Tulle Death Do Us Part Read online

  I chuckled because I had been right, while Aunt Fiona gave him a saucy grin.

  He eyed her with false malevolence, though I recognized that twinkle in his eyes. The look predicted a pithy quote. “‘A fine horse or a beautiful woman,’” he said. “‘I cannot look at them unmoved, even now when seventy winters have chilled my blood.’” Dad crossed his arms as if to rest his case. “Not that I’m as old as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle when he said it.”

  Aunt Fee laughed, stood, and cupped my dad’s cheeks. “I have a quote, too.” She cleared her throat, not letting go of his face. “‘She would have despised the modern idea of women being equal to men. Equal, indeed! She knew they were superior.’” Aunt Fee kissed my dad’s cheek. “So said Elizabeth Gaskell, and so say I.”

  For Aunt Fee, I applauded. Lord of the Bling, she had him. She had my father in the palm of her hand. By giving as good as she got, she’d been offered his surrendered heart on a gold platter. Quoting him back—a trick my mother had never tried.

  That’s what Dad had needed to wake up and smell the latte: Aunt Fee standing alone, separate in his mind, once and for all, from Mom.

  I stood, hugged her, and elbowed my frowning dad, as if he and I shared a joke. I loved his stubborn sense of denial. He really did it for Fiona. He filled her heart to overflowing. And in turn, she did the same for him.

  For them, I should judge whatever they wanted me to. For myself, well, I should shout “No!” like any normal daughter. “Why exactly do you want me to judge?” I asked, in case I caved, which I hoped I wouldn’t.

  Aunt Fee stepped away from Dad, her cheeks rosy as she smoothed her Westwood pencil skirt. “More entrants than we can manage want to participate in the country club’s This Is Your Life segment,” she said. “There can only be five participants. So we made you the golden ticket, well…a ‘chosen by Madeira Cutler’ piece of vintage clothing is the ticket. In order to win, the entrant must wear a piece that was worn to the club’s original Golden Jubilee, which we’re modeling our event after. The Golden Jubilee celebrated the club’s fiftieth anniversary.”

  Aunt Fiona touched my arm. “We thought those with the best vintage outfits would have had the most interesting lives.”

  My father cleared his throat. “You must admit, Madeira, it’s better than putting names in a hat, and the winners will wear their original vintage outfits during the segment.”

  “How are you going to discover their life stories to do the segment?” I asked, thinking of my psychometric trip back in time to another Golden Jubilee night—well, the aftermath, anyway—the one Dad and Fee now wanted to replicate with their Very Vintage Valentine fund-raiser.

  On the other hand, what they learned about the event’s history could very well help me figure out what was already starting to feel like another mandate from the universe, a sleuthing expedition.

  “Fee and I are the show hosts and therefore the researchers,” Dad stressed, teeth grinding as he spoke. “So the entrants are giving us significant dates and family histories, honors and awards, spouses and so forth, the important life points of reference.”

  “I think you should ask them to describe the original Golden Jubilee as they remember it, if the winners were actually there,” I suggested. “I wish I could interview them with you. But I can’t see it happening with my schedule. Take really good, detailed notes while doing your research. ’Kay?”

  Aunt Fee gave me a double take and hid a knowing grin, though she failed to dim her interest. She knew I’d just been to the past. She knew that I knew…something.

  “Mad, they’ll have to give you their winning outfits to refurbish and alter. So you’ll spend time with them, do the fittings, ask some questions. Oh, and you can charge your regular prices, while introducing some very well-to-do people to your shop.”

  We both smiled.

  “We made a deal,” she continued, “that you get to display their outfits after the event. You can make the outfits part of your Valentine’s Day display for the church’s candlelight city tour the weekend after the holiday. It was such a smart marketing idea for you to enter your historic building as a stop on the tour.”

  That would save me a great deal of fuss at a busy time, this judging thing making it worse. The Valentine house tour was only a few days after this country club event. I gave her a nod of approval. “Thanks.”

  “No one will see the outfits twice, because the country-club set aren’t the ones who take the tours,” she said. “They’ll be at home showing off their houses.”

