“Goodness, yes,” Trudy said. She patted her wild updo, as if a single touch could tame the silvery flyaways.
“Before my grandparents were married, you mean.”
“Heavens, no,” Trudy said. “The way I heard the story, your mama was just a babe—”
Fern interrupted, picking up the story as if she and Trudy were one person telling it. “Zinnia and Jeb were havin’ trouble in the baby-making department—”
“Not like their daughter,” Trudy said under her breath.
“—and people around town said she was plumb sure it was Jeb’s fault.”
“Zinnia wanted to have a baby more than anything, so she went to Dalton—”
“Your grandfather,” Fern clarified, in case I didn’t know who she was talking about.
“—and propositioned him. She wanted him to father her child.”
“Shockin’,” Fern said.
“Utterly and completely,” Trudy agreed.
“But they didn’t… He didn’t…” My heart had stopped. Surely my grandfather, with his blue plaid shirts and belly hanging over his belt, hadn’t cheated on Nana. “They didn’t…”
Fern shook her head, looking at me like I’d gone cuckoo. “Heavens, no. Have you seen their daughter, Sandra? She’s the spitting image of Jeb.”
Fern piped up. “They’re just rumors. Probably not even true, but you see why there’s no love lost between Zinnia and your grandmother.”
The rift between the two women was like a boulder in my stomach, but I reminded myself that fighting over a man, and even trying to steal him away from another, was not at all the same thing as murder. Mrs. James could be guilty of loving my grandfather, but that didn’t make her a killer.
After Trudy and Fern finished filling me in on the final dress rehearsal, Trudy stood up. “Would you like to see our atelier?”
Like any dressmaker worth her salt, my pulse skittered and I practically flew off the sofa. Seeing another seamstress’s workshop was like crack to an addict. And the Lafayette sisters? From what I knew, they didn’t let anyone into their studio who wasn’t having a Victorian dress made. “I’d love to.”
Trudy’s step suddenly had bounce to it and even the tension Fern had been holding seemed to roll off her as we sidled through the kitchen, into the backyard, across a gravel path, and into a separate building faced with the same pink bricks as the main house. We walked through the sliding glass door and into a dressmaker’s wonderland. Victorian gowns, their hoops making the skirts as wide around as Christmas trees, hung on headless mannequins. “Resplendent” had been one of Maximilian’s favorite words. If he uttered it in your presence about a project you were working on, you could live on the praise for months and months. It was the only word that came to mind as I stared at the array of nearly finished dresses. Fourteen of them.
It felt like a dream room decked out in silks, satins, and velvets. Trains and ruffling, lace and ribbon, beads and sequins. Each gown was a work of art. Inwardly, I gave a huge sigh of relief. The first two dresses I’d been commissioned to make were just as ornate and showstopping as these. Libby’s was simpler. The dress, after all, had to fit the wearer. And Gracie’s? I still hadn’t decided what to do for her. But seeing the Lafayette sisters’ atelier and the presentation of gowns was filling my creative well with bolts of ideas.
“You do it all by hand?” I asked, my fingers floating over a pale rose-colored silk gown.
“Hand-done, each and every one.” Fern pointed to an ivory dress with tulle artfully draped along the bodice line. “You won’t see this attention to detail anywhere else in the country,” she said, exhibiting a wash of beading on one of the gowns. “Each bead is done one by one.”
“Corsets and petticoats?” I asked, although I knew the answer to every question in my mind. Yes, corsets, petticoats for the traditionalists, but crinoline for those who weren’t sticklers. A dress could weigh up to eighty pounds if it was heavy on the beading and had layers of petticoats. Wearing one would be like lugging around barbells, and that was one more reason I was glad I was well past the age of being a Margaret. At least that’s what I told myself.
“Ms. Cassidy?” Fern snapped her fingers in my face.
“Oh!” I blinked, lurching back a step. “I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
The look she gave me sent a shiver down my spine. Suspicious. Distrustful. As if she thought I were somehow secretly photographing the workshop so I could go back to Buttons & Bows and duplicate them all. “Who’s the girl you’ve added to the Margaret lineup?” she finally repeated.
