A Killing Notion: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery (11 page)

As I arrived back at Buttons & Bows, my mind was still reeling from my discovery. It was not a normal scenario by any stretch. What I knew for certain was that the suspect pool had now quadrupled. If any of the people in either of the families knew the truth, one of them could have reacted badly and sought their revenge. Suddenly Barbara Ann Blake, Reba Montgomery, and both Shane and Teagen’s motives had strengthened.

I’d phoned Will after I left Mama and Hoss and told him I had some news. He said he’d meet me at Buttons & Bows. True to his word, he’d hightailed it over to my house and was there to greet me when I pulled into the long driveway, which ran along the left side of the little yellow farmhouse. I parked under the row of possum-wood trees, jumped out of the truck, and practically fell into his arms. “You’re never going to believe this,” I said to him.

“Try me.”

We headed through the gate, walking over the
flagstone path. I started at the beginning, telling him about my visit with Mrs. Blake, but as the porch came into view, so did Thelma Louise. The feisty goat stood at the base of the porch steps and raised her nose, her fathomless yellow eyes staring at us nonchalantly. Something hung from her mouth. My heart lurched as I realized what it was.

A mum!

“Oh no!” I took off in a run, clapping and calling her name. “Stop that, Thelma Louise! Shoo! Shoo!
NO!
”

She looked at me like she didn’t have a care in the world. Her jaw worked as she continued gnawing at the mum. The nearly completed base with loops of red ribbon to form the flower, and strands of red, black, and white ribbons creating the drape were mashed. I looked more closely, recognizing some of the trinkets: a rhinestone B for Bliss, a miniature vintage car, an enormous cowbell that clinked every time Thelma Louise moved her mouth, a flower clipped onto a wide piece of ribbon, and curly silver trim that added shimmery volume to the strands of the mum. It was Danica’s. Another minute or two in the goat’s mouth and all her hard work would be ruined. “How did you get that?” I demanded, glaring at Thelma Louise.

She didn’t answer, of course, just continued staring at me with her bulbous eyes.

“Don’t think you’re gonna get out of this,” I said, wagging my finger at her. I advanced, holding out my hand to take back the mum.

She backed up, never looking away.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the open window to the dining room. “Ah, so that’s how you did it,” I said. The mums the girls had been working on had been left
on the table. “You stuck your head in there and grabbed one, didn’t you?” Under my breath, I said, “Meemaw, why didn’t you stop her?”

Of course there was no answer. Loretta Mae, wherever she was, was probably having one good belly laugh right about now. She never had been one for the whole Texas mum tradition, so to see one of Nana’s goats chowing down on the ribbon extravaganza probably filled her with all kinds of joy.

But it didn’t fill me with any because now I’d have to remake the mum. As it was, half the flower portion was in the goat’s mouth. It was a crushed, mushy mess, and I’d never send Danica out with a mum in that state. If I was lucky, I’d be able to salvage the lower half, which was the most unique part. A new base wouldn’t take me too long to put together.

But Thelma Louise wasn’t going to give up the mum easily. She stared me down, almost taunting me. Behind me, I’d heard Will’s truck door slam and the sound of his boots crunching across the path as he came back. “Rope,” he said from behind me.

I nodded, keeping my attention squarely on Thelma Louise. If the goat sensed any weakness on my part, she’d take off and I’d never get the mum back. That would never do. At this point, it was personal.
I
was in charge, not the Nubian, and she was not going to abscond with Danica’s homecoming mum.

I inched forward, my body cocked forward at the waist. Thelma Louise stood her ground. It felt like it took forever, but we were finally just a foot apart. The trailing ribbons blew in the breeze. I almost grabbed for them, but stopped myself. The staples holding the mum
together would give, the ribbons would just yank right off and Thelma Louise would escape with her plunder.

No, I needed to get ahold of the flower base.

Thelma Louise was
not
going to win this battle.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Will skirt around the perimeter of the yard, ready to intercept Thelma Louise if she bolted and leapt down the side steps of the porch. I felt like we were Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in a dusty Old West town, arms bent at the ready before a shoot-out. I cocked my arms, slid my feet forward just a tad more, sucked in a deep breath, and . . .

. . . lunged.

