Deadly Patterns

by Melissa Bourbon

  Mrs. Abernathy beckoned me with her finger. “You come with me.”

  I followed her into the parlor. Mrs. James stood at the window in her low-heeled navy pumps, trim navy skirt, and cream-colored blouse.

  “Harlow, my dear.” Mrs. James strode toward me, her arms outstretched. She clasped my hand in hers. “Once again, you’ve saved the day.”

  Mrs. Abernathy hadn’t shifted her attention and I felt the heat of her gaze on me. “How did I do that?” I asked nervously. If Mrs. Abernathy was a murderer and if she suspected I knew anything, there was nothing stopping her from doing to me what she’d done to Dan Lee.

  “You’ve given the kids Santa Claus. This whole thing would have been a flop if your Mr. Flores hadn’t stepped up.”

  “He’s not my—,” I started to say, but stopped as the front door opened and Madelyn bustled in, camera equipment in tow.

  “It’s a bloody icebox out there,” she exclaimed as the strap of her camera bag slid down the puffy sleeve of her down jacket. She shifted her load, grabbing for it and setting it on the floor.

  I rushed toward her, taking the tripod from her arms.

  “Thanks, love. Put it over by the screen.”

  I followed the direction of her extended arm.

  And stared, slack-jawed.

  Right there in the corner between the staircase and the entrance to the kitchen, big as day, was a dark fabric backdrop hanging from a horizontal bar that was attached to two light-stand supports.

  A lush Christmas tree, fully trimmed with twinkling white lights and Victorian ornaments, an enormous overstuffed thronelike chair, and a painted open box filled with red-and-white-striped candy canes sitting on top of an antique side table created the holiday scene. So this was where Will would play his part as Santa Claus.

  A dull pounding started in my temples, wending its way around to the back of my head. How had I missed seeing that whole setup? Maybe I had a concussion and the doctors had missed it.

  Madelyn’s voice floated in my head like gauze in a summer breeze. She angled her head at me. “You okay, Harlow?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, I’m fine.” I said, trying to swallow my worry. I’d just been distracted by Mrs. James and Mrs. Abernathy, that was all. My powers of observation were fine. They had to be. Fashion design is all about high standards, exact measurements, and precision when cutting patterns. I need to see the details . . . even non-sewing-related things.

  Madelyn looked skeptical, but the clomping of footsteps on the stairs pulled her attention away from me. “Well, would you look at that,” Madelyn said.

  If I hadn’t known it was Will, I never would have guessed it. The red suit fit him perfectly, the soft velvet shimmering against the folds of dark shadows that highlighted the sumptuousness of the fabric. The beard he’d affixed to his face completely masked his goatee, and with the fur-trimmed hat, the gleam in his eyes was like a beacon.

  “As I live and breathe,” I said, placing my hand to my fluttering heart. There was something about a man who’d dress up as a jolly old elf. “It’s Santa Claus.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, he gave me a mischievous smile. “Want to sit on my lap and tell me what you want for Christmas?” he said, the rogue.

  Did I? I felt heat creep up my neck, settling on my cheeks in what I was sure was a scorching blush. I did.

  Mrs. Abernathy, her attention thankfully off of me, clapped her hands in quick succession. “Let’s get started, shall we? Mr. Flores, you sit there.”

  She directed him to the throne while Madelyn set up her tripod. “The light’s a trifle dim in here,” she uttered under her breath, but still loud enough for us to hear.

  Mrs. Abernathy scowled. “Don’t you have a flash?”

  “Of course I do,” Madelyn said. “But . . .” She put one finger to her cheek, thinking.

  Mrs. Abernathy’s foot tapped impatiently. “What is it, Mrs. Brighton?”

  Madelyn shook away whatever had been on her mind. Mrs. James cleared her throat and glided across the room, scooping up a potted poinsettia and the quilt from the rack. “Helen, Harlow has a long list of tasks to do for the fashion show, and I’m sure everyone else is plenty busy. Let’s get started, shall we? Harlow?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Bring a few of those gifts over and place them around the tree.”

