Read Online A Fitting End: A Magical Dressmaking Mystery by Melissa Bourbon - Free Book Online

her father is. Boy, I know what that feels like.”
    “Wait.” My mind whirled as I connected the dots. “He has a kid who doesn’t know he’s the father?”
    She shrugged, but she didn’t look unsure. “That’s what it sounded like.”
    “Do you know who it is?” I prompted when she didn’t offer anything else, but she shook her head. I paused, then asked the big question. “Who’s the mother?”
    She snorted. “Take your pick.”
    Right. The golf pro who got around.
    After a minute, Gina lowered her chin. “You look like you have an idea,” Gina said, her chin lowered, lips pouty.
    I pressed my fingertips between my tense eyebrows. “I do?”
    “Yeah, you do.”
    “I don’t. No ideas.” But as she scraped her chair back and started to stand, I decided to share my suspicion. “Unless…”
    She plopped back down. “Unless what?”
    “You said he made lots of unhappy housewives happy, right?”
    “Right.”
    “So what if he had an affair with a married woman and she got pregnant. That’s a pretty good reason to be kept out of the child’s life, right?”
    A dollop of color returned to Gina’s cheeks. “Hey, Harlow, that’s pretty good.” She sat up straight, looked off to the side like she was giving my idea considerable thought, but then she shook her head. “So then some angry woman, the mother of his child, stabbed him?”
    “I don’t know…” Unless a woman was particularly strong or had the element of surprise, it seemed unlikely that stabbing by scissors would be the method chosen for murder. Which meant…
    “The husband,” we both said at the same time.
    “If only we knew who his daughter is—
was?
No, is—,” Gina said, “we’d know who the pretend father is, and
voila
! We’d catch a murderer.”
    If only it were that easy.
    “I gotta get back,” she said. She scooted behind the counter and made my iced coffee. Moments later I waved, heading back into the heat. I had Margaret gowns to work on, Gracie’s pedigree to write, and family history to sort out.
    What I did not have was a murder to solve.
    Somehow it consumed my thoughts anyway.

Chapter 7
    My old farmhouse has been in the Cassidy family since Meemaw was a little girl. Now here I was, back in Bliss after a long, grueling stint as a minion in a New York City fashion empire. Just driving up Mockingbird Lane from the square sent a wave of comfort through me.
    The driveway ran along the left side of the house. I parked Meemaw’s beat-up old truck under the row of possumwood trees, climbed the back porch, iced coffee in hand, and entered the house through the kitchen. The Dutch door, along with the buttercup retro-styled appliances, were my favorite features of the house. Meemaw had had an eye for style and she’d always known what she wanted. The vintage stamped metal bodies of the stove, dishwasher, and refrigerator made the kitchen the most welcoming room in the house. Next to my sewing workroom, I spent most of my time right here.
    But not today. Instead I headed straight for the workroom, but as I passed the staircase, I heard a series of grunting sounds, followed by a loud thump, that echoed through the house. I stopped short. My first thought was that Meemaw was up to no good, rattling the pipes or some other such ghostly activity, but the sounds cameagain and the hair on the back of my neck rose. Men. My heartbeat revved. There were
men
in my house.
    I didn’t have anything valuable except a legendary and elusive trinket Butch Cassidy had supposedly sent to Texana Harlow, my great-great-great-grandmother, but no one had ever seen hide nor hair of it, so who knew if it even existed.
    Panic raised goose bumps on every ounce of my flesh. Frantic, I searched for a weapon, trying to stay calm, but this was Bliss. I dealt with armadillos, snakes, and goats—not intruders. Maybe Bliss wasn’t as insulated as I’d thought.
    I spotted my collapsible umbrella in the corner by the front door. That was as good as