My arm shot out and I grabbed hold of the part of the mum base Thelma Louise didn’t have in her mouth. I pulled, but she put her weight into it and yanked back, dragging me with her. She shook her head, trying to knock my hand away. She was a wiry thing, and a lot stronger than she looked.

But I was wiry, too, in spirit, if not in physique. I got my other hand around the streaming ribbons, winding the bunch around my hand, gingerly working my way closer, careful not to yank the ribbons right off the base. A minute later, Thelma Louise and I were nose to nose. She flipped her head back, knocking my glasses askew on my face. I couldn’t fix them, though. I wouldn’t release the mum. No way was the goat winning this battle.

“Darlin’,” Will said from behind Thelma Louise. “You can let go. I’m right here.”

I peered up at him. Without my glasses on, and being tugged by Thelma Louise’s ratcheting head, he was a dark blur more than anything else. “She’s not going to win,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Neither are you.” I couldn’t see the smirk, but I could hear it, and it made me dig my heels in and pull harder. “Be careful,” he said, and suddenly he was moving toward me. “If Thelma Louise lets go, you’re gonna go fl—”

Before he could finish the sentence, the diabolical goat
did
let go. The release of tension was sudden and immediate and I was hurled backward, literally flying through the air just like Will had been in the middle of warning me. But he’d already been on the move, anticipating Thelma Louise’s next play. He managed to break my fall before I crashed, back flat, against the porch.

My glasses were knocked clean off my face, I was half sprawled on top of Will, but I clutched the slobbery mum to my chest, clearly the victor in the battle against the grand dam of Nana’s herd.

“Take that,” I said to her as Will dislodged himself from under me. In seconds flat, he had Thelma Louise contained.

I retrieved my glasses and peered at her, now tethered with the rope Will had brought from his truck. “Do you think she planned all along to let go, or do you think she heard you say it?”

Will arched an eyebrow at me, looking for all the world like he thought I’d gone crazy, but Thelma Louise bared her teeth, either side of her mouth tilting up. That was a guileful goat smile if I’d ever seen one. “Never mind,” I said. I had my answer. I V’d my index and middle fingers, directing them at my eyes, then flipped my hand to angle my pointer finger at her. “I’m watching you,” I said to her.

“You about done, Mr. Byrnes?” Will said, stifling a laugh at my impersonation of Robert DeNiro in
Meet the Parents
.

“For now.” I headed toward the front door, throwing one more warning glance over my shoulder at the goat. Will took her back to my grandmother’s property, which butted up against mine. Instead of going inside, I sat in one of the rockers on the front porch. The chair started its back-and-forth rocking motion without the help of my feet pushing off. The other chair rocked, too.

Meemaw.

I bit back the chastisement hovering on the tip of my tongue.
Now
she decided to make an appearance? She couldn’t have, say, put a stop to Thelma Louise taking the mum in the first place, or maybe lent a little muscle against the goat when I’d been trying to get it back?

In the distance, I could hear a low chuckle. “Go ahead and have your laugh, Meemaw,” I said, the words snatched away by the breeze.

Will got back and sat, not noticing that his chair had been moving. “She behind bars?” I asked, knowing that there were no pens or gates that could contain Thelma Louise.

“She’s back at Sundance Kids,” he said.

We rocked in silence for a minute. After I let go of my aggravation with Thelma Louise, I went back to the murder and to what I’d been about to tell him before the mum debacle.

I told him about recognizing Eddy Blake as Chris Montgomery in the picture Sally had shown me, and the phone numbers programmed into Eddy Blake’s cell phone. “He had two families and they practically lived right under each other’s noses,” I said, wrapping up my theory. “It’s just . . . just . . . worse than . . . than I don’t even know what. Worse than a pickled watermelon.”

“That’s pretty bad,” he said, grimacing. He planted his boots on the porch and stopping the rocking motion of his chair. “Maybe they just resemble each other.”

“I’ve tried to convince myself of that, but no. They don’t
resemble
each other. They
are
each other,” I said. “And there’s more. Both wives said their husband stayed overnight at the other shop. Plus neither one liked to be photographed. He was pretty young, right? He told both Reba and Barbara Ann that he didn’t want his photo on display at his own funeral. Why would he say that unless he was protecting his secret? So,” I finished, “that’s why I think Chris Montgomery and Eddy Blake were never in the photos with their families. Bliss and Granbury are both small towns. He couldn’t take a chance that someone would recognize him from the wrong photo.”

