Dior or Die (Joanna Hayworth Vintage Clothing Mysteries Book 2) (5 page)

"Everything is so simple here—stark, really—but so beautiful."
 

"Oh, even after she found religion, Vivienne liked her luxury. She had to have flowers, and she insisted on sterling flatware. Said it was softer in the mouth." As she spoke, she opened and closed drawers, lifting stacks of pristine white blouses and loose pants. "Every evening before dinner she went to the den and put on classical music. Debussy, lately. She had a special set of Baccarat cocktail glasses, and she'd make herself a Bee's Knees."

Heaven, Joanna thought, wishing she’d known Vivienne in life. "A Bee's Knees?"

"Some kind of gin cocktail she'd first had at a bar in Paris when she met Dad." Joanna noticed Vivienne's husband earned "Dad" while her mother-in-law was still "Vivienne." Helena turned from the closet. "Anyway, as you can see, I guess there's not much here for you. Just her everyday clothes. I’m sorry. I should have looked before I had you come over." She stopped. "You know, though, Vivienne did give a few dresses to the convent for a fundraiser. I think they were having some kind of sale. I don't know if the sale is over or what, but you could check with them. Maybe they'd lend them to you."

As she passed through the bedroom, her eyes were again drawn to the backyard's vivid shrubbery. Helena had turned out to be a lot nicer than she'd anticipated. She'd been through so much lately, too, with Vivienne's murder.
 

"I know the words must sound empty right now, but I'm so, so sorry for everything you've been through. I imagine you'll be glad when the police investigation is over and you can get back to normal."

"Normal? What's normal? I don't even know anymore."

After spending the morning at Helena's, Joanna's home felt like a shack. Her neighborhood was slowly gentrifying—the sewage treatment worker next door had retired to the coast to be replaced with a graphic designer who held backyard parties where guests cooed at his Taj Mahal of a chicken coop stocked with Araucanas. But the houses, including Joanna's, were mostly small, postwar affairs, as simple as if they were drawn by children.
 

"Hello, Aunt Vanderburgh," Joanna said to an amateur pastel of a stranger with thin, pursed lips and horned-rimmed glasses. The portrait bore a crease across its middle from where it had almost been destroyed when her house was broken into the year before. Now the portrait was back on duty as a sounding board. "It turns out that not all rich people are tasteless. I was just at a fabulous house." She put her hands on her hips and looked at Auntie V’s disapproving stare. "I’m afraid you’d be tossed in the dustbin over there."

The midday sun radiated through the Schiaparelli-pink rhododendron outside to fill the living room with rose-inflected light. Pepper, Joanna's cat, lay partly under the coffee table in a sunbeam's path. His black fur was warm, and his tail curled up when she reached down to pet him. She set her purse on the chaise longue by the front window and leaned against the window frame.
 

Her life had taken such a dramatic turn during the past nine months. Just last summer she was moving in on her fourth year of owning Tallulah's Closet and had found a quiet, comforting routine. Work, scout for more stock, home, hot bath, bed. Then Marnie—someone she regularly bought clothes from—turned up dead in the store. Thinking of Marnie, she took a deep breath. What she wouldn’t give to be able to share a Martini with her at the store after hours again some evening. Joanna had met Paul at about the same time. And Eve's attempts to open a rival vintage clothing store down the block had sparked Joanna to upgrade Tallulah's Closet with higher-end dresses and clientele. The peacefulness of Helena's sun-filled den felt far away. Joanna sighed and turned back toward the living room.

"Pepper, have you been good today?" She opened the mail slot that fed into the dining room and flipped through the envelopes. Mostly bills, including one from Puddletown Plumbing and an even larger bill from the designer who did her website and never seemed to get it right. Joanna's resolve to take Tallulah's Closet to the next level was getting expensive, but selling just one of Vivienne's items would pay this bill at least. If she ever saw those dresses again. And then there was the NAP auction. Really, all she needed were five more gowns. She tossed the mail on the table.
 

Maybe it was time to go visit some nuns.

***

The Sisters of Saint Mary Salome the Myrrh Bearer convent was a two-story colonial house not far from the Saint Philip Neri Catholic church and a short walk from Tallulah's Closet. Joanna wasn't sure of her reception as a drop-in. What were the ways of nuns, anyway? She figured an early evening visit might be best—the sisters probably weren't night owls.
 

