Pleating for Mercy (6 page)

She had a point. I was back, and I had to admit there was a lot to like about small-town life.

If you could overlook having a murder take place in your front yard.

I sat back and started rocking again. Madelyn Brighton looked like a force to be reckoned with. She was crouched next to the dead body in my front yard at 10:20 on a weekday evening, which told me she had bigger aspirations than taking pretty pictures of Bliss. Medical examiner, maybe? But one body did not make for a career in criminal justice. Surely murder—and I was convinced it was murder; how else would a healthy young woman wind up dead in a stranger’s yard?—couldn’t be a common occurrence in Bliss.

“Why would anybody kill her?” Mama prattled on to herself as she creaked back and forth in her rocker. “She was a nice girl. Built the bead shop from the ground up. Not literally, of course; it’s on the square. But she remodeled it, taught classes, hired your friend Josie. She put all her time and energy into Seed-n-Bead. Did I show you the bracelet I made?” She thrust her arm toward me, her fist nearly ramming my chest. “She helped me, you know. Dug out her special stash of premium beads just to find ones that matched my eyes,” she said.

I turned my palm up and Mama rested her hand in mine. I knew less about beads than I did about Nell. I had worked long enough in the fashion industry to admire quality costume jewelry, though, and the double strands of silver and crystal beads with two spectacularly bright green ones strung on the center of each bracelet wire were spectacular.

She wriggled her wrist, letting the silver and glass jingle. “I’ll always think of her when I wear it.”

“It’s lovely,” I said, but what really caught my eye was the ring on her other hand. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now it glinted in the moonlight. My heart skittered to a stop. “Mama, is that a diamond?”

Her gaze shot to her right hand, to the yard, then back to me. Not to the yard, I realized. To Sheriff Hoss McClaine. Holy cow, Mama and Hoss McClaine? Was there something going on there? Could he have given it to her? But a man didn’t buy a diamond ring for a casual friend.

She tucked her hand by her side, the shimmering stone out of sight for the moment. Like that would make me forget about it. I dropped the subject . . . for now. Which was a good thing, because at that very moment a shrill voice carried into the garden. “She can’t be dead! I was with her practically all day today. She was almost ready to—”

“Calm down. You need to calm down, now,” a man said, drowning out her words, but the woman kept talking.

“Just. Today!” She didn’t seem to realize that everyone who dies had been alive just moments before, so the fact that Nell had talked with the woman shrieking in the street earlier today wasn’t anything unusual. In fact, I figured the sheriff would want to talk to everyone Nell had spoken with today in hopes of gathering some clues about what had happened.

A low voice countered the shrill one that was still ranting just beyond the entrance to the yard. As she calmed down, a flicker of recognition flitted through me.

“It’s a mistake. It has to be. Josie’s wedding . . .” The voice trailed off as a man and the woman stepped through the archway, framed in the moonlight. I recognized her immediately. She’d been with Nell practically all day today—right here at Buttons & Bows.

“Karen!” Josie stumbled across the gravel pathway toward the couple, tear streaks glistening on her face in the moonlight. They fell into each other’s arms. She still had her cell phone pressed to her ear, and I couldn’t tell if she was talking to the person on the other end of the line or to her bridesmaid.

Whether Karen was holding Josie up, or Josie was holding Karen up, I couldn’t tell. I felt like an intruder on Meemaw’s porch, watching Nell’s friends grieve for her. “She was only thirty-five,” I heard a muffled voice say. Mama and I looked at each other. Tears pricked behind my eyelids. It didn’t matter how old Nell was. Her life was over far too soon. She was just a couple of years older than me, and I felt like I’d hardly even started living.

What was it that people said these days? Thirty was the new twenty, and forty was the new thirty. My whole life was ahead of me, just like Nell’s had been just a few hours ago.

“Thirty-five,” I muttered, shaking my head. Mama rested her hand on mine and squeezed, seeming to understand the thoughts circling through my head. Looking at Josie and Karen, and at Nell’s body, still being photographed by Madelyn Brighton, seemed to put everything into perspective. Life, after all, was fragile.

The man with Karen looked a little like a young Robert Duvall, complete with balding head and watchful eyes. He had to be Karen’s husband.

