Authors: Melissa Bourbon
“Anything’s possible,” she said.
I knew that was utterly true. I’d seen it proven over and over.
Georgia Emmons departed with her apron, leaving a slew of questions in her wake. Delta Lea Mobley as a kleptomaniac or a straight-out thief hadn’t ever crossed my mind, but then again, the best thieves seem above suspicion. I didn’t know how this information translated to making her a victim of murder, but I filed it away in the back of my head to consider at another time.
Walking into Bliss’s yoga center, I felt an immediate sense of peace settle over me. The perimeter of the small lobby was lined with slatted wooden benches, multiple pairs of sandals and shoes lined up beneath them. A poster on the wall illustrated a whole range of yoga poses that I’d never achieve, even if I practiced for a million years. Pose number seventy-eight, a man balancing on one arm, his legs twisted above him like a pretzel, his other arm stretched above his head, made me want to turn and run. I didn’t see how that particular position was humanly possible.
Randi Martin’s singsong voice wafted to the lobby from the studio space behind the blue cloth curtains that separated the two rooms. She was the reason I was here, not the contortionist pictures on the wall. I slipped my shoes off, pushed them under one of the benches, and poked my head between the two curtain panels. The wood floor stretched out before me, the small lobby opening up to a large studio. Three people were early birds. They had their yoga mats laid out, blankets tri-folded and placed at the back end of the mats, foam blocks and off-white canvas straps set to the side, and were sitting cross-legged and ready for class.
“Harlow?” Randi called to me from the front of the room
where she’d been lighting a candle. She padded over barefoot, her long black yoga pants accentuating her leg muscles, her thin orange cotton T-shirt long and fitted at the waist. She looked the part of a yoga teacher. I closed my eyes for the briefest moment, hoping to get a vision of an apron, but my mind was blank. Randi as a yogi and Randi in the kitchen at the planned progressive dinner weren’t meshing. I needed to give it time. Maybe by the end of the class I’d have a better idea of what made her tick.
“I thought I’d take your class,” I said, smiling at her.
She chuckled, her smile breaking up her long face. “To get an idea of what my perfect apron might be like?”
I felt myself blush. “How’d you know?”
“Everyone in town knows how you work, Harlow. You get to know a person and that helps you form a vision of whatever you’re making for them. You think taking my class will help you understand me.”
I just managed to stop my jaw from dropping. I’d had no idea I was so transparent with how my charm worked. Likely everyone chalked it up to my process, rather than magic, but still, I was stunned. “I didn’t know everyone knew that about my work.”
“You’re a novelty. A small-town girl who went to the big city and came back intact. You’re like a child star who didn’t get sucked into fame and drugs, instead figuring out how to become a quality actor.”
“No Miley Cyrus syndrome for me,” I said with a laugh. I’d worked in New York and had returned to Bliss without any scars. I was both small town and big city, and that’s exactly what my designs represented.
“Grab two blocks and a strap,” Randi said, pointing to the corner where all the supplies were neatly stacked.
She took a mat and blanket and padded back across the room. I followed, setting down my things next to the mat she laid out. “Have you done yoga before?” she asked.
“Never.”
She folded the blanket, set it at the back of the mat like the others, and told me to sit, legs crossed.
I slipped off my sweat jacket, tossing it aside, straightened the waistband of the yoga pants I’d worn, pulled down the hem of the stretchy workout top, and did as Randi said. My spine instantly straightened when I put my sitting bones on the blanket.
“Now just breathe,” Randi said before gliding across the floor to speak with someone else.
In my limited experience, people were often killed by someone they knew, and often by someone they knew well. Everyone was a suspect. I watched Randi from the corner of my eye. Could
she
have killed Delta Lea Mobley? She was thin and lithe, but with small, firm muscles evident on her arms. But Delta had been plus-sized. Could Randi have lured her into the cemetery, picked up a big rock, and crashed it against the back of her head, all without Delta putting up a fight?
I couldn’t see it.
My eyes fluttered closed and I tried to clear my mind, but a familiar voice greeting Randi interrupted my yoga peace. Megan Mobley. And by her side was Rebecca Masters. They both looked like they knew their way around a yoga studio. Rebecca wore stretchy capri pants and a tank top. Megan had
on steel blue pants that flared below the knee and had a split in the back up to the top of the calves. She wore a cream-colored cami under a black long-sleeve burnout tee.
