A Killing Notion: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery (14 page)

There was only one way to know if Barbara Ann’s sentiments in the letter we’d read were consistent throughout her letter writing. Read another one.

I didn’t know if they were in any kind of order, and I wanted a random selection, thinking that would somehow give me a truer view of Barbara Ann and her feelings. The next envelope had Eddy’s name across it, a curved line scrolled underneath the name, just like the previous one. I dove right in.

Eddy, how can she be gone? If I close my eyes, I can still see her dimpled face, her huge grin, the braids in her hair. Did I do something wrong? Fail as a mother? I can’t see through my tears, and they’re blurring the ink. I want to curl up and disappear. No more dreams of your race-car-driving daughter. No more Sue. No more McQueen. What are we going to do without her?

It was as if the letters to Eddy were Barbara Ann’s personal journal. She wrote what she felt at that moment, examining the things going on in her life.

I handed the brief letter to Madelyn. It took her all of ten seconds to read. “Who’s Sue? Who’s McQueen?”

“Sue was their daughter. McQueen must be a nickname. I can’t even imagine . . .”

“Poor thing.”

“Yeah.”

I reached for another letter, wondering if I’d find a sad Barbara Ann, a loving Barbara Ann, or someone in between. This one was in a gray envelope and instead of Eddy’s name on the front, Chris’s name was.

“He kept his life separate, but mixed his letters,” I said as I opened the envelope. A single notecard slipped out, and this one also took less than ten seconds to read.

I know who you really are and what you’re doing.

“Oh my God!” I dropped the card and recoiled. Madelyn arched an eyebrow as she reached for it, but my hand shot out, grabbing her wrist. “Don’t touch it.”

“What?”

“We have to call the sheriff.”

“Your stepfather? Why? What in the world—?” But she broke off when she craned her head around and read the one, brief sentence.

She drew in a sharp breath and looked at me.

I looked at her.

And together we said, “The killer.”

I waffled back and forth between suspects as I waited for the sheriff to come and take the box of letters. I’d immediately assumed that Barbara Ann Blake could have found out the truth about Eddy and snapped, messing with his car and killing him.

But the letters had been in the Montgomery house, so it just as easily could have been Miss Reba who’d discovered the truth and had done in her husband.

“Or maybe,” I told Madelyn, “it’s like that Carrie Underwood song ‘Two Black Cadillacs.’ Maybe they both learned the truth and conspired together to kill him.”

“That’s a good song,” she said.

I nodded my agreement. Carrie could sing, and maybe she was onto something with the two women in the black veils. They hadn’t bothered to cry because they were guilty of murder. Had I seen Miss Reba or Barbara Ann cry?

I couldn’t say that I had, but I couldn’t draw a straight
line between that little fact and the car accident. Otis Levon and his wife, Sally, lingered in the back of my mind as possible suspects. Blackmail was a dangerous game, and either one of them could have orchestrated that with Eddy/Chris.

Each of the four of them had motive. There was no way to pinpoint when the car had been tampered with, so any one of them might have had the opportunity.

And then there was the means. Otis knew cars inside and out, so messing with the steering would have been a no-brainer for him.

But what did Miss Reba, Barbara Ann, or Sally Levon know about cars? That was a big fat question mark.

A short while later, Hoss McClaine sauntered through the front door of Buttons & Bows, pulling off his cowboy hat as he entered. His curmudgeonly tendencies couldn’t hide his Southern gentleman upbringing. He dipped his chin in greeting and in one fell swoop, he seemed to take in the room, his eyes landing on the box still sitting on the coffee table.

“Ladies,” he said. He ambled toward us, and though one corner of his mouth lifted, it wasn’t really a smile and it definitely didn’t reach his eyes.

“Sheriff,” we said in unison. Hoss McClaine was newly married to my mama, but when he was on duty, he was sheriff. Come to think of it, whenever he wasn’t on duty, he was still the sheriff, too.

“That it?” he asked, nodding toward the box, his drawl as thick as molasses.

I nodded. “Miss Reba gave it to me this morning. I read a few of the letters from Barbara Ann Blake to her husband, but then I saw that one.” I pointed to the gray
card with the single sentence. The writing was nondescript, as if whoever wrote it had tried to disguise it.

“You didn’t look at the rest of them?”

“No,” I said.

Madelyn and I sat back down and the sheriff took a seat in the center of the love seat. “So you touched the box, and those three letters.”

He’d said it as a statement, but it was really a question. “Right. I took one from the center of the pile, so I may have touched a few more.”

If he was disappointed, he didn’t say. Instead, he pulled a wad of something lavender from his pocket. He unwound the mass, peeling off what I realized were gloves. Purple latex gloves. He tossed a set to me, one to Madelyn, and kept a set for himself. “First rule of investigation is not to contaminate the evidence.”

“I didn’t know it was evidence,” I said. That was a little bit of a fib. I’d thought about calling the sheriff the moment Miss Reba had told me about the letters, but I’d let her talk me out of it. Now my fingerprints were all over the note to Chris Montgomery, a note that might have come from his killer.

