Deborah sipped from the glass of water her maid held, acting weak, but not too weak to send eyeball daggers my sister’s way.
When it came to an unplanned pregnancy, everyone usually blamed the girl, especially the boy’s parents. So why wasn’t Deborah blaming Jasmine?
All Sherry did was agree to marry her son.
So Deborah blamed Sherry for what? Saying yes? Did the pending wedding, ah, or the announcement, bring Jasmine to Mystick Falls?
Speculation, I reminded myself, did not a murder solve, and I had enough speculation to muck up the facts but good. I’d do well to separate my “clues” into two columns, “speculation” and “fact.”
Frustrated by the number of questions without answers and by the charged silence, I offered Werner dessert and coffee.
“Thanks,” he said, accepting both and taking them down to the river.
I offered the same to everyone, and most accepted coffee, at least. Even the Vancortland maids were in shock, because they didn’t move to action until I handed one of them an empty pastry tray.
Deborah was clearly not herself or she would have been snapping orders.
Fiona arrived in less than fifteen minutes. Werner saw her and crossed the yard to the patio. With his help, we caught Fiona up on what she’d missed.
Ready to resume questioning, Werner checked his notes. “Now, young Mr. Vancortland, can you tell me where you were when Jasmine Updike was murdered?”
Sherry raised her chin. “We’d had a misunderstanding and we were making up in my father’s boathouse.”
“We were making love in her father’s boathouse,” Justin countered.
Ah. Sex. That kind of vanishing act. Bummer. I’d thought of that and dismissed it. I needed a brush-up course.
Nick raised a speaking brow, as if offering his services. I rolled my eyes and he shrugged.
I should have figured it out, but I’d discounted the possibility, because they were keeping it a secret. Everybody expected an engaged couple to have a sex life. There was hardly anything incriminating in the admission. But were they telling the truth? That particular location was a pretty dicey alibi.
While some boathouses were actually buildings, ours was more like a three-sided shack, the open side facing the river and any boaters who happened by. A hard pill and all that.
Werner definitely had trouble swallowing. “You’ll pardon me,” he said, “if I’m skeptical, under the circumstances. Any witnesses?”
“That’s a kinky damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t question,” I snapped.
Werner raised both brows my way.
Sherry covered her face and started to cry.
Justin grinned. “A boatload of tourists. A riverboat full.”
Sherry all out wailed.
Werner kept his head down as he took notes, but I’m sure I caught the corner of his mouth turn upward for an instant. “We’ll see if we can trace any of the riverboat passengers who were on that tour,” he said.
Justin grinned. “The tourists did plenty of cheering, hooting, wolf-whistling, and clapping. I’m sure there are a few snapshots out there as well. I don’t care if you plaster my face, though maybe it should be my bare ass, all over the six o’clock news, just find us a witness.”
Deborah looked ready to faint again, but she rallied, her gaze snapped my sister’s way.
Maybe I should worry about Sherry’s safety.
The paramedics arrived and took Deborah’s vitals, pronounced her fit, and left. Deborah would always land on her feet.
Nick pulled me aside. “Why didn’t Sherry tell us where she and Justin had been?”
I straightened his Hugo Boss tie. “She’s mortified.”
“I wouldn’t waste those bragging rights.”
Neither would I. “Meet me at midnight.” I winked.
“Date.” He rubbed his nose. “Wear your lucky panties,” he whispered.
I got closer. “Which ones?”
“Hot lips.”
Ah, white silk and lace with mouth prints in red “lipstick” and “Kiss My Sass” on the back. “Done.”
“For what it’s worth,” Nick said, “I think Justin and your sister are telling the truth.” He grinned. “You can’t make up something that kinky.”
“I’m glad you have faith in them.”
“And I admire them, too.”
I tugged Nick off the patio and around to the side of the house. I couldn’t wait any longer to ask him for a favor. Werner’s latest round of questions had shot my sense of urgency into overdrive. I needed to do some serious investigative work.
“Why wait till midnight?” Nick asked, pulling me into his arms. “Let’s give Cort’s boathouse a practice run.”
