She leaned back against the white-tiled counter and folded her arms, that defiant Hattie expression planted firmly on her face. “What’s the story with Gavin McClaine?” she asked.
Raylene was at the swinging door, heading back to the dining room with her loaded, tiered tray. She stopped with her shoulder against the newly refinished oak. “He was in here yesterday poking around, asking questions about your mama and the sheriff—”
“What kinds of questions?” A red flag went up in my head. Gavin had that effect on me. For whatever reason, he didn’t approve of his dad’s relationship with my mother. As if the McClaines were too good for the Cassidys. We were the Hatfields and McCoys to Gavin’s mind.
Hattie and Raylene locked gazes for a second before Raylene answered, “He wanted to know how many guests, the general plan for the reception, asked to see all the accommodations, seems worried that we can’t handle the guests if the . . . the . . . murder . . . er, if the other guests are still here.”
“Did he say how long he and his dad were going to request that they stay?” I asked, tilting my head toward the dining room. After all, either one of them could release the group from Dallas and New York. They didn’t have any evidence to hold anyone.
They both shook their heads. “No, but I got the impression they weren’t going to be set free any time soon,” Hattie said, “and I also got the feeling it wasn’t necessarily because of that man dying.”
My jaw tightened, right along with my fists. If Gavin McClaine was using Beaulieu’s murder to throw a wrench into the wedding plans, he had another think coming. All the more reason I wanted this resolved, even if I had to get involved to make sure that happened. Nothing was going to stop this wedding from happening, least of all a hotshot deputy with a wild hair in his craw.
Chapter 11
The sheriff’s department, which used to be the old Baptist church, was part of Bliss’s historic registry, a plaque affixed to the outside entrance announcing the building’s importance in the town, since circa 1898. It was spittin’ distance from Buttons & Bows and was now home to the city offices. But being as old as it was, the devotion from years and years of prayer had seeped into every board, every brick, and every crack. It still looked like a church. Its faded brick siding and peaked roofline would never be changed, and entering the building made me feel more like praying than confronting my soon-to-be stepbrother, aka the deputy sheriff.
I walked into the vestibule, past the old sanctuary to the left with the pews still pushed up against one wall and the solemnness hovering in the air. I stifled my urge to hold out my arms in reverence, instead plowing down the hallways toward reception, searching for Deputy McClaine. I sucked in a calming breath, and walked up to the cutout window. “Hey, Dixie,” I said, throwing up my hand in a friendly wave. Meemaw always said you can catch more grain moths with apple cider vinegar, which was a spin on the catching flies with honey metaphor. It was another thing I never understood when I was a little girl, but now that I was grown and in my thirties, I got it. What’s sweet to one person may not tickle someone else’s taste buds. The trick was always getting to the nitty-gritty and finding what people responded to. It was true in fashion, in cooking, and in everything else, too.
I racked my brain for what I knew about Dixie. She’d been a few years ahead of me in school, had been the head cheerleader from Bliss High School, and had married Jake Stannis, her high school sweetheart, who’d been the star quarterback of the Bliss Bobcats. I knew she and Jake had three kids. She worked here to make ends meet while Jake coached football at the high school. I’d heard the catty women around town say that her receptionist job was so she’d have spending money for her spray-on tan and hair bleach, but I imagined she was good at her job.
“Hey yourself, Harlow,” she said, giving me a good once-over. I couldn’t tell if she was impressed by my outfit—a prairie dress, belted low on my hips, paired with my favorite red Frye boots—or if she was holding back a mocking smile.
Either way, I had to find some common ground with her. I smiled real big. “Did I hear that your daughter was in the play at the middle school?”
The hard lines on her face softened and she smiled. If the way into a man’s heart was through his stomach, the way into a woman’s was through her kids. “She sure was. Four days of auditions. She had the starring role,” she said.
“Wow, congratulations. If she’s anything like you, I bet she was great,” I said, completely sincere. From what I remembered, Dixie had starred in several of Bliss High School’s plays.
