“Damn, I have questions, but my next class is coming in.”
“Wait, what year did she graduate?”
“Nineteen seventy-two. I’ll want details, Cutler.”
“I have to go read a gown now.”
She hung up screaming, literally.
I chuckled as I took the gown.
I took it by the hanger to the fainting couch. Because when and if I zoned, there was always the possibility that I would also swoon, so I prepared for a soft landing.
Practically committing psychic hari-kari, I removed my gloves, laid the gown over me like a blanket, and wrapped my arms around it. The fabric was so soft; the imagery of its creation almost romantic.
Impatience got the better of me when I didn’t zone in a blink, and then I experienced a slight dizziness and disorientation, and, as I began to swirl away in earnest, Dante materialized—and about time. “I’m here for you,” he said.
So I swirled away with a friend who would watch my back from the future. But suddenly, no friends stood among those on whom I would never turn my back.
I still held the treasure box that Vainglory had handed Bambi, shocked the gown had taken me back to the place I’d left, though I could have no idea what had transpired in my absence.
“Bambi,” Grody said, “maybe you should take the scavenger list from the box before you give it back.”
“Maybe she should.” Vainglory chuckled. “But when? Tomorrow, next week, next year? It won’t matter, really.”
“What day is it?” Bambi asked.
“How much did you drink, girl?” Vainglory asked with a titter. “You know very well that we left the country club’s Golden Jubilee dinner dance only a few hours ago.”
“We’ve been out here more like ten or twelve hours, missy,” Brut corrected. “It’s got to be the day after by now.”
It must be near dawn, I surmised, at which time I’d get to see their faces. My heart raced at the thought.
“Bambi-Jo, don’t you think about writing any of this in one of your crazy journals or diaries,” Vainglory stressed. “It didn’t happen. Get it?” The depth of that threat did not go unnoticed by the others.
And then, deep in the back of my mind, Vainglory’s voice came back to me, from around the time I had my first ever vision, with her uttering a different, more personal kind of threat to someone else. And with that, I believed that I could name her.
Oh, I could name her. I’d almost forgotten Eve’s call. Zoning often totally separated me from the present, but not this time. I remembered.
I had been right. Vainglory was not just any woman, but her royal PIA self, a spoiled coed who would grow up to become my sister Sherry’s witch of a controlling mother-in-law. I might not be able to prove much until the gown’s first fitting in real time, when I might wheedle some answers out of her if I bowed, scraped, adored, and slobbered enough over her.
So Vainglory and Deborah VanCortland were one and the same poor little rich girl, who, as it turned out, happened to be the biological grandmother of my sister Sherry’s twins, the poor things.
Biology aside, though the gown would flatter any figure, I suspected that Deborah may have outgrown it over the years. And shame on me for delighting in the thought.
Other than her size, she hadn’t changed at all. Here, she’d been to an exclusive formal event—only the rich and greedy need apply—yet this coed and her cohorts had had to make their own fun, some of it off the tears of others.
That described Deborah to a T.
They were all bored rich kids, or, rather, adults, actually. Even I was guilty of according them young adult status, but not so according to their post-college comments. Had been the best swimmer at Vassar. Adults, yes. Deborah had been twenty-two or twenty-three at the time. Adults, and still they didn’t get it. Somebody might have drowned tonight, and it seemed that most of them shrugged a mental “oh well.”
No souls, these people.
“Why isn’t Robin with us?” Bambi asked.
“She’s more interesting to the guys than the rest of us at the moment,” Vainglory said. “Not for any reason that I envy.”
Bambi stamped a foot. “Can you speak English, please.”
“You know,” Vainglory stressed. “That trip to Paris Robin took last semester, for six months’ worth of ‘art lessons.’ Really? I mean, trips like that, a girl usually leaves a little something behind…”
Bambi huffed.
I didn’t sense that she caught Vainglory’s “pregnant” pause but I knew when she gave up on getting an answer. “So why did she dive in the water? There’s a storm for heaven’s sake!” Bambi was either fearless or clueless, I wasn’t sure which.
“What are you? A dimwit?” a new voice snapped. “Finishin’ school din do you no good!” Wynona said. Lady Backroom, they called her behind her back—I somehow got that and her name straight from Bambi’s thoughts. ’Cause finishin’ school din do Wynona no good, neither, Bambi silently snapped.
Wynona was evidently a country-club tart who planned to marry rich, and when she got nervous, she forgot to act the lady.
Bambi did have some helpful musings, though I had to catch them as they bounced around her brain, like a zig-zag stitch gone rogue.
“And we’re not all here, ya twit,” Wynona added. “Couple of the boys ain’t. Probly doin’ the deed to knock it off the list, the lucky stiffs.” She tittered at her dubious joke.
It was like a time stamp, her phrasing. “Dimwit”—so not politically correct. Insulting and rude.
I did the math to see how long ago this event took place. The Mystick by the Sea Country Club was founded in 1923, which set their Golden Jubilee as happening in 1973. These people were all in their mid to late fifties to early sixties by now, like Odd Duck at the roof-raising, who, I’m betting, practically willed that box not to be found.
