Praise for
Pleating for Mercy
“Enchanting! Prepare to be spellbound from page one by this well-written and deftly plotted cozy. It’s charming, clever, and completely captivating! Fantasy, fashion, and foul play—all sewn together by a wise and witty heroine you’ll instantly want as a best friend. Loved it!”
—Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity award–winning
author Hank Phillippi Ryan
“Melissa Bourbon’s new series will keep you on pins and needles.”
—Mary Kennedy, author of the Talk Radio Mysteries
“Cozy couture! Harlow Jane Cassidy is a tailor-made amateur sleuth. Bourbon stitches together a seamless mystery, adorned with magic, whimsy, and small-town Texas charm.”
—Wendy Lyn Watson, author of the
Mystery à la Mode series
“A seamless blend of mystery, magic, and dressmaking, with a cast of masterfully tailored characters you’ll want to visit again and again.”
—Jennie Bentley, national bestselling author of
Mortar and Murder
“A crime-solving ghost and magical charms from the past make Pleating for Mercy a sure winner! The Cassidy women are naturally drawn to mystery and mischief. You’ll love meeting them!”
—Maggie Sefton, national bestselling author of
Unraveled
Also by Melissa Bourbon
Pleating for Mercy
A Fitting
End
A MAGICAL DRESSMAKING MYSTERY
Melissa Bourbon
Copyright © Melissa Ramirez, 2012
All rights reserved
For Sophie…
and Kym Roberts
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much thanks to my critique group, where I am mostly MIA: my pal, Kym Roberts, Tracy Ward, Beatriz Terrazas, Jill Wilson, Kim Quinton, Mary Malcolm, Marty Tidwell, Wendy Lyn Watson, and Jessica Davidson. Cheers to October at the Lake House! To Kerry Donovan, Jesse Feldman, the artists, and the amazing team at NAL for making this book better. To Holly, for your continued support. And for my family… because of everything.
Chapter 1
Every small town has its traditions. Bliss, Texas, is no exception. We have your typical holiday parades and summer concerts, sure. But the big deal on the annual town calendar in Bliss is the Margaret Moffette Lea Pageant and Ball. Or the Margaret Festival, as the locals call it. The event used to be one of the dividing lines between the haves and the have-nots in our small town. If you weren’t a Margaret, you were a have-not.
I was never a Margaret.
Which meant it was a funny twist of fate that I’d been hired to make dresses for a few of this year’s debutantes.
I was back in my hometown after being away for more than fifteen years. I’d inherited my great-grandmother’s house on Mockingbird Lane and had turned the front section into Buttons & Bows, my custom dressmaking boutique. My great-grandmother’s spirit was alive and well and keeping me company, although effective communication with her was a might dicey and difficult. The best thing, though, was that after years of thinking the Cassidy family legend (a charm bestowed upon the women in my family by our ancestor Butch Cassidy’s wish upon an Argentinean fountain long ago) had skipped over me, I now knew that it hadn’t.
I had magical dressmaking abilities.
Which meant that when I created dresses for people, their wishes and dreams, both good and bad, came true. Unfortunately, my charm was relatively new to me and didn’t manifest on command. I needed a needle, thread, and a real sense of who a person was before it seemed to work.
“That’s not a stage,” I said, pushing my square-framed glasses up on the bridge of my nose and staring in dismay at the raised wooden walkway running through the center of the Bliss Country Club’s event room. “That’s a catwalk.”
“And it’s a big one.” Josie Kincaid, née Sandoval, stood next to me. We both frowned at the four-foot-wide, twenty-eight-foot long, five-foot-tall T-shaped monstrosity. As a former New York fashion designer, I knew my catwalks, and this one was the granddaddy of all runways. It was lit with summer runway splendor. Floor lights were already installed along the edges, while bright intelligent stage lights stood like sentries to the gray carpeted platform. Mrs. Zinnia James, chair of this year’s pageant, had clearly spared no expense. She’d just directed her dollars in the wrong direction.
A charge of mischievousness shot through me. I looked at Josie. She looked at me, a glimmer in her eyes. And without a single word, we both scurried to the steps leading up to the stage. I dropped my sewing bag, and with one more look at each other, followed by determined nods in unison, we sashayed down the wooden runway, sucking in our cheeks, pouting our lips, and swinging our hips the way any model worth her salt would do.
At the end, we stopped to pose. “Oo-la-la.” Josie gave a little hip wiggle before sashaying back down the runway. “The room’s nice,” she tossed over her shoulder.
“Yeah, it is.” Celebrating Sam Houston’s presidency of the Republic of Texas was an annual monthlong event, culminating in the debutante ball that would take place in this very room. Bliss’s finest families, all primed and dressed to the nines, would watch their daughters make their formal entrance into polite society.
“You’re a natural,” I said, following her back down the catwalk. “You sure you were never a Margaret?” Of course I knew Josie had never participated. Neither one of us had the pedigree. Josie came from a working-class, immigrant mother, and I was descended from an outlaw. Not quite debutante material.
“Positive,” she said. “But my daughter, if I ever have one? She’ll be a Margaret.” She whirled around and wagged a finger at me. “Which reminds me. I want you to pencil that in. Little baby girl Kincaid. Margaret dress. Date unknown, but whenever she’s sixteen, I want you making her dress. Deal?”
I eyed her stomach. Josie was shorter than me and curvy in all the right places, but I didn’t detect even the slightest bit of a baby bump. “Josie, you’re not—?”
She waved away the very idea. “Not yet. Give a girl a chance to be married for a few months, would you?”
I laughed. “Take all the time you need. Rest assured, baby girl Kincaid, sixteen plus years from now, will have a gorgeous Margaret gown handmade and hand-beaded by Harlow Cassidy.”
I’d been commissioned to make three dresses this year—at a cost of nearly fifteen thousand dollars each and with a nice profit built in—including one for Zinnia James’s granddaughter, Libby. The wealthy residents of Bliss spared no expense for their daughters’ pageant gowns. The first two dresses were done, and I was thrilled with how they’d turned out, but I was struggling with Libby’s.
And being summoned to the club by Mrs. James was interfering with my precious sewing time… time I couldn’t afford to squander.
“Right,” Josie scoffed. “You’ll be so famous for your couture clothing that my poor baby girl’s gonna have to get her dress made by one of the Lafayette sisters. They’re old now. In sixteen years, they’ll be ancient.”
I didn’t want to be famous. Able to make a comfortable living doing what I loved—that was my goal. “They still look good, but sixteen years is a long time. I’ll save the date for your not-yet-conceived daughter.”