With both arms, I elbowed my way out of Nick’s hold and stayed a safe distance away. “You have a one-track man-brain. How do you solve FBI cases?”
“I’m normal . . . when you’re not around.”
“Glad to hear it. Now try being normal when I am.”
“It was worth a shot, and Cort’s got a great boathouse.”
I huffed. “I need a background check.”
Nick aped my huff. “Fine, a background check on who?”
“Anything on a maid who worked here about twenty to twenty-nine years ago. Her first name was Pearl. She grew up here and stayed to work for a few years. Her mother was Cort’s nurse. I don’t know their last name but her mother came from New Orleans.”
“Nurse? Was Cort sick as a kid?”
“No, she was his nanny. You know, she took care of him in the nursery. It’s a rich-people thing.”
“Gotcha. Why do you want to know about this Pearl, precisely?”
I cringed inwardly at the question. Fiona believed the universe sent me information for a reason. I wasn’t sure what I believed. My visions came from the wedding dress, though, and solving Jasmine’s murder seemed somehow linked to my sister’s wedding or the dress. In any case, I wasn’t ready to tell Nick about my psychic visions. I might never be. “Let’s say I’m playing a hunch.”
“That sounds like you,” Nick said. We returned to the patio with his hand at my nape and my mind on our midnight date.
Werner stood front and center with Justin as his target. “How can you explain a two-year lease for an apartment in walking distance of Harvard signed by you and Jasmine while you were both enrolled there?”
Justin’s guilty expression begged Sherry to understand. “You had dumped me, Sherry. I was mad and on the rebound. Our relationship—mine and Jasmine’s, if you can call it that—didn’t last a week, but she was on scholarship and her credit sucked.” He shrugged. “I cosigned as a ‘thank you’ to her for tutoring me in Bio.”
“Bio! Great,” Sherry snapped. “I’ll bet you aced it and got stuck for a bundle. Oh!” She started to cry again. “You cheated on me.”
“You broke up with me. I wanted to get you back, but I only hurt myself. One week out of a six-month breakup. It was awful being with anybody else. I only wanted you. Sherry, you have to believe me.”
“I don’t know if I can. I’m not sure there will be a wedding.”
Deborah perked up at that.
Sherry’s stubborn Cutler chin came up. “Was Jasmine’s baby yours?”
“Of course not!”
My sister was not a crier, but she’d been weepy since the murder. True, she had reason; the Jezebel trying to steal her fiancé had died in our house, and Sherry was the prime suspect. Now she finds out that her true love once lived with the Jezebel.
“I didn’t live in the apartment with Jasmine,” Justin repeated for Werner’s sake, while he fought Sherry to take her hand. “I spent one week dating Jasmine, but I didn’t spend one night, not one minute, in Jasmine Updike’s bed, car, hammock, boat, or boathouse. Ever.”
Nick snapped his fingers. “Hammock,” he whispered. “Nice.”
Sherry turned to leave but Justin sprinted after her and caught her up in his arms despite her struggle to get free. “You,” he said
. “I love you.”
Werner closed his notebook. “Then you won’t mind coming down to the station with us right now, Mr. Vancortland, to answer a few more questions, make a formal statement, and give us a DNA sample.”
Eighteen
The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.—COCO CHANEL
Early the next morning, I opened my eyes and realized that I was trying to hit snooze on my cell phone.
When I focused, I read the caller’s name and opened my phone. “Aunt Fiona, what’s wrong now?” I asked, sitting up, not sure what time I’d been roused from sleep.
“Everything that was wrong yesterday, dear, I’m sorry to say, but nothing new. I do want to tell you that your father, Sherry, and I stayed with Justin at the police station until one. Your father couldn’t have gotten your sister home until after two, and she was still upset about Justin and Jasmine, so if she finally fell asleep, don’t wake her.”
At least I didn’t have a boathouse tryst to feel guilty about. How could I have followed through with my sister in such a state? But I had taken a rain check.
I fell against my pillows. “You woke me to tell me not to wake my sister?”
