Threaded for Trouble (12 page)

Chief Smallwood, too. She didn’t look up from her writing. “Didn’t that woman have a whole tribe of kids?”

It was probably a rhetorical question, but I answered anyway. “Eight, and Susannah and I tested the machine before it left the shop. It worked perfectly. I’ve had no problems with the other Chandler Champion here, either.”

Susannah reminded us in a soft voice, “Lots of people played with that machine here in the store, before and after the presentation. Maybe someone damaged it then.”

Did she know who and was afraid to tell?

Gartener obviously wondered the same thing. “Who damaged it?”

Red blotched Susannah’s neck. “No one. I mean I don’t know. But something could have happened to it then. Like when we were serving refreshments—maybe someone dropped her chewing gum and it got stuck in the pedal.” She held her hands out, palms up, showing she didn’t have a clue.

I couldn’t tell if she was acting. But I had to agree with her. “I’m afraid that lots of people did touch the machine then. But also, that afternoon the Chandler rep was supposed to give Darlene a lesson in using the machine. If it had misbehaved like it did just now, wouldn’t Darlene and Felicity have noticed?”

Haylee laughed. “Darlene might have, but Felicity?”

Remembering Felicity’s cardboard interfacing, I had to grin.

Smallwood asked Gartener, “Does the state forensics lab have a sewing machine expert?”

“They could find one. Meanwhile, can you three see anything else wrong?”

“The top of the broken needle is still in the machine,” I said. “Most seamstresses would remove it and throw it out, but…” Darlene apparently hadn’t had time. In her panic to stop the machine, she may have punched the switch with so much force that she’d broken it, leaving her with only one option—unplugging the machine. But before she could, it had jackhammered its way off the table, and there’d been no helpful detective nearby to grab it and save her.

“Okay, good,” Gartener encouraged me. “Anything else?”

I asked, “Is it okay if I touch the shaft holding the needle fragment? It’s coming out of the machine at an odd angle, and it dented the stitch plate in several places.”

“It shouldn’t have gone down that far,” Haylee said.

Susannah spoke up. “Something’s too loose, then, right?”

“Yes.” Haylee was seldom this solemn.

Smallwood handed me a pair of cotton gloves. “Put these on before you touch any more of it.”

I did, then opened the shield around the threading mechanism. The part of the machine that plunged the needle up and down should have been tightly fastened. It wasn’t. I leaned aside to show the others. “It shouldn’t wiggle like that.” I looked up into Detective Gartener’s intent brown eyes. “Any chance your crime scene investigators loosened this?”

“I don’t think they took it apart, or anything like that. They dusted it for fingerprints.” He and Smallwood raced their pens across their notebook pages.

Fingerprints.
That had to mean that, all along, they’d been treating Darlene’s death as possibly suspicious.

I
ASKED DETECTIVE GARTENER, “DID YOUR crime scene investigators find fingerprints on the sewing machine?”

“The victim’s.”

Did Gartener mean victim of an accident or of murder? Maybe he didn’t know.

Before I had a chance to ask, Smallwood said sternly, “And no one else’s.” As if she feared I might continue to interrogate Detective Gartener, she placed herself between him and me. “Would it be surprising if the owner of a new machine cleaned it before she used it, especially after all those people had been touching it?”

No, it wouldn’t. It also wouldn’t be surprising if Chief Smallwood knew things she wasn’t telling us.

She pointed to the too-loose shaft. “Maybe it came like that from the factory.”

“I’m sure it didn’t. Let’s check the other one.” I led everyone to the Chandler Champion for sale in my shop and opened it. The plunger was firm. I turned the take-up wheel. The needle went up and down as it was supposed to, without damaging or denting the stitch plate.

We all moved back to the killer machine. Haylee pointed at the stitch plate. “That steel is thick. Darlene must have been very careless to let the needle hit that hard.”

“The shaft of the needle probably did that,” I said. “After it broke.” Dents pocked the stitch plate around the slot the needle was supposed to go through to pick up thread from the bobbin. I explained, “The shaft was so loose that the needle must have been driven down at a slant.”

