A Fitting End: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery

by Melissa Bourbon

  “Can I have my bag back?” I asked.

  “No can do,” a deputy said, coming up beside me with his cowboy swagger. He couldn’t have been more than five ten, and was lean and handsome, even in his khaki deputy uniform. He was clean shaven, though I got the feeling he let his whiskers go scruffy when he was off duty. Well, if he ever took a day off, which I wasn’t clear on, considering I couldn’t get a vision of him in anything other than his khakis. Of course, maybe my gift of visualizing people and clothing that would flatter them was selective and limited. My charm was not always under my control.

  I gave up any hope of seeing those sewing supplies—or my Dena Rooney-Berg bag—again and started a mental list of what I’d need to replace. Tape measure, pins, seam ripper, spools of thread—

  “Why’d you bring your sewing scissors to a golf club?” the deputy asked me. His brown eyes narrowed and he studied me like he thought I had a secret or two. Which I did. They were just unrelated to Macon Vance.

  “Like I told the sheriff, Deputy, um…”

  “McClaine.”

  “No, not the sheriff…” I stopped, looked from one man to the other, then did a double take. “You’re… Gavin?” As in Hoss McClaine’s son? I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help it. He’d been a few years younger than me and I don’t think I’d ever uttered three words to him. He’d been the shyest boy in school, which had made him fodder for Derek Kincaid and his posse of entitled rich kids, but hadn’t gotten him involved in much else.

  He nodded and the corner of his mouth lifted in a cocky smile. I got the feeling he liked shocking people who remembered him as the ninety-pound weakling. “All grown up.”

  Yes, indeed. “I had no idea you were a deputy,” I said, thinking he might give the town’s crop of preeminent bachelors a run for their money. If you could get past the cocky attitude.

  He knocked back his straw cowboy hat, identical to his dad’s, and stared me down. “Just transferred from Fort Worth. Heartwarming trip down memory lane,” he said with a heavy drawl. “Now, back to my question, Miss Cassidy— It is Miss, isn’t it?” Deputy Gavin cracked that satisfied smile again, like he was privy to the fact that being a thirty-three-year-old unmarried woman meant you were past your prime and on a downhill slide.

  “Yes,” I said, throwing my shoulders back and my chin up.

  He nodded, his left eye narrowing slightly. His father looked from him to me, then back to him. He patted Gavin on the shoulder. “Looks like you can handle this. ME’s here. Come find me when you’re done.” And he ambled off behind the velvet curtain.

  Gavin didn’t miss a beat. “Why did you bring your scissors to a golf club?”

  I threw one arm out and gestured to the runway and stage lights. The room was deathly quiet with all the people cleared out. I lowered my voice to compensate. “The Margaret Moffette Lea Pageant and Ball. I’m making dresses for a few of the girls. I came to meet Mrs. James—”

  “The senator’s wife?”

  As he pulled a notebook out of his pants pocket and poised the tip of a miniature pencil on the page, my heart stopped. “Y-yes, but—”

  “Zinnia?” he said, but he seemed to be talking more to himself than to me. He gave a single nod, then said, “Continue.”

  “She just wanted some ideas—”

  “’Bout what?”

  “I’m not actually sure,” I admitted.

  “Right,” he blurted, as if he’d made some great discovery. “Because she didn’t know you’d been here, isn’t that right?”

  Nerves pricked the surface of my skin. “I—I, uh, n-no. We didn’t end up talking, which is why I’m back here now.”

  “Did she ask you to meet her here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “To give her some ideas?”

  I didn’t like the way this was going, but there was no escape. “To talk about plans for the ball—”

  “Festival business. I see. And did you sew something for her?”

  “Here? No, I—”

  “Yet you brought your sewing bag. With scissors. Why? Did you think you were going to sew something? Did she give you the impression she needed you to sew something?”

  “No, I’d just come from doing some alterations, but—”

  I stopped as his eyes narrowed. He tilted his head to one side. “Mighty convenient, don’t you think?”

  “Mrs. James is a good woman,” I said. I had to stop myself from wagging my finger. “You’re barking up the wrong tree, Gavin McClaine.”

