Tulle Death Do Us Part

by Annette Blair

  “When it’s time for me to leave, no mercy!” I promised.

  Tomorrow, after a night of dueling banjos, he’d squeal like a greased pig on a playground slide.

  Five

  The consciousness of being perfectly dressed may bestow a peace such as religion cannot give.

  —HERBERT SPENCER

  I grabbed my yogurt from the mini fridge, because I’d long ago missed lunch. I must have spent more real time in the belly of that whale than I’d thought.

  While I ate, I thought about Robin, who “they” said could swim through a stormy sea, and I wondered why she’d have to. I was afraid she’d tried to escape the person who’d “scavenged” her, or maybe she’d been pushed from a boat. I hated to think about how far her hunter had taken his role.

  Part of me wanted to call the police or read the papers to see if the second best swimmer from Vassar had survived. But she’d gone into the water on that stormy night forty or more years ago.

  I tried Googling her name and came up with links to thousands of red-breasted birds and pages of Celtic surnames. So much for that.

  I bet the scavenger hunters never thought the box in my attic would ever come to light.

  Their intentions had been almost honest in the beginning. They’d thought it was all being returned. Or most of them had. Whoever had inspired Robin to jump might have known better all along. Heck, abducting someone probably went above and beyond the terms of the hunt. And who were its missing members? The scavenger hunters, like slimeball and his ilk?

  So many questions. What had happened to keep them from returning the box…which they’d put the scavenger list inside. I looked down at the box and shuddered to the point of rubbing the gooseflesh on my arms. “I will not open you alone. No way. No how. Wait! Where’s the wrapper?”

  I looked for Chakra, soother of my solar plexus, but she’d disappeared. “Chakra? Chakra baby?” I called. “I have a treat for you.” Ba-da-bump, ba-da-bump, ba-da-bump. I heard her kitty paws running lickety-split on the hardwood floor, the sound of thumps getting dimmer, rather than louder. She wasn’t running toward me but away. Had she stolen the petticoat piece that had given me my vision? “Naughty little furball!”

  She growled an objection and scurried away, but she didn’t return the goods.

  I called Eve. “Hey, my goth computer-genius fact finder?”

  “If that isn’t a butter-up.” Eve chuckled.

  “I need names. Captains of the Vassar swim teams, range 1960 to 1973.” Some of them might have graduated as recently as the June before the country club’s anniversary event, which usually took place mid-summer.

  “Madeira Cutler, are you sleuthing again? Never mind. I know the answer. It was that flipping box, wasn’t it?”

  “No, it was the fabric cover on the box, so there.”

  “Same thing,” Eve said. “Anyway, you don’t need a PIA Fed for that info. I’ll get back to you in a blink.” Click. She’d hung up. Must be teaching a class. Eve loved that Nick had sort of disappeared. She’d never liked him.

  Now for my traitor of a cat. When I finally found Chakra, there wasn’t a petticoat piece in sight. She swirled around my legs, purred, and even jumped into my arms and licked my knuckles to get back into my good graces, but she’d stashed the goods, all right.

  “Chakra, I need that petticoat piece.” I bit my lip. I should hand it over to Werner. It was absolutely, undeniably the biggest clue in a case of larceny gone horribly wrong. My visions were inadmissible, of course. And, well, Werner didn’t know about my psychometric gift and wouldn’t believe me if he did.

  And he worked alone. I mean, if he were to have the fabric wrapper analyzed, I’d never know the story it told. Whereas, if I were to get it analyzed at FBI headquarters on the q.t., I would receive and understand the results, maybe piece them together with the vision. Of course, eventually I’d share the pertinent info with Werner, in my own way. But I was the only one—not counting the scavengers—who could give any new clues the chance of a correct spin.

  Or maybe not. I dialed an old family friend, Tunney Lague, the local butcher, who not only cut the meat and sold it to you, he told you how to cook it so it tasted expensive and amazing. On the other hand, he also knew everything about everybody, mostly because he charmed the daylights out of them and lured their secrets out of them.

