Elizabeth Lynn Casey - Southern Sewing Circle 10 - Wedding Duress (4 page)

“No, Mrs. Brady hasn’t rung me up . . .”

And judging by Rose’s face the previous night, the hurt Leona’s actions had birthed went far deeper than any simple “I’m sorry” could ever erase.

A flash of movement snapped Tori’s attention back to Beatrice and the chair the nanny was in the process of reclaiming. “Okay, Mrs. Johnson, I’m sitting just as you asked . . .”

Tori exchanged a curious glance with her friends only to look back in time to see the nanny’s face contort in confusion.

“Miss Gracie? Yes, yes, of course I’ve spoken with Miss Gracie . . . Luke and I spent time with her and the Brady children at the park this afternoon. We all met there after school to play. We pushed the kids on the swings, played a few rousing rounds of Simon Says and Follow the Leader, and then made a lavish birthday cake out of sand to celebrate the arrival of the teddy bears Miss Gracie brought for Reenie, Kelley, Sophie, and even Luke.Yes, we had a wonderful day.

“Yes, of course it is a day I will always remember with Miss Gracie . . .”

With nary a look exchanged between them, six resolute bodies stepped forward in silent solidarity just as the muffled voice on the other end of the line grew even more muffled.

“
Dead?
” Beatrice shrieked as she shot upward onto her feet once again. “What do you mean, Miss Gracie is—”

Dixie’s horrified gasp echoed around the circle just before Beatrice’s phone hit the ground and five sets of arms lurched forward to keep their young friend from doing the same.

It was nearly eleven o’clock when Tori walked into her room, dropped her cell phone on her nightstand, and flopped onto her bed, exhausted. Yet even as she let her eyelids drift closed for one glorious moment, she knew sleep would elude her for hours to come.

Beatrice’s heartbroken wail at the tragic news of Miss Gracie’s passing had known no end as Tori held her close, assured Mrs. Johnson she would see their nanny home, and even stayed beside the young woman’s bed until sleep temporarily silenced the pain.

She’d shed countless tears herself as she returned call after call from the Johnsons’ driveway before finally heading home, each sewing sister’s voice mail–delivered concern for Beatrice only serving to highlight Leona’s silence.

“
Why
, Leona?” she whispered as she stared up at the
ceiling. “
Why
do you insist on showing this awful side to everyone around you?”

Grabbing her phone off the nightstand, she clicked on her message center and noted the zero next to her voice mail box.

Maybe Leona was still smarting from her sister’s words . . .

Maybe Margaret Louise, Georgina, and the rest of the crew had been too hard on her . . .

Maybe—

Tori sat up tall and scooted herself backward until she was flush against the headboard.

No. What Leona did to Rose was wrong—horribly, awfully wrong, and she deserved to be called out on her behavior. Leona’s lack of concern for Beatrice was a separate issue entirely, and one that bared a second and, perhaps more thorough, chastising at the very least.

But that was for another day. When she had more energy and staying power . . .

Looking down at her phone once again, she scrolled through her contacts until the smile she desperately needed found its way across her mouth. Pressing the call button, she held the device to her ear and hoped against hope her soon-to-be husband was still awake.

Her wish came true on the second ring.

“Hey there, beautiful, how was your meeting?”

She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her free arm around them, releasing a long-held sigh as she did. “We never really got to have one.”

“Oh?”

“Miss Gracie is dead.”

A momentary pause in her ear gave way to a more
alert-sounding Milo. “Miss Gracie? Why does that name sound familiar?”

“Because you heard it the other evening. When we were at the park together.” Tori rested her chin atop her knees and tried to block out yet another mental encore of Beatrice’s cry. “Miss Gracie was Beatrice’s governess when she was a little girl in England, remember?”

“The one who was coming here to be the Bradys’ new nanny?” Milo clarified.

“Yes. Miss Gracie arrived yesterday morning as planned. Beatrice and Luke met her at the airport, drove her here, and got her settled at the Bradys’.”

“What happened?”