Oh! They’d asked earlier, but we’d gotten sidetracked. “Her name’s Gracie Flores. She’s just the sweetest girl,” I gushed. “She’s become my right hand at my shop, you know. She already says she wants to go into fashion…” I trailed off when their mouths drooped to pronounced frowns. “What’s wrong?”
“Zinnia is okay with her being a Margaret?”
“Why wouldn’t she be?” I bristled, instantly reminded of why I hadn’t participated in the pageant when I was sixteen. Whoever was in charge wouldn’t have been okay with me. I wasn’t Margaret material because my grandmother and mother had turned their backs on the town tradition. “Gracie’s probably got more strength than Margaret Moffette Lea ever did,” I said, not knowing how much gumption the original Margaret had had. Probably quite a lot considering she’d married and sort of tamed Sam Houston, Texas’s most radical historical figure. “But yes, Mrs. James was—is—fine with adding Gracie. Like I said, we were going to write the pedigree—”
“No reason, dear,” Trudy said, steering me toward a row of sewing machines and sergers.
“Two without,” Fern mumbled behind me.
She had a bad habit of talking under her breath and it was beginning to get on my nerves. I bit my tongue, barely stopping myself from blurting out something I’d regret. They didn’t even know Gracie. I couldn’t hardly stand them judging her. The gowns on the headless mannequins suddenly felt like fashionable nineteenth-century female soldiers closing in. “Two what?” I asked, heavy on the accent, my tone somehow light and friendly.
Trudy shot her sister a hush up look, then said, “Just that Margarets usually come from more… established families, shall we say? Families like the Kincaids—”
“The Kincaids?” I said with a scoff. They’d been wrapped up in a murder not that long ago. They weren’t all that upstanding anymore.
“Gracie Flores isn’t your typical Margaret, is all,” Fern said, backtracking.
“But then again, Ferny, are there any typical girls, anymore?” In perfect sync, they both bowed their heads for a moment of silence over the lack of perfect Margarets.
As they raised their gazes again, I could suddenly picture Gracie in my mind, clear as a bell, dressed and primped in the sage green gown from Meemaw’s armoire. That would be her Margaret dress, I decided. No matter who it had once belonged to, it was going to have its second coming with Gracie Flores.
Chapter 10
The second I stepped through the flower-covered archway into my front yard, the scent of homemade cinnamon rolls encircled me. I closed my eyes, breathing in the ribbon of sweetness, letting it nearly lift me up and carry me up the porch steps. Nana must have let herself in, I realized as I took the little handmade sign saying I’d be back at eleven o’clock off the hook to the right of the door. Buttons & Bows wasn’t the type of shop scads of people happened by. It was a destination shop, a place you came if you wanted a custom dress made, or were hoping for a designer off-the-rack outfit. Closing every now and then to run errands wasn’t going to put me out of business.
I followed the cinnamon aroma through the dining room, stopping short in the kitchen. “Nana?”
My grandmother was not there baking pastries. “Mama?” I peeked through the door next to the butter yellow refrigerator. The washer and dryer sat just beyond the kitchen. The clothes that I’d moved into the dryer that morning were now neatly folded in a wic
ker laundry basket sitting just outside the utility room. “Mama?” Coming in and finishing my laundry wasn’t something my cowgirl mother, Tessa, tended to do, but was something Nana would do. But Nana’s Nubian goats followed her everywhere, a definite drawback to her charm. And they took the majority of her time. I didn’t think she’d take time from her new goat milk pomegranate moisturizer lotions to fold my wash and make cinnamon rolls.
No, the kitchen was empty, but the sweet smell lingered. As I shut the mudroom door, the sweet smell of the cinnamon rolls quickly hit a high note and then, as if someone had snapped their fingers, it simply vanished.
“Meemaw,” I whispered under my breath. Of course.
The faint whisper of a laugh floated in the room.
“I went to see the Lafayette sisters today,” I said to the empty room. I had taken to chatting with my great-grandmother, filling her in on my days. Meemaw was my secret, but one I’d have to share with Mama and Nana before too long. A thread of guilt wound through me each time I saw them and didn’t reveal that Loretta Mae wasn’t quite as dearly departed as they thought.
