Deadly Patterns (20 page)

“I put shears in one of the bags,” I said.

Gracie picked through the pile she’d dumped out onto the table, but came up empty-handed. She pulled the other bag between her legs, bending over and rummaging through it, finally straightening up, holding the garden shears up like a trophy. “Got ’em.”

As she offered them to Raylene, I had a flash of protectiveness. If Raylene had shoved Charles Denison off the widow’s walk, then Gracie was in the company of a murderer. I didn’t want to believe it, but hell’s bells, we all were. My doubt turned to straight-up anxiety, as pure and harsh as a batch of freshly brewed Texas moonshine.

My mind raced through my options. (1) Gather up Gracie and the mistletoe and hightail it out of the Denison mansion; (2) pretend that everything was grand and that Raylene wasn’t a suspect in a murder (not really a feasible option given that I was a Cassidy and Cassidys faced everything head-on); or (3) go fishing.

I opted for number three. In my heart of hearts, I didn’t believe Raylene could have done anything to Charles Denison, so I truly believed she was innocent. But as Meemaw always said, an ordinary person—meaning anyone but her—couldn’t wish something into being. And even with her sheer force of will, she couldn’t make people do something they weren’t inclined to do. I hadn’t come back to Bliss only because Loretta Mae had wanted me to. I’d come back to Bliss because it was my home, and somewhere deep inside, I’d wanted to return to my roots and my family.

It was the same for my charm. When I sewed for someone, their desires rose inside them and were realized. But the consequences of those desires sometimes had a sharp edge; things didn’t always work out the way I expected them to.

If Raylene did, in fact, have a hand in Charles Denison’s death, it had been personal. She wouldn’t turn on us, would she?

I chastised myself for even questioning it. Of course she would. Anyone would do anything to protect a secret like murder. So maybe number three, going fishing for more answers, trying to gather information from Raylene to clear her, at least in my mind, wasn’t the smartest thing to do. And I could almost guarantee that Will didn’t want Gracie in the proximity of a potential murderer.

But how did I get Gracie out of here without upsetting Raylene, in case she was innocent, or—if she was guilty—because an agitated murderess didn’t seem like a good idea.

“I’m hell on heels, say what you will . . .” The Pistol Annies’ song broke into my scattered thoughts.

Gracie’s cell phone. She answered. “Okay. Mmm-hmm. Sure, Daddy.” She hung up, stuffing the phone back into her pants pocket and looking up at me. “Can I take these home to work on them, Harlow? My dad’s on his way to pick me up.”

Problem solved. Gracie would go home and be safe in her own house with her daddy.

“Sure—”

“Just close your eyes and feel the plants,” Raylene said. She took the mistletoe-laden foam ball and trimmed as if she’d made a thousand of the decorations and the process was old hat.

Gracie watched her in awe, uttering an amazed “Wow” when Raylene was finished. The mistletoe ball looked more perfect than the sample. Lush and festive, but not so perfect that it looked fake.

Raylene had a definite gift.

“Thanks,” she said. “I worked in a florist shop when I was in high school. If I ever open my shop or bed-and-breakfast, I’ll be doing this type of thing all the time.”

A pang of regret for Raylene filled me. I knew just what it was like to have something you wanted so badly you could taste it.

Mrs. James came back into the kitchen, her shoulders sagging slightly. I had a vague recollection of a Bible verse about each of us carrying our own burdens. What was Mrs. James lugging around that bore down on her?

And then it hit me. Mrs. Mcafferty had sat right in my dining room during the Santa doll class and said that she had a quilt that had belonged to Ethel Bishop. The name had rung a bell, but I hadn’t thought much about it. But now it resurfaced. I’d researched Butch Cassidy plenty over the years. Nobody was really sure what Etta Place’s real name was, but there were plenty of folks who speculated that it was Ethel Bishop. How could I have forgotten that?

My lungs clenched, as if the air had suddenly been sucked out of them. The room started to spin. Jebediah had had an affair with Eleanor Mcafferty before he’d married Zinnia. What if . . . oh God . . . what if Eleanor had gotten pregnant and . . .

I followed Mrs. James’s gaze, and suddenly I knew where her thoughts were. Everything fell into place.

Gracie. She’d known all along who Gracie Flores’s grandparents were, but she’d kept it a secret. I hadn’t thought too deeply about why she hadn’t told, but a collision of ideas suddenly converged in my mind.