“From what Chief Dallas was able to tell us, it appears as if she lost her footing at the top of the basement stairs and tumbled all the way to the bottom, hitting her head multiple times in the process.” Tori closed her eyes as she recalled turning down the Bradys’ road with a sniffling Beatrice in the passenger seat. The pulsating emergency lights up and down the Bradys’ driveway had intensified Beatrice’s cries on sight. “Beatrice insisted we stop there as soon as she heard, but fortunately, Miss Gracie’s body had already been removed. I think it would have destroyed Beatrice to see her that way.”

A long, low whistle permeated her ear just before Milo’s deep voice. “You’re probably right. Wow. I’m so sorry to hear this, so sorry Beatrice has to go through this. Is there anything I can do for her?”

“Hmmm . . . that does seem like the normal response when someone you care about suffers a loss like this, isn’t it?” She released her legs, stretched them across the top of her bed, and wiggled her toes back and forth, the
motion doing little to alleviate the knot of tension she felt building inside her body. “Everyone called and left a message on my phone at some point while Beatrice and I were at the Bradys’. Dixie, Georgina, Melissa, Debbie, and Margaret Louise—they all called. Even
Rose
, who wasn’t at Georgina’s when we first heard about Miss Gracie, called to see how Beatrice was doing and whether there was anything anyone could do, you know?”

“Okay . . .”

“Everyone except Leona, that is.” She cocked her head against the edge of the headboard and stared, unseeingly, at the ceiling once again, the irritation she’d felt prior to calling Milo beginning to resurface at an alarming rate. “She not only stayed silent when the call came in, she also failed to check and see how Beatrice was after we left.”

“Leona has never been good with sympathy. You know that, Tori. She probably just didn’t know what to say amid the initial shock, and then, after you took Beatrice home, maybe she thought it was best to give you space to focus on Beatrice rather than a potentially bothersome phone call.”

She swung her feet over the edge of the bed and worked to keep the irritation in her voice under control. “No. That’s not it at all. Leona was pouting because her sister and a few of the other ladies called her out on the way she humiliated Rose on that precious Cable TV show of hers last night.”

“Oh, no. Tell me she didn’t.”

“I wish I could,” she answered simply.

“Why didn’t you tell me this when we talked last night?”

“Because I was far too angry to speak about it coherently.”

“I guess that’s understandable.” He took a deep, audible breath and then released it slowly. “So everyone came down on her pretty hard for it this evening?”

“You could say that. In fact, I’ve never seen Margaret Louise that angry before and, I suspect, neither had Leona. She actually seemed to think we should all just laugh it away as if she did nothing wrong. But we couldn’t. She hurt Rose deeply . . .”

A second, longer pause finally gave way to Milo’s yawn-peppered words. “I’m . . . sorry, Baby. Excuse the . . . yawning. I’ve had a really long day, and you’ve obviously had a long night, so why don’t we call it quits for now and get some sleep? We can talk more about this tomorrow, okay?”

A siren somewhere in the distance held her agreement at bay for several seconds and sent an inexplicable shiver down her spine. “Do you hear that?” she asked.

“Hear what?”

“Another police car.”

“Yeah, actually, I do. Hang on . . .” Seconds later, Milo returned to the line with another yawn-dotted report. “It wasn’t a cop car. It was an ambulance, heading out for a call based on the direction it was going. Now get some sleep, okay? I need you in tip-top shape when we get married in twelve days.”

“Twelve days,” she echoed in a whisper. “Can you believe it?”

“I can, and I can’t wait.”

She savored the genuine joy that elbowed its way past all residual anger at Leona and inhaled deeply. “Neither can I. I love you, Milo.”

“I love you, too, Tori.”

“Sweet dreams, I’ll talk to you—” Their standard good night died on her lips as her gaze fell on the answering machine and its blinking red light atop her dresser on the other side of the room.

“T-Tor-i?” he yawned. “Is everything okay?”

She waved a dismissive hand in the air and then realized her mistake. “Everything is fine, Milo. I just realized I have a message on my house phone. I’ll check that when we’re off and then get some sleep. I promise.”

“Good. Sleep well, my love.”

When she heard the line disconnect, she stood, walked across her bedroom, and pressed the play button.

