A Custom Fit Crime (8 page)

The house phone rang. I pushed away from the table and snapped the handset of the old yellow phone from its wall cradle. It had been there ever since I could remember. “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” Meemaw always said when I’d ask her why she didn’t get rid of the old thing and replace it with a new, modern wireless unit. Now I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the original phone, either. The once tightly coiled cord was now stretched. I wound it absently around my fingers as I answered.

“Sugar, you’re not going to believe what I just heard.”

Whenever Mama had a secret, her voice was full of the dickens, and I could tell she had a doozy.

“What’s that, Mama?” I stretched the phone cord a little farther so I could wave to Orphie. A cloud of sadness seemed to hover around her. It had been a rough day. A rough week. Maybe a rough year.

“Hoss isn’t so sure that man just up and died like we were thinkin’.”

I dropped the phone cord and slipped back into the kitchen, that niggling feeling I’d been battling with breaking free and surging through me freely. “Why not?”

There was a rustle and then Hoss’s baritone voice hit my eardrums this time. The sheriff had a slow Southern drawl and a lazy way about him, but I knew from experience that he was as sharp as a nail stuck in an unsuspecting tire, and clever, to boot. “I talked to the man’s doc back in Dallas. He was fit as a fiddle. No heart trouble. No genetic illnesses. No nothing that could explain his sudden death,” he said.

Michel Ralph Beaulieu might not have had a heart condition, but he was sure giving me one. “And?”

The sheriff didn’t say anything right off. Trying to get him to spit out the information was like ripping out a seam sewn in very tight stitches. Painstakingly and frustratingly slow.

I pulled the phone cord taut again as I walked farther into the kitchen. Finally I stopped when the cord pulled against the wall. If I went too much farther, I’d rip the unit clear off the wall.

“Gavin and I got to wondering about the timing,” he finally said.

“What do you mean?”

“Shame to die just as you’re about to get a big magazine break.”

Well, that was true enough, but a faulty ticker didn’t care about media opportunities. “He
was
talking about how he was going to steal the show with the magazine article.”

A heavy pause came over the line. “Was he, now?”

I gulped, realizing too late how that statement could be interpreted. “Yes. We had a little bit of a . . . discussion about it.”

“More like an argument.”

I’d turned my back to the dining room, but I spun around at Orphie’s voice, pulled the phone away from my ear, and held my finger to my lips telling her to shush.

Too late. Hoss had heard. “Argument, huh?”

“He’s—was—a little hotheaded, is all. It didn’t mean anything.”

“Tell me about it anyway.”

I folded one arm over my chest, one foot tapping, indignant at being questioned by my mother’s fiancé. So what if he happened to be the sheriff and a man happened to die in my shop?

“Cat got your tongue?” he asked when I didn’t respond.

“I guess.”

“What’d y’all argue about?” he repeated.

“He felt as if he was a better designer than I was. He was putting down Bliss. A little square town just isn’t—er, wasn’t—enough for him.”

“It ain’t enough for a lot of folks.”

That was true enough. I’d thought it wasn’t enough for me . . . until I came back home. Now it filled me to the brim.

“What are you saying, Sheriff?” I asked, needing him to say it in plain English.

“I’m sayin’, Harlow, that you might well have had a murder take place in your shop. I ain’t so sure that man died of natural causes.”

Oh Lord. My instincts had been right on the money. “Are you sure?”

“We won’t be sure until the doc finishes the autopsy. But in the meantime, we’re runnin’ with this. Don’t touch anything. We’ll be back to process the shop. In fact, Harlow, go on out on the porch, why don’t you?”

He’d asked all nice and pleasantlike, but the truth was, it had been an order. He didn’t want me to mess anything up, just in case he was right and we were dealing with something sinister.

“Harlow,”
he scolded. “You have a habit of pokin’ your nose into things, and you’d do well to stay out of this one. Let us look into it. Got it?”

“Sure thing, Sheriff,” I said, the discomforting feeling of a daze washing over me. Murder. Right here in Buttons & Bows. Not only was Michel Ralph Beaulieu dead, but my fashion design business might be dead right alongside him.

