Cloche and Dagger

by Jenn McKinlay

  “And you called me manipulative?” I asked. “You’ve got a one-two punch of guilt and fear going here.”

  Mac glanced between me and Harrison as if trying to figure out if there was going to be an argument.

  Harrison met my gaze and had the grace to look embarrassed.

  “I’m not above a little good, old-fashioned manipulation, especially if I know it will keep you and Viv safe,” he said.

  “Bee charmer,” I accused and he winked at me. Again, with the confusing signals. Was I ever going to understand him?

  I turned back to Mac. “I suppose the alarm system would be for the best. Thank you.”

  As he walked away, I whispered to Harrison, “Can we afford this?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I have it all factored into the operating budget.”

  “Okay, then. Won’t Viv be surprised?”

  “Serves her right,” he said. He turned and studied me and picked up a damp strand of hair. “You look younger like this, like you did when we were children.”

  Chapter 30

  A burst of warmth hit me right in the middle and my voice was still a whisper when I asked, “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  His gaze met mine and a smile tipped the corner of his mouth when he said, “A good thing.”

  I noticed his voice was whisper soft, too.

  “Harrison,” Mac called, breaking the moment between us.

  He dropped my hair and walked away, and I had the craziest urge to grab his hand and stop him, but I didn’t; that was probably a good thing.

  Harrison left shortly after that. He said I was in good hands with Mac and his crew, but I got the feeling he wanted to put some distance between us. I couldn’t say that I blamed him. The combination of exhaustion and stress was undoubtedly causing us both to feel things that weren’t entirely appropriate, given that we were business partners of sorts.

  Fee arrived at midmorning. She looked startled to see Mac and his crew.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  I told her about the break-in, pleased that my voice didn’t crack. In the light of day, it was refreshing to find that instead of feeling weak and vulnerable, I had a nice steam of rage blowing out of me.

  Although I tried not to make it sound overly dramatic, there was no way to tell her I had almost been suffocated than to just get it out. Fee’s eyes went wide and she slumped onto a chair.

  “Bloody hell, Scarlett, you could have been killed,” she said.

  “But I wasn’t. And now we’ll have a lovely alarm system to keep us safe and sound.”

  Fee gave Mac and his crew a dubious look. She looked scared and I felt bad that she was frightened.

  “If you want to take a leave of absence until everything calms down, you can,” I said.

  “No!” Fee shook her head. “I won’t leave you in the lurch. It’s just, well, I really wish Viv were here. I’m worried about her. I heard on the news today—”

  “I know,” I said. “I heard it, too. You know she had nothing to do with Lady Ellis’s death.”

  “Of course, I know,” Fee said, looking indignant. “But it doesn’t look good for the business, does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I agreed. “So the best thing we can do is try to take care of business until she returns.”

  “That’s aiming pretty high since we can’t even open our doors, and on market day,” Fee said.

  “One Saturday closed won’t kill us,” I said. “Why don’t we dig into some of the special orders and see if we can use the downtime to get ahead.”

  “It would be nice to get ahead,” Fee agreed. “Do you have any experience blocking hats?”

  “Not any good ones.”

  Fee tucked her lips in as if she were trying to keep from laughing.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Come here,” she said.

  She led me over to the supply cupboards where bolts of sinamay and felt in every color and the wooden forms used for blocking were stored. Fee pulled over a chair and stretched to reach the back of the top shelf. She pulled down a hatbox. It was one of Mim’s original boxes before Viv had updated the design and made them more eco-friendly.

  Fee handed me the box and I gave her a questioning glance.

  “Open it,” she said.

  I put it on the worktable and wiggled the lid off. Nestled in pale blue tissue paper was a hat in an eye-searing pink adorned with feathers and flowers and gobs of sparkly crystals, you know, because the feathers and flowers just weren’t enough.

  “Holy hats,” I said. “I made this!”

  “I know.” Fee clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing out loud, no doubt.

  I lifted the eyesore out of the box and studied the hideous shape, the sad tuft of feathers and silk flowers.

  “Poor Mim,” I said. “She had such high hopes for her granddaughters after her own daughters had been such a bust as milliners.”

  “How old were you?” Fee asked.

  “I’m not sure, but it had to be about the same time I painted my bedroom that hideous pink. What was I thinking?”

  Fee laughed and I joined in. The workmen looked over at us and I quickly put the hat on and gushed, “Isn’t it gorgeous?”

  One look at their horrified faces and I could tell this was the equivalent to “Do I look fat in this?” for them. They were clearly afraid to answer. Fee and I busted up in the face of their confusion, which caused them to turn back to their work with the speed of mice fleeing a hissing cat.

  “You did a nice job on the brim,” Fee said. Her eyes were kind.

  “I remember this was when Mim was going through a huge sinamay phase,” I said, referring to the material my hat had been formed from. “Stephen Jones brought it back from Japan in the eighties and, boy, didn’t it take over in hats?”

  “It’s probably the most common material used now,” Fee agreed. “Especially for fascinators.”

  “I can’t believe Viv kept it all these years.”

