Tulle Death Do Us Part

by Annette Blair

  Fiona pulled my butterscotch-striped baby away, but I hadn’t named her Chakra for nothing. That cat knew when I was scared, or when I should be, I suppose. And now, because of her reaction, I had that solar plexus tremble that only she could soothe and, evidently, instigate.

  I held on to what appeared to be a wrapped box tightly, rather than drop it and risk breaking whatever might be inside. The last unexpected find in this building gave me nightmares still, and I didn’t have hope for better with this. So I wouldn’t speculate on the contents or reveal them in public.

  Eve took pictures of the find at varied angles. She said she had enough memory to take thousands. I presume she meant the camera did, though I’d learned never to sell Eve short.

  The treasure looked like a pale, square brick of moiré-a-pois silk appliquéd in a faded peach-and-white single-V chevron motif, applied with tiny, perfect hand stitching, reminiscent of haute couture. Odd to find a Parisian piece used as wrapping paper when newspaper would have done as well.

  I pulled back on the suspicious fabric with my gloved hand—glad it was gloved—to reveal a vintage brass box, high quality, topped by a raised and engraved plate, and as I did, the wind whipped the fabric up and swiped it across my face.

  Screech! It touched me.

  Eve snapped pictures of the box from several angles, then the fabric alone, then the bare box and the engraving. “Mystick by the Sea Country Club, Established 1923,” she read, and whistled.

  A rush of ice had already run up my neck and, by the time my knees weakened, I was pretty sure that the fabric might once have been a piece of vintage clothing.

  “Oh, oh,” Aunt Fiona said. “Harry, grab her.”

  “Not again!” Eve fought me for the box, but I had no control over my hands and held it in something of a death grip, as if rigor mortis had set in.

  “I bet that’s part of a dress or something!” Eve said. “I hate when this happens!” Her panic tickled me as I slipped from the reality of this plane to another, though, as always, I left my body behind.

  “Mad?” she shouted. “Where did you go this time?”

  “Eve,” my father groused. “She’s right here!”

  Confession time: My father doesn’t know about my psychometric gift or my mother’s. Not his thing, Mom used to say.

  Right now, it only mattered that everyone swirling away from me. Or, rather, their voices were doing so as I, in my own psychic way, swirled away from them, and found myself…where?

  A hovel, cold, dark, and dank, barely warmed by the labored breaths of the specters gathered there, their features shadowed like spirits in the belly of a whale. I saw only the whites of their eyes, and my gag reflex was triggered by the overpowering stench of fish, fear,…and guilt.

  Two

  Over the years I have learned that what is important in a dress is the woman who is wearing it.

  —YVES SAINT LAURENT

  So whose dress had I stepped into? Whose body? And why did she wear such a tight rubber girdle? Some vintage pieces I didn’t appreciate, and here I found myself being strangled by the master, a design horror that rivaled an unsanctioned sweat lodge for dehydration.

  Fortunately, these psychic trips I took after touching certain items of vintage clothing never lasted long, which meant I would be out of here soon, so I had to learn as much as I could in very little time.

  I caught the tension as I eyed the antsy group and was unable to stand completely still, while having no idea where I stood. Literally. The belly of a boat seemed more likely than a whale. I found limited proof in the fact that I saw no corners in my peripheral vision, though the area could be termed a black pit. As a seafaring vessel, it would have to be good sized, possibly eighty or ninety feet, and though I smelled the sea and heard the waves, I found no need for sea legs.

  Midnight had surely come and gone. A quarter moon peeked through a window or a hole in the wall, while a storm rushed nature’s fury all around us, the wind howling in the distance without mercy. In other circumstances, the combo might seem romantic, but the copper scent of blood mixed with sweat and brine told a different story.

  I’d surely and inadvertently been kissed by a piece of vintage clothing, a secret my building had been keeping since who knew when.

  Well, possibly since this moment in which I now found myself, I suppose.

  My gift of viewing the past in snippets came more frequent of late, like all aspects of my mother’s legacy. These days, rhymes like spells filled my head without warning, especially at moments of high emotion. Not that I knew what to do with them, and I might not be ready to learn. Yet.

