Threaded for Trouble

by Janet Bolin

  Detective Gartener was tall, dark, handsome, and confident.

  He was also, I had to admit to myself, slightly scary, with a way about him that made me fear he could wheedle a confession from the completely innocent. The last time Smallwood and Gartener had been in my shop together, though, they’d been very helpful. I couldn’t help darting a glance at his left ring finger. Still no wedding band. Smallwood didn’t wear one, either.

  He shook my hand. “Willow! Nice to see you again.” His deep, resonating voice always made me wonder why he’d chosen the dangers of police work when he could have gone into broadcasting, or maybe singing or acting. His usually wary brown eyes warmed infinitesimally. His hand was warm, too, and big and strong.

  “Welcome, Toby,” Chief Smallwood said sweetly.

  I should have known she would invite him. I had nothing against him. He always seemed fair, and I was glad she had included him. I should have thought of it. Then again, why would I have needed to? Chief Smallwood always called for backup from the state police, including, no doubt, if someone ran a stop sign. She probably hoped, each time, that Gartener would be the one to respond to the call. Apparently, the night Darlene’s body had been found, Smallwood had lucked out, and Gartener had been the detective on duty, and now he was the lead investigator into the somewhat unusual cause of Darlene’s death.

  Her head bent and her lustrous mane of dark curls hiding her face, Susannah backed away from the thread display, making it obvious that she was afraid of the officers. Why would she be?

  I strode to her. “Let’s get the Champion out.”

  In the storeroom, I whispered to her, “What’s wrong, Susannah?”

  Pressing her hands against her cheeks, she glanced toward the open storeroom door. “Nothing. Why?”

  “You seem upset.”

  “I do?” She arranged her face into an obviously fake nonchalance. Panic lurked in her eyes.

  “But—”

  “They’re waiting for us!” She appeared about to pick up that heavy carton by herself.

  Resigned to finding out what her problem was after the officers left, I helped her carry the carton out of the storeroom.

  Detective Gartener sprang forward, took it from us, and set it on the floor beside my bistro table.

  Her eyes on us, Chief Smallwood crossed her arms over that under-embroidered bulletproof vest.

  “How did you end up with this machine?” Detective Gartener asked.

  As if she were looking for holes in my story that might show I was a liar at best and a murderer at worst, Chief Smallwood paid careful attention as I explained it all to Gartener.

  Susannah squatted and stroked the top of the machine, still in its carton. I had sold Susannah a very good machine the year before, but it wasn’t the top of anyone’s line, and even with her employee discount, she probably wouldn’t be buying a Chandler Champion anytime soon. Her voice harsh, she said, “Plug must have been awfully angry about his wife’s death to give up a machine like this.” She peