“Just a passing curiosity,” I answered, zeroing in on the break-ins and assault. I’d come back to Bliss thinking it was the safest little town this side of the Mississippi, but then the murder in my yard had tainted my view. Now there’d been another murder and two more incidents? What was going on? “Who was assaulted? Was it a house that was broken into, or a business?” My house was my business… and vice versa. Either way, I’d have to be more careful about locking up.
“Doctor’s house,” he answered.
A shiver slipped up my spine. “Doctor Hughes? Are he and Anna okay?”
He angled his head down, considering me. “They’re fine. You know them?”
“Just a little. He’s friends with Will, and I met Anna at their house a few nights ago during a… a… a little party.”
He shook his head, the slow blink of his eyes showing his disappointment. “It happened right after that little shindig. Everybody in the damn town was at that party. Makes it pretty tough to gather up any reliable evidence.”
“It was standing room only, that’s for sure,” I said.
He looked me up and down, his eyes taking in my forehead and my mouth, before settling back on my eyes. “Why the devil do you women torture yourselves? You don’t need that garbage. Shaving and waxing and getting your claws painted. Uh uh. I’m with Brad—”
“Brad?”
“Paisley? Thank God I’m still a guy?”
When I raised my brows, he scoffed, but then he leaned forward and sang a few lines. “‘These days there’s dudes gettin’ facials…’”
I bit the inside of my cheek to stop from smiling, managing to feign a puzzled look. I’d heard Brad’s “I’m Still a Guy,” but hearing Gavin McClaine sing it in his heavy Southern drawl was priceless. “Keep going,” I said, holding my finger to my cheek like I had the answer to a test question on the tip of my tongue.
“‘Yeah, with all of these men linin’ up to get neutered, it’s hip now to be feminized. But I don’t highlight my hair. I’ve still got a pair.’” He kept singing, ending with a warbling, “‘Yeah honey, I’m still a guy.’”
He stopped singing and spread his arms wide. Was he waiting for applause? An encore? A pat on the back? I batted my eyelashes. “You’ve still got a pair of what?”
He leaned against the receptionist’s counter. “Funny.”
I laughed. “I’m kidding. I love Brad Paisley. No one’s ever sung one of his songs to me—that’s all.”
“Yeah, well, those uptight New Yorkers where you’ve been living all these years… I reckon they don’t get Brad Paisley or Dierks Bentley or Little Big Town. ‘Boondocks’? Now that’s a great song.”
“It sure is. So is ‘Cowboy Casanova,’” I added, thinking that Gavin could be the poster boy for that Carrie Underwood ditty. He looked the type… all suave and snakelike with his blue eyes.
The interior of the jailhouse had been remodeled, but it still felt old and musty like the song said.
He gestured toward the fabric swatches. “I’m done with those.”
I gathered them into a stack and tucked them back into my tote.
“I hear you and Will Flores are an item. That right?”
I guessed the singing and chitchat were done. “We’re friends,” I said, because saying any more would be stretching the truth.
“Does he know what he’s gettin’ into?”
Jamming my hand on my hip, I stared at him. “What in tarnation does that mean, Gavin?”
He laughed, but it was low and laced with a touch of venom. “All you Cassidys think no one knows about you.” He nodded, his eyes darkening. “We know. All that crazy shit goes on ’round y’all. Goats and plants and I don’t know what your deal is. Your mama might have fooled my dad, but you cain’t fool me.”
My pulse pounded in my temples, but I forced my gaze to remain steady. “My mama isn’t fooling your daddy about nothin’, and I don’t know—”
He held up his hand, palm facing me. “Don’t say it.”
I clamped my mouth shut. Madelyn Brighton had recently—and completely accidentally—snapped some pictures of my yard before and after Mama’s charm had worked its magic. Now I wondered if Gavin—or anyone else—had seen them. The Cassidy women had always flown under the radar with our charms, but maybe we’d been deluding ourselves. Did we only think our charms were a secret, while really, everyone knew?