When Megan walked into the studio, the air in the room grew still, as if everyone was holding their breath. She didn’t seem to notice that all eyes were on her as she walked toward me with Rebecca, slipping her yoga mat from the black cylindrical bag slung over her shoulder.
“So good to see you here, Megan,” Randi called.
Megan smiled wanly, giving a half wave, but otherwise didn’t make eye contact. She kept her head down as she laid out her mat. My heart ached for her. Grief was a heavy burden.
“Hi,” I said to them both.
Megan glanced at me, that same sad smile on her face. “Hi.”
“Good to see you again,” Rebecca said.
Before I could even think of something more to say to Megan, Randi started class. We brought our hands together in front of our chests and chanted “Om” three times. Randi led the class in a series of stretches, gradually moving into downward dog and into poses that forced my body into positions I didn’t know it was capable of. Randi pushed us, moving us through sun salutations, balancing poses, and floor poses. I concentrated on my breath, my muscles quivering with each new move.
Randi flowed through each one, demonstrating with ease, her biceps strong, her glutes even stronger, and I reconsidered my earlier question as to whether she could have heaved a rock and hit Delta in the back of the head. It was clear that
she had the strength for it, but I couldn’t think of any possible motivation for her to have done such a thing.
There wasn’t any chance to talk to Randi or Megan during class, but I stuck around after the closing relaxation, slowly rolling up my mat to stall for time. I snuck a look at Megan. Her eyes glistened. The yoga class had relaxed me, given me time to reflect about how to talk to Megan, and made me aware of muscles I didn’t know I had. But for Megan, the class seemed to have heightened her sorrow. Her chin quivered. Rebecca stayed by her side, her hand on her friend’s back.
“Are you okay?” I asked, everything else I’d wanted to ask her going out of my head.
“That’s kind of a loaded question, isn’t it?” she said.
“I guess it is.”
“It’s okay,” Rebecca whispered. “Just take it one breath at a time.”
Megan nodded, breathing in and out, slowly. Audibly. As if class were still going on and we were focusing on our breath. Then, finally, she said, “It’s complicated. I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that my mother was killed. And not just, like, passively killed in an accident, or something. That’s not premeditated, is it? I mean, does a person plan a murder and say to themself, I think I’ll kill her with a rock to the head?”
She’d put so succinctly what I’d been thinking all along. Delta’s demise likely hadn’t been planned, it had been a heat-of-the-moment killing. One thing about that scenario bothered me, though. I’d found Delta, and while she’d looked a little disheveled lying faceup in the grave, she didn’t look like she’d just fought off an attacker. The blow to the head
had come from behind. Would she have had a heated argument with someone and then turned her back?
It didn’t seem like a smart move to me. Unless she was used to arguing with her killer, hadn’t thought anything about turning around, and never saw the attack coming.
Instead of returning my yoga mat to the stack Randi had taken it from, I set it back down, flattened the soft wool blanket, and sat face to face with Megan and Rebecca. “Who do you think might have done this, Megan?”
It was a brutal question, but I knew it was something that had to be preoccupying her thoughts. I knew I wouldn’t have been able to think about anything else if the same thing had happened to someone I loved. In fact I probably would have suspected every person I passed on the street. The idea that someone she knew could be responsible for her mother’s death had to feel deeply unsettling. The sympathy I felt toward Megan suddenly filled me with a determination to help her. She could never undo the fact that her mother had been murdered. She could never erase the painful tragedy that was sure to haunt her. But she could have some closure in knowing who was responsible, and knowing that justice had prevailed.
She leaned toward me, chin down, but there was a new sparkle in her eyes. “That’s the thing Harlow, I have no idea. She didn’t do much to endear herself to the people around
her, but murder? I can’t imagine who would have been capable of doing that to my mother.”
I thought about Jeremy Lisle and what else was behind their hostile relationship, but mostly, I wondered how Delta got along with others in the community. I needed to understand Delta better if I had any hope of figuring out what had happened to her. “Can I ask you about her Red Hat group? They’ve been friends for a long time, right?”
