Pleating for Mercy

by Melissa Bourbon

  I made small talk with Karen, leaning against the banister, trying to craft a question without being too blunt.

  Turned out I didn’t have to make the effort. After a minute of awkward starts and stops, she ripped her attention away from the crowd downstairs and looked at me. “I . . . I don’t know what to do, Harlow.”

  “About what?”

  She looked over her shoulder at the deserted landing and hallway, then back over the banister. We were completely alone. “The sheriff questioned Ted today about Nell.”

  “Your husband.” I kept my voice steady and my face still, but maybe my rogue thought wasn’t so far off.

  She nodded. “This is Bliss. Nothing stays quiet for long. People are going to find out. What if they think he had something to do with it? It could ruin him.”

  At least now I knew why Karen was dressed to disappear and was hiding upstairs. She was already afraid the gossipmongers of Bliss had turned their forked tongues her way. “Why would they think that, Karen?” I replied. “It was probably routine. I mean, when was the last murder in Bliss? Probably eons ago. So this is a big deal. They’re probably questioning everyone who knew Nell.”

  “No,” she blurted. Her eyes welled with tears, her lower lip trembled, and her whole body seemed to quiver. “He . . . he saw her. Just . . . just before she died.”

  Whoa. “He did?” I flashed back to the night of the murder, when Josie, Mama, Karen, and I had all been questioned by the sheriff. He’d asked if any of us had seen Nell after she’d left Buttons & Bows. All of us had said no. Karen’s husband hadn’t been with her at my shop—the reason, I guess, the sheriff hadn’t even asked him if he’d seen Nell. The question, then, was why hadn’t he offered up the information?

  “Nell wanted to revise her w-will—”

  “Wait. So you knew she had a will?” But Ruthann hadn’t.

  She nodded. “Ted did it for her.”

  “Your husband’s a lawyer?” Now I was up to speed. It looked like Nell had used her friends for very specific things. Ted must have been the lawyer Gina had seen Nell with at Villa Farina.

  She nodded. “He doesn’t even do wills and trusts. Strictly oil and gas. But she asked me for his help. He . . . he only did it as a favor. He met her that night at Seed-n-Bead so they could go over the final document, but . . . but . . .”

  I put my hand on her shoulder. Her body stopped shuddering, her tears subsiding. “But what?”

  “There was no one to witness it,” she said, looking completely devastated.

  “Who was supposed to?”

  “I have no idea. She wanted me to convince Ted to help her, but she didn’t tell me any more than that. But, see, he’s a lawyer. He should have made sure there was a witness, right? So why didn’t he?”

  It wasn’t hard to read between the lines. What she really wanted to know was if her husband and Nell were working on the will at all, or had their meetings turned personal? She looked at me like I might be able to help her make sense of things, but I couldn’t.

  “Have you asked him?”

  “I tried.” She lowered her voice, darting another furtive glance over her shoulder. We were still alone. A hint of anger crept into her tone. “He turned it all around, like I was trying to tell him how to do his job, and how dare I doubt him. I want to trust him, but why wouldn’t there be a witness when they were meeting to sign the will so she could leave everything to her bab—?”

  She broke off before finishing the word, but too late for me not to fill in the blank. To her baby. So Karen knew about Nell’s pregnancy.

  “I presume the will’s not valid.”

  “Not if she never signed it.” She spoke sharply now, unloading everything she’d been keeping bottled up inside. “They met a bunch of times to work on it, but when I asked him about that, he said I was being selfish, that he was just doing his job and helping my friend.”

  What if Ted was the father of Nell’s child and she’d turned to blackmail? That was something I hadn’t considered. If Nell had threatened to spill the beans about their illicit affair, would Ted have killed her to silence her? A sullied reputation in a small town would be hard to live down.

  I mentally penciled Ted—and Karen—onto my list as suspects. Of course, all I had was a bunch of meaningless theories. With no proof, none of them would hold water.

  Oh, how I wished I’d known Nell. Even one close glimpse into her life could have told me so much about who she was and what she was up to.