“He was taking a hell of a chance,” Will said.

I couldn’t agree more. Another thought struck me. I stopped the chair from rocking and my back straightened. “That’s why they always sat at the picnic table!”

Will raised a curious eyebrow. “Who’re they, and what picnic table?”

“Barbara Ann Blake said that whenever she went to Bubba’s, she and Eddy wouldn’t ever go inside, they’d go sit at the picnic table. Strange, right?”

“Is it?”

I nodded. “It is.” I pointed at him for emphasis. “Unless you don’t want the people in the shop to know anything about your personal life.”

I shared with him the final bit of discovery. “Otis Levon, aka Bubba, has known Eddy from the beginning. He moved to the Bliss shop to help run things there, so he worked with Chris Montgomery every day. Which means—”

“He knew.” Will stared past the front yard at Mockingbird Lane. “So what are you thinking? Otis tampered with Chris’s car hoping he’d crash? But why? It’s hardly a foolproof murder plan, especially for someone who really knows cars.”

That was the one major flaw in the theory. I was sure there were others, I just didn’t know what they were yet. “Maybe he got tired of keeping his boss’s secret and tried to extort him. Them.
Him
.”

“But if he was supporting two families, there wouldn’t have been a lot of extra money to go around.”

There was another flaw. “Right,” I said, feeling my brows pull together.

“I can’t think of another reason, though, so let’s just go with that theory,” he said. “If Otis Levon killed his boss, is he actively trying to frame Shane?”

Good question. Had he planted the flask of vodka, the printout of the steering system, and the shirt in Shane’s locker? If he had, there ought to be video of him in the building. I made a mental note to ask Hoss about this, in case he didn’t think of it himself.

I needed time to think, which meant I needed to go inside and be surrounded by my sewing and design. Nothing helped me process and untangle my thoughts better than touching fabric, sketching, and simply immersing myself in my work.

“I have some homecoming mums to finish,” I said, keeping quiet what we both knew: that there wouldn’t be a homecoming for Shane or Gracie if I couldn’t prove Shane’s innocence.

He caught the door with his hand, squeezed my arm,
and leaned down to give me a kiss. “Be careful,” he said, and I knew he wasn’t talking about the mum-making.

I didn’t know if my charm extended to nonclothing items I created, but it was worth a try. Especially if it would help Gracie, my cousin and the girl I’d come to love as a daughter.

After Will drove off, I took a deep breath and walked into Buttons & Bows. There was no cinnamon. No scent of apples. No clanking in the kitchen. Meemaw had been outside moving the rocking chairs, but I hadn’t sensed hide nor hair of her since Will had come back from returning Thelma Louise to Sundance Kids.

Of course I knew she was around. She couldn’t go anywhere. As a ghost, she was trapped, which I knew put a giant hitch in her giddyup.

“Meemaw,” I called, heading into the kitchen. No response. I doubled back and peeked my head into the workroom. Leslie’s sapphire and confetti-colored dress hung from the dress form. My sketchbook lay open. But, I thought, I hadn’t left it open. In fact, I hadn’t even left it in my atelier.

There was only one explanation, and her name was Loretta Mae. She wanted to tell me something.

I hurried to the cutting table and grabbed the book.
My sketches were there, from a classic ball gown to a sleek tube dress, and several in between that I’d been toying with.

They’d each been added to. Developed. And colored with watercolor crayons.

Danica’s dress had continued to be a mystery to me, but looking at the fleshed out drawings, I was seeing her in a new light. I hadn’t been able to get a handle on her and what homecoming design would work, but now one clearly stood out as the right design—mainly because it was circled with a red loop and the name Danica was scrawled in my great-grandmother’s shaky cursive.

But even without those clues, it was obvious that the girl would look great in it.

The bubble dress.

Jessica Alba and Kate Beckinsale had both rocked bubble dresses. This modern take on a pouf skirt was more subtle, the tapered hemline billowing gracefully instead of ending in a hard edge. It was perfect. “You’re right, Meemaw,” I said. “This is it.”

I held my breath, waiting and wondering if the sewing machine would start up or if the pipes would moan.