  “Well played, Aunt Fiona.” And I meant it in several ways.

  She preened. “But their relatives will surely come to your shop to see their family history on display,” she continued. “Which can net you some great new customers.”

  “I can trump that,” my father said. “This event is bigger than you think. Everyone who was ever a member of the country club has been invited from wherever they live in the world right now.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Is this an anniversary year?”

  “No, but in the spring, the country club’s breaking ground for a new building, so they’re creating warm feelings for their contribution to the community, family style. In case anybody wants to ‘invest.’ Friend-raising, you could call it.”

  “I should have known it would come down to money,” I grumbled.

  Aunt Fee stepped, without thought, into my dad’s arms, and he, without thought, closed his arms around her. “Doesn’t it always?” she asked.

  “I suppose.” I crossed the back of the shop and took a bottle of green tea from my mini fridge, offered it around—no takers—and sipped it myself. “So the five people participating in the This Is Your Life portion of the evening dress in vintage outfits from the Golden Jubilee, but what does everyone else wear? Vintage clothes from any era?”

  “They can wear what they wore to the fiftieth, if they want, or whatever best represents their own history.” My dad chuckled. “I can just imagine the preponderance of academic robes,” he said.

  Aunt Fee nodded in surprise. “That’s true. I plan to suggest military uniforms, as well, so I can thank people for their service to our country.”

  “Make thanking them part of the event,” I said. “They and their families will appreciate it.”

  While my father and Aunt Fee congratulated each other on my brilliance, I realized that attendees would feel safe playing dress-up, because who knew that clothes had tales to tell? “I hope I’ll have plenty of time to examine the outfits submitted for the This Is Your Life segment?”

  “Of course. Eve and I intend to help you,” Fiona said. “You know, handle what you tell us to.” She gave me that “between us” look, because she knew there would be certain clothing items I might not want to touch.

  “Come on, Mad, say yes,” she urged. “We’re also going to have a contest on the night of the event, and there’ll be prizes for the best vintage outfits. Most outrageous, most original, most famous designer, greatest vintage find, best one of a kind.” Aunt Fee bit her lip. “Will you be on the panel to judge those, too? You’ll love the event! Think of the outfits you’ll get to see and you get to wear your favorite yourself.”

  My father squeezed her waist, like maybe she shouldn’t have told me about the second round of judging quite yet. Then he pulled me against his other side. “Nobody can judge vintage clothes like you can, dumplin’.”

  “Oh, bring out the big guns. When I’m Daddy’s dumplin’, I’m ruffled and starched.”

  “Is that a yes?” he asked.

  “No, but you can keep trying.”

  “As we said, you only have to choose five This Is Your Lifers,” Aunt Fiona said. “That’s all we’ll have time to get into the segment.”

  “You have some pretty good arguments, but I have a better one: I can only choose one. I’ll alienate half my local clientele. They’re my bread and butter.”

  Aunt Fiona’s grin grew. “You won’t be choosing people, dear. You’ll be choosi
ng anonymously owned outfits.”

  I couldn’t stop my shoulders from sagging. It had been a long day, and I was worried about a girl named Robin. I didn’t need this pressure, too.

  From her caramel lizard-skin box bag by Nettie Rosenstein, Aunt Fiona took a stack of assorted photos—square, oblong, jagged- and straight-edged, dated and not, with some streaked old Polaroids we had to squint at to see.

  Fee didn’t know it, but I probably would have caved sooner if I’d noticed her carrying the bag I gave her for her birthday. In the fifties, that Nettie Rosenstein bag was a pricey sought-after piece of vintage magic.

  I perused the photos, some color, some black-and-white, with an unbiased eye and great interest. Several group candids and posed shots, then pictures of attendees dancing in an awesome assortment of gorgeous vintage formals, the kind you wore crinolines beneath. My heart picked up speed, until the sight of one, where just the hint of a chevron pattern made me sit hard on my mom’s old wing-back chair behind me.

  I believed in Aunt Fee’s sense that my psychometric gift was a mandate from the universe, but did I have to get hit upside the head with it?

