A Custom Fit Crime (30 page)

“You mean tried to blackmail her like he did me?” Orphie interjected, coming through the dining room and stopping at the threshold of the kitchen, holding on to the wall at the entrance.

Will nodded and finished with “And she killed him?”

“It might coulda gone down just like that,” Gavin said.

The seeds! I pointed to the drawer, pushing down my disappointment at finally getting a glimpse of Meemaw after all this time only to have her vanish again. Soon. Hopefully I’d see her again before too long. “Look at those.” I’d seen Nana put the baggie away, not realizing at the time what it was. “Could that be the poison?”

Orphie gasped, a jolt of energy making her surge forward. Gavin sidestepped, blocking her, and then catching her when she stumbled back. He guided her to the table. “It’s evidence, baby. You can’t touch it.”

Baby? Wow, they had progressed quickly.

Her face contorted as she dragged her arm up, pointing at the drawer. “Somebody poisoned me with . . . with . . . that.”

I stared at her. She was all bowed up, as Granddaddy would say, and more than that, she was the wild card in the whole deck. The unknown. If Midori had killed Beaulieu, and it seemed plausible that she had, had she also been behind what had happened to Orphie? It was the only logical conclusion, but we still didn’t know why.

Seven Gables. It was fitting to break the news about Midori here given that seven sets of eyes were staring at me. The four models, Jeanette, Lindy, and Quinton stood in the parlor and I was the sole focus of their attention.

“Arrested?” Jeanette shook her head, one side of her mouth quirking in disbelief.

“Opium?” Lindy stared, wide eyed. “So he was right,” she muttered under her breath.

The attention shifted to her. “Beaulieu?” Quinton asked. He was a man of few words, but when he spoke, he cut right to the chase.

Lindy nodded, propping her black-framed glasses on the top of her head. I responded by straightening my own and pushing them up the bridge of my nose to sit more firmly. “He said her designs were off, and there had to be a reason why. His words,” she said, “not mine.”

I turned to the models. “You each commented on it. How the fit was wrong.”

Esmeralda was the first to speak up. “Totally wrong. The hemlines were, like, totally messed up and—”

“Wide,” Barbi finished. “Really, really wide. And they hung wrong.”

Lindy had pulled out her trusty pencil and notepad and was tapping the eraser end against her cheek. “So let me get this straight. Someone would cultivate the poppies for the drug and smuggle it in the imported fabric. Midori would then collect it, sew it into the hems of her runway designs, and then what?”

I remembered something Midori herself had said to me. “She donates her clothes right off the models,” I said. “That had to be her method of distribution. She gets a tax break and gets rid of the drugs all at once.” I dug my cell phone from my purse and texted Deputy Gavin McClaine. There were still missing pieces, but one by one, they were coming together.

Only her words as Gavin had arrested her still echoed in my head. She’d flatly denied having anything to do with Beaulieu’s murder, and with Orphie being poisoned.

I’d watched her being handcuffed and dragged away, fighting the whole time, tears staining her cheeks, her gaze meeting mine before Gavin placed his open palm on her head and guided her into his squad car. “I did not kill him,” she said to me before the car door slammed. “Please, listen to me. I did not kill him.”

I wanted to believe her.

I braced myself to dig a little deeper, thinking maybe I’d missed something.

But blackmail was a powerful motive, and if Beaulieu knew about her opium scheme, she had every reason to want to eliminate him from the picture.

Lindy set three glasses on the coffee table before sinking down onto the Victorian golden couch in the Seven Gables parlor, taking the pitcher of tea from Jeanette, and pouring. She sipped as Jeanette sat opposite us, laying her sketchbook on the table next to her glass. Her eyes were wide, still looking dumbstruck by everything that had happened. “And then there was one,” Lindy said. She frowned. “Sorry. Bad joke.”

But she was right. Beaulieu was dead. Midori was cooling her heels in the Bliss County Jail while awaiting a court appearance. And I was the only designer left.

“Not the way either of them expected it to turn out,” I said, turning off my cell phone and setting it on the couch next to my leg.

She gave a dry laugh. “No, I imagine not.”

“The article,” Jeanette started. “Are you still writing it?”

Lindy nodded. “I’m taking a different angle. New York fashion designer comes home to Texas and makes a name for herself and her town. It’ll showcase more of your fall collection,” she said to me.

