Tulle Death Do Us Part Read online

  “My God, you’re dazzling,” he said, shirtsleeves rolled up, dish towel over a shoulder, a stirring spoon in each hand.

  “Nothing retro for tonight,” I said. “I’m making a fashion statement that I hope will take us from the present into the future. Screw the past.”

  He dropped his spoons.

  “Don’t! No kissing until after dinner, and after I’ve bared my soul.”

  “Sounds ominous. Will we ever get to the kissing part?”

  “That’ll be up to you.”

  “Glad I’ll have a say in it. Can we talk while we eat—multitask, so to speak—get it all out there as soon as possible, let the kissing and disrobing begin?”

  I laughed. How could such a hunk, such a strong-willed and, when necessary, hard-hearted detective also look like my own personal teddy bear? It would be difficult to keep my own ground rules.

  We sat at the perfectly set round oak dining room table with Werner holding a meatball at the end of his fork while staring straight at my cleavage.

  I took a deep breath, widening his eyes. “My mother was a witch,” I said.

  He twitched, trying not to react. The meatball fell off his fork, bounced, and landed in his lap.

  I bit my lip on a giggle as he retrieved it. “She was Wiccan, but she was also a natural. I’ve inherited several of her gifts. I haven’t embraced the Wiccan faith, but spells come to me in my sleep though I haven’t cast any. I participated in a ritual at my dearest friend’s funeral in New York and told myself I stood in my mother’s place. Aunt Fiona and I, we cleansed the shop, once a morgue, of negativity, Wiccan style, before I moved in.”

  “Now can I touch you?”

  “No. How do you feel about my paranormal ability? About me?”

  “Horny. Wrong answer? I always knew you were special?”

  I chuckled. “I’m psychic. Psychometric, actually.”

  “You read objects?”

  His knowledge surprised me. “In my case, it’s vintage clothes. What I learn helps me sleuth. For some universal reason, my visions are always connected to, or they’re the origination of, my sleuthing. Like the wrapping around the box. It’s a petticoat piece that took me to the night the box was stolen.”

  Werner threw down his napkin. “Damn it, Madeira, I knew you had an edge. You always know so much about the cases we’re working on.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Exonerated. I feel exonerated. I’m not a second-rate detective. You’re a first-rate sleuth.”

  I started to reach for his hand but then pulled back. “You don’t hate that I’m a natural witch, and psychic to boot?”

  “I hate that we’re on different sides of the table,” he said.

  “Aunt Fiona calls my readings universal mandates, like I’m supposed to help solve the mystery they bring me to, past or present.”

  “Fee’s a wise woman. Did she suggest you tell me?”

  “I learned that from my parents’ experience. My mother waited until after she and my dad were married to let him know about her abilities. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like Fee either, my mother’s sister witch, for years and years.”

  “He’s sure changed his mind.”

  “Yes, he has.”

  Werner came around the table to sit in the chair beside me, his hands clasped so he wouldn’t reach for me. “I suspected you were psychic, which is why I didn’t want to know for sure where your information came from, though if you remember, I kept suggesting you had an edge.”

  I sat straighter. “Yes, I remember.”

  “I’m a bit psychic myself, though I’ve never admitted it to anyone, and I don’t want anyone in Mystic to know, which shows how much I trust you. It could ruin my rep as a detective.”

  All I could think of was how psychic our children might be. Talk about premature.

  He kissed his way from my wrist to my inner elbow, lips but no hands. “I think I’ve always known that you belong to me.”

  Great, so he echoes my thoughts. “We haven’t exactly established that, yet.”

  “We will, as soon as you let me touch you. Any other secrets you care to share?”

  “Don’t you want to know what I’ve seen so far in the case we’re working on?”

  “All I want at this moment is to take that dress off you.” He traced the leather at the lowest point of my plunging neckline, but he stroked nothing but fabric. Touching but not. Raising my expectations and shivering me to my Ferragamos.

  With some bit of psychic communication, we stepped away from the table, and Werner swept me off my feet and carried me up the stairs to his room.