There was nothing but silence. Meemaw, it seemed, had decided to interact with me on a deeper level, first with her more opaque visage, then in the kitchen, and now with offering insight to my designs. I liked this more concrete way of communicating, but I had to admit that I missed the creaks and groans and rustling curtains.

I hurried upstairs to the attic and surveyed the pieces of fabric I had stored there. I zeroed in on the ones with enough yardage and style to make the dress. If I couldn’t
find what I was looking for, I’d have to take a trip to Fort Worth, something I preferred not to do at this point. I was out of time.

There were several lengths of cotton, one of which was an electric pink and black cheetah print, but after spreading them out and feeling the weight, I discarded them as options. They wouldn’t hold the ballooning element, just like silk wouldn’t. No, I needed something that could hold its shape.

I scanned the fabrics again, my attention landing on a tangerine microfiber. It had the right weight and wouldn’t turn limp at the hemline. And it was wrinkle-free, a bonus. Fashion designer Robert Cavalli said, “Fashion should be fun and put the woman in the spotlight with a little bit of danger.” That fit what I was trying to do for Danica—the bold and fun color was perfect for her.

Any dress I made for Danica wasn’t going to put the girl in danger, but the tangerine color would certainly draw attention. If it boosted her confidence in the process, it was worth every bit of time, energy, and ounce of creativity I could muster.

“What do you wish for?” I mused aloud, thinking of the possibilities. Danica had no family. She was at the mercy of fairy godmothers like Zinnia James and me to help her get to homecoming. I imagined her greatest desire was to have her family back, and that was one thing my charm couldn’t make happen. Her parents couldn’t come back from the dead, but if family was her wish, maybe she’d develop one of her choosing. The circle of my family had grown to include Will and Gracie Flores,
Josie Kincaid, Orphie Cates, and Madelyn Brighton. By default, it also included Hoss and Gavin McClaine.

Of course, Danica didn’t wallow in sorrow, and she seemed pretty practical from what I’d seen. Maybe finding love or going to college would be her biggest dream. If my design could help her with either of those things, I’d be happy.

As I headed back to the workroom, my thoughts drifted to Leslie. She was much more outwardly confident than Danica, but I got the feeling it was all a show. Deep down, she was injured and being alone got to her. She compensated by trying to woo friends, racing around in a sporty car inherited from her parents’ estate while Danica struggled with a fixer-upper that kept breaking down on her.

I couldn’t help feeling that Mrs. James’s foundation to help girls in need had brought Leslie and Danica together. They were both low mileage, as Meemaw would have said. Young and with a lot of time ahead of them to figure out how things worked and who they were. It was true that they had time, but I couldn’t help but hope that maybe Leslie, with her need for friends, and Danica, with her reservations about opening up to anyone, would find a happy balance with each other.

Josie walked in, her baby girl, Molly, in her arms, just as I finished stripping an old design from a dress form in my atelier. The tangerine microfiber lay in a heap on the cutting table, ready to be manipulated into the shape of a homecoming dress.

Right after I’d moved back to Bliss, I’d reconnected with Josie. She’d been Josie Sandoval then, an old friend
from elementary school, and had been on the verge of marrying Nate Kincaid. Now she and Nate had a baby girl, a happy marriage, and I had a goddaughter. I took the baby from her and breathed her in. I wouldn’t say my maternal clock was ticking, but it wasn’t nonexistent in a black hole, either.

Josie dragged a chair from the dining room over to just inside the French doors and collapsed into it. She hadn’t quite gotten back to her prepregnancy self, but she was trying, walking every day with the baby in her stroller, putting on a dash of mascara even when she didn’t feel like it, catching naps when the baby slept to keep up her energy.

But I knew that she missed working at Seed-n-Bead, the shop she owned on the square. Even with naps, an infant meant short spurts of sleep and a lot of sleepless nights. The dark circles ringing her eyes were proof she wasn’t getting enough rest.

Bless her heart, she didn’t try to pretend she was. “I’m deprived of sleep and adult conversation,” she announced, and for a second I wondered if she’d read my mind.

Molly heard her voice and turned toward her. She fussed, and after a moment, I handed her back to her mama. Josie tugged up her shirt, offering the baby nourishment. Molly settled down, her little legs moving, her hand gripping the collar of Josie’s blouse, the soft suckling sound growing rhythmic as her body started to relax. “I need some gossip. I need to hear what’s going on in the outside world.”