“Good evening, dear, it’s me. I thought about calling your cell to check on how Beatrice is doing, but I didn’t want to take the chance it would come in at a bad time. So I’m calling this line instead. Give me a ring regardless of how late you get home and let me know how she’s doing, all right? I’m worried.”

“Worried,” she repeated aloud as the message ended and the tape rewound. “Well, I suppose that’s a start.”

Retracing her steps back to her nightstand, she grabbed hold of her phone once again and dialed Leona’s number, any and all mental preparation she did for the call a waste as six rings came and went, unanswered.

“So much for wanting to know,” she mumbled.

Tori wheeled the cart down one row after the other, stopping every few feet to return the morning’s take from the book depository to its proper homes.

The Vault
by Emily McKay in Young Adult . . .

Hearse and Buggy
by Laura Bradford in Mystery . . .

Summer Moon
by Jan DeLima in Urban Fantasy . . .

Book by book, she made her way through the library, the necessary yet largely mindless task providing the perfect opportunity to clear her head before she got to work on the expenditure report she was due to give at Thursday’s library board meeting. Once that was completed, it would be on to finalizing the next quarter’s programming for everyone from toddlers to senior citizens and all age groups in between.

It promised to be a challenging day under normal circumstances. The fact that she’d tossed and turned
throughout much of the four hours of sleep she’d managed to get only made it seem all the more daunting.

The Art of Floating
by Kristin Bair O’Keeffe in Women’s Fiction . . .

For the umpteenth time since she walked out of her home an hour earlier, she found her thoughts straying from Beatrice’s tragic night to Leona’s verbal lynching and back again, the previous evening’s events still hovering in the vicinity of surreal.

“I thought
I
looked tired when I looked in the mirror this morning. But compared to you, Victoria, I look like I slept two nights’ sleep in the time span of one.”

Tori looked up from the final book on her cart and found the closest thing to a smile she could for her trusty assistant, Nina Morgan. “I take it Lyndon is still working on that new tooth of his?”

Nina nodded, her dark eyes widening. “I thought the bottom teeth were tough when they broke through, but the top ones? Wow. He’s just been howling with the pain each night.”

Tori pushed the cart down the aisle and shelved the final title, the instant regret over doing so making her laugh. “I almost wish there were another twenty or so titles to put away just so I could procrastinate from the budget report a little longer. Sad, isn’t it?”

“More like understandable, if you ask me.” Nina leaned her shoulder against the end of the closest shelf and folded her arms across her chest. “So is that why you look so tired? Knowing you had to put together that report today?”

If only it were that simple . . .

To Nina, though, she offered a half shrug. “I don’t know, maybe that was part of it on some level . . .”

“And the rest?”

Abandoning the cart, she claimed the shelf directly across from Nina while wishing, instead, for a chair. “Beatrice’s governess, from when she was a little girl herself, fell down a flight of stairs last night and died.”

Nina’s quick and audible intake of air mentally transported Tori back to the previous evening’s sewing circle meeting and the moment the young nanny was given the news. “How awful!”

She nodded along as Nina continued to deliver all the appropriate responses about a woman neither of them had ever met yet cared about simply because of the common denominator they all shared.

“Is Beatrice holding up okay? Is she flying back to England to attend the funeral?”

“Miss Gracie fell here, in Sweet Briar,” she explained as her focus returned to the present. “She’d literally arrived here the day before, to be the Bradys’ new nanny.”

Nina covered her generous mouth with her hand and closed her eyes briefly. “That must have been what that siren was about late last night. It woke Duwayne and me from a sound sleep.”

“No, Miss Gracie fell
early
in the evening—sometime before our sewing circle meeting started at seven.” She thought back to her own late night and the siren that had interrupted her conversation with Milo. “As for the siren I think you’re talking about, I heard it, too, and Milo said he saw an ambulance go by his house as we were talking on the phone. I guess it was just a busy night in Sweet Briar.”

“It sure sounds like it. Wow, I’m so sorry for Beatrice, and the Bradys. A new nanny was sorely needed in that house, I’ll tell you.” Then, realizing she’d said too much,
Nina pulled her hand from her mouth and waved it in the air. “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. Please forgive me, Victoria.”

