Tulle Death Do Us Part (5 page)

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.

“When it’s time for me to leave, no mercy!” I promised.

Tomorrow, after a night of dueling banjos, he’d squeal like a greased pig on a playground slide.

I grabbed my yogurt from the mini fridge, because I’d long ago missed lunch. I must have spent more real time in the belly of that whale than I’d thought.

While I ate, I thought about Robin, who “they” said could swim through a stormy sea, and I wondered why she’d have to. I was afraid she’d tried to escape the person who’d “scavenged” her, or maybe she’d been pushed from a boat. I hated to think about how far her hunter had taken his role.

Part of me wanted to call the police or read the papers to see if the second best swimmer from Vassar had survived. But she’d gone into the water on that stormy night forty or more years ago.

I tried Googling her name and came up with links to thousands of red-breasted birds and pages of Celtic surnames. So much for that.

I bet the scavenger hunters never thought the box in my attic would ever come to light.

Their intentions had been almost honest in the beginning. They’d thought it was all being returned. Or most of them had. Whoever had inspired Robin to jump might have known better all along. Heck, abducting someone probably went above and beyond the terms of the hunt. And who were its missing members? The scavenger hunters, like slimeball and his ilk?

So many questions. What had happened to keep them from returning the box…which they’d put the scavenger list inside. I looked down at the box and shuddered to the point of rubbing the gooseflesh on my arms. “I will not open you alone. No way. No how. Wait! Where’s the wrapper?”

I looked for Chakra, soother of my solar plexus, but she’d disappeared. “Chakra? Chakra baby?” I called. “I have a treat for you.” Ba-da-bump, ba-da-bump, ba-da-bump. I heard her kitty paws running lickety-split on the hardwood floor, the sound of thumps getting dimmer, rather than louder. She wasn’t running toward me but away. Had she stolen the petticoat piece that had given me my vision? “Naughty little furball!”

She growled an objection and scurried away, but she didn’t return the goods.

I called Eve. “Hey, my goth computer-genius fact finder?”

“If that isn’t a butter-up.” Eve chuckled.

“I need names. Captains of the Vassar swim teams, range 1960 to 1973.” Some of them might have graduated as recently as the June before the country club’s anniversary event, which usually took place mid-summer.

“Madeira Cutler, are you sleuthing again? Never mind. I know the answer. It was that flipping box, wasn’t it?”

“No, it was the fabric cover on the box, so there.”

“Same thing,” Eve said. “Anyway, you don’t need a PIA Fed for that info. I’ll get back to you in a blink.” Click. She’d hung up. Must be teaching a class. Eve loved that Nick had sort of disappeared. She’d never liked him.

Now for my traitor of a cat. When I finally found Chakra, there wasn’t a petticoat piece in sight. She swirled around my legs, purred, and even jumped into my arms and licked my knuckles to get back into my good graces, but she’d stashed the goods, all right.

“Chakra, I need that petticoat piece.” I bit my lip. I should hand it over to Werner. It was absolutely, undeniably the biggest clue in a case of larceny gone horribly wrong. My visions were inadmissible, of course. And, well, Werner didn’t know about my psychometric gift and wouldn’t believe me if he did.

And he worked alone. I mean, if he were to have the fabric wrapper analyzed, I’d never know the story it told. Whereas, if I were to get it analyzed at FBI headquarters on the q.t., I would receive and understand the results, maybe piece them together with the vision. Of course, eventually I’d share the pertinent info with Werner, in my own way. But I was the only one—not counting the scavengers—who could give any new clues the chance of a correct spin.

Or maybe not. I dialed an old family friend, Tunney Lague, the local butcher, who not only cut the meat and sold it to you, he told you how to cook it so it tasted expensive and amazing. On the other hand, he also knew
everything about everybody, mostly because he charmed the daylights out of them and lured their secrets out of them.

“Mad!” Tunney said as he answered his phone, and I could just see the handsome man—my father’s age—standing there in his bloodstained apron, grinning. “You’re looking good.” He always said that over the phone.