It wasn't hard to convince Apple to come along. Although Apple wasn't much a fan of the pope, she saw the convent as a sister institution to a coven and was just as curious as Joanna to check out its interior. Joanna shut off the store's lights and flipped the sign to "closed." They crossed Division and entered shaded streets of bungalows.

The convent's grounds spread across the end of a short city block. Roses beginning to open in garish coral and lipstick red lined the parking strip. A tidy lawn sloped up the hill to the house, interrupted by a rusted arch announcing Sisters of Mary Salome the Myrrh Bearer. A curtain rustled on the second floor as a figure pushed it aside, then let it drop.

Joanna and Apple mounted the path through the lawn, past a cement Madonna. "I hope we're not catching them at dinner." She pictured an antiseptic kitchen with buzzing fluorescent lights and institutional food. Or maybe the nuns were reading the Bible and knitting caps for orphans.

Apple appeared not to hear her. "Haint blue."
 

"What?"

"The shutters and door are haint blue. It's a color people in the south use to keep bad spirits out."

The convent's trim was a shade of flat sky blue Joanna associated with 1960s park-at-your-door motels. A cut-out of a cross pierced each shutter, and paint peeled off in spots. "Good one, Apple. Maybe they do voodoo, too. Come on." She rapped the brass door knocker.
 

The door opened quickly, as if someone had been waiting, hand on the knob, for their arrival. A middle-aged woman in a powder blue habit with navy trim smiled. "May I help you?"

"My name is Joanna Hayworth, and I was hoping I could talk to you about some old dresses Vivienne North might have given you."

"Vivienne. One of our favorite donnés." The nun smiled again. Her face fell just as quickly. "So sad about her death. Come in and I'll fetch Sister Mary Frances. I'm Sister Mary Carmen. Have a seat." She gestured from the entry hall to a living room to the right. "Just let me move this bag from the couch."

Joanna raised an eyebrow at the shopping bag brimming with pink-wrapped condoms.
 

"We're making safer sex kits for the high school's youth group. Of course, we don't condone sexual relations outside of marriage. But you know what they say about an ounce of prevention." Mary Carmen was already turning toward the hall as she spoke.

Joanna and Apple traded glances as they settled on a low couch in the living room with a view down the lawn, past the Madonna, to the street. Joanna pulled her sweater closer to ward off the chill. The scent of dank carpet competed with an armload of lilacs in a chipped vase on the mantel. Above it loomed a lurid print of Jesus with a bored stare despite his open chest cavity and thorn-wrapped heart. She was busy mentally ripping out the false ceiling and replacing the carpets when Mary Carmen returned, accompanied by a steel-haired woman with a sharp nose.

"Joanna and, I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name—"

"Apple, pleased to meet you." She rose and extended a hand.

"And Apple. This is Mary Frances. She's our money manager and the one handling Vivienne's donation. Sister Mary Frances, Joanna is interested in talking about Vivienne's dresses."

The Sisters Mary took the love seat across the couch. Meanwhile, another, heftier nun settled into an armchair behind them. She put on reading glasses and opened a magazine. It wasn’t
Vogue
, was it?

"I'm sorry about the temperature in here. Heating oil costs money, and, well it's June anyway. How can we help you?" Mary Frances folded her hands in her lap.

"I'm helping with the Northwest AIDS Project's gala. NAP—we call it NAP—is holding its annual fundraiser, a dinner and art auction. We're dressing some of the volunteers in evening dresses from the 1950s. I have a vintage clothing store, but my stock of evening dresses is thin right now, so I visited Vivienne's daughter-in-law—"

"Helena," the younger nun said.

"Yes, and she mentioned that her mother-in-law had given you some of her gowns. I was hoping I might borrow them for an evening. Of course, I'd have everything cleaned before I returned them." The nuns' expressions were friendly but blank. Then Joanna had another idea. "If you'd like, I could sell the dresses in my store for you. That is, if you're not going to keep them."

The nun reading behind them perked up and lowered her magazine.

"That's a very generous offer, Joanna. But I'm afraid we aren't able to lend the dresses to anyone. We're putting them on the, um—"

"Etsy. We have an online store," the magazine-reading nun finished.