  Understand that “gift” and “curse” are two sides of the same cold-steel blade, especially at times like this, but Aunt Fiona had convinced me that I had a universal mandate to make the best of each vision. I’d learned that someone or something attached to them depended on me. My job was to find out who, what, or why.

  A man in a tattered tux, who might have worn an aftershave called Low Tide and recently fought a saber-toothed shark, filled the center of my vision, his body language giving off edgy vibes. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw a near circle of followers who seemed to be waiting for their pacing leader’s next words.

  Why? Because he could be counted upon to get them out of trouble? Or because he’d been the one to get them into it? Why trouble? Well, the location itself shouted it. This was no shrieking slumber party I’d happened upon.

  “Stop assuming the worst,” the agitated leader snapped. “She was the best swimmer at Vassar.”

  The timbre of his voice, as if by shouting his voice alone could ensure the girl’s health, had startled us all, especially me, deep in my solar plexus. Instincts kicked in, like I knew him but didn’t like him much. The sound of his voice left a bad taste in my mouth, so I found myself referring to him in my mind as Grody.

  I sensed that, before my arrival, the group had been contemplating the matter that had instigated Grody’s telling statement.

  We must be near the sea, I silently reasoned, if someone’s swimming ability matters in quite possibly a life-or-death way.

  “I’m certain she made it,” he muttered, again his voice willing it to be true, adding fear and desperation to his ticket.

  Across the circle, a girl whose outline revealed the pouf skirt of a crinolined gown, raised her nose in a perfect show of snobbery. “The second best swimmer!” she snapped, heavy on the snit. Her voice, with its vainglorious tone, also seemed eerily familiar.

  I might actually have known the two of them—in the present, I mean. Wow, what were the odds? I shrugged inwardly. In a town this size, I guessed pretty good.

  “I”—she pointed to herself—“am the one who captained the Vassar swim team,” Vainglory added. “Not Robin.”

  “Yeah, and you were prom queen, too. We know,” said Grody, still stirring in me a shivery ambivalence, bordering on dislike. Good news/bad news: I thought we’d tangled at some point, but I couldn’t place him.

  And the “we” could be debated. “We” as in he and Madeira Cutler? Or “we” as in Grody and the person I now occupied?

  With vagaries and misdeeds in mind, I wished uselessly for a full moon so I could see all their faces, certain, given their furtive energy—not forgetting the swimmer they wanted to believe had reached shore—that they did not want the lights on.

  Why? So as not to be found trespassing? Or not to be caught for their misdeed?

  “What about G.I. Joe?” Grody asked. “Does he know his girl left the fiftieth with…you know?”

  “No,” Vainglory said. “Uniforms draw attention. He couldn’t get away from the girls at the bar—especially Wynona—and had his back to us when Prince Charmy lured Robin from the country club.”

  “He’ll be looking for her now, then, won’t he?”

  Vainglory gave one inelegant snort. “He shipped out at midnight, none the wiser. Done deed.”

  “I forgot,” Grody said. “On his way to Nam,
poor devil, though they say it’s nearly over.” And the heartless man sounded almost sorry for a soldier who’d lost his last night with his girl, and maybe a future with her, too—if she couldn’t swim, however far, in storm-tossed waters.

  Nam? Toward the end. If that was true, I had quite possibly stepped into the early seventies.

  “Some scavenger hunt,” said a young man with a slight Southern baritone. “Bor-ing.” His careless attitude curled around me like a get-it-off-me reptile. Icy, slimy, icky. “Did we get anything good at least?” Snake asked.

  He thought some tangible good could come from this? I shivered. One of them might be drowning, and he was whining to know what they had netted.

  “Why are we here?” another girl asked. “Shouldn’t we have scattered?”

  “We’re here,” Grody said, “to get our stories straight.”

  “Better if they’re all different,” Vainglory said. “We’ll each stash our own spoils, after all.”

  “Temporarily,” Grody added. “Don’t go getting attached. The goods have to be returned to their owners as soon as we know who wins.”

