Tulle Death Do Us Part Page 16

  Aunt Fee threw her arms around Werner. His stern expression dissolved as he looked at me over her shoulder, almost calf-eyed. He stepped from Fee’s embrace and hugged my shoulder, pulling me against his like a big brother, but I melted into his arms.

  For half a beat, he held me like I was his, until his eyes met my dad’s, and he offered my father his hand. “Sir, may I have your permission to love your daughter?”

  Had Werner’s voice cracked? Who knew? At my dad’s stupefied nod, he kissed me quick and hard, got in the patrol car, and Billings drove him away.

  That started everyone on a string of questions.

  “Aunt Fee, can you get me a paper bag to hold the contents of this stinky bag so I can throw it away out here?”

  “I’ll do it,” Aunt Fee said. “You two run up and take a shower.”

  Eve hesitated. “Mom?”

  “She’s staying until you’re warm and dressed in your own clothes,” Aunt Fee said, and Mrs. Meyers nodded and took Eve’s hand to go inside.

  The two of us ran up to take our respective showers. I felt like nothing would erase the fish smell. I chose my most strongly scented hair products, soaps, and creams and blew my nose about ten times, then I found the silkiest padded bra I could find—after I’d moisturized.

  When I got into my room, Aunt Fiona had transferred the makeshift weapons and wrapped treasures from the stinky liquor bag I left outside into a reusable grocery bag. “I won’t even ask,” she said, opening her arms to me.

  Stupid me. When I stepped into her embrace, I burst into tears.

  “Mom came to our rescue,” I confessed. “We followed the scent of chocolate to safety.”

  “Don’t tell your father you had such a close call.”

  “I know. Thanks for being here so I can tell you.”

  “Get dressed and come down. Brunch is waiting. Mrs. Meyers and I went a bit overboard, and your father needs a good long hug himself. And we want to know when you admitted to yourself that you’re in love with Detective Werner. We’ve known for ages.” She touched the piece of drainpipe on my nightstand, shook her head, and left.

  Funny thing happened when I picked up the drainpipe I’d stolen from Bradenton Cove to put it away before anyone else saw it: I noticed that it seemed weighted. I mean, I held it at one end, and the opposite end fell, like it was heavier. I balanced it with my hands a distance apart and saw I was right.

  Werner had held it by only one end, probably the heavy end, and had uncapped it that way, at the light end.

  Determined to discover the weight discrepancy, I used the claws of the hammer in the grocery bag, one of my weapons of choice for the evening, to uncap the heavy end. No easy feat, but I did it. Then I put on a pair of gloves to handle whatever I found inside.

  Nothing fell out of the uncapped end, but I flashed a light inside and it was packed so tight, it wouldn’t have jiggled for anyone. It certainly didn’t budge for me.

  I tugged on the wrapping, and it tore. Tissue paper. I tore at that paper until I got the first piece out. A gold locket with a letter R on it, with a picture of a man and woman inside. Rather damning evidence, considering. Next, I pried out a man’s ring with a brick of a diamond in it, five carats, maybe. I checked the inside of the band. No initials, but 24K. Next I found an emerald art deco pendant that my mother would have adored, a purse-size Lalique perfume bottle, probably worth a fortune because of its size. Last, an antique pocket watch with all kinds of compartments and dials. If Zavier had scavenged all this, he’d been right, he might have won, if…Robin had cooperated?

  Speculation, I told myself. Nothing more. Besides, Zavier’s brother, Councilman Eric McDowell, had also been there. He could as easily have hidden these pieces with their Day’s—read Dad’s—cars.

  I put everything in a bottom drawer for later, when I’d have a chance to dig inside the stair pipe Eve had found, and if I found more treasure there, I’d give it all to Werner at the same time.

  He now knew about my psychometric gift. Heck, he now knew all the intimate little details about me.

  The couple that sleuths together, stays together. Or not?

