Pleating for Mercy

by Melissa Bourbon

  “Miss Sandoval,” McClaine said, gesturing to the door.

  Josie held up one trembling finger as she frantically whispered something into her phone. A moment later she was being ushered out the door, followed by the sheriff. I brought up the rear. I’d barely made it out when the door slammed behind me. All by itself. I threw the house a backward glance, puzzled, but the mysterious happenings were just one more thing I’d have to think about later.

  Chapter 11

  The Sheriff’s Department still looked like a church with its faded brick siding and peaked roofline. The building had been around since the late 1800s. A fresh coat of paint, some stain, and a few nails couldn’t shake the worship out of the old building.

  We walked into the vestibule. To the left was the old sanctuary, which still looked like a . . . sanctuary. Even the pews were still there, though they were pushed up against one wall. The whole place retained a solemn air and I got the sense that the town officials didn’t know what to do with it or how to make it feel like government offices. I wondered if they had much leeway. It seemed likely that the building was part of the historic registry.

  Josie and I stayed a step behind Sheriff McClaine. Even his walk was lazy, his bowed legs making him look like he belonged on a horse rather than in a police car. Josie clutched my arm, slowing me down. “What do you think he wants to ask me?” she said in a feathery voice that still seemed too loud for the former church.

  I couldn’t even speculate. Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead and The Murder at the Vicarage had not prepared me for a real murder. “Routine questioning?” I said, hoping I was right and that McClaine just wanted to fill in whatever gaps his deputy might have left from the night before.

  “He’s not going to arrest me, is he?”

  “I’m sure he’s not,” I said, praying that I was right.

  “So I’ll just answer his questions and he’ll let me go. Not cooperating would be bad, right?”

  She seemed to need reassurance. I offered what little I could. I nodded.

  It seemed enough to bolster her. As she shuffled to catch up to the sheriff, I glanced over my shoulder. Still no sign of Nate screeching to a halt just outside the door, ready to barrel in, Josie’s knight in shining armor.

  It was quieter outside than a field of cotton.

  We walked up the ramp across from the sanctuary, turned right, and made our way down a hallway that used to lead to the church classrooms but now seemed to house all the actual city offices. Brown placards engraved in gold identified the occupants of each space. We passed the mayor’s office, the council members’ offices—one for each of them—animal control, business services, public works, personnel, and finally, at the end of the hallway, law enforcement.

  There was a separate entrance with a counter and a clerk who probably dealt with traffic violations and such. Poor Josie. By the look on her face, the scenic route through the building had done a number on her.

  We stopped in front of McClaine’s office. He took the toothpick from his mouth and used it to point to a hollow aluminum-framed chair. “You can have a seat there,” he said to me.

  Humph. I’d naively thought I would be able to stay by Josie’s side when he questioned her, for moral support as much as to stay in the loop. The murder happened on my property, after all. “Tell Nate where I am when . . . when—” She broke off, her voice trembling. “If he comes,” she finished.

  I squeezed her arm. “He’ll come,” I said to reassure her. Then they disappeared into the office and I sank down onto the uncomfortable chair, wishing I had been blessed with the ability to hear through walls. That was a Cassidy gift that would come in handy right about now.

  No matter how close I pressed my ear to the wall, I couldn’t hear a thing.

  “Ms. Cassidy?”

  I jumped, knocking my cadet hat askew. Madelyn Brighton stood in front of me. I noticed she was shorter than she’d seemed the night before. Up close, her skin was the color of sable, the black of her short hair several shades darker. It didn’t look as perfectly coiffed, more like she’d poked her finger in an electrical outlet, sending stray strands on end. It reminded me a little of Alfalfa from The Little Rascals, only instead of one wild hair, she had them all over. Oddly, it worked for her.

  “I’m Madelyn Brighton. I work for the department.”