  A pile of beautifully wrapped boxes tied with gold and red ribbon sat next to the settee. They were light as air. Faux gifts.

  I carried a few over and arranged them on the tree skirt. Mrs. James handed me the quilt and then crouched to put the poinsettia among the gifts. “Drape that over the arm of the chair, would you?”

  Adding the homespun element softened the scene. “It’s a nice touch,” I said. Will shifted as I arranged the old quilt. A section of stitching had come loose, a few pieces of the patchwork gaping to reveal the batting underneath.

  As I refolded it, hiding the torn section, Will’s hands snaked around my back. “Oomph!”

  I lost my balance, flopping onto his lap, the silky strands of his white beard tickling my cheek, his plump belly soft against my side. “I knew you’d end up here,” he said, a definite twinkle in his eyes. “Just where I wanted you.” And then more quietly, so only I could hear, he asked, “What do you want for Christmas this year?”

  I could hear Meemaw’s voice in my head. True love, Harlow. It’s magical, and without it, you don’t have anything. My great-grandmother’s charm had always been foolproof. What Meemaw wanted, Meemaw got.

  She’d wanted me home in Bliss. Check.

  Wanted Gracie Flores in my life. Check.

  I was pretty sure she wanted Will and me to settle down together and make a passel of Cassidy-Flores babies.

  And I wanted . . . him, too.

  Love. Since discovering my Cassidy charm, I’d been afraid that realizing one of my own dreams, namely falling in love, would mess with my gift. It was another reason I was so hesitant about telling Will about my charm. He might balk and leave, but what if he didn’t? What if he stuck around, we fell head over heels in love, and my Cassidy blessing flitted away?

  I tamped down the fluttering in the pit of my stomach. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I said coyly. I disentangled myself from his oh so warm and cozy lap and ducked my head to hide the heat that had risen to my cheeks.

  Madelyn glanced up from the digital screen of her camera. “Ready?” she asked after I’d moved out of the way.

  “As I’ll ever be,” Will said.

  I couldn’t see his lips through the silk of his snowy beard, but I sensed his smile. Sensed that what he wanted for Christmas was me.

  Madelyn snapped away, taking a series of pictures, directing Will on how to sit, which way to look, where to put his arms, and every other nuance of his position she could think of. “Bugger,” she said, half under her breath.

  “What?” Mrs. Abernathy asked.

  “I want to try it without the backdrop. To capture the mood of the house, you know?”

  “I thought we agreed—”

  Madelyn held up her hand, stopping Mrs. Abernathy’s words on her pursed lips. “You said you wanted the backdrop, but it’s not working. There’s no . . .” She paused, as if she were searching for just the right word. “Life,” she finally finished. “The pictures are flat.”

  The wallpaper in the small central room was alive with color. The old-fashioned brown, green, gold, and copper tea rose pattern climbed up an ivory background. No question, it would give the photos character that black backdrop didn’t.

  But Mrs. Abernathy didn’t agree. She shook her head. “The house isn’t alive. It doesn’t have a mood. We’ll work with what you have.”

  But Madelyn stood firm. Photography to her was like dressmaking to me. It was her passion, even if it wasn’t the thing she made a living doing. She had an eye for telling stories through pictures. Every now and then, she placed a picture or an article in D Magazine or Texas Monthly. She’d done one r
ecently on women entrepreneurs and had included me in it.

  She shrugged her shoulders back, straightening up to meet Mrs. Abernathy’s steady gaze. “Every house tells a story,” she said matter-of-factly, “just like every outfit Harlow makes for someone becomes part of that person’s story.”

  “That’s true.” I’d made Madelyn several outfits. Each had enhanced a part of her character that had been buried. She’d blossomed, become more confident, but really I thought she’d become more . . . Madelyn. An enriched version of herself.

  Will spoke from his throne. “It’s the same for a house. For a building of any kind, but especially for something as old as this place. Hidden nooks and crannies, secret passageways, scars on the wood, handprints in paint on the porch. Every corner has a story to tell.”

  I snuck a glance at Mrs. Abernathy. Was there something hidden in a nook or cranny here that she and Dan Lee had both known about?

