Tulle Death Do Us Part (7 page)

As I suspected, the petticoats were missing. There should be a crinoline, or cage, closest to the body and at least four tulle petticoats above it. The one that had been destroyed would have been worn closest to the gown. Why did the petticoat and gown match? Because if the dress hem flipped up, say in a dance, the perfection of its beauty would be mirrored and enhanced, and not marred by a petticoat.

That most important piece of the formal had been
missing for more than four decades and just might hold the key to a murder, a detail I intended to confirm, if possible by reading the gown.

My cell phone rang before I had a chance, showing Eve as my caller. “Don’t spare me the details,” I said in lieu of a hello.

“I’m faxing you a list of Vassar swim captains as we speak. But this is a hoot. One of them was—”

“Sherry’s mother-in-law?”

“Brat.”

“If it’s any consolation, I didn’t know for certain. I knew that she went to Vassar, and something about the voice was familiar. Besides, a paper trail is confirmation, an actual clue, and admissible as evidence, except that my corroborating evidence is a psychometric trip to La La Land. It’s still better than unfounded speculation, however.”

“Damn, I have questions, but my next class is coming in.”

“Wait, what year did she graduate?”

“Nineteen seventy-two. I’ll want details, Cutler.”

“I have to go read a gown now.”

She hung up screaming, literally.

I chuckled as I took the gown.

I took it by the hanger to the fainting couch. Because when and if I zoned, there was always the possibility that I would also swoon, so I prepared for a soft landing.

Practically committing psychic hari-kari, I removed my gloves, laid the gown over me like a blanket, and wrapped my arms around it. The fabric was so soft; the imagery of its creation almost romantic.

Impatience got the better of me when I didn’t zone in a
blink, and then I experienced a slight dizziness and disorientation, and, as I began to swirl away in earnest, Dante materialized—and about time. “I’m here for you,” he said.

So I swirled away with a friend who would watch my back from the future. But suddenly, no friends stood among those on whom I would never turn my back.

I still held the treasure box that Vainglory had handed Bambi, shocked the gown had taken me back to the place I’d left, though I could have no idea what had transpired in my absence.

“Bambi,” Grody said, “maybe you should take the scavenger list from the box before you give it back.”

“Maybe she should.” Vainglory chuckled. “But when? Tomorrow, next week, next year? It won’t matter, really.”

“What day is it?” Bambi asked.

“How much did you drink, girl?” Vainglory asked with a titter. “You know very well that we left the country club’s Golden Jubilee dinner dance only a few hours ago.”

“We’ve been out here more like ten or twelve hours, missy,” Brut corrected. “It’s got to be the day after by now.”

It must be near dawn, I surmised, at which time I’d get to see their faces. My heart raced at the thought.

“Bambi-Jo, don’t you think about writing any of this in one of your crazy journals or diaries,” Vainglory stressed. “It didn’t happen. Get it?” The depth of that threat did not go unnoticed by the others.

And then, deep in the back of my mind, Vainglory’s voice came back to me, from around the time I had my first ever vision, with her uttering a different, more personal kind of threat to someone else. And with that, I believed that I could name her.

Oh, I could name her. I’d almost forgotten Eve’s call. Zoning often totally separated me from the present, but not this time. I remembered.

I had been right. Vainglory was not just any woman, but her royal PIA self, a spoiled coed who would grow up to become my sister Sherry’s witch of a controlling mother-in-law. I might not be able to prove much until the gown’s first fitting in real time, when I might wheedle some answers out of her if I bowed, scraped, adored, and slobbered enough over her.

So Vainglory and Deborah VanCortland were one and the same poor little rich girl, who, as it turned out, happened to be the biological grandmother of my sister Sherry’s twins, the poor things.

Biology aside, though the gown would flatter any figure, I suspected that Deborah may have outgrown it over the years. And shame on me for delighting in the thought.

Other than her size, she hadn’t changed at all. Here, she’d been to an exclusive formal event—only the rich and greedy need apply—yet this coed and her cohorts had had to make their own fun, some of it off the tears of others.

That described Deborah to a T.

They were all bored rich kids, or, rather, adults, actually. Even I was guilty of according them young adult status, but not so according to their post-college comments.
Had been the best swimmer at Vassar
. Adults, yes. Deborah had been twenty-two or twenty-three at the time. Adults, and still they didn’t get it. Somebody might have drowned tonight, and it seemed that most of them shrugged a mental “oh well.”

No souls, these people.

“Why isn’t Robin with us?” Bambi asked.

“She’s more interesting to the guys than the rest of us at the moment,” Vainglory said. “Not for any reason that I envy.”

Bambi stamped a foot. “Can you speak English, please.”

“You know,” Vainglory stressed. “That trip to Paris Robin took last semester, for six months’ worth of ‘art lessons.’ Really? I mean, trips like that, a girl usually leaves a little something behind…”

Bambi huffed.

I didn’t sense that she caught Vainglory’s “pregnant” pause but I knew when she gave up on getting an answer. “So why did she dive in the water? There’s a storm for heaven’s sake!” Bambi was either fearless or clueless, I wasn’t sure which.