Josie’s spine suddenly stiffened. “Oh!” She pulled away from Karen and quickly raised her cell phone back up to her ear. “Sorry, Mrs. Kincaid,” she said, listening, then speaking, then listening some more. “Yes . . . I know, but . . . I can’t.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “But Nell’s dead!”

She looked at the ground, cupping her hand over her eyes as she listened to Nate’s mother on the other end of the phone. The tall man with Karen hunched his shoulders and whispered in her ear. I felt as if I was in the middle of a movie. The characters were bleeding with emotion and I was on the outside looking in.

“They should postpone the ceremony,” my mother said under her breath. “A wedding on the heels of death is sure to bring bad luck.”

I didn’t always believe her superstitions, but this one actually made sense. Starting a new life as another one ended felt disrespectful, though it was the natural order of things.

“No . . . yes . . . you’re right,” Josie said into her phone, a new calm slipping into her voice. Karen grabbed her wrist in support.

I held my breath, thinking she might gather up her gumption to postpone, but she didn’t. She kept her gaze down and nodded. “Okay,” she finally said and disconnected the call.

“Ms. Cassidy.”

Mama and I both stiffened as Sheriff McClaine came up the walkway. Josie, Karen, and the Robert Duvall look-alike startled and stared up at us. They’d had no idea we were here, I realized.

Josie’s eyes were wide and spooked. She raked one hand through her hair, staring at us, then at the sheriff. She shoved her phone into her pocket as Hoss McClaine walked up the porch steps.

Mama took her hand off mine and gave a barely perceptible nod.

“Ma’am.”

“Sheriff.” Mama looked out into the garden. “Quite a tragedy.”

“Yes, ma’am, it is.”

I looked from Mama to the sheriff and back, wishing I knew what each of them was thinking. Were they hiding a relationship?

After a long twenty seconds, he turned his lazy gaze to me. “Harlow.”

“Sir.” I felt like we were playing chicken, and if I blinked, I’d lose. “It’s been a long time.” Though not near long enough. I’d been back in town for less than two months, but when I’d been a resident here, that was probably the longest stretch of time I’d ever gone without seeing the sheriff—he’d hauled me into the station too many times to count on two hands. “Who do you think did this?”

The look he gave me sent me reeling back to when I was eighteen and he’d brought me home after catching my friends and me tipping cows or that time we’d been busted for climbing Bliss’s water tower. Slipping back into adolescent roles was easy in a small town, especially when you’ve had a few brushes with local law enforcement. I had a momentary feeling of doubt about coming back to Bliss.

His gaze was steady and unyielding, but I couldn’t figure out why he was staring so intently at me. “Can’t say quite yet, ma’am,” he said, finally answering my question.

Mama flicked her chin at the sheriff’s notebook. “You have some questions for us, Hoss?” He barely had a chance to acknowledge her before she continued. “That girl’s been murdered. Guess you’d best do your job and figure out who did it.”

“Guess I should at that,” he said. The side of his mouth quirked up, just a hint, and I got the distinct impression that he liked my mother’s fiery personality. “Anybody see Ms. Gellen today?”

Mama shook her head no, but Josie nodded from the bottom step, breaking down with another sob. Karen’s husband draped his arm over his wife’s shoulder as she, too, nodded.

“We were all here. Except Mama,” I said. “Josie, Nell, Karen, Ruthann, and me. I was going to make her bridesmaid dress.”

He jotted something down in his little notebook, writing slow, just like he did everything else.

“Is that all?” Mama asked after he’d asked a few more questions.

“I do have some questions for you,” he said, turning his gaze my way, but he stood there another few seconds doing nothing.

“Well, are ya waitin’ for a written invitation?” Mama demanded, but there was a little gleam in her eye and I suspected she was playing up how aggravated she was for my benefit.

The sheriff flipped a page in his notebook and tapped his pen against it. “Where were you earlier tonight?” He scanned the porch with lazy eyes, but I knew they were taking in every last detail, right down to the spool of azure thread sitting on the white-painted window frame and my sketchbook on the little table between Mama and me, opened to the drawing of Josie’s wedding dress.

“I’ve been here all day. Mama’s been here since, what . . .” I looked at her. “Seven forty-five?”