A chuckle that I loved smoothed my not-so-ruffled feathers. “Forgive me, sweetie, but I seem to remember you making a breakfast picnic out of watching the sun rise.”
“There is no sun in New York, but there are plenty of all-night clubs. I morphed.”
“Ah, well, maybe you’ll morph back while you’re home. At any rate, I did have another reason for calling. You asked me about the Underhill Funeral Chapel carriage house and I wanted to tell you where to pick up the key so you could take a look at it.”
My heart took on the beat of a parade drum. I sat straighter, a John Philip Sousa march in my chest, probably because I was home in Mystic, Americana to the core, where I’d watched so many parades from the sidewalk beside that very building.
Home. Maybe deep down, I wanted to stay.
“Who, where, when?” I lowered my legs to the floor as I sat on the side of the bed.
Had the building enticed me even then? At parades where I shunned shorts and wore ruffled dresses with shiny Mary Janes, held the perfect purse for the perfect outfit, while devouring cotton candy, my hand in my mother’s?
In memory, it seemed so.
“Let me grab a paper and pencil,” I told Fiona.
“Certainly, dear.”
I looked at the phone. She’d sounded . . . sarcastic. I grabbed a pencil and aimed it at a notebook. “Shoot.”
“All right, listen carefully, because it’s complicated. Take a right out of your driveway, drive a tenth of a mile, and get the key from old Mrs. Sweet.”
I fumbled the phone and caught it halfway to the floor. “Aunt Fiona, are you there?”
“Yes, dear.”
“Old Dolly Sweet owns the Underhill Funeral Chapel carriage house? Is she a granddaughter or something?”
“Something. It was a juicy old scandal when I was a girl. She had an affair with Underhill, who was years older than her at the time, and to make matters worse, he left her the property.”
I grinned. “Goddess bless the Mystick Falls gossip mill! Can we have a scandal sleepover sometime, you, me, and Eve, and you can dish up the dirt?”
Fiona chuckled. “Maybe if you stick around long enough, you’ll unearth some dirt of your own. Take your father to see the building with you, dear, and bring a flashlight. It’s falling down. It could be dangerous. Have a nice day and let me know what you think.”
I smiled, sat back against my pillows, and wallowed in anticipation. Okay, don’t wake Sherry. Good thing I had faith in her love for Justin or I’d feel guilty about doing something for myself, like touring the carriage house, for a couple of hours.
I hit speed dial. “Eve, wake up,” I said when she mumbled hello. “We’re touring the Underhill carriage house today. Just you and me.”
She hung up on me. That’s the kind of friends we were. We could flip each other off—metaphorically speaking—and still be BFFs.
A half hour later, my phone rang as I stepped from the shower.
“What time?” Eve asked when I answered.
“Eleven. I have to fit old Mrs. Sweet for a new dress and—”
Eve growled. “You woke me at dawn so I could meet you at eleven?”
“Okay, make it ten. I’ll go right over to the Sweets. They’ll feed me breakfast.”
Eve did that metaphorical thing again with a mumbled “up yours,” which of course meant she’d be there.
In New York, morning communication, which ranked right up there with taxicab- and commuter-eze, had no bearing on the language used by the working population during the rest of the day. Evidently we’d brought a mild case home with us.
At the Sweets, I followed the scent of cherry pie to their back door and knocked on the screen, though I could see them drinking tea and bickering, their favorite sport.
They’d been up for hours, the ambitious old things, and by the scents and clay flowerpots lined up out here, one had been gardening and the other baking.
My breakfast consisted of vanilla hazelnut tea and cherry pie. Yummers. Old Doll tried to feed me a lemon square in addition, but her daughter-in-law slapped her hand. “Leave her be, Momma. I’m sure she wants to keep her figure to find a man.”
I nearly spit out my tea and ended up having a coughing fit. More tea was their prescription. By the time we finished breakfast, I had enough caffeine in me to fly over the Underhill building.
In her bedroom, afterward, I made old Doll strip to her slip, so I could take her measurements. “Now what kind of dress do you want?”