“How are they going to do an article on three Dallas fashion designers when one of them is dead?” Nana put in words the question I’d been asking myself since the day before. Deputy Gavin McClaine had come back and inspected my shop from top to bottom. If he found anything, he hadn’t revealed it. But what he
had
said was that no one—not Lindy Reece or Quinton the photographer, not Jeanette, not Midori, not the models, not Orphie, and not any of the Cassidy women—was to step foot outside Bliss’s town limits.

We were all possible suspects in the murder of a top local fashion designer Michel Ralph Beaulieu. The
Dallas Morning News
and the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
had both picked up the story. Reporters had swooped into town to conduct impromptu interviews and to report on the suspicious death of one of Dallas’s own right in front of 2112 Mockingbird Lane. This was not the kind of notoriety I wanted for my shop, but this was the kind I kept garnering.

“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. Everyone who’d been at Buttons & Bows the morning before was being questioned, and even people who hadn’t been at my shop—like the models who’d been dropped off at Seven Gables before the rest had descended on my shop— were under the microscope.

“The good thing is that the
D Magazine
people can’t leave,” she said. She scurried around rinsing out glasses, tucking herbs back into the spice drawer, shoving cereal boxes back into the cupboard, and balling up a used piece of plastic wrap. A murder in her granddaughter’s house and her daughter marrying the sheriff meant she was all a-flutter inside. Nervous energy that she was channeling in my kitchen.

Orphie took out the broom, starting at the far end of the kitchen. I followed her with the dustpan. “Maybe if they stay around long enough, they’ll help figure out what happened,” I muttered to myself. “If he was really murdered.”

“Right. And maybe,” Nana said as Orphie knocked the bristles of the broom against the floor, “they’ll find something else to write about here in Bliss that’ll dull the blow of the death.”

Ever the optimist. “I’m not holding my breath about that.” I had the sinking suspicion that the editor would offer the journalist a kill fee on the article and the whole thing would be a no go. After all, they’d have to figure out how to spin it without Beaulieu involved, and the fact was, he was a big name in Dallas fashion. The article, without him, would feel lacking somehow, like a mouth with a tooth suddenly gone.

Despite my skepticism, I had to go forward as if it was still a go, but I also had other things to work on, namely Mama and Hoss’s wedding. My father, Tristan Walker, had been true to his last name, walking out on Mama, my brother, Red, and me, when we were just young’uns. He’d found out about the Cassidy charm and that, as they say, is all she wrote. He left without a backward glance, and eventually they’d divorced. It had been more than thirty years since she’d been married, and she’d even taken her time telling me she was sweet on Hoss McClaine. But now that it was out in the open and she had herself a ring, there was no stopping her. They were getting hitched, and nothing—not even murder—was going to stop the wedding from happening.

I left Nana and Orphie to finish cleaning up the kitchen while I went into my workroom. There was no question in my mind now that something sinister was going on in Bliss, and once again, it had come into my life, uninvited.

The bells on the front door jingled and the door swung open. “I’m here!” Gracie called. “And I have treats for Earl Grey!”

My sweet little teacup pig had been neglected since all the hoopla the day before, but Gracie would turn that around in no time. She loved Earl Grey as much as I did—maybe even more—and other than the fact that the piglet lived here with me, he was just as much hers and her dad’s as he was mine.

“He’s out on the porch in the pen.” Will had made Earl an enclosure. It was the best of both worlds: It had ample room for a miniature piglet to run around and be free, all the while keeping him safe.

Gracie was a typical teenager, minus the attitude. She had her moments, but for the most part, she was a great girl who loved school, her dad, and sewing. She threw her arms around me and gave me a big squeeze. “My dad told me what happened,” she said, letting go. “I can’t believe it. He was one of the designers? And now he’s dead?”

“Not just dead. It looks like he may have been murdered,” I said, cringing as the words left my lips.

She gasped, her lips forming a pronounced O. “Murder?” she whispered. “Are you sure?”

“The sheriff feels pretty certain.”

“Oh no.” She turned and paced, whirling around to face me again after she’d processed for a few seconds. “Are they going to close your shop? Are you okay? Did you see anything? Do they know who did it—”

“Whoa, Gracie! Slow down.”