She glanced over at Randi. “They used to be close.”
A red flag went up in my head. “What happened?”
“Most of them still are, I think,” she said, “but not my mother. A few months ago, she started to withdraw from the group. Stopped inviting the other women over or returning their calls. It was like she put up a wall and there was no tearing it down. She used to”—she lowered her voice before uttering the last word—“care. She cared about everyone. About Granny. About me. About Todd. About Auntie Sherri and Auntie Coco.”
“But she was still part of the group. I bet she still cared about the people close to her, but maybe she didn’t know how to show it.”
But Megan shook her head. “I don’t know. She was so involved in town business, from her real estate work, it’s like she gathered up information about people, then turned it against them. Auntie Coco couldn’t work with her anymore.”
“They used to work together?”
She nodded. “Shared an office. Coco, my mom, and my dad. But my mom made things tough. She thought Auntie Coco let a big client go, and she never forgave her. Her own sister. What if I . . . ?”
She trailed off, but the question was clear. What if Megan
had done something to upset her mother? Would she have been written off, too?
We left the yoga studio together, and the peace that had flowed through me during the class was all but gone. Megan had to carry the uncertainty over how much her mother had loved her, and whether there were any limitations on that love, for the rest of her life. I, on the other hand, kept coming back to three questions: What had happened three months ago to warrant such a change in Delta? Who else had Delta shut out? And was that person responsible for her death?
As a seamstress, my reaction to entering a fabric store was akin to how most of the men I’d known in my life reacted to a hardware store. My brother, Red, could spend hours trailing up and down the aisles in Jury’s Hardware, the large local store. Since Will and I had started dating, I’d spent countless hours there myself—but give me the quilt shop on the square or one of the big fabric stores in Granbury or Fort Worth any day. The rows of stacked bolts of fabric, the notions and patterns, the lace and tulle and burlap all filled me with contentment. And joy.
Yet right at this particular moment, I felt like a mama duck, trailing her brood of ducklings behind her. Only the ducklings were Randi Martin, Bennie Cranford, and Cynthia Homer. We’d met at the store so I could figure out designs for the rest of the aprons. “Do y’all like to cook?” I asked, slipping into Southern speak in hopes that they’d open up to me
Cynthia scoffed. “My kitchen has never seen a turkey in the oven.”
“It’s never seen anything in the oven, has it?” Bennie said with a laugh.
“I tried a ham once, but otherwise, no. The oven is just eye candy.”
“You and Coco.” She nudged me. “She has one of those super expensive numbers. All stainless steel with red knobs. And she barely boils water.”
“I can make hard-boiled eggs,” Cynthia said, “but that’s about it. I prefer takeout. Have y’all tried the little teahouse on the square? They cater now.”
“So I guess you’ll be using them for your stop on the progressive dinner?” Bennie asked.
Cynthia met Bennie’s challenge head-on. “I haven’t decided. I imagine
you’ll
be cooking all week so you can put us all to shame.” It wasn’t a question, but a loaded statement. And more than a little bit accusatory.
“I have no intention of putting you to shame,” Bennie responded, “but I do have
my
part of the menu planned. And I’m working with Todd and Megan about theirs. Delta had been on the schedule for dessert, and they’re going to host it now.”
“Is Todd a good cook?”
“Oh yes. He went to cooking school.”
“Megan said she’s gained ten pounds in the few years they’ve been together. Poor thing, he’s pretty critical of her weight, but then he turns around and makes all this great food for her.”
“I thought he went to law school,” Bennie said.
“Right. At College Station, but he’s a renaissance man. He helps Megan with all those flea markets and antique shows. Another Anson, if you ask me.”
My heart still ached for Megan, but having Todd as support was something, at least. For all of Delta’s distaste for the Cassidy family, Megan had always been the opposite. She liked Nana’s goats, had come over to meet Earl Grey, my
teacup pig, and had even looked at my rack of prêt-à-porter clothes, buying a high-low skirt that I’d made one rainy Sunday afternoon. I’d realized after she left with it that I’d actually had her in mind when I’d made it. The Cassidy charm at work.
Bennie sucked in an audible breath, a sudden thought occurring to her. “Most people are killed by loved ones, aren’t they?”
“Did you see that on one of your crime shows?” Cynthia asked.