  “She said she’d never bin it,” Fee said. “She said it gave her hope.”

  “I think she needs to raise her expectations a bit higher than this.”

  “I think she meant it gave her hope that you’d come home.”

  I took the hat off and studied it. Home. All my life I’d had dual citizenship, but I’d spent most of my time in the States. I’d always thought of myself as American, but when the going got tough, where did I run to? Mim’s.

  Maybe Viv was onto something. I put the hat back in the box and put it back on the high shelf. I didn’t have the heart to toss it either.

  The workmen headed upstairs to alarm the rest of the house. Fee was checking the work orders and pulling the needed wooden blocks from the supply shelf.

  “You sure you don’t want to help?” she asked. “I have three hats to form today,”

  Her dark brown eyes were twinkling and I knew she was teasing me.

  “I think we’ll spare our customers the horror,” I said.

  She laughed and cleared off a section of the large worktable and set to work. I watched her for a bit. She moved with the same confidence Viv had. She cut two large pieces of gunmetal-gray sinamay and then moved to the sink to soak them in hot water for a few minutes to soften the material. Next she would pin the fabric to the wooden brim form, stretching it as tightly as she could to keep it from creasing. She would then paint it with a fabric stiffener and let it dry for twelve hours. She would do the same with the fabric on the wooden crown form.

  Despite my own ineptitude, I was always amazed at the process and truly loved watching the hats come to life under the nimble fingers of a talented milliner. I was pleased that Viv had taken Fee on as an apprentice since she obviously had the same love for the art and definite skill.

  While Fee set to pinning the softened fabric to the wooden form, I moved over to the desk in the corner.

  It wasn’t that I was ignoring Harrison’s concerns, exactly; it was more that I planned t
o completely disregard them. With the shop being closed, it presented me the perfect opportunity to reach out to our customers, and if one of them happened to have something to say about Lady Ellis’s murder, well, who was I to stop her?

  I opened up the files on Viv’s computer. Logic dictated that the best plan would be to call the clients she had most recently been working with. I scanned the list of invoices that were in her file by date.

  I left a message for the first two, but the third one answered on the fourth ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Good morning,” I said. “May I speak to Claudia Reese?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Scarlett Parker with Mim’s Whims—” I began but she cut me off.

  “What do you want?” she asked. Her voice sounded suspicious.

  “I wanted to inform you that in light of recent events, we’re going to be open by appointment only,” I said.

  “You’re ‘the party crasher,’ aren’t you?” the woman asked.

  “I—”

  “I’ve seen the video. You looked demented,” the woman continued. “And your cousin Vivian murdered Lady Ellis! To think I let her measure my head!”

  Claudia Reese said it with such horror. She made it sound as if Vivian had tried to lop off her head while taking her measurement.

  “She did not murder anyone!” I argued. My usual way with people was abandoned as I choked back the anger in my throat like a dry biscuit.

  “Of course, you’d say that,” the woman said. “You’re a nutter.”

  “I am not!” I snapped. “And if this is how you feel about my cousin and me then may I suggest you take your business elsewhere.”

  “Count on it!” Claudia snapped back and hung up.

  Chapter 31

  I stared at the phone in my hand for a beat or two. “Why . . . that’s . . . just . . . oh!” I slammed my phone down, too.

  “Problem?” Fee asked. She was pinning the soaked sinamay around a crown form now.

  “That horrible woman just called me a nutter,” I said.

  “One client down,” she said. She said it with a sigh that made me think she anticipated a lot more of this.

  One of the workmen came back into the room and began working on the lock on the back door. He was young, and I realized that, like Fee, he was probably an apprentice, maybe learning the locksmith trade from Mac with the hope of opening his own business one day.

  Well, if I didn’t start getting better responses from my calls, there wasn’t going to be a business for Fee to apprentice and Viv would come back to an alarm system with nothing to protect.

  “Who was the woman Nick told us about yesterday?” I asked Fee. “The friend of Lady Ellis?”

  “Marianne Richards,” she said. She wrinkled her nose and I took it that Ms. Richards was not one of her favorites. “There’s a whole pack of them. Lady Ellis and Lady Cheevers are the social leaders and then Marianne Richards, Chelsea Cline and Susie Musselman tend to follow them.”

  “Are they just ladies of leisure?”

  “Mostly. Marianne Richards has a career but the rest, yeah, they all have too much money, not enough brains and the emotional depths of turnips.”

  “Okay then, somehow I need to get Lady Ellis’s friends into the shop to show that they don’t hold Viv responsible for Lady Ellis’s death,” I said.

  I tapped a pencil on the desktop while I mulled it over.

  “How do you plan to do that?” Fee asked.

  I watched her for a moment. Her nimble brown fingers, moving swiftly over the fabric-wrapped wood. Hats!

  “Fee, do we have any special stock that’s been packed away?”

  She tipped her head and considered me. “Meaning?”

  “Special hats that were ordered but never picked up, that sort of thing,” I said.

  “A fair few,” she said.

  “Do you think you could gather five or six of them for me?”

  “Whatever for?” she asked.

  “I have an idea,” I said. I was planning to keep it vague until I knew whether my gambit would work or not.

