A Fitting End: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery

The healthy swig of the drink Will handed her seemed to spread through her like wildfire. Her eyes went from glazed to flashing in a split second and she snapped her hand away from mine. She sat up straight and took another sip. “It’s that damn golfer,” she said, sucking her lips over her teeth after she spoke. “Macon Vance.”

Will sat back down, stroking his goatee. “Did you know him?”

“Know him?” She looked at Will as if he’d suddenly sprouted pig’s ears. “No. Not at all. That is, of course I saw him around the club, but no, I didn’t know him. No,” she added, a touch more thoughtfully. “No,” she repeated hoarsely, “and I didn’t want to know him.”

“What did you want to tell me, Mrs. James?” I asked, wanting to cut to the chase. This conversation was getting us nowhere mighty fast.

“I’d say that I’m in a heap of trouble.” She looked at Will, eyeing him suspiciously for a moment before blinking and shifting her gaze to me. “I can trust you, I suppose? Of course I can. That’s why I came here,” she mumbled to herself.

We waited, again, for her to keep talking, but criminy, she was taking her sweet time—which went against everything I knew about Mrs. Zinnia James. In the short time I’d known her, she’d been brutally honest. So why the sudden closed lips?

She’d come here, I reminded myself, so I had a free pass to pry. “You said that everything was wrong. What’s everything?”

She lifted her lemonade cooler to her mouth and knocked back the last of it. “It’s all gone to hell,” she finally said.

“What has?”

“My granddaughter’s future—”

My eyes flew open wide. “Why? The sheriff isn’t shutting down the pageant, is he?” The streetlights had been adorned with festival flags and the invitations had been sent out. The catwalk was up. The lights were situated. Heck, even the bubble machine was all set. The debutantes would be devastated if the event were canceled. The Margaret Moffette Lea Pageant and Ball was a Bliss institution. A tradition akin to Fourth of July, Blue Bell ice cream, and pecan pie. Not to mention the investment I’d already made in the dress pulley contraption Will had installed. I didn’t have another wedding dress lined up yet. The commission from Libby’s dress was meant to pay for the pulley. I tossed up a silent prayer.

“No. Goodness, no.” She looked at me like I’d plumb lost my mind.

Which is exactly how I was looking at her. “Then what is it, Mrs. James?”

She stood up, did a slow loop around the kitchen, her heels clicking against the tile, then turned to face us. “The other day at the club,” she said to me. “You told me you weren’t there, but you were.” My jaw dropped open, but she continued before I could stammer out an excuse for lying to her. “The day you left your sewing bag.”

“Y-yes—”

“You didn’t wait to talk to me—”

“You were… busy.”

“Busy,” she repeated.

I nodded my head. “Busy.”

“So you heard?”

I nodded. We couldn’t have blocked out the argument if we’d tried.

“You were with the newly minted Mrs. Nate Kincaid, correct?” she continued.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Yes.” I’d told the deputy and the sheriff that I’d been there with Josie Kincaid. I tried to shove away the fact that I’d omitted the argument from the story I’d told, but from the tight expression on Mrs. James’s face, I suspected Josie hadn’t left out that tidbit.

She muttered under her breath, “She mentioned to the deputy, apparently, that she’d overheard a bit of a kerfuffle that morning.”

I wasn’t at all sure if the unspoken accusation that Josie had spilled the beans about something she shouldn’t have was real or my imagination. Either way, I was tongue-tied. There had been a kerfuffle, and we had overheard it. It wasn’t hard to put one and one together.

“Were you with Macon Vance?” Will asked.

I waited on the edge of my seat, wanting confirmation of what I thought I knew: that Mrs. James might not have known Macon Vance socially, but she knew him enough to argue with him over the pageant.

Mrs. James drew her mouth tight, a vertical bow of wrinkles shooting into her top lip. “Yes.”

“Your conversation sounded pretty, um”—I weighed my words carefully—“heated.”

“Yes, well, he was a contrary man. To say we didn’t see eye to eye on things would be understating the matter.”

Will and I raised our eyebrows at each other. Yikes. There was definitely no love lost between Mrs. James and Macon Vance.

I tilted my head to one side, considering what she’d told us just a minute earlier. “But you said you didn’t know him.”

“We’ve had… run-ins. He was an outsider. He didn’t understand the tradition here in Bliss,” she said.

A snippet of their argument came back to me. Do you check their teeth and the bottom of their shoes? Macon Vance might not have understood the tradition, but I thought he actually understood the rules of the pageant pretty well. And he didn’t like them.

“Why was he so against the pageant?” I asked.

She brushed the question away. “It really doesn’t matter,” she said. “Harlow, I’m here because I need your help.”

I didn’t know what she was going to say, but instinct was telling me to keep my nose out of it. I opened my mouth to protest, but she threw up her hand, quieting me. “Before you say anything, hear me out.”

Suddenly Will’s hand was on my knee, gently squeezing a warning. He shook his head, just barely, and muttered, “Your plate’s pretty full with the dresses, Cassidy.”

He was dead right, but Mrs. James looked desperate. As desperate as a plucked, face-lifted, silver-haired former Texas beauty queen can look. I nodded to her. “I’m listening.”

Will shook his head, taking his hand away from my leg, leaving a cold spot in its absence. “Something’s not right here, Cassidy,” he muttered so only I could hear. Water suddenly began dripping from the kitchen faucet. It started out sounding like plop, plop, plop, but to my ears ended up sounding like he’s right, he’s right, he’s right.

So Meemaw didn’t want me helping Mrs. James, either. But was that because I was already stretched thin, or was it the rift between Mrs. James and Nana?

She glanced at the clock, tapping her foot impatiently. “I’ve got crews picking up the runway and delivering the correct stage right this very minute. Everything is in order, but I’ve been summoned by the sheriff, my dear, and in case… in case I’m… unavoidably detained,” she said, “I’ll need you to run the final rehearsal.” She gave Will a pointed look. “Your daughter’s going to be in the program now, so you should be there to help. Make sure the stage is done properly, check the lighting, and such.”

I stared at her. “Unavoidably detained? But this is your baby, Mrs. James. You’ve been working on it all year. Where are you going?” I asked, but the second the words crossed my lips, I wanted to snatch them back. Fear tinged the pallor of her skin and I suddenly knew where she was going.

She was going to be arrested for the murder of Macon Vance. Anxiety raised goose bumps on my skin. Did she know what would happen next because she’d actually killed the man?

Another thought hurried into my mind. She’d summoned me to the club, where I’d left my bag. My scissors were the murder weapon. My skin turned clammy. Lord almighty, I might well end up in the cell right next to hers.

Chapter 9

Cursing the extra work I’d agreed to before Macon Vance was killed, I spent the next hour frantically finishing a skirt for one of my mother’s friends. I pinned a gore to the fabric of the skirt I’d cut apart, stitching the triangular