Beauty to Die For and Other Mystery Shorts by Lauren Carr Page B

Styrofoam and feathered creature from his jaws to hand them back to its owner. “I’m sorry about your hat. Maybe you can fix it with some glue.”
    “Peasants!” She grabbed her hat and bird and stormed out.
    “Do we have thirty-one thousand for Celeste Taylor’s wedding gown worn in Sparkle ?” the auctioneer was asking.
    “You just bid thirty thousand for that dress!” Ben laughed. “’You’ve been bidding on it and you didn’t even know it.”
    “Going twice!”
    Mac felt the blood drain from his face. He froze like a statue in his seat. “Don’t anybody move,” he whispered. “Don’t even breath.”
    Holding his breath, he prayed that one of the other two bidders would cough up another thousand, hundred, ten dollars, dime to make it all go away so that he could have a good laugh about his blunder on the way home.
    Judging by the expression of the bidder eyeing him from the front row, it wasn’t going to happen.
    Mac’s only hope was the phone-in bidder. Desperate, he turned to the man on the phone. Frederick was handing a coffee mug to the operator. With a glance in Mac’s direction, he hung up the phone before taking a sip of his coffee.
    “Going thrice!” The auctioneer announced in a loud voice while pointing across the room at Mac. “Sold to the man with the bird dog!”
    “I saw that you didn’t really mean to bid,” Millicent Taylor, the woman in the pant suit who had been conferring with her lawyer told Mac as he wrote out the check for thirty thousand dollars to complete his purchase of the rhinestone gown.
    “I’m a man, I can take it.” Mac handed her the check.
    “I’m really sorry,” she said. “If there was anything—” She turned to the man who she had been conferring with while watching the bidding. “Maybe—” She turned back to Mac. “This is my mother’s attorney, Reginald Patterson.” She turned back to her lawyer. “Everyone saw that it was a mistake …”
    “Millicent, if you take back items then you aren’t going to make enough money to get the estate out of the red.” He flashed his bright white teeth at Mac. “I’m sure, being a businessman, Mr. Faraday, you understand.”
    “Don’t worry about it.” Mac didn’t want to admit that he felt sorrier for her selling her belongings. “Maybe my daughter will wear it when she meets some nice man, he passes a background check, and I allow him to get close enough to my daughter for them to get married.”
    “Maybe,” Reginald interjected before Mac could turn away. “Privately, I could take that gown off your hands. Of course, you won’t make back all of your money. I knew Celeste for years and am sorry to say that it was business for us so much that I neglected to get anything to remember her by.”
    “You want her dress?” Mac looked him up and down.
    “Those gowns belong in a museum,” he said. “The Smithsonian. They’re a part of Americana.”
    “If we didn’t need the money so bad to pay Mom’s debts, that’s where I would send them,” Millicent said with teary eyes.
    “Give me a call.” Patterson handed Mac his business card. “We’ll work something out.”
    As disgusted and embarrass as Mac was, his companions were laughing it up a few paces away. His tail high up in the air, wagging away, Gnarly seemed to be enjoying the joke as much as they were.
    The man from the front row made a “psst” noise in Mac’s ear. “Hey, buddy.” He grasped his elbow. “How much do you want for it?”
    Still reeling after paying thirty thousand dollars for a woman’s gown, Mac had to wrap his mind around being offered money to resale it.
    Wait a minute, Mac. I bought it for thirty thousand, even if by accident. That means I need to sell it for more in order to make a profit. Ask for more than thirty thousand.
    Meanwhile, the man in the suit thrust a business card in Mac’s hand. “I might be able to get my client to go up to forty thou.”
    The card read Eli Harris. The address was New