I picked up the first length of microfiber as I launched into all the details about the mystery of Chris
Montgomery’s death, my theory about who Eddy Blake really was, the homecoming mums, and the dresses I was making for Danica and Leslie.

“So, you’re not really up to much of anything,” she said, one side of her mouth quirking up in a small grin.

“Nope, nothing exciting,” I said with a laugh. I stood in front of a naked dress form, ready to begin the draping process. There were times when I mapped out a pattern, measuring and planning and drawing the pieces of a garment on paper to create a blueprint for a design. But there were also moments, like now, when draping was more appropriate. I could picture the bubble dress I was designing for Danica in my head, a hybrid of what I’d started in my sketchbook and what Meemaw had completed. I had details I still wanted to work out, and right now I needed to see the fabric on a figure to watch it come together.

What I’d learned over the years in my schooling, punctuated by Loretta Mae’s lessons, was that simply knowing the principles of patternmaking and design wasn’t enough. To really create a design that can be put together in the desired fabric, that is, to translate a garment from conception to execution, took a lot more than patternmaking skill.

“So he’s really the same person, Chris and Eddy?” Josie asked.

“I’m ninety-nine percent positive,” I said, testing the weight of the fabric in my hands. “Now it makes perfect sense for Eddy Blake’s phone to have Teagen and Shane’s phone numbers on it. Not to mention that the home number rang the Montgomery house, not the Blake house.”

“How did he keep it all straight? Did he ever call his children by the wrong names? Or worse, one of the wives?” She gasped. “Can you imagine!”

I hadn’t thought of that, and it wasn’t an image I wanted in my mind.

Josie bit her inner cheek, her lips working. It was her thinking expression. A question was coming. “So do you think either of the wives knew?”

I’d been puzzling over that very question and so far, I had no idea. “That’s something I plan to find out,” I said.

“What if one of them is the killer?” she asked, biting her lower lip. “Harlow, you’ll call Hoss or Gavin if you suspect anything, won’t you?” We fell silent as I manipulated the fabric, watching it take shape in my hands. As I worked, my decision to use the microfiber was validated. The cotton wouldn’t have worked. If I’d doubted it before, I was one hundred percent certain of it now. It would be like a sculptor trying to round the corners of a block of wood instead of using clay, or a painter trying to create a light, ethereal image using heavy oil paint instead of watercolor.

I followed a straightforward process as I draped, beginning with the right length and width of fabric, allowing extra for fullness, flow, and seams. Anchoring the fabric to the core points of the form came next. I pinned the microfiber to the center back, front, waistline, and hips. Then I worked around the dress form, cutting the cloth at the control seams as the elements developed.

“That’s for one of Mrs. James’s girls?” Josie asked
after a few minutes. She held Molly against her, gently patting her back until the baby burped.

“I’ve been struggling with the design,” I said, nodding, “but it’s finally coming together.”

“Homecoming,” she said, the one word sounding a little melancholy.

“What gave it away?” I joked, looking at the mums still hanging from the stair banister.

“I never went to homecoming,” she said.

“Me neither.” I was more a behind-the-scenes kind of girl. I’d made dresses for my friends, sending them off with their dates and their mums while I moved on to my next design. Nothing had changed as I’d gotten older. I still preferred to be the one making the clothing, not strutting down the catwalk wearing the garments.

As I worked, the design became clearer in my head, the lines flowed, the proportion and balance and detail came together bit by bit. The color and feel of the fabric inspired me. If I closed my eyes, I could see Danica’s face, smiling, the dress accentuating her eyes, the curve of her hips, and softness of her form. I let my fingertips manipulate the fabric until I had the look I wanted—the perfect balloon dress for Danica Edwards.

I stood back to survey it once more before I trued up the pattern I’d drawn out as I draped, perfecting the fit based on Danica’s proportions and measurements, and duplicating the first side.

“It looks good,” Josie said. “Really good.”

That melancholy in her voice was still there. Even after nearly fifteen years, she still regretted not attending
the dance. The realization reinforced my decision to make the dresses for Danica and Leslie. They wouldn’t have Josie’s regret.

My thoughts strayed to Gracie. With Shane still under the veil of suspicion, she might be the one with that regret.