Pleating for Mercy

by Melissa Bourbon

  Karen blinked back her tears, half nodding, half shaking her head. “You weren’t there for her when she was puking her guts out. I was.”

  Nell’s words about Nate breaking Josie’s heart rattled around in my brain. What if Nell had decided Josie couldn’t have with Nate what she herself had been denied? She had seemed on edge when I met her yesterday. I imagined a confrontation. The argument Mama and I heard from inside the house—could it have been Josie and Nell? Was it a coincidence that Josie had discovered Nell’s body, or could she have been the one to kill her, conveniently making the discovery when the time was right?

  Or could it have been Nate and Nell arguing? He’d been conspicuously absent last night. Overwrought with guilt because he’d resorted to murder to stop Nell from ruining his wedding?

  A chill spread through me. I didn’t want it to be either of them. These were people I’d hoped to be friends with now that I was home in Bliss.

  Ruthann’s shoulders hunched as she retreated behind the screen to change. “Guess I should cancel my date with George,” she said.

  Karen gaped. “I thought you said you weren’t seeing him anymore.”

  Gracie had finished pinning the pattern pieces I’d drawn to the muslin. I handed her a pair of dressmaking shears, Ginghers with red chrysanthemums and petite blossoms on the handles. “Go ahead and cut it out,” I whispered, not wanting to interrupt Karen and Ruthann.

  “I wasn’t, but he asked again,” Ruthann said over the rustling of her clothes as she changed.

  “Do you know what he told Ted?”

  “Who’s Ted?” Gracie whispered to me.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered, getting lost in their rapid-fire discussion.

  Karen flicked a glance at us. “Ted’s my husband,” she said.

  “What did George tell him?” Ruthann asked with a dejected sigh.

  As Karen hesitated, looking like she was having second thoughts, I imagined a similar conversation between Nell and Josie, only with Nell not holding back at all, instead revealing to Josie the relationship she’d had with Nate.

  I rubbed my temples, trying to loosen the suspicions taking root there. I was supposed to be helping Josie prove Nate was innocent, not redirecting suspicion toward her.

  “George told Ted that Nell always looked like she’d . . .” Her voice cracked. Another button dropped. The sound of sharp metal sliding across metal as Gracie opened and closed the scissors magnified in my brain.

  “Just spit it out,” Ruthann said.

  She cleared her throat, and said, “George told Ted that Nell had been rode hard and put up wet. He’s slimy, Ruthie. You can do better than him.”

  Gracie stopped in midcut, scissors open wide. “Rode hard . . . you mean like a horse?”

  Oh, boy. “Yeah, you know horses need to be groomed. Brushed and stuff after they’ve been ridden. George was just saying that, uh . . .” God, I had no idea how to explain such a crude remark to a fifteen-year-old girl. “He was just saying—”

  “He was saying that Nell got around,” Ruthann blurted from behind the screen, “which is more a statement about her than about George.”

  Unless he was the one doing the riding, I thought.

  “He’s a user, Ruthie.”

  “Why does your husband hang out with him, then?” Ruthann shot back.

  “He doesn’t.”

  “Oh, right, he’s not with the city anymore. He’s a big shot now.”

  They went on and on, but I couldn’t get Nell out of my mind. It sounded to me like her self-esteem had been crushed over and over again and she’d ended up with a reputation that was going to live on.

  Long after Ruthann and Karen left, I was left wondering if George Taylor could be the man Nell had been dating.

  Chapter 26

  The next morning, Madelyn Brighton blew through the door of Buttons & Bows like a mini tornado on a tear through Bliss. She knocked into the little antique table as she entered. The door banged behind her against the wall. As she spun around, clutching a camera strap in her hand, the lens swung wide and hit the back of the sofa.

  No, not a tornado. A bull in a china shop. A petite, squat British bull, but a bull nonetheless. Her hair still looked electrified, and she still seemed a tad disheveled. I was beginning to think it was how she always looked.

  “Hi,” I said, dropping my pin box on the cutting table and hurrying toward her.