  Turning back to the computer, I looked up Lady Cheever’s number and called her. She was the remaining leader, so I figured it’d be best to get her on board first.

  I dialed the number. Four rings. I braced for the voice mail to pick up but instead, a man answered. He had a pleasant voice as if talking on the phone were his profession.

  “Lord and Lady Cheevers’s residence, how may I assist you?”

  “This is Scarlett Parker, of Mim’s Whims. May I speak with Lady Cheevers please?” I asked.

  “One moment,” he said.

  Fee looked up from where she was painting stiffener on the fabric wrapped on the crown form. She had twisted back the one long strand of hair that always fell over her eyes and she looked at me curiously. I gave her a small smile.

  “This is Lady Cheevers. How may I help you?” a woman’s voice asked.

  “I was hoping you might have need of some hats,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” she asked.

  “I’m Scarlett Parker from Mim’s Whims. Sadly, we have several hats here that were ordered by Lady Ellis,” I said. I kept my voice low with just the right amount of regret. “Given the circumstances, we would like to spare her family the painful chore of having to acquire them for no good purpose and would like to offer them to her friends instead.”

  “I’m sorry, are you trying to sell me my dead friend’s hats?” Lady Cheevers sniffed with disdain.

  “No, they would be gratis, yours for the taking,” I said. “Just a token, something to remember your friend by.”

  I saw Fee clap a hand over her eyes and tilt her head back as if she couldn’t believe the amount of stupidity she was being forced to watch.

  “Oh, well, that’s thoughtful of you,” Lady Cheevers said. I could tell by the way she said it that she knew exactly what I was trying to do. If I could bring her in, and the media found out, it could save our business.

  “We would include, of course, Lady Ellis’s other close friends.”

  “I am surprised that Vivian did not make the call,” Lady Cheevers said, and I knew she was fishing. There was no point in not telling her the truth.

  “Vivian has been out of town on business since the beginning of last week,” I said.

  “Oh.” Lady Cheevers perked up at the sound of that.

  “Yes, I’m sure once the media gets all of the facts, they will be more accurate in their reporting,” I said.

  “Indeed,” she agreed.

  “How would tomorrow be?” I pressed. “Around tea time? We’ll provide refreshments of course.”

  “One moment. Let me check,” Lady Cheevers said.

  I waited, convinced she was going to leave me hanging while she came up with fifteen excuses to blow me off, but to my surprise she was back in no time.

  “Yes, I’m free,” she said. “I’ll be there at five.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I was a bit stunned that this was going to work. “We’ll see you then.”

  I ended the call and turned to look at Fee.

  “What are you playing at?” Fee asked.

  “I’m trying to save the business,” I said. “And it looks like we’re having a tea party tomorrow. Are you available?”

  “I can be,” she said.

  “Great!” I said.

  The three other friends of Lady Ellis were available as well. So Sunday tea at the hat shop was a go. Now I just needed to get my supplies, hunt down some spare and amazing hats and get Fee up to speed, all of which took the rest of the morning.

  “So, to recap,” Fee said. “You told a big, fat lie about having extra hats that Lady Ellis had ordered so you could get her mean girlfriends to come here,” she said. “How am I doing?”

  “Spot-on so far,” I said.

  “And I can only guess that you’re doing this because if word gets out that these ladies are still coming here despite the fact that
one of you is a nutter and one is a killer, then you think the business will be saved.”

  “Brilliant, right?”

  Fee crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her gaze. “Is that the only reason?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

  Mercifully, Mac chose that moment to appear to talk to me about how I wanted the upper levels monitored. I trotted after him, pretending that I was unaware that Fee was frowning after me.

  • • •

  I checked and rechecked all of the doors and windows. I did the same with the new alarm system. The small square panel indicated that all was well, but still I took an old cricket bat from my grandmother’s closet and brought it to bed with me.

  I slept in my old room. Well, I should say that I rested because there really wasn’t much sleep happening. I thumbed through several of Mim’s and Viv’s mystery and romance novels but nothing was distracting me.

  Every little creak in the house made me jump and clutch the bat close. I figured I must be having a mild sort of post-traumatic stress episode as every time I tried to close my eyes I felt paranoid that a pillow was going to be held down on me.

  It was midnight and I still wasn’t sleeping when my cell phone on my nightstand chimed. Who would be calling this late? Maybe it was Viv, she was never one to observe the no-calls-after-ten rule. I scrambled for my phone and checked the display. Not Viv, but I smiled, surprised at how pleased I was to see his name.

  “Hi, Harry,” I answered. “What’s the matter? Did you miss my lumpy couch and want to crash on it again?”

  “Not exactly.” His laugh was deep and rich and tickled me right between my ribs.

  “Did I wake you?” he asked. “I’m sorry if I did, but I rather thought you’d be up.”

  His voice was full of understanding and it made me feel better about my paranoia, as if it were perfectly reasonable to sleep with a bat in the bed.

  “No, I’ve just been listening to the house settle and creak. It’s noisier than one would think,” I said.

  “It has a lot to say.”