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens by her mourning husband, who, legend had it, never again spoke his wife’s name. The sculptor had given it the grandiose title
The Mystery of the Hereafter and the Peace of God that Passeth Understanding
. But everyone knew the gloomy figure simply as
Grief.

I’d be moved by Clover’s legacy too
, Lacey thought. Had her depression somehow found its way into her clothing? Did Clover’s dresses contain her gloomy aura? Or were the interns depressed simply because Clover’s story was so melancholy?

“And although it isn’t exactly haunted,” Noël continued, “we do have in the collection a wedding dress that’s known as the Bad Karma Dress. Did I show you that one?”

Lacey remembered the gown well, with its layers of ethereal lace that ruffled their way up to the waist, the graceful bodice and delicate sleeves. That particular confection of white lace was designed by Christian Dior and made for a bride who died soon after her wedding. However, in such a large collection there had to be at least a few items associated with heartbreak.

Every Smithsonian costume exhibit was the culmination of years of planning. Special mannequins were made to fit the clothes and evoke their period and mood. Displaying the gowns and dresses and shoes and hats at the museum was a way of keeping their stories and their owners alive. With regret, Lacey realized the public would never see more than the smallest fraction of this glorious collection. And while the collection also had men’s clothing, Lacey had focused on the women’s.

The fabulous dresses were carefully stored behind the doors of endless rows of plain beige cabinets. Dresses that were sturdy enough were hung, while more delicate items were protected by muslin or acid-free paper and laid flat in long drawers. Lacey had glimpsed only a few of the highlights of the gowns hidden there, but she’d been hypnotized by the depth and wonder of it all, as Noël and her assistant pulled dress after amazing dress from the Smithsonian closets, each owned by women, famous or unknown, throughout American history, and lovingly preserved for posterity.

The Smithsonian clothing collections were personal, even intimate, but according to Noël, they were
not
haunted. Clothes, it seemed, did not have the kind of magnetism for ghosts that creaky old houses and woods and lonely bridges possessed. But clothes had something better than ghosts. In Lacey’s opinion, they had
magic
.

Lacey was initiated into the magic spell of clothing when as a teenager she had first visited her great-aunt Mimi and her wonderful trunk, where Mimi kept all the unfinished clothes and patterns and fabric for outfits she planned to make one day, but never did. Mimi’s trunk was a veritable pirate’s treasure chest of styles of the late 1930s and 1940s, full of enchanting apparel made to fit and flatter real women. All of those artifacts held magic for Lacey, even if others couldn’t feel it.

Unfortunately, Lacey was finding the magic elusive in her research into “haunted clothes.” Marie’s shawl and Leonardo’s death kept crowding her thoughts.

She didn’t feel remotely recovered from the Sagebrush adventure, Stella’s impending wedding was sucking up all her energy, and now there was the untimely death of Leonardo. On top of everything else, it was spring! Lacey craned her neck to look out a corner of her window and gaze dreamily at the flowers blossoming in Farragut Square.

I should have taken the whole week off
.

She’d compromised with her editor to work Monday, Tuesday, and part of Wednesday, and then take the rest of the week off to deal with any unexpected wedding details that might crop up, Stella’s-wedding-wise.

Lacey had the vacation time stored up, but with the newspaper industry in the shape it was in, she was afraid that if she took too much time, her job would vanish. Her fashion beat would be parceled out to the guy who took classified ads and an underpaid intern who didn’t know a pleat from a pedal pusher. Besides, Mac Jones always whined when she asked for time off.

“You’re gonna give up some future weekends to make up for this favor, right?” Mac had said.

“Right. I’m owed the time, Mac. It’s not a
favor
.” But Newspaper Guild contract or not, Lacey wasn’t eager to push too hard for her rights. Mac grudgingly granted her request, as long as she’d finish a column or a Fashion Bite or two ahead of deadline. And there was also the “true crime” book that Mac and Tony (and very reluctantly, Lacey) were cobbling together from the paper’s Sagebrush reportage. Lacey had to steal the time for that late at night.

And have I mentioned it is spring!
She wanted to luxuriate in it, bathe in it. She wanted to walk around the Tidal Basin and enjoy the lush cherry blossoms with her secret fiancé, Vic. Stella wasn’t the only one in love with those pink and white petals.

Leonardo’s sudden and unexplained death and a strange shawl of Russian origin were just too many layers of additional stress. She needed answers before she could calm down enough to write a story for her own beat. Short of calling the police department and asking questions she knew they wouldn’t answer, Lacey sought out the next best thing to being there: Tony Trujillo,
The
Eye
’s police reporter. Sure, Tony was a byline hog, but what reporter wasn’t? He was a pal—and a born gossip.

