A Fitting End: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery (26 page)

I forced a tense smile. I’d been prepared to see Anna at the front door, not the doctor, and it threw my mojo off.

“Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“I didn’t notice you drive up.” He peered over my shoulder as if he couldn’t believe he’d missed seeing the truck parked on his horseshoe driveway.

“Anna stopped by my shop last night, but I was too busy to talk dress design for her sister’s wedding. Hey, Duane,” I said, lifting my hand in a wave.

“Hi, Ms. Cassidy.”

Turning back to Buckley, I asked, “Is she here?”

The doctor stared at me, his brows pulled together. “Her sister’s wed—”

“Just chatting about a dress,” Anna said, appearing at the front door. “You know how I hate scrambling at the last minute and feeling like I’m always playing catch-up.”

Buckley’s reaction verified my suspicion. There was no wedding.

“That, I do.” Buckley frowned, deep vertical lines shooting down between his eyebrows. So he didn’t partake in his own cosmetic treatments. Interesting.

The doctor gave his wife a peck on the cheek before sidestepping me and heading across the spotty lawn toward the back of the house. “See you tonight,” he said
with a final wave. Duane trotted after him, hanging a valet bag, probably holding his suit for the pageant, in their car. His dad tossed a ring of keys to him, they got in, and they drove away, Duane at the wheel.

“He’s growing up so fast,” Anna said, watching as the car disappeared. “He can’t make up his mind whether to be a doctor or a lawyer, you know? He’s so interested in both.”

“I’m sure he’ll do great at either,” I said.

She looked at me, dark shadows creating half circles under her eyes. Her skin looked sallow. My guess was that she hadn’t slept a wink the night before. The fight with her husband, or guilt at stealing Trudy Lafayette’s notebook from my house? Or maybe both. She stood back and opened the door wide. “I guess you’d like to come in?” she said without a trace of actual Southern hospitality. I got the distinct impression she’d prefer I
didn’t
come in.

Truth be told, I didn’t want to, but I did want Trudy’s notebook back, so that made my decision. “Sure.”

She held the door open wide and I stepped past her.

“I figured you’d be coming.” Her voice was off, the consonants slurred and stretched out. As I passed into the living room, I saw the open bottle of wine and the quarter-filled glass on the coffee table. Ah, that explained it.

I glanced at my watch. Ten seventeen. Way too early to even say it was close to noon, and unless you were Charlie Sheen, most people thought lunchtime was about the earliest time in the day to start with the cocktails.

Something was not right in the world of Anna Hughes.

Behind me, the door closed with a bang. I turned around and my jaw dropped.

Her eyelids fluttered at half-mast as she walked toward me. “I suppose you’re here about this?” she said as she held up Trudy’s cloth-covered notebook.

Anna perched on the edge of her tasteful brown sofa across from me while I tried not to sink into the well-worn easy chair. She knocked back the rest of her wine, setting her glass on the occasional table by her side.

The last two times I’d seen her, I’d had immediate visions of her in black taffeta, but this time, my mind was drawing a blank. I could see
her
, but her image was fuzzy around the edges, and the outfit she wore was a dull, nondescript gray.

“Buck doesn’t know,” she said.

I cocked my head to the side, trying to be patient so I wouldn’t rip the book from her hands. “Doesn’t know what?”

She leaned forward, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I have a little confession.” A hiccup, followed by a little giggle, escaped her lips. She pressed two fingers to her mouth, as if that could stop the hiccups from continuing. Another one came, and her eyes went wide.

A drinking problem, I thought grimly, just as I’d suspected. “What kind of confession?”

Her fingers closed tightly around the notebook, her
knuckles going white from the pressure. “I… that is… m-my sister… she already had her wedding.”

“Yup, I figured that out.”

Her pencil thin eyebrows shot up toward her hairline. “How?”

I filled her in on my ten minutes of Googling. “You can find anything on the Internet.”

The tension between us lessened. I had a sudden flashback of my New York roommate and fellow Maximilian flunky, Orphie Cates. Whenever our sycophant boss, Luciano, would ramble on about Maximilian and his brilliance, Orphie would lean over and in her Low Country Carolina drawl, she’d whisper, “I wish that man would just cut to the chase, already.”