We chatted about her kids for a few minutes, my blood pressure finally getting back to normal. “I’ve been meaning to come by your shop,” she said after I’d been fully updated on Jake Junior, Heather, and Tiffany. She scrolled through pictures on her smart phone, bragging on her kids in true mother style. Dixie still had a cheerleader’s personality, but she’d also grown up and seemed like a great mother. “Fashion’s Night Out is coming in the fall. We don’t have a mall nearby that’s going to participate, but the town council wants Bliss to be part of it. Kind of a block party, all about fashion.”
I knew about Fashion’s Night Out. It was an annual event from Manhattan to Milan to L.A., and everywhere in between. The Galleria in Dallas always took part, I knew the suburban city of Southlake drew a big crowd, and the shops at Highland Village joined in, but I’d never imagined Bliss being in the mix. “Sounds like fun!” I said, a trifle too enthusiastically. I was calm, but still distracted by my desire to chew out Gavin McClaine. I’d waited a few hours to simmer down before coming to talk to him, but time hadn’t helped in this instance. I was still worked up. Taking on a new project like Fashion’s Night Out would have to wait until after my mother’s wedding, and after the weight of Beaulieu’s murder was lifted off the town.
“Great! I’ll come by real soon,” she said with a toothy smile. “Now, Harlow, what can I do you for?”
“Is Deputy McClaine around?”
“He’s right back in his office,” she said, pointing to the hallway behind her.
I hesitated. “Can I . . . ?”
“Sure thing.” She pressed a button underneath her desktop, and a buzzing came from the door, followed by a click.
I’d been to the department before, but I usually entered through the city offices side of the old church. Being buzzed through was a new experience. “Do you know where to go?” she asked once I’d passed through to the back.
“Sure do. Thanks a bunch, Dixie. Come on by anytime so we can talk.” I waved and headed down the hallway and into the maze of offices. Will had an office at the opposite end of the building with the other city employees. This side was the law enforcement side. I really wanted to take a hard left and go see Will, but I stayed my course, heading for Gavin’s office instead.
His door was cracked open slightly and his Southern drawl carried into the hallway. I paused long enough to listen to the snippets of conversation, suddenly recognizing the other voice. What was she doing here?
I’d been taught not to eavesdrop, so I lifted my hand to knock, but the sound of my name stopped me. My hand froze midair and all my good Southern breeding went out the window.
“I plan to win that Pulitzer one day,” Lindy said. “I’ve done some research, and I won’t stop until I have what I need.”
“And?”
“And yes, she has a name in the industry.”
There was a weighty pause. Gavin’s voice changed slightly, almost turning forlorn, as he said, “Does she, now?”
“At least she’s starting to. She left Manhattan and her job at Maximilian, but she’s still just starting out.”
My breath caught in my throat. Why were they talking about me? My thoughts hitched. I couldn’t possibly be a real suspect in Beaulieu’s murder, could I? Gavin and Hoss McClaine knew me better than that.
“That can’t be why she’s here,” Gavin said.
Lindy met Gavin’s refusal to believe head-on. “It certainly coul
d be.”
I could supply her with the truth. What Loretta Mae wanted, Loretta Mae got. And she’d wanted me back home in Bliss, so here I was. I dropped my hand back to my side. Why in the world did they even care? I debated on what to do—tiptoe out of here and leave them to their discussion, or barge in and demand to know why they were talking about me.
I went with option number two. I was my mother’s daughter and I didn’t back down from anything. I was the great-great-great-granddaughter of Butch Cassidy, which gave me extra gumption. I wouldn’t turn my back on the likes of Gavin McClaine when I had a beef with him about interfering with my mother’s and Hoss’s wedding, and certainly not when he was asking around about me and why I was even back in Bliss.
My hand fisted and I rapped my knuckles against the door, pushing it open at the same time. “I’m taking her at face value. She came to help her friend with her mama’s wedding and with that photo shoot,” Gavin was saying. “Nothing more.”