  “Mad!” Tunney said as he answered his phone, and I could just see the handsome man—my father’s age—standing there in his bloodstained apron, grinning. “You’re looking good.” He always said that over the phone.

  “Tell me what you know about a scavenger hunt that might have taken place at the country club’s fiftieth jubilee celebration.”

  Tunney whistled. “Nobody knows anything about that one, kid. An old friend of mine got mixed up in it. Drank himself to death but never spilled as much as a sentence as to what really happened, not even at his drunkest.”

  “Wow, if you don’t know, who does?”

  “Nobody, Mad. That’s a closed case.”

  “Thanks, Tunney.”

  “Pork roast is on sale.”

  “I’ll tell Aunt Fee.”

  “You do that. Bye, kiddo.”

  With no more info than I started with, I set my gloves beside me, sat near the box, and speed-dialed Nick, for like the millionth time since he left for DC. Nick has been my brother Alex’s FBI partner for years.

  All Alex knows now is that they’re not partners anymore, that a bigwig showed up, asked Alex to step out of his and Nick’s shared office, and spoke to Nick for a few minutes. Nick’s eyes had widened as they spoke, Alex said. Then the bigwig led him away.

  Alex told me Nick grinned and saluted him as he passed. That was their signal that everything was about to change. And according to my brother Alex, Nick was happy about it. We’re both pretty sure there was a promotion involved. Alex heard some scuttlebutt that a change of assignment, like maybe Europe, too.

  Nick and I had always had a contingency plan in place, the FBI being what it was. Since I hadn’t heard from him in five months, nearly six, three months being our cutoff date, we were currently in an off-again portion of our relationship. The longer the silence the more firm the breakup. Oh, Nick hadn’t officially dumped me or anything. If he had, he would have told me—

  “Paisley Skye answering for Special Agent Nick Jaconetti.”

  “Paisley, it’s Madeira.” Paisley had been my last client. Whaddaya know, I’d introduced my boy toy to a doll.

  I heard whispers through the phone, which ticked me off a bit.

  “Ladybug, what a surprise.” Paisley had obviously been standing beside Nick. According to Paisley’s great-aunt Dolly, Paisley had moved to France with her grandfather, Dolly’s brother. “How’d the roof-raising go?” Nick asked. “Wasn’t that today?”

  If he remembered, he should have called. “All raised. Now I have to be patient while they finish the inside over the course of the winter.”

  “You don’t know how to be patient.”

  “You leave me for months, no word, and you wanna talk about my roof, my impatience? Sticky subject right now.” I stuck my tongue out at the phone for several not-so-childish reasons, and yet wasn’t it about time we left high school behind us? I figured we could open the brass box of trouble together over the phone, as long as he was there to keep me calm. “Are you busy?” Besides with Paisley?

  “That depends. Want to speak to a prime minister?” he whispered. “A defense minister? A four-star general? A dictator? Didn’t Alex tell you I gave him the go-ahead when classified cleared.”

  I remembered the other night when my brother had really tried to get me to sit still long enough for a talk. Maybe I hadn’t wanted to know.

  “I think he’s tried, but I’ve been too busy getting ready for the roof-raising. It doesn’t happen without direction, you know.”

  “Well, Cupcake, they whisked me away for a slam-me-against-the-wall orientation with no outside communication, and th
en they took me out of the country.”

  “Without your consent?”

  “I gave my consent years ago when I signed on for this gig. I’m unattached and an adventurer. You’ve always known that about me. I made that clear, right? You went to New York for seven years. Did I complain?”

  “No, you forgot I existed.” Like now. The silence, like the distance, between us grew.

  “I want to see the world and climb the ladder at the same time. Haven’t I always said that?”

  Sigh. “Right.” He had said it a time or three, and I’d ignored it, like when Alex’s five-year-old, Kelsey, declared, “Someday I’m gonna be president.”

  “Well, get this, I’ve been promoted to attaché at one of the Bureau’s classified liaison offices.”

  This time I embraced the knowledge pertaining to his love of adventure though I wanted to break every bone in his body with that embrace. “Why you?” I asked. “Do I sound pouty?”

