A Veiled Deception

by Annette Blair

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know if Mrs. Sweet realizes it’s here. She may want it.”

  My father gave me a second look. “I don’t think any centenarian wants a hearse, honey.”

  Aunt Fiona raved over my idea for a fitting room while my father grunted noncommittally.

  The caskets stopped them both in their tracks and though they stood closer to each other than they had in eighteen years, they didn’t touch.

  I entertained them on the way home by telling them about Eve scaring herself by opening them.

  Aunt Fiona laughed so hard, she caught my father’s begrudging attention.

  Maybe, with Sherry getting married, I shouldn’t move home. Maybe, without his children to distract him, Dad might turn his mind to settling this feud between them.

  Before going up to Aunt Fiona’s garage loft for the dress I thought Dolly Sweet might like, the one that loosely reminded me of the wedding dress from The Philadelphia Story, I kissed Dad and Aunt Fiona good-bye.

  Dad grunted and walked back toward our house without a good-bye for either of us. Stubborn, that man.

  With Dolly’s vintage gown in a preservation box beside me, I drove to the Sweets’.

  As I parked, Dolly appeared on the opposite side of the front screen door. Despite the wiry white hair escaping her bun and more than a century’s worth of wrinkles, she looked as eager as a girl.

  We had so much to talk about, I didn’t know where to start, but when she let me in, she kissed my cheek and invaded my space. “Did you see him?” she whispered.

  I fell back against the doorjamb. “Who?”

  “Dante, of course. Shh. Ethel’s out back.”

  Dolly hooked her arm in mine and led me out the front door. “Let’s take a little walk. Slow,” she added. “And you have to do the steering.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’ve always been such a dear girl.”

  This from the woman who’d wanted to whack me with a broom once. “Seems to me I made you frightfully mad when I was a child, but I don’t remember why.”

  “Hah. You picked my prize roses. I expected to win a blue ribbon for them and you picked them so I couldn’t enter the competition.”

  I gasped. “No wonder you were spitting mad.”

  “What possessed you?” she asked.

  “My mother wasn’t recovering from her accident the way we hoped, and I wanted to see her smile. It worked.”

  Mrs. Sweet squeezed my arm. “Then they went for a good cause.” We walked in silence for a minute, each lost in thought, until she turned to me. “So, did you see him?”

  She couldn’t possibly mean what I thought. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  Her gaze caught mine and held. “Yes, you do. Top hat, black tux with tails, and gray pinstripe pants. That’s how I thought Cary Grant should have dressed to marry Katharine Hepburn at the end of The Philadelphia Story. It’s a perfect movie, really, except for what he wore to marry her. Don’t you think Dante looks like Cary?”

  “Looked,” I said. “Past tense. He’s dead.”

  “Hah. You had to see him or you wouldn’t be agreeing with me about his looks. After I inherited the building, I went to close the place up and he showed himself to me.”

  “I so hope you mean that he appeared to you.”

  Twenty-two

  Fashions fade, style is eternal.

  —YVES SAINT LAURENT

  I learned something from Dolly in that moment. After your hundredth birthday, don’t try to laugh, breathe, and walk at the same time. Her amusement brought on a fit of coughing and some major imbalance.

  My heart raced while I sat her on a neighbor’s wall so she could breathe, please God. I might very well have killed her with that joke.

  When she caught her breath, I released mine. “Are you all right?”

  “This is the most fun I’ve had in years, but you can’t tell anyone that I saw a ghost,” she said, “or Ethel will put me in a home. You’ll keep my secret, won’t you, dear, about my hottie ghost?”

  “If you keep mine. He is gorgeous. He said he still thinks about you.”

  “Oh.” She covered her trembling mouth. “You’ve made an old lady very happy.”

  “He congratulates you on your hundred and third birthday.”

  My God, Dolly glowed. She must really have been in love. She wagged a finger at me. “You should be honored. He doesn’t appear to just anyone.”