  His bed had been transformed, covered as it was with wildly expensive bedding, the spread a cool Vera Bradley–type sea of paisley silk in cobalts and teals. Manly but sexy to the skin. When Werner threw back the comforter, he set me down on decadent electric-blue sheets. Real silk, not polyester fakes.

  “I’m worried I might lose you in there,” he said. “Your dress is the same color.”

  I silently opened my arms to him.

  At three in the morning we nuked supper and ate from deep cereal bowls, sitting next to each other on the sofa, me wearing his shirt, my bare legs over his lap, again touching but not. When he picked up a meatball, I laughed the way I’d wanted to when he’d dropped the first, and he laughed with me.

  The laughter made me think of my parents. Dad and Mom. Dad and Aunt Fee. And I reached for Werner again, so the food was forgotten.

  I didn’t get to the shop until noon the next day. Not smiling like a calf-eyed puppy was a chore.

  To give Eve credit, she said nothing snarky and let me lead the conversation. “We have to go sleuthing tonight,” I said.

  “What about Werner?”

  “He’s got a day of meetings that won’t end until after midnight, so I suggested he and I skip tonight. Make him wait.”

  “Shut! Up!”

  I looked up from my perusal of the seventies formals.

  “Little Wiener, you called him. So? Is he?”

  I tried to look stern. Crossed my arms, firmed my lips, tapped a pointy-toed René Mancini sheer zip bootee, but I couldn’t hold my laughter. “That was a pre-psychic call. Huge mistake. Huge!” I stressed.

  “I knew it! You lucky—I miss Kyle.”

  I chuckled. “For tonight, you sleep at my house. We’ll play some loud concert on TV that’ll send Dad and Fiona to her house. Alex hasn’t moved in yet, so we’ll have the place to ourselves.”

  “You’re an everything-turns-to-gold brat.”

  “Go tell my mother that. Listen, we’ve got to be ready to roll at midnight, and it’ll be easier to leave an empty house.”

  “What do you two have your heads together over?” Dolly asked, coming into the area behind the back-walled checkout counter. Good thing she was deaf. “You look like you’re up to no good,” she said.

  “You should know,” I responded, and her cackle improved everybody’s spirits, even Dante’s—my spirit’s spirits.

  Eve shrugged as she put her father’s army coat in the closet. “I can’t believe Mad left the shop in the middle of the afternoon yesterday and stayed away for an entire twenty-four hours,” she griped, laying it on to take them off the sleuthing scent, “just because she and Werner are a couple.”

  I couldn’t help smiling or remembering the romance of our time together. “He is a charmer,” I said, remembering our short but powerful night.

  “Oh, barf,” Eve said, watching me.

  Dolly wagged a finger and gave her a “Tut tut tut. What’s wrong with you, Eve Meyers? Have you lost all sense of romance? Where’s that nice Kyle DeLong these days?”

  “He’s running the Parisian arm of DeLong Enterprises,” Eve said on a sigh.

  “We need to find you a man.”

  Eve grumped. “No offense, Dolly, but could you find me one about seventy-five years younger than you are?”

  I thought Dolly would laugh up a lung. She had a charming laugh, if
you weren’t afraid she’d kill herself using it, but I still got a peek at the girl Dante had fallen for. Heck, I’d once worn the body of the girl Dante had fallen for. It was a scary but romantic minute, and I got out just in time. Dante showed himself now just to watch her. He had no concern for her health; she’d be his when her life ended. He stood, arms crossed, his grin pretty darned deadly. I could tell by the look on his face that it wouldn’t be long before Dolly disappeared from our work area.

  I hadn’t thought about the case or the formal entries since yesterday, when I’d left to spend time with Lytton.

  Problem was, I was dying to find out how the case was going, but we just hadn’t found time to talk about it. “We need more hangers,” I said. “I’ll go get some.”

  When I got to my second-floor workroom, I speed-dialed Werner. “Hey, how did it go with the O’Dowds yesterday? Did you learn anything about Robin? I can’t believe we didn’t talk about this last night.”

  “If you want to talk anytime soon, we’ll have to sit outside in a park where I can’t ravish you.”

