A Fitting End: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery Read online

  “You’ve been here long enough to know that we are presenting Bliss’s daughters to society. These girls, sir,” Mrs. James intoned haughtily, “go through an arduous year of preparation for an upper-class lifestyle. They receive an education in etiquette, good manners, and bearing. They’ve attended rounds of parties and afternoon teas that began last September. A truly prepared Margaret knows how to greet and introduce people, knows the importance of writing proper invitations and thank-you notes, and will be able to host with poise, manners, and social grace, something every man wants for his daughter or his wife. Wouldn’t you agree—”

  He snorted, cutting Mrs. James off again; he was clearly lacking in social grace. “I’m talkin’ ’bout girls who don’t have the right pedigree. What about them, hmm?” I imagined him making air quotes as he said this. “They’re just shit outta luck. A little elitist, don’t you think?”

  Mrs. James cleared her throat, likely swallowing down her desire to slap the man for his impudence and his language. “That is not your concern.”

  “Oh, but it is. All the poor girls who can’t afford the price tag—”

  “The pageant is for everyone, not just those girls who are being presented. It’s our town’s show of patriotism. It stems,” she said more forcefully, “from our love of God and country. We have a scholarship fund, you know. Why must you make a fuss?” she hissed.

  The man sneered, “It’s not about patriotism. It’s for show, and it’s all a lie. All of it,” he repeated. He said something else, but we couldn’t quite hear.

  “Over my dead body,” Mrs. James asserted, but the next thing out of her mouth was calm and controlled. “Our pageant sets the tone of social life that filters down and elevates the whole of Bliss. You will not spoil it, and you will not get what you want.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “Enough, sir.” There wasn’t a bit of compromise in Mrs. James’s voice. “It’s quite a good thing you don’t have a daughter, don’t you think?”

  “Harsh,” Josie whispered.

  “Yeah,” I whispered back.

  He spoke with slow deliberation, grinding out his words. “If I did, would she be welcome here?”

  He was like Cesar Chavez, representing the little guy, the people with no voice. I liked Mrs. James, but I totally saw his side of things. I wished I could drag him outside, tell him that my family did go back five generations in Bliss, but that hadn’t made me want to participate in the pageant and I’d turned out just fine. Better than fine, in fact.

  “You have no right to be here. You cannot come in here and tell me how to run this pageant,” Mrs. James said. “The Margaret Society works on this event all year long. It runs like clockwork, and nothing will stop it from happening. Not you. Not anything. The Lafayette sisters have devoted their lives to it, for heaven’s sake. It’s a tradition—”

  “I work here. I have every right to be here. This pageant and ball”—he said it like he could barely stand to utter the words—“is a circus. Do you make them do tricks and show their teeth and the bottom of their shoes?”

  “You’re just the golf pro,” she said, her voice dripping with disdain. “That hardly qualifies you to comment on our tradition.”

  “Really low blow,” Josie whispered.

  He gave a bitter laugh. “I may not come from a wealthy family— Oh, wait. Neither do you. Oh, yes, I’ve done my research. The Heckers were just a mercantile family. Shopkeepers.” He scoffed. “You act all high and mighty, but you’re no better than me. At least I’m honest about it, unlike most of you. You go to your luncheons and get your plastic surgery and play dress up like you’re some kind of Texas royalty, but you’re all frauds, throwing parties and doing whatever you can to make people think you’re something you’re not. If you only knew how easy it is to forge your credentials… Oh, wait—,” he snapped. “You do. You’ve written family histories for all the girls, whether they’re legitimate or not.” He laughed, adding a snide, “Kind of like a lawyer who never passed the bar or a doctor without a license—a Margaret without a pedigree. Might bring down the whole town.”

  “We’re done here,” Mrs. James said tautly.

  “Are we? I told you, I’d back off if—”

  “I said, enough!”

  His voice dripped with sarcasm. “You better watch your temper or your face might crack. Then who will put all the pieces back together again?”

