the other ladies could not understand me. I twitched the neckline slightly, and Mrs. Tranh slapped my hand.
'I don't see why you don't have mirrors back here,' I called out.
'So you won't be tempted to look until the ladies are satisfied it's ready,' Michael called back.
So we won't run away screaming, I added, silently. The ladies finished their manipulations, and I was surrounded by their smiling, bobbing faces. Mrs. Tranh began shooing me toward the doorway.
'Well, here goes,' I muttered. I swept aside the curtains, awkwardly maneuvered my hoops through the doorway, and planted myself in front of the mirror.
'Oh, my God,' I gasped, and gave the neckline of the dress a few sharp upward tugs. 'I really am falling out of this.' Surprisingly, the dress wouldn't budge, although the neckline looked even lower and more precariously balanced in the mirror than it felt.
'The effect is historically accurate, I believe,' Michael drawled. He was grinning hugely, enjoying my embarrassment.
'Sadist! I don't care if it's required by law, it's just not gonna work. I can't possibly walk around like this. Especially in church. And around drunken relatives.'
'On Samantha and the others, this style gives to meager endowments a deceptive appearance of amplitude,' Michael said, pedantically. 'However, we may have miscalculated the effects of this amplification on your ... radically different physique. Let me talk to the ladies,' he added quickly, and backed away as if he suspected how close I was to swatting at him.
He exchanged several rapid sentences with Mrs. Tranh, punctuated by gales of giggles from the ladies. Mrs. Tranh and two of the other seamstresses surrounded me and began pulling and tweaking at the bodice of the dress, applying measuring tapes to one or another angle of me or it and pointing to or even poking my troublesome endowments. The fact that the tallest of them still fell short of my shoulder only compounded my feeling of being huge, awkward, and ungainly. Michael was carrying on a running dialogue with the seamstresses. I assumed he must be a very witty conversationalist in Vietnamese as well as English; every other sentence of his provoked a fresh crop of giggles. Or maybe they were just all enjoying themselves at my expense. Michael wasn't giggling with the rest, but he couldn't suppress a huge grin.
'They think they've got it figured out,' he said at last.
'Good; does that mean I can take it off? I feel like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.'
'Sorry,' he said, choking back laughter. 'I had a hard time convincing them that anything needed fixing, and once I did, they kept trying to talk me into letting them not change it until Samantha had seen it. They don't like her very much, and they kept insisting they wanted to see her face when she saw it.'
'You're right; she'd have a cow. And then she'd probably put the evil eye on me or something.'
'That's more or less what I told the ladies,' Michael said. 'And they agreed that it would be a shame, since they like you at least as much as they dislike Samantha. They're going to fix the dress so you look beautiful, but in a somewhat less spectacular manner, and Samantha will have nothing to complain about. Don't worry,' he added, momentarily serious, 'Mrs. Tranh will manage; she's really very good.'
'Thanks,' I said, feeling a little bit better as I ducked back into the dressing room to take off the dress. The giggles of the seamstresses seemed somehow friendlier, as if they were laughing with me at the ridiculousness of the dress rather than at how I looked at it. Of course he might have been lying outrageously, but since I would never know, I decided to think positively.
Well, I told myself, at least Michael is in a better mood than when I walked in. For that matter, so was I--at least until I got home and tried, for what seemed like the millionth time, to reach the calligrapher. Surely, by now, she had found the time to finish addressing Samantha's wretched invitations.
Dad was also incommunicado. Like the parents of a small and mischievous child, I had learned to be most suspicious when Dad was seemingly quiet and on his best behavior. I was beginning to regret having let him abscond with Great-Aunt Sophy.
After my search of Jake's house, I deduced that either Dad was planning to steal Emma Wendell's ashes and leave Great-Aunt Sophy behind in her place, or he wanted to run some kind of test on Emma Wendell and was using Great-Aunt Sophy to rehearse. Neither one of which seemed like a particularly pleasant thing to be doing. And considering there wasn't much left of either lady but ashes and a few bits of bone, I wasn't sure what on earth he thought he was going to test for, anyway. I decided to drop by and see him tomorrow.
I would have tried to call him, but I had to fight Mother for the phone to call the calligrapher. She was busy putting the word out about the costume party. Apparently she and Eileen had decided to hold it in ten days' time.
'Before any of us gets too busy,' Mother remarked. Apparently it had escaped her notice that some of us were already rather busy.
Friday, June 24
I spent the morning phoning tent rental companies and the afternoon tracking down a supplier for the mead that Steven and Eileen had decided was the only appropriate drink to serve at a Renaissance banquet.
I was tired by the end of the day, but the fact that Steven and Eileen had taken Barry with them to a craft fair in Richmond raised my spirits considerably. I decided to take the weekend off, doing only the most necessary tasks--like continuing to hunt for the errant calligrapher. And keeping an eye on Dad.
Which was harder than I thought. I tried to hunt him down after dinner, and he was definitely nowhere to be found. Not in our garden, not in his apartment over Pam's garage, not in her garden. So I dropped in on Pam.
'Pam,' I said. 'What's Dad been up to recently?'
'Up to? Why, what should he be up to?'
'Has he been doing much gardening?'
'No, come to think of it, he hasn't,' she said, looking out at the rather shaggy grass in the backyard. 'That's odd.'
'Has he been performing experiments?'
'What kind of experiments?'
'You know, chemical ones.'
'How would I know?'
'Noticed any funny smells? Heard any explosions?'
'No,' Pam said. 'And he hasn't been dragging home stray body parts, or putting out a giant lightning rod on the roof, or drinking strange potions and turning bad-tempered and hairy. What do you mean, experiments?'
'Never mind,' I said. 'Can I borrow your key to the garage apartment?'
I wanted to check out Dad's lair. I could always pretend that Pam had asked me to help her clean up.
There were several hundred books lying about, apparently in active use. Medical books. Criminology texts. Electricians' manuals. Heaps of mysteries. Bound back issues of the Town Crier, the weekly local newspaper, for the past five years. All of them fairly stuffed with multicolored bookmarks. Dad's messy little laboratory looked recently used. His bed didn't. I saw no signs of Great-Aunt Sophy.
I sat down on the cleanest chair I could find with the old Town Criers and began checking out Dad's bookmarks.
I found Emma Wendell's obituary, two years ago this month. She'd died in her sleep of heart failure, following a long illness. She'd been quietly cremated and memorialized in a service at the nearby Methodist church. Jake and sister Jane were the only survivors.
I also reread the articles about what the Town Crier had called the 'Ivy League Swindlers'--Samantha's ex-fiance and his friend. It had a list of local residents who had been bilked out of large sums.
Including, I was surprised to note, Mrs. Fenniman, who was quoted as saying she'd lost a few hundred thousand and was glad they'd been exposed before she'd invested any real money with them. Interesting. I knew Mrs. Fenniman must be well off if she lived in our neighborhood; I'd had no idea she was that well off. And apparently Samantha's father's law firm had been involved as local legal counsel for the Miami-based swindlers-- although the articles made it clear they had been duped just as the investors had--in fact, had lost some of their