  Twenty-seven

  The most reliable thing in my closet [is] my old RAF military jacket bought years ago at Portobello Market in my old neighborhood in Notting Hill, London. It looks great with jeans, leather pants, or even a cocktail dress. Plus I love the history of it.

  —PADMA LAKSHMI

  My first fitting for This Is Your Life had been scheduled for the next morning.

  “Mr. Jay Gilchrist?” I asked when he stepped into the shop, much too young to have worn the airman’s uniform to the country club’s fiftieth.

  The man who saluted wore stonewashed jeans, a scruffy pair of regulation gunboots, and a high-quality camouflage T-shirt.

  I saluted back. “At ease.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Habit, when my name is called.”

  I led him toward the dressing room. “I’m glad there are no half-dressed women in and out of the stalls.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I guess you don’t get too many men in here.”

  “More than you think. I suppose I should have had separate dressing rooms built, but I do have a bathroom. Men usually try things on in there. Except that I need the riser and the three-way mirrors to do a fitting. Are you in the service, too?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m a lifer. Surprised you can tell.”

  “It’s your stance. Very military.”

  “Glad I can go to this event, like my parents did. Curious to see what they’re going to find out about my life. The pickin’s will be pretty slim. I wouldn’t be having this fitting if I wasn’t chosen for the This Is Your Life segment, right?”

  “That’s right.” I handed him the uniform on its hanger. “Go put it on, then stand on the platform in front of the mirrors there, so I can make sure it fits.”

  “I don’t expect it will,” he said, walking away.

  I didn’t think so either. “Yell when you’re ready.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m ready,” he said a short while later.

  He looked beautiful, though a bit like he was playing dress-up. “My first reaction,” I said, watching him come toward me, “is that you lost weight, except that you need more room in the shoulders, less in the waist, and I’d think you grew a half inch or so taller.”

  “These were my daddy’s. I never met him. I don’t know anything about him except his name. I’m hoping to learn about him when they talk about my life. It’s pretty tame other than…you know, the war, and all that.”

  “Do you have a picture of your father wearing this to the fiftieth?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Here it is.” Jay handed it to me. It was framed. “That’s him. You can tell he’s looking at somebody he loves,” Jay said.

  “Can I keep this?”

  “No, it’s all I have of him.”

  “May I make a copy of it for the This Is Your Life segment? I think they’re going to enlarge and display them.”

  “Sure. You can make a copy.”

  “Good. You fill out this form so I can call you when the uniform has been altered, and I’ll run upstairs to use the copy machine.” I had to take the picture out of the frame to scan it. I looked for a name in gold leaf at the bottom, or at least on the back, but this picture had been backed by black felt paper.

  I returned as quickly as I could. “Here you go,” I said, handing it back to him in the fitting room. Then I knelt to start fitting Jay’s father’s aged blue-gray uniform to him. “He was a handsome man, your dad. You take after him in looks.”

  Jay colored a bit at the backdoor compliment.

  “You don’t say much, do you?” I asked.

  “No ma’am. I’ve learned to speak when spoken to.”

  I chuckled. “I’m having trouble filling in the conversation by myself.”

  “On the form,” he said, “I didn’t leave a phone number. I’ll call you. Every day if you want. Jus
t tell me when.”

  “You live in Rhode Island, I see.”

  “Scituate. My grandma’s place.”

  “And your dad?”

  Jay tilted his head.

  I shut up, looked down, and kept pinning. I’d recently discovered that if I bought extra-long common pins with big round heads, I could carefully pin a garment without touching the fabric. I held the pin just so and let it do the touching. It took a while to devise the technique but I had aced it, unless I got distracted.

  “Heard through a military grapevine when I was a kid that my dad was a prisoner of war until he went missing.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  A controlled shrug. “I never gave up looking. I’ve got this sense he’s out there, wanting to find me as badly as I want to find him.”

  “Are you just a little bit psychic, maybe?”

  “My grandma says I’m intuitive, like her. Since I got the call that I was coming here, my stomach has been flipping and cheering. It’s like I’ve got corn popping in there.”

  “Because you’re so excited to be on This Is Your Life?”

  “Don’t think I’m crazy, but it has to do with meeting you. I think that’s why I’m talking so much.”

  “You’re hardly talking at all, but never mind that. Keep going.”

  “I don’t know but I have this feeling that there’s a connection between you and my past.”

  “It’s actually my parents who are chairing the This Is Your Life segment of the ball. I’m only judging and altering the vintage formals.”

  Jay shrugged. “There’s something about you. I can’t put my finger on it. I’ve been reading that blog. It’s not your parents helping that detective. It’s you. I know my dad is a piece of that puzzle somehow, and I’m counting on you to find the key.”

  I sat back on my legs, rather shaken, and looked up at him. “That’s a tall order, soldier.”

  “I think you’re up to it. I believe in you.”

  Dante appeared in the corner of the dressing room, a distance behind Jay. I tried not to react. “Ask him his father’s name,” he suggested.

  “Jay, turn so I can see how the uniform fits in the back.”

  I was trying not to react to Dante, so it would be easier if my intuitive model couldn’t see my face. “Tell me, Jay, what’s your father’s name?”

  “Glen Gilchrist.”

  “Gilchrist. I can see a family resemblance, if it’s the same family,” Dante said. “I think Dolly and I went to school with his…great-grandfather, name of Liam. He would probably have been this boy’s paternal grandmother’s father. Liam knew things, too. Had the sense when something momentous was about to happen. Kids made fun of him, but trust this boy’s intuition. Maybe Werner can help you try to find his father.”

  Jay cleared his throat. “Why do I feel as if something is happening, even in the silence of the moment?”

  “Must be the smell of burning rubber. I’m thinking.”

  Jay chuckled.

  “Turn,” I said.

  He nearly saluted as he obeyed.

  “You look born to the uniform, and you’ll look even better when I’m done with you.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. I’m in the same branch of the service, and, every chance I get, I pester anybody who might be able to help find my dad, from general to clerk, anybody who can get their hands on classified information.”

  My heart sped, and I tried not to let my eyes fill. This man had lost his father to his country, and his tenacity touched me deeply. I picked up the picture of his dad. “Well, you look just like him. Have you tried posting the picture online?”

  “Ma’am, I’ve tried everything, every way, all the way up to and through the secretary of defense. He is listed as MIA.”

  “My condolences.”

  “I don’t accept them, and I apologize for being flip. But he’s not dead.”

  “I respect and believe you.” I looked up from my measuring tape and focused on him. “How did you get his uniform, if he didn’t come back?”

  Jay cleared his throat. “He left it behind. Nobody seems to know why, though it’s been like a living connection that kept me searching. In a torn pocket, I found a letter addressed to no one but signed by him from the early days and it’s filled with love.”

  “As if you were meant to have that love.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You know, we’re about the same age. I wish you’d call me Maddie or Madeira.”

  “My training is strong. Not sure I can.”

  “I sort of knew that before I made the offer, but you’re welcome to.”

  “You a bit psychic, too, ma’am?”

  Funny he should ask as I intentionally touched the fabric, let my hand rest against the jacket’s hem for a minute, allowing a familiar miasma to overtake me. For Jay’s sake, given my bold and impetuous move, I found myself glad I was already kneeling on the floor. What would the poor boy think when I zoned? Or would a psychically sensitive person recognize what was happening?

  I floated fast away from the real world, from my shop and the walls that surrounded me. I traveled like never before, as if on a wave. I felt water sluicing over me, raining down on me like the wrath of the gods, and in time, I felt buoyed and hopeful.

  I took to floating, warming, because my man was carrying me from the cold shower, warming me as we went.

  I, Madeira Cutler, had never had this experience in a vision before. Inside the body of another, a woman profoundly in love—physically, emotionally, spiritually—and judging by the eyes that looked into mine, my love was deeply returned. I got placed naked on a bed and got wrapped in the spread, then a blanket floated over me, tucked from the outside to beneath me, so I felt like a mummy.

