Little Black Dress with Bonus Material (4 page)

She stared at the mess, so overwhelmed that it paralyzed her.
I'm hyperventilating,
she realized and made herself take a deep breath.

“Your mom would've sent me packing if I'd dragged you into this!” The housekeeper kicked at a swollen box with the toe of a navy blue Ked. “It's a sorry state of affairs when a woman who's always been as persnickety as Miss Evelyn lets her life fall apart like this. I'm beginning to wonder if this stroke won't be what saves her.”

What an odd thing to say,
Toni thought and experienced a chest-crushing bout of anxiety she hadn't had since planning her very first wedding when only three members of a string quartet had shown up for the ceremony, the hungover groom couldn't locate the rings, and the minister had an unholy attack of the runs.

Gnawing on her pinky nail, she scanned the room. Despite all the chaos, she realized that something was missing. “Where's the computer I bought for Evie after Daddy died?” She'd even had Greg install QuickBooks for the home office on it, and Toni had carefully forwarded all the CDs and manuals. If her mother had been using it, there would be a virtual trail of money to follow. But she didn't see hide nor hair of an HP desktop, at least not on the surface of the indoor landfill.

“Oh,
that
thing,” Bridget said.

That thing?

The housekeeper waved a blue-veined hand. “Miss Evie donated it to the library without ever unpacking it.”

“What?” Toni gritted her teeth. Why would her mom have done that? How could anyone keep tabs on so many accounts when her filing system meant filling up a room with paper?

“Don't blame an old dog for not wanting to learn new tricks.” Bridget wagged her finger. “Besides, they've got computers at the winery, and it doesn't seem to be helping things there.”

“So what's going on at the winery?” Toni asked, wondering,
Good God, what next?

“All's I know is what I hear,” Bridget clarified and shoved her hands into her apron pockets. “Six months back, the fellow who'd been running the place up and quit, and Miss Evie never replaced him. Instead, she lost her mind.”

“How?” If Bridget dragged this out another minute, Toni might shake her senseless.

Bridget scowled. “Your mom's gone and made a deal with the devil,” she said. “She's got a Cummings boy sticking his nose in things. When I found out about it, I fell off my chair. ‘Miss Evie, have you gone stark raving mad?' I asked, but she said it was the smartest thing she'd ever done.”

“Which Cummings boy?”

“The youngest.”

Hunter,
Toni thought, recalling a quiet but good-looking adolescent who'd tagged along with his sports-star older brothers and who'd stared at her across the counter during the summer she worked at the Tastee Freeze.

“What if Miss Evie gave that Cummings boy access to the winery? What if he's robbing her blind as we speak?” Bridget asked.

Toni pressed her fingers to her temples, her brain on overload. She could only handle so much at once. Hunter Cummings would have to wait.

“Let's just worry about Evie's health for the moment,” she said, making an executive decision. “We'll get to the rest later.”

“Of course,” Bridget murmured, “whatever you say, Miss Antonia,” although she hardly sounded pleased.

Toni looked around them, at the disaster that had once been her dad's office and her grandfather's and great-grandfather's before that, while the housekeeper slipped blue-veined hands from apron pockets and folded arms across chest, watching her expectantly, as if Toni might wave a wand and set everything to rights.

First things first,
she told herself, the mantra she used when a bridezilla—or the Monster-of-the-Bride—blew up in the midst of arranging a six-figure wedding.

“I'm taking a bath,” she said, “and then I'm going to see my mother.” Visiting hours at the hospital started at ten and she wanted to be there, even if Evie didn't know she was around. “If you want to make a list of what needs doing, you can get started now.”

“Fair enough.” Bridget nodded and patted Toni's shoulder before she shuffled out of the den. Soon the noisy whir of the vacuum started up again.

Toni sighed and took a lingering look at the mess in the office before she escaped, shutting the double doors behind her and secretly wishing she could set a torch to everything sealed up behind them.

As she trudged up the stairs, she realized that nothing about coming home this time was going to be any easier than the last. She'd been an inconsolable mess at her father's funeral while Evie had stood stoically, never shedding a tear in Toni's presence. Nor had her mother cried when Toni had packed up and left.

How could I be her flesh and blood when we're so different?
Toni wondered then—as she often did—but she shook the unsettling thought from her head. It wasn't fair to dwell on what wasn't right with her and Evie while her mother lay unconscious in a hospital bed. In fact, it felt dead wrong.

