sipping a frothy coffee drink with the uber pulled-together Mrs. Helen Abernathy and a third woman I’d never seen before. A man and a woman whispered together in the corner. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her. A group of men I recognized from the golf club this morning stood on the sidewalk outside the shop’s front window, but I couldn’t put names to their faces. A few sprite teens, up mighty early for a summer day and looking awfully distraught about it, sat at a round top, a plate of croissants between them.
“Everyone?” I asked.
She nodded her head, brows pulled together into a V. “Everyone. I can’t believe y’all hadn’t heard that.”
“I’ve been holed up making clothes.”
“Right. For the Margaret Ball, I hear.” She waved her hands. “Not my thing.”
I smiled. “Wasn’t mine, either, but the gowns are beautiful. Is there anything you don’t hear, Gina?”
“Nope.” I would have expected a little smile from her. Instead, her already thin lips drew into an even thinner line. “So they really don’t know who did it?”
I didn’t blame her for feeling anxious. A murderer was on the loose—not a comforting thought. But I sensed there was something else Gina wanted to say. I put both my palms against the tabletop. “What’s wrong?”
She paled again, looking downright pasty. “I was just wondering if…” She trailed off.
“Wondering what?”
After a glance over her shoulder, she leaned closer and whispered, “He was in here yesterday, talking on his cell phone.”
“Uh huh,” I said, knowing there had to be more.
“Not talking, exactly,” she said. “More like arguing. Really loud. It didn’t sound good.
“Do you think it might have something to do with the murder?” I asked.
She shrugged her bony shoulders. “I guess I don’t really know. Sh-should I, like, talk to someone?”
“If you think you know something…”
She made a face. “Like the sheriff? He doesn’t like me, not since I rammed a bunch of mailboxes when I was, like, sixteen. He holds a grudge.”
Been there and done that.
Gavin McClaine’s smug face popped into my head. “There’s a new deputy in town,” I said, sounding like I was quoting a line from a Western movie. Not that he’d be much better than Hoss McClaine, but I kept that thought to myself. Gavin and his dad were both single-minded, passionate, and direct to the point of being rude, but Hoss McClaine was good at what he did, and the apple doesn’t usually fall far from the tree. I was betting Gavin was a fine deputy, just like his daddy.
“How ’bout I tell y’all and you decide if it’s worth sharing?”
My hands pressed harder against the table. I couldn’t believe I was getting sucked into another murder. Did Meemaw curse me? When she was alive, whatever she wanted, she got. That had been her Cassidy charm. Had she wanted me thoroughly wrapped up in Bliss’s small-town dramas? Was that why, for the second time since I’d been back home, I found myself in the thick of a murder investigation?
I shook my head. “Gina, I’m just a dressmaker—”
“But the scuttlebutt around town is that you helped figure out what happened to Nell Gellen.” She threw another glance around the bakery. The line at the counter had grown and the buzz of conversation had grown right alongside it. “Dang it all. I gotta get back.”
“Okay—”
She raised one hand, and just like that, I stopped. “Just listen,” she rushed on. “I know who Mr. Vance was talking to.”
“You mean arguing with?” I asked.
“Right. On his cell phone. Look—you know I’m adopted, right?”
I nodded. I had heard the story about her adoption from my mother. Gina’s biological parents had made an arrangement with her adoptive parents before she was born. They’d already had four children, and Gina was just one too many. If she drove a few towns over, she had four siblings who
The women sitting across from us threw their heads back and giggled, their high-pitched laughter just a little bit grating this early in the morning, especially in light of the murder; though in their defense, they might well be ignorant about Macon Vance. It wasn’t just me. One or two of the teenaged boys looked just as aggravated by the laughter.
“That’s why it struck me,” Gina was saying. “He kept repeating that his daughter had a right to know who her father is. Boy, I know what that feels like.”
“Wait.” My mind whirled as I connected the dots. “He has a kid who doesn’t know he’s the father?”
She shrugged, but she didn’t look unsure. “That’s what it sounded like.”
“Do you know who it is?” I prompted when she didn’t offer anything else, but she shook her head. I paused, then asked the big question. “Who’s the mother?”
She snorted. “Take your pick.”
Right. The golf pro who got around.
After a minute, Gina lowered her chin. “You look like you have an idea,” Gina said, her chin lowered, lips pouty.
I pressed my fingertips between my tense eyebrows. “I do?”
“Yeah, you do.”
“I don’t. No ideas.” But as she scraped her chair back and started to stand, I decided to share my suspicion. “Unless…”
She plopped back down. “Unless what?”
“You said he made lots of unhappy housewives happy, right?”
“Right.”
“So what if he had an affair with a married woman and she got pregnant. That’s a pretty good reason to be kept out of the child’s life, right?”
A dollop of color returned to Gina’s cheeks. “Hey, Harlow, that’s pretty good.” She sat up straight, looked off to the side like she was giving my idea considerable thought, but then she shook her head. “So then some angry woman, the mother of his child, stabbed him?”
“I don’t know…” Unless a woman was particularly strong or had the element of surprise, it seemed unlikely that stabbing by scissors would be the method chosen for murder. Which meant…
“The husband,” we both said at the same time.
“If only we knew who his daughter is—
If only it were that easy.
“I gotta get back,” she said. She scooted behind the counter and made my iced coffee. Moments later I waved, heading back into the heat. I had Margaret gowns to work on, Gracie’s pedigree to write, and family history to sort out.
What I did not have was a murder to solve.
Somehow it consumed my thoughts anyway.
Chapter 7
My old farmhouse has been in the Cassidy family since Meemaw was a little girl. Now here I was, back in Bliss after a long, grueling stint as a minion in a New York City fashion empire. Just driving up Mockingbird Lane from the square sent a wave of comfort through me.
The driveway ran along the left side of the house. I parked Meemaw’s beat-up old truck under the row of possumwood trees, climbed the back porch, iced coffee in hand, and entered the house through the kitchen. The Dutch door, along with the buttercup retro-styled appliances, were my favorite features of the house. Meemaw had had an eye for style and she’d always known what she wanted. The vintage stamped metal bodies of the stove, dishwasher, and refrigerator made the kitchen the most welcoming room in the house. Next to my sewing workroom, I spent most of my time right here.
