by Janet Bolin
Someone had written Welcome to TADAM in fancy, curlicued script on the newsprint pad on the easel.
Dora needn’t have worried about Edna, Haylee, Opal, and Naomi. They were sitting near the back of the crowded room.
I muttered to Ashley, “I think you drummed up enough business.”
Laughing at the dummy’s unreal proportions, she threw me a smile. “We know just about everyone here, don’t we?”
It seemed that all of Threadville plus a busload of our usual tourists had come to the introductory fashion design class. Greeting those nearest us, we sat down.
Loud footsteps sounded from the foyer, and then Loretta came swooping into the room in a stylish but impractical purple cloak. She wore it over tight black suede short shorts, turquoise tights, high yellow suede boots with an allover pattern of cutouts showing off the tights, a form-fitting black tank top, and possibly the world’s widest belt, in purple leather with cutouts matching the pattern on the boots. She stopped and posed, her face and body both expressing extreme, fake-looking amazement. “Wow! I didn’t expect such a turnout.” Her cloak swishing and her heels hammering the rock maple floor, she marched to the front of the classroom.
Beside me, Dora muttered, “I didn’t expect her turnout, either. What superhero does she think she is, SuperDesigner?”
I had to suppress a fit of giggles, and the people around us laughed, too. The woman in front of Dora turned around and gave her a high five.
“Tough crowd,” Ashley whispered. But she was still smiling, obviously eager to begin her education in fashion design. She’d been doodling in her notebook and had copied the Welcome to TADAM page perfectly, every curlicue in place.
Dora murmured to me, “I hope your young man sees her in that getup.”
I grinned and shook my head. In my opinion, Loretta looked better than I had last night in my Little Bo Peep dress. And after he saw me wearing that, Clay had come inside with a smudge of Loretta’s lipstick on his shirt. I hoped he wouldn’t see her in those snug shorts and tank top. He might appreciate them more than this all-female crowd seemed to.
I was sure she had designed the dramatic outfit herself. I wasn’t being catty, of course, but I thought the combination made her resemble a superhero wearing a wrestler’s trophy belt.
Someone slipped into the chair behind me and touched my shoulder in greeting. I glanced back. Our police chief, Vicki Smallwood, who always professed to know nothing about sewing, was attending a fashion design course? Instead of her uniform, she wore jeans, a white shirt, and a camel blazer. For once, her blond hair wasn’t tied back in a ponytail but fell in a neat bob to her shoulders. I gave her a thumbs-up and faced the front again.
Loretta had been staring toward us with an unreadable but not very friendly look on her face. However, she welcomed us all. Wiping her eyes and swallowing hard, she made a speech about how much everyone at TADAM would miss Antonio. She offered her condolences to his family.
Paula did not seem to be in the mansion’s former dining room.
Bravely straightening her shoulders and raising her chin, Loretta announced, “Tonight, Kent Quarrop and I, who are teachers here at the Threadville Academy of Design and Modeling, will give you a preview of the night school course we’ll be offering the public this semester, Design 101. Kent and I have very different approaches to design, both highly successful. I’ll let him tell you about his after I finish my demonstration.” She flashed a smile at us. “But first, let me explain a little about Saturday night’s fashion show.”
Her face took on a mask of tragedy. “I’ll let you in on a little secret about Antonio, TADAM’s late director.”
Everyone in the room seemed to stop breathing. I leaned forward.
Loretta lowered her voice. “Antonio did his best to foster creativity, and one of the many ways he did it was by tricking his students into digging deep and coming up with ideas that were so original that his students often surprised themselves. He would give an assignment that sounded straightforward, and then award the highest marks to people who had not followed his instructions.” Her mouth twitched in another smile. “The students tended to catch on quickly.”
Dora cleared her throat, quietly for her.
I grumbled silently to myself about Loretta’s latest defense of Antonio’s actions. The Threadville store owners had not been his students when he gave us sketches and instructions about the outfits he wanted us to model in his fashion show. We’d been trying to help him by doing exactly what he’d asked, even when, as in my case, we didn’t like the designs he had proposed.
