Threaded for Trouble (16 page)

Nice guy.

“I’m quite confident,” he added, “that in time, you’d work your way up to national rep. Then you’d get to come live in New York City! How would you like that? Imagine—the Manhattan lifestyle! SoHo lofts! Nightlife!” He gave my arm a squeeze.

I wanted to laugh aloud but managed to keep it down to a breathless chuckle. “I lived in New York City for about ten years. I moved here because I preferred Threadville.”

That silenced him for a moment. Behind us, waves splashed. The night had cooled, and the air felt fresh.

“We’d pay for your move, of course,” he purred. I suspected he’d made similar promises to Felicity Ranquels,
though maybe not quite in that tone of voice, and certainly not in person. Now he was ready to fire her.

“No,” I said more firmly. “I really like it here.” And I preferred the other sewing machines I sold to the ones his company made. None of my favorites had, as far as I knew, gone on rampages and thrown themselves onto their owners.

We passed Mona’s home décor shop, Country Chic, on our side of the street, and Naomi’s Batty About Quilts on the other. Both were dark, as was the apartment above Naomi’s shop. The Ironmonger was closed up tight, but across the street in Edna’s dimly lit Buttons and Bows, Edna and Dr. Wrinklesides, standing close together, looked out through her glass door and waved at us. Haylee’s spies were everywhere.

I couldn’t see lights in Haylee’s or Opal’s shops and apartments. Jeremy and I turned toward my porch.

Rocking chairs squeaked. Picturing a paint-daubed ear, I imagined Clay waiting for me.

Opal stood up from one of the chairs. “There you are, Willow!”

Naomi emerged from another chair. “We ate way too much and are more than ready for our nightly walk with you and the dogs.”

Nightly walk? This was news to me. I had to fight impending giggles again. “Great!” I turned to Jeremy. “Thank you so much for dinner and the offer of the sewing machine for poor Darlene Coddlefield’s daughters.”

“Think about my other offer. Midwest rep.” His syllables had become clipped. Opal and Naomi must have surprised him.

“I’ll let you go,” I said. “You have a long drive to Cleveland.”

He turned on his heel and marched down the sidewalk as if he couldn’t leave quickly enough.

I suspected I would be giving Darlene’s family a Chandler Champion all by myself with no help from him. It had
turned into an expensive night. But an entertaining and perhaps informative one.

I let my two friends into In Stitches and locked the door behind them. Jeremy was out of sight. “Thanks, you guys,” I said, finally letting the laughter out.

“Smarmy.” Protective of members of her extended family, Opal lowered her eyebrows in what she probably believed to be a very fierce expression. “I didn’t like his looks.”

“He was okay to look at.” Naomi always had to be fair. “We hope you don’t mind our interference, Willow.” Naomi also liked to apologize.

“Not at all.” I eased my feet out of the shoes. “He offered me a job that might one day allow me to live in New York City and enjoy its lofts and nightclubs.”

“Willow,” Naomi gasped. “You wouldn’t go back there, would you?” She spoke as if Manhattan were the worst possible den of iniquity.

“Nope.” Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho were whimpering at the door to the apartment. “Want to come outside with us?”

Naomi nodded. “Sure.” She patted her waistline. Slender, she didn’t carry an ounce of extra weight. “We did eat too much.”

Offering me another of her fake glares, Opal really resembled Haylee. “And some
mystery
person paid for our dinner.”

“It was delicious,” Naomi said. “Thank you, Willow. We’ll have you over to one of our apartments for a feast one of these evenings.”

I opened the door to the stairs leading down to my apartment. “I’d love that, but there’s no need to. You gave up your evening, and I really appreciate it. And thanks for being here when I got back, too.” I could always count on my sisters-in-thread.

The dogs ran up and down the steps about a hundred times to make certain we were following them, which, of course, slowed our progress. I put on comfy flats and we all went outside. Naomi, Opal, and I toured my fragrant, night-lit garden and made fusses over the dogs whenever they returned to us. Eventually, the humans walked, with
the dogs running circles around us, to the gate near the street. Opal and Naomi left for their apartments, and Sally, Tally, and I went back into ours.