  I sighed, remembering.

  “Truth is, as soon as I mentioned Wayne’s dead sister, Wynona zipped it. I get to question them Friday morning at nine with their lawyer present.”

  “Darn. Anything else new? What about Bambi-Jo?”

  “I thought I’d question her after I finished going through the boxes of info I got from the country club.”

  “Ooh, wish I could go through them with you. Can I come by after work?”

  “No, because I’ve got a suspect coming in, and I don’t want him to see you.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Zavier McDowell.”

  “Oh, that’s not fair. You wouldn’t know him if he hadn’t waved us down. Be nice to him. Life hasn’t been.”

  “You told me you found out about him from an anonymous tip.”

  Maybe confessing my abilities had muddied the waters. Too late to worry about. “That was true. That wasn’t a vision. I got a tip about the key and some vague person who might have hidden the stuff in a drainpipe. No names were given to me.” Zavier was also probably the person who’d hidden the brass box in my attic, but I wanted to approach Zavier about that so he wouldn’t be afraid.

  “But was the tip anonymous?”

  As anonymous as a ghost could get. “Absolutely.”

  “Our perp could as easily have been Zavier’s brother, the councilman. We got a search warrant to search Bradenton Cove, especially Zavier’s room, but we didn’t find any of the scavenged items, not even the cane we saw him using.”

  I tried to defend Zavier. Something told me he wasn’t guilty.

  “He’s prone to telling everything he knows, and his name’s on the guest list for that night. Plus, he has a history of sexual harassment,” Werner countered.

  “Say what?”

  “Three times. His family always made it go away. The victims all declined to press charges. He very well might have scared Robin into jumping in the ocean that night. I’m just bringing him in for questioning, Mad.”

  All the more reason why I had to step up my sleuthing. “I forgive you. You’re simply doing your job.”

  “Thanks loads. I’m sorry I won’t see you tonight.”

  “Thanks for yesterday. It was—”

  “Incredible.” He cleared his throat. “To set the record straight,” he said, just short of a whisper, “I love sharing supper and breakfast with you, and I especially love our time in between.”

  “My knees are weak. Who would’ve thought, back in third grade?”

  “The Wiener and the Glamazon? No way.” I loved the smile in his voice as I hung up.

  A bit dazed—doubly so, between the upper of remembering last night and the downer of learning about Zavier’s background—I grabbed an armful of hangers and went back downstairs.

  “Okay,” I said, returning to the racks of formals. “Time to get back to work.”

  “Don’t act like we’re the slackers,” Eve said. “You played hooky yesterday, and now, stalling tactics?”

  I winked. “Jealous?”

  My BFF stuck her tongue out at me.

  “Girls, girls, you’re both pretty,” Aunt Fiona said, entering the room. “Cut the squabbling and get to work. We have a lot to do, and I’ll be in panic mode until it’s done.”

  I kissed her cheek and looked around. “Yes, ma’am. Okay, I already see a few bloopers. The Bob Mackies; there are three on the label rack, am I correct? Mackie designed for Cher in the seventies. He didn’t start his label line until 1982. Pull them aside to be returned. They weren’t worn to the country club’s fiftieth, not unless somebody borrowed them from Judy Garland or Cher.”

  “My stars,” Dolly said. “You do know your stuff, Madeira.”

  “Thank you, Dolly.” I looked at the single formal I’d chosen. “Hang the peach crepe silk with the chevron-striped apron and tulle petticoats beside the airman’s uniform.” I was being forced to pick Vainglory’s dress for a reading with her wearing it. Much more powerful. I hated to give Deborah VanCortland the satisfaction, but maybe I’d find a way to use the pair of antique shoe-shaped ink bottles her son and my sister gave me as a maid-of-honor gift to out her as being part of the scavenger hunt.

  Dolly tittered, and she wasn’t looking at us. “Oh, I think I need to go work in Paris when it Sizzles,” she said, distracted.

  My resident ghost, her former lover, must have appeared just beyond the counter wall and waved her his way.

  I could have used Dolly’s help, but at 106, the old girl deserved to have some fun.