  Four

  There is a playfulness…reflecting the growing sense that women were rebelling against the conformity of the 1960s “Mod” look and now wanted to plunder the dressing-up box of history. This new romanticism must have felt startlingly new and would continue as a big influence throughout the 1970s. It was from this moment that the miniskirt went into a decline.

  —DESIGN MUSEUM, FIFTY DRESSES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

  I examined the next photo, one that would literally change the course of my life. Sleuthing always did, and all I needed to see, in its full backlit glory, was a color shot of a gown with a gather of peach and white with that rare chevron striped design appliquéd to it, over an embroidered crepe silk peach gown.

  I looked down at the box on the floor beside me and knew—I just knew—that the paler version of chevron stripes on silk moiré-a-pois belonged to that very special petticoat, the one designed—and hand-stitched in Paris, I believed—to be worn beneath that very special haute couture gown.

  So…at least one petticoat piece had never been mailed back to Vainglory’s mother.

  The existence of the box, in a place that had been an abandoned building at the time, might also indicate that none of the “borrowed” treasures had ever been returned.

  How many other trinkets, as Vainglory had called them, and Golden Jubilee outfits were still out there, and what kind of stories did they have to tell?

  If I said yes to my father and Aunt Fiona, would I learn more guilty secrets from that Golden Jubilee scavenger hunt, or had my first trip to the past been an isolated vision?

  If that gown with the chevron stripes came to me—to judge now, or at the ball later—I might be able to find out.

  I hadn’t wanted to be a judge because I didn’t want my customers to feel I had favorites. I didn’t want to risk alienating any of them. Also, I’d disliked my vision; the people in it; their cavalier, entitled attitudes; the lack of respect for the rights of others.

  Essentially, I did not want to sleuth the forty-year-old country club event. I’d bet the club had seen more than their fair share of bored-rich-kid scavenger hunts over the years. I just wondered how many had ended in the loss of a life.

  Yet, more than I disliked the scenario, I wanted to know if a Vassar swimmer named Robin had survived the sea on one particular stormy night. And I definitely wanted to know what, or who, caused her to jump into the briny deep in the first place.

  So, I thought, how could I do worse? For a donation to the Nurture Kids Foundation, I might also find the unknown slimeball who’d led Robin to plunge into the ocean, and bring him to justice.

  I sighed. “Dad, Fiona, I will judge the vintage formal wear contest for you. I won’t like it, but I’ll do it, if”—I raised a finger—“you let me see the research on your This Is Your Life candidates. Give me that option, and I’ll even be on the panel to judge the rest of the outfits on the night of the event. That’s my only request.”

  “Done,” Aunt Fiona said while she and my dad high-fived each other.

  “How romantic,” I remarked with snark.

  Oh, the look they gave each other; it warmed a daughter’s heart.

  I think for a minute they forgot I was there, but I had plenty to occupy my mind.

  It seemed too much of a coincidence, I thought, all of this happening at once. But we live in a wily universe, we do; a real schemer. All kinds of things happening that we don’t understand or believe. Spirits of loved ones walking about, nudging us to go on, holding us when we cry. Past and present colliding and, more often than not, going so far as to knock us about. Then the spirits help us get our heads on straight again.

  So much we don’t know.

  Maybe the love of vintage clothes—their histories in particular—started me on this path when, at the age of ten, I refused to give my dead mother’s clothes to a secondhand shop like my dad wanted. Maybe with that I set my mom’s legacy free. Who knows?

  Maybe my dad and Aunt Fiona found each other because she offered to store my mom’s clothes, which were the items with which I would begin my vintage shop. Maybe Aunt Fee had started the hand of fate manipulating psychic ripples in the universal waters of life. Like a rock tossed into a lake, the circles had grown bigger and reached me today in the form of a box, whose wrapper I touched and to whose past I journeyed, where I’d seen the box’s wrapper as a whole, a petticoat, and its match, the gown, as it had once been. A beauty that should not have been desecrated. A haute couture gown—priceless—in the hands of a careless brat.