Tony wasn’t at his desk. Lacey circled back to her own cubicle and found him snooping around the food editor’s domain. Felicity Pickles, grand dame of
The Eye
’s food section and Harlan Wiedemeyer’s heartthrob, had not yet graced the office with her presence and the delicacy of the day. Felicity had trained the reporters and editors to behave like circus seals, begging for tasty nibbles from her test kitchen every day. On those infrequent days when Felicity didn’t feed the masses, there was sorrow in the land, and Tony looked sorrowful.

“She’s not here.” Lacey pointed out the obvious.

“I can see that,” Tony growled. “And the candy machine in the break room is broken. Doesn’t anyone have anything to eat around here?”

“O cruel fate. Don’t look so downhearted, Tony. It’s almost lunchtime,” Lacey said. “Working on anything interesting?”

“
Nada.
The usual.”

That could mean anything or nothing. “What, no homicide or strange crime in the city?”

“Day is young.” Tony flashed his killer smile. “What’s up in the world of hats, hose, and haberdashery?”

“Same old, same old. Navy and white are in for spring, because they’re
always
in for spring. This year with a dash of yellow. Yellow is the new black. Actually it’s not. But somebody is bound to say it is. Might as well be me.”

“Then I guess you’re at the head of the pack.”

She took a deep breath. “Hey, Trujillo, I heard a body was found this morning.”

“Like many a morning. Tell me more.” Tony made himself comfortable in Felicity’s chair and propped his booted feet on the wastebasket. He sported a new pair of snakeskin cowboy boots he’d bought on their recent shopping expedition in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. He balanced his coffee cup on his knee. “You got a fashion clue? Know the victim, or just interested in my beat? There are days your beat seems to wield more weird murder wattage per square mile than mine, you know.”

Lacey hesitated. Her week was jammed, including a final fitting scheduled for her maid of honor dress. She didn’t know what to do about Stella “hating” her wedding dress, but she comforted herself with the knowledge that a dress was not a life-or-death decision, no matter what the bride said. Even so, Lacey still had to ride shotgun on Brooke or she would show up in something better suited to a courtroom proceeding or a funeral than a wedding. And she had promised Stella to help check out the reception venue and fret over the pinkness of the cherry blossom petals with her.

Tony sipped his coffee and waited, probably hoping a cart full of cookies would soon materialize, along with Felicity. “You were saying?”

She decided to spill. There might be a news story surrounding Leo’s death, but whatever it was, it had nothing to do with her. Tony was welcome to it.

“Remember Leonardo, the temperamental diva stylist who used to work with Stella?” He looked blank. “He was a suspect in the Angela Woods murder.”

“Rings a bell. That Karpinski guy? Arrogant and unpleasant? What about him?”

“He’s the dead body. Can you check it out?”

Tony sat up straighter. “Sounds like you already have. What do you know?”

“Nothing. Except—he crashed Stella’s bachelorette party last night. And he’s dead this morning.”

Tony grinned and put his snakeskin boots on the floor. “Brenda Starr, you’ve done it again. Wherever you go, bodies follow. Or is that
fall
?”

“Hilarious, Trujillo. Leonardo’s demise had nothing to do with the party.”

“You say that
now
. I’ll make some calls and— Hey, wait a minute! You threw a Girls Gone Wild bachelorette bash and didn’t tip me off?”

“Tony!” She snorted. “Are you a bachelorette?”

“No, but I know a few. Oh, that’s right, I forgot. Smithsonian isn’t known for her party-giving flair. And on a Sunday night? But I’m sure it was
killer
. Maybe the dead guy ate something lethal at your party.”

“You want lethal? You’re asking for it, Trujillo.”

“Of course I am. How did he die?”

“I’m asking
you
. Call your sources. I’m not the police reporter.”

“I’m glad we got that straight. For once,” Tony said. “Sometimes I wonder.”

“Can you find out for me without whining?”

“I can, if you tell me one thing.” Tony looked around. He picked up her left hand. Lacey pulled it back. Tony dropped his voice. The sports guys were glued to their TV and the annoying junior police reporter wasn’t around. “When are you going to announce the big engagement? Remember, Lois Lane, you said yes to Superman, and don’t forget there are witnesses. So where’s the ring?”

She grabbed him by the lapels of his leather jacket. “Shut up, Tony. That is classified information.”