She was a few inches shorter than me, so she tilted her gaze upward. “We were going to wait awhile. You know, until the dust settled.” Her face clouded, her eyebrows pulling together. She looked down at her flat belly. She definitely didn’t have a baby bump. Yet. “Wait a second. How do you know I’m pregnant?”
I shrugged. Nonchalant was the way to go. “Just a hunch.” But I’d never been more sure of anything in my life.
* * *
I’d thought the country club had been chaos earlier, but this… this was utter mayhem. Ushering a gaggle of teenage girls dressed in Victorian gowns to their places on the stage was harder than herding cattle. They clucked, milled around, moved from their spots, and tugged at the heavy sleeves or fanned out the petticoats and crinoline beneath their weighty skirts.
The curtain was drawn, blocking us all from the audience filing into the banquet room. Will Flores was out there, ready to watch his daughter become part of something he’d never imagined she would.
With Trudy’s book in hand, Josie and I had managed to get all eighteen of the Margarets into the right dresses. Now, Mama, Nana, and I, needles and threads in hand, busily inspected each and every one of them, turning the girls this way, then that way, checking for torn hems, gaping seams, or anything else amiss.
Finally, the chaos settled and like the calm before the storm, the Margarets and beaus grew quiet and fell into their places. Duane, dressed in his 1800s replica suit, stood back and practiced an imaginary golf swing as I knelt in front of Libby, slip-stitching the flapping hem of her dress. I watched her parents from the corner of my eye. If they’d been out of sorts earlier, they seemed over it now. They were already in their outfits, Sandra decked out in a silk burgundy gown, an off-white starched bonnet on the back half of her head, the three-inch ties done up under her chin. Steven looked smart in a tightly tailored coat and trousers, a wide cravat tied in a small, centered bow. His low-cut vest showed off the fine white shirt.
They were playing the central roles of Margaret and Sam Houston in the pageant. They took their places, one just out of sight at stage right, the other at stage left. “How much time do we have?” I called out.
Mama’s voice rose above the din. “Five minutes. Just about done, right here,” she said, sending another Margaret to her place on the stage. I tied off the thread just as Libby waved to someone across the stage. I turned and relief flowed through me. Mrs. James waltzed in, the color returned to her cheeks, the confidence back in her stride, and looking radiant in the sky blue dress I’d made special for her. She waved to Libby and made a beeline for us.
“Darlin’,” she said, bending to give her granddaughter a peck on the cheek, “you look divine.”
Libby’s cheeks stained pink, her smile stretching from ear to ear, her dimple carved in her left cheek. “You do, too, Grandma.” After a quick hug, I sent Libby to her place on the stage. The beaus were in a huddle waiting for their entrance. Libby stood right next to Gracie. Mrs. Zinnia James was a tricky old bird to make sure that the two girls who’d hit it off in my shop became better friends. I liked her even more.
Someone yelled from across the stage. “Two minutes!”
“Libby and Gracie are lovely, aren’t they?”
“Like two peas in a pod,” she said, and I snapped my gaze to her again.
Zinnia James looked at me, nodding thoughtfully. “Yes, they are. I know the truth,” she added softly, taking my hand. “Your grandmother, bless her heart, entrusted me with your family’s secret all those years ago. I’ve seen it in Libby recently. She has an uncanny ability to create the most decadent concoctions in the kitchen. Once I realized it went beyond what anyone could say was normal, I knew. She puts things together, uses herbs and flowers and, voila! Suddenly, there’s the most delightful creation and you feel absolutely breathless.”
“It’s true,” a voice said from behind me. “We spent that whole night at Miss June’s talkin’ about it and figurin’ out how to tell Libby… and Gracie.”
I whirled around to face my grandmother. “I—I thought… I thought you two didn’t like each other?”
“Water under the bridge, Harlow. You made me see that not so long ago.” Mrs. James slipped her arm through Nana’s. “Isn’t that right, Coleta?”
“One minute!”
The girls were all in their places. Josie and Mama slipped out front to watch, but Nana, Mrs. James, and I sidestepped to stage right, where Sandra James Allen stood dressed up like Margaret Moffette Lea.
“That’s right.”