“Put the gloves on,” Hoss told us. “We need to do two things. One: Read each and every one of these letters. And two: Sort by date.”

“The ones we read weren’t dated,” I said, “but we could try to organize them based on things happening in their lives.”

“You want me to help, Sheriff?” Madelyn reminded me of Tigger, nearly bouncing off her seat. She was the sheriff’s staff photographer, taking pictures of crime scenes, but she also worked for the city of Bliss,
capturing moments in time, doing macrophotography along the walking trails, and any other job that involved photography.

His response was a raised bushy gray eyebrow.

It was all Madelyn needed to pull on the gloves, snap them at the wrist, stretch her fingers wide, and charge ahead. She took a letter from the pile inside the box and started reading.

I did the same, though I didn’t muster quite as much gusto as Madelyn had.

One by one, we read the letters written by Barbara Ann Blake to her husband, Eddy. The tone of each letter was similar . . . Eddy was her true love, and while they’d suffered trials and tribulations, together they’d survived. There were plenty of letters where she was angry at him for staying out at the Bliss store overnight, more than a few about the challenges they had with their daughter, whom she always referred to as McQueen. It seemed Eddy really had thought she’d be a successful race-car driver. They’d nicknamed her McQueen when she’d been a little girl, after Lightning McQueen, from the Disney movie she’d been obsessed with. The name stuck and she’d gone on to compete at the track as a seventeen-year-old . . . just before they’d lost her.

Madelyn gasped, waving the letter she’d been reading over the center of the table. “Listen to this.” She cleared her throat and read.

Eddy, after twenty years I can tell when something’s wrong. If you can’t talk to me, then what do we have together?

She looked at me, and then the sheriff. “This one has a date. The week before the accident, exactly.”

“Keep reading,” Hoss said.

I saw Reba Montgomery in Granbury today. She’d come by Bubba’s to pick something up for Chris, she said. She went to the fabric shop on the square. That’s where I ran into her. I was picking up some new fabric for an apron. I never pictured her as a woman who sews, but maybe I was wrong about her. She bought some yardage of three different prints, not at all what I would have imagined her choosing.

I can’t say as I like the woman . . . too uppity for my taste, but she was pleasant enough and we chatted for a few minutes. For some reason, she confided in me. She said Chris had been acting strange. Distant. And she seemed really worried.

It got me thinking about you and me and how we’ve been distant, too. It got me wondering if I should be worried. I know you love me, but sometimes I wonder if love is enough.

“She was beginning to realize something was wrong,” Madelyn said.

“Maybe they both were. From that letter, Miss Reba sensed it with Chris, too.” I suddenly remembered something Miss Reba had said after her husband’s funeral. She’d told me and Will that Chris had called her from the car and asked her to wait up for him, that he had something he wanted to talk about. Had the guilt of his
double life gotten to him? Or had he fallen out of love with one of his wives?

Had he made it home to the Blake house in Granbury, talked to Barbara Ann, and crashed on the way back to Bliss? Or had he never made it to Granbury in the first place?

There were too many unanswered questions, and the only person who could answer them was dead.

We kept on with the letters. There were no references to Barbara Ann discovering that Eddy had created a new identity as Chris Montgomery, no other mention of Miss Reba, only the occasional lamentation about Eddy’s late nights at the Bliss store. There was nothing else to shed any light on whether Barbara Ann had discovered the truth.

At the very bottom of the box lay one last envelope. My heart skipped a beat when I realized it was gray, just like the other one that seemed like it might be from the killer. I picked it up, looking at Hoss and Madelyn. Slowly, I opened it and pulled out the single notecard.

I read it silently before handing it to the sheriff.

Dear Chris . . . or should I say Eddy? Tony Stewart—you know who he is, right? Won the Allstate 400 in 2005. He said, and I quote, “If I died right now, my life would be complete.” If you died tomorrow, would your life be complete? I think you should answer that question. Say good-bye to your wives. Your kids. Your cars.

Say good-bye.

See you tomorrow.

As he read it aloud in his slow Southern drawl, a chill worked its way up my spine. It was a death threat. There was no other way to look at it. Someone knew the truth, and Eddy Blake, aka Chris Montgomery, knew he was going to die.

An hour later, Hoss and Madelyn had gone and I had moved back to my workroom. Hoss had taken the letters with him. The way the last letter was phrased made us all think it hadn’t been written by either Barbara Ann Blake or Reba Montgomery—why would either one of them refer to herself in the third person? Then again, it could have been intentional.

Hoss didn’t share his investigative plan, but I had a feeling he’d be paying a visit to Barbara Ann Blake, Reba Montgomery, and to Otis and Sally Levon. If it was up to me, that’s what I would do, anyway. They all had motive. Was one of them guilty?

I moved the garment bag with Leslie’s dress to the front room. She’d be here anytime to pick it up. Next, I moved the dress form with Danica’s dress next to the cutting table. Josie was on her way with the beads to complete the garment.