It had been a trick, all right, but I doubted that he’d been trying to foster creativity. All of us were good at coming up with original designs.
Unless I was mistaken, Antonio had wanted attention. Maybe he thought of himself as a budding stand-up comic and had used us as the butt of his questionable jokes. I remembered Loretta’s anger at him on Saturday night, and how, only a few minutes later, she had tried to spin what he’d done into something commendable. Now she’d come up with a possibly more praiseworthy reason for Antonio’s behavior. Was she trying to make us forget her original display of anger?
I didn’t buy Loretta’s explanation. Worse, I suspected that honesty was not high on the list of traits she valued in herself. Maybe she lied frequently, like maybe about knowing Clay in fourth grade. She could have merely recognized him as the area’s most well-known contractor and then made up that first-love story to quickly get close to him.
I didn’t need to ask myself why she, or any woman, would want to do that. All she had to do was look into his warm, brown eyes. I stifled a sigh.
But what if she had placed those candies in Antonio’s pocket and wanted to be with someone else when they took effect, and Clay was her chosen, handy, and very tempting alibi?
Loretta grabbed a marker, turned with a theatrical swirl of her cloak, and ripped the top page of newsprint from the easel. “My design technique begins with sketches.” On the next page, she quickly drew the lines of a simple, slinky dress with a cowl neckline. “Based on my sketches and the size I want the finished dress to be, I draft a pattern. I know the measurements that go along with the size I’m creating, and with the complicated techniques that I’ve developed, I create a pattern. In Design 101, we’ll keep things simple, and we’ll all work on drafting a pattern for a dress similar to the one I’ve sketched.”
Dora harrumphed again. “How original.”
Behind me, Vicki muttered, “I’ll be original, too, and design cargo pants and a bulletproof vest.”
I turned and wagged my finger at her and her oh-so-angelic smile.
Bent over her notebook, Ashley scribbled a sketch identical to Loretta’s, and then she drew several similar dresses, with sleeve, pocket, and neckline variations. Ashley could go far with design, but would TADAM offer her enough good, solid training?
Carrying a bolt of satiny silver fabric, Muscle Shirt swaggered in from the kitchen. He plunked the bolt on the long table.
Loretta smiled at him. “This will be the first time Kent sees the sketch I made, and I haven’t told him what I was going to sketch. He will show you the technique he uses to construct the garment I’ve sketched.”
She maneuvered one shapely, pale arm from inside the cloak and gestured toward her sketch. “Ta-da!”
Kent, aka Muscle Shirt, stared at the sketch for a moment. Did the man never smile? Or speak? Without saying a word, he unrolled a length of fabric from the bolt and pinned part of one end of it to the overly curvaceous dummy. Then he took the longest dressmaker’s shears I’d ever seen and slashed at the fabric. A few minutes of pinning, a few more of slashing, and he tossed four pieces of fabric, two for the front and two for the back, into the lap of a woman in the front row.
“Here,” he said. Apparently, he could speak. “Sew the front and back seams, insert a zipper, narrow-hem th
e sleeve and neck edges, sew the sides up, and hem the bottom. Shouldn’t take you much longer to stitch it together than it took me to cut it out.”
We all applauded. People chattered.
Ashley giggled. “I don’t think that any real person is built like that dummy.”
“Mannequin,” Dora corrected her with a glint of mischief in her brown eyes. “And I was watching him. He left lots of extra fabric at the waist.”
The woman in front of me turned around. “If he’d thrown those pieces to me, Willow, I would add some machine embroidery.”
I smiled and nodded. “Me, too.”
A woman’s voice rang out over all the others. “What is going on here?”
14
Her limp brown hair uncombed and her eyes puffy and red, Paula stood in the doorway leading to the kitchen. “This is a house of mourning! Get out!” The old maroon bathrobe she’d thrown over threadbare pajamas was many sizes too big for her. I guessed it had belonged to Antonio.