  Not Robin, I thought. It sounded like she might have come out the loser in all this.

  Vainglory tittered. “Hide your trinkets well, or this could be embarrassing in the morning.”

  Embarrassing? Someone could quite possibly be dead by morning, and they were going to wait it out? “Shouldn’t we call the police?” the person I occupied asked, while the same question sat at the tip of my silent tongue. Made me hope my thoughts influenced hers.

  Vainglory tittered again.

  Call me a fake Ferragamo, but I could almost name the vain one, given her superior tone and familiar disdain.

  Grody, the leader? He fit a memory as substantial as fiberfill. Vainglory, on the other hand, cut a bloodier swath, like machine stitching through a thumbnail. But she must have left Mystick Falls by now, because I had the good fortune to have blocked our shared past, er, future.

  For some reason I was more Madeira in this vision than the person I was wearing, not a strong character at all.

  Vainglory chuckled, as if mocking the thought, and I knew that nothing good could come of her amusement. To prove me right, I saw her in shadow as she tugged and slithered from one of her bell-shaped petticoats. She waved it like a victory flag and chuckled while my heart sped to the subsequent sickening sound of fabric tearing.

  “Your mother’s going to kill you,” said the woman I occupied, her kind voice jarringly out of place in this viper’s den. “Isn’t that gown worth a fortune? She keeps it encased in glass. It’s her most prized possession.” My body for the evening, totally unknown to me, caught her breath and I caught her sorrow. “Did your mother give you permission to wear that? Or did you steal it?”

  “I borrowed it,” Vainglory said with a purring lilt of self-satisfaction, and I knew instinctively that her amusement showed as a grin laced with evil. “Don’t sweat it, and don’t be a fink, Bambi-Jo. I’m not tearing the gown after all, just the matching petticoat.”

  “The matching petticoat?” Bambi-Jo asked.

  “Of course. It’s huge. There’ll be lots of pieces when I’m done with it. We’ll each have enough to wrap and hide our scavenged items in. At least it will have gone for a good cause.” She dropped it to the floor. “There, everyone. Tear it into as many pieces as you need.”

  Vainglory proceeded to wrap her first fabric piece around a trinket. “After we send everything we borrowed to the country club—let them return our spoils to their members—I plan to send the petticoat back to my darling mother piece by piece, month by entertaining month.”

  Bambi-Jo squeaked beneath her breath, and I wondered how this nice, if mousy, girl got mixed up with this set.

  “Here, Bambi, you take and hide this. I think it’s the biggest item we scavenged tonight, except for Robin herself, of course.”

  Robin, the Vassar swimmer who could be drowning. Who might now be safe, or not.

  “How long have we been here?” I thought and Bambi asked. Coincidence?

  Vainglory huffed. “You know very well that we only left the country club’s Golden Jubilee dinner dance a few hours ago.” She shoved a prewrapped box into my hands—well, Bambi-Jo’s hands—as if my question had ticked her off. It was the same box that had brought me here. Oh oh. So as not to rush off, psychically speaking, I handed it to the unnamed person next to me. Let’s call him Brut, because that’s what he so overwhelmingly smelled like. I wanted to stick around a little longer. I had too many questions to leave now. Who were all these players, and who was the smarm who had lured Robin to sea?

  And what were the results of Robin’s unexpected swim?

  “I hid a scavenger-hunt list in that box,” said Brut, “for posterity. Don’t get blood on it.” Then he shoved it back into my hands, cover and all, while his voice grew distant and my vision wavered.

  Three

  Clothes are…nothing less than the furniture of the mind made visible.

  —JAMES LAVER

  Ready or not, and bound by frustration, I parted company with the felons in the belly of the whale, the distance between us widening by the minute. Literally. Physically. In miles and in time.

  My ears rang as my shop came into focus, and I saw my father standing over me.

  I adjusted my position on the fainting couch while Dad held the lecture stance, serious, determined, professorial words pouring forth, as if…as if he’d been trying to talk me into doing my homework, or taking a part in one of his dreaded impromptu Shakespearean plays.

