A Fitting End: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery

the pulley idea. Any long gown could be strung up on the contraption, I could do handwork on the skirts without worry, and with one pull of the rope, I could safely store the dress at ceiling level, out of the way and completely secure. “I just sketched the idea out and”—I flourished my hand toward Will, still on the ladder, carefully screwing the first piece of the pulley system into the ceiling—“voila! He figured it out and now he’s installing it.”

The drill bit slipped and he cursed under his breath.

“Maybe we should get started on the attic,” Gracie said, looking at her dad with a wary eye. “Best to be out of his way if it’s not going too well.”

Being my part-time assistant included helping with the arduous task of clearing out my grandmother’s things from the attic. From her enthusiasm, though, Gracie seemed to enjoy being at Buttons & Bows as much as I liked having her around. We were good company for each other.

“Good plan,” I said. We left Will to the innovation of his dressmaking pulley system and headed upstairs. Gracie gazed at the pictures elbowing their way up the wall. She stopped at an old discolored photograph of a young, solemn-faced couple, tilting her head to the left, studying the photo as if she wanted to memorize every last detail.

“That’s Butch Cassidy and my great-great-great-grandmother, Texana Harlow. I was named after her.”

“That’s him?” She scrunched up her nose. “He’s got such a big face.”

There weren’t many photographs of Butch Cassidy. I’d looked plenty when I was a kid trying to research my family lineage. The ones that did exist didn’t show him as a particularly handsome man. Paul Newman, who made Butch come to life on the silver screen, was a good sight more handsome. “More like a wide jaw,” I said.

“And that’s the outlaw gang?” she asked, pointing to another photograph from Loretta Mae’s tribute to the Cassidy’s colorful family history.

“Yup. Butch is in the center. That’s Sundance on the left. Will Carver and Kid Curry are there,” I said, pointing to one seated man, and another standing behind.

“And who’s that guy?” she asked, pointing at the figure seated in front of Kid Curry.

“That guy,” I said, “is actually Laura Bullion. She was the only Hole-in-the-Wall Gang member who was a woman.”

“Really? A woman outlaw?” She leaned closer. “Huh. You’re right.”

“She robbed her share of trains, from what I know.” We started back up the stairs, ending up in what used to be Loretta Mae’s bedroom but was now mine. Meemaw had kept a tidy house, but her cleanliness downstairs had been at the expense of general organization in the attic. She’d been spry till the end—the end having come when she was well into her eighties—but venturing into the dark attic space through the door off the master bedroom had probably gotten to be too much; haphazardly stacked boxes and miscellaneous stuff were pretty much everywhere.

“Here we go,” I said. The door creaked as I pulled it open. When I’d first inherited the old house, the lightbulbs in the attic had long since burned out. Another reason she’d probably steered clear of the place, letting things pile up instead of clearing them out. It had taken me a flashlight, an hour, and a dicey few minutes standing on top of a wobbly chair just to replace two bulbs.

“So your great-grandma really liked her family history, huh?” Gracie asked as we pulled boxes from the attic and stacked them in my bedroom. I’d made the decision to go through them, one by one, but after just fifteen minutes, I could tell it was going to take forever to make a sliver of headway.

“She loves, er, loved being connected to Butch Cassidy,” I said, correcting my slip of the tongue before Gracie noticed. I had to watch that. I knew Meemaw’s spirit was hanging around, but no one else did and it needed to stay that way. The town already thought my family was strange because of our secret supernatural talents. The family charm manifested itself in different ways, and we tried to keep it under the radar, but I got the sense that many people in town thought there was something odd about my family. It was pretty tough to explain the mysterious goings-on with my mother and her ornery green thumb and the special way my grandmother had with her favorite animal, goats. Mama had taken to growing lavender lately and was trying her hand at lotions and soaps. I had no doubt her crop would yield more lavender than she’d know what to do with. Enter Nana’s goats. They were one another’s check and balance. Nana could get her Nubians and Lamanchas to do anything, even chow down on the overgrown vegetation my mother was behind.

People called us eccentric, but they came from miles away to get Nana’s goat cheeses, invited Mama over for garden consultations, and hopefully, if I was lucky, they’d start contracting with me to make them custom clothing.

“That’s pretty cool.” Gracie bit her lip like she wasn’t sure if she should continue. “But after you told me about him,” she finally said, “I looked him up and—”

“And no Harlow woman is mentioned,” I finished, sensing where she was going with her train of thought.

“Someone named Etta Place is—”

“Etta was Sundance’s girlfriend.”

“But the article I read said they sorta… um… shared.”

Why was it that Gracie brought up tough subjects with me? I knew her mom had dropped her off with her dad when she was a tiny little thing and had never looked back, but Will was a hands-on father. Couldn’t she talk to him about these things? I’d met Gracie only a few months ago and I grappled with how honest to be with her about close, personal subjects.

Of course, if she’d read anything, then she had to know already where Sundance and Butch met Etta Place. I decided honesty was the best policy. Gracie was a teenager, after all. It wasn’t like she didn’t know how the world worked. “She was a prostitute down in San Antonio,” I finally said.

“Yeah, I read that, too.”

We dragged another box out of the attic, finally creating a path to the wardrobe sitting against the back wall. My target. I’d wanted to rifle through it since I’d moved in, but I’d never made it past the endless jars of buttons and bows. I’d taken dozens of them downstairs to display on an antique bookshelf, but there were still more Mason jars filled with the collectibles. Along with magic and the farmhouse, I’d inherited my great-grandmother’s love of notions. I was constantly adding to the Cassidy collection.

“Most of the women those outlaws hooked up with were. Prostitutes, I mean,” I continued as we picked through the narrow path we’d made to the wardrobe. “So, yeah, Etta might have dated Butch first.”

“Guess times were different back then,” she said.

“Yeah.” I didn’t think times were so different. I knew plenty of women who’d been two-timed by the men they’d loved. Secrets and lies seemed to transcend time. I pulled at the wardrobe door, but it held fast. Locked. “Do you see a key?” I asked, glad to change the subject.

We both searched around the hulking cabinet. There was no ornate key in sight. No key of any kind, in fact.

“What’s in there?” Gracie asked.

“When I was a kid, the wardrobe was downstairs. Loretta Mae kept stacks and stacks of fabric in it. I’m not sure when—or how—it got up here, but I’ve been wanting to look through those old fabric pieces since I moved back.” I backtracked to the wall of jars and ran my fingertips over the outside of the glass containers, stopping when I noticed a small jelly jar filled with needles. Maybe I could pick the lock.

I took hold of it, trying to pull it closer, but it didn’t budge.

Strange. Moving the other jars out of the way, I got a better grip and rocked it back and forth. Finally, it started to come loose and I was able to grab it and yank it free.

A nagging feeling settled in my gut. None of the other containers were stuck to the shelf. I looked at the wood, then at the bottom of the jar. There were no marks. No glue. Nothing that should have prevented me from lifting it right off.

Curious, but then things at 2112 Mockingbird Lane had been curious lately, especially with Meemaw’s invisible spirit flitting around. The jar held a variety of needles: thin, traditional sharps; long-eyed embroidery needles; shorter ones for quilting; long milliners’ needles; as well as an assortment of specialty types. Meemaw had them all, from blunt-tipped darning and tapestry, to long, thin doll needles, to heavy curved upholstery needles. She even had a good selection of spiral eye sides, probably to help her with threading as her vision failed.