The soft sound of whispered words came to me, but dissolved into the air before I could make them out. She was trying to communicate with me… or maybe it was me that hadn’t figured out how to hear her. Either way, our interaction was more one-sided than I liked. I talked. She listened. And flung clothes out of the closet, moved my sewing notions, and flipped pages of books and magazines to communicate what she wanted with me.
“Mrs. James asked me to help her with the pageant,” I continued as I pulled a container of Nana’s goat cheese from the refrigerator, a box of crackers from the cupboard, and poured myself a tall glass of sweet tea. “Have you ever seen their atelier? Fourteen gowns, and they were all spectacular. It was like walking into a showroom. They do all the beading by hand. Did you know people get on their schedule when their daughters are newborns? They’d have to. All that handwork is so time-consuming, but you know, I could feel their love for it all. And I found out they made Nana’s Margaret gown—”
I stopped short as the red-and-white-checkerboard curtains under the sink fluttered suddenly and the plantation shutters on the window above rattled. The lights, which I hadn’t switched on, flickered, and the trickling sound of water filling the mechanisms of the freezer’s ice maker magnified. “What? What’s wrong?”
The Dutch door leading to the back porch flung open. “Thelma Louise,” Nana called over her shoulder. “You stay put, you hear?” As she stepped out of her navy blue Crocs and turned toward me, the mayhem in the kitchen instantly stopped.
“Hey, Nana.”
My grandmother, standing there in her pristine white socks, stared at me. “Child, what in heaven’s name are you doin’?”
I was standing in the center of the kitchen, the box of crackers under my arm, the container of chèvre in one hand, the class of sweet tea in the other, and a surprised expression on my face. It was as if I’d been frozen for a moment and Nana’s voice brought me back. “I was just… er… getting ready to have some of your cheese,” I finished. I’d almost revealed the secret—that I’d been chatting away with Meemaw—but the chaotic interruption made me hold my tongue and a sliver of skin at the hairline on my forehead tingled. I felt it was a sign she didn’t want Nana to know about her yet.
“Well, what are you waitin’ for?” She took the cracker box and plopped down at the table, her fingers fluttering to her hairline, almost as if she were mirroring me. I started, realizing that the prickling sensation stemmed from the exact spot where all the Cassidy women’s dark hair streaked blond. Odd, I thought. Were we feeling the same thing, or was it a coincidence? Did she sense Loretta Mae?
“You buy the same crackers Meemaw did,” Nana said.
I set two plates and a knife on the table and she began spreading the chèvre, filling up both the plates with the cracker rounds.
“Oh.” I looked at the box, realizing that it was the same brand. “I hadn’t realized.”
“You’re more like her than your mama or me ever were. You know that?”
I nodded. I was well into my thirties, but I felt like I was finally figuring out who I was and what I wanted and to hear that I reminded Nana of her mother filled me with a comfortable sense of home. “I didn’t think I wanted to come back to Bliss,” I said, “but Meemaw was right.”
“Meemaw was always right. What Meemaw wanted, Meemaw got.” She chuckled. “Right down to the crackers,” she said, pointing to the box. “I bet you didn’t even know you had a hankering for ’em when you bought ’em.” She nodded, as if she’d experienced the very same thing. “Happens to me all the time. I don’t know what I want, then, bam!” She slammed her open palm down on the table. “It hits me and a memory of Meemaw hits me at the same time. She had a gift, and sometimes…” She trailed off for a minute, staring off in the distance. “Sometimes I think she’s still here.”
Sometimes she is, I wanted to say.
As we finished our snack, I asked Nana, “Can you stay and help do a little beading?” I’d learned to sew from Meemaw, but Nana knew her way around a needle and thread. She was particularly good with the tedious hand-beading. Whenever I needed extra help, she usually sat by the open window and chatted under her breath with Thelma Louise and whatever other of her goats happened off her property and onto mine. She beaded and hand-sewed three times faster than I could, but her attention span was ten times shorter.