  “So,” he said, sounding relieved to have finished. “That’s why you’ll make the perfect judge.”

  “Judge?” I asked. “Fiona’s the judge, not me.” I sat up, almost glad I’d returned from the back of beyond, from possibly as close as the Mystic docks yet as far as decades ago.

  I must have been looking at my dad like he spoke in tongues. I knew Aunt Fiona understood my confusion, but only when I gave her a slight wave did she realize that I was truly back. All of me. My mind and everything.

  She knew I’d checked out for a time, though my dad hadn’t figured it out. Probably thought I was resting my eyes, or Fee told him I was.

  I heard the hammers and heavy equipment above us and, despite my trip to the past, I was glad for the progression of my third floor. Well, my fourth floor, if you counted the old county morgue some people called my basement, a floor I’d not yet seen. Horror for another day, and all that.

  I shuddered and put the morgue from my mind. “Aunt Fiona? What does Dad think I’m judging? Which, by the way, I’m not…judging, that is.”

  My father slapped his hands on his hips. “Haven’t you been listening? By Zeus, your attention span needs a recharge. I can’t believe you’ve got an MBA.”

  As far as my father was concerned, my degree in fashion design didn’t count for much. No biggie. It counted big time in the glamazon world of designer vintage.

  Chakra settled against my solar plexus to soothe me while she kept raising her paws toward the fabric-covered treasure box on the floor. Finally, she pounced on it and rolled with the fabric. “Dad, can you get that away from her?”

  He did and set it on the counter. “Aren’t you going to open the box?” he asked.

  Given my previous experience with opening things and finding, well, people parts, I wanted to open Pandora’s newest surprise like I wanted a root canal.

  A better bet would be to have Detective Lytton Werner by my side with a Dos Equis in each of our hands. I was suddenly glad it had been wrapped. That meant the box itself could be dusted for prints. And I’d handled it with gloves—in this world, at least. Although the spoiled brats of the past should have been wearing gloves, I didn’t remember having noticed any.

  Aunt Fiona lowered herself to the foot of the fainting couch and patted my hand. “It’s about judging vintage formals for the country club’s Very Vintage Valentine fun- and fund-raiser, dear. It’s a ‘remembe
r the old days’ dinner with music for dancing, and a bit of a show while we eat, a This Is Your Life segment—”

  My father ran a hand over his face.

  Fee tried to look more enthusiastic. “You probably don’t remember the programs, dear, but they’d put the contestant in a comfy chair with a cup of tea and some refreshments, make them sit back, and a voice from the past would come from behind a curtain. Like, ‘Remember me? I took you on your first pony ride.’”

  My father huffed. “And the contestant goes, ‘Nanny Carousel?’ Ta-da, here comes old Nanny Carousel, who the contestant hasn’t seen in eleventy-seven years, and they have a teary reunion, and so on. It’s all voices and people from the past ad nauseam.”

  “Wow,” Fiona said. “Harry, you sure know how to neutralize the anticipation.”

  My father looked contrite. “It is more exciting than that,” he admitted to me. “I just wanted it said fast, so we could get down to business with a yes from you, Mad.” His look pleaded with me. “What do you say?”

  Fee sighed in exasperation. “Yes, that’s where you come in.” She gave me a “there, there” pat because she understood my qualms because of my visions. “The event will benefit the foundation that your sister Brandy works for,” she said. The children will get the ticket proceeds minus expenses.”

  “The Nurture Kids Foundation.” I remembered. “A good cause, feeding hungry children.” It would be harder to say no now, but not impossible. I’d make a personal donation if my refusal jinxed Brandy’s cause.

  “Correct.” Aunt Fee winked “That’s the exact foundation.”

  “I told you we’re chairing the event,” my dad snapped, frustrated at repeating himself, except that I hadn’t been here in the true sense. “I told you that new members of the country club have to do their share.” He was also probably frustrated with Fee for volunteering them. “Not my idea!” he added, proving it.

  Do I know my dad or what?