Gartener and Smallwood looked at each other, probably thinking the same thing I was. If the needle hit the stitch plate at a slant, the fragment could have been deflected up into Darlene’s arm. Then, in pain and panic, she had rushed to unplug her machine…

Detective Gartener spoke first. “So it looks like that plunger thing was loose before the crime scene investigators checked the machine?”

I agreed that was probably what happened. “Mind if I tighten it?”

They told me I could. I turned a screw, and the plunger looked straight again.

How had it become that loose in the first place? Maybe the screw had come undone, and we should warn the Chandler company about that as well as telling them their on-off switch was dangerously flimsy. Phoning Felicity and suggesting a recall of all Chandler machines should be loads of fun. Not.

“Maybe Darlene caused all the damage by ramming her needle into a pin.” Haylee didn’t sound convinced.

Checking out the machine seemed to have had a calming effect on Susannah. “A huge pin,” she said. “While she was running the machine at top speed.” She no longer seemed to be putting on an act. She couldn’t have sabotaged Darlene’s Chandler Champion, but what had caused her apparent fear of Smallwood and Gartener, other than they could both be pretty scary at times?

To be certain the shaft was high enough and going in straight, I asked their permission to investigate more thoroughly. Cameras and notebooks ready, they agreed.

First, I turned the take-up wheel slowly. Everything seemed to mesh. I removed the bobbin. “Dented. Not surprising. It can’t be used again and will have to be tossed.”

Smallwood held out an evidence bag. “Toss it this way.” Good. She was taking all of this seriously.

“What about the part it fits into?” Susannah asked.

Shining a bright light, I turned the wheel slowly. “I can’t see any problems.” I asked Smallwood and Gartener if I could install a new bobbin, needle, and the foot pedal from the other Chandler Champion.

They said I could.

The killer Champion threaded the new bobbin like a…well, like a champ. I took out the needle fragment, gave it to Smallwood, slipped a needle into position and tightened the screw that clamped it in.

Still without plugging the machine in, I turned the take-up wheel. The wing needle went down into the slot where it was supposed to go, and brought bobbin thread up with it. So far, so good.

We attached the newer Champion’s undamaged foot pedal to the machine. I grinned up at Gartener. “Mind if I plug this machine in again?”

What a warm smile he had, and what a pity he seldom let anyone see it. “Wait.” He gripped the machine. Pressure whitened the tips of his fingers. “Okay,” he said.

I crawled under the table and plugged the machine into the outlet. Because its switch was broken in the on position, it powered on. I was prepared for it to start its mad stitching, but with a new foot pedal, it remained unmoving, ready to sew.

I clambered out from under the table and lowered the presser foot onto a piece of fabric. Detective Gartener steadied the machine again.

I pressed the pedal carefully and started the default stitch, a plain straight stitch. It was fine. I pushed harder, and the sewing machine sewed faster. It didn’t go out of control. I let it sew for a couple of inches, then lifted my foot. The needle obediently raised itself and stopped.

That was good, but the stitches were loose in places. The tension settings weren’t right, which wasn’t surprising after all the machine had gone through. We adjusted the tension on top, and finally decided that the bobbin carrier had been damaged. We tried a new bobbin carrier. The stitches were fine.

Susannah peered at the old bobbin carrier through a jeweler’s loupe. “I can’t see any damage. Maybe Darlene fiddled with the screw. She shouldn’t have, since only a repair person can fix that.” She got out the repair manual and recalibrated the bobbin carrier. She popped it into the machine.

I tried stitching again. The tension was perfect. I took out the universal needle and inserted a wing needle.

“What’s wrong with that needle?” Smallwood asked.

Haylee explained that the double-edged needle was supposed to make decorative holes next to stitches. “But you can only use it with certain stitches, or it would cut the stitches you just made, instead.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Smallwood said.

Haylee suggested, “Maybe Darlene put a wing needle into her machine, then switched to a wide stitch and forgot to turn on the override.”

Normal needles could do the machine’s widest stitches with no problem, but for needles that took up extra space, like wing needles, double needles, and triple needles, the stitches had to be narrowed or the needle would move too far to the side and plow into the stitch plate beside the slot they were supposed to go into.