  “Oh, good, you’re here,” she said. “I was afraid I’d miss you.”

  Something about her accent made me stand a little straighter and smile. “This is where I always am during business hours.”

  “Right. Okay, down to it. I have a thought.”

  “Just one?” I said with a chuckle.

  She stared at me, unblinking, for a few seconds; then, like someone flipped a switch, she laughed. “Ha! No, not just one. You don’t want to know all my thoughts, Harlow. Trust me on that. But this one, you just might.”

  I’d lowered myself halfway to the couch when she said, “It’s about the Cassidy magic.” My glutes seized, panic rushing through me. And to think she’d almost won me over with her fun British accent and charm.

  For a while, I’d been able to forget about the fact that I’d accidentally confirmed her suspicions about the Cassidy women, but with her here, in Buttons & Bows, there was no more avoiding it.

  My throat constricted. I tried to say, “What about the Cassidy magic?” but it came out a prolonged groan.

  She held up a hand. “Relax, mate. I’m not going to turn you in to the Ministry of Magic.” She winked. “Though wouldn’t it be absolutely fabulous if there were such a thing?”

  I stared blankly.

  “Harry Potter?” she said. “Ministry of Magic?”

  “Right!” I forced myself to laugh with her. I had stayed up late and made progress on all three muslin mock-ups, but time was still marching on. Talking magic wasn’t on my agenda. “So, about that thought you had?” I prompted.

  “I’ve been thinking about your family lineage. I’m sort of a history buff, too,” she said as an aside. “Was your great-great-grandmother Cressida gifted? And what about her mother, Texana?”

  I felt my eyelids strain as they opened wide. What if Madelyn was a stalker? It just wasn’t normal to know so much about someone else’s life, was it? All I knew about her was that she was from England, took pictures, and was married to a professor. That was a whole lot different than knowing about a family’s magical charms. “How do you know about my family?”

  “Writer, remember?” she said, though when she said “writer,” it sounded more like “writ-a.”

  Even through my wariness, I felt there was something likable about Madelyn Brighton. But was she diabolical under the unassuming exterior? “Let me rephrase that. Why do you know so much about my family?”

  “Like I said before, Harlow, I’m a bit of a magic junkie. I’ve studied the Salem Witch Trials. My husband is a leader in the North Texas Paranormal Society. Your family, Harlow, is renowned in those circles.”

  The pipes upstairs creaked. We both glanced at the ceiling. I hoped Meemaw wouldn’t choose now to materialize. I hadn’t seen her since last night when her wraithlike form had appeared before me and I’d asked if she knew who’d killed Nell.

  I gulped, trying to wrap my mind around what she was saying. All these years, I’d thought the Cassidy women flew under the radar, but according to Madelyn, that was not the case. “What, exactly, do you mean by ‘renowned’?”

  She fiddled with her camera, taking the lens cover off. “Maybe renowned is overstating it a bit. Nobody seems to know that it’s your family, specifically, but just that there is a family in Texas whose women have some sort of magic in them.”

  “But how would anyone know that?”

  “People talk, Harlow, and if the right person is listening—and the Paranormal Society is always listening—then stories get around.”

  Madelyn pressed buttons on her camera, finally liftin
g it and aiming at me. “Do you mind if I take a photo? I’m actually doing an article for the Fort Worth Business Review on women entrepreneurs. I’d love to interview you for the piece.”

  My mind reeled. She had a hundred irons in the fire, including her hunt for the paranormal. What else did she have up her sleeve?

  I nodded, and she set to work, snapping a series of pictures of both me and the shop. “My deadline’s day after tomorrow, but I’m also photographing a fund-raising gala for the Kincaid Family Foundation and writing a piece for the Bliss Record-Chronicle on Nell Gellen’s funeral. Quite busy at the moment, but I do want to include your dressmaking shop in the Business Review piece. If I could just shadow you for a while today and ask a few questions . . .”