  But her gaze remained steady, her foot had stopped tapping, and I chased away my suspicions. The woman was part of Bliss’s old guard. She couldn’t be involved in anything as sordid as murder.

  “Clothes are clothes,” she said. “And a house is a house. The people who came before don’t stay behind.”

  Maybe not in her world, but she didn’t know about Loretta Mae, or the fact that all the Cassidy women apparently hung around 2112 Mockingbird Lane after they’d crossed to the hereafter.

  Madelyn had already started taking down the backdrop. Will maneuvered around his belly to help her. I moved the light stands and before long she was snapping pictures of Will again. She paused to look at the camera’s digital screen. “Much better,” she said. “Now lift your chin, Will. There you go. And look left, uh-huh . . .” She peered through the viewfinder and snapped away.

  Ten minutes later, she suddenly tucked her camera into her bag, straightened up, and announced, “Done.”

  I heaved a relieved sigh. Now I’d be able to skedaddle back to Buttons & Bows and get back to the fashion show garments—

  “Harlow, when will you have the newsletter ready?”

  I gaped at Mrs. James. “Wh-what?”

  She frowned at me, the faint outline of blue veins visible under her papery skin. “Helen said you’d take the pictures and create a newsletter—”

  “She did?”

  We both turned to Mrs. Abernathy. Mrs. James was looking for confirmation and I wanted an explanation.

  But Mrs. Abernathy wasn’t behind us. I peeked into the parlor. She wasn’t there. I looked in the kitchen. Not there either.

  “Where’d she go? Mrs. Abernathy!”

  “I’m right here, Harlow, for heaven’s sake.”

  She glided across the hardwood floor from the other side of the staircase. She’d come from an odd nook, tucked under the incline of the stairs, a tiny powder room with a sloped ceiling.

  I hesitated, my polite Southern roots making me want to hem and haw around the question burning in my mouth, namely, had she been searching for something? But of course that didn’t make sense. She’d had plenty of opportunity over the last six months to scour the house for hidden treasures. “I’m making a newsletter?”

  “Well, of course,” she said, as if there were no other possibility and how thick was I to not understand that? “And some flyers to post in the businesses on and off the square.”

  “You never—”

  “What did you think needed to happen after these PR photos?” She leveled her steely gaze at me, and not for the first time I wondered why she disliked me so. “Are you, or are you not, in charge of this part of the event?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  She flicked her hand toward Madelyn and Will. “You do it, or have one of them do it. I don’t care. I just need it e-mailed to me as soon as possible so it can go out to our mailing list.”

  “But the fashion show—”

  She stopped me with another wave of her hand. “Without a Santa, the kids won’t want to come. And without the kids, parents won’t come. And all our effort will have been for naught.”

  “We’ve sold a hundred tickets already,” I reminded her. We weren’t completely dependent on Santa Claus for people to show up.

  “A hundred is good, but we were counting on the additional people to support the vendors. Your grandmother is one of those. Goat lotion, or something.”

  Mrs. James refolded the quilt, taking it back to the parlor. “If we’re to make this an annual event, we need it to be a success, Harlow,” she said, coming back to the entry room.

  “I’d do it, love, but Billy’s home from Austin and we have a holiday dinner at the university tonight,” Madelyn said. She pulled the memory card from the camera and handed it to me.

  I tucked it into my pants pocket. It seemed I was facing an evening at the computer instead of at the sewing machine. Not what I’d had planned.

  Time was running out. It was going to be a long night. My eyesight would be strained by the time I was finished trying to design the perfect outfit for Josie, threading needles, getting set up for tomorrow’s Santa dollmaking class, and sewing straight seams. At the rate I was wearing out my eyes, come the new year, I’d need to visit the eye doctor, update my exam, and get a new pair of glasses.

  And all this just when I felt like I was on the right track with figuring out what had happened to Dan Lee Chrisson.

  Chapter 21

  I sat in my old yellow truck, dug my sketchbook out of my bag, and started to jot down the thoughts rattling around in my mind, competing for my attention. If I got them on paper, maybe my head would clear and I’d be able to think straight. That had always been Meemaw’s philosophy. She called it a trigger list. “Hit the main points, Harlow,” she’d told me over and over again, “and the rest will fall into place. It’s like piecing together a quilt, one scrap at a time.”