I poked my head in and saw Gavin reclined in his chair, his heavy black boots on the corner of the desk, his fingers linked behind his neck. Lindy turned in her chair from where she sat at the far side of the desk. But before either of them could say another word, the realization of their last sentence hit me. They hadn’t been talking about me.
Oh Lord. They’d been talking about Orphie Cates. And Gavin was trying to believe she had nothing to do with Beaulieu’s death.
• • •
“Sorry. Wrong office,” I said, the words spilling from my mouth before I had time to think. The fact that the deputy was questioning why Orphie was in town, and given that Beaulieu had been murdered just after she arrived, was probably a big ol’ red flag. Until the murder was solved, I was pretty sure Gavin would be focusing all his brainpower on that, which meant he’d have Hoss’s ear, which meant the sheriff would be spending his time involved in a murder investigation instead of enjoying his upcoming nuptials with my mother.
Which also meant that Gavin could wedge his foot between my mother and his father, if he was so inclined.
“Harlow Jane,” Gavin said, “were your ears a-burnin’?” Gavin met my gaze, his dark eyes boring into me as if he knew perfectly well that I’d been standing outside the door, listening.
“Why would they be? Were you talking about me?”
Lindy tucked her notebook in her satchel, but her spine was straight, her shoulders back. She was on high alert and while she might not be taking notes, not a single detail of the conversation we were having would slip past her.
“Sure was,” Gavin said. He dropped his legs down, the soles of his boots hitting the hard pile of the industrial carpet with a dull thud. “You have a lot on your plate, what with the wedding and the magazine article—”
“If that’s still even happening.”
He ignored my interruption and continued. “And the murder at your shop, of course.”
My heart ratcheted to a thunderous rhythm, but I made my voice remain steady. “I work better under pressure.”
“Then a murder under your roof shouldn’t slow you down in the least.”
My fingers twitched and I forced my feet to stay rooted to the spot. “I’m sure you’ll figure out what happened.”
“Working on that very thing. Top of the priority list.” He pointed at Lindy. “We were just discussing it, in fact.”
Orphie’s face appeared in my head, front and center, her infectious smile tainted by the murder that had happened in Buttons & Bows. “Oh?”
“I’ve been talking with all the people who were at your shop that morning. Wanna go through the list with me?”
How could I refuse? “Sure thing, Deputy.”
Gavin’s eyes narrowed. He usually had to remind me to address him as deputy, and calling him Gavin was so much more fun because it got under his skin, but bless his heart, he just kept going. “Great.”
I went through the list in my mind, ticking off one person after the next. “Lindy,” I began, looking at her and offering a quick smile. “And Quinton. Beaulieu, of course, his assistant—”
“Jeanette?” Gavin had flipped open a file folder and alternated between looking down at his notes and looking at me.
“Yes.” I went on. “Midori. Her models—”
“Zoe and Madison?”
“Right. And Beaulieu’s models, Barbi and Esmeralda.”
“Esmeralda,” he murmured, shaking his head. “Who names their kid Esmeralda?”
Who named their kid Hoss or Bubba or Betty Sue? Texans, that’s who, and I imagined Esmeralda was a family name since the girl didn’t look as though she came from some exotic place far away from the South.
“Your mother, too, right?” Lindy asked.
As if she didn’t know with absolute certainty that Tessa Cassidy had been there. “Yes, my mother, my grandmother, and a friend who’s visiting—”
“Orphie Cates,” Gavin said, his lips lifting just slightly on one side. He looked up at me, an innocent, Barney Fife look on his face, as if I couldn’t tell he was smitten with her. If someone who looked like Timothy Olyphant could summon up Barney Fife, that is.
“Yes, Orphie Cates. My friend.”
Gavin met me gaze again. “And you, of course.” He chuckled, but the sound sent a chill down my spine. He had a truckload of Southern charm he could employ when he wanted to, just like his daddy, but underneath it all, he was shrewd and wanted nothing more than to get the job done.
“And me.”
He flipped a page in his file, scanning it before looking back up at me. “Let’s go through them all, one by one, shall we?”
