A Dress to Die For

by Margaret Evans

  “Have you heard of Regal Airs or Luxe Talent?” Laura asked, staring at the cards again. Thoughts were whirling in her head.

  “Yeah, I think they’re both up in Duluth. I had a friend from Mapleton High who talked to Regal Airs about being a model. They were pretty snobby with her even though she came from a wealthy family, but they did accept her in their program and classes.”

  “Did she make it as a model? I mean, did you ever see her picture anywhere?”

  “Come to think of it, never did see her anywhere. And I wouldn’t have missed it. She was very pretty. Now that you mention it, I never heard from her again, either, and she promised to let me know where she landed. Texted her a few times but never got a response or saw her again.”

  Laura was silent a moment in thought.

  “Hey, how did the big meeting go with the hotsy-totsy boutique manager?”

  “It went well, but I don’t think I know much more than before I went there.”

  “Well, good luck. Nine years is a long time. But if anyone can find out what happened to that girl, I know you can. And I’m sure glad the cops took all that stuff away, including what was in your carport. Whew! Glad I don’t have to help you go through any more. I sure hope whoever did that is finished with whatever they wanted to accomplish. You know, that stuff may not have been on any list of stolen goods, but I can’t help thinking there’s something shady about the whole thing.”

  Laura’s thoughts exactly, and she was texting Connor before she even punched in the code to the front door and relieved when he called her shortly after she walked into the kitchenette. She answered as she placed the yellow roses in the sink to be trimmed.

  “What do you need?”

  “I need you or someone to look at a label sewn into one of the side seams of the red dress and text me the exact code number on that label. With that number, the Marjeanne boutique can verify if it’s the exact dress they sold to Brittany or a knockoff. Also, if you know what French re-weaving is, tell me if the label is woven into the seam like that. And, Connor? There was only one red dress that year. Only one.”

  With his promise to get the number and label information to her as quickly as possible, Laura visibly relaxed, at least for a moment. She trimmed and put the fresh vase of yellow roses on the shop counter, tidied up the floor again, and made mental notes of what stock needed to be refreshed before the shop opened bright and early Tuesday morning.

  Then she headed upstairs to write everything she had learned from Diana Popovich on the board.

  Sometimes what you think is a new clue, Laura, is actually just another question. But those are the questions that lead to other possibilities. Keep an open mind.

  Her father’s words came back to her, and she looked at her new information freshly added to the Brittany white board.

  Dang! They looked like more questions. She wanted answers! Questions meant more work, but hopefully that extra work would eventually yield some answers that made sense and fell into the right places in this puzzle.

  And it was so hard to wait for word from Connor on the red dress stain. Lab work could take days, and since this was a cold case, it was probably at the bottom of the list.

  She put question marks next to three new bullet points. Then she printed out a picture of lovely Brittany in her beautiful prom dress and taped it near the top of the board. From there, she drew lines to more ideas, mapping out what they knew—which wasn’t much—and what they didn’t know about who could have been involved in her disappearance. Her boyfriend Dante had been a suspect at the time, from the reports she had read. She put his name beneath a printed prom picture of him and drew a question mark.

  But the biggest thing she had learned this morning was that there quite possibly could be another suspect that no one was ever able to identify: an unknown young woman who had wanted the dress that Brittany bought. And they didn’t have a picture of her, forcing Laura to draw a box with a question mark inside it and write “unknown girl” beneath it.

  Before heading downstairs to work on the dream baskets for the silent auction, Laura touched the bag covering the beautiful dress she had bought to wear for Connor at the prom. But she wasn’t as excited or thrilled with it as she had been a week ago. Did the missing girl who actually bought and wore the red dress die because she bought and wore it? Had she thought she looked like a princess, too?

  sixteen

  Justin Carlson was still in his hotel room in St. Paul on Monday, thinking hard about what he had read in the letter. He had stayed there and gone through two more bottles of cheap Scotch, stuck in a loop of re-reading the letter. His only exercise had been pacing his room and walking the hallways. And pouring another shot, and picking up the letter.

  He knew he had no choice but to contact Edna Phelps.

  What was this woman going to tell him? What could she tell him that would make everything right again? His heart told him there was nothing anyone in the whole world could say or do to make his life as it was before he read the letter.

  He had many questions to ask her, like, what was his real name and birth date? But it turned out the lady was harder to locate that he had anticipated. For one thing, she wasn’t in the online phone directory, yellow or white pages. He Googled her name and found a bunch of Edna Phelpses but none with an address in St. Paul, Minnesota.

  It would have been the polite thing to call her first, but his parents had told him to simply show up at her door. And he couldn’t even find where she lived. So when he thought he finally located the woman in St. Paul by checking one of those “find anyone anywhere” websites, he was conflicted about not finding her phone number as well. Perhaps she didn’t have a phone. Or maybe it was just unpublished. In any event, he was more frightened of calling her than showing up at her front door.

  After dinner, he made a decision to force himself to go to her door.

  Trying very hard not to think about the upcoming encounter made it almost impossible to think of anything but the upcoming encounter. The cab got him there in minutes.

  The building where Edna Phelps lived was an older, red brick garden apartment building in a lower rent district of St. Paul. It sat among a clustered arrangement of such buildings that someone, somewhere along the line, and probably the owner or designer, had thought would look attractive, artistic, and even inviting. Justin, the engineer, thought it looked silly and disorganized.

  He walked up to the third floor and paced the hall, passing by Edna’s apartment no fewer than twenty times before he stood in front of her door. But the knocking wouldn’t come and he remained in front of her door for a solid ten minutes before his brain could force his hand into a fist and aim it at her door.

  The first knocks that came from his fist were an embarrassment to all knocks throughout the history of knocking. Not even a bat would have heard them.

  When no one inside the apartment responded, Justin thrust his strength against the door and knocked harder.

  This time, he heard the unlocking of a bolt.

  He took three steps back and watched the knob turn and the door slowly open.

  seventeen

  Baskets of various sizes sat in a neat rectangle on the long, work table in the back room of Second Treasures. Lines ran down one side, over each short end, and up the other side. A pile of organized materials sat patiently next to each basket, awaiting its opportunity to turn a generic basket into a dream.

  Laura stood at one end of the room, near the kitchenette and the stairway to her apartment, and gazed over all the work she had done throughout the afternoon and early evening. Extra wide tubes of crisp, clear cellophane perched upright against the wall adjoining the staircase. Rolls of various colored wired ribbon were scattered along the center of the table, available for any basket that begged a particular color to tie up its cellophane wrap with a pretty b
ow at the top.

  After double-checking the back door to make sure it was secured by the new code she had created earlier in the evening, Laura shut off all the downstairs lights and climbed the stairs to her apartment. She was about halfway up when her iPhone buzzed. The display showed Eric Williams.

  “Eric?” she asked, answering just as she reached the top of the stairs.

  “Yes, hi, Laura. Everything okay?”

  “Yes, why? And how did you get my cell number?”

  “You gave it to me on a business card a couple months ago. I’m just calling to make sure nobody else has dumped trash in your front yard. Have they?”

  “Nope. All quiet on the western front.”

  “Good. I got you great deals on both the security company contract and DoorBell App that links to your phone. They’ll both be out tomorrow to check where you put their cameras. You got a really big discount on the DoorBell thing, but it’s only for one year. So when you get a renewal notice, turn it over to me and I’ll get you the discount for another year.”

  “Eric, I’m really grateful for what you’ve done. I have to admit I’ve been a bit rattled by all this.”

  “No problem. Glad to help. And it’s really the best deal you can get anywhere.”

  “I think I asked you before how you get such good deals.”

  He chuckled.

  “You did. And I told you I know people and they respect how I do business. Besides, I still get a small commission on each sale, and every little bit helps. Thank you for letting me do this.”

  “How do I do the App on my phone?”

  “I’ll show you tomorrow. Easier than the dumb red button.”

  “Thanks and see you tomorrow then. Remember, it’s a business day for me.”

  “Got it. We’ll be early and won’t interrupt anything. Bye.”

  After Laura ended Eric’s call, she felt a little safer than she had in the last two days. Eric had been on her case for several months to get the security company contract set up, but she had put him off, claiming it didn’t fit in her budget just yet. Now she had to make it happen, and she wondered if he was right and the lower insurance premiums for having the security surveillance in place would offset the cost of the two contracts.

  She wandered over to her Brittany white board, glanced over the notes, lines, arrows and question marks, but felt too brain-dead to work on it. After a quick meal of micro waved leftovers, she plopped down on her father’s old La-Z-Boy and turned on the TV, a giant monstrosity of electronic wizardry loaned to her by Connor’s friend, Max.

  Halfway through The African Queen, she paused a tense scene between Bogie and Hepburn in their boat. She remembered that she was supposed to call the manager of the Marjeanne boutique back and ask her the questions she hadn’t thought of until after she left.

  She pulled out her little notebook, saw that she’d added the questions, which was a good thing, and also picked up the Regal Airs and Luxe Talent business cards, handling them thoughtfully. The notebook remained on the side table and Laura returned to finish up the movie, but her attention wandered more than once back to the notebook with the business cards sticking out from just inside the cover.

  Once the ending credits ran on the screen, the wheels kept turning, and she realized she was not so brain-dead after all. She poured herself a glass of Chardonnay and went right back to the white board and spent the next two hours drawing a couple more lines and adding more questions and question marks.

  For the first time, she added the word “model.”

  eighteen

  Laura was again awakened by Empress Isabella standing on her belly, merrowing, and licking Laura’s chin with its raspy tongue.