I made myself smile. I didn’t want to be ungrateful, but the truth was, Beaulieu was dead and Midori was heading to prison. Not the way I wanted things to end up and certainly not how I wanted to end up as the sole focus of Lindy’s article. I’d rather have shared the spotlight with both designers, but I couldn’t change the choices either one had made—or the result.

“Michel always thought he’d end up on top,” Lindy said. “And Midori? I still can’t believe she could have killed him.”

“But I told you,” Jeanette said. “Who knows how many other people he had dirt on?”

“But here’s the thing,” Lindy said, looking at some invisible spot over my shoulder. “People thought he was stealing from other designers, but he always denied that. I started investigating that.”

I thought about the garments and sketches I’d seen since the designers had descended on Bliss. A few of Beaulieu’s resembled Midori’s. He’d had drawings of some of my designs in his pocket when he died. Madison’s—or was it Zoe’s?—dress at the wedding had similarities to Midori’s, too.

My eyes strayed to the coffee table, to the sketchbook lying there, and something tugged at my memory. It was the one Midori had had with her the day before when she’d come to Buttons & Bows with my maid of honor dress. Jeanette’s, she’d said. The same one that had a page torn out.

My breath caught in my throat. Midori’s words as she’d been led away repeated in my head.
I did not kill him.
What if she’d been telling the truth? She was guilty as sin with the opium smuggling, but did her crimes actually extend to murder?

“What if . . . ,” I started, but I trailed off, still making sense of this new idea. I was relieved to hear the distant sounds of someone bustling about in the kitchen. The creaks and groans of the old Victorian were disconcerting. The sounds couldn’t be attributed to Meemaw, and every noise felt like nails on a chalkboard as I tried to untangle the mess of threads surrounding all that had happened.

Lindy and Jeanette waited, Lindy tapping her pencil eraser and Jeanette’s foot swinging back and forth in a frenzied motion. “What if what?” Lindy asked.

I thought about the time frame of Beaulieu’s designs compared to Midori’s. “What if it wasn’t Beaulieu who was copying Midori?” I said slowly, wondering if it was possible. “What if Midori had copied his designs?”

Lindy smiled, nodding. “Possible.”

She had questioned the very idea that Beaulieu was the one stealing intellectual property. To her, I was definitely on the right track.

But Jeanette balked. “But you saw the dresses. They’re too close to not be stolen designs.”

“You said you and Midori just met recently, right?” I asked her.

Jeanette reached for her sketchbook and iced tea. “That’s right.”

Lindy’s chin snapped up. “No, that’s not right. I interviewed you both almost a year and a half ago for an article on Japanese fabrics when you were interning for her. And again about a month ago when I started investigating this article.”

Jeanette’s foot started moving faster than the wheel on a freight train. “Met her again, I guess. I didn’t know her well back then. You know how interns are treated,” she said, offering a self-deprecating smile.

One by one, small, seemingly insignificant details I’d overlooked began to take on greater importance. It was Jeanette’s dress that Madison had been wearing, and that I’d mistaken for Beaulieu’s work. I’d assumed that Beaulieu was stealing from Midori, but now something Meemaw said came back to me. Whenever I’d tell her about trouble at school and what different girls would say behind my back, she’d say, “There’s a lot of jealousy, ladybug, and quite often, what you hear and think is actually the opposite of the truth.” What if Midori and Jeanette had both been the ones stealing ideas from Beaulieu, instead of the other way around?

“You said you overheard his conversations about blackmail,” I said to Jeanette.

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, my hands cupped under my chin. “The page of my designs he had on him when he died . . . it was from your sketchbook, wasn’t it? Was he blackmailing you?”

She sputtered, shaking her head and saying, “No! Of course not!” but her shaking foot gave away her agitation.

“You did everything for him, didn’t you?” I’d been shocked by how she’d hurriedly stopped picking up the things spilled from her purse to take the magazine from Beaulieu’s hand. How he’d ordered her to fetch him water. “When you stopped for coffee on your way to Bliss, did you get it for him?”

She scoffed. “Of course. He didn’t want to step foot in a bourgeois coffee shop. I was his assistant. That’s what I did.”