  One thing was clear. If both Karen and Ruthann knew about the pregnancy, chances were others did, too.

  “If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  But Karen had her eyes squeezed shut and her hands clenched around the banister. Her anger was melding with fear that her husband had betrayed her. Tears were threatening and she was doing everything she could to ward them off.

  It took a good couple of minutes for her lips to turn pink again and for her face to relax.

  “So what’ll happen to the store now?” I asked.

  She sighed, that lower lip starting to twitch again. “We . . . we were partners,” she said, her voice so low I almost didn’t hear.

  “You and Nell? In the bead shop?”

  She nodded. “She’d been saving forever, but wasn’t making much headway. She asked me if Ted and I would help her. She promised she’d be able to pay us back in just a few months.”

  “But she didn’t?”

  “She kept saying she wasn’t quite ready, that she needed a little more time. I think Ted realized she didn’t really have the money. He was furious.”

  I took this all in, mulling it over. From what I knew, murder was usually an act of passion brought on unexpectedly. Karen and Ted each had another possible motive. Either one of them could have snapped.

  “How was Nell planning to get enough money to pay you back? Was business really good?”

  “She was always in the middle of some scheme or plan. All she’d tell me was that she was getting her happily-ever-after. Said I’d find out the rest soon enough, along with everyone else. Whatever she was up to backfired this time.”

  The announcement at the rehearsal dinner. “Guess it did.”

  She let out a biting little laugh. “Some happily-ever-after.”

  I wasn’t quite sure if she was talking about Nell’s happily-ever-after or her own. Neither one had ended as planned. Nell was gone and Karen’s marriage had some big ol’ red flags flying over it. She was back to staring over the banister at the party scene below. I left her alone with her complicated grief and went off in search of Josie.

  Chapter 34

  I’d started at the far end of the hall and had almost finished looking in each and every bedroom, but the brideto-be seemed to have vanished. This soiree was a far cry from the high school parties I remembered, where hormonally charged teens looked for any available room to get, er, rowdy in.

  A sewing machine sat on top of two clear plastic bins in the corner of one room. I couldn’t resist sneaking in to take a peek. It was a midrange Pfaff with enough bells and whistles to keep a girl happy for a long time. The bins were full of notions and trims, patterns and fabrics. A few pillow forms were compressed inside. If this was Miriam’s and she never used it, I wondered if she’d sell the whole kit and caboodle to Will so Gracie could sew at home.

  I made a mental note to ask her about it, shut the door, and whirled around . . . plowing right into a pair of strong arms, my hands pressed firmly against—

  “Cassidy, what are you doing?”

  Will.

  “Will Flores,” I said, surprised by the warmth he sent swirling through my body. “Are you following me?”

  “I’m not, Harlow,” he said, quirking a smile, “but I am curious to know what you’re doing up here.”

  I barely knew Will, and to hear him using my first name seemed . . . intimate and unfamiliar. I pushed away from him, a little whopper-jawed by how I felt. “I was looking for Josie,” I said. “I saw h
er come up here. I wanted to see if she’s okay. Since Nate’s . . .”

  I hesitated. For all I knew, Will and Nate were old friends. And since one of the scenarios for Nell’s murder put Nate as the killer, talking to one of his friends about it probably wasn’t a good idea.

  “Nate’s what?”

  “I was just wondering how long you’ve known the Kincaids.”

  He folded his arms over his chest, studying me. “Uh-uh. You’re not getting off that easy, darlin’. Answer me this: Do the ghosts follow you everywhere you go?”

  I started. Did he know that Meemaw’s ghost seemed to be hanging around my house? Had Gracie told him something? “Well, of course not,” I said, waving away the very idea with an idle laugh. “I’m just looking for Josie.”

  I started back down the hallway to where I had last seen Karen. Will stayed right beside me. It hadn’t escaped my notice that he hadn’t answered my question. “So, are you friends with Nate?” I asked.

  “I know him.”