  I wrote down what I knew, which, as it turned out, wasn’t much.

  Raylene and Dan Lee divorced, but not so amicably

  Maggie Pagonis stole Boone

  Loose railing on the widow’s walk

  Hattie protecting her sister?

  Mrs. Abernathy: Dan Lee had no business nosing around that house

  Why were the bolts loose in the first place and who could have done it?

  This last question stuck out like a prairie dress would at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. The same people circled in my mind. The Barnetts, Raylene, and Mrs. Abernathy. They all had keys to the house, and any one of them could have loosened those screws. Plus there was Mrs. James’s missing key to consider.

  I added one more thing to my list.

  Dan Lee Chrisson had been born as Charles Denison. Why had his family hidden who they really were, and was he after something at the Denison mansion?

  No matter how I cut the fabric, the pieces of this mystery quilt didn’t fit together right. No, something was missing. But as I pulled up to 2112 Mockingbird Lane in my rumbly pickup, a movement from the porch caught my eye and the question left my head. “Thelma Louise, if you’re causing trouble again, so help me . . .” I muttered under my breath, yanking the steering wheel to the right and angling the truck alongside the curb.

  In seconds flat, I was out of the cab, coat pulled tight to ward off the chill, and charging through the arbor and gate leading to the front yard. I hurried up the flagstone pathway, taking inventory of the lush winter growth in the yard—a peculiarity, given how cold it had been. Pansies lined the path, bluebonnets sprouted from the icy ground, and even the wisteria was going through a blooming cycle. Mama had a way with plants, and she spread her charm all around, whether she wanted to or not.

  And it all looked just fine. Better than fine. I slowed down. In fact, it looked abnormally perfect, which meant . . .

  “Harlow, what in heaven’s name are you doing standing there like that? Come on up here and let us in the house.”

  Mama. She stood on the porch, tapping her booted foot, her lips pursed in exasperation. “Meemaw never locked the door, you kn
ow,” she said. “Here I thought I could help you with some of your sewing for a spell, but—”

  “Things around Bliss have changed,” I told her. The murder of a bridesmaid in my front yard was evidence of that. A dead Santa was proof. “But I would have left it open if I’d known you were coming by,” I added, walking toward the porch steps.

  The rocking chair creaked, and from the corner of my eye, I saw it moving back and forth. “Meemaw—” At the top of the steps, I turned, expecting to see the misty ghost of my great-grandmother. But I stopped short. Raylene Lewis sat on the old wooden rocker cradling and cooing to her baby.

  Oh! I’d plum forgotten that I’d left her a message and asked her to come over. “I didn’t see you!” I said, hurrying to the front door and plunging the key into the lock. The temperature had dropped to thirty-three degrees, a good mite too cold for a mother and her swaddled babe. A good mite too cold for anyone to be out.

  I held the door for them, closing it against the biting chill once they were inside. The faint scent of evergreen—as much as a mostly fresh five-foot tree from the hardware store could emit—floated in the air. Buttons & Bows didn’t have the ambience of the Denison mansion, but it was home.

  Mama whirled around, whipping her Longhorns cap off her head and hanging it on the coat tree next to the front door. No matter how old she was, she would always be a down-home country girl at heart. No pretense, no gussying herself up beyond her Wranglers and UT clothes (which she wore on account of Red and me both graduating from the Austin university), and no lollygagging around the bramble bush. “Where in tarnation have you been?” she demanded.

  Mama’s temper flare-up didn’t faze me. I hadn’t inherited that tendency, but she’d been this way since I was a tiny thing, and I imagined she always would be. In ten seconds flat, she’d simmer down and be back to normal. “Doing a photo shoot of Santa Claus,” I said, trying my darnedest to ignore the sudden image I had of her in a calf-length, scarf-hemmed lacy white wedding dress, a veil attached to the white cowgirl hat on her head. Oh Lord. It was cheesy—but completely her.