The baggie of spices Nana had found and tucked away in my kitchen. I suddenly realized that they’d probably fallen from Jeanette’s bag when she spilled the contents. The murder weapon.

I continued to rearrange the ideas in my head, placing Jeanette at the center of everything instead of Midori. “He’d turned his blackmail to you, hadn’t he?” I asked her.

“You’d been taking his abuse. Being his assistant was far worse than interning for Midori. Did you know about her drug smuggling? Did you tell Beaulieu? Try to play his game and get the upper hand?”

A red splotch spread up her neck, turning her cheeks ruddy. Her knuckles turned white as they gripped her glass, and her lips thinned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she spit. “He was blackmailing her, but it had nothing to do with me.”

Lindy cocked her head to one side, as if she could hear every detail of what was transpiring better that way, filing it away for the article I was sure she planned to write.

“You copied one of his designs,” I said, thinking again of Madison’s dress. “Did he find out? Was he blackmailing you, too?”

She seemed to realize that she had no way out, and she also knew the police weren’t here at the moment. Anything she said now she could deny later. “He turned the tables on me,” she snapped. “Trying to blackmail a blackmailer isn’t so easy. He said he’d ruin me.”

Just as he’d told Orphie.

And just like that, my brain hitched. Not only had she killed Beaulieu, putting poison in the coffee she’d gotten for him on the way into Bliss; she’d also tried to kill my friend. This was the one thing I had no answer to. “Why did you poison Orphie?”

Her eyes skittered around the room, settling once or twice on Lindy before straying again. That was all it took for me to realize the truth. “Lindy invited Orphie here for tea to flesh out her interviews, but the poison wasn’t meant for her, was it?”

Lindy’s eyes narrowed from behind her heavy-framed glasses. She glared at Jeanette. “You intended to poison me?”

“The cups were switched,” she said tightly. “I asked Raylene which cup was for which of you, and when she had her back turned, I put in a little of the powder. But those stupid sisters switched them somehow. You drank the wrong one.” She shrugged. “After it happened, though, I thought it might give me another chance to look for Maximilian’s book.”

“Which you knew about because—”

“I knew everything Beaulieu had his hands in,” she said flippantly.

“And you wanted it to help you with the creative part of designing.” She’d told me that was her weakness. I’d seen her tailoring and sewing skill with Gracie’s sweetheart dress. It was the conceptualization she struggled with.

Lindy clamped her hand to her throat, staring at Jeanette as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. There was no remorse. No sense that she regretted killing Beaulieu, attempting to kill Lindy, and accidentally poisoning Orphie.

I gripped my own glass of tea in my hand, the beads of condensation dampening my skin. From the kitchen, I could hear the faint sound of Raylene’s west Texas drawl mixing with Hattie’s. I willed them to come to the door, hear what was going on, and call Gavin. But they didn’t come and their voices faded away as Jeanette spoke again.

“Have some tea,” Jeanette said, nodding toward the glass I held. “You look a little peaked.”

I
felt
pale and drawn and, frankly, more than a little frazzled. I’d already raised the glass to my lips, but stopped suddenly. Had she managed to sprinkle some of that poison powder into our tea?

“Oh God, you poisoned it, didn’t you?” Every bit of color drained from Lindy’s face. “Stupid. How could I have been so stupid?”

From the corner of my eye, I saw a movement at the registration desk. Either Raylene or Hattie. My skin grew cold and clammy, the breath leaving my body as I realized another truth. “It was you,” I said to Jeanette, my voice barely more than a breath. “You ransacked my shop to find Maximilian’s book.”

She sat there, still as a trapped lioness ready to pounce, but I kept going, slamming the glass of tea down on the table, the amber liquid sloshing over the edges. “Is this poisoned, too?”

“You should just leave well enough alone,” she said. “I like you, Harlow, but I like being free more.”

I stood, skirting away from the old-fashioned furniture and backing away. Lindy looked too pale to move. If the tea was poisoned, was it working on her already, or was she just stunned into immobility?

Jeanette’s hands clenched by her sides, she grew completely still, and I knew she was going to pounce. She did, moving with speed I wouldn’t have imagined she had. But she didn’t fling herself toward me. She bolted for the door, barreling through it, careening down the porch steps and across the flagstone pathway, and hurling herself into one of the cars parked along the curbside.