Haylee phoned. “I gather you sent the new man away quickly.”

“Yes, and Naomi and Opal were extremely helpful. Thank you.”

“Actually, thank
you
for dinner. Clay feels like he owes you. That can only be good.”

Someday, I hoped to renovate Blueberry Cottage with Clay’s assistance. The paint on his ear had been cute, but I wondered how charming he’d find
me
if I were covered in sawdust, paint, and I was afraid to think what else. He had looked hot at the restaurant, and I had tried to. Had he noticed?

Haylee asked, “Did your date bring a swatch of fabric for you to admire?”

“I brought that.” I explained about the sampler that Susannah had found. “If Darlene worked from left to right, she switched from a universal needle to a wing needle and back again, and turned off the wing needle override, all without a problem. The machine had to have been functioning properly when she did all that.”

We went over the evening, every single course, our friends in the restaurant, everything that Jeremy had said, including his somewhat dubious promise to send a replacement sewing machine for Darlene’s children. By the time I got off the phone, my face and sides were hurting from laughing. Not fair, I knew, but Jeremy deserved it, just as he and Felicity deserved one another and (if anyone were to ask me) their inferior line of sewing machines. And toasters, too, and whatever else the Chandler company sold.

I pulled Darlene’s stitch sampler out of my bag and examined it, front and back, under strong light.

No bloodstains, strange holes, or stitches gone wild.

What had she been working on when her power switch broke?

C
OULD PLUG OR SOMEONE HAVE THROWN out whatever Darlene was working on when her machine went berserk? Maybe Gartener’s investigators had taken Darlene’s project with them. Smallwood wouldn’t be anxious to fill me in on that, but I did have news for her, so first thing in the morning, I called her and told her I had more evidence. It was Monday, the day our Threadville shops were closed

Smallwood said she’d be at In Stitches in about an hour. She must have been busy. Either that or she was bringing Detective Gartener along again.

Sure enough, both of them arrived at the shop together. I told them that Jeremy had said a sledgehammer would have been required to break the power switch.

“Doesn’t sound like he has much regard for the truth,” Smallwood said.

“Maybe a screwdriver, used as a lever,” Gartener suggested.

“Did the lab find evidence of that?” I asked him.

“We don’t know yet,” Smallwood said quickly as if to quell Gartener.

Gartener stared back at me with his dark, inscrutable eyes. I took it as confirmation that he believed that someone had used a screwdriver to tamper with the machine.

Attempting to ignore the chills needling their way up my spine, I showed them the stitch sampler stitching. “After that, someone disabled the wing needle override, loosened the needle shaft, damaged the power button, and put sticky stuff in the foot pedal.”

“We don’t know that someone actually
intended
to hurt her,” Gartener reminded me.

Barely hiding a gasp, Smallwood looked up questioningly at him. I could almost hear her asking,
We don’t?

I became more certain than ever that these two knew something I didn’t, some evidence they weren’t making public.

Outside, a yellow VW drove slowly down Lake Street. Susannah was at the wheel. She peered toward the two cruisers parked in front of In Stitches, then sped away.

Gartener asked me, “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to hurt the deceased?”

“Most likely, as I said before, it was someone in Darlene’s household. Her husband, Plug, so he could be with the nanny, Tiffany. Or Tiffany so she could be with Plug.”

Gartener wrote in his notebook. “People don’t usually go to such lengths to carry on affairs.” He didn’t look at either of us and said it drily, like someone who had been unceremoniously dumped.

I asked, “Aren’t murders frequently committed by those closest to the victim?”

Gartener kept writing, so of course I went on talking, as he probably expected me to. “And then there’s their oldest son, Russ. His mother humiliated him in public the morning they were both here, and the night she died, he went roaring around the village in his truck, shouting out the windows.”

Chief Smallwood shook her head. “You said that was around two. His mother was already dead, but he hadn’t been home all evening. From what you told me about him
running you and Edna off the road the next evening, that boy has a habit of reckless driving. I’ll catch him at it one of these days, never fear.”

Before he hurts someone,
I thought. I asked, “How did he find out about his mother’s death?”