  “Was I talking about Mrs. James?” he said, accusation lacing his voice.

  I gulped, his meaning loud and clear.

  “Why’d you leave the bag?” he continued.

  “I… um…” I bit my lip. What I’d said so far had come out all wrong.

  “Harlow,” he pressed, adjusting his hat lower on his forehead. “Answer the question. Why’d you leave the bag?”

  “I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I put it down while I was looking at the catwalk. Mrs. James was… um… she was busy.” The argument she’d been having with… with… Oh, Lord. She’d been arguing with the golf pro. Who was now dead. My skin turned clammy. This was not good. “I, um, I decided I’d catch up with her later and I left.”

  “And the bag…,” he said, leaving the rest of the sentence hanging there.

  “I forgot about it.” I pointed to the spot where I’d left it. “I set it down, was looking around, and I forgot.”

  It might have been the truth, but he wasn’t done asking questions. “Did she specifically ask you to bring your scissors?”

  My skin pricked and dark swirls danced behind my eyelids. So now we were talking about Mrs. James. “No, of course not. She didn’t ask me to bring anything. It’s a sewing bag. I always keep a pair of scissors in it.”

  “Uh huh.”

  My mind suddenly reeled back to the moment I’d seen Josie’s maid of honor dead in my front yard. To being questioned. To the horrible feeling of being a suspect in a murder investigation. Criminy. Was I a suspect? And had I just made Mrs. James a suspect? “Neither one of us had anything to do with this,” I said, defending Mrs. James even though the tiniest bit of doubt crept through me. She hadn’t looked herself yesterday. Surely it wasn’t because she’d been about to take someone’s life. Right?

  “Does she know what you keep in your sewing bag?” he repeated.

  “She’s never seen my sewing bag, so she wouldn’t know what I keep in it,” I snapped. “And she didn’t ask me to bring it.” Gavin McClaine was as unrelenting as his dad had been when I’d been busted breaking and entering at the Grange Hall when I was sixteen. He didn’t care that I’d just been trying to recover our school’s mascot costume—a massive bronco—that my brother Red had taken. When it came to high school football in Texas, a prank was sacrilege. You just didn’t mess with football.

  He ignored my frustration and went on. “What was Mrs. James busy doing? Why didn’t you meet with her?”

  I hesitated, my sails deflating. I liked Mrs. James, but the fact was, I didn’t know her very well. What if… “I don’t know,” I finally said. “She was, um, talking to someone. I figured I’d catch up with her later.”

  “Uh huh. Who was she talking to?” His miniature pencil scratched against the notepad again.

  “I couldn’t see. I didn’t want to interrupt—”

  “But she asked you to meet her.”

  “But she was busy—”

  “And you couldn’t see who was she talking to?” God, he had a bad habit of interrupting me.

  I shrugged. “No, Gavin—”

  “Deputy,” he corrected.

  I rolled my eyes, but not before he saw. I was not scoring any points with Deputy Sheriff Gavin McClaine. “Deputy,” I said. “I couldn’t see.” I pointed to beyond the bubble machine. “They were back there and I was out here.”

  He clearly didn’t like my story, but after a few more questions, he finally let me go. I caught a glimp
se of Macon Vance’s muddy shoes—still on his feet—as I left. Only one thought circled in my mind. Could Mrs. James have done this?

  Chapter 6

  Another murder in Bliss. Not so blissful, I thought. I parked my old jalopy of a pickup truck in front of the Italian pasticceria, Villa Farina, on the square. Bobby Farina was a third-generation baker who lived out his family’s tradition of producing delectable Italian mini pastries, but today what I needed was an iced coffee. My stomach was still churning from seeing MaconVance’s dead body. Butter and sugar might do me in.

  Lord almighty, I really had brought the violence of New York City back with me to Texas.

  Gina, the college student who seemed to live at Villa Farina, was like a sight for sore eyes. Her two-toned black-and-red hair was pulled back into a ponytail, little curls sticking to her hairline from the early-morning heat and her proximity to the kitchen, where hot ovens were going throughout the day. The buildings on the square were old, drafty as hell, and inefficient as all get-out. “Y’all are up and out early this mornin’, Harlow.”