Precisely what I felt at this very moment. “Anna?”

“Yes?” She smiled tightly, her skin taut either from her husband’s Botox treatments or from her nerves at being busted as a thief. Maybe both.

“I have eighteen girls waiting on me to put them in their dresses. The pageant’s tonight.” My eyes darted to the notebook clutched in her hands. “I need that book.”

Her grip had softened just a touch, but now it tightened again, her knuckles going white. “I know, but…”

“But what, Anna? If there’s something wrong, you can tell me.”

She swallowed, trying to maintain what little composure she’d managed to gather up, but I could see her struggle, like little fissures cracking from the inside out. She lifted her wineglass to her lips and tilted it to drink. One lone drop of red liquid slid down the crystal.

“I just started flipping through this last night while I was waiting on you…” She trailed off, looking toward her empty wineglass for fortification.

“All Trudy’s and Fern’s notes about the Margaret dresses are in there. Without it, I don’t know which dress belongs to which girl.” I stretched my arm out, hoping she’d just hand it over.

Instead, she rose and reached for the wine bottle across the coffee table, refilling her glass. “I started reading—”

“Anna!” Wine sloshed over the top of the glass, spilling onto the pine table. I grabbed the bottle, setting it upright, then darted to the kitchen.

Even in her discombobulated state, she could keep up most of her appearances. Her kitchen was immaculate, though not my style. Roosters and more light pine, cowboy paraphernalia, and a big copper Texas star defined the decor. There was an unspoken rule in the Lone Star State: every house must be adorned with the Texas star. My old farmhouse had had one hanging on the porch just between the rocking chairs for as long as I could remember.

I grabbed the roll of paper towels from the counter and hightailed it back to the living room, quickly mopping up the spilled wine. Anna was bent over the table, her lips over the rim of the glass, slowly sipping the wine down.

“Thanks,” she said when she came up for air.

“No problem.”

Anna’s eyes had grown glassy and her shoulders hunched slightly. The alcohol daze settled over her like a woolen blanket.

“Can I get you some coffee, Anna?” Before she could answer, I had the wineglass in one hand, the bottle in the other, and was once again headed for the kitchen. A knot of unease settled in my gut as I dug around in the cupboards looking for coffee and a filter. Anna needed
to sober up real quick, so I kept up the search. Finally, I found what I needed and started a small pot of coffee brewing.

“So what was in the notebook that interested you,” I asked, coming back a few minutes later with a steaming mug of java.

Anna was slouched on the couch, a glazed look in her eyes. “My husband played golf with Macon Vance. Did you know that?”

I sat on the edge of the chair this time, my elbows on my thighs, chin propped on my fists. I just wanted the dang book. “No, I didn’t.”

“I didn’t want him to. Macon Vance had a reputation,” she said.

“So I’ve heard.”

“I was always afraid he’d say something he shouldn’t, or that maybe Buck would start having affairs on me if he heard how easy it was.” She leaned back, closing her eyes, her head lolling to one side.

“Being a philanderer’s not contagious,” I said, trying to lighten things up.

When she opened her eyes again, tears welled in her eyes. She shook them away, sitting up, taking a few sips of her coffee, and pulling herself together. “No, but men talk, you know? If he made it sound easy, why wouldn’t another man try it? And what if it got back to Duane?”

A rogue thought ricocheted through my mind. Was it possible that Anna had followed Macon Vance to the country club and killed him to keep her husband from being influenced by his cheating ways? As far as motives went, it seemed like a pretty flimsy one, but what
did
justify murder?

I fell back on what Meemaw had always taught me.
“Any man can be tempted, Anna. It’s what they do in the face of temptation that speaks to their character.”

She’d loosened her grip on the notebook and must have felt my stare because she sat up and held it out to me. “Guess you want it back.”

Does an armadillo wear armor? I took it before she changed her mind, and once it was safely in my hands, I asked, “Why’d you take it?”

She sat back against the firmly stuffed couch again and crossed her legs. With the back of her hand, she brushed a long strand of hair away from her face, following up by combing her bangs back down over her forehead. Stalling, getting a handle on her alcohol-blurred mind, or gathering up her gumption? Maybe all three.

