Free A Custom Fit Crime by Melissa Bourbon

enough. I’d thought it wasn’t enough for me . . . until I came back home. Now it filled me to the brim.
    “What are you saying, Sheriff?” I asked, needing him to say it in plain English.
    “I’m sayin’, Harlow, that you might well have had a murder take place in your shop. I ain’t so sure that man died of natural causes.”
    Oh Lord. My instincts had been right on the money. “Are you sure?”
    “We won’t be sure until the doc finishes the autopsy. But in the meantime, we’re runnin’ with this. Don’t touch anything. We’ll be back to process the shop. In fact, Harlow, go on out on the porch, why don’t you?”
    He’d asked all nice and pleasantlike, but the truth was, it had been an order. He didn’t want me to mess anything up, just in case he was right and we were dealing with something sinister.
    “Harlow,” he scolded. “You have a habit of pokin’ your nose into things, and you’d do well to stay out of this one. Let us look into it. Got it?”
    “Sure thing, Sheriff,” I said, the discomforting feeling of a daze washing over me. Murder. Right here in Buttons & Bows. Not only was Michel Ralph Beaulieu dead, but my fashion design business might be dead right alongside him.

Chapter 8
    “How are they going to do an article on three Dallas fashion designers when one of them is dead?” Nana put in words the question I’d been asking myself since the day before. Deputy Gavin McClaine had come back and inspected my shop from top to bottom. If he found anything, he hadn’t revealed it. But what he had said was that no one—not Lindy Reece or Quinton the photographer, not Jeanette, not Midori, not the models, not Orphie, and not any of the Cassidy women—was to step foot outside Bliss’s town limits.
    We were all possible suspects in the murder of a top local fashion designer Michel Ralph Beaulieu. The Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had both picked up the story. Reporters had swooped into town to conduct impromptu interviews and to report on the suspicious death of one of Dallas’s own right in front of 2112 Mockingbird Lane. This was not the kind of notoriety I wanted for my shop, but this was the kind I kept garnering.
    “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. Everyone who’d been at Buttons & Bows the morning before was being questioned, and even people who hadn’t been at my shop—like the models who’d been dropped off at Seven Gables before the rest had descended on my shop— were under the microscope.
    “The good thing is that the D Magazine people can’t leave,” she said. She scurried around rinsing out glasses, tucking herbs back into the spice drawer, shoving cereal boxes back into the cupboard, and balling up a used piece of plastic wrap. A murder in her granddaughter’s house and her daughter marrying the sheriff meant she was all a-flutter inside. Nervous energy that she was channeling in my kitchen.
    Orphie took out the broom, starting at the far end of the kitchen. I followed her with the dustpan. “Maybe if they stay around long enough, they’ll help figure out what happened,” I muttered to myself. “If he was really murdered.”
    “Right. And maybe,” Nana said as Orphie knocked the bristles of the broom against the floor, “they’ll find something else to write about here in Bliss that’ll dull the blow of the death.”
    Ever the optimist. “I’m not holding my breath about that.” I had the sinking suspicion that the editor would offer the journalist a kill fee on the article and the whole thing would be a no go. After all, they’d have to figure out how to spin it without Beaulieu involved, and the fact was, he was a big name in Dallas fashion. The article, without him, would feel lacking somehow, like a mouth with a tooth suddenly gone.
    Despite my skepticism, I had to go forward as if it was still a go, but I also had other things to work on, namely Mama and Hoss’s wedding. My father, Tristan Walker, had been true to