“It’s hard to believe she’d be so careless,” I said. “The clothes she made seemed perfect.”

Susannah frowned at the machine. “People forget things.”

Yes, and Darlene could have been distracted by one or more of those children.

Or by catching her lovely young nanny in the arms of her husband.

I touched the screen to make the wing needle override come on. The picture of the stitch on the screen should
have immediately looked narrower, but it stayed the same, too wide for a wing needle. Specialty needles were expensive, especially if they broke and damaged a machine. I turned the hand wheel slowly, and stopped the needle before it hit the stitch plate.

The wing needle override on Darlene Coddlefield’s Chandler Champion did not work.

“Have I lost my mind?” I asked Susannah. “We checked this before we turned the machine over to Darlene, didn’t we?”

“It was fine.”

Together, Susannah and I worked our way through the manual. “Maybe she put something into the memory that she shouldn’t have,” I suggested. Like many computerized sewing machines, the Champion allowed seamstresses to place stitches and combinations of stitches into memory banks, one way of bypassing the factory default settings.

Sure enough, Darlene had set up the Champion to ignore the wing needle override. That had been more than careless, it had been foolhardy. From what I’d seen of Darlene, she’d been neither careless nor foolhardy.

We erased that portion of the machine’s memory, and the Champion narrowed its stitches enough for a wing needle to move side to side and fit into the slot in the stitch plate.

I turned to face the two police officers. “Do you still think her death was an accident?”

“Probably,” Detective Gartener said gently. “Even if someone maliciously sabotaged the machine, they could not have known for sure that their tampering would cause a death.”

He had—pun intended—a point.

“Except,” Smallwood blurted. At a look from Gartener, she closed her mouth.

Haylee and I demanded in unison, “Except what?”

“Nothing,” Smallwood answered. “The death was very likely an accident.”

Very likely.
She had her doubts. Seconds before, Gartener had obviously stopped her from telling us something. What evidence about Darlene’s “accident” were they keeping a secret?

And why?

Suddenly, I thought of a possible reason and felt almost sick. Maybe they knew or suspected that one of Darlene’s youngest children had messed around with the machine and caused a fatal chain of events. If so, I hoped the child would never find out the truth. How could he or she live with that?

Susannah asked, “Do any of the other memories have stuff in them?

Good question. I fingered the touch screen. All of the banks were empty except one. The Champion had a memory bank called
Monograms
, with space for five large letters or eight small ones in each monogram. I leaned aside so the others could see. “
FR
. Felicity Ranquels put her initials in the monogram memory bank.”

“What other initials are in there?” Gartener asked as if only vaguely interested, but I knew better. That man wanted to know everything.

I scrolled down.
DC
for Darlene Coddlefield, then other sets of initials ending in
C
, for her husband and children, probably. Then we came to one that said
TIFQRSC
.

“Tiffany?” I guessed. “Showing one of the little kids how to make letters appear on the screen?”

I scrolled down to the last monogram. Actually, it was more like a signature.

WILLOW.

H
OW DID MY NAME GET TYPED INTO THE memory of Darlene’s sewing machine?

Haylee and Susannah appeared as baffled as I was, but Chief Smallwood stared at me like she’d caught me harboring a skunk in my ponytail.

“Did you put your name into this machine?” Gartener’s mild tones didn’t deceive me. His voice could be warm, but the man was stronger than steel.

“No.”

Susannah defended me. “It wasn’t there before we gave the Champion to Darlene, and that’s not how Willow signs her name in thread, either. She doesn’t use a sewing machine and a plain font like that.” She pointed at my nametag. “She uses an embroidery attachment and a script that looks like it’s made of willow wands.”

Smallwood dismissed fonts. “If you didn’t program your name into the machine before it left the shop, you must have done it after it got to Coddlefields’.”

I almost wished I did have a skunk, and could aim it at her. “I never set foot in the place until after Darlene died,
when Edna and I took the family some cookies and a casserole and saw Plug and the nanny in a clinch.”

Gartener nodded. Smallwood must have already told him about what Edna and I had seen and done that day.