  Josie and I stood frozen in place as the heels of Mrs. James’s pumps clicked against the vintage hand-scraped hardwood floor of the back stage. We’d eavesdropped for too long and now it would be impossible to pretend we hadn’t heard the knockdown fight between Mrs. James and the country club’s golf pro. Any second, she was going to round the corner of the curtains and see us. My breath was itching to be released from my lungs, but I held it in, nervous as all get-out, afraid one little exhalation would reveal our presence.

  I snuck a look at Josie. Her face looked exactly like I imagined mine did—horrified that we were about to be caught. Catching her attention, I held my left palm out flat while pretending to walk my right index and middle fingers across it. She notched her head toward the side door that led right into the parking lot. Could we tiptoe out without them knowing?

  She had on a pair of coral linen shorts, a draped black beaded blouse, and suede-and-rhinestone Yellow Box flip-flops, a staple in nearly every Texas woman’s closet. With their rubber soles, they were also quiet—perfect for sneaking out of a room.

  I, on the other hand, had started my day with a red gingham dress trimmed with white lace, a jean jacket, and black cowboy boots that may as well have had taps on the soles, they were so loud. We had to give it a try, though. She scurried off the end of the catwalk; then we hunched over and tiptoed across the room, probably looking like the worst spies in history.

  Mrs. James and the man’s voices rose again, agitated and loud. “We’re done here—”

  He cut her off. “Not until—”

  “I said we’re done. You will leave now, sir,” Mrs. James said, a good dose of venom in her voice, “or you’ll regret it.”

  Before we heard his response, I pulled open the door and Josie and I snuck out into the muggy late-July heat of North Texas.

  Chapter 2

  It took me a good long while to shake out of my mind the blowout between Mrs. James and the man she’d been arguing with, but I’d managed, and now, back at home, I got to thinking about Libby Allen’s Margaret dress again.

  “You want it like this?” Will Flores looked down at me from the second to top step of his eight-foot ladder, his deep, rumbling voice knocking me out of my reflections. He held one part of a pulley up to the ceiling.

  “Looks good,” I said, hiding a crooked smile as I looked over the top of my glasses, thinking he looked just as good as the pulley’s placement. He was like Toby Keith and Tim McGraw, with a little bad boy Pancho Villa all rolled into one package, and there he was, smack dab in the middle of my sewing workroom. I wondered what my great-grandmother would think of her former dining room housing a custom-rigged dressmaking pulley system made and installed by the man she’d intentionally brought into my life.

  If I knew Meemaw, she was doing a country two-step, pleased as punch at her matchmaking. He seemed to find plenty of time to come around and repair the things on my to-do list, which had been Meemaw’s doing, too. Before she passed on, she’d made a deal with Will that I’d give his daughter sewing lessons in exchange for his handyman work around the old farmhouse. Things were working out just how she’d planned them.

  The front door to the shop suddenly flung open and my new assistant, who happened to be Will’s sixteen-year-old daughter and a budding seamstress in her own right, Gracie, appeared in the threshold. My apprentice. She was a pantheon of fashion, what with her cockeyed gingham cap, Hollister T-shirt, and white capris. A girl after my own heart. “What’s that?” she asked, sidling up to me and peering at the contraption her dad was installing.

 
“Your dad’s installing a pulley system so I can work on Libby Allen’s Margaret dress without it dragging on the floor.” After Josie Sandoval’s wedding dress and the hassle of keeping the train off the floor, I’d come up with the pulley idea. Any long gown could be strung up on the contraption, I could do handwork on the skirts without worry, and with one pull of the rope, I could safely store the dress at ceiling level, out of the way and completely secure. “I just sketched the idea out and”—I flourished my hand toward Will, still on the ladder, carefully screwing the first piece of the pulley system into the ceiling—“voila! He figured it out and now he’s installing it.”

  The drill bit slipped and he cursed under his breath.

  “Maybe we should get started on the attic,” Gracie said, looking at her dad with a wary eye. “Best to be out of his way if it’s not going too well.”

  Being my part-time assistant included helping with the arduous task of clearing out my grandmother’s things from the attic. From her enthusiasm, though, Gracie seemed to enjoy being at Buttons & Bows as much as I liked having her around. We were good company for each other.

