Chapter Fourteen
Belle
Belle and Beau had their costume fittings right after breakfast.
Beau’s fitting for a shirt, vest, and trousers took him all of fifteen minutes. Getting in and out of clothes with lots of buttons and hooks took considerably more effort from Belle.
While Beau went to meet Adam at the saloon to learn his new role, Belle used her fitting as an opportunity to give Pearl a checkup.
Pearl wasn’t exactly checkup averse, but she was busy and healthy and not overly interested in having a doctor confirm what she already knew.
Grady had been her doula with Linda and would be with this baby, too. Belle was backup. At best.
Nothing could ruin Belle’s good mood this morning, however. The last time she’d gone off the deep end like that she’d raided a liquor cabinet. This time she had Beau. He wasn’t a good influence at all, but he had great ideas.
“Get into that costume department and take what you want,” he’d said.
Belle couldn’t go quite that far. She still suffered guilt over stealing the Irish cream almost two decades ago. But telling a few little white lies? Everyone in Burning Scrub had been lying to her and she was still angry about it.
The costume department was crammed with racks upon racks of clothing and took up half of the town hall. Pearl had sewn many of the items from old patterns she’d collected. Others she’d bought from thrift shops and altered. Each rack was labeled alphabetically with the names of the residents.
One corner of the room was a dedicated workspace, with shelves from floor to ceiling stocked with notions and bolts of fabric, and three industrial sewing machines.
Pearl kept a handwritten wardrobe bible, crammed with photos and written descriptions of every stitch of clothing each resident of Burning Scrub wore, in a red binder.
She noted any alterations and mending required.
Belle stashed her blood pressure cuff in her medical bag.
Adam had gifted the bag to her when she first came to Burning Scrub, and she loved it.
Leather, with a wide mouth and a strong metal lock, Gladstone bags hadn’t changed much over the decades, and he’d had it filled with everything modern she’d need for simple house calls and minor emergencies.
“Everything’s normal,” she said.
Pregnancy suited some women, and Pearl was their poster girl. She had two months to go, and while every pregnancy was different, Linda had arrived right on schedule and this baby most likely would, too.
“Great,” Pearl said, sounding less than surprised. “Let’s take a look at your costumes.”
Belle didn’t care what clothes she’d be given.
She had no plans to wear them. A few adjustments to a Sunday dress should be all that was required to turn her from helpless victim into shameless madam.
The only other thing needed to pull off the change was Pearl’s help to make the alterations, and that might not be easy.
They were friends, but Pearl was loyal to Benny and Mavis.
She’d known all along that Belle was related to them, and yet she’d said nothing.
So much for friendship.
Beau was right. She should take what she wanted.
But Belle made a show of following Pearl to the rack that held costumes meant for her.
She passed a mannequin sporting a brightly embroidered scarlet silk day dress with a neckline that plunged low enough to give Benny a stroke.
It was one of the harlot dresses that Belle had tried on.
Pearl was in the process of hemming the narrow skirt to raise it from ankle to midcalf.
She touched the rough silk, admiring the texture. Take what you want.
“These are for you,” Pearl said.
The two dresses she showed Belle weren’t ugly, exactly. One was plain gray, and the other, a pin-striped pink and blue. Both had high ruffled collars and long, boot-grazing skirts, and looked like something someone’s strait-laced grandma might have worn.
Belle felt the squeeze of injustice. Her mother, who was in her late forties, got to wear fun clothes and to play a fun role.
Meanwhile Belle, barely thirty, was expected to play the town prude who waited faithfully for her lazy husband to return from the mines.
And who got kidnapped while picking berries.
Again. Beau was right.
But Belle wouldn’t steal. She had something less conscience-tweaking in mind.
“The dresses are lovely,” she said, which would be true enough if she were Mavis’s age. “What about undergarments?”
“Undergarments?” Pearl echoed.
“Can you make me a pair of cotton bloomers with an over-bust lace corset to match?”
“A corset?”
Belle understood Pearl’s confusion. The women in Burning Scrub wore what they liked underneath their costumes, because that was an area where Benny hadn’t dared venture, and Pearl knew from previous fittings that Belle’s tastes ran more modern.