“Deputy McClaine,” I said, mustering up as much gumption as I could. “My mama isn’t wooing your daddy. In fact, I’d say it’s the other way around. He wants to marry her and she wants to take it slow. So whatever spell you think she’s got him under, you’re dead wrong.”
His jaw clenched, but he didn’t say anything else. “Beth Marie,” he said to the receptionist who was just ambling back to the receptionist counter. “Take Ms. Cassidy to see our murder suspect.”
“Yes, sir.” Beth Marie’s voice trembled, but the tone of the deputy’s voice had lit a fire under her. She moved quicker than a lightning bug, maneuvering her rotund body faster than she had a right to, moving around the desk and heading down the short hallway into the depths of the jailhouse. “Come on this way,” she said over her shoulder.
And without so much as a backward glance at Deputy Gavin McClaine, I followed Beth Marie into the depths of the Bliss town jail.
Chapter 21
Mrs. James, bless her heart, was sitting in her tiny cell, her shoulders hunched against the brick wall. She traced a figure eight on the floor with the tip of her shoes. She wore a pair of navy slacks, flats, and a cardigan. At least the deputy hadn’t made her change into some God-awful orange jumpsuit.
My shoes clacked against the stone floor as I followed Beth Marie down the hallway. Mrs. James pushed away from the wall, brushing her hands over her sweater and patting her hair as if she were meeting me for lunch instead of me visiting her in jail. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes, Harlow Cassidy.”
I wished I could say the same about her. She looked haggard, her face drawn and pale, and her eyes rimmed with dark circles. Her skin sagged from the strain of detention.
I forced a bright smile even though the whole place felt like a scene out of Pirates of the Caribbean. Only Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, and the dog clasping an iron ring of keys were missing. “I thought you might like some company.”
She pshawed. “I’m a tough old bird, Harlow. It takes more than a dense deputy thinking I’ve committed murder to wear me out.”
I wanted to believe her, but the dullness in her eyes told the truth. Before heading back to her desk, Beth Marie had pulled a chair forward, but I skirted around it, instead standing at the iron bars, reaching my hand through. “Mrs. James, how are you, really?”
She ambled up to the bars, lifting her hands so I could clasp them. “Sweet girl,” she said. Her voice cracked a tiny bit, and her whole spirit deflated. I tried to summon up an image of the perfect outfit to flatter her figure, something that normally just happened, but pixilated pictures bounced around in my head, darting this way and that so that I couldn’t pull one out. I was oh for two in the jailhouse. Maybe the nineteenth-century brick walls were mortared with charm repellant.
“Can I do anything for you? Do you have a lawyer?”
She pulled her hands free, retreating to the rickety cot pushed against the right wall and sitting down.
I sat on the edge of the chair facing the cell.
“I suppose you mean besides Libby’s young man? He’s a bright whippersnapper, if there ever was one. But yes, in all seriousness, Ted Mitchell is working on getting me out of here as we speak. You know Ted, right?”
“Of course.” Hard to forget. He worked for the Kincaid family as their lead council, but he reminded me of Tom Hagan from The Godfather. He was the spitting image of Robert Duval, right down to his balding head, heavy jowls, and blind loyalty. I’d helped his wife put a little spark back into their marriage by designing a dress for her. “I hear he’s good.”
“The
best,” she said.
“You’re innocent, so I’m sure you’ll be back home in no time.”
Her eyes flickered with a little light. “You believe I’m innocent?”
“Of course. I know you were with my grandmother when the murder happened.”
Whatever response I’d hoped for, it didn’t come. She just nodded.
“You could tell the deputy,” I said. “Miss June and Nana would corroborate it.”
“A jury can convict on circumstantial evidence,” she said, sighing so heavily that I wondered if she’d really given up hope, “and that’s all they have.”
So she didn’t want to talk about her alibi. “Ted Mitchell’s the best. You said so yourself.”
“He is, but my dear, we must find the real killer, and I suspect the police are not even looking.”