  “The photographer, right,” I said. “My mother said you’re working on a town brochure?” I was still trying to connect the dots between a Madelyn Brighton, crime photographer and Madelyn Brighton—

  “Freelance,” she said, answering my unasked question. “I contract out with the city, do weddings and graduations.” Her British accent landed somewhere between Eliza Doolittle and Dame Judi Dench. “You name it,” she said, “I photograph it.”

  I took her extended hand. She pumped up and down exactly three times before dropping mine. “I saw you last night . . . taking pictures of . . . of Nell Gellen.”

  “It’s a bit of a coincidence seeing you here.” She smiled. “I was going to phone you today, actually.”

  A knot formed in the pit of my stomach. Our town pseudo medical examiner or crime photographer or whatever she was phoning me up about something didn’t sound good. “Oh?”

  “Do you have a minute, by chance?”

  I glanced at Sheriff McClaine’s closed door. I hadn’t been able to hear a thing through the wall and there was no way to tell how long he’d keep Josie in there. “I guess so,” I said, reluctant to leave my post but curious about why Madelyn Brighton had planned to call me.

  She led me along the hallway to a little conference room. Her wide-legged pants flopped around her calves as she walked and her square jacket hid any shape she had. She was like a blank canvas. Too bad she wasn’t asking me for a fashion consult.

  I sat down at the little circular table and waited while she pulled a black laptop out of the computer bag slung over her shoulder. “I have to tell you,” she began, “I’m something of an American crime buff. I’ve watched every episode of Law and Order, The Closer, Cagney and Lacey, and Supernatural. You name it, I’ve seen it.”

  Her accent was thick and I had to concentrate a touch more than normal as I listened to her. She probably felt the same way about Texans. “I’m more a Project Runway , Dancing with the Stars, and Iron Chef kind of girl,” I said. The photographer and I didn’t have much in common. Too bad. There was an inherently likable quality about her.

  “I wanted to show you something in the photographs from last evening,” she said, sitting across from me. Her laptop sat between us.

  I was immediately apprehensive, but I’d faced worse than Madelyn Brighton flashing pictures in front of me. Even photos of Nell’s body. My immediate supervisor at Maximilian, for example, had dressed like Tim Gunn, but had acted like Attila the Hun. All bite, no bark. I could handle whatever Madelyn threw at me.

  But then I noticed that Madelyn’s pudgy cheeks had a rosy sheen and she looked more like a kid in a candy store than a warrior out for blood. Whatever it was she wanted to talk about was giving her a giddy little thrill.

  Be noncommittal and give nothing away. Those were the rules I’d learned to live by in New York. Let others lead the conversation. They’d either tell you what they wanted, or they’d tell you what they hadn’t intended to just to fill up the dead air.

  “I noticed flowers,” she said.

  “Flowers,” I repeated.

  “Specifically the flowers around the body.”

  “And . . . ?” I asked, but of course I knew just what she’d seen. My mother’s emotions at work.

  “At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but after a while I was quite sure they weren’t. When I started taking pictures, the flowers were small. But—”

  Was that a smile tickling her lips?

  “—by the time I was done,” she continued, “they looked like this.”

  She ran her index finger over the touch pad of her computer and tapped it with her fingers a f
ew times. Bringing her gaze back up, she spun the computer around to face me.

  My breath caught in my throat and for an instant I lost track of my surroundings. My mother’s green thumb had gotten the better of her—and Madelyn Brighton had caught the evidence on film. I thought I’d stopped her from making the weeds and flowers sprout before anyone could notice, but I’d thought wrong. Now I understood Madelyn’s emphasis when she’d said “supernatural.”

  But it wasn’t the flowers that struck me about the picture. It was the swirl of white, like a wispy cloud, at the edge of the frame. It reminded me of . . .

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said, tapping the screen with the pad of her finger. “The rumors are true, aren’t they?”

  Just like that, I was back in the room. I sat a little straighter in my chair. Rumors were never good. Ever. “I don’t know what you mean, Mrs. Brighton.”

  She ran her hand over her head, but instead of helping her hair to lie flatter, her touch seemed to make the strands respond. Static electricity. The woman was charged.