I got my feet to move forward and sat in the hard, ladder-back chair next to Lindy. Wanting to hightail it out of there might be at the top of my list of things to do, but making sure nobody I knew and loved ended up in some horrible state penitentiary was higher on my to-do list. “Sure.”
He looked at Lindy. “I’ll talk to you later, darlin’,” he said.
Some people liked a Southern man’s endearments, but from the tense look on Lindy’s face, she wasn’t one of them. She stood, slinging her satchel over her shoulder, and with a quick, almost nonexistent wave, she was out the door.
Gavin dipped his head and held his palm out to me. “I want your perspective on the suspects, Harlow.”
I nearly fell out of my chair. “Since when do you want to hear what I have to say? Haven’t you already interviewed everyone?”
He sat perfectly still for a good ten seconds. “I have,” he finally said, “but I’m interested in what you observed.”
I wasn’t quite speechless, but I was stunned. “Okay.”
“Let’s start with Beaulieu, shall we? What do you know about him?”
I perched on the edge of the chair. No amount of effort could stop my heart from hammering in my chest. “I know of him and his designs,” I said, not really sure what Gavin wanted to hear. “I met him last week when we did the first photo shoot in Dallas. He was just as surly then as he was here. Almost.”
He took out a fresh sheet of paper and started jotting down notes. “What’s his reputation in the fashion world?”
“He’s a good stylist,” I started. Orphie’s description of him came back to me. “I guess he’s, er, was, a bit derivative.”
Gavin stared at me, his head shifting forward on his neck as if he were a turtle darting its head out of its shell. “Derivative how?”
Beaulieu wasn’t on trial and I felt guilty at speaking ill of the dead, but then again, understanding the victim of a crime could help Gavin figure out what really happened. “He sort of”—I made air quotes—“borrowed from other designers.”
“Did he borrow from you?”
“No!” I understood the question, but the idea was absurd. A sliver of doubt about Gavin’s motives worked under my skin. Maybe I’d fallen prey to his Southern charm. A little barrier went up, just in case.
“What about from Midori?”
Oh boy. If Beaulieu routinely used
my designs, or Midori’s, adopting our aesthetic and point of view, and one of us happened to be at the right place at the right time when Beaulieu was murdered, we’d be the first suspect. But I shook my head. “From what I gathered, they didn’t like each other, but no, his aesthetic was more influenced by other big-name designers, like Jean Paul Gaultier. If you put their collections side by side, they’d be pretty similar.”
“But this Jean Paul Gaultine character—”
“Gaultier,” I corrected.
“I stand corrected. This Gaultier character wasn’t at your shop, or in Bliss.”
I sat back on the hard chair. “No.” And the odds of him sneaking into Bliss to kill Beaulieu over some stolen designs were zero. Which brought the focus back onto me and Midori.
“Anything else you know about him?” With Gavin’s heavy Southern drawl, the French elegance of the dead man’s name was lost, another thing Beaulieu would have been cringing at. The first being his murder, of course.
I shook my head. “Not really, no.” He had no connection to anyone who’d been in my shop that I was aware of. “He brought in his own models from New York,” I offered.
“I ran into them at Seven Gables,” he said, the corner of his mouth lifting in a smile.
A sudden thought occurred to me and I framed a question that could help with my own personal investigation. “Hattie and Raylene mentioned you were there. Something about the wedding?”
He waved his hand dismissively. “Harlow, I ain’t gonna lie to you. You Cassidys? I think y’all are nuttier than a tornado chaser, but my pop is happy, and if your mama makes him that way, I’m not gonna poke the fire.”
I was speechless for a second, finally managing a hoarse “Really?”
“Sure. I’m not gonna break up two people in love. I’m not heartless.”
“So why were you grilling Hattie and Raylene?”
He chuckled again, but this time it wasn’t directed at me, and no chill wound its way up my spine. “Grillin’s the wrong word, Harlow Jane. That Raylene makes a mean pecan tart,” he said. “I’d do just about anything for a truckload of those.”
A Custom Fit Crime Page 9