“I want one like Katharine Hepburn wore in The Philadelphia Story.”
I sat back on my knees. “Which scene?”
“The wedding scene, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, remembering a pale pink swath of silk organza in my collection, a gown she might like better than a stylish new dress, but I measured her anyway. Might as well be sure the vintage layered pink confection would fit. “Mrs. Sweet, do you remember all the brides who wore the Vancortland gown?”
She chuckled. “I’m old, but I don’t have amnesia. The first bride to wear it married the year I was born, cupcake, but I remember the rest, and I’ve seen pictures of the first.”
“Deborah showed us pictures of them last night, but, you know, I have the strangest sense that I didn’t see them all.”
“You saw five albums?” she asked as I made her raise an arm.
“I did, but one of them was Justin’s baby pictures. Deborah couldn’t find her wedding album, but we saw the rest.”
“Well, it’s five brides with Deborah. Far as I know, only one other girl might have tried on that dress.”
Hel-lo! “How long ago was that and who was she?”
“She was the maid who ran away. Bit of a scandal, that.”
I looked up from the floor, measuring tape forgotten. “Why?”
“Because she was Vancortland’s first love. Vancortland Four, I mean—Cort—not your Sherry’s man. I think her name was Ruby or some such. She and Cort were engaged and she broke his heart when she left. He married Deborah on the rebound. Maybe that’s why she’s so sour.”
Okay, okay, suspicion confirmed, but what did it mean and how did it fit into the murder—if it did fit into the murder? I added this new information to the scraps I’d snipped from various sources since Jasmine’s death. So far all I could do with them was make a crazy quilt.
I got off my knees. “Measurements finished. Want to look at dress designs, though I didn’t bring any that look like Tracy Lord’s wedding dress.”
“I really had my heart set on that one.”
“Fine. I’ve got a couple of design ideas and I’ll bring them around later. I have another errand to run first, though. Did Fiona tell you I was coming?”
“No, sweetie, you told us you were coming.”
Sharp
as a tack, my father called her, and with good reason. “Okay, did Fiona tell you that someone was interested in the Underhill building?”
“Yes, and how stupid are they? It’s older than me, though my memories of it are as vivid, glorious, and sweet as ever.”
Okaay. I cleared my throat. “It’s me. I’m the stupid one. I mean, I fell in love with the building when I was a little girl. I found myself going right to it the night I came home.”
“You want Dante’s building?”
“Dante?”
Dolly’s eyes went all starry. “Dante Underhill, the undertaker’s son who became the undertaker.”
A sweet-talking undertaker, evidently, one she still missed. “I don’t know if I want the building yet. I do know that I need to look at it.”
“What would you do with it?”
“I’m not sure, but I’m thinking vintage clothes might play a role.”
“You mean like for a museum?”
Hmm. “I hadn’t thought of that.” But I shouldn’t dismiss it. Some of my finds were museum quality. “Maybe. Why? Does what I do with it matter? I mean, if I was interested, I’d buy it from you.”
“Oh, I understand that. I’d have only one stipulation to the sale. It was in Dante’s will that I never tear it down, and I’d want to sell it with the same stipulation.”
“Oh, it’s too beautiful. I’d never—” I stilled. “Why? Is there a body buried under it?”
Old Dolly laughed so hard, I had to help her to a chair. When she caught her breath, she cupped my face. “You think it’s beautiful.” She’d spoken with awe. “Everybody else thinks it’s an eyesore. A shack. I’ve fought for years to keep it there. I kept it up to building and electrical code standards, so it wouldn’t be condemned. Pissed off the Mystick Falls town council once a year. A real perk!”
Her grin was contagious. “You mean it has electricity and running water?”
“Sure does.”
“Why is it boarded up, then?”
The old girl blushed and giggled. “To keep kids from breaking in and using it for a love nest.”
Oh, Lordy, I wanted Dolly Sweet’s old love nest.
Nineteen
Success is often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.—COCO CHANEL
A Veiled Deception Page 13