“What are you? A dimwit?” a new voice snapped. “Finishin’ school din do you no good!” Wynona said. Lady Backroom, they called her behind her back—I somehow got that and her name straight from Bambi’s thoughts. ’Cause finishin’ school din do Wynona no good, neither, Bambi silently snapped.

Wynona was evidently a country-club tart who planned to marry rich, and when she got nervous, she forgot to act the lady.

Bambi did have some helpful musings, though I had to catch them as they bounced around her brain, like a zig-zag stitch gone rogue.

“And we’re not all here, ya twit,” Wynona added. “Couple of the boys ain’t. Probly doin’ the deed to knock it off the list, the lucky stiffs.” She tittered at her dubious joke.

It was like a time stamp, her phrasing. “Dimwit”—so not politically correct. Insulting and rude.

I did the math to see how long ago this event took place. The Mystick by the Sea Country Club was founded in 1923, which set their Golden Jubilee as happening in 1973. These people were all in their mid to late fifties to early sixties by now, like Odd Duck at the roof-raising, who, I’m betting, practically willed that box not to be found.

But how could I be sure? There’d been dozens of people that age in the crowd.

“How did we get into this mess?” asked Grody, who still pulled ambivalence from my every pore and twitched my ultrasensitive nerve endings raw. A sensible man, who at least knew they were in trouble, though maybe that was because he seemed to be at least five years older than the others. “All I did was join a country club,” he said. “Dream of a lifetime, I thought, and now this. I mean, it was supposed to be a lark. A game of rascals and rogues, a scavenger hunt, and now what? I’ll never make town selectman when this comes out. We could have a crime to hide. You all understand that, right?” he asked, though no one answered.

Well, he hadn’t said “a crime to confess,” so he wasn’t as smart as I thought.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’ll not be an accessory to…to—”

“You already are,” Snake hissed, his threat palpable. “And the word you seek is ‘murder.’”

One of them produced a flashlight while they all ignored the word “murder” as if it had never been said, and wrapped their booty in petticoat squares like six prissy pirates, wily cohorts who looked more like escapees from a costume ball. Hard to believe that this happened before I was born. Not that I could see their formals clearly, but hooped skirts bounced against mine while tailcoats and striped cravats danced into and out of the shadows, an example of the sour cream of society.

Why did they linger in this dank place, mocked by the ripping tides that sounded closer by the minute, as if the ocean might devour them, which it appeared they deserved.

Had they been first to the scene of the actual crime, where Robin had been forced to take her swim? Or had they met here after that and heard the tale secondhand? How much was supposition? How much truth?

I wished I’d been in it from the beginning. I’d have had a clearer perspective. Crime or no crime? Which was it? Though their selfish acts and attitudes were crime enough.

So now they stayed, hiding away with their secret. I needed to know the why of it all before I turned back into a pumpkin, though the situation fit
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
more than my own.

Bambi could identify them, but I couldn’t force her to transfer that knowledge to me, or even to speak it, no matter how I willed her to. At the moment, I could put neither a real name or face to anyone but Deborah.

Of course, I knew Wynona as Lady Backroom. Fat lot of good that did me.

As I pondered it all, the flashlight illuminated a silver flask being wrapped in a piece of petticoat, but not before I saw blood smeared on the engraved flagon.

With that small bit of bobbing light, I caught bits of the people around me, parts of faces, even. Some could be related to current residents of Mystic and its environs, I suppose, and though Deborah’s voice rang familiar, I barely recognized her. She was a full forty years younger than the last time I’d seen her. One for the books.

They concentrated on their wrapping, the better to hide their deeds, but in shadow I saw the nebulous man, tall, gangly, all lines and angles. Snake gestured as he spoke, and I recognized him as the one who had the barest trace of a Southern accent. A trait that sailed in and out of his speaking voice, as if he was trying to overcome it but failed when agitated.

Snake took it upon himself to grab pieces of that petticoat and hand them round to his so-called friends. “Hide
your prizes well for now,” said he. “Every piece has to be returned to its proper owner.”

“When?” Bambi asked.

Vainglory huffed, clearly miffed. “Bambi-Jo, you just don’t know when to shut up.”

I sensed the strength of Bambi’s dislike. Whaddaya know, we had something in common. Two things: She wanted facts, too, and she didn’t like Deborah much, either.

“But when?” Bambi asked again louder, stronger.

“When we see what the tide brings in,” Snake snapped, claiming the role of leader. “Which reminds me,” he added. “Don’t throw the scavenged items you’re responsible for in the drink. The sea has a way of returning what we don’t want, and if just one borrowed item comes back with a body, we’re done for.”

“What body?” Bambi asked again, so they all looked at me, or her, like we had two heads—I guess we did. Two brains that thought alike, anyway. I thought I might try to find Bambi first, after I returned to the present—kindred spirits, her and I.

I might know her well enough to inspire her to talk. I’d contact her, if ever I escaped this boat-belly place.

Yes, that was beginning to worry me, how long I was staying this time around. Vainglory’s gown had big mojo, but then, it belonged with the petticoat, which had been splintered and traveled far with the help of Deborah/Vainglory, Brut, Wynona, Grody, Snake, and even Bambi-Jo, which wouldn’t make my investigation any easier.

“I don’t like that we can’t find Robin,” Bambi said.

Snake snorted. “You didn’t like her any more than we did.”