She took a deep breath and regrouped. “Sorry, I just . . . it’s, like, crazy that this is happening.”

I’d been saying the very same thing to myself over and over and over. Why was this happening, and why had it happened here in Buttons & Bows? I ticked off my fingers as I answered the slew of questions she’d thrown at me. “The sheriff took some things as evidence, but they’re not closing the shop. I’m fine. And no, I didn’t see anything, and as far as I know, no, they don’t know who did it.”

She darted a gaze around the shop, settling for a second on Nana and Orphie in the kitchen, before dropping her voice and speaking in a shaky whisper. “They don’t think it was you, do they?”

I gaped at her, sure that if a fly happened by, it would wing its way right into my mouth and I’d swallow it. Leave it to a teenager to cut to the chase. No hemming and hawing. No beating around the bush. Just right out with the questions gnawing at her gut. “Of course not, Gracie.”

She shrugged, a sheepish look coming over her. “Thank God. I was worried the sheriff might think you had something to do with it since he died here. In your house,” she added, in case I hadn’t felt the full power of her statement.

A shiver crept up my spine. I was speechless for a moment, because, truthfully, she was right and I’d felt the weight of that truth when I’d spoken to Hoss McClaine on the phone. He hadn’t said it, but now that Gracie had, I realized that I probably
was
suspect number one simply because of the unfortunate location of the dead body. “I’m sure they’ll find whoever did it, and everything will be fine,” I said.

She gulped and bit her lower lip. “I’m going to find Earl Grey,” she said, and then she turned and was gone, beating a quick path to the kitchen. A few seconds later, I heard the Dutch door squeak open and then slam shut. I could hear the low rumble of Orphie’s and Nana’s voices, but I tuned them out as I flipped open my sketchbook. Inside was an eclectic jumble of drawings and swatches and commentary about the designs I’d dreamed up. At the end were a few pages of notes I’d taken about the other untimely deaths that had occurred in Bliss recently.

Gracie had planted a seed, and now I couldn’t shake it from my mind. Michel Ralph Beaulieu had died right here in my house. I’d already told the sheriff that Beaulieu had disparaged my town, my shop, and my designs. People had killed for less, I’m sure. How long would it take before the sheriff—or his overzealous deputy of a son—turned his attention my way, in earnest? I was sure they’d figure out the truth sooner or later, but why not help them with it?

I racked my brain, trying to remember all the details of that morning. It came to me in bits and pieces rather than replaying as in a movie. The whole group swooping into the shop. The underlying competition between Beaulieu, Midori, and me. The article. Snapshots flashed through my head. My steamer. The dress forms. Mama’s wedding dress. Lemonade. Maximilian’s design book. They were like pieces from different puzzles, and no matter how I turned them over in my mind, they weren’t going to fit together in any semblance of order.

I went through the possible suspects one by one. Lindy Reece and her notebook. Quinton and his camera. Both worked for
D Magazine
and wouldn’t be likely to have a grudge against Beaulieu—none that was obvious, anyway. Jeanette and Midori. Both of them could have sketchy motives. Jeanette had taken the brunt of Beaulieu’s daily wrath, while Midori, I knew, had struggled to find her footing in the U.S. fashion world. Her connections to Japan were still strong and Beaulieu hadn’t had any qualms about pooh-poohing her design aesthetic, but she’d found success nonetheless.

Was any of that enough of a motive for murder, though? I didn’t think so.

I moved on to the Dallas and New York models who’d come as part of the designers’ entourage. They hadn’t actually been in the shop yet, but could one of them have snuck over from Seven Gables and . . . And what? Beaulieu hadn’t been hit over the head. He hadn’t been startled to death. Could he have been poisoned? That was a possibility. So maybe one of the models had slipped some arsenic, or something, to him somehow.

Was the fact that they hadn’t physically been at the shop when he died calculated? From my experience, models could be as cutthroat as the mothers of child beauty pageant contestants. Okay, maybe not quite that bad, but pretty brutal. And they weren’t empty-headed. One of them could definitely be a murderer, just as any one of the other possible suspects could have done it.

Still, I couldn’t fathom a reason why a model would do in a designer, especially before a photo shoot that could gain said model just as much exposure as said designer.