Tori pushed off the shelf and stepped closer to her friend. “Stop. It’s just the two of us here.”

“I still shouldn’t—”

“No, please, why did you say that? About the Bradys needing a new nanny?”

Pulling her own shoulder from its resting spot against the opposite shelf, Nina shrugged. “Because the last one they had paid no attention to that little girl. In fact, every night after a lap sit program, I’d go home and tell Duwayne it was only a matter of time before that little girl got hit by a car or fell down a hole or some other awful thing.”

“By that little girl, you mean one of the Brady kids, yes?”

“The youngest one, Sophie.” Nina inhaled deeply then let it release slowly through her nose. “Such a pretty little thing, Victoria—curly blonde hair, bright blue eyes, and a smile that lifts her cheeks high every time I start reading a book in story time.”

“And this former nanny wasn’t terribly good?”

“More like horribly awful.” Nina shook her head with obvious disgust, her normally calm eyes darkening with restrained anger. “She spent more time texting and playing games on her phone than she did taking care of that baby. And when she
did
have to look up, she wasn’t happy about it. Like Sophie being excited to show her something was such an inconvenience, such a tragedy.”

“Beatrice pretty much said the same thing about this girl. Only Beatrice’s stories involved the Bradys’ other two girls.” She sighed then gestured toward the information desk and the daily task list she’d compiled before the
reshelving had begun. “I guess we better get back to work. Sadly, that budget report won’t write itself no matter how much I wish it would.”

“Take it to your office.” Nina placed her hand on Tori’s arm and smiled. “I’ll hold down the fort out here. When it’s quiet, I’ll see how many of the other things on your list I can get done, okay?”

She covered Nina’s hand with her own and squeezed, eliciting a smile from her friend that surely matched the one creeping across her own face. “You’re a godsend, Nina Morgan, an absolute godsend.”

*   *   *

She plugged in the final numbers on the quarter’s expenditures and pressed print, the responding whir of the printer as it sprang into action on the other side of her office akin to the sweetest lullaby she could imagine at that moment.

Two hours and a few dozen invoices and receipts later, she was ready to face the board members and any and all questions they could possibly ask about the financial aspect of the library over the past three months. She’d also included a page or two detailing their expected expenditures for the final quarter of the year.

“One dragon slayed,” she mumbled to herself as she took in the clock and noted the time she had left to tackle the program calendar. If she put her mind to it, she could get everything done before it was time to join Nina for the day’s assorted closing duties.

But even as she pulled out her folder of confirmed authors and patron suggestions, she knew she needed a moment or two to properly transition from the number
side of her brain to the creative side. With any luck, a second call to Leona would do the trick.

She pulled the desk phone within easier reach and punched in the familiar number as her mind raced ahead to all the things she wanted to say.

First, she needed to acknowledge that Leona had, in fact, cared enough about Beatrice to leave a message on Tori’s home voice mail.

Second, she wanted to know if anything Margaret Louise or Georgina or any of the rest of their sewing circle members had said the night before had gotten through to Leona on any level.

And finally, if it had, she wanted to know if Leona had called Rose to apologize for her egregious behavior Sunday night . . .

Holding the phone tight to her ear, she silently counted each ring—one, two, three, four, five, six.

No answer.

Disconnecting the line momentarily, Tori, instead, punched in the woman’s cell phone in the event she was working at the antique shop or batting her false lashes at every eligible bachelor in town.

Once again, she counted—one, two, three, four, five, six.

This time, Leona’s voice traveled through the line, her recorded message dripping with the kind of sex appeal one might expect from a twenty-four-year-old hottie.

“Hello there, you’ve reached Leona. I’m sorry I missed your call but I’m out enjoying life in the way it’s meant to be enjoyed. Leave your name and number and maybe we can enjoy it together for a little while.”

Tori rolled her eyes, cleared her throat, and spoke
slowly into the phone. “Leona, it’s me, Victoria. I got your message last night about wanting me to call regardless of what time I got back from looking after Beatrice, but you didn’t answer. Call me when you get this and I’ll fill you in on whatever you want to know.”

