Lord almighty, I really had brought the violence of New York City back with me to Texas.
Gina, the college student who seemed to live at Villa Farina, was like a sight for sore eyes. Her two-toned black-and-red hair was pulled back into a ponytail, little curls sticking to her hairline from the early-morning heat and her proximity to the kitchen, where hot ovens were going throughout the day. The buildings on the square were old, drafty as hell, and inefficient as all get-out. “Y’all are up and out early this mornin’, Harlow.”
Gina’s looks belied her soft nature. Drop her in Jersey City and she’d fit right in… until she opened her mouth to speak and her Texas quirk came out. “Y’all” was her standard word, something only a true Southerner could understand. “I’ve been over to the country club.” I leaned in, a thread of guilt winding through me. I wasn’t an inherently gossipy person, but anxiety at another murder in Bliss had formed a knot in the center of my gut and telling someone else about it might help unwind it. “There was a murder.”
“No,” she said, her voice barely a breath. She glanced over her shoulder, then over mine. No one was in line behind me. “Who?” she asked.
“Macon Vance—”
She gasped. “The golfer? N-no, really?” Her already pale face drained completely.
I nodded. “The place was a madhouse. The local news was there, and tons of looky-loos.”
Her voice dropped to a low whisper. “How?”
I lowered my voice to match hers. “He was stabbed.”
Her hand went to her heart and she turned a little green. “Did they arrest anyone?”
“Not yet,” I said, secretly praying Mrs. James and I would steered clear of the county jailhouse.
She sucked in a deep breath, recovering her nineteen-year-old composure. Death was hard to take, I thought, no matter the age. “A lot of suspects, I bet.”
I blinked. “You think?”
Instead of answering, she waved another clerk over. “I’m gonna take five. Can y’all cover for me?”
The teenage boy smirked. “Yeah, Gina, I think I can handle the crowd.”
Right, since the crowd was all still at the country club.
Gina rolled her eyes as she came around the end of the glass pastry-case counter. She grabbed my arm and dragged me to a little round table in front of the café. She snuck another look around the bakery before focusing on me. “You never heard the gossip about him?”
I shook my head. I’d been back in Bliss for a few months, but it took more time than that to get caught up on the rumor mill.
One side of her mouth angled down in a lopsided frown. “The way I hear it around here is that he makes—I mean, made—a lot of lonely housewives happy and a lot of absent husbands less missed.”
“Ah,” I said, a lightbulb going on above my head. “So Macon Vance was a golf pro in the”—I cleared my throat—“tennis pro sense. Got it.”
“Everyone knows it.”
I looked around the shop. Did they all know about Macon Vance’s extracurricular activities? And if they did, why hadn’t he been run outta town on a rail?
There were a few familiar faces, some of whom I’d seen at the Kincaids’ big fund-raising gala a few months back. I recognized Mrs. Eleanor Mcafferty, streaks of blond highlights prominent in her severely pulled back hair, sipping a frothy coffee drink with the über pulled-together Mrs. Helen Abernathy and a third woman I’d never seen before. A man and a woman whispered together in the corner. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place her. A group of men I recognized from the golf club this morning stood on the sidewalk outside the shop’s front window, but I couldn’t put names to their faces. A few sprite teens, up mighty early for a summer day and looking awfully distraught about it, sat at a round top, a plate of croissants between them.
“Everyone?” I asked.
She nodded her head, brows pulled together into a V. “Everyone. I can’t believe y’all hadn’t heard that.”
“I’ve been holed up making clothes.”
“Right. For the Margaret Ball, I hear.” She waved her hands. “Not my thing.”
I smiled. “Wasn’t mine, either, but the gowns are beautiful. Is there anything you don’t hear, Gina?”
“Nope.” I would have expected a little smile from her. Instead, her already thin lips drew into an even thinner line. “So they really don’t know who did it?”
I didn’t blame her for feeling anxious. A murderer was on the loose—not a comforting thought. But I sensed there was something else Gina wanted to say. I put both my palms against the tabletop. “What’s wrong?”
She paled again, looking downright pasty. “I was just wondering if…” She trailed off.
“Wondering what?”
After a glance over her shoulder, she leaned closer and whispered, “He was in here yesterday, talking on his cell phone.”
“Uh huh,” I said, knowing there had to be more.
“Not talking, exactly,” she said. “More like arguing. Really loud. It didn’t sound good. He didn’t sound good.”
“Do you think it might have something to do with the murder?” I asked.
She shrugged her bony shoulders. “I guess I don’t really know. Sh-should I, like, talk to someone?”
“If you think you know something…”
She made a face. “Like the sheriff? He doesn’t like me, not since I rammed a bunch of mailboxes when I was, like, sixteen. He holds a grudge.”
Been there and done that.
Gavin McClaine’s smug face popped into my head. “There’s a new deputy in town,” I said, sounding like I was quoting a line from a Western movie. Not that he’d be much better than Hoss McClaine, but I kept that thought to myself. Gavin and his dad were both single-minded, passionate, and direct to the point of being rude, but Hoss McClaine was good at what he did, and the apple doesn’t usually fall far from the tree. I was betting Gavin was a fine deputy, just like his daddy.
“How ’bout I tell y’all and you decide if it’s worth sharing?”
My hands pressed harder against the table. I couldn’t believe I was getting sucked into another murder. Did Meemaw curse me? When she was alive, whatever she wanted, she got. That had been her Cassidy charm. Had she wanted me thoroughly wrapped up in Bliss’s small-town dramas? Was that why, for the second time since I’d been back home, I found myself in the thick of a murder investigation?
I shook my head. “Gina, I’m just a dressmaker—”
“But the scuttlebutt around town is that you helped figure out what happened to Nell Gellen.” She threw another glance around the bakery. The line at the counter had grown and the buzz of conversation had grown right alongside it. “Dang it all. I gotta get back.”
“Okay—”
She raised one hand, and just like that, I stopped. “Just listen,” she rushed on. “I know who Mr. Vance was talking to.”
“You mean arguing with?” I asked.
“Right. On his cell phone. Look—you know I’m adopted, right?”
I nodded. I had heard the story about her adoption from my mother. Gina’s biological parents had made an arrangement with her adoptive parents before she was born. They’d already had four children, and Gina was just one too many. If she drove a few towns over, she had four siblings who hadn’t been given away. Poor thing.
The women sitting across from us threw their heads back and giggled, their high-pitched laughter just a little bit grating this early in the morning, especially in light of the murder; though in their defense, they might well be ignorant about Macon Vance. It wasn’t just me. One or two of the teenaged boys looked just as aggravated by the laughter.