But how could I be sure? There’d been dozens of people that age in the crowd.
“How did we get into this mess?” asked Grody, who still pulled ambivalence from my every pore and twitched my ultrasensitive nerve endings raw. A sensible man, who at least knew they were in trouble, though maybe that was because he seemed to be at least five years older than the others. “All I did was join a country club,” he said. “Dream of a lifetime, I thought, and now this. I mean, it was supposed to be a lark. A game of rascals and rogues, a scavenger hunt, and now what? I’ll never make town selectman when this comes out. We could have a crime to hide. You all understand that, right?” he asked, though no one answered.
Well, he hadn’t said “a crime to confess,” so he wasn’t as smart as I thought.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’ll not be an accessory to…to—”
“You already are,” Snake hissed, his threat palpable. “And the word you seek is ‘murder.’”
Seven
It does not seem fair that, unbeknown to you, every single item you put on your body literally shouts out your unconscious dreams and desires to the entire world. Everyone who sees you can read you like a book, yet you yourself have no idea what you’re saying.
—CYNTHIA HEIMEL
One of them produced a flashlight while they all ignored the word “murder” as if it had never been said, and wrapped their booty in petticoat squares like six prissy pirates, wily cohorts who looked more like escapees from a costume ball. Hard to believe that this happened before I was born. Not that I could see their formals clearly, but hooped skirts bounced against mine while tailcoats and striped cravats danced into and out of the shadows, an example of the sour cream of society.
Why did they linger in this dank place, mocked by the ripping tides that sounded closer by the minute, as if the ocean might devour them, which it appeared they deserved.
Had they been first to the scene of the actual crime, where Robin had been forced to take her swim? Or had they met here after that and heard the tale secondhand? How much was supposition? How much truth?
I wished I’d been in it
from the beginning. I’d have had a clearer perspective. Crime or no crime? Which was it? Though their selfish acts and attitudes were crime enough.
So now they stayed, hiding away with their secret. I needed to know the why of it all before I turned back into a pumpkin, though the situation fit Grimms’ Fairy Tales more than my own.
Bambi could identify them, but I couldn’t force her to transfer that knowledge to me, or even to speak it, no matter how I willed her to. At the moment, I could put neither a real name or face to anyone but Deborah.
Of course, I knew Wynona as Lady Backroom. Fat lot of good that did me.
As I pondered it all, the flashlight illuminated a silver flask being wrapped in a piece of petticoat, but not before I saw blood smeared on the engraved flagon.
With that small bit of bobbing light, I caught bits of the people around me, parts of faces, even. Some could be related to current residents of Mystic and its environs, I suppose, and though Deborah’s voice rang familiar, I barely recognized her. She was a full forty years younger than the last time I’d seen her. One for the books.
They concentrated on their wrapping, the better to hide their deeds, but in shadow I saw the nebulous man, tall, gangly, all lines and angles. Snake gestured as he spoke, and I recognized him as the one who had the barest trace of a Southern accent. A trait that sailed in and out of his speaking voice, as if he was trying to overcome it but failed when agitated.
Snake took it upon himself to grab pieces of that petticoat and hand them round to his so-called friends. “Hide your prizes well for now,” said he. “Every piece has to be returned to its proper owner.”
“When?” Bambi asked.
Vainglory huffed, clearly miffed. “Bambi-Jo, you just don’t know when to shut up.”
I sensed the strength of Bambi’s dislike. Whaddaya know, we had something in common. Two things: She wanted facts, too, and she didn’t like Deborah much, either.
“But when?” Bambi asked again louder, stronger.
“When we see what the tide brings in,” Snake snapped, claiming the role of leader. “Which reminds me,” he added. “Don’t throw the scavenged items you’re responsible for in the drink. The sea has a way of returning what we don’t want, and if just one borrowed item comes back with a body, we’re done for.”
“What body?” Bambi asked again, so they all looked at me, or her, like we had two heads—I guess we did. Two brains that thought alike, anyway. I thought I might try to find Bambi first, after I returned to the present—kindred spirits, her and I.
I might know her well enough to inspire her to talk. I’d contact her, if ever I escaped this boat-belly place.
Yes, that was beginning to worry me, how long I was staying this time around. Vainglory’s gown had big mojo, but then, it belonged with the petticoat, which had been splintered and traveled far with the help of Deborah/Vainglory, Brut, Wynona, Grody, Snake, and even Bambi-Jo, which wouldn’t make my investigation any easier.
“I don’t like that we can’t find Robin,” Bambi said.
Snake snorted. “You didn’t like her any more than we did.”
He spoke of Robin in the past tense, I noted, and Bambi didn’t deny it.
Snake, with his peekaboo accent, shouldn’t be too hard to track down, if he was still alive.
“The scavenger hunt was your idea,” he reminded Bambi. “And when did you grow a conscience?”
“Screw you. I started with a tame inventory of pretty baubles. That added list of unsavory conquests was your idea. I told you those things could harm people.”
Snake waved a defiant piece of petticoat at her.
She grabbed it and gasped. “Where did the blood come from?”