Feeling terrible for invading her privacy and grief, I stood up, as did most of the people around me.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Loretta shouted. “Everybody stay put.” Cloak flying, she twirled toward Paula. “This is a class that your late husband planned. We are carrying out his wishes.”
With one hand, Paula grasped the bathrobe’s lapels near her throat. “Can’t you give a grieving widow some space in her own home?”
Kent stepped forward. “This building belongs to the Threadville Academy of Design and Modeling. And the shareholders are . . .” He folded his arms like he was considering waiting all night for an answer.
“Antonio,” Paula retorted. “And only Antonio. I’m his heir, so I own TADAM and this building. This is my home. Get out.”
Behind me, I wasn’t surprised to hear Vicki’s voice. “I’m Vicki Smallwood, Elderberry Bay’s police chief. Maybe I can help you sort this out.” She didn’t say it threateningly. A tone of kindness wrapped around the steel that was always at the core of her voice.
Paula stared at her, and then at the rest of us near her. “You! You haven’t arrested those two women for their fatal attack on Antonio. They’re in front of you, making a mockery of you and the law. Out!” She made a violent shooing motion. “All of you, out!”
“Wait,” Loretta hollered. “Before you go, there’s a sign-up sheet in the foyer for the rest of the Design 101 course. Many of you have vouchers for it that will save you a bundle. And if you don’t sign up here tonight, you can do so on our website.”
Apparently, Loretta wasn’t planning to simply walk out of TADAM just yet.
She beckoned to Vicki. “And as a citizen of this village and an employee of TADAM, I am requesting that the police chief come up here and mediate.”
Kent bent one arm at the elbow, raising one hand above shoulder level in a lazy motion like he was voting with Loretta. “I agree. Maybe you can talk some sense into this woman, Chief.”
Vicki sharpened the steel in her voice. “You three, let’s reconvene your discussion in the kitchen.” She made her way to the front of the room. “Everyone else, class is dismissed.”
People in the audience gathered purses, notebooks, and phones. I sidestepped out of my row between chairs.
Paula yelled at Vicki to go away and, on her way out, to arrest Dora and me for murdering her husband.
Would-be fashion students cast me sympathetic glances and patted my arm.
I was more determined than ever to attend the Design 101 course. Ashley wanted to be one of the first to put her name on the list, but I whispered, “Let’s allow the others to sign up first.” To make room for them all, I pulled her down the hallway almost all the way to the kitchen.
Dora, Haylee, Opal, Edna, and Naomi joined Ashley and me. None of us were eavesdropping. That’s why we all stood still with looks of fierce concentration on our faces.
“You’re not evicting me,” Paula shrieked. “This is my home!”
Vicki said firmly, “No one’s evicting anyone.”
Loretta chimed in, “I don’t want anyone interrupting our courses. TADAM’s on pretty shaky financial ground as it is.” The shaking must have been contagious. It had crept into Loretta’s voice, along with what sounded like barely controlled rage. “Antonio expected many more tuition-paying students to enroll in the school, and he borrowed heavily to restore this building—and to add that lavish director’s suite you live in.”
Vicki asked calmly, “Who owns this building?”
Paula shouted, “I do. It was left to me by my late husband.”
Loretta corrected her. “The bank owns the building.”
Paula retorted, “Lenders don’t own a building unless there’s a foreclosure. Antonio owned it, and now I own it. And anyway, the loans were for renovating. There’s no mortgage to foreclose on.”
Kent’s voice held a note of wonder mixed with sarcasm. “Then the building itself must be collateral for the loan.” He paused. No one said anything, and he continued. “Antonio told me that he and some silent partners owned TADAM, which of course owns this building. Antonio never mentioned anything about Paula inheriting even his share.”
Paula muttered, “He never said a thing to me about any silent partners.”
Vicki asked, “Paula, can you show me the deed to this mansion?”
“I don’t know where Antonio put it.”