The Lafayette sisters had agreed to meet me at the country club at three o’clock to take a look at what was done and what still needed doing. That didn’t leave me much time and Libby’s gown beckoned.
“I can work for a spell.” I followed as she padded toward the workroom. “I have a new batch of lotion I’m working on,” she said over her shoulder, “but it can wai—” She stopped in her tracks and—“Oomph!”—I plowed right into her, lurching her past the French doors leading to the workroom and right into the old armoire Will and his friends had moved from the attic.
“This is just where it used to be,” she said, lightly running her hand down the side paneling of the wood.
“I remember. Red and I used to play hide-and-seek and whenever I hid in the armoire, he never found me.” My brother would shout my name from the top of his lungs. He’d even open the doors of the armoire and take a quick peak, but I’d shrink back into the corner behind the stacks of fabric, careful not to put my weight on the center floorboard where the buckled wood popped. It was as if I blended right into the paneling itself. I’d giggle to myself, then jump out when his back was turned, scaring him half to death.
It was only when I was about ten years old—too big to fit inside the cupboard without making the base creak and moan—that I realized that the armoire wasn’t magical and couldn’t transport me to Narnia. That was about the same time I figured out that Red only pretended not to see me. “Why was it in the attic?” I’d recently asked Mama the same question.
“No idea,” she said. “Meemaw never would say why she moved it up there.”
Nana’s wavy hair had taken on a charge of electricity, the flyaway strands reaching toward the ceiling. “How did you get it back down here?”
“Will Flores brought some friends by and they moved it down. It was tough. They got stuck on the landing, and I hadn’t taken out the—”
She pulled open the doors and gasped, cutting me off. “Gowns,” she said, the word like a heavy breath floating in the room. “Oh my word. I haven’t seen these since… Where did they come from?” Her fingers fluttered over the fabrics just as mine had and although Nana was a goat-whisperer and her charm had nothing to do with sewing, I could almost hear her heartbeat speed up and see her breath settle over the silk.
I sat on the red plush settee. There had to be a reason these dresses had been kept secret all these years. Finally, I broached the subject in the forefront of my mind. “It was locked,” I said. “I used different needles to pick the lock and when we—”
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br /> She looked up sharply. “We?”
“Gracie was with me.”
The green of Nana’s eyes, so similar to mine, had grown concentrated. She waved at me. “Yes, yes. Go on.”
“I used different needles to pick the lock,” I repeated. “We opened the doors and there they were.”
“Three dresses. They didn’t use to be in here. I didn’t know Meemaw still had ’em.”
Nana was known to turn on her heels and blow out of a place if she didn’t like the subject of conversation or didn’t feel like talking anymore. I drew in a deep breath and gathered up my words, letting them waft out of my mouth gently so they wouldn’t send her scurrying back to her farm. “They are the… pageant dresses, right? Margaret gowns?”
She dropped her hand to her side and stood stone still, her back to me. She hadn’t bolted, which was good, but she wasn’t bursting with an accounting of the dresses’ history, either. The air in the room thickened and felt suddenly heavy, the way it feels before a storm hits and the thunder rolls across a dark sky. “They’re a whole lot more than that, Harlow,” she finally said.
My brows lifted. “What do you mean, Nana?”
“I wore this one,” she said, taking the yellow gown out of the cupboard and holding it out. “The Lafayette sisters made it.”
“Why didn’t Meemaw make it?”
She closed her eyes like she was remembering. “They’d just moved from the Panhandle and missed their town, bless their hearts. They’ve long since settled here, but at the time, I reckon Meemaw was just trying to help ’em build their business.”
“It’s what she wanted, and I guess it worked,” I said. “They have a good business.” Ah, Meemaw. Tears pricked behind my eyelids. She was with me, I knew, but I missed her touch. The sound of her voice. Her laughter. Breath caught in my throat as the sheer curtains on the picture window facing Mockingbird Lane fluttered. She was here now.
The faint scent of lavender settled my emotions. “Who wore the other two?” I asked Nana. Those dresses had a story to tell; I was sure of it.
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