She plugged the claw-foot bathtub and ran the hot water long enough to steam up the bathroom. Turning her back to the mirror, she peeled off the nightshirt and her panties then slid into the tub. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the rim, and it seemed only seconds had passed when she heard Bridget knocking on the bathroom door and calling through the crack, “Miss Antonia, there's someone here to see you!”

“Who is it?” she asked, not opening her eyes, refusing to move at first. No one in town even knew she was here but Bridget and the hospital's ICU staff.

“It's that Cummings boy about the vineyard,” Bridget hissed through the door. “No doubt, he's heard what happened to Miss Evie and that you've come back, and he figures to take advantage of the situation.”

Aw, rats.

Toni sighed. “Give me a minute,” she said and pulled the plug from the drain, water gurgling away, taking any chance she had at unwinding along with it.

She gripped the slick sides of the tub and slowly stood, reaching for a towel and wrapping it around her before she stepped out. Wiping the heel of her hand on the foggy vanity mirror, she stared at herself in the glass, water dripping down her face, and she wondered all the while what the devil she'd gotten into and how the hell she was going to get out.

A
nna and I snuck off the day before her wedding, or “Daddy's wedding,” as Anna liked to call it, since our father had been itching for her to marry Davis Cummings since the summer she'd turned eighteen.

Davis' family had countless acres of land that reached nearly to the Mississippi, with rows of vines that seamed the dirt and stretched across rolling hillsides as far as the eye could see. Part of it had once been ours before Granddad Joseph sold off most of Herman Morgan's original hundred acres during hard times. I'd heard Mother say more than once that Granddad had never forgiven himself, and I knew my daddy's goal in life was to get it all back if he could.

“That soil's the most fecund in the county,” my father had remarked, “more fertile than Helen von Hagen,” which made my mother laugh huskily. Everyone in town knew Helen was the typical farmer's daughter, a regular baby-machine. She had six children by two different daddies, and she was only twenty-three. I was twenty-one—the same age as Anna's groom—and not long out of teacher's college, but Daddy hadn't yet tried to marry me off, maybe because my looks didn't give him as much to bargain with.

Lucky me.

“It's a good match, Beatrice,” I caught him telling my mother as I paused by the door to his study. “They'll have a wonderful life, I do believe it. And half the Cummings plot belongs to Anna as much as to Davis so this marriage means returning it to our family. It would please Joseph beyond end, knowing that one day it'll pass down to Anna's children.”

“I've no doubt my father would appreciate reclaiming Herman's stake, but does she love the boy?” Mother asked to my surprise, since feelings were a subject little discussed in our house. “Davis is certainly charming, but I'm not convinced she's as infatuated with him as he is with her.”

“Good grief, love will come if it hasn't already! Besides, Archibald thinks it's high time his son settled down, and Davis is quite taken with her, as any young man would be. Anna's the prettiest girl in Blue Hills,” Daddy replied without really answering her question. “They belong together,” he added decisively and slapped his hand on his desk, as though to say
and that, my dear, is that
.

It effectively ended their conversation, and I drifted away from the study door so as not to be caught eavesdropping.

For an instant, I'd considered telling Anna what I'd overheard; but then I quickly changed my mind. If there was one thing living in a small town had taught me, it was when to keep my mouth shut. So much was riding on Anna's marriage that I could cause nothing but harm if I were to interfere in any fashion. Daddy would have never forgiven me. I realized, too, how shrewd our father was. He did everything for a reason, and this wedding was no exception. He had a head for business and had learned well from Joseph Morgan, who'd taken Daddy under his wing the moment he and my mother had wed. My granddad had taught my father the ins and outs of growing grapes and drilled horror stories into his head—into all of our heads—about the dry years of Prohibition, when every winery in the state had been shut down, which killed off some vineyards entirely. Daddy liked to remind us how heartbreaking it had been for Joseph to parcel off the land, which he'd wisely chosen to do instead of risking starvation for his family.

“It takes great inner strength to learn to swim when you're sinking,” my father liked to lecture us. “A weaker man would have given up.”

While Joseph Morgan had firmly held on to twenty acres, enough to stay in the wine trade on a much smaller scale, I knew my father was anxious to prove himself and bring that lost land back into the fold. Anna's union with Davis would do just that.

Only getting Anna and Davis together had not been so easy.

