At first Samantha didn’t want to touch the dress, but when Mike moved his hand, she saw something sparkle. Taking the dress from him, she slowly let it unfold, holding it up by the shoulders to look at it. “Lanvin,” she whispered in awe, reading the label at the back of the neck, speaking in reverence of the Paris couturier’s name.
It was a beautiful dress, red moiré with a fitted bodice, narrow shoulder straps, and a heavenly draped bias-cut skirt that was hemmed to midcalf in front with a bit of a train in back. On the right side of the waist was a sunburst design done in diamanté.
“Looks like you got over your fear,” Mike said sarcastically, but she ignored him as she looked at the dress, admired the way it flowed when she moved it.
Mike took a pair of shoes from the box. They had been made to match the dress: red moiré T-straps with diamanté running down the vertical strap and Louis heels. Samantha knew the moment she saw them that they were exactly her size.
“Look at this.” Mike handed her a small box covered in blue velvet. Resting on the velvet inside were a pair of earrings, but not just any earrings: These were long and pear shaped, diamonds from the earlobe to the base, with three large pearls hanging off the bottom edge.
Mike gave a low whistle.
“Doc’s earrings,” Samantha whispered. “The ones he said he gave Maxie the night she disappeared.”
Mike pulled underwear from the box: a peach silk crepe de Chine bra trimmed with delicate ecru lace and matching panties. A tiny sexy garter belt and flesh-colored silk hose were folded together.
In the very bottom of the hatbox were tossed a long string of pearls and two diamond bracelets. Holding the bracelets to the light, Mike examined them. “I’m not a jeweler, but it’s my guess that those are real,” he said as he handed them to Sam, then ran the pearls across the back of his fingernail. Rough enough to use for emery boards, a roughness found only in genuine pearls.
“Real?”
“Absolutely,” he said, adding the pearls to the pile on the table.
Samantha put the bracelets down, and the two of them looked at the articles on the table: the red evening gown, the matching shoes, the fabulous earrings, the bracelets, the necklace, and the underwear. It was obviously everything a woman had been wearing from the skin out on a night in 1928.
“If these things were in your father’s possession,” Mike said, “it removes any doubt that your grandmother was Maxie.”
“Yes,” was all Samantha could answer, but she didn’t have to make another comment because the doorbell rang and the food arrived. They sat at one end of the table eating, not saying much as they looked at the pile of clothes and jewels draped across the
other end of the table.
Both their minds were on that night in 1928 when, for whatever reason, a young woman, clad in silk and diamonds, had walked out of a bloodbath and not been seen again. Pregnant, she’d traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, and three days later had married a man who could not have children. She stayed with her husband, bore a child, had seemed to be happy, then in 1964 she had once again disappeared.
“Mike,” Sam said, “wouldn’t you like to know what happened that night? Wouldn’t you really, truly like to know?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I really would.”
“Doc said Maxie’s baby was his, but Abby says Maxie loved Michael Ransome.”
“I’d put money on Uncle Mike. I can’t see Doc sharing even sperm with someone.”
“Mike!” she said, not liking his crudity. “Maybe he did love her. She could have been Doc’s mistress but in love with Michael Ransome too. Maybe she loved both of them.”
Mike didn’t answer as he was looking at the dress, at the way it was reflecting the light. “Did you see the stain on the dress?”
“Yes,” Samantha said quietly, looking down at her plate of food. She’d seen the stain and instinctively knew what the discoloration was.
Leaving the table, Mike picked the dress up and held it to the light. “It’s blood, isn’t it? It looks like someone tried to wash it out, but you can’t remove blood.”
“No, at least not that much blood.”
“Wonder whose it is?”
“From your accounts of the massacre, it could belong to any of several people.”
Mike kept looking at the gown under the floor lamp. “Doc said Maxie was in the back of the club when Scalpini’s men opened fire and she didn’t come out again. If that’s true, it couldn’t be Uncle Mike’s blood; he never left the dance floor. He was shot there and stayed there until the medics took him away. And, according to Doc, he was in the john most of the time.” Mike looked up at Samantha. “I’m going to send this to Blair and have her have it analyzed. If we get a type on this blood, maybe we can match it with hospital records of the people who were shot that night.”
Samantha got up and took the dress from him. “Will they cut the dress up?” she asked sadly.
Mike wanted to point out that she’d had the box for months and not opened it, had even seen the dress and not cared enough to take it out and look at it. Now she looked like a child whose teddy bear was being donated to charity, but he didn’t point that out to her.