One of them careened to the forefront. The three pageant dresses in my great-grandmother’s wardrobe. Gracie had worn a green gown—the very one that Eleanor Mcafferty had worn when she’d been a Margaret in the annual ball. And the only one Mrs. James had told me was authentic. It had belonged to Etta Place.

Another recollection crystallized in my mind. Gracie was a gifted seamstress, on par with where I’d been at the same age, and when she’d touched that gown, she’d been lost in a daze, as if she could see the history that dress held within its seams.

“Oh Lord,” I whispered. “The dressing gown.” The same thing had happened right here, upstairs, when she’d touched the silk robe worn by Pearl Denison.

Words Mrs. James had spoken a few months ago came back to me when we’d talked about Eleanor Mcafferty wearing the green Margaret gown. “Your great-grandmother took one look at her,” she’d told me, “and said things were as they should be; it belonged to her.”

What Loretta Mae wanted, Loretta Mae got. Most often, she wanted the truth even if it took years and years for that truth to come to light.

That Margaret dress had belonged to Eleanor back then because she’d already been pregnant with Naomi. Loretta Mae had to have known she’d been carrying a child with Cassidy blood running through her veins. Meemaw wanted that dress, one day, to belong to Etta Place’s other great-great-great-granddaughter.

Gracie.

Chapter 27

While I’d gone off on a rabbit trail in my mind, decoding Gracie’s family heritage, she and Raylene had whipped up two more kissing balls. Mrs. James had sidled over to me and now she rested her hand on my forearm. “I can see by the look on your face that you’ve figured something out,” she said to me so only I could hear.

Before I could even fathom an answer, a robust “Ho! Ho! Ho!” came from the foyer. Will’s gravelly baritone bounced off the ornate wallpaper and into the kitchen.

“In here!” Gracie called.

We heard the door close and the
clomp clomp clomp
of his boots crossing the hardwood floor. They paused—probably checking out the holiday decorations, I thought—then resumed.

“It was never my story to tell,” she continued softly. “Eli and Jeb . . .” She paused, swallowing heavily, as if it was difficult to think about her husband and Mrs. Mcafferty, even after all these years. “I always wondered, you know. She married Rudy so quickly. But I wasn’t sure until Naomi was about five years old. We ran into them on the square one Sunday. I remember it, clear as day. Jeb bent down and ruffled her hair. Seeing them side by side like that . . . well, I just knew.”

But she’d never said a word. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Bliss was full of those kinds of secrets.

“Knew what?” Will asked. I’d been so transfixed by Mrs. James that I hadn’t heard him come up beside me.

“Nothin’,” I said, inadvertently dropping the “g.” “Just idle gossip.” That affected his daughter.

He looked at me funny, as if he could tell I was holding back, but Gracie popped out of her chair before he could question me any further. “Daddy, look!” She held up the kissing ball she’d just finished, with Raylene’s help.

If it upset him to see his daughter sitting with a woman some people thought capable of murder, he didn’t show it. Or maybe he was just really good at hiding his feelings. Either way, he ambled over to Gracie and bent down, planting a kiss on the top of her head. “Where do these go?” he asked, but he turned and winked at me. I got the feeling he knew
exactly
where he’d like one to go. Right over my head. It was mistletoe, after all.

I smiled, pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose to distract myself. Gracie’s lineage had thrown me for a loop, one that was going to be more tricky to unravel than a strand of yarn for the Santa dolls’ beards. My head swam with all the secrets swirling around town. I needed my sketches and my workroom and the sanity that fabric and threads and buttons and bows offered me. Buttons & Bows was my safe place. My thinking space. And right now all I wanted to do was get back to my little farmhouse, work on Josie’s outfit, and in the process sort through the web of mysteries I found myself tangled in.

Chapter 28

Mama dropped by soon after I got home, her sheriff beau in tow. Now Hoss McClaine sat back on my sofa, his left leg bent, his ankle resting on his right knee, looking more content than I’d ever seen him. Mama crouched in front of my little Christmas tree, one arm casually draped over his brown leather boot. She gazed at each of the wrapped gifts resting on the pale green satin skirt—an heirloom from Cressida Cassidy, Butch and Texana’s daughter and my great-great-grandmother. I didn’t have many things that had belonged to her, but this tree skirt, hand-embroidered with snowflakes, was something I’d found in Meemaw’s attic and I knew I’d use it every year. A note, in Loretta Mae’s shaky cursive, had been pinned to it.

