A Fitting End: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery

death? “Heard what?” I said, my voice as somber as the newscaster’s expression.

“The golf pro, Macon Vance,” she said. She pointed a perfectly manicured acrylic nail in the direction of stage left. “He was found murdered, and I believe the sheriff was just about to take your bag, and everything in it, into evidence.”

The breath suddenly left my lungs, heat spread to my cheeks, and a wave of dizziness slipped over me. “Murdered?” I looked back toward my bag of supplies, and noticed something I hadn’t seen a minute ago. My inexpensive, orange-handled Fiskars were on the ground, a good couple of feet from my bag, like they’d been dropped in a hurry. I started, a lump catching in my throat. They didn’t look right. The blades were open and stained with something dark. “How?” I asked, barely choking the words out.

Rebecca Quinones had followed my gaze. From the corner of my eye, I saw her wave her microphone. The cameraman moved in closer, getting a tight shot of me. I tried to turn my back, but Rebecca said, “Stabbed,” and I froze. Because I suddenly knew what the dark substance on the blades was.

Blood.

Chapter 5

Sheriff McClaine, also known as my mother’s secret boyfriend, shooed the looky-loos from the room, then leveled his gaze at me. “Harlow, speak of the devil.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, a solid dose of wariness in my voice.

“Guess you heard about the murder,” he said. “I reckon this is yours?” He gestured to the scattered sewing items.

“Yes, sir.” I thought the sheriff and I had had a little breakthrough after Josie Sandoval’s wedding, but the murder at the golf club seemed to have sent him back to his curmudgeonly state. I jammed my hands on my hips. “I came to collect my bag, and to meet Mrs. James.”

“And just why is your bag here?” he asked in his slow, John Wayne style.

His manner of speaking might be slow and Southern, but his mind was sharp as a tack. I bristled. “I accidentally left it here the other day. I’m working on some of the Margaret dresses.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, tilting his cream-colored straw cowboy hat back on his head. Then he added, “Seems like murder follows you.”

I gulped, not liking this conversation at all, and hoping Rebecca Quinones and her cameraman had gone far, far way. “I heard, yes, sir.” I was thirty-three, but the sheriff sent me reeling back to being a scolded sixteen-year- old.

“A man was stabbed.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, the words catching in my throat.

“And your fingerprints’ll be all over those scissors there, I reckon,” he said, pointing to the scissors that one of his gloved deputies was sliding into a plastic evidence bag.

“They’re my dressmaking shears,” I said, “so, yes, sir, I reckon they will.”

The sheriff opened his mouth to speak, but stopped, instead waving at someone over my shoulder. “Find anything?

“And you didn’t know Mr. Vance?” he said to me a second later.

In my heart, I knew Hoss McClaine couldn’t possibly think I had anything to do with the golf pro’s death, but I also knew he had a job to do. I shook my head. “Never even heard of him until that reporter mentioned his name.”

The scattered items from my sewing bag had been numbered, and now I saw Madelyn Brighton, her dark skin shimmery from the heat, her short black hair plastered against her head, and her navy slacks and a colorful blouse sticking to her plump body. She’d come onto the stage, Canon camera lifted to her face, snapping picture after picture of the crime scene.

“Can I have my bag back?” I asked.

“No can do,” a deputy said, coming up beside me with his cowboy swagger. He couldn’t have been more than five ten, and was lean and handsome, even in his khaki deputy uniform. He was clean shaven, though I got the feeling he let his whiskers go scruffy when he was off duty. Well, if he ever took a day off, which I wasn’t clear on, considering I couldn’t get a vision of him in anything other than his khakis. Of course, maybe my gift of visualizing people and clothing that would flatter them was selective and limited. My charm was not always under my control.

I gave up any hope of seeing those sewing supplies—or my Dena Rooney-Berg bag—again and started a mental list of what I’d need to replace. Tape measure, pins, seam ripper, spools of thread—

“Why’d you bring your sewing scissors to a golf club?” the deputy asked me. His brown eyes narrowed and he studied me like he thought I had a secret or two. Which I did. They were just unrelated to Macon Vance.

“Like I told the sheriff, Deputy, um…”

“McClaine.”

“No, not the sheriff…” I stopped, looked from one man to the other, then did a double take. “You’re… Gavin?” As in Hoss McClaine’s son? I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help it. He’d been a few years younger than me and I don’t think I’d ever uttered three words to him. He’d been the shyest boy in school, which had made him fodder for Derek Kincaid and his posse of entitled rich kids, but hadn’t gotten him involved in much else.

He nodded and the corner of his mouth lifted in a cocky smile. I got the feeling he liked shocking people who remembered him as the ninety-pound weakling. “All grown up.”

Yes, indeed. “I had no idea you were a deputy,” I said, thinking he might give the town’s crop of preeminent bachelors a run for their money. If you could get past the cocky attitude.

He knocked back his straw cowboy hat, identical to his dad’s, and stared me down. “Just transferred from Fort Worth. Heartwarming trip down memory lane,” he said with a heavy drawl. “Now, back to my question, Miss Cassidy— It is Miss, isn’t it?” Deputy Gavin cracked that satisfied smile again, like he was privy to the fact that being a thirty-three-year-old unmarried woman meant you were past your prime and on a downhill slide.

“Yes,” I said, throwing my shoulders back and my chin up.

He nodded, his left eye narrowing slightly. His father looked from him to me, then back to him. He patted Gavin on the shoulder. “Looks like you can handle this. ME’s here. Come find me when you’re done.” And he ambled off behind the velvet curtain.

Gavin didn’t miss a beat. “Why did you bring your scissors to a golf club?”

I threw one arm out and gestured to the runway and stage lights. The room was deathly quiet with all the people cleared out. I lowered my voice to compensate. “The Margaret Moffette Lea Pageant and Ball. I’m making dresses for a few of the girls. I came to meet Mrs. James—”

“The senator’s wife?”

As he pulled a notebook out of his pants pocket and poised the tip of a miniature pencil on the page, my heart stopped. “Y-yes, but—”

“Zinnia?” he said, but he seemed to be talking more to himself than to me. He gave a single nod, then said, “Continue.”

“She just wanted some ideas—”

“’Bout what?”

“I’m not actually sure,” I admitted.

“Right,” he blurted, as if he’d made some great discovery. “Because she didn’t know you’d been here, isn’t that right?”

Nerves pricked the surface of my skin. “I—I, uh, n-no. We didn’t end up talking, which is why I’m back here now.”

“Did she ask you to meet her here?”

“That’s right.”

“To give her some ideas?”

I didn’t like the way this was going, but there was no escape. “To talk about plans for the ball—”

“Festival business. I see. And did you sew something for her?”

“Here? No, I—”