My sister had never lacked for beaus. Even in pigtails and pinafores, she'd had boys hovering around her. I likened her to a flower with spectacular nectar, and they were the greedy honeybees. By the time she started high school, they swarmed incessantly. When she tired of one, another would start courting until he bored her, too. It wasn't until the June before her senior year that our father began playing his hand; perhaps not very subtly, but cleverly nonetheless. The Cummings family suddenly seemed ever-present, invited to the Victorian for each backyard barbecue, Fourth of July picnic, and marshmallow roast.

As I was less in the midst of things and more on the sidelines, I knew from observing that Davis had an eye for Anna. You could see it in his face every time he looked at her. Only my father must have taken him aside and instructed him on wooing my sister, as he didn't fawn over her as the other boys were wont to do. He kept his distance, chatting up other young women, talking business with the men, and generally avoiding Anna like the plague until my sister couldn't bear it.

Before the summer ended, she set her sights on Davis Cummings and, like every boy she'd ever coveted, she had him twisted 'round her little finger before anyone could say, “Boo!” By the fall, she wore his Sigma Chi pin on her sweater, and Mother started bringing up hope chests and trousseaus. Father was over the moon when Davis asked if he might take Anna's hand in marriage, something that happened one night while I was home. Mother had oh-so-conveniently dragged Anna to a lecture at the library in Ste. Genevieve while I begged off to grade papers. When the doorbell rang, it was Davis, looking decidedly nervous. Father barely took the time to shake the young man's hand before dragging him into the study, where they remained for nearly half an hour before the doors banged wide-open. Daddy shouted at me to “bring that bottle of forty-year-old brandy, Evie, we're celebrating!” Although he didn't offer me a glass. When Davis finally left after a cigar and a snifter, my father followed him out onto the porch, patting him on the back so effusively I was surprised young Mr. Cummings didn't go flying down the steps.

“This is a big day for us, String Bean,” he told me and gave my own back a pat.

“A big day indeed.”

Unfortunately, when Davis actually proposed to Anna, she wasn't near as bowled over as Daddy.

“You told him
what
?” my father said the next evening at dinner when Anna admitted she hadn't given Davis an answer to his Very Important Question. “What's wrong with you, Annabelle?” he'd demanded, the veins in his forehead pulsing; his eyes bulging from their sockets. “Of course you'll say yes!”

“What's wrong with taking the time to make up my mind? Maybe I'm too young to get married. Maybe I have things I'd like to do first,” my sister had countered, her nostrils flaring, and she'd tossed her napkin on the table. “It's my life, isn't it?”

“For the moment,” Daddy had murmured and smoothed the hair back from his brow to calm himself. Then he leaned over his plate and pointed a finger at her, telling her in no uncertain terms, “But if you blow this, Annabelle, your life might become very unpleasant and very brief indeed.”

To which Anna had glared at Daddy and said very calmly, “Sometimes I think you have no heart at all.” Then she glanced at Mother, burst into tears, and fled the table, howling as she ran upstairs to slam her bedroom door.

I waited past dark until the house had calmed down—or rather, until Mother had calmed down both my father and Anna—and then I slipped into Anna's bedroom and crawled beneath her covers. “Are you all right?” I asked, and she had sighed, rolling onto her back.

“Will there ever be a time, do you think, when we live our lives for ourselves and not for other people?” she said by way of reply, and I told her I couldn't answer.

I asked her if she loved Davis, and she was evasive. “He's a small-town boy beneath his spit and polish. He may have gone to Italy after his college graduation, but only to visit the wineries his father does business with, to see their presses and to sniff the oak barrels in their cellars. He didn't even care to see Rome or Venice, can you imagine? How could he not toss a coin in the Trevi Fountain or gawk at Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel?”

Things, I knew, that Anna desperately wanted to do.

“He's a vintner,” I reminded her, “from a family of vintners. He sounds sensible to me, more than I gave him credit for.” I'd always assumed Davis Cummings was merely a spoiled boy raised with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth.

“Sensible?” Anna snorted and rolled away, turning her back to me. “Yes, you would find that a winning trait, wouldn't you, Evie?”

The next day, when I returned home after a long day in the classroom, I found Anna emerging from my father's study, fingering my grandmother Charlotte's precious pearls around her throat.

Mother and Daddy came out shortly after, and I saw the tightness on her face and the smile on his.

It was done. My sister had agreed to a spring wedding.