  The hallway and landing were empty. Maybe Karen had gone back downstairs. We stood side by side at the banister. Down below, people spilled out the French doors onto the stone-and-brick patio. There was no sign of a distraught brunette in polyester pants. Maybe she and Josie were comforting each other.

  A willowy blonde glided through the room, stopping to chat with a few people before moving on to the next group. Ruthann. It wasn’t her party, but it might as well have been. She looked like the quintessential hostess, ready to meet and greet her guests, throwing out her naked left hand to be kissed, the only adornment sparkling from her right hand. She was clearly available, and every man’s gaze was instantly drawn to her. I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose. Did she know she was the most beautiful woman in the room?

  Will leaned against the banister, his attention firmly on me. He had to have seen Ruthann below—she was impossible to miss—but he didn’t seem fazed by her ethereal beauty.

  I tucked a wayward strand of hair behind my ear. A wish that contact lenses didn’t feel like boulders in my eyes came and went. There was no point in worrying over things you can’t change. Glasses, contacts, or twentytwenty vision, I was no Ruthann.

  “Why’d you ask about Nate?” Will said.

  “Just curious,” I answered him, and left it at that.

  A few minutes later, I made my escape from the event, rounding up Madelyn and hightailing it back home to the familiarity of my butter yellow appliances, hand-stitched quilts, Meemaw’s settee, and my sewing machines. This was my cocoon. The scent of lavender enveloped me as soon as I walked in the door. This was home.

  Chapter 35

  Calling in the cavalry was nothing short of essential if I was going to finish the bridal dresses. I’d called Miriam to make sure that she was really going to be in the wedding, confirmed her appointment, then stayed up past two in the morning sketching designs for her dress. With no time to shop, I’d dragged bins of Meemaw’s fabric down from the attic, riffled through them, and resketched so the design and the fabric would work together. To keep myself going, whenever I grew tired I flipped to the last page of my sketchbook and worked on a list of suspects and scenarios for Nell’s murder. Josie, Nate, Karen, and Ted each had possible motives for wanting Nell out of their lives.

  I’d slept on it, but in the morning I was no closer to any answers. I had to figure out a way to find out who Nell had been seeing and who had put the bun in her oven. Otherwise I was going to be too distracted to complete these dresses for the wedding.

  With the wedding just days away, Nell’s funeral at two o’clock, and Miriam already fifteen minutes late, I was running on pure adrenaline. There were a million and one tasks that needed to be done on the garments, but thankfully, the troops had been deployed.

  Mama hunched over Meemaw’s old Singer, finishing the French seams on the skirt of Josie’s gown. Gracie bounded into the shop. “We’re here!”

  I’d been expecting her, but not her father. Will came in after her, a soft black tool bag in one hand, a little white paper bag and a disposable coffee cup in the other.

  “Morning,” he said.

  Mama whipped her head around the second she heard a man’s voice. “Will Flores,” she cooed. “It’s been a coon’s age.”

  A coon’s age? Had Mama gone hillbilly?

  Will set his tool bag down next to the shelves, smiling. “Yes, ma’am, it sure has.”

  “I guess introductions aren’t necessary,” I said.

  “Will and I go way back. Now when was that problem you had with, what was her name, Maggie Sue?” Mama looked to the ceiling like she was trying to remember.

  “Mama!”

  She looked at me like I was off my rocker. “What?”

  Will chuckled, a smooth, silky sound. “Maggie Sue is my neighbor’s goat. She got through the fence onto my property and was harassing my horses.”

  He had horses. So he wasn’t all hat and no cattle.

  “That rascally doe wouldn’t budge,” Mama said. “Was that a year ago already?”

  He nodded. “I tried everything, but she just laid down and stayed put. I’d heard stories about your grandmother. Cesar Millan is to dogs what Coleta Cassidy is to goats.”

  Mama flapped her hand at him. “Stop,” she said, as if the praise was hers and not her mother’s.

  “I didn’t believe it, but it’s true,” he said, admiration in his voice.

  “Never doubt a Cassidy,” I said. “Have you seen Nana with her herd? They follow her everywhere.”

