Free Tulle Death Do Us Part by Annette Blair Page B

larceny?”
    “Here in Connecticut? The difference is in the value of the items taken. If those are diamonds, and that’s not a wooden shoe with a weight in it, our thief is a felon.”
    Werner didn’t know the worst of it, like a possible death bydrowning, aka murder, but I didn’t know yet if Robin had gone missing that night or made it to shore.
    Seam rippers and pin tucks, I was ashamed that I didn’t even know Robin’s last name.
    “How much money do you think is in the box?” I asked.
    “Count it,” Werner said, his fingers flying over the computer keys. “Wait. Found something here.”
    “Read it out loud.”
    “Looks like a cash box was stolen from the cloak room during the country club’s twenty-fifth anniversary, or Silver Jubilee.”
    I shook my head. “You mean the Golden Jubilee.”
    He raised his hands from the keyboard, turned on the wheels of his I’m-the-boss chair—so big, it doubled as a throne—and looked down at me like I might be a lowly peasant. “Madeira? What makes you so sure it was the fiftieth?”
    I scrounged for an answer that made sense. “Ah…that piece of fabric.” Like the one the box was wrapped in and I lost, I did not say.
    Whew. He bought it.
    What do experts on body language call an instantaneous reaction, the look that escapes before one can school one’s thoughts? Micro expressions, that’s it. And it was too late to pull mine back; I knew it had been filled with shock to hear about the twenty-fifth.
    “Madeira Cutler, what do you know that I don’t?”
    Oh. He didn’t buy it after all.

Ten

    Only self-appreciation is allowed in the fitting room. Praise your curves and give thanks for those fantastic legs.
    — JANIE BRYANT,
THE FASHION FILE

    The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Mystick by the Sea Country Club did not compute, according to my vision. Unless, as I stood in Bambi’s shoes, I had not been given the same box my construction boss found in my attic, but I assumed it was the very same, because it sent me there.
    Could the cash box I was given have been a different one? Or had the box in the belly of the whale been stolen at the twenty-fifth, and, ah, perhaps re-stolen on the country club’s fiftieth? Was taking the cash box some kind of generational privilege, a rich, entitled-family tradition? Theft, really?
    Surely computers would put period to the possibility of stealing a cash box at the centennial at least. People would pay by credit. So why didn’t they at the fiftieth in 1973? Surely credit cards were in use, though I remember Dad saying once that “the average Joe” didn’t start abusingthem until the early eighties. Then again, people who belong to country clubs aren’t average Joes, are they? They would have been using Diners Club cards since the fifties. But my dad’s generation was likely too smart to fully embrace the death of solvency. Perhaps.
    “Madeira, I’m waiting for an answer.”
    I sighed. “Scavenger hunts, real ones, were tradition, weren’t they, in the old days? Passed down from one generation to the next? A rite of passage? Maybe that same box was stolen repeatedly—”
    Werner tilted his head like I might have grown horns. “With the same old money in it?”
    “That doesn’t compute, does it? That way it isn’t stealing, is it, if you don’t spend the money?”
    Werner went to his window to look out toward the Mystic River. “It’s still stealing, if you keep it.”
    “Right, and if it was tradition, it might be stored for that very purpose.”
    “Too valuable,” Werner said. “The large bills are old enough to have been used at the country club’s opening thousand-dollar-a-plate event. Or maybe it was five hundred dollars a plate back then, and somebody paid for two dinners with the thousand dollar bill?”
    I got up to cross the room, open the closet, and get a mint from my jacket pocket. Stalling for time. Showing off my legs, giving Werner a look at the wings on my Giselle, Lady Double You