  “Little bit,” he said. “I forgive.”

  “The Paisley Skye case was bigger than any of us thought,” Nick said. “She’s working with us on it. Her family willed her their diaries, plus her grandfather has given his journal solely to her alone. So we need her.”

  Do we, now? “But Alex worked on Paisley’s case with you. Why isn’t he there?”

  “Your brother eventually declined overseas promotions in his contract, because of Tricia and the kids.”

  I let silence carry my reply. I was thinking something along the lines of “What am I, chopped goose liver on a stale cracker?”

  “Coming, sir,” Nick said.

  Great, I’d had my two minutes. Time was up.

  “Cupcake. Werner’s there for you, whatever you need,” Nick added. “I trust him.” Nick’s phone dropped the connection.

  Oh, I trusted Detective Sergeant Lytton Werner of the Mystick Falls Police Department, too, but we’d had a…thing, he and I, amounting to a personal best for thermonuclear kisses. A blip, yes—during another off period for Nick and me—but still an elephant in the room whenever Werner and I got together.

  It was true, I could let down my guard with Werner in a way I couldn’t with Nick. Be myself, no matter how wacko. Was it because I could leave high school behind with him? That he encouraged me to be me, showed he appreciated the mature Mad, the woman I’d grown into? To Werner, I might just be more than a booty call between international adventures. Maybe.

  Inside, I was still processing. For Nick, I had already experienced most of the stages of grief, as it were. My roof-raising was a bit of reconstruction and a working-through, and after our short call I decided to work toward acceptance and then hope for a new romantic future for myself.

  In other words, get on with your life, Madeira Cutler. Easier said than done.

  Though Nick did not say that he’d never be home…maybe it was time for me to grow up and move on from a relationship that never seemed to progress past a certain point. Again, I’d just have to work through it.

  My second choice to have beside me when I opened the brass box: Detective Lytton Werner, with whom I liked feeling free to be me.

  Maybe I didn’t believe his acceptance would last, though. If that was the case I’d have to mourn later, but now I must move…onward and upward, like to my second-floor workroom to tackle a rack of alterations. From there I could see the surveillance camera’s eye on the front door and hear the amplified sound of the bell above the door that heralded new arrivals. That way, I could design and sew during a quiet shop day.

  I barely had a chance to get started.

  The first set of gowns came within the hour. Aunt Fee delivered them and put them on racks, so I wouldn’t inadvertently get a reading.

  She left quickly to return to my dad at the country club, where entries kept arriving. Wow, they’d really asked me last minute…so I wouldn’t have time to change my mind, of course, the sneaky tacticians.

  Hoping to see that particular gown from my trip to the past, I carefully unzipped each garment bag halfway down, until I had unzipped them all. Though I proved that many would fit the country club’s This Is Your Life segment, I did not find Vainglory’s gown among them, to my disappointment.

  More disillusioned than after my talk with Nick—something to think about—I went back to work.

  Aunt Fee called around closing time. “Your father and I have put another batch of formals in garment bags. Can we bring them by? We feel as if we’ve accomplished something when we empty the room.

  “You do. You give me the work.”

  Aunt Fee giggled, and not from my snarky comeback. “Is Dad standing beside you?”

  “Oh…yes, and he said to tell you that he doesn’t envy your task. And neither do I, sweetie. Though we know you well enough to know that you’re going to love what you see.”

  “Bring ’em on.” My heart raced at the thought. The possibilities. The opportunity…to read Vainglory’s dress. I looked to the ceiling in petition. “If it please the universe.”

  Six

  My most prized possession [is] my mom’s wedding dress. It’s from the ’70s, half bohemian/half Victorian. She wore it in the fall of 1975 with orange and yellow chrysanthemums in her hair. I wore it to my own wedding five years ago and it still seemed completely modern.

  —BECKI NEWTON

  Dad and Aunt Fee arrived together with the second batch of formal wear, this one bigger than the first. And they placed these on a separate set of racks. “We think your mother was helping us this afternoon,” Aunt Fee said.