Made and embroidered by Cressida Harlow (Parker) Cassidy, circa 1930.

“Harlow Jane,” Mama said, “my goodness, but these packages have to be prettier than whatever it is you’ve wrapped up.” She looked at Hoss. “Aren’t they plain gorgeous, honey?” she asked him, the “honey” more of a Southern endearment than a pet name. Mama called nearly everyone honey.

“Yes, ma’am. Plain gorgeous,” the sheriff said. A funny little smile danced on his lips, but with his iron gray mustache, soul patch, and the black cowboy hat on his head, he still looked intimidating. Or maybe it was my recollecting all the times I’d spent in his office, being read the riot act.

I peered at the colorful lights decorating the tree and the ornaments Mama had given me—a new one each year to represent what I’d accomplished or what I was passionate about. Most of them were sewing machines, spools of thread, dress forms, or some other trinket that had to do with dressmaking.

I chased away the memories, focusing on the moment. Christmas in Bliss. Mama had always done her best to make the holiday magical for Red and me. It didn’t matter that our daddy had walked out on us. It didn’t matter that she’d never had money to buy us all the fancy duds and big-ticket items the well-to-do folks in Bliss were giving their children. We had fresh-baked cinnamon rolls, roasted turkey and corn bread stuffing, and handmade gifts for each other.

Nothing much had changed. The treasures inside the wrapped packages Mama was admiring—necklaces strung from handmade felted beads for Mama, Nana, Josie, my sister-in-law, Darcie, and Mrs. James—had been made with love. And I thought they were just as pretty as the wrappings themselves.

For the color-blocked scarf for my newly discovered cousin Sandra and red cabled mittens with black and white cuffs for Libby, I’d recycled several different sweaters that had been more than fifty percent wool fiber, one of them a cashmere set I’d found in a Hoboken thrift shop. I’d used the technique of fulling, or washing the disassembled sweaters in extra-hot water. That, and the agitation, made the fibers interlock. The result was a thick felt perfect for scarves, mittens, bags, decorative flowers, bags, and anything else I could imagine.

I had planned to give Gracie a special one-on-one lesson on dyeing fabric for her Christmas gift, but if my thinking was right and she was a cousin, she needed her own pair of mittens, too.

“Mama,” I said, not able to keep my wonderings to myself any longer. “Etta Place had a child by Butch Cassidy.”

“Mmm-hmm. Old news, honey.”

Old news that had resulted in a second Cassidy bloodline. And maybe a third offshoot.

“I also heard that Jebediah James had a little”—I glanced at Hoss McClaine, wondering how to phrase the thought—“something-something with Eleanor Mcafferty.”

She looked up at me, here eyes narrowing just enough for me to see that she was curious. “I reckon I’ve heard something about that.”

“That’s old news, too. Happened before she married Rudy,” Hoss said.

“Is that right?” I said, playing innocent.

He nodded, a satisfied smile tickling his lips. He looked pleased at having something to contribute to the conversation. “That’s right. Funny,” he mused, running the pad of his thumb over the soul patch on his chin. “Naomi Mcafferty don’t look much like her daddy, does she?”

Mama and I both whipped our heads around to stare at him. Gossip? From the sheriff?

“She favors her mother, is all,” Mama said, but from the way she looked at me, her head angled to one side and her eyebrows pulled together in alarm, I knew that she’d got my meaning.

She picked up another gift, this one a pretty throw I’d made for Josie and Nate. It was their first Christmas as a married couple, and the blanket was meant to commemorate it. “You even wrap things with flair. You have a gift, Harlow Jane,” she said, turning to me as she spoke.

The corners of my mouth lifted, but I knew the smile didn’t spread all the way to my eyes. With Hoss sitting there and not looking inclined to move anytime soon, Mama and I had two choices: (1) Drop the conversation until later, or (2) be cryptic.

An invisible thread of understanding passed between us. We were going for number two. “I reckon we all have gifts of one kind or another.”

“I guess I do have a way with plants.”

“You guess?” Hoss let out a belly laugh. “How many sprouts and flowers and weeds d’ya have growin’ at your place, Tessa? Good grief, it’s practically a jungle over there.” He spoke slowly and with a thick drawl that stretched out his words until “there” became “thar.”

“And what about your mama and those goats?” he went on. “I’ve never seen nothin’ like that. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they actually understand each other.”

Oh boy. People didn’t often speak of the Cassidy charms in the open, and we preferred it that way. We did our thing, folks considered us eccentric—in a good way—and that was that.