“She’s meddlesome…”

“Trudy?” I asked, working to keep my voice steady. It was quite possible I was sitting in a room with a killer, and that didn’t make me feel very calm and collected.

“It’s just… I hate to spread rumors about someone who’s in ill health.”

Too late now. She’d already planted the seed. I looked at the notebook, the edges of the cover worn and frayed from use. What was in here that had set Anna off? What did Trudy know?

The tone in her voice had an edge to it that made my spine stiffen. Trudy was lying in a hospital bed, her face swollen and her mind muddied, after being drugged and injected with— My mind screeched to a halt. With Botox.

A chill seized me. What if the break-in here had been fake? And furthermore, what if Anna had been the one to stage it, all to cover her tracks as she attacked Trudy? But I came back to why?

I started to stand, itching to get the heck away from Anna and back to the club with the notebook, but she leaned forward and she patted the air so I’d sit back down.

Anna closed her eyes, and for a moment, I thought she’d fallen asleep. They popped open suddenly, and I jumped, startled. “She did it.”

I stared at her. “She did what?”

“Trudy Lafayette killed Macon Vance.”

Anna couldn’t explain why she thought Trudy had killed Macon Vance, so I waved her proclamation aside and told her I had to get back to the club to get ready for the pageant.

But once I was out of the Hughes’s house, I knew I had to take a few minutes to look at the notebook more closely. I pulled my truck forward until I was parked on the grassy shoulder in front of Will Flores’s house instead of the Hughes’s. My hands shook and blood pulsed in my ears. What in tarnation was going on with this town. In two seconds, I’d practically convinced myself that Anna had killed Macon Vance so her husband wouldn’t be influenced by the golfer’s promiscuity, and that she’d attacked Trudy to keep her quiet about… something.

Ridiculous, it turned out.

But it was more ridiculous to think that Trudy Lafayette could have done it. Stabbing a man with a pair of sewing shears had to require some strength, didn’t it? Trudy couldn’t have overpowered Vance. And would she have broken into the Hughes’s house, stolen a vial of Botox, drugged her sister so she’d be none the wiser, and
then injected herself enough to send her to the hospital? That seemed terribly risky to me.

“Assuming the two incidents are related,” I muttered, but I felt sure that they were.

As I opened the notebook to scour it for information, I felt the force of someone’s stare. I looked up to see Will, a length of rope in his hand, sidling along the cattle fence of his property, his gaze curious. I gave a little wave. “Hey,” I said through the open passenger window.

“Hey, yourself.” He looked around, as if he could read the environment to see why I was sitting in front of his property, finally arching an eyebrow at me when the answer didn’t come to him. “Wanna come inside? You look a little hot.”

My breath hitched and a wave of self-consciousness floated over me about how the curls of my hair were weighed down by the humidity. It was tough to weather well during July in Texas.

“Inside your house?”

One side of his mouth quirked up. “Unless you’d rather melt in that old truck.”

He didn’t wait for me to agree. He moved around the hood of the truck, grabbed the handle of the driver’s door, and yanked. It stuck for the briefest moment, then jerked open. “Come on. I don’t bite.”

“Of course you don’t,” I said with a self-conscious laugh. I knew Josie and Mama were handling things at the club and by now the girls had gone home and wouldn’t be back until four o’clock for a last minute rehearsal. I had a little time, but I sure hadn’t planned on spending any of that time at Will Flores’s house. “I have a few minutes. Very few,” I added, telling him I needed to get back to the club.

Grabbing my Michael Kors bag and Trudy’s moleskin notebook, I hopped out of the cab. I schooled my expression, pretty sure I looked calm and collected, but on the inside, my nerve endings were firing double time. I needed to see what had caught Anna’s attention in the notebook.

I walked with him down his asphalt driveway, along the cement sidewalk leading to the front porch, and into his ranch house. I stopped short just inside the door. The entry opened up into a big family room. The largest table I’d ever seen sat on the right side of the room, covered in tiny houses and buildings.

I moved toward it as if an invisible rope, just like the real one in Will’s hand, had lassoed me and was pulling me forward. “What is this?” It looked like Bliss’s town square, and beyond, all done in miniature.