  “Go ahead, but while you’re in there, pray that we find out who put that cash box in my attic and when. You hear me? It’s important that I know the answer, and praying, no matter how loud, doesn’t seem to be working for me. I can’t seem to connect with the big guy, if you get my drift.”

  Dolly laughed a little hard for a private joke, but Eve didn’t seem to think anything of it. Well, Dolly was Dolly.

  My head came up at that. I sure hoped it wasn’t Dolly who’d put the box in the attic. Oh, heck no. Forty years ago, she would have been in her late sixties and never would have been a member of that clique. Silly me. Which begged the obvious question: Why was Dante protecting Zavier?

  “Look at this gown,” Fiona said. “I think I have a picture of it.”

  The picture hadn’t done Vainglory’s dress justice. I knew that because I’d seen her take off her petticoat from beneath it and tear it into the pieces that would be used to hide the evidence.

  “That’s the one.”

  I wouldn’t know, without a doubt, who the real owner was until the first fitting. Deborah might have sold it after Cort divorced her. I did hope, however, that it would be the same poor little rich girl. Thank the stars that Sherry’s Kathleen and Riley would have Fiona as a second grandmother.

  “Fiona, can you lift the skirt?”

  She did.

  “Darn, the petticoats are missing. There should be at least four, all made of tulle, and a crinoline.”

  Not to mention the torn petticoat which just might hold the key to a murder.

  Twenty-four

  O what a sight were Man, if his attires

  Did alter with his minde;

  And like a dolphins skinne, his clothes combin’d

  With his desires!

  —GEORGE HERBERT, 1593–1633

  As I predicted, dad found it necessary to go and help Fiona with some handiwork—bad choice of words, Dad—around nine, the minute the rock concert started on television.

  “We’ll see you tomorrow,” she mouthed before he dragged her out the door.

  After they drove away, Eve and I high-fived each other and turned the blaring thing off. I checked my watch. “What say we get a few hours’ sleep and plan to sneak down to the old docks around one?”

  “Are we setting our alarms for midnight or one?” she asked, with her hand on the doorknob to Sherry’s old room.

/>   “Alarm for one, we’ll be there by half past.”

  “Gotcha.”

  I thought about what I’d take for protection and decided the Taser gun, pepper spray, and a hammer would do, all of which were already in my Coach bag. But I needed a less expensive carryall for our foray into the world of greasy old mills.

  Three and a half hours later, my alarm clock rang. Two seconds later, my door slammed open. “Ugh,” Eve said.

  “Yep.” We were both still dressed. “I left the coffee on. Let’s grab a cup and hit the road.”

  By one twenty, we had hit the mill section, where I hoped to find the warehouse/belly of the whale/whatever, where more clues were hidden in a makeshift pipe handrail and where I believed the scavenger hunters had gathered in the wee hours of the morning in question.

  We left Eve’s car and started with the farthest mill so we could work our way back to the car.

  I flashed my light around the first. It had ceilings like a Vanderbilt mansion. “This sure isn’t it.”

  We left and checked a second that looked more like a center walkway between two floors of offices. “Not this one, either.” Though both of them were decrepit, neither had brick walls, inside or out.

  The third was in the worst condition by far—read: skittering squealing rats with debris and dust at every step. The place frankly shivered me to my bones. I ran the flashlight along the inside walls as I’d done in the first two, and there it was, plain as day: The word “steam,” barely visible on the disintegrating brick wall. I wouldn’t have been able to read it, if I didn’t already know what it said.

  I turned toward the center of the room, but there was no more stairway. Gone, except for the top step hanging in the air off the floor above, a floor that could probably fall on our heads any minute.

  Beneath the former stairs, scattered on the ground and across the room, I spotted the kind of fat plumbing pipes I remembered and sought now, some still jointed, some not.

  “We have to look inside pipes like that.” I circled a group with my flashlight. “Start with the ones on the floor around where the stairway used to be.”

  Eve gave a whole-body shiver with an accompanying whine of a sound, like something evil had just passed through her. “You jest.”