“Sounds about right,” she said.

I’d put a little extra emphasis on the word “Mama,” but he didn’t react. Cool and collected—that was Hoss McClaine. Which just made me wonder what in tarnation Mama was doing sneaking around with him in the first place. She deserved somebody who’d take her out on the town—or at least on the town square. Hiding—whatever it was they were hiding—wasn’t enough for Tessa Parker Cassidy. She deserved better.

He lifted his gaze to me. “What were you doing here with your mama, Harlow, while Nell Gellen was being strangled in your yard?”

From the tone of his voice he may as well have been commenting on the lovely weather we were having. It couldn’t be more than seventy-five degrees, a beautiful, mild Texas night in April. But even though his voice was calm and he tipped his cowboy hat back all casuallike, I got the feeling he was suggesting something else, like maybe I had something to do with Nell Gellen being—

It took a few seconds, but I finally found my voice. “She was strangled?”

He gave one slow nod. “By the looks of it.”

“She was waiting on me!” Josie blurted, stumbling up the porch steps and tripping on the last one. I lunged from my rocker and caught her, stopping her from landing on her knees on the splintered wood. “I’m getting married and Harlow’s making my dress,” she said as I pulled her up. “Only . . . only . . .” She sobbed. “Only not Nell’s dress now . . .”

Time was on the sheriff’s side. He waited while Josie dried her tears, and then he continued calmly as if there hadn’t been a break in the conversation. “What time did y’all leave the shop here?”

“Nell drove me home around four o’clock,” Josie said.

“Ruthann and I left together right around the same time,” Karen added from the bottom of the steps.

“That’s Ruthann McDaniels?”

A small-town sheriff tended to know everyone. Hoss McLaine was no exception.

Karen nodded. “That’s right.”

“And none of you saw Ms. Gellen after that?”

“She dropped me off at home,” Josie said. “That’s the last . . . the last . . . the last time I saw her.” She broke down with another sob. “W-we were supposed to meet b-back h-here.”

Karen held a clump of tissues to her face, quietly crying. With my peripheral vision, I saw that Madelyn Brighton had made her way around Nell and was now crouched on her other side. Every few seconds, a flash of light lit up the already artificially bright yard. All I could think of was that Madelyn was going to end up winnowing down seven hundred corpse shots of Nell.

We all turned as a car screeched to a stop just behind the sheriff’s car. I couldn’t see the make, but by the sound it made, even when coming to a quick stop, it had to be expensive. A woman hurried through the flower-covered arbor. “Josie?”

Mrs. Lori Kincaid, Nate’s mother. She’d changed clothes since her visit to the shop this afternoon. Gone was the sophisticated cream-colored sleeveless summer frock she’d been wearing. It had been replaced by gray slacks, a white oxford blouse, and a prim cardigan. This was a rich woman’s
It’s nine o’clock at night and there’s an emergency
outfit.

She put a comforting arm around Josie’s shoulders. “Come on, now, pull yourself together.” It was a gentle command, and it did the trick. Josie gave a final sniffle, wiped her eyes, and stood stoic.

Impressive.
That
was power.

“This here’s a crime scene, folks.” Sheriff McClaine’s accent was thick, like gravy on biscuits.

“Not to mention a private property,” Mama added stiffly. She didn’t like all these people hovering around her childhood home.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the flower head on a weed waving in the yard, growing before my eyes. I flashed a quick look at my mother. “Stop it!” I hissed.

She frowned at me. “What?”

I jerked my head to the right. She stuck her chin out and narrowed her eyes like she was trying to figure me out. “You have a twitch, Harlow Jane. What’s wrong with your neck?”

“Nothing’s wrong with my neck!” I lifted my chin this time, trying to get her to look at the garden without alerting anyone else.

She finally looked in the direction of the two-foot-tall black sunflower and the cluster of weeds surrounding it. Her eyes grew round. None of that growth had been there moments before.

“Mama,” I whispered, a good warning in my voice, “you pull it together.”

“Ohhhh,” she murmured. She fisted her hands and relaxed her face. I looked back at the weeds. They were still . . . and didn’t seem any taller. She’d gotten it under control, but not before another flash of light from Madelyn Brighton’s camera went off.