Bennie didn’t bat an eyelash. “Maybe, but it’s true, right?”
“What are you saying?”
“Well, what about Delta’s family? Megan? Todd?” She drew in another breath. “Jessie Pearl? Could one of them have done it?”
We all stared at her. “Jessie Pearl hit her own daughter on the head with a big rock?”
“She’s strong for an old lady,” Randi said. “She takes my senior class once a week. Or she did until she hurt her leg.”
Cynthia shook her head, frustrated, staring them both down. “Why not Coco or Sherri? Do you think one of them might have killed her, too?”
“The thought did cross my mind,” Bennie said.
Cynthia’s eyes narrowed to thin slits. “Oh for Pete’s sake, Bennie, how can you even begin to think it was one of Delta’s own family?”
Bennie shrugged. “Someone gave her her due?”
“Her due? Do you think she deserved to die, Bennie?” Randi asked, showing her own mortification.
A spatter of red spread from Bennie’s chest, up her throat, and to her cheeks. She fiddled with the headband in her hair,
readjusting it. “That’s not what I meant. All I’m saying is that I don’t believe any of her own family was to blame.”
“I don’t, either,” Cynthia said.
Bennie leveled her gaze at her friend. “If you had to say, then who do you think could have done it, Cyn?”
She shrugged nonchalantly. “I’d put my money on Jeremy Lisle.”
We all stepped back, pressing ourselves against the bolts of fabric shelved in the knit section, as a woman pushed her cart past us. “I talked with him the other night at the Historic Council meeting,” I said. “He didn’t strike me as a murderer.” Which didn’t really mean a thing. I’d met several people who’d turned out to be murderers, and not a single one of them had seemed off to me at first. Which made me take a sidestep. Of all the people I’d met in relation to Delta’s death, the women around me, as well as Georgia Emmons, seemed the least likely murderers. It was definitely possible that one of them had attacked Delta, leaving her for dead.
I looked at each one in turn, trying to imagine the scene in the graveyard, each in the starring role as murderess. Randi, the yoga teacher, was strong enough. Bennie looked like she’d have enough spunk. Cynthia was the only one who didn’t seem to have the gumption. She was too proper. Too put together. I couldn’t even imagine her traipsing through a graveyard, let alone killing a woman who had been a friend.
“Megan said something happened a few months back and that Delta changed. Did any of you notice that?”
“I remember this one conversation we had a while back,” Cynthia said. “It might have been two or three months ago. We’d been reorganizing the personnel files at the church, and we were getting ready to break for lunch. Then out of the
blue, she says,
You ought to be able to trust your husband, right?
”
The other women stared at Cynthia, Georgia gasping. “Surely she didn’t think Anson was up to something?”
Cynthia shrugged. “She wouldn’t say any more than that, but I wondered.”
“She started spending more time talking about the mayoral campaign,” Bennie said. “And helping Megan and Todd with the antiques and the cooking.”
“It was as if she was reprioritizing things in her life,” Randi said, her voice calm and contemplative. “Almost as if she knew her time here was limited.”
We all pondered that in silence for a moment until another woman, this one with a baby in the front section of the shopping cart and a toddler holding fast to her hand, passed us. We stepped back as far as we could to let them by, but the woman frowned. We were clearly blocking the fabric selection from her curious eyes. “Let’s look around,” I said, clapping my hands and making my voice cheerful. “The progressive dinner must go on, which means we need aprons. We’ll try the cottons first,” I said, and led them to the next row to get out of the woman’s way.
“Do they make nice aprons, then?” Bennie asked.
“The best,” I said. Adding fancier fabrics and embellishments made them more interesting, but a cotton base made the most sense. “Let me know if you see something you like.” I watched them as they wandered up and down the aisles, hiding a smile behind my hand at the delight on their faces. I knew just what they were experiencing.
I remembered my very first trip to a fabric store. Meemaw had been the mama duck and I’d trailed behind her,
skimming my hand along the bolts of fabric as if they were made of spun gold. Eventually, she’d led me to the flannel section and asked me which one I liked. I scanned the patterns, zeroing in on one. It had a teal background and scattered over it were chubby pink and gray elephants, umbrellas clutched in their trunks. As an imaginative five-year-old, I had wondered if I had something made from the fabric, would I float away like the elephants?