  “Madelyn,” she said. “And I’m sure you do know what I mean.” She tapped the computer screen again. “It’s right there in full color. Small, then large.”

  Footsteps and male voices came from the hallway. I glanced over my shoulder, wondering if this was some sort of good cop, bad cop—with the bad cop hidden somewhere. Except that Madelyn Brighton wasn’t a cop. Was she?

  “Are you a police officer?”

  She laughed, an infectious, bubbly laugh. “No. Could have been. Maybe should have been. I’m a photographer, Harlow. Can I call you Harlow? And no, I’m not in training to be a police officer, either. I’m not asking questions for the police. This is for my own personal interest only.” She leaned closer and her voice dropped to a whisper. “Truth be told, I’m sort of a magic junkie. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, all that.”

  I leaned closer, too. “I thought you were into crime.”

  “I am. I’m a photographer. A writer. A photojournalist. But it’s tough to make a living doing any of that. Which is why I do a bit of all of it. Truly, I love to photograph the unexplained. And this . . .” She clicked the arrow on the computer screen and the next picture appeared. In this one Nell’s body could hardly be seen through the two-foot-tall zinnias and lavender. “This is unexplained.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, her white blouse gaping between the buttons. When she turned back to me, she lowered her voice even more. “I’ve heard about the Cassidy women.”

  My jaw dropped, my glasses slipped, and everything went blurry. “Wh-what have you heard?”

  She sat back, leaving the laptop facing me, the evidence of the bionic flowers staring back at me. She didn’t look menacing, like she was ready to lead a witch hunt, but people were not always what they seemed.

  “I’ve heard that your grandmother talks to goats. And that your great-grandmother—you live in her house, right?—I hear she could just make things happen. If she wanted it, she basically got it. And your mother, well . . .” There was that bubbly giggle again. It made Madelyn Brighton endearing and not nearly so threatening as she could be, considering the topic of our conversation and how highbrow her accent made her seem. She nodded at the computer. “It’s clear what her charm is.” She cocked her head, her brow furrowing, her smile turning contemplative. “Everyone says you don’t have a gift, though. Why is that?”

  A wave of dizziness crashed through me. I’d never had to explain the charmed ways of the Cassidy women before. It was private. And a gift. A gift I didn’t share, but still . . . To talk about it made me feel like I was betraying all the Cassidy women, past and present.

  But Madelyn Brighton was not going to let it drop. I shrugged helplessly, wishing I knew the answer for my own sake. “I don’t know.”

  She bolted up and spun around. “Aha! So I was right!” she bellowed, then quickly slapped her hand over her mouth and sat back down. “I was right,” she said again in a whisper. “The Cassidy women, minus you, are charmed.”

  I stared at her. All proper and British, my foot. She had completely tricked me. I cringed at how artfully she’d slipped the question in and how easily I’d replied to it, corroborating her suspicions. Damn. I’d been away from Bliss too long. I was out of practice with the secretkeeping. I’d have to be careful about that. Or try it myself when I needed information.

  “Did you get some good pictures of Nell?” I asked, and then immediately cringed. That had not come out right. “I mean, do they show anything, like who killed her?”

  “I know what you mean. They revealed plenty. I probably shouldn’t show you this, but—” She gave a furtive look around, whipped the computer back to face her, tapped a few times, and whirled it back to face me. “Strangulation, plain and simple.”

  My stomach roiled. It was a close-up of Nell. The skin around her eyes and mouth was swollen, tiny pinpricks dotting the surface, making her look like a used pincushion. Her neck was marked with an uneven zigzag pattern. I pointed to the markings. “Why does it look like that?”

  “Uneven pressure during strangulation,” she answered. “I’m no expert, but it looks like the markings from a braided rope, or something.” She indicated the larger markings of the zigzag pattern on Nell’s neck. “See these? One strand of the braid was bigger than the others. That’s my guess, anyway.”

  The realization of just why the sheriff had searched Buttons & Bows knocked the wind out of me like I’d been thrown off a mechanical bull. The search hadn’t been routine.

