BOOK 2
Where Is Lottie Vale?
The Cutting Room Lost and Found
Her coat is on its peg. Her tea is unfinished. Lottie Vale is nowhere to be found.
Lottie has been the fit model at Spindle Street School of Fashion for decades. She has a hat for every errand, an opinion on every hem and a habit of arriving exactly when she says she will. When she misses her Friday fitting, Inez Barral knows something is wrong.
Lottie’s phone is still charging. Her winter coat has been left behind. Only her best little black hat is missing—and Inez remembers a private errand and a mention of an old sweetheart.
Soon the school’s mending-table regulars are searching Manhattan, while head of safety Gloria Kent works through the evidence. But an anxious niece, an old acquaintance and a growing tide of gossip pull the search in different directions. Inez’s own assumptions may be making matters worse.
As the February evening grows colder, Inez turns to the details she understands best: what Lottie wore, what she chose and what she left behind. Can those small decisions lead her to her friend before time runs out?
Read the opening ↘A FIRST LOOK INSIDE
Chapter One
Lottie Vale stood on the platform in the fitting room on Thursday afternoon with her arms held out from her sides like a scarecrow, while three third-years argued about her shoulders.
“She’s square,” said the first.
“She’s not square, she’s sloped. Look. Look at the left.”
“Everybody’s left is lower. It’s the handbag.”
“I haven’t carried a handbag on that side since 1994,” said Lottie, without moving her arms. “Oh, pins. Somebody’s left one in. Right there. Under the arm.”
It was the second week of February, and the winter fittings had begun. Every Friday at ten for as long as anyone could remember, and on extra afternoons when a collection was behind, Lottie Vale came to the fitting room on the ground floor of Spindle Street School of Fashion and stood on the platform and was pinned. She had been the school’s fit model since 1990, and a fit model in the Garment District since 1981. Half the dresses in the archive had been cut to her shoulders. The third-years who were working on the winter collection called the dress they were making on her the Vale dress, though it was not, strictly speaking, hers. It was a long column of dark green crepe with a high neck and a draped back, and it would be shown on the spring runway in May on a girl of nineteen. But it had been cut on Lottie, and fitted on Lottie, and would carry, in some way none of them could have explained, the shape of Lottie in it forever.
Inez Barral sat on the bench at the side of the fitting room with a pincushion on her wrist and watched.
She was not, strictly speaking, needed. She ran the lending counter. But she had spent twenty-five years in alterations before that, and since October the third-years had started asking her to sit in on the difficult fittings. Inez suspected Lottie had told them to. She said very little. Every so often she got up and moved a pin, and the argument stopped.
End of excerpt