“I cut myself on a broken window getting in.” He showed the cut across his wrist.
“I cut myself, too,” said Grody, further mixing my emotions. Would Robin’s body show signs of trauma?
It took two of them to climb across broken glass before one had the sense to open a door? They lie.
“What if Robin doesn’t make it back to shore?” Bambi cried, working herself into a good case of hysteria. “What do we do then?”
“The body will do what a body does,” Snake said without a care, as if offering us mint juleps from a porch swing by a peach tree, miles away from Mystic, and years away from the present, which is where I was heading.
Eight
The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.
—CARSON MCCULLERS
After work, I prepared to visit Werner at the police station without the fabric the brass box had been wrapped in. It seemed that Chakra had absconded with the original covering, and I hadn’t yet found her hiding place. What a cheeky kitty. She really had a thing for tulle. With a place full of sixties and seventies gowns, she was in turn accosting and “making love to” anything tulle in the shop. That was some estimable quantity, yet none got left un-fooled-around-with. She wasn’t harsh. She didn’t tear anything. She rolled, she wallowed, she purred, as if they were all made of catnip. And if a tattered piece fell off from too much cat-love, she ran with it, and it got secreted away for her later rolling pleasure. They’d be lucky to get a print off the original box-covering when Chakra was done.
To turn Werner up sweet and distract him from the missing fabric cover, I changed into a fifties Mainbocher three-piece linen blend suit in a cheery citron. I particularly loved the jacket’s wide-cut double-notched collar and pearlescent cream Lucite buttons. Mainbocher is probably best known for designing the wedding gown and trousseau for Wallis Simpson’s 1937 wedding to Edward VIII, the Duke of Windsor.
I confess that I dressed well to sweeten the detective’s mood, in a business suit sort of way. But I countered my sobriety of choice with a pair of Giselle, Lady Double You “Giselle” spikes in buckskin tan suede, with bronze hand-applied metallic leather crests from ankle to heel tips. Nothing shows off a leg better than giving it wings.
I reapplied my makeup while I enjoyed the beat of a big band piece called “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me).”
Too late for you, Jaconetti, I thought. You made your choice.
Why, when I was on my way to see Werner, did I feel giddy? Why did the universe wag that jazzy finger my way? Like I should embroider a scarlet letter on my blouse for moving on with my life? Sheesh. I’d recovered from the shock of losing Nick, made peace with his decisions, especially when he had Paisley with him. Now I was free to make some choices of my own.
I topped the outfit with the tiniest forties ochre satin twist toque labeled: Balenciaga, 10 Avenue, George V Paris.
Not until after I’d donned my supple kid gloves did I place the recovered country club treasure box into an appropriately sized Vuitton travel bag that matched my personal shoulder bag. and wished I had Chakra’s petticoat scrap.
At the police station, Officer Billings saluted and grinned when he saw me. “Gad, ma’am, I sure hope the detective stops yelling now that you’re around again.”
“I’m not moving in,” I said. “And you can drop the ‘again.’”
“Sorry to hear that, ma’am. He’s not here, anyway. He took the late shift last night so a couple guys could go to a bachelor party. He’s working from home today.”
“Will you do me a favor? Call Detective Werner and ask him if I can drop by?”
The desk clerk made the call and set the phone on speaker.
I winced, preparing for Werner’s shout, but even when we were frenemies, I’d liked him, though I’d kept expecting the grizzly to show his claws.
“Not her again,” Werner grumbled.
I raised my arms because he’d repeated the “again,” but I could tell that the Wiener didn’t mean it. Have I mentioned that I dubbed him that in third grade?
Picture it: The Cafeteria. Lull in the conversation. When he poked the tiger—that would be me�
�I called him “Little Wiener,” instead of Lytton Werner, so the whole school heard it together. And it stuck…to this day.
Surprising how many times the words “Wiener” and “again” had popped up since I walked in the door to the station.
“Good,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll be right over, er, unless you’re otherwise occupied.”
“Madeira, when I say I’m working at home, I’m working.”
Funny, I thought I remembered an occasion when he/we weren’t quite. “Working,” that was.
When I pulled into the drive, Werner opened his front door, not the kitchen door I used to breeze through without knocking. Putting up a wall. Testing formality as its fabric. Self-protection, however weak.
Never mind. I could knock down all his defenses with a pair of well-placed innocently lowered lashes. I needed the Wiener on my side today.
Standing there waiting for me, he made a show of rolling down his sleeves and slipping into his suit jacket to prove this was business.
Point taken, but I so wanted to keep him as a friend, frenemy, ally…as a pair of arms I could step into? Hmm.
He left the door open for me and disappeared, and when I got inside, I found him in his home office, behind a desk bigger than the one he used at the station.
All business.
In the doorway, I raised my shoulders and lowered them again. Did I look innocent enough? What could I say, except: “I brought a peace pipe.”
I stopped across the desk from him, almost at attention. If the words “peace pipe” made him think about us while we played the Indian lovers Running Bear and Little White Dove—an intimate rock and roll encounter during a previous sleuthing expedition of mine—well, so be it. It was a good memory that I did not want to lose.
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