Free 10 Lethal Black Dress by Ellen Byerrum Page A

in D.C. And they
never even got rid of the chair Mariah died in. The Death Chair sailed around
the office from desk to desk like a ghost ship, an oaken Flying Dutchman on
wheels. It always seemed to wind up back near Lacey’s cubicle.
    But what happened to Courtney?
    “The biggest question right now is the dress,” Lacey said.
“How did a dress that I suspect was made in the early Forties, or maybe the
late Thirties, happen to have a lining dyed a color supposedly not used since
the late nineteenth century?”
    “They stopped using Paris Green?”
    “Long ago. After people found out how dangerous it was. I
think maybe they still use it in fireworks, things like that, but not in
clothes.”
    “You’re the fashion seer. What do you think?”
    “It looked like part of her series on vintage clothing. She’d
been wearing a different vintage outfit for each story. I need to view all those
video clips, I only saw a few on TV. They sounded suspiciously like they were
cribbed almost word-for-word from my articles and columns in The Eye .
However, Courtney reminded me last night that ideas are not copyrightable.”
    “In other words, it was okay to steal your stuff and change a
few words.”
    “Basically, yes.”
    “She sounds like a lawyer, not a reporter.”
    “I’ve never seen anything quite like that Madame X dress of
hers,” she mused. “Where did it come from? And where is it now?”
    “With her personal effects. It might go back to her family.
Unless the M.E. hangs onto it.”
    “Champagne stains have to be taken care of right away. It’ll
be ruined. No one will want that dress now.”
    “You’d like to look at it, wouldn’t you?”
    Lacey peered out the window. “I don’t know that it could tell
me anything. But I’d like to see it.”
    “It will keep. If there’s a way to see it, you’ll find it. I
have a better question on this beautiful day. When are we going to get your
engagement ring?”
    “My what ?”
    Weddings were in the air all around them. Lacey’s friend
Stella Lake had finally married Nigel, the man of her very specific and unusual
dreams, despite all the odds against it. Brooke was paired up with Damon, again
a dream that only Brooke could have dreamed. Felicity and Harlan, Marie and
Gregor Kepelov. And Vic Donovan had proposed to Lacey, in the least likely
circumstances she could ever have imagined. She stared at her left hand, which
was still bare.
    “You heard me.” Vic was smiling. “We need a ring for that
hand.” He wants to go ring shopping?
    “What’s the hurry?” she asked.
    “Darling, we’re not getting any younger. I want to rock you down
the aisle without a walker. When I see a ring on your finger, I might start to
believe it’s real. You have a history of fleeing men who ask you to marry
them.”
    “One time! Gee whiz. That was all.”
    “One time, but you went two thousand miles!”
    “Only eighteen hundred. Or so. And I was fleeing a terrible
town!”
    Lacey ran away from Sagebrush, Colorado, and the cowboy—correction, rancher— who proposed to her. It was a small town. People talked. Vic
always made a bigger deal of it than it really was. Maybe.
    “It’s time to set up a home, Lacey,” he said softly. “You and
me. Together.”
    And shop for a ring? It was things like that—setting up house
together—that terrified her. Vic reached for her hands. The feel of his hands
warmed her skin, her heart, her soul. Lacey felt at home with Vic, without the
need to set up house. Not just yet.
    It was funny how love complicated things and simplified them
at the same time. Perhaps it was because she feared losing her independence.
Yet when she thought of Vic, she felt so at home with him. However, he had more
money, a more stable career, a family business. She’d never be able to match
him dollar for dollar with her reporter’s salary.
    What if the newspaper folded and she couldn’t find another
job? Papers were in a precarious position everywhere and The