  He’d been looking for something very specific amid all the trims and cording in the shop. He’d been looking for the murder weapon.

  Chapter 12

  Out of nowhere, Nate Kincaid careened down the hallway, past the table where I sat with Madelyn Brighton. I could barely find my voice—Madelyn and her photographs were having that effect on me—but when I did, I muttered, “I gotta go.” I scraped the chair back and hurried after Nate. He’d stopped in the middle of the hall, arms spread, spinning around like a lost child.

  I reached out, touching the sleeve of his gold-colored polo shirt with the tips of my fingers. “Nate.”

  He whipped around, handsome as ever, looking more like a crazed prom king than a buttoned-up Kincaid son. “Where is she?” He looked up and down the hallway. “Where does that dim-witted sheriff have her?”

  “He’s not dim-witted,” I said, for the life of me not knowing why I was defending Hoss McClaine. “He’s just doing his job.”

  “By interrogating my fiancée?”

  “No, by investigating the murder of her maid of honor.”

  “She had nothing to do with it.” He spoke with such conviction, but I had to wonder how well he really knew her. She’d admitted they hadn’t been dating all that long. Was his faith in his fiancée misplaced, or—My suspicious mind took over. Could he be protecting her?

  What motive could the police think Josie had? Nell’s words about Nate possibly breaking Josie’s heart came back to me. What if Nell had warned Josie she didn’t trust her fiancé, and Josie had flown into a rage? It could have been a crime of passion.

  Or what if Nate wasn’t really Josie’s one and only true love? Could the improved lifestyle she would gain by marrying a Kincaid have had anything to do with Nell’s death?

  Really, what did I know about Josie other than what I remembered of her when we were kids and what she’d said about having a rough childhood? Nothing. How far would she be willing to go to ensure a different future for herself? If Nell had known something about Josie’s true motives, would she have revealed it? And would Josie have killed to keep her silent?

  My head swam. It was all a big pile of what ifs.

  “Where were you last night?” I asked Nate. That was another one. What if he’d killed Nell for some reason? The problem, of course, was what reason?

  “I was working.”

  “Well, Josie’s a wreck,” I said, trying not to sound accusatory. I d
on’t think I pulled it off. But seriously, unless he had reason to stay away—like he was guilty and was destroying the murder weapon—where had he been when he should have been comforting Josie?

  “I got here as soon as I could,” he snapped. His eyes blazed with a vaguely familiar anger.

  I stumbled back, my limbs suddenly weak. Up close, Nate looked even more like his brother, Derek. It sent me reeling into the past. I never thought I’d have anything to do with the Kincaids again, yet here I was. “I’m—I’m sure she’ll be glad you’re here,” I said.

  “Where is she?” he asked again, his emotions dropping down to a powerful simmer.

  I pointed at the door Sheriff McClaine had taken Josie through. “They’re in there.”

  Without another word, he burst through the door.

  “What the devil do you think you’re doing?” Sheriff McClaine bellowed.

  The door slammed and I was alone in the hall. I listened to see if I could gauge how Josie was holding up, but the voices were muffled. Nothing to do but go and open the shop. Not that anyone would be there waiting for custom couture.

  Footsteps sounded behind me, then stopped. I looked over my shoulder. Madelyn Brighton stood halfway down the hallway, staring at me as if she could read my every thought. From out of nowhere, a vision appeared in my head. She was wearing a skirt that hit just at the knee, made in a bold print, a light-weight denim jacket, and a homespun scarf.

  Behind her was a misty form—just like the one on the edge of the photo she’d shown me.

  The vision disappeared with a pop.

  Something was definitely amiss in Bliss.

  Chapter 13

  The town square in Bliss, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, looks like it came straight out of a movie set. With its hundred-plus-year-old limestone courthouse smack in the center and quaint restaurants and shops circling the perimeter, it was easy to see why people might come back home to roost. Or land here later in life and decide to stay.