Setting the phone back on its cradle, Tori allowed the sudden sparkle of her engagement ring to momentarily push all negative thoughts from her head. In eleven days, she would don her wedding dress for real, take her bridal bouquet in her hands, and make her way down the white runner to stand beside Milo and become his wife.

“Milo’s wife,” she whispered as a smile played across her lips. “Milo’s. Wife.” Twisting her hand to the left and then the right, she marveled at the way the light caught her diamond.

“It’s a pretty ring, that’s for sure.” Nina took a step into their shared office and then stopped. “And it won’t be long before there’s another one alongside it.”

She pulled her hand back toward her chair and grinned up at her assistant. “Sometimes, I wish the next eleven days would hurry up and go by just so I could look at Milo and say, ‘I do.’ But then, at other times, I remember all the things still on my list. Like stopping by the jewelry store and picking up the rings, for starters.”

“You’ll get it done. You always do.” Then, sweeping her own hand in the direction from which she’d just come, Nina lowered her voice so as not to be overheard by anyone other than Tori. “Beatrice is up at the information desk and asking to speak with you. She doesn’t look good, Victoria. She doesn’t look good at all.”

Tori shifted her focus to the folder on her left and tried
not to think of the solid hour or so of work it represented—work she needed to get done before she could even think about tackling the ever-growing personal list of to-do’s she’d jotted down over breakfast. She was getting married in eleven days. Not only did she have wedding stuff to take care of, she also had to make sure all of her
i
’s were dotted and
t
’s crossed at the library before leaving for her week-long honeymoon.

But still, it was Beatrice . . .

She tried not to let Nina hear her sigh as she pushed the folder farther to the side and nodded. “Okay. Send her back.”

“You’ll get everything done, Victoria. I know you will,” Nina repeated before she disappeared down the hallway toward a waiting Beatrice and the library’s main room.

Minutes later, Nina’s shy smile and dark hair was replaced by an even shyer, sadder smile and Beatrice’s red-rimmed eyes. Tori pushed her chair back from the desk and came around to greet her friend.

“Oh, sweetie, you’ve been crying again, haven’t you?” She pulled Beatrice in for a hug and did her best to hush away the sniffles and hiccups the gesture stoked to the surface once again. “Shh . . . shh . . . I’m here for you, Beatrice . . . I’m here. I know you’re hurting.”

Slowly, Beatrice stepped away, wiped her eyes, and tried to speak. “Miss G-G-Gracie is—is d-dead be-because of m-me.”

Tori gasped. “Because of you? No, no, that’s not true, Beatrice.”

“Y-yes it is. She—she c-came be-because of m-me. If I had not rung her up, she—she would not be d-dead.”

“Beatrice, you can’t do this to yourself. She came because she
wanted
to come.” Wrapping her arm around Beatrice’s heaving shoulders, Tori guided the nanny to the folding chair alongside her desk. “No one—not you, not Miss Gracie, not anyone—could have known she’d lose her footing on the stairs. It was an
accident
, Beatrice, a tragic, horrible
accident
.”

Cries turned to sobs as Beatrice dropped onto the chair and laid her head atop Tori’s desk. “I—I just can’t understand why in b-bloody hell she—she fell,” Beatrice wailed. “M-Miss Gracie w-was always so—so sturdy . . . so . . .
aware
.”

“Accidents happen, Beatrice,” she soothed. “Even to people who are sturdy and aware. That’s why they’re called accidents, sweetie.”

“And if it wasn’t?” Beatrice asked between sniffles.

She stopped her hand mid–back rub and studied the side of her friend’s face. “If it wasn’t what?”

Lifting her head from the surface of Tori’s desk, Beatrice plucked a tissue from a nearby box and wiped the tears from her cheeks with a hurried hand. “An accident.”

“Beatrice, you’re not responsible for what happened to Miss Gracie. Sure, you called and told her about the nanny position for the Brady family, but it was ultimately her decision to come and take the position. You didn’t force her to say yes. And you’re not the one who made her lose her footing on the stairs yesterday evening. It just happened, Beatrice . . . like
accidents
happen.”