  Surely my gifts grew stronger over time. Heck, the day Dolly sold me this building for the cost of taxes had to have been key. It was from here that I’d solved mysteries from the past, and just today another began with a box covered in a petticoat from the country club’s Golden Jubilee.

  It didn’t bear trying to figure out. I’d learned not to argue with the universe. I had wanted to say no to judging to begin with, so what does the universe do? It gives me the very dress I’d die to get my hands on. Smack in my lap, if I was lucky. Well, on a hanger, at least. And as long as I could get my hands on it, whether I picked it as a winner or not didn’t matter.

  Given the nature of the last, and possibly current, owner—if it belonged to the same person—I might not pick it on principle. Who needed a customer like Vainglory to try to satisfy?

  I winced inwardly. Who was I kidding? I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the peach gown and the tulle petticoats beneath it.

  My fear? That would be the one dress not entered in the competition.

  First things first. “When can I see the clothes?” I asked my moonstruck parents.

  Fiona had the grace to look chagrined. She had no idea how long they’d zoned. They really needed me to get my own apartment.

  She cleared her throat. “The entries are being delivered to you starting tomorrow, if not sooner.”

  “How did you know I’d say yes? Suppose I didn’t want to judge?”

  “You didn’t,” my father said, “but you caved. We knew you would. For us.”

  Fiona cuffed him.

  “Let’s just call it a mandate from the universe,” I said, which made Fiona prepare to drag my father from the shop. We both knew it was better not to go there with him. I got thanked, kissed, and hugged extra hard before they left, since they’d duped me with manipulation aforethought.

  “Hey!” I called after them. “Where did Eve go?”

  “She had a class to teach,” my father said. At UConn’s Avery Point campus, where Dad himself taught.

  Fiona chuckled. “Soon as we got you to the fainting couch, she ran out of here like she was being chased by a tall, open can of red paint.”

  For years, Eve wore only black, a palette which she had recently stretched to include dark earthy and metallic tones, after she’d tempered her wardrobe with
a steampunky edge. Sure, I egged her on. So yes, a giant can of colored paint, any color, would scare her witless and turn her white as a cranky goose; that was a pun, Eve-style. “She’s a wuss, my gothic friend.”

  “Yep, she is.” Fee let my father work a bit to catch her hand as they crossed my parking lot, then she leaned into him to show she was teasing, and I heard his newly enlivened chuckle, a sound that had been absent for so long from our lives.

  I waited to hear them drive away and then called the one person who could tell me how the box had gotten into my attic. “Dante?”

  No answer. No tuxedo-clad hunk appeared, top hat askew, wicked smile wide. “Dante, where are you?” My resident ghost, Dante Underhill, undertaker and Cary Grant clone, could not leave my building, formerly his building. He could however drive its new owner crazy. That would be me.

  Not that I found him annoying. More like a perk. He kept me company and helped solve crimes. He watched over me and had saved me a time or three. He also hung around the women’s dressing rooms with a big grin on his handsome face but, hey, nobody’s perfect.

  He made my days brighter and whispered sweet words of love…to his soul mate, Dolly Sweet, age 106, every time she stopped in. Almost daily.

  Most times, Dante materialized when I called. This time, he did not. “I call your lack of attention guilt, my man,” I said. “I’m betting you know something about that box. A tale you don’t feel like telling. I also know that you’re abandoning me on purpose, because you’re stuck right here in this building for eternity.”

  I heard his charming chuckle. Felt the cool whisper of his hand on my cheek.

  “Don’t try to turn me up, sweet. Show or suffer.”

  Silence held. “That’s it,” I said, when he failed to show. “When I leave, I’m adjusting the electronic sound system. I’ll blast the volume and fill each room with a different type of music. Hard rock. Jazz. Country and western. Rap. Disco.”

  Yes, Dante had gathered enough energy from my customers over the past couple of years to move objects, open doors, and such. He could probably even turn an old Bakelite radio dial, but he had absolutely no control over electronics, or he hadn’t figured them out yet. Either way, the lack drove him bonkers.