  Gina’s looks belied her soft nature. Drop her in Jersey City and she’d fit right in… until she opened her mouth to speak and her Texas quirk came out. “Y’all” was her standard word, something only a true Southerner could understand. “I’ve been over to the country club.” I leaned in, a thread of guilt winding through me. I wasn’t an inherently gossipy person, but anxiety at another murder in Bliss had formed a knot in the center of my gut and telling someone else about it might help unwind it. “There was a murder.”

  “No,” she said, her voice barely a breath. She glanced over her shoulder, then over mine. No one was in line behind me. “Who?” she asked.

  “Macon Vance—”

  She gasped. “The golfer? N-no, really?” Her already pale face drained completely.

  I nodded. “The place was a madhouse. The local news was there, and tons of looky-loos.”

  Her voice dropped to a low whisper. “How?”

  I lowered my voice to match hers. “He was stabbed.”

  Her hand went to her heart and she turned a little green. “Did they arrest anyone?”

  “Not yet,” I said, secretly praying Mrs. James and I would steered clear of the county jailhouse.

  She sucked in a deep breath, recovering her nineteen-year-old composure. Death was hard to take, I thought, no matter the age. “A lot of suspects, I bet.”

  I blinked. “You think?”

  Instead of answering, she waved another clerk over. “I’m gonna take five. Can y’all cover for me?”

  The teenage boy smirked. “Yeah, Gina, I think I can handle the crowd.”

  Right, since the crowd was all still at the country club.

  Gina rolled her eyes as she came around the end of the glass pastry-case counter. She grabbed my arm and dragged me to a little round table in front of the café. She snuck another look around the bakery before focusing on me. “You never heard the gossip about him?”

  I shook my head. I’d been back in Bliss for a few months, but it took more time than that to get caught up on the rumor mill.

  One side of her mouth angled down in a lopsided frown. “The way I hear it around here is that he makes—I mean, made—a lot of lonely housewives happy and a lot of absent husbands less missed.”

  “Ah,” I said, a lightbulb going on above my head. “So Macon Vance was a golf pro in the”—I cleared my throat—“tennis pro sense. Got it.”

  “Everyone knows it.”

  I looked around the shop. Did they all know about Macon Vance’s extracurricular activities? And if they did, why hadn’t he been run outta town on a rail?

  There were a few familiar faces, some of whom I’d seen at the Kincaids’ big fund-raising gala a few months back. I recognized Mrs. Eleanor Mcafferty, streaks of blond highlights prominent in her severely pulled back hair, sipping a frothy coffee drink with the über pulled-together Mrs. Helen Abernathy and a third woman I’d never seen before. A man and a woman whispered together in the corner. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her. A group of men I recognized from the golf club this morning stood on the sidewalk outside the shop’s front window, but I couldn’t put names to their faces. A few sprite teens, up mighty early for a summer day and looking awfully distraught about it, sat at a round top, a plate of croissants between them.

  “Everyone?” I asked.

  She nodded her head, brows pulled together into a V. “Everyone. I can’t believe y’all hadn’t heard that.”

  “I’ve been holed up making clothes.”

  “Right. For the Margaret Ball, I hear.” She waved her hands. “Not my thing.”

  I smiled. “Wasn’t mine, either, but the gowns are beautiful. Is there anything you don’t hear, Gina?”

  “Nope.” I would have expected a little smile from her. Instead, her already thin lips drew into an even thinner line. “So they really don’t know who did it?”

  I didn’t blame her for feeling anxious. A murderer was on the loose—not a comforting thought. But I sensed there was something else Gina wanted to say. I put both my palms against the tabletop. “What’s wrong?”

  She paled again, looking downright pasty. “I was just wondering if…” She trailed off.

  “Wondering what?”

  After a glance over her shoulder, she leaned closer and whispered, “He was in here yesterday, talking on his cell phone.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, knowing there had to be more.