I held my breath, waiting to see if he’d say anything else, but he seemed to be done with his observations. Cryptic meant we had to tread lightly and lead up to the real point of the conversation slowly and without raising a bit of suspicion. I turned back to Mama, wondering how to get from point A in our conversation to point D, given that Hoss wasn’t budging from his spot on my sofa.

“What’s your gift, Sheriff?” I asked.

“Ferreting out bad guys, I reckon,” he said after a few seconds’ pause.

Mama patted the sheriff’s knee. “You are mighty good at that.” She placed Josie and Nate’s present back under the tree and then turned to me. “Gracie’s been working with you for a while,” she said. “What’s her gift?”

Mama knew exactly what I’d been getting at with the question about Eleanor Mcafferty and Jebediah James. The Cassidy blood would have carried through their child, Naomi, and straight into Gracie. It was the perfect opening. “She’s a talented girl. Took to sewing like fuzz on a peach,” I said, stifling the cringe that surfaced. I’d been away from Bliss for so long that I’d lost a fair amount of colorful Southern speech, but it was coming back to me full force.

“And not a lick of formal training or lessons,” Mama said thoughtfully.

“Nope. Just picked it up on her own. When I tell her something or show her a technique, she gets it”—I snapped my fingers—“just like that. And do you know, she’s got some special connection to fabric.”

Hoss arched a bushy brow at me, shifting his gaze until it zeroed in on the stacks of fabric against the wall in the workroom.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “Fabric-aholic. It’s a prerequisite for every seamstress.”

Mama wasn’t about to be sidetracked. “Does she, now?” she asked.

Once again, I mulled over how to phrase it so she’d get my meaning but Hoss wouldn’t. “I’ve seen her touch a garment and be swept away by the history in it.”

“Like she can see the past,” Mama said quietly, musing.

“Exactly.”

Mama nodded thoughtfully, but her eyes had opened wider than normal and her nostrils flared slightly. I could almost see the thoughts darting in and out of her head because I imagined that they were the very same thoughts making their way around mine. Did anyone else know about Naomi Mcafferty being Jeb James’s daughter? Did Naomi have any magical charms? Did she know the truth about her lineage?

“Mama,” I said, changing the direction of my thoughts. “All this talk about family has me wondering—”

“Were we talkin’ about family?” She darted a glance at the sheriff, who, I admit, I’d momentarily forgotten was there.

“I’ve been thinking about family, I mean, what with Red and Darcie coming in for the holidays, and such.”

Hoss McClaine’s expression was blank and he seemed awfully intent on studying the colorful Christmas tree lights, but I knew that while we might think he wasn’t paying attention, he was likely catching every word, nuance, and look Mama and I had shared.

“I was just wondering,” I said, thinking he might actually have a little insight to the story of Loretta Mae and Bobby Whittaker. “I was at the courthouse on the square yesterday.”

“Old John and Arnie did some fine work there, from what I saw,” the sheriff said, nodding with approval. “Renovation ain’t easy, ’specially when the Historic Society gets involved in things. Old John knows everythin’ there is to know about them old houses.”

“They were just wrapping things up when I was there. Will Flores made a model of the square and the historic district. This house is on it, Mama.”

“Is that so?” Mama asked, but she was back to perusing the gifts under the tree.

“Yes, ma’am, that’s so.” I picked up my lookbook, absently flipping through the pages, trying to be nonchalant. “They have some old quilts. A few old newspaper articles. Oh, and an iron and sewing machine from the turn of the century.”

“I guess we’ll have to go give it a gander,” she said, looking at the name on a gift tag dangling from another package.

“There was one about—”

The Christmas tree suddenly jerked, sending a shower of pine needles cascading through the branches and right on top of Mama’s head. They pooled on the tree skirt below her.

Which was strange. The tree was still fresh. I didn’t have a cat. No small critters had climbed the trunk. Which meant only one thing.

Meemaw.

“About what, Harlow?”

I considered defying Meemaw, but there was really no reason to at the moment. She’d gotten her point across. She wanted me to hush up about whatever her past was with my great-grandfather, Bobby Whittaker, and I could oblige, for the moment. But not forever. It was my own family history, after all. “About Butch Cassidy and the other old outlaws from around here,” I said. “Probably nothing you don’t already know.”

For now I would focus on Gracie’s part in the Cassidy family tree. It had been shaken, once again. Which meant more people to keep secret . . . and more people who had secrets to keep.