She took my elbow, guiding me down the steps of the church. We turned and walked along the sidewalk toward the bead shop.
“So why don’t you trust him? Ted Mitchell, I mean.”
She took a moment to consider her words before responding. “Besides his career choice? Did you ever see The Godfather?”
I smirked. “Oh, yeah. My brother’s all-time favorite movie. I’ve probably seen it a hundred times. I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” I said, barely moving my lips, doing my best mumbled Marlon Brando.
“Nicely done.” She chuckled. “It’s a classic.” We walked half a block in silence before she said, “Jeb was right. I don’t really know him, so I shouldn’t say a word.”
I felt a but coming.
“But . . .”
Ha!
“. . . with the Kincaids being an oil and gas family, I can’t help but think of Tom Hagen. Remember him?”
Remember him? I could hear Don Corleone’s adopted son, played by Robert Duvall, in my head as he said, “Sonny . . . ?”
We crossed the street at the corner. Mrs. James’s high heels slowed her down. I filed away the observation so I’d remember to recommend a low heel to go with the gown I designed for her. “Ted’s a bit taller, and has more hair than Tom Hagen,” she said, “but he has the same blind loyalty.”
I never figured the Kincaids as a Mob-type family but it would explain why Ted Mitchell was on duty at the funeral instead of comforting his wife. The lawyer knew who buttered his cornbread.
Seed-n-Bead was already crowded when we arrived. Josie waved to me from inside. Even from this distance I could see how drawn her face was. It looked like she’d lost ten pounds since she’d first set foot in Buttons & Bows. Her dress was going to need altering and I wasn’t even finished with it yet. “Best be fixin’ to work on it to the very last second,” Mama had said after she’d caught a glimpse of Josie in the church. If there ended up being a wedding.
A group of people walked around Mrs. James and me, filing into the shop. The senator brought up the rear. Mrs. James said good-bye to me, took his arm as he approached, and they went in together.
Ted Mitchell strode up the sidewalk, Karen scurrying along after him, taking twice the number of steps that he did. “The same loyalty,” Zinnia James had said, comparing Don Corleone’s lawyer, Tom Hagen, to Ted Mitchell. The image stuck in my mind. What else did I know about him? So Ted worked for the Kincaid family. At Karen’s insistence, he’d helped Nell write a will. If his loyalty to Keith Kincaid extended to Keith’s sons, then maybe meeting with Nell about a will was just an excuse. If the family had gotten wind of the pregnancy, maybe he’d really been trying to intimidate Nell to stop her from revealing it.
On the evidence of how’d they treated Miriam during her divorce and what Will had said about the Kincaids, it was a safe bet that they would not want Nell’s secret coming out.
Just a few yards shy of reaching the door to Seed-n-Bead, Ted answered his cell phone and abruptly changed course. With a quick, dismissive wave to Karen, he darted into the street, dodged a truck, and cut across to the grass in front of the courthouse, phone still pressed to his ear.
I made a split-second decision and dashed across the street after him.
Chapter 41
Ted Mitchell disappeared around the north side of the courthouse. I slowed. Barreling around the corner in funeral attire might be a little obvious. Surely not how a private eye would do it. Of course I was just a dressmaker, but being the great-great-great-granddaughter of Butch Cassidy and Texana Harlow meant adventure was in my genes.
I was doing a fast walk now, jabbing my glasses back into place and blowing upward to get the spirals of hair out of my face.
I turned the corner and stopped short. Whirling around, I scanned the courthouse green. Where in tarnation did he go?
“There you are,” a man said loudly just as a hand clasped my elbow. “I thought you weren’t coming.”
I tried to shrug free, but the grip tightened. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I looked up into Will Flores’s face. “What are you talking—”
“Shhh!” he interrupted, never breaking his stiff smile. He lowered his voice. “Are you crazy, following Ted Mitchell like that?”
“How did you—”
“Darlin’, you’re about as inconspicuous as a copperhead at the beach.”
My confidence deflated. Being a descendant of Butch Cassidy didn’t mean my reconnaissance skills rivaled his during his primo train- and bank-robbing years. “What’s going—”
He pulled me to him until not a puff of air could have slipped between our bodies. “Pretend like you’re happy to see me,” he whispered.
The short, staccato squeeze of his arms zapped the air from my lungs and cut me off. His warm breath through my hair tickled my ear. “I’m saving your ass, that’s what’s going on,” he murmured. “You don’t want to mess with Ted Mitchell. He works for the Kincaid family, and if he thinks you’re snooping into their business . . . Let’s just say it wouldn’t be good.”
He released me and I pushed away from him. From the corner of my eye, I saw the flash of Ted Mitchell’s eyes looking at Will and me as he crossed the street. “What’s over there?” I asked after he disappeared behind a closed door.
I started to point at the space next to a vacant space on the square, but he gently pushed my hand back down to my side. “Not pointing at his office would be a good idea. I’ll lay money down that he’ll be watching us from his window.”
I started to turn my head to look, but he caught my chin with his fingers, tilting it up until I looked in his eyes instead.
“Don’t quit your day job,” he said.
I’d been married to my sewing machine and the fashion world for so long that there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d quit designing. But it also meant I hadn’t remembered what it felt like to be this close to a man, and it was throwing me for a loop. My fluttering heartbeat turned my thinking upside down. In a movie, this would be the moment when the hero lowered his head until his lips lightly brushed the heroine’s in a long-awaited kiss.
This wasn’t a movie. There was no kiss.
Will dropped his fingers from my chin, put his hand at my lower back, and started guiding me back to Seed-n-Bead. When we were out of Ted Mitchell’s potential line of vision, he stopped walking suddenly. Facing me, his black suede cowboy hat blocking the sun from my eyes, he demanded, “Cassidy, just what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Chapter 42
“It’s possible it was a married man,” Mama whispered. “She was awfully secretive about it.”
“You mean an engaged man.”
“Someone who was already taken,” she amended.
I’d avoided Will’s question and he’d escorted me back to the reception, leaving me at the door. He headed to the hardware store to buy some wood glue so he could finish repairing Meemaw’s antique shelf while I went in search of my mother. Now we huddled in the corner of Seed-n-Bead, talking under our breath.
I showed her the ring and told her my theory that Nate might well be Nell’s killer. One by one, I ticked the facts off on the fingers of my left hand. “First, he was in Buttons and Bows that day, so he could have taken something to use as the murder weapon. Second, Nell’s mirror. I found it in my yard, all scratched up. She must have had it with her the night she died. Maybe she was hiding that, too.”