  “I know. Eve didn’t see him and he was standing right beside me.”

  “Are you interested in buying the place? You shouldn’t wait too long to decide. I’m not getting any younger.”

  “I’d need to have it appraised, and inspected.”

  “No, dear, don’t have it inspected or valued. Your taxes will skyrocket. Let them think it’s still a shack until you turn it into . . . what do you want it for?”

  I explained my idea, details emerging as I did.

  Dolly tilted her head. “You know, I always thought there were fashions that could have stood the test of time.”

  “Precisely. But, Dolly, there are valuable antiques in your building.”

  “What? The hearses?”

  “One hearse.”

  “When you got to the top of the stairs, did you go left?”

  “I couldn’t because there’s a wall there.”

  “Right, because the door is cut into the wall toward the front of the building. You’d have to be looking for the cuts to find it. The key I gave you opens it. It leads to a storage room over the horse stalls.”

  “Of course. I hadn’t accounted for that space upstairs. Another hearse?” I asked.

  “At least one and some other stuff. Odd things. I forget what exactly. The hearses were outdated, but Dante’s father had loved them, so Dante stored them away.”

  “Is Dante as nice as he looks?”

  “He is.”

  No, he was, I thought.

  Dolly smiled like a dreamy-eyed schoolgirl. “Did you notice the names of the horses in brass at the back of each stall?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “One brass plaque says Dolly. Dante named his favorite filly after me. It’s a sound building.”

  “Seems scary not having it appraised or inspected, but I see your point. My dad seemed to think it was sound, too. How much do you want for it?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that ever since you left. I’m out of the kind of time and energy I’d need to spend the money I have. Dante left me money, too, you know? Lots of it. Ethel will get most of that. I mean she’s put up with me all these years. I haven’t always been easy, but neither has she. She thinks you’ll need to spend fifty thousand, maybe more, to fix the place, and she could be right. I haven’t been inside in years.”

  That amount shocked me, but I tried not to let it show. Her selling price would be the deal breaker then. But I could get a mortgage on it if I had to.

  “With expenses like that, you can’t afford to pay much,” Dolly said. “Would ten thousand dollars be too much?”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly, then I shut my mouth so I wouldn’t catch flies, as my nana used to say.

  “Too much,” Dolly said. “I knew it. Five thousand then.”

  “No, no, I don’t want to take you to the cleaners, Dolly. That’s a prime piece of commercial property. A corner lot. I could turn around and sell it for . . . a bundle.”

  “But you won’t. Dante will have his home and you’ll have your dream.”

  “How do you know it’s my dream?”

  “Everybody knows you kept your mother’s clothes at Fee’s and bought more.”

  Of course everybody knew, everybody except my father, until today.

  “Cupcake, you love vintage.” Dolly covered my hand with hers. “I want you to have it. You brought up your sisters and brothers like a little mother when you should have been out playing. You had no childhood. I’ve lived a good long life. Bet I’ve had more fun than you. I
had that fling with Dante, not unlike yours with Nick, I guess.”

  My jaw dropped.

  She chuckled. “I can see that tree from my back bedroom on the second floor. You started young. I was a bit worried about you back then, but you’ve held your own and you were due for some fun.”

  She tilted her head. “Still, I don’t think your Nick is as attentive as Dante was. Always going off on assignment. You should make him stay home more.”

  “I can’t believe you’ve known about me and Nick since the beginning. Does the whole of Mystick Falls, including Mystic proper, know how long we’ve been . . . together?” Sort of.

  “Of course not. Not even Ethel. I know when to be discreet. Nobody knew about me and Dante, either.”

  That’s what you think. Scrap!

  She patted my knee. “To hell with the money. I’m deeding Dante’s carriage house over to you for the cost of this year’s taxes.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t just take it—no, wait, how much are this year’s taxes?”