  “Good plan,” I said. We left Will to the innovation of his dressmaking pulley system and headed upstairs. Gracie gazed at the pictures elbowing their way up the wall. She stopped at an old discolored photograph of a young, solemn-faced couple, tilting her head to the left, studying the photo as if she wanted to memorize every last detail.

  “That’s Butch Cassidy and my great-great-great-grandmother, Texana Harlow. I was named after her.”

  “That’s him?” She scrunched up her nose. “He’s got such a big face.”

  There weren’t many photographs of Butch Cassidy. I’d looked plenty when I was a kid trying to research my family lineage. The ones that did exist didn’t show him as a particularly handsome man. Paul Newman, who made Butch come to life on the silver screen, was a good sight more handsome. “More like a wide jaw,” I said.

  “And that’s the outlaw gang?” she asked, pointing to another photograph from Loretta Mae’s tribute to the Cassidy’s colorful family history.

  “Yup. Butch is in the center. That’s Sundance on the left. Will Carver and Kid Curry are there,” I said, pointing to one seated man, and another standing behind.

  “And who’s that guy?” she asked, pointing at the figure seated in front of Kid Curry.

  “That guy,” I said, “is actually Laura Bullion. She was the only Hole-in-the-Wall Gang member who was a woman.”

  “Really? A woman outlaw?” She leaned closer. “Huh. You’re right.”

  “She robbed her share of trains, from what I know.” We started back up the stairs, ending up in what used to be Loretta Mae’s bedroom but was now mine. Meemaw had kept a tidy house, but her cleanliness downstairs had been at the expense of general organization in the attic. She’d been spry till the end—the end having come when she was well into her eighties—but venturing into the dark attic space through the door off the master bedroom had probably gotten to be too much; haphazardly stacked boxes and miscellaneous stuff were pretty much everywhere.

  “Here we go,” I said. The door creaked as I pulled it open. When I’d first inherited the old house, the lightbulbs in the attic had long since burned out. Another reason she’d probably steered clear of the place, letting things pile up instead of clearing them out. It had taken me a flashlight, an hour, and a dicey few minutes standing on top of a wobbly chair just to replace two bulbs.

  “So your great-grandma really liked her family history, huh?” Gracie asked as we pulled boxes from the attic and stacked them in my bedroom. I’d made the decision to go through them, one by one, but after just fifteen minutes, I could tell it was going to take forever to make a sliver of headway.

  “She loves, er, loved being connected to Butch Cassidy,” I said, correcting my slip of the tongue before Gracie noticed. I had to watch that. I knew Meemaw’s spirit was hanging around, but no one else did and it needed to stay that way. The town already thought my family was strange because of our secret supernatural talents. The family charm manifested itself in different ways, and we tried to keep it under the radar, but I got the sense that many people in town thought there was something odd about my family. It was pretty tough to explain the mysterious goings-on with my mother and her ornery green thumb and the special way my grandmother had with her favorite animal, goats. Mama had taken to growing lavender lately and was trying her hand at lotions and soaps. I had no doubt her crop would yield more lavender than she’d know what to do with. Enter Nana’s goats. They were one another’s check and balance. Nana could get her Nubians and Lamanchas to do anything, even chow down on the overgrown vegetation my mother was behind.

  People called us eccentric, but they came from miles away to get Nana’s goat cheeses, invited Mama over for garden consultations, and hopefully, if I was lucky, they’d start contracting with me to make them custom clothing.

  “That’s pretty cool.” Gracie bit her lip like she wasn’t sure if she should continue. “But after you told me about him,” she finally said, “I looked him up and—”

  “And no Harlow woman is mentioned,” I finished, sensing where she was going with her train of thought.

  “Someone named Etta Place is—”

  “Etta was Sundance’s girlfriend.”

  “But the article I read said they sorta… um… shared.”

  Why was it that Gracie brought up tough subjects with me? I knew her mom had dropped her off with her dad when she was a tiny little thing and had never looked back, but Will was a hands-on father. Couldn’t she talk to him about these things? I’d met Gracie only a few months ago and I grappled with how honest to be with her about close, personal subjects.