  “Not talking, exactly,” she said. “More like arguing. Really loud. It didn’t sound good. He didn’t sound good.”

  “Do you think it might have something to do with the murder?” I asked.

  She shrugged her bony shoulders. “I guess I don’t really know. Sh-should I, like, talk to someone?”

  “If you think you know something…”

  She made a face. “Like the sheriff? He doesn’t like me, not since I rammed a bunch of mailboxes when I was, like, sixteen. He holds a grudge.”

  Been there and done that.

  Gavin McClaine’s smug face popped into my head. “There’s a new deputy in town,” I said, sounding like I was quoting a line from a Western movie. Not that he’d be much better than Hoss McClaine, but I kept that thought to myself. Gavin and his dad were both single-minded, passionate, and direct to the point of being rude, but Hoss McClaine was good at what he did, and the apple doesn’t usually fall far from the tree. I was betting Gavin was a fine deputy, just like his daddy.

  “How ’bout I tell y’all and you decide if it’s worth sharing?”

  My hands pressed harder against the table. I couldn’t believe I was getting sucked into another murder. Did Meemaw curse me? When she was alive, whatever she wanted, she got. That had been her Cassidy charm. Had she wanted me thoroughly wrapped up in Bliss’s small-town dramas? Was that why, for the second time since I’d been back home, I found myself in the thick of a murder investigation?

  I shook my head. “Gina, I’m just a dressmaker—”

  “But the scuttlebutt around town is that you helped figure out what happened to Nell Gellen.” She threw another glance around the bakery. The line at the counter had grown and the buzz of conversation had grown right alongside it. “Dang it all. I gotta get back.”

  “Okay—”

  She raised one hand, and just like that, I stopped. “Just listen,” she rushed on. “I know who Mr. Vance was talking to.”

  “You mean arguing with?” I asked.

  “Right. On his cell phone. Look—you know I’m adopted, right?”

  I nodded. I had heard the story about her adoption from my mother. Gina’s biological parents had made an arrangement with her adoptive parents before she was born. They’d already had four children, and Gina was just one too many. If she drove a few towns over, she had four siblings who hadn’t been given away. Poor thing.

  The women sitting across from us threw their heads back and giggled, their high-pitched laughter just a li
ttle bit grating this early in the morning, especially in light of the murder; though in their defense, they might well be ignorant about Macon Vance. It wasn’t just me. One or two of the teenaged boys looked just as aggravated by the laughter.

  “That’s why it struck me,” Gina was saying. “He kept repeating that his daughter had a right to know who her father is. Boy, I know what that feels like.”

  “Wait.” My mind whirled as I connected the dots. “He has a kid who doesn’t know he’s the father?”

  She shrugged, but she didn’t look unsure. “That’s what it sounded like.”

  “Do you know who it is?” I prompted when she didn’t offer anything else, but she shook her head. I paused, then asked the big question. “Who’s the mother?”

  She snorted. “Take your pick.”

  Right. The golf pro who got around.

  After a minute, Gina lowered her chin. “You look like you have an idea,” Gina said, her chin lowered, lips pouty.

  I pressed my fingertips between my tense eyebrows. “I do?”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  “I don’t. No ideas.” But as she scraped her chair back and started to stand, I decided to share my suspicion. “Unless…”

  She plopped back down. “Unless what?”

  “You said he made lots of unhappy housewives happy, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So what if he had an affair with a married woman and she got pregnant. That’s a pretty good reason to be kept out of the child’s life, right?”

  A dollop of color returned to Gina’s cheeks. “Hey, Harlow, that’s pretty good.” She sat up straight, looked off to the side like she was giving my idea considerable thought, but then she shook her head. “So then some angry woman, the mother of his child, stabbed him?”

  “I don’t know…” Unless a woman was particularly strong or had the element of surprise, it seemed unlikely that stabbing by scissors would be the method chosen for murder. Which meant…

  “The husband,” we both said at the same time.

  “If only we knew who his daughter is—was? No, is—,” Gina said, “we’d know who the pretend father is, and voila! We’d catch a murderer.”