  The old lady cackled. “Reasonable for a prime piece of commercial real estate on the corner of West Main and Bank. Sell one of the hearses and you could pay your taxes, maybe for more than a year.”

  Right. I’m sure there are loads of hearse collectors out there. “Are you certain about the hearses?”

  “Nobody my age wants a hearse, believe me.”

  “That’s what my father said.”

  Dolly grinned. “I have no attachment to the building or its contents, only to the man who owned them. And I love you for saving me the cost of taxes. Open your shop. There’s no price between friends.”

  We started back toward her house, me doing the steering. “Can I keep the key for a couple of days so Nick and Alex can see it?”

  “Of course, dear, and I’ll have Fiona draw up the property transfer papers. The title will be clear, I assure you.”

  I got Dolly home safe and sat her on her sofa. “Oh, wait. I brought you something. Almost forgot in my excitement.”

  I fetched the gown from the car, and then I had to break it out of its preservation box. “It’s a 1937 Chanel,” I said, opening it in front of her, “and quite reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn’s wedding dress.”

  Dolly applauded when I removed it from the box and then she got silent as it unfolded itself from the waist down. I shook it out. “Pink froth and layers,” I said. A pricey prize of a gown, but nothing compared to the Underhill carriage house.

  She tilted her head. “How much would I have to pay for that if I was a collector?”

  “There’s no price between friends.”

  She nodded. “No need to make me a dress. This is the one.”

  I nodded, too, because I knew it. “You can wear it to next year’s birthday party with the governor.”

  “I don’t know about that, dear, but I’ll certainly be wearing it when I leave to join Dante on the other side.”

  Twenty-three

  In fact . . . fashion was also inspired by history.

  —CHRISTIAN LACROIX

  The next morning, I drove to Deborah’s to pick up the wedding gown we’d forgotten at Vancortland House in the excitement of the Wiener raid the other night. I needed to get serious about fitting Sherry and redesigning the gown because time was running out . . . in the event there would still be a wedding and not an arrest.

  No, I refused to buy into the fact that nothing had gone right since I came home. Instead, I’d make it right. I’d alter the gown and envision a wedding. Never mind that I might be the next murder victim when Deborah saw what I did to the gown.

  I chuckled, imagining her expression when Sherry and my dad walked up the aisle.

  I turned my mind to figuring out how to keep the gown’s train, given the new design. Two possibilities came to mind: attaching the train where the skirt swirled out from the fitted body at the thighs or removing the original train and making Sherry a cathedral veil from the same barely there gossamer lace as the coat.

  I’d had some lace catalogs overnighted from New York and found an amazing Bruges lace—known as Binche or magic lace—from an artisan on the coast of Belgium. There was no question. Magic it would be.

  As I gave my name to Deborah’s surveillance robot, I thought about Dolly Sweet, who knew she’d be wearing her Katharine Hepburn dress for her funeral.

  Seriously, what hundred-year-old wouldn’t? And yet, she’d fooled me into being happy for her. Probably because she thought of going to Dante as something more like a wedding.

  It also creeped the scrap out of me to think I might eventually have two chatty ghosts in residence at the carriage house, because Dante wasn’t “on the other side,” though maybe he’d leave the building if Dolly was finally waiting for him. Who knew? Maybe she was what he’d left unfinished, after all, and they were meant to be together for eternity.

  One could only hope.

  Then there was the matter of telling my dad that I had actually acquired “the shack,” as he calls it, for the nebulous price of taxes.

  Cortland House looked less ostentatious the second time around, without the last bright sunburst before dusk gilding it. The dozen or so police cars out front did not add to its ambience.

  Son of a stitch! What now? Had Justin’s DNA matched the fetus? I didn’t want my sister to be the prime suspect, but I didn’t want her heart broken, either.

  Deborah met me at the door by throwing herself into my arms. Huh? “Madeira, you’re just the person I’d want beside me at a time like this.”

  “A time like what? Why me?”

  “Because you tried to help when I fainted last night.”