Meemaw had taken the bolt up to the counter and had the clerk cut a length of it.
Is this for you?
she’d asked, handing it to me all folded into a neat square.
I’d looked up at Meemaw, who’d nodded.
Every girl needs floating elephant pajamas,
she’d answered.
“Harlow?” Bennie’s voice pulled me out of the happy memory.
I swiped away the pools of tears that had gathered in my eyes. “Did you find something?” I asked, noticing right away what an understatement that question was. What she’d found was a shopping cart, and it was already piled high with bolts of mismatched cotton. Cherries, graphic birds and flowers, denim with embroidered daisies, and a brown and pink collection with cupcakes and coffee cups. “Oh yeah,” she exclaimed, “Take a look!”
I dug through the rest of the cart, trying to envision an apron that I could design which could combine a few of the fabrics. None of them quite fit Bennie in my mind. But then
again, what did I really know about her? Her short, curly dark hair was always perfect. She often wore fun headbands that made her look younger than her sixty-some-odd years. She wore pastel-colored capris and cute, matching tops. She looked like she could have appeared in one of the iconic ads from the 1950s, pushing a vacuum with one hand, reading a book in the other.
She was Bennie the Homemaker.
And none of the fabrics in her cart really worked for her, in my opinion. “What’s your favorite color, Bennie?”
“Yellow,” she answered immediately. “Definitely yellow. And red. Happy colors.”
I guided her back through the aisles, replacing a few of the bolts, choosing another cherry pattern instead of the one she’d selected, and adding red and yellow ribbon and a package of green pompoms. “Not sure what we’ll do with these, but I can’t pass them up.”
She looked skeptically at the miniature pastel green puffs, but nodded. “You’re the expert.”
The moment I smiled back at her in encouragement, a vision of her in an apron finally came to me. A retro cocktail number with ruffles. “Perfect!”
Bennie transferred her skeptical gaze from the pompoms to me. “What’s perfect?”
“I know what your apron’s going to look like,” I answered, “and I think you’ll love it.”
She looked at the shopping cart. “So which fabrics?”
“None of them.”
Her smile drooped. “None?”
“Well, maybe one. This green one, I think. I have just what I need at home for the rest of it.”
She frowned, and I could see the question plain on her face. She’d just told me she adored yellow and red, so why would I choose a green fabric? And none of the others she’d liked?
“You’ll love it, I promise.”
“If you say so,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced. She pushed her cart, wandering off, and I went in search of Randi and Cynthia. I had a feeling that getting them all together again would be like herding cats.
They hadn’t had as much success as Bennie, but Randi had found a selection of tie-dyed and naturally dyed fabrics. I helped her choose a few that I could work with.
Cynthia, on the other hand, looked to be stymied by the entire process. “Can I help?” I asked her. She hadn’t selected a single bolt and seemed to have stopped looking.
“I’m not going to bother with an apron.”
Uh-oh. So Bennie had gotten to her. “Cynthia, of course you are! You’ve all been looking forward to this dinner. You can’t be the only one to not have an apron.”
She fluttered a hand in front of her. “It’s not like I’m cooking. Why would I need one?”
It was a good question, but I’d done a bit of research on the history of aprons, and one of the things I’d realized is that the utilitarian purpose they’d had in the past was long gone. Their resurgence wasn’t about protecting the clothing underneath. It wasn’t about actually cooking. “The way you all are using them,” I said, “for this progressive dinner? It’s more of a fashion accessory. It’s retro-chic. You have to have one.”
I had expected my pep talk to sway her, but Cynthia looked at me, her eyes flashing and determined. “I don’t need an apron, Harlow, and I don’t want one. You go on and make
the others, but don’t waste your time on me. Delta’s not here to—”
She trailed off, her voice cracking. Losing Delta must have opened a floodgate of emotions, and those feelings didn’t just evaporate overnight. Dealing with the grief of losing a friend was a long endeavor.
To my mind, despite her protests, Cynthia deserved an apron made just for her. She might say she didn’t want one, but I was going to make her one anyway, and if my charm held true, it would help her realize whatever dream she held close in her heart and was afraid to let free.