  I went over my plan for the day. The silk for Josie’s dress had arrived, as well as the other fabrics I’d ordered. I’d be diving into the actual dressmaking, which meant Madelyn would probably be bored out of her mind. Sewing wasn’t an action-packed activity. Gracie was coming back for another visit. There should be no harm in allowing Madelyn to stay.

  “Sure,” I said, but I had a niggling feeling in the pit of my stomach that things were going to get curiouser and curiouser.

  Madelyn asked me question after question, going back and forth from my life in New York, to my return to Bliss, the opening of Buttons & Bows, and the Cassidy charms.

  “Your great-grandmother bequeathed you this house?” she asked.

  “Actually, she deeded it to me the day I was born.”

  “She knew then that what she wanted was for you to live here. Hmm, interesting. So you always knew you’d come back.”

  I looked up from the cutting table where I had yards and yards of Diamond French silk laid out for Josie’s dress. “No. I hadn’t planned on coming back until I found out about the house, but it was definitely the right thing to do.”

  Like a magnet, my gaze was drawn to a pile of quilts I’d brought down from the attic. All the Cassidy women, starting with Butch Cassidy’s daughter, Cressida, had pieced together bits of clothing and fabric to tell the stories of their lives in quilts they made, sometimes together, sometimes alone. From hand-tied creations to painstakingly pieced patterns, the threads of the quilts bound us together.

  “This is where I belong,” I said.

  She jotted something down in her fabric-covered notebook. I went back to my silk, a warm comfort settling around me. She looked up from her writing. “Is someone baking?”

  I breathed in the scent of fresh-baked banana bread, one of Meemaw’s favorites. Every day, the house seemed to be coming more and more alive with her presence. “The window’s open,” I said, gesturing toward Nana’s farm. “My grandmother must be baking.”

  She looked skeptical, even sneaking a peek out the French doors toward the kitchen to be sure. Finally, she walked over to the cutting table and sat down on the stool I’d pulled up next to it. “Tell me how it works, Harlow.”

  I took the pins from between my lips, glancing up from the paper pattern I’d created for the wedding gown’s bodice. “How does what work?”

  Her hazel eyes sparkled. “The magic.”

  The pipes groaned again, first in a high-pitched tone, then deeper, like a foghorn. It reminded me of the guitar players in the seventies like Peter Frampton who’d hooked their instruments up to talk boxes and made their guitars speak. Tell. Her. Tell. Her.

  The creaking grew louder, more persistent. Madelyn’s shoulders curved in. A nervous tint colored her face. Tell. Her. Tell. Her.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just old pipes,” I said, sending a surreptitious scowl around the room, hoping Meemaw would see and get the message.

  She must have, because the creaking stopped as suddenly as it had started. Madelyn visibly relaxed, but I felt like I’d absorbed her tension. We’d kept the family gifts under our hats for so long, it didn’t seem right to share details with a complete stranger. I’d already said too much.

  Madelyn closed her notebook, but her finger held the page she’d been taking notes on. “Were Texana and Cressida charmed?” she asked.

  “Is this off the record?” I asked, even though the question seemed silly. It was right up there with a lawyer purposely saying something during court that he knew would be stricken, but once the jury heard it, could it really be erased from their minds?

  She let her finger slide out from between the pages. “Absolutely. Look, Harlow, I can see you don’t trust me, but I promise to keep your secrets. I’m simply fascinated by your history and I’d love to learn more.”

  I didn’t trust Madelyn, but I trusted Meemaw and she seemed to want this woman to know our story. I didn’t understand, but I knew if I started to say something I wasn’t supposed to, Meemaw would rattle a chain or do something to interrupt me. I’d seen it happen when Will and Gracie were here. I had no doubt I would see it again.

  I sucked in a bolstering breath—I’d never uttered these words to anyone outside the Cassidy family—and said, “We all think Texana and Cressida were charmed, but I don’t know what their gifts were. For me, it started with Meemaw.”

  Her eyes danced with excitement. “So Loretta Mae started getting what she wanted, but when did she realize it was more than just luck?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the only way I ever knew her. She never talked about it.”

  “Hmm. How did it work? Was there some ritual? Some incantation, or something?”