  “But you wouldn’t let me.”

  “I was embarrassed,” she said.

  Lucky me. A red-letter week: on the downside, a dead body, a sister with a broken heart, and an exasperated father. On the upside, two new friends: a hottie ghost and a strutting society peacock. Or peahen, I supposed. However, knowing Deborah, she’d surely appropriate her mate’s colorful plumage.

  With no other choice, I slipped an arm around her and went inside. “What’s going on?” I asked, watching two policemen upending vases in the foyer as if searching for drugs.

  Deborah huffed. “They have a warrant!”

  “How dare they!”

  Her head came up and I tried to look innocent.

  “Did they say why?” And did they plan to stay for a week, because that’s how long it would take to search the place. A month, maybe.

  “No, they showed Cort the warrant and invaded. When I protested, Cort told me to—” Her eyes filled. “He told me to ‘be quiet.’ He’s never spoken to me like that before.”

  About time somebody did, but maybe not Cort. “Is Detective Werner here?”

  “I’m right here,” Werner said, coming our way.

  Deborah snubbed him and walked away.

  Werner scratched his chin as she did. “Did you want me for something, Madeira?”

  “Maddie might not,” Justin said, “but I do. Why are you searching Cortland House?”

  “The deceased could have had something that somebody wanted badly enough to kill for, something she might have hidden here where she stayed. That’s the scenario we’re exploring. I have a full team in her room.”

  Justin’s eyes narrowed. “You have a full team in my mother’s room, as well.”

  Werner failed to respond. He knew something we didn’t. Scrap!

  One of the maids approached me then, and Werner took the opportunity to disappear. “Mrs. Vancortland wanted me to tell you, miss, that she found her wedding album and left it for you in your favorite room.”

  Deborah’s album. Yes!

  After the maid left, I hugged Justin on a whim and pulled as quickly away. “Sorry. I’m just so glad that they haven’t arrested you.”

  “I knew my DNA wouldn’t be a match, Madeira.”

  “I’m sorry, Justin. Sherry knew it, too. I’m just in panic mode. I never thought that any of this could happen
.”

  He hooked an arm around my neck. “You’re forgiven, Sis.”

  Aw. Now if he put me in a headlock, he’d feel like a real brother. “That’s you off the hook. Now we can concentrate on getting Sherry off. Stay positive.”

  “Is she with you?” he asked, failing to hide his longing.

  “No, I came to pick up the gown. I have to get moving on the alterations.”

  “If Sherry will still have me.”

  “Go and convince her that she will.”

  “The police want me to hang around,” Justin said, “so I called her. She’ll be here any minute.”

  “But I need her for a fitting. Never mind,” I said at his disappointment. “I’ll fit her here in the sewing room, but you—” I poked him in the chest with my index finger. “You have to get lost while I do.”

  “We have a sewing room?”

  “Sure. Your mother usually keeps the door closed, but the wedding gown’s in there, so stay away.”

  Justin turned toward the doorbell. “That’ll be Sherry. Let me have her for a while, Mad, before you start fitting her? I need her to forgive me.”

  I waved him away. A minute later, I found Werner in the sewing room examining Sherry’s gown.

  He looked up in surprise.

  I crossed my arms. “Lytton, if you take that gown as evidence, I’ll beat you.”

  “Threatening a law officer, Madeira?”

  “My sister will be wearing that in less than a month to marry Justin. Seriously, tell me it’s not evidence.”

  “It doesn’t appear to be, but the Vancortland museum is enough to distract anyone.”

  “Even a detective?”

  Werner raised his chin and I knew enough to shut up. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Fitting my sister for that wedding gown.”

  “So where is she?”

  “She and Justin are making up after last night, I hope. They’re in love, but they’d be happier if Jasmine Updike had never shown up.”

  “Jasmine would be happier, too.” Werner checked his notes. “She showed up the week after the announcement of your sister’s engagement hit the society pages.”