“Sandra has the charm, too,” Mrs. James whispered, winking at her daughter. “She and Steven have done everything in their power to keep it quiet, protect Libby, especially when it came to Libby’s biological father. God knows how he might have used that information. It was bad enough he figured out we’re connected to an outlaw and his lover.”
I stared, practically speechless. “You have it, too?” I managed to say.
Sandra nodded solemnly. “Libby and I are the same. When we cook, it’s like our energy flows into the food and is absorbed by whoever eats it.”
I gaped at her, trying to make sense of everything I was hearing. They all knew about the Cassidy charms.
“Time,” someone called, and, slowly, the curtain began to rise. As the strains of a piano sonata by Robert Schumann filled the air, the girls, in perfect unison, curtsied, and began their dance, moving through the choreographed steps they’d been practicing for months. Only Gracie, who’d had very little time to rehearse, stumbled. She kept her eye on Libby to get the steps right, biting her lower lip and shooting a quick glance in my direction.
Sandra’s voice ripped my attention away from Gracie and back to the murder of Macon Vance. “We didn’t kill him,” Sandra whispered. “That’s what you’re thinking. I can see it on your face.”
“You’re sure about your husband?” I snuck a glance at him. He circled his chin, looking strangled by the cravat around his neck.
“I’m sure.”
I debated going for the whole enchilada, finally taking a deep breath and plunging ahead. “What about Anna Hughes?”
Nana and Mrs. James whispered together like the old friends they apparently were again. I caught their occasional glance at Sandra and me before they focused again on the dancing Margarets.
“What about her?” Sandra watched her husband and her daughter, only half focused on our conversation. She took a step toward center stage at exactly the moment he did.
I wanted to be delicate, but I was running out of time. “Was she jealous? Could she have…” I snuck a look at Mrs. James, not wanting to just ask her outright if she’d been having an affair with Macon Vance.
Sandra moved back toward me, still in time with Steven and the music. “Macon was Libby’s father, but that was it. Whatever we had was over before Libby was born,” she said as she bent at the waist in a flowing dance move. “Anna was having an affair with him. If she was jealous, it wasn’t of me.”
The music changed, and the dance shifted gears, each of the Margarets twirling, holding their dresses out as they spun. Sandra and Steven met in the center of the stage, taking hands, coming together, then separating.
The Allens waltzed toward the front of the stage. The bubble machine, now strapped to a platform above the stage and out of sight, whirred to life. And just like that, as the bubbles cascaded down, surrounding the debutantes in a magically iridescent moment, a memory sparked. Macon Vance, right here on this very stage, arguing with Mrs. James, asking her what happened to girls who didn’t have a pedigree, but had something different.
My breath hitched. Like a charm?
I racked my brain, trying to remember the rest of the conversation. It hit me the next second. He’d asked if the Margarets have to do tricks.
Macon Vance had known about the Cassidy charm.
Chapter 36
That suspicion led me back to Mrs. James. My heart clenched in my chest as if a velvet bow had been tied around
and around it, pulled tighter and tighter. “I know what you’re thinking, Ladybug, and it’s not true.” Nana whispered in my ear. “Zinnia didn’t kill that man.”
I gave my grandmother the silent stink eye. A few days ago she didn’t want to have a thing to do with Mrs. James; now she was defending her? I couldn’t make heads or tails of anything.
“Harlow?” Zinnia James’s strong Southern voice interrupted my thoughts.
“Yes, ma’am?” I tucked my hair behind my ears, turning to face her. When I did, I melted. She glowed in her softly ruffled dress, her eyes alight with love for Libby and Sandra. “You know, a week ago I never would have thought Coleta and I would ever mend our bridges, but look at us now. I couldn’t have wished for anything more than this moment, right here.” She leaned over and gave me a hug, and I knew that the dress had worked. I’d thought Mrs. James’s deepest desire would be to be clear of the murder investigation. It wasn’t. She wanted her friendship with my grandmother back.