I had more faith in Hoss McClaine than that. He was good at his job and he took justice seriously. But if she wasn’t willing to help herself, then she was right. The best way to prove her innocence was to find the real killer. “All anyone seems to know is that Macon Vance had a lot of girlfriends—”
“An understatement. From robbing the cradle to cougar-hunting, he definitely had his share.”
I remembered what Gina had told me the day Macon Vance had been found. Stopping him from revealing the truth—that he’d fathered a child—was strong motive for murder. Something about my conversation with Gina had raised a red flag; I just hadn’t been able to put my finger on what bothered me. Mrs. James’s comment, though, brought the flag front and center in my mind, with the answer right alongside it. Two women had been at the bakery that morning, and Gina had looked their way and said, “She’s too old.” Both women were well past their childbearing years. Macon Vance had been in Bliss for sixteen or seventeen years, so any child would be younger than that. I’d recognized one of them as Mrs. Eleanor Mcafferty, who I now knew was the grandmother of…
“Gracie,” I whispered.
“Will Flores’s girl?” Mrs. James stared at me. “What about her?”
I shook my head, fingering the fabric swatches. “I was just thinking. Mrs. James, you know almost everyone in town.”
“I’m a senator’s wife. Comes with the territory. Although there are plenty of people I’d rather not know.”
“I heard that Macon Vance had a child—”
Mrs. James gasped, the color—what was left of it—draining from her face. “Where did you hear that?”
“A friend of mine overheard him talking about it on the phone. Could it be…?”
“Grace?” She shook her head vehemently. “With Eleanor? Good heavens, no,” she said. “She’s well past her child-bearing years.”
“Not Eleanor. Her daughter, Naomi.”
She stared at me. “How do you know about Naomi?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Will told me. Gracie found out who her grandparents are.” Now I stared at her. “You knew?”
“I’m one of the few, I’m sure. I saw Naomi in Bliss the day she left that child with her father. She’d been gone for so long, no one ever thought she’d come back, and she so rarely does. She’s in and out, hardly letting anyone catch a glimpse of her. Bless her heart. Eleanor thinks Naomi gave the child up for adoption. It’s torn me up inside knowing she has a granddaughter right here, but it’s not my secret to tell.”
Mrs. James held too many secrets for people, it seemed.
She blew out a heavy breath and looked to the ceiling of the cell, looking like she had a basket of bricks on her shoulders.
“That man didn’t father a child with Eleanor Mcafferty,” she finally said after a good thirty seconds of silence, “but I’m sorry to say that he did have an affair with her.”
The fact that even Bliss’s so-called best families had sordid secrets was interesting. Could Eleanor Mcafferty have stabbed Macon Vance? Maybe he’d been blackmailing her about their affair.
I remembered what Steven Allen had said outside Will’s house before we’d gone into the Hughes’s cosmetic party. Macon Vance had gotten around with more than Eleanor Mcafferty. “The golf board was always split on whether or not to rehire him, right? There were plenty of people who didn’t like him.”
Mrs. James crossed her legs, one foot shaking back and forth. “The board is always split. Half have always been firmly against him, believing he was a bad influence in the community and caused more harm than good. The other half wanted the status he brought to the club as a former pro-circuit player. The board went in always knowing who was going to vote which way. The newest member is always the wild card and the half that wanted Vance gone kept waiting for someone to come on who’d side with them.” She shook her head. “If only it had happened that way, he’d have left Bliss, and he would still be alive. Don’t let’s talk about this anymore. Ted Mitchell is doing what he can.”
As the conversation shifted to the pageant, I had a fleeting thought that maybe one of the club’s board members could have taken the scissors to Macon Vance. Something to consider, and a better option than Gracie’s newly discovered grandmother being the murderer.
“I brought some fabric samples for you to look at,” I said when I was done giving her an update on the Lafayette sisters and the pageant, hoping a new dress would bring some color back into her cheeks, as well as be her get-out-of-jail card. The colors and garment images in my head began running together, the pixels tightening until one color became prominent, one design front and center. “I thought I’d make you a dress to wear to the Margaret Pageant.” I didn’t have time to, really, but I had to. It was the most I could do for her.
Her hand fluttered up, her bony finger dabbing under each eye. “Lord, child, you are a blessing.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said with a little laugh. “Meemaw taught me to sew. It’s all I know how to do.”
“You bring people joy. It’s the Cassidy way.”
Something in her voice made goose bumps rise on my skin. For the second time in less than an hour, I was pretty sure that the Cassidy secrets weren’t so secret after all. Zinnia and my grandmother had been good friends once upon a time. Had Nana told Mrs. James about the family charms?
“I’d love a Harlow Cassidy creation,” Mrs. James said, interrupting my thoughts. She pushed herself off the cot and shuffled over to the bars, reaching into the bag of swatches I handed her. She seemed to keep returning to one above the others—a pale blue voile, the cotton fabric the exact color, I realized, of the Margaret gown she’d worn so many years ago.
“There were three Margaret gowns in Meemaw’s armoire. Who wore the green one?” I asked, the question rolling off my tongue before I could even gather why I’d asked it.
She hesitated for a moment, taking hold of the iron bars, looking like she wanted to rattle them, demanding her release. Her gaze bore into mine, the blue of her eyes deepening until it was the color of the ocean. “Eleanor Mcafferty.”
My mind swam as I tried to unravel all the threads knotted up in my mind. “So you, Mrs. Mcafferty, and my grandmother were Margarets together?”
She nodded, her knuckles turning white from her tightening grip on the bars.
“And Mrs. Mcafferty wore the green dress?”
“Yes. It was lovely on her, too. I’ll never forget the day we tried them all on. Ellie’s was the only one that was authentic. A bit of their family history, as it turns out. I could tell your grandmother wanted the green one instead of the one Trudy and Fern Lafayette had made for her, but Loretta Mae wouldn’t hear it. She said that each dress had a history, and that it belonged to a particular person. The yellow one was made especially for Coleta, and it would carry her history.”
Except my mother and I had never been Margarets so the history had been trapped in the seams of the gown forever.
“I knew the blue one was mine. Trudy and Fern made it just for me.”
My pulse ratcheted up. Dressmaking had a way of doing that to me. “Where did the green gown come
from?” I asked, my head fuzzy, my thoughts disjointed.
“Loretta Mae told us that Etta Place wore it. Ellie fell in love with it the moment she saw it. She tried it on and your great-grandmother took one look at her and said things were as they should be; it belonged to her. That irked your grandmother, Coleta, to no end. She loved that dress.”
Was that part of why Meemaw tried to keep the dresses from me? Did she not want to dredge up old memories for Nana?
I believed exactly what Meemaw believed: that every piece of clothing made for a person carries history in every stitch and seam. What did a tear and ripped threads mean to that history? Was it a metaphor for a damaged life? “What happened that night?” I asked. “Why is the green dress torn?”
Instead of answering, she said softly, “We’re all the same underneath, you know.” She pointed her manicured finger to herself, then to me. “We’re not so different, you and I.”
I felt myself go blue in the face trying to get Mrs. James to spill what she knew, but the woman was as stubborn as a mule. “You need to ask your grandmother, Harlow. It’s her story to tell, not mine.”
“She doesn’t want to talk about it,” I said.
She wouldn’t budge, and finally I gave up.
As I gathered up the swatches, I tried to understand what she and her family were going through. Mrs. James’s daughter Sandra had looked worse than her mother did, as if she’d suffered a one-two punch. Having your mother in jail had to be one of the worst things a person could experience. Only having it be your child would be worse.
The thoughts triggered a chain reaction of ideas in my mind. The argument between Mrs. James and Macon Vance that day at the club. Meeting Sandra and Libby, then meeting Steven Allen, Libby’s father. Their images flashed like scenes from a movie. Libby didn’t look like Steven, with his pointed nose.
I pictured the faintest smile on Libby’s face and the tiny dimple that formed. Just like the picture in the newspaper of Macon Vance…
Oh no. Had he putted a few rounds with Sandra Allen?
“Harlow?” Mrs. James said, her eyes narrowing as she peered at me through the bars of her cell.
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