Vicki said calmly, “I’ll get someone to check with the land office. And they can find out whether TADAM is a corporation, a partnership, or a sole proprietorship, and who owns the school.” Vicki’s voice became louder, as if she’d turned her head toward us. “Okay, then how about you two, Kent and Loretta. Do you have legal papers showing you have the right to continue teaching in this building?”
“I have an employment contract,” Loretta chimed. “In my apartment, a couple of blocks away. Kent lives in the same building. Do you have your contract, too, Kent?”
“Mine’s in my safe deposit box in Erie,” Kent answered. “I’ll get it as soon as I can, but I teach classes here from ten to five tomorrow and the rest of the week.”
Paula objected, “No, you don’t.”
Vicki heaved a sigh that was audible in the hallway. “Maybe none of you should use the TADAM mansion until after we find the answers to all of these questions. If the mansion is, as Paula says, in Antonio’s name only, we’ll have to wait until probate. If anyone questions the will, the courts can close this mansion for months or years, as long as it takes, and no one will be allowed to teach here or live here. Is that what you want?”
Silence.
Vicki wasn’t done. “Each of you should consider hiring a law firm to represent your interests.”
Paula gasped. “I can’t afford that!”
Kent said, “Resolving the issue could still take years. And cost us a minor fortune.”
Loretta’s answer was terse. “Hiring lawyers is not an option.”
Vicki said slowly, “Here’s another possible solution, then. You can all agree right here and now that Paula can continue living in the apartment on the third floor, but only if Kent and Loretta continue operating the school as planned.”
I could barely hear Kent’s question. “How else do you propose to pay the bills, Paula? Taxes on the mansion, loan repayments, interest . . . If we stop teaching, the students will leave.”
Paula sounded smug. “They’ve paid their tuition until June, and—”
Loretta cut her off. “They’ll demand refunds.”
“Well, they can’t have them,” Paula said, sounding less smug.
“Oh boy,” Kent said. “Now you’ll really need a lawyer.”
“You’re giving me no choice but to let you continue teaching here,” Paula complained. “This is blackmail.”
“How is it blackmail?” Vicki asked.
“Letting these
people continue to come into my home and fill it with strangers.” Paula’s voice again, bitter. “You’re making me pay for something that is legally mine.”
“That’s not exactly my definition of blackmail,” Vicki said.
Paula stated again, “I own this school.” She was sounding less sure.
Kent asked, “Don’t you want your late husband’s project to succeed?” His question might have placated her if he’d hidden his amusement.
Besides, he was heading toward emotional blackmail. Why didn’t he and Loretta leave for more secure jobs? Maybe I was seeing the situation through my own selfish eyes. I didn’t want Loretta to stay anywhere near Clay.
Vicki asked, “Paula, how did all those people get into the mansion tonight? I returned Antonio’s keys to you, and you said you also had your own set. Did you leave the mansion unlocked, or did you let everyone in this evening?”
“I locked it, and I certainly did not let anyone in. I’ve been a basket case since Saturday night. I’ve mostly been sleeping.”
Kent offered, “Loretta got here first and opened up.”
Again it sounded like Vicki turned her head toward us. “You have keys, Loretta?”
“Of course.” Loretta’s answer was abrupt. “So does Kent. Antonio wanted us to be able to teach classes without him or Paula having to traipse all the way down from the third floor to let us in.”
Vicki managed to sound puzzled, though knowing her, she wasn’t. “But Loretta, on Saturday night, you didn’t know how to lock up. You asked Clay Fraser to help. Then you let me use Antonio’s keys to lock up while you watched. Why didn’t you mention that you had keys then?”
Dora winked at me.
Loretta snapped, “I didn’t have them with me.”
Knowing that she’d be attending the reception in the TADAM mansion, she hadn’t brought the mansion’s keys with her that night. Maybe it made sense. TADAM students had been preparing the reception in the mansion when Loretta arrived, and she could have expected Antonio and Paula to lock themselves inside after everyone left.