  “Does she bewitch them?” Gracie asked.

  Mama looked aghast. “Good heavens, no! She just happens to have a connection with them.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Will said. “She came right over, sat down next to Maggie Sue and had a conversation about God knows what, and would you believe that goat just popped right up and toddled back through the fence to her own yard.”

  “Goats are funny animals,” Mama remarked. “My mama says most of us just don’t appreciate them, but they’ve got so much personality and spunk, if they could speak English, we’d all be rolling with laughter. She says they respond to her because she listens to them, that’s all.”

  Gracie’s brow pulled into a V. I could tell she didn’t understand how you listened to a goat. Honestly, I didn’t either.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, patting her on the shoulder. “It’s like the creaky pipes. You’ll get used to it.”

  Will leaned against the doorjamb, watching as I set his daughter up with a needle and thread in front of a dress form. His scrutiny unnerved me and brought up the same anxiety I used to feel before a test. If I handled Gracie the wrong way, I’d fail and he would abruptly yank her from my presence. My hands shook. The story of her mother leaving her had gotten to me. Loretta Mae might get what she wanted, but that didn’t mean Will couldn’t change his mind and call off the sewing lessons. Gracie had started to work her way into my heart and I didn’t want to let go.

  After a mini lesson on invisible stitching, she set to work hemming the skirt of Karen’s flirty little dress and I turned to her father. “I’m going to Nell Gellen’s funeral. If you want to come back for Gracie in a few hours—”

  He shook his head. “I have some time. Thought I’d tackle a few more things on your repair list.”

  Now was not the best time, but I couldn’t turn him away. The number one reason was Gracie, but the repair list was getting longer and longer. I’d added “fix loose floorboard in bedroom” and “leaky faucet in upstairs bathroom” to it, and I knew there would be more. A turn-of-the-century house was kind of like the Golden Gate Bridge. By the time the bridge was painted, it was time to go back to the beginning and start over. There’d always be something to fix in Meemaw’s house.

  “Those bricks have been bugging me,” he said, angling his head at the short stack holding up the corner of the shelves in the workroom. “I’m going to fix that leg.”

  Great. Not only wa
s he going to stick around the house, he was going to be right here where we were working.

  It had taken me a while to identify another layer of emotions I’d been experiencing around him. Pinging nerves. Flirtatious urges. Anger mixed with excitement. All that good conflict.

  Attraction, pure and simple. All things I hadn’t felt since I was eighteen. It was like a light switch that had been turned off and no matter who I dated, it couldn’t be switched back on. But Will had flipped it on without even trying and now I didn’t know how to handle the flurry of emotions inside me.

  And I certainly didn’t have time to think about it.

  So I did nothing but nod and help him take the jars off the shelves. “Why does one woman need so many buttons?” he asked after we’d carried the last of the thirty or so jars to the coffee table.

  We walked back to the workroom. “This isn’t even all of them. Meemaw has old tins full of buttons up in the attic. When I was little, she’d pull out a tin and dump it out so I could sort them by color or size. They’d keep me busy for hours and hours. Every now and then, I’d find a treasure and hold it up for her to see. She’d instantly remember where that particular button had come from and tell me the story.”

  “She has the buttons of one of your great-great-great-granddaddy’s shirts somewhere,” Mama called from her sewing table. “Those are worth some money, let me tell you.”

  Will looked skeptical. “Buttons can be worth money?”

  “No—” I started to say.

  “Yes!” The steady sound of the Singer stopped as Mama turned her head. “Because they belonged to Butch Cassidy.”

  “Mama, that’s crazy. They’re just buttons.”

  “Who’s Butch Cassidy?” Gracie asked from her stool.

  Mama gasped. “You don’t know who Butch Cassidy is? Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?”

  “N-no.”

  “They lived a long time ago, Mama—”

  “They were famous bank robbers,” she said.

  “Infamous,” I corrected. Their lives were glamorized by Paul Newman and Robert Redford, but they’d been thieves and the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang had killed plenty of people in their day.