I peaked out at the audience to gauge the reaction. Madelyn Brighton floated through the crowd, snapping pictures of the Margarets. All the tables were full. Ice clinked against the clear glasses, the waiters moved quietly as they set up the buffet table, and… My gaze hitched on one table. George Taylor sat with a woman I didn’t recognize. She was the lucky woman dating Bliss’s most eligible bachelor. Next to him was Will, then Karen and Ted Mitchell, Josie’s partners in her bead shop. Anna and Buckley Hughes rounded out the table.
I zeroed in on Anna, wondering if her version of the story was true, or if Sandra’s was. Either way, there was something about her that sent up a warning in my head.
The dance concluded, and Mrs. James straightened up, gave Nana’s hand a fortifying squeeze, and waited for her cue to go onstage to announce the Margarets and read the pedigrees. Before she passed the curtain, she stopped and turned. “Harlow, I almost forgot. When I went to pick up the dress at your shop, your computer was buzzing. Making a really strange noise, almost like something was inside the box.”
Meemaw. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll get it fixed.”
“Yes, good.” The music faded and the girls dropped into a deep curtsey. Applause and a few “Yipees!” broke out from the audience. “I couldn’t help but notice,” Mrs. James continued, “that you’d Googled Anna Hughes.”
“Oh! Right.” Good grief, that seemed like eons ago. “I was trying to find out about her sister’s wedding.” Inside, my stomach roiled. It was as if Mrs. James had known I’d just been thinking about the doctor’s wife.
“It’s a doozy of a secret she’s been keeping from her Amarillo days,” she said, one eye on the Margarets, her fingers lightly fluttering over her forehead, then along her upper lip. I’d never seen Mrs. James nervous. It made her even more endearing.
“O-ohhh.” I frowned. “Yes.” Affairs and daytime drinking were pretty good secrets.
“Your pipes started creaking, too.” She turned to look at me, one finger poised against her cheek. “That’s quite a rickety old house you have there,” she added, but she cocked her head at me, like she wanted confirmation that it was Loretta Mae, and not the pipes, making a ruckus in my house.
“That darn plumbing,” I said, giving an aw, shucks snap with my fingers. The beaus made their way onto the stage, spun the Margarets in a well-rehearsed twirl, then retreated back to the wings.
“Quite a scandal,” Mrs. James said. “Fern said Trudy’s recovering nicely. Guess we can tell her she was wrong. Lightning certainly can strike the same place twice.”
I stared at Mrs. James’s back. Scandal? Lightning? “I don’t—,” I started to say, but the music queued, the girls separated into two lines, and Mrs. James waved at me. She glided out to her spot, looking exactly like a former debutante should look, her silhouette lovely as she basked in the limelight. Being held in the town’s jailhouse hadn’t hurt her one lick.
As Mrs. James read each birth story, the young lady’s beau joined his Margaret onstage. The teenage boys edged up behind me, waiting for their cue. I only half listened to Mrs. James, my mind trying, instead, to make sense of the fragmented conversation we’d just had.
Lightning striking twice. Someone else had said that to me. Recently, too. But who?
“She looks beautiful.”
Will Flores’s voice at my side pulled me out of my thoughts. “Yes, she does,” I said, looking at Gracie. My gaze drifted to Libby. She looked so poised. To think, Macon Vance, her own father, could have destroyed that.
My stomach grew tight as I remembered something. Deputy Gavin McClaine had said Macon Vance was from Amarillo. Mrs. James had just said there’d been some scandal in Amarillo with Mrs. Hughes.
Coincidence? My gut was saying no way.
I still didn’t know what Trudy Lafayette and lightning striking twice had to do with anything.
I tapped my foot impatiently, waiting while Mrs. James read through each Margaret’s pedigree. Each girl stepped forward, one by one, as her beau handed her a yellow rose.
“Darlin’,” Will said, catching Gracie in a hug as she left the stage, “you’re beautiful.”
Duane dropped Libby’s hand as she came up to us. The straight skirt, double rows of ruffles, and the heavily appliquéd bodice with the square neckline perfectly matched the girl and her quiet personality. Sandra glided up next to her, their smiles widening as Steven appeared from behind the backdrop curtain in his Victorian suit. Behind him, the beaus gathered, dressed to the nines in period costumes, waiting to escort the newly presented girls during their first waltz.