"You see," Mary Frances glanced at the younger nun, then blurted, "We've been having some financial troubles."

Joanna wasn't surprised. "I'm sorry."

"We own the convent outright, but the house needs several thousand dollars in repairs, including a new roof. The county is threatening to condemn us. Vivienne, bless her soul" —she made the sign of the cross— "knew we were having trouble and put her things to auction. The proceeds all go to us."

"You should be fine, then. The auction must have raised quite a bit of money. In fact, I bought Vivienne's wardrobe."

"Then you know the police are holding everything in custody until the question of her death is cleared up. We were due to receive a generous check from the auction house, but everything is up in the air now." She clasped her hands in her lap. "So we're no better off than we were."

Suing a convent seemed a little harsh to Joanna, but she wouldn't put it past some people. "Surely the church will help you?"
 

Mary Frances looked at Mary Carmen, then at Joanna and Apple. "We, well, we haven't had a completely cooperative relationship with the Church. Some of our methods are, uh, unconventional, dear. They said they'd pay the bill if we moved, and—"

"—Then they'd raze the convent and divide the land into lots," Mary Carmen finished.

"And what would happen to you, to the sisters?" Apple asked.

"I'm afraid we'd have to split up. The convent would dissolve."

The women sat in silence for a moment as a clock ticked in the background.

"So you understand why Vivienne—God rest her soul—Vivienne's estate is so important to us."

Joanna glanced through the living room. The place did need a lot of work, and that was just the part she saw. It hardly seemed fair, though, that a group of harmless nuns could be kicked out of their home. And no dice on Vivienne's clothes. Where was she going to find five more dresses?
 

The nun in the armchair heaved her body forward, reached under her chair, and withdrew a silver laptop. Without speaking, she settled between Apple and Joanna on the couch. Apple grabbed an armrest as the sofa's springs caved. The nun opened the computer on the coffee table in front of them.
 

"Pride goeth before a fall, Sister Mary Alberta."

"Yes, Sister Mary Frances. But these ladies are vintage clothing professionals. Maybe they'll have some ideas to help us."
 

Mary Carmen, Mary Frances, Mary Louise, and now Mary Alberta. "Are you all named Mary?" Joanna asked.

Mary Frances raised her eyebrows. "Of course."

The laptop whirred to life. Mary Alberta's thick fingers typed a few keys, and a pink tableau filled the screen. "Sisters Vintage" it said in gothic letters next to an image of a church. "It's not live yet, but here's what I have so far."

"Nice," Apple said. "Wait—is that part of Saint Philip Neri?"

"We clean the rectory for the priests. We were sure they wouldn't mind if we took a few photos while they were at mass."

Mary Alberta pressed "enter" and the screen broke into squares. Hovering the mouse over one square filled the screen with a young blonde wearing a slender navy cocktail dress and leaning against a stone fireplace with a crucifix mounted over it.

"Is that a Givenchy?" Joanna asked.

"Dan Millstein copy from Boston," Mary Alberta answered promptly. She moved the mouse, and a handful of other items, all worn by the blonde in different poses in the rectory, popped forward. "What do you think?"

"Impressive." The clothes weren't as valuable as those Vivienne put up for auction, but they would thrill any vintage clothing collector. And they’d be perfect for the NAP auction. Joanna looked at Mary Alberta with fresh respect. She only wished her own website were as nice, especially for all the money she'd already laid out for it. Her heart dropped as she thought of the bill at home. "I wouldn't change much. It might be useful to have photos of the labels for collectors, but, really, the site looks great and things seem priced fairly."

"Sister Mary Alberta did all the design herself, including the styling," Mary Carmen said. "And the model is Sister Mary Louise's niece."

"We only have a dozen items for sale, but we wanted to do it up right, you know? Attract a higher level of clientele."

Mary Frances rose. "I'm sorry we can't help you. I wish you the best of luck with the fundraiser."

A sharp rap on the ceiling drew their attention. The Sisters Mary exchanged glances. The rapping started again. "Just a moment, Mother," Mary Frances said in a singsong voice, looking toward the second floor.

"The Exalted Mother. She's bedridden, unfortunately," Mary Carmen said. "Can’t come down."