Smallwood looked to Gartener for an answer.

“His father told him,” Gartener said. “No state troopers were present.”

“And no one has questioned the boy?” I asked.

Smallwood glowered at me. “The investigators are looking into everything. Including…” She clammed up.

Including me? Susannah?
I tried a different line of questioning. “When was Darlene found, and who found her?”

Smallwood didn’t answer.

Gartener pointed at the pink fabric with the neat lines of white stitching. “May I take that with me?”

“It’s yours,” I said.

He placed the scrap into a brown paper bag, then folded the top of the bag as precisely as if he’d first measured and marked it with a ruler. “Could this have been what she was working on when the sewing machine fell on her?” he asked.

I straightened linen hanging from a bolt beside me. “If that machine was sewing madly like it did here on Saturday, the needle’s shaft would have punched holes in the fabric and probably torn it. When she was found, whatever she was working on should have been in or near the machine.”

Smallwood lifted one delicate eyebrow and one delicate but bulletproof-vested shoulder. She looked up into Gartener’s face.

“You were on the scene before I was,” he said to her in that warm voice that contrasted with his usually distant demeanor. “Did you see anything stitched like Willow just described?”

Smallwood shook her head firmly. “There was no fabric anywhere near that machine. Maybe whatever she was working on slipped out when the machine fell?”

“Only if someone cut the thread from both the spool
and the bobbin,” I said. “Maybe she had a habit of turning her sewing machine on before she collected what she was going to sew, but this time, with the pedal gummed up that way, the machine started stitching crazily and broke the needle. The fragment pierced her arm, and she dove under the table before she had a chance to get out whatever she was about to sew.”

“Very likely,” Smallwood agreed. Admonishing me to let them know if I found or thought of anything else, she left with Gartener.

I ran errands, shopped for groceries, prepared meals to freeze for the week, and baked cookies to serve in my store. I kept thinking about Darlene and the people who might have wanted to harm her. Chief Smallwood didn’t seem to want to imagine a sixteen-year-old as a murderer, not even one as fond of dangerous pranks as Russ, and I didn’t either. I suspected that Russ usually spent his time as far from his parents as he could, and wouldn’t willingly venture anywhere near Darlene or her new sewing machine.

Darlene had humiliated most of her older children in my shop, from Russ to the other brother who hadn’t worn his cowboy shirt but had cooperated enough with his mother to hold it out for everyone in the audience to see, to the twelve-year-old daughter who had been forced to wear a dress that was too tight and made her look silly. The fifteen-year-old girl had obviously been coached to photograph her mother accepting the certificate, and she had done as asked. Parents often angered their kids without the kids taking physical revenge. Darlene’s children must have been used to her bossy ways.

My hair was in my eyes, and my hands were floury. I brushed at my forehead with the back of my wrist and rolled out more cookie dough. I was certain that neither the eight-year-old girl nor any of the three smallest children would have harmed their mother on purpose. I smiled again at the little girl’s pronunciation. Dwess. She was adorable.

Tiffany had promised to make her more dresses.

Was Tiffany offering empty promises, or did she know
how to sew? She’d obviously learned enough about the Chandler Champion to program a monogram into it, and she’d learned that very quickly, as if she’d sat in on the lesson Felicity gave Darlene. Tiffany wasn’t a Threadville tour student, which wasn’t surprising. Darlene hadn’t been one, either, and if Tiffany was looking after the younger Coddlefield children, she didn’t have time to come into the village for sewing lessons.

However, if Tiffany
did
start coming to our courses, we would be able to learn more about her…

It was possible that no amount of suggesting that she start attending Threadville classes would make her come, no matter how motivated she was, unless we suggested she bring the children. Could we cope with that? There were enough Threadville tourists in our classes to help look after all the kids.

Uh-oh. I was thinking too much like Haylee’s mothers. If I was unconsciously imitating them, what else might I do? I was already making most of my own clothes. What would be next? Knitting my own lingerie?

I eased my sewing-machine-shaped cookie cutter into the rolled-out slab of dough. There was a lot about the Coddlefield family that didn’t quite add up. Like having a nanny. Had Darlene worked outside the home?