  Sweet words and soft kisses met my face. He toweled my hair. Warmth piled on warmth. He’d trapped me in a cocoon, until finally, a dear uniform jacket covered me from the shoulders down, above all the rest.

  I touched the fabric to my nose, and inhaled his Old Spice scent. I released an arm, slipped a hand in his jacket pocket, and closed it around something odd, forged of metal and fabric.

  “Let me in,” my new husband said, distracting me, “I’ll warm you with my body.”

  I hid, yet wallowed, deep inside her soul, though I could feel myself fading, but I stayed long enough to join her in lifting her blankets and his jacket, and opening our arms and heart, we let him in.

  But as good as he felt, I floated away from him, from them, thank the universe, and I looked up at a concerned military man—the product of that love?—with a cup of water in his hand, and my head on his lap.

  Twenty-eight

  The intoxication obtained from wearing certain articles of clothing can be as powerful as that induced by a drug.

  —BERNARD RUDOFSKY, THE UNFASHIONABLE HUMAN BODY

  I looked down at myself and found that Jay had covered me with his jacket. His father’s jacket, in the same way that his father had covered his mother with it, hence my vision.

  I accepted the water he offered me and sipped it. “I forgot to eat breakfast, and it’s past lunch.”

  “Here,” he said. “Power bar.” He unwrapped it and put it in my hand.

  I accepted with a nod and took a bite. “Mm. Strawberry. Good. You never said anything about your mother.”

  He firmed his lips. “I lost her, too, but I always know where to find her. Granite’s granite after all.”

  A headstone. I hadn’t sensed him mourning her death.

  He helped me stand and kept an arm around my waist until I took a seat on my mother’s fainting couch in my sitting area. He sat in a chair facing me. “Do you have a date for the Very Vintage Valentine dance at the country club?” he asked, shy for a military man.

  “I do, yes.”

  “Oh. Too bad. I’m planning on being nervous,” he said.

  “You fight with guns for a living, and you think you’ll have stage fright?”

  “Humor me.” />
  As far as I was concerned I was in a committed relationship. I was not sure Werner had reached that conclusion yet, though he sure gave new meaning to thermonuclear…everything.

  “Why are you grinning?” Jay asked.

  “New relationship. Detective Lytton Werner of the Mystick Falls Police Department. My last relationship ended about six months ago, with an FBI agent, a long-time friend. They both are, actually. School chums, the both of them.”

  “You favor powerful men. I’m sorry you won’t be on my arm.”

  “I have two choices for you. I’d love to walk in with a man on each arm.” I paused and hooked my left arm for him to take, and he nearly did.

  “Hey, Mad,” Eve said, coming in the front door, out of our line of sight from the dressing room.

  “Or you can escort my best friend, Eve.”

  She stepped into the dressing room wearing a copper bustier with a calf-length pencil skirt of black lace over shiny copper. Her Little Shoe Box booties from 1996 were black patent leather pumps with four-inch heels and ankle straps with copper locks on them. One could also call her hair copper with black and blonde highlights.

  I think Jay swallowed his tongue.

  “I’m not a dom,” Eve said, “like these shoes would imply. Just a goth with a steampunk edge and a BFF who can dress me properly. Mad, can I have an introduction?”

  “Airman Jay Gilchrist, meet Eve Meyers, my best friend since third grade.”

  “Ms. Meyers,” he said, forgetting I was in the room. “May I escort you to the Very Vintage Valentine ball at the country club? I won a spot as a This Is Your Lifer.”

  “Mad has good taste. You surely deserve to have won a spot. I’d love to walk in on your arm, Airman.”

  The man’s green-eyed grin just about stole my breath, so it was no surprise to me that Eve actually grabbed me to keep from losing her sea legs.

  “I won’t disappoint you,” the airman said. “Can we sit with Madeira and her detective?”