  “We’re not witches, Madelyn.”

  “No, no, of course not,” she said, watching as I absently picked up my happy red scissors, the blades sliding open and closed with a smooth, slick sound.

  “And to be honest, I don’t know how it works—”

  “Works?”

  “Worked,” I corrected, darting a glance at her, hoping I hadn’t clued her in that Meemaw was still up to her old tricks. “She could never explain it. It’s the same with my mother and grandmother. It’s like they have some emotional connection to the world. Their thoughts and emotions float off into the universe and connect with something. For Meemaw, what she wanted came true. My mother’s emotions are tied in to things that grow. Could be weeds, flowers—could be anything. For my grandmother, it’s the goats.”

  “Then it skipped a generation with you?”

  I started cutting, carefully slicing through the two layers of silk. Since I was old enough to understand about the charms of the Cassidy women, I’d felt I’d missed out on something big, had done something wrong that prevented me from having a gift, or worse, was just not worthy of the charm.

  But now that I knew Meemaw was with me, and apparently I was the only one she could communicate with, I felt revitalized. I was a Cassidy woman, through and through. “I guess so,” I said, but I smiled inwardly. She sighed, disappointed. She asked a few more questions before we fell silent.

  After a few minutes, I said, “Let me ask you a question, Madelyn.”

  “Anything.”

  I held my scissors. “You’ve been in Bliss for a few years now, right?”

  “Three and a half. Bill grew up here. After Oxford, he wanted to come back home.”

  Bill Brighton. That name did not ring a bell.

  “And you seem to be in the thick of things, what with your photography and journalism and work with the sheriff’s department and the city.” I set the scissors on the table and turned to face her. “Who do you think would have wanted Nell Gellen dead?”

  Chapter 27

  “That woman turned heads,” Madelyn said after she took a minute to ponder my question.

  Between Josie, Karen, Ruthann, and Zinnia James, I’d heard plenty about Nell, but I was curious what Madelyn thought.

  “Turned heads? What do you mean?” I’d moved to the dress form I’d adjusted to reflect Josie’s measurements. Piece by piece, I began pinning the bodice together, mentally fast-forwarding through the darts for her bustline and pleats for shape and structure.

  “I took a bead-making c
lass from her a few months ago,” Madelyn said.

  “I think everyone in town took bead-making from her.”

  “It’s something to do.”

  “That’s true. I used to climb the water tower. Might have stayed out of trouble if I’d had beads.”

  Madelyn laughed. “I can’t picture you in trouble, Harlow.”

  “That’s why I got away with it,” I said with a wink.

  “Nell couldn’t get away with much. I could always tell when something was on her mind.”

  “How?”

  Madelyn drew her bottom lip into her mouth and clamped her upper teeth down. “She’d chew her bottom lip, like this,” she mumbled. “Like it was a good hunk of Turkish Delight.”

  I wasn’t sure what Turkish Delight was, but I got the picture. I knew Madelyn must have some insight on Nell. Being a writer and photographer made you a student of human nature, just like fashion design did.

  It was my job to create the perfect garment for a person, to see beyond what she imagined an outfit could be, to bring out her inner beauty through what she wore. In order to do that, I had to study human nature, too.

  “Do you think she had a man on her mind?” I asked her.

  The house creaked, like it was settling after an earthquake. Except Texas doesn’t have earthquakes and I figured that any settling the old farmhouse was going to do had happened decades ago.

  Madelyn didn’t pay the sounds any mind. “Could be. I didn’t know her well enough to say. But I bet if we nosed around,” she said, then pointed her finger back and forth between us, “we could figure out who killed her.”

  The lights flickered and one of the dress forms lurched forward. Madelyn gasped. “Bloody hell, what the devil’s going on?”

  I was getting tired of explaining that it was an ornery old house, but what choice did I have? Better than explaining it was an ornery old ghost, I suppose.

  Did Meemaw’s ruckus mean she wanted me to work with Madelyn? I edged a tentative toe forward. “We might could at that,” I said, gasping the moment the words left my mouth.