  Of course, if she’d read anything, then she had to know already where Sundance and Butch met Etta Place. I decided honesty was the best policy. Gracie was a teenager, after all. It wasn’t like she didn’t know how the world worked. “She was a prostitute down in San Antonio,” I finally said.

  “Yeah, I read that, too.”

  We dragged another box out of the attic, finally creating a path to the wardrobe sitting against the back wall. My target. I’d wanted to rifle through it since I’d moved in, but I’d never made it past the endless jars of buttons and bows. I’d taken dozens of them downstairs to display on an antique bookshelf, but there were still more Mason jars filled with the collectibles. Along with magic and the farmhouse, I’d inherited my great-grandmother’s love of notions. I was constantly adding to the Cassidy collection.

  “Most of the women those outlaws hooked up with were. Prostitutes, I mean,” I continued as we picked through the narrow path we’d made to the wardrobe. “So, yeah, Etta might have dated Butch first.”

  “Guess times were different back then,” she said.

  “Yeah.” I didn’t think times were so different. I knew plenty of women who’d been two-timed by the men they’d loved. Secrets and lies seemed to transcend time. I pulled at the wardrobe door, but it held fast. Locked. “Do you see a key?” I asked, glad to change the subject.

  We both searched around the hulking cabinet. There was no ornate key in sight. No key of any kind, in fact.

  “What’s in there?” Gracie asked.

  “When I was a kid, the wardrobe was downstairs. Loretta Mae kept stacks and stacks of fabric in it. I’m not sure when—or how—it got up here, but I’ve been wanting to look through those old fabric pieces since I moved back.” I backtracked to the wall of jars and ran my fingertips over the outside of the glass containers, stopping when I noticed a small jelly jar filled with needles. Maybe I could pick the lock.

  I took hold of it, trying to pull it closer, but it didn’t budge.

  Strange. Moving the other jars out of the way, I got a better grip and rocked it back and forth. Finally, it started to come loose and I was able to grab it and yank it free.

  A nagging feeling settled in my gut. None of the other containers were stuck to the shelf. I looked
at the wood, then at the bottom of the jar. There were no marks. No glue. Nothing that should have prevented me from lifting it right off.

  Curious, but then things at 2112 Mockingbird Lane had been curious lately, especially with Meemaw’s invisible spirit flitting around. The jar held a variety of needles: thin, traditional sharps; long-eyed embroidery needles; shorter ones for quilting; long milliners’ needles; as well as an assortment of specialty types. Meemaw had them all, from blunt-tipped darning and tapestry, to long, thin doll needles, to heavy curved upholstery needles. She even had a good selection of spiral eye sides, probably to help her with threading as her vision failed.

  There was bound to be something in the jar that would work. I went back to Gracie and the wardrobe.

  Crouching down in front of the lock, I peered at it, gauging which needle might possibly work to disengage the lock. I started with a tatting needle. It was long and had the same thickness for its entire length. Even so, it was too short.

  “Try this one,” Gracie said after I dropped the tatting needle back into the jar.

  “The blunt-tipped tapestry needle.” It looked to be a size 13, the largest width available. “Good choice.” Gracie was a natural. But was she a natural seamstress, fingersmith, or locksmith—that was the question. As I plucked it from her open palm, I suddenly knew what it must feel like to be a surgeon asking his OR nurse for a scalpel or clamps. Sewing wasn’t the same as surgery, but just like in the medical world, the variety of tools at a dressmaker’s disposal was vast.

  I carefully poked the needle into the keyhole of the armoire’s lock and wiggled it. Around and around the needle went, but still, I couldn’t find the mechanism.

  “I can try,” Gracie said.

  I was learning to expect the unexpected in Bliss. Just a few months ago, I’d found myself smack dab in the middle of a murder case. Small towns, it turned out, were just as dangerous as the big city. Teaching Gracie to disengage a lock could be considered a life skill. I held out the tapestry needed, but she shook her head, holding up the longest upholstery needle instead.