They’d had the corset discussion already, too, so she also knew Belle’s professional opinion on those.
“Not a bone corset with laces that tighten. Something that’s … easy to get in and out of.” Belle’s face heated up. Lying wasn’t as easy as she’d expected so she tried to stick close to the truth. “Beau likes to cosplay.” But not too close. She didn’t want to be boring.
Pearl had no trouble grasping her meaning. “Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. You’re sleeping together.” She reached for a plastic bin on a shelf. “I have just what you’re looking for. Grady has similar interests. Help me with this.”
Belle helped her lower the bin to the floor. When Pearl opened the lid, it was stuffed to the brim with lightweight cotton garments.
“These were part of my trousseau. I made them when Grady and I began dating because I knew he was the one.” Pearl had the faraway light of remembrance in her eyes and a slight smile on her lips.
“We’d met Adam by then and talked about us moving here.
I wore these when we were first married, but I put them away when I got pregnant with Linda.
I switched to a simple shift after she was born because we were both too tired to put in the effort these took at night.
” She held up a lacy corset in a pale seafoam green and admired it with wistful longing before passing it over.
“Frankly, I’m a little surprised by Beau’s tastes. ”
Beau would be, too. Belle ran her fingertips over the hand embroidery on the green corset. Pearl had put a lot of work into the details. She began to feel guilty about lying to her, but then she looked at the red dress on the mannequin, and the flash of guilt passed.
“Take off your dress and let’s see how things fit,” Pearl said.
The bin held two more corsets and five pairs of bloomers. Other than a few nips and tucks, no major adjustments to the corsets were needed, and the bloomers, generic in size, tied at the waist.
Pearl set the corsets on a sewing machine table. “I can have these ready for you this afternoon.” She played with the garments, thumbing the stack like a deck of thick cards. “Are things serious between you and Beau?”
Belle had anticipated the question. Hoped for it, in fact.
Because, if she was to spend four more years here, then she was going to reset certain expectations.
Mavis and Benny had been trying for years to mold her into the person they’d hoped Shanda would be, but Belle was her own person. She made her own choices.
“No. We’re having fun, that’s all. Our lives are too different,” she said.
“Oh. I thought maybe…” Pearl’s voice trailed off. “Never mind.”
“That we’d ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after together? That he completes me?” What a crock of hooey that was. She’d miss Beau when he left. He brought out the worst in her and he didn’t judge. But she didn’t need him. She was a survivor.
“Something like that.” Pearl’s expression turned troubled, as if she wanted to believe what Belle said but didn’t quite buy it. “I love it here, so sometimes it’s easy for me to forget that not everyone feels the same way. Benny and Mavis would hate to lose you.”
Belle fastened her skirt and straightened the bodice. It was all about Benny and Mavis. When was it going to be about her?
Reset expectations.
“I have four more years on my contract,” she said. “A lot can happen.”
*
Beau
Beau had been inside the saloon before.
The main floor was straight out of a movie set, except it served tea and coffee, and the locals played board games instead of poker to kill time, because Benny was the worst cult leader ever.
The various bottles and kegs behind the polished mahogany bar with the brass rails were for show, filled with nothing more exciting than colored water.
Beau did like the piano in the corner, however. He wasn’t great on the keyboards because the guitar was his thing, but he could play Moonlight Sonata in his sleep.
Adam and Shanda were sitting at one of the tables when he walked in. They each had a mug of coffee in front of them. He wasn’t sure about saloon protocol, and he really wasn’t sure Shanda qualified as a lady—not in real life or her role—but he removed his bowler hat, just in case.
He hated the hat because it messed up his hair, so any excuse to get rid of it worked for him. The vest and pants he could tolerate for a few weeks, although he felt like a dandy in them.
“Hey, guys, what’s up?” he said cheerfully, just to watch Adam’s scowl deepen. He tossed the hat on the table, pulled up a chair, then waved an arm to get the bartender’s attention. He was half-blind and three-quarters deaf, based on his service industry skills.
“I’ll have a coffee with one cream and a double shot of whiskey,” he said loudly, making sure his lips were easy to read, because he could dream, and then he returned his attention to his table companions.