  “Either that,” my dad said, “or one of these gowns has a pocketful of melted chocolate.”

  Aunt Fee and I groaned. My father winked. A measure of how far he’d come when it came to accepting the existence of the paranormal and the role of the women he loved within it.

  After he ushered Fee out the door, I stood there among the garment bags while the scent of chocolate swirled around me. “Mom,” I said. “You were helping them.”

  That scent was how my chocoholic mother made her presence known from the other side. My siblings—Sherry, Brandy, Alex—and I had discussed this chocolate nod from Mom, and we decided that she made the rounds, swirling from one of us to the next, but that she stayed where she was needed most. We only wish we’d realized it as children.

  So I put on my gloves and headed straight for the newest garment bags, unzipping the one indicated by a metaphoric chocolate arrow.

  My heart flipped at my first look of peach tulle peeking from beneath the dress, and I wanted to get a good look at the gown before I hopefully “read” it, hence the gloves, so I removed its garment bag and put it alone on a separate rack, so that I could walk around it.

  None of Fee’s pictures did it justice. No doubt this was the dress. I knew that because the petticoat piece that had been wrapped around the box in my attic mimicked the gown’s waist-high chevron design so perfectly, albeit in petticoat fabric, not satin. Plus, I’d seen Vainglory remove the petticoat from beneath her gown—this gown—and tear it into the pieces she distributed to her cohorts in which to hide their baubles—for years, as it turned out.

  A fifties strapless gown of gathered dark peach tulle, it had a perfect heart-shaped bust and a Southern belle skirt with a hand-embroidered design that would also require a crinoline, or, as some designers called them, a cage.

  Though there were certainly more expensive formals here, already this was unique. I’d attribute that to the cream satin apron appliquéd with two-inch, peach-and-white chevron stripes. They graduated in size depending on where they sat on the simple leaf-shaped back apron, which ended at the hips in back and at the waist in front. Its bib stitching mimicked the chevron stripes in a self fabric—forming a straight-up, single V—embracing the rib cage and raising the breasts to best advantage. The chevron stripes obliterated the waist seam. Such clean lines enhanced the figure.

  This dress had been designed and worked by a master. I walked around it to the rear. One beauty of the apro
n was having it mirrored in the back, so that from the side you saw the petal skirts meeting about eight inches from the waist. A beauty from every angle, it had triplet chevron self-fabric bows down the back, a covered metal zipper, and a boned bodice.

  I checked the inside of the bodice, making certain that no fabric touched my bare wrists in shorty gloves. I’d have to find some formal evening-length gloves for the future. They’d be best to keep me from getting a vision I did not want.

  Not that it would be sane or work-efficient to wear gloves while fitting my customers. That would still be impossible, and I would still have to take that universal chance with my psychometric gift every time I did.

  Inside, I found hand-stitched French seams and a label. Atelier, Liette de Paris, Originale. A private Parisian label by a designer of haute couture whose history and work I intended to study in the future.

  As I suspected, the petticoats were missing. There should be a crinoline, or cage, closest to the body and at least four tulle petticoats above it. The one that had been destroyed would have been worn closest to the gown. Why did the petticoat and gown match? Because if the dress hem flipped up, say in a dance, the perfection of its beauty would be mirrored and enhanced, and not marred by a petticoat.

  That most important piece of the formal had been missing for more than four decades and just might hold the key to a murder, a detail I intended to confirm, if possible by reading the gown.

  My cell phone rang before I had a chance, showing Eve as my caller. “Don’t spare me the details,” I said in lieu of a hello.

  “I’m faxing you a list of Vassar swim captains as we speak. But this is a hoot. One of them was—”

  “Sherry’s mother-in-law?”

  “Brat.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I didn’t know for certain. I knew that she went to Vassar, and something about the voice was familiar. Besides, a paper trail is confirmation, an actual clue, and admissible as evidence, except that my corroborating evidence is a psychometric trip to La La Land. It’s still better than unfounded speculation, however.”