Read Online Raiders of the Lost Corset by Ellen Byerrum - Free Book Online Page B

mourners showing up in their casual Friday clothes or their barest black cocktail dresses, just because they were black.
    “Maybe we could all wear black ones. You know, like formal funeral corsets?” Stella looked so hopeful that Lacey didn’t want to crush her spirit with a dose of conventional good taste. All Stella had learned from reading Lacey’s columns was that if you wore clothes to express who you really were inside, you were in fashion and all was forgiven. Stella liked to broadcast her inner vixen through her clothes. Lacey realized that the “dress-to-express” side of her message resonated with Stella’s rebellious little inner vixen, but the other side of the message, the “dress-to-respect” side, wasn’t what Stella wanted to hear.
    “Well, my own Magda Original corset is not exactly somber enough for funeral wear,” Lacey pointed out. “It’s baby-blue.” She groaned inwardly for giving in to Magda’s flattery and having a corset made in the first place. Where could she ever wear such a thing in Washington? And Stella couldn’t possibly imagine that Lacey would really wear a baby-blue satin corset to a funeral, she thought. Could she?
    “Michelle has three, Lacey, maybe you could borrow one.”
    That suggestion was even more alarming to Lacey. “Stel, it’s not really done, wearing underwear to funerals. Not without wearing something over it.”
    “But it’s for Magda! She’d understand.”
    “She’s French. Heaven only knows what she’d think.”
    “She’d love it!” Stella waved her glass at the waiter for another Pink Lady. “She’d totally love it. La Vie en Rose and all that. It would be like a tribute to her life’s work. Can’t you just see it, Lace?”
    Lacey sipped her blue champagne. She could see it all too clearly. A chorus line of corset-clad women, all shapes and sizes and colors, rocking Magda’s funeral like a late-night cabaret. They would be wearing berets and scarves and fishnet tights. Edith Piaf would be singing. Then Edith would toss them all top hats and canes and they would dance, like the Rockettes or the Folies Bergère. Would Magda rise up from her coffin and join the corseted chorus line?
    “I just want to do something nice for Magda. Everybody’s dying on me, Lacey. First poor Angie. Then that diva supermodel Amanda Manville. Now Magda!” Stella wailed. “What is it about me? I’m like some death magnet.”
    Lacey had asked herself the same question. “Don’t be ridiculous, Stella, you had nothing to do with any of those,” she said.
    “Coincidence.”
    “I can’t believe Magda is dead.” Stella gazed into her reflection in her fresh Pink Lady, as if to divine what fate it was that caused her friends and clients to die.
    “It’s not you,” Lacey said, wondering how to avoid the subject of Magda’s unknown cause of death. “She didn’t live a healthy life.”
    “That’s true,” Stella mused. Although Stella was in the dark about the lost corset, she was aware that Magda and Lacey were working on some kind of fashion story. “So I guess the big trip is off? The big story, corsets in French couture or whatever?”
    “No. France is still there. I’m still going and I’ll write some kind of tribute to Magda.”
    “Aw, that’s so sweet of you.” She downed some more of the Pink Lady. “Hey! I know. I could go with you!”
    “Uh, right. Okay.” Stella in her corsets and her sleek new look would no doubt dazzle them in Paris. Think fast, Lacey. “So, Stella, do you have a passport?”
    “Oh, hell, a passport! I knew there was something I’ve been meaning to do. Guess it’s a little late now.”
    “This time, yeah.” Lacey wasn’t about to tell Stella how to get an emergency passport application expedited. “But thanks for the offer. Next time.”
    Stella clinked their glasses together. “Deal, Lacey. Do you know how the old girl died? Stroke or something?”
    The question she had been trying to avoid now hung in the