Read A Dress to Die For for Free Online Page A

threatened or daunted. She didn’t blush or shy away from confrontation, and in that moment, Laura loved her mother with a prideful passion.
    “The interior was brought to me on a form,” Mom said. “I draped the shell on it, and I will tell you now, the sewing on the garment I saw in that show was not couture. The shell I sewed and the beads I attached were done to the highest standards, interior construction notwithstanding. Anyone who knows anything could see something isn’t right here.”
    They were having a standoff. Laura was glad she’d come. “I’m wondering if there was a switch at some point. How did the delivery happen?”
    “I already went over this with the police,” Bernard said.
    Laura noticed him looking at her mother a little longer than normal, as if he wanted to memorize her face before it went away forever, and though it made Laura highly uncomfortable, Mom either didn’t notice or didn’t care.
    He took a binder out of a drawer and put it on the coffee table. “It came on an unmarked truck, in a box, on the form.” He opened to a page featuring the princess of Brunico at her husband’s inaugural ball. Her face was cut off at the middle of her toothy smile, which seemed odd. But still, she was vibrant and beautiful, with long dark curls falling over her shoulders. It must have been late in the party, because her smile was too easy for the first hours of photographers and formality, and her body was twisted as though she were on her way to another dance or a long-coveted fresh drink. She was a girl at the best party of her life, wearing a forty-thousand-dollar saffron-orange gown.
    “See the cuff button?” Mom pointed. “Flush to the fabric. It came in two pieces. You sew the first part on and then snap the dome on top. Did it with my own hands. And that button last night? Drooping.”
    “Is it not possible that over the course of years, the thread loosened and the button drooped?”
    Mom held up her chin. She was sticking to her story.
    Bernard, however, was sticking to his. “The dress was kept in a closet, a very crowded closet, in the Iroquois building for the past twenty years. It is possible that it was worn in that time by someone who was not the Princess. It is possible the button fell off in that time, and it is possible it was sewn back on improperly. It is also possible there was a deterioration of the thread in that time that could have caused the button to droop. As you can imagine, the dress was not kept in an archival setting. We had no control over it beforehand, except a visual check at the Iroquois apartment, but I assure you, we took sweat samples from under the arms. The Royal Society of Sciences in Brunico reported that the DNA was a match.”
    That was lovely. Laura enjoyed the fallacy that people like Princess Philomena of Brunico didn’t sweat. “Okay.” Laura stood up from her chair. “We’re sorry to have bothered you.”
    “It’s no bother,” Bernard said as he walked them to the door. “I’ll be leaving town once this is settled. I hope I see you again before then.” His smile was sincere, and he touched Mom’s shoulder, as if he had earned the intimacy.
    “I’m sure we’ll be around,” Laura said.
    **
    Mom’s neck got a few inches longer and her chin a centimeter higher once they were half a block away from Bernard’s place and safely on Madison Avenue.
    “Did you meet him before?” Laura asked.
    “Not that I remember.”
    “He seemed awfully familiar with you. Like he knew you.”
    Mom waved Laura’s concern away. “This is not finished. The entourage stayed at the Iroquois. Something’s going on.”
    “Mom, it’s totally finished. We have to get that dress back into the exhibit ASAP. Like, faster. It looks bad for Jeremy.”
    “Give me a break. There’s ‘how things look,’ and there’s Jeremy. Maybe I’d be concerned if I thought he was worried, too.”
    “Don’t change the subject. The dress is going back up. I have no