Tulle Death Do Us Part Read Online Free PDF

Sleuthing always did, and all I needed to see, in its full backlit glory, was a color shot of a gown with a gather of peach and white with that rare chevron striped design appliquéd to it, over an embroidered crepe silk peach gown.
    I looked down at the box on the floor beside me and knew—I just knew—that the paler version of chevron stripes on silk moiré-a-pois belonged to that very special petticoat, the one designed—and hand-stitched in Paris, I believed—to be worn beneath that very special haute couture gown.
    So…at least one petticoat piece had never been mailed back to Vainglory’s mother.
    The existence of the box, in a place that had been an abandoned building at the time, might also indicate that none of the “borrowed” treasures had ever been returned.
    How many other trinkets, as Vainglory had called them, and Golden Jubilee outfits were still out there, and what kind of stories did they have to tell?
    If I said yes to my father and Aunt Fiona, would I learn more guilty secrets from that Golden Jubilee scavenger hunt, or had my first trip to the past been an isolated vision?
    If that gown with the chevron stripes came to me—to judge now, or at the ball later—I might be able to find out.
    I hadn’t wanted to be a judge because I didn’t want my customers to feel I had favorites. I didn’t want to risk alienating any of them. Also, I’d disliked my vision; the people in it; their cavalier, entitled attitudes; the lack of respect for the rights of others.
    Essentially, I did not want to sleuth the forty-year-old country club event. I’d bet the club had seen more than their fair share of bored-rich-kid scavenger hunts over the years. I just wondered how many had ended in the loss of a life.
    Yet, more than I disliked the scenario, I wanted to know if a Vassar swimmer named Robin had survived the sea on one particular stormy night. And I definitely wanted to know what, or who, caused her to jump into the briny deep in the first place.
    So, I thought, how could I do worse? For a donation to the Nurture Kids Foundation, I might also find the unknown slimeball who’d led Robin to plunge into the ocean, and bring him to justice.
    I sighed. “Dad, Fiona, I will judge the vintage formal wear contest for you. I won’t like it, but I’ll do it, if”—Iraised a finger—“you let me see the research on your
This Is Your Life
candidates. Give me that option, and I’ll even be on the panel to judge the rest of the outfits on the night of the event. That’s my only request.”
    “Done,” Aunt Fiona said while she and my dad high-fived each other.
    “How romantic,” I remarked with snark.
    Oh, the look they gave each other; it warmed a daughter’s heart.
    I think for a minute they forgot I was there, but I had plenty to occupy my mind.
    It seemed too much of a coincidence, I thought, all of this happening at once. But we live in a wily universe, we do; a real schemer. All kinds of things happening that we don’t understand or believe. Spirits of loved ones walking about, nudging us to go on, holding us when we cry. Past and present colliding and, more often than not, going so far as to knock us about. Then the spirits help us get our heads on straight again.
    So much we don’t know.
    Maybe the love of vintage clothes—their histories in particular—started me on this path when, at the age of ten, I refused to give my dead mother’s clothes to a secondhand shop like my dad wanted. Maybe with that I set my mom’s legacy free. Who knows?
    Maybe my dad and Aunt Fiona found each other because she offered to store my mom’s clothes, which were the items with which I would begin my vintage shop. Maybe Aunt Fee had started the hand of fate manipulating psychic ripples in the universal waters of life. Like a rock tossed into a lake, the circles had grown bigger and reached me today in theform of a box, whose wrapper I touched and to whose past I journeyed, where I’d seen the box’s wrapper as