  “My chin? Really? Can’t you leave me alone once in a while? I was up late!”

  Laura tried brushing the cat away but sat up and the cat scampered off, on its own, to settle in one of its favorite spots: Laura’s father’s La-Z-Boy.

  My gosh! Please no more trash dumps in front of my store!!!

  Laura noted it was actually seven-twenty on her iPhone, realized no alarm had been set, and that she owed Isabella a thank-you instead of grief. She threw off the covers, hurried past the feline waving thanks—which went completely unacknowledged—and went right to the front window to peek out at the front sidewalk.

  Thankfully, it was clear, but a car was pulling up in front, then another one. Eric Williams emerged from one; an unknown man, from the other. She texted Eric that she would be down in a minute to unlock the front door, then rushed through dressing and hair, the whole process being watched with amusement by the cat.

  At one point, she went to Isabella and held out her arms.

  “I could give you a big hug and kiss!”

  The cat literally vanished, and Laura rolled her eyes.

  At least, now I know how to make you go away if I want to.

  Laura raced down the stairs and let in the two gentlemen. She started a fresh pot of coffee and pulled out yesterday’s brownies from the fridge.

  It was surprisingly easy to get both security systems set up. Shortly after the first man set up the new DoorBell camera in both front and back doors and downloaded the apps to Laura’s iPhone, he showed her how to use the system and whom she should call with any questions. Then the second person showed up.

  Laura had to admire Eric’s style. He took the woman to both doors, inside and out, and pointed to where the cameras were and told her what the angles should be. Williams looked like such an expert that Laura wondered how often he had done this. Of course, he also managed to fit in time for the coffee and brownies in between all the activities, and while the security lady was adjusting the cameras and testing them.

  Since the software for the security firm was already installed on her laptop, the security company rep checked to make sure all sections were activated and was soon on her way. Everything was operational, and Eric stayed behind to make sure it all worked. He and Laura tested everything multiple times. The DoorBell system worked at both doors, and so did the security camera system. They tried sending an alarm to the company and called them to make sure it was received and was only a test. All video footage from both systems, Laura discovered, would be stored in the cloud until Laura wanted it deleted.

  Now the pair sat in the kitchenette. Williams took advantage of Laura’s offer of yet another cup of coffee, his fourth, as well as four more brownies.

  “You’ve done this before,” she commented.

  “Well, you make very good coffee,” he began.

  She laughed. “I mean the security installations. You seem to know right where the cameras needed to be aimed.”

  He shrugged.

  “I have done a lot of it. But you still make very good coffee. And the brownies are awesome. Can I take some in a bag with me for later?”

  While she loaded four more brownies into a sealed bag, she leaned back against the fridge and looked down at him.

  “When do I get my bill from these guys?”

  “Oh, you won’t for a few months. I paid them for the first ninety days, and I’ll send you a monthly bill for that. I realize you weren’t prepared for all of this at once. It kind of got thrust on you, but it was necessary to get it in place as quickly as possible.”

  “Thank you, Eric. Where’s the first bill?”

  He rose, taking the bag of brownies.

  “I’ll have my staff prepare the invoice,” he said in a formal voice, winking.

  She shook her head, laughing.

  “Make sure it’s soon. I have to pay something or it will look funny on the books.”

  He turned to go.

  “You are such a Boy Scout—I mean Girl Scout,” he tossed over his shoulder. “Thanks for the brownies. Do you make these very often?”

 
“More often lately.”

  “You could make a business of them,” he commented, sneaking into the bag to break off another piece of brownie. It found its way into his mouth as he exited the front door.

  Yes, I’ve thought of that.

  There was still time, after Eric Williams left and before the shop day began, to get a text off to Diana Popovich, the manager of Marjeanne in St. Paul. Laura asked for a call back during a few free minutes while Popovich traveled this week. She said she had another question or two regarding the boutique and mentioned evenings after six o’clock or early mornings between six and eight worked best for her.

  She didn’t add not to worry if she called outside of those times because her cat would wake her, if necessary, at any time.

  • • •

  Soft music, scented candles, bottle of wine with two glasses. A luxurious hotel suite with a balcony view of the ocean, its soothing waves washing onto shore. Stars twinkling in the clear, night sky, courtesy of an accurate weather forecast. No one would have guessed this arrangement was anything other than a romantic tryst.

  Then the two people who paid for the room took their wine out on the balcony.

  She sat. Her beauty and elegance went unnoticed by her business partner. If was of no consequence to her and actually a relief. Her self-confidence sat at a high enough level to allow her to take everything she could from the life around her. Sucking it dry came to mind, but it wasn’t a concern and hadn’t been in years.

  “I used to be a model in high demand. I know how these things work.”

  The man, dressed in very expensive casual clothes, leaned on the balcony railing and took a deep puff on his cigarette, as if contemplating how many trillions of stars there were.