Until one of them arrived, I had time to think. I flipped open my newest sketchbook, turning to the
last page so I could jot down my notes. I reached for a pencil, stopping when I saw that it wasn’t blank. Lines of familiar writing filled the page. Loretta Mae’s shaky script.

“Meemaw,” I said to the empty room, “you’re messing with my sketchbook again.”

The latch on the window lifted and the window slid up. I watched, riveted, as the air rippled. Her form started to take shape, but before it really looked like her, it shimmied and scattered into a million sparkles. “Someday, Meemaw,” I said. I knew she’d keep trying to find a way to be more present, but today wasn’t that day.

I talked to her when I was alone, filling her in on my life, the things happening around Bliss, and lately, the murder of Eddy Blake, aka Chris Montgomery. The simple one-sided conversations helped me gain some semblance of order with my thoughts, and she knew me better than anyone.

And right now she was trying to help me. I pulled the sketchbook toward me and turned to a blank page.

The sparkles that had been her rippling form a minute ago now circled around me, finally funneling like a tornado over the open sketchbook. She wanted me to write, as I’d done in the past, to help me make sense of all the information.

“Good thinking, Meemaw.” I picked up the pencil that suddenly appeared next to the sketchbook and started writing.

Eddy Blake marries Barbara Ann.

Eddy opens Bubba’s in Granbury.

Otis joins Bubba’s and becomes Eddy’s right-hand man.

Otis is given ownership in Bubba’s when the Bliss store opens.

Eddy and Barbara have a daughter, Sue.

At the Bliss store, Eddy meets Reba.

Enter Chris Montgomery. Eddy creates the new identity to pursue a relationship with Reba.

After a whirlwind courtship, they marry.

Shane is born.

Teagen is born.

Sue dies.

Otis Levon must know the truth.

Otis must know.

Does Sally?

I reread the last few lines I’d scribbled almost without thinking. With Miss Reba’s discovery of her husband’s letters, and the question of whether or not she or Barbara Ann could have known the truth, I’d almost forgotten about the fact that Otis Levon had to have known and been an accomplice in Eddy’s double life. Someone had to have been there to cover for him, to raise the alarm when one of the wives called—or worse—showed up, and to help him keep up the ruse with the other employees.

That could only have been Otis. I’d thought, briefly, that Otis could have told his wife, Sally, the truth, and that maybe Sally could have been blackmailing Eddy. But so far, I’d found nothing to indicate blackmail. Miss Reba had said she hadn’t noticed money missing from their account, but Eddy/Chris would have had at least two accounts.

I looked up Barbara Ann Blake’s number and dialed. “Mrs. Blake,” I said when she answered, “I’m so sorry about everything that’s happened.”

“I have nothing to say.”

“I’m trying to help, ma’am,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t remember that when I first met her, I’d told her that I was friends with Miss Reba.

“What? What do you want? Reporters have been calling. The police have been here. I just want to be left alone. I’m just alone.”

“One question, Mrs. Blake.” I forged ahead before she could say no, or worse, hang up. “Do you think someone might have known about . . . about your husband’s . . . activities and was blackmailing him? Was any money missing from your account?”

There was no response, but I could hear her ragged breath. Finally, she answered. “When the Bliss Bubba’s opened, we were supposed to see an increase in our income, but that never happened. We’re in worse shape now than ever before. And do you know why?”

Everyone knew why. Mrs. Blake had no more secrets, and couldn’t escape the lies and betrayal of her husband. But it was a rhetorical question because she went on, not waiting for me to answer.

“Because,” she said, “he married someone else, had a whole ’nother family. What kind of house do
they
live in?” she asked.

“Mrs. Blake, don’t—”

“Don’t what? He broke my heart! He stole everything from me. Every memory I have of him is tainted. It’s all lies.

“Let me tell you where they live. It’s not a trailer park. There aren’t stupid Mustangs parked everywhere. They have a pool and a gardener and God knows what else. That other family got everything that should have
been ours. Those kids have iPods and cars and all the name-brand clothes they could ever want.”

She was ranting, but she was one hundred percent right. Because Eddy had become Chris Montgomery, he siphoned off half, or maybe more, of his income to support Reba and the Montgomery kids. No matter how anyone tried to spin that, Mrs. Blake was the most injured party. A cold feeling rushed through me knowing that she’d driven to Bliss and had seen the Montgomery house. I didn’t blame her, but on the other hand, the knowledge scared me. I hadn’t pictured Barbara Ann Blake as a take-action kind of person, but she had sought out her husband’s other family.

Had Miss Reba done the same? And if she did, what did she think of the Blake household?

The blackmail angle had been a bust, but—my thoughts halted. She’d mentioned the Montgomery kids’ iPods. Was that coincidence, or did she know that they’d had them because
she’d
broken into their house? Could she have been the one standing over Miss Reba in her bed?

Oh boy. Maybe Barbara Ann Blake really had killed her husband.