From that point forward, the house was in a constant tizzy, filled with visiting relatives, seamstresses, and parcels stacked from floor to ceiling.

The day before the ceremony, Anna came to my room a few hours after breakfast, told me to grab my purse and coat, and put a finger to her lips, saying, “Don't tell a soul, Evie, but we're running away for a spell. If I don't, I swear I'll go stark raving mad.”

How could I resist such an invitation?

We slipped out of the house and drove into Ste. Genevieve, a quaint river town—and the county seat—not far south, which had a long and storied French past.

We took tea at the Southern Hotel on Third Street before exploring several nearby shops, including a confectioner's and a perfumery, until Anna drifted toward a corner store with purple drapes inside the plate-glass windows.

“What kind of place is this?” she asked, dark brows knitted above her eyes, too curious to resist. Before I knew it, she headed inside, setting a bell over the door to madly tinkling.

I dove in after her, though my eyes took a bit to adjust to the dim. Only a single light fixture hovered above our heads with pale bulbs that seemed ready to flicker out at any instant.

“Bienvenue, mamselles,”
an olive-skinned woman greeted us and beckoned us in. She had long, inky hair woven with ribbons and dark eyes lined with kohl. She looked as I imagined a Gypsy would. “I have lovely vintage baubles I carried with me all the way from Paris. Please, take a look,” she said, watching us as we tucked kidskin gloves in our pockets and fingered a table filled with silk scarves.

Anna wandered over to a display rack swollen with hats of all ilk, many that had surely seen better days. From a knobby arm, she snatched a wide-brimmed bonnet bound by a faded pink ribbon and placed it atop her dark hair, batting her lashes and vamping it up. “Evie,” she said, “aren't I the spitting image of Audrey Hepburn? All I need are big sunglasses and Cary Grant.”

“This is silly,” I said, putting aside a fan with molting peacock feathers, because I had a bad feeling about the place and the woman whose gaze had never left Anna's face from the moment we'd walked in. Not that I wasn't used to people staring at my sister, but this was the first time it had happened that I'd felt a shiver scurry up my spine. “Let's go, all right? Mother will be wondering where we are besides, with the rehearsal and dinner a few hours away.”

“My God, Evelyn! Stop being so excruciatingly responsible for five minutes, will you?” Anna hissed. “We have plenty of time before we need to get home to change.”

The Gypsy's ears pricked at the mention. “So you are about to marry?” she asked my sister, her curiosity reflected in the arch of her thin eyebrows. “Is it soon then?”

“Tomorrow.” Anna expelled a weighty sigh as she removed the hat and returned it to its hook.

“You do not find him appealing?” the Gypsy asked.

“Oh, he's handsome enough,” my sister said with a shrug, “but shouldn't the earth move and the stars explode when I'm with him? If it were all that, maybe I wouldn't feel like I'm being traded for a few acres of grapes.”

“Annabelle!” I couldn't believe she'd voiced such a thing aloud, particularly to a total stranger.

“I see.” The woman ignored me, her focus on Anna.

Again, I urged, “Let's go, please.”

My sister pursed her lips and refused to look at me.

Something was happening between the two of them. I recognized it even if Anna couldn't. Whatever the Gypsy had in mind, I wanted no part of it.

“Come on.” I caught my sister's arm, spurring her toward the door despite her dragging feet, but the shopkeeper interceded, calling out and stopping Anna in her tracks.

“Wait, please,
ma pauvre
. I have something very special for you,” the woman said, lowering her throaty voice as though sharing a secret. “You cannot leave until you see it.”

“Something special?” my sister said, perking up.

I let out an impatient snort, glaring at her. But she didn't seem to notice.

“Yes, please.” Anna's smile returned, and she jerked away from me. “Surely, it can't hurt just to look.”

“You will not be disappointed.” The Gypsy smiled at Anna before she disappeared into the back room. Minutes after, she emerged with a sleek black dress that shimmered oddly in the electric lights. “It is very pretty, no?”

“Oh, yes.” Anna instantly reached for it. She gazed at it, unblinking, completely mesmerized. “It's quite beautiful.”

“And very, very rare,” the woman insisted. Then she started talking in her accented voice, mesmerizing in itself, explaining that the dress was made from the silk of spiders found only in Madagascar and that the spiders had to be watched as they wove, for fear they'd devour one another.

Oh, boy, tell me another one,
I thought and snorted.

“Enough,” I said. I had no patience for such foolishness.