Seeing the Allens together—or maybe it was the new ideas percolating in my mind—I was beginning to believe Sandra’s version of things. She and Will both painted less than flattering pictures of Anna Hughes. They couldn’t both be wrong.
“Libby’s gown is wonderful, Harlow,” Sandra said to me. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so… so… happy.”
“Well, of course,” Mrs. James said as she passed by, as if it were ludicrous to think it would have turned out any other way. I thought about chasing her down to find out what the Amarillo scandal had been, but she was already surrounded by a group of clucking mamas. I’d have to catch up with her later.
Libby beamed. She did look happy. Poised and confident, just exactly what I’d hoped she’d feel after wearing the dress I’d made for her. Her eyes sparkled, her cheeks had a rosy tint to them, and she looked like she’d blossomed, breaking out of her caterpillar cocoon, emerging as a colorful butterfly. “I’ll probably never wear this again,” she said, “but I love it.”
Gracie extricated herself from her dad’s hug and whispered something to Libby. They giggled, said, “Ta ta!” in unison and with perfect debutante inflection, and skipped off, giggling and talking before their waltz.
“I need a computer,” I said to Will as the music started again.
Sandra Allen piped up. “Tina Nelson’s the country club’s manager on duty. I’m sure you can use hers. Ta,” she said with a wave of her hand as she and Steven started to wander off. Will and I started backstage, but Sandra’s voice stopped me. “Harlow?”
“Yes?”
“I can’t thank you enough for stepping in and taking care of things for my mother.” She gestured to the stage and the Margarets milling around. “Everything really is perfect.”
I smiled, and thanked her. It was perfect, except that Trudy and Fern weren’t there to see the fruits of their labor. Trudy was barely hanging on after being attacked, and there was a killer still on the loose who had used my dressmaking shears as a murder weapon.
Chapter 37
We stayed put until the waltz was over and Gracie had been escorted by her last-minute beau, one Jason Boone, off the stage and to her seat in the banquet hall. Will whispered in her ear before joining me at the club’s lobby computer. He stood on one side of me, Josie and her blond-haired, suntanned husband, Nate, on the other. “What are you looking for?” Josie asked.
I’d Goog
led Anna Hughes, just as I’d done at home, and was scrolling through the entries. “Following a hunch.”
“I hear you got you some smarts, Ms. Cassidy.”
We all turned to see Deputy Gavin McClaine amble up to us looking just the same as he ever did in his beige law enforcement clothes. Once again, I tried to get a vision of him in something else—anything else—but came up blank. The man was an enigma… but not necessarily in a good way.
“So you’re Will Flores,” Gavin said. He didn’t offer his hand like a good Southern gentleman. Good manners only went so far, apparently.
Will didn’t offer his either. “Deputy.”
Nate straightened up, his left arm draped comfortably around Josie’s shoulder, the other extended. Breeding had been drilled into him by Lori Kincaid, society matron extraordinaire.
“Gavin. Heard you were back in town,” Nate said, his chin dimple looking more pronounced than usual. Where Will was more ruggedly attractive, and Gavin was kind of badass good-looking, Nate was a classically handsome man. Together, he and Josie would make beautiful babies.
“With bells and whistles,” Gavin said. “Wouldn’t miss such a highfalutin shindig.”
“Look!” Finally, the Amarillo scandal involving Anna Hughes loaded onto the computer screen. They all leaned in to read the Amarillo Globe-News article. The deputy’s breath hit the back of my neck. “So the woman died,” he said a few seconds later.
Josie grabbed my arm. “‘Paralysis at the wrinkled area is caused by injecting the neurotoxin, but apparently also caused paralysis of the respiratory muscles and dysphagia—’”
She looked up at Nate. “Trouble swallowing, I think,” he said.
“‘—which led to pneumonia and fluid in the lungs. The incident ended in the death of Louisa Renee Babcott. No charges have been filed and the death has been called a tragic accident.’” She shook her head sadly. “Is that what happened to Trudy Lafayette? Oh, gosh, she’s not going to die, is she? Is her throat paralyzed?” She’d gone a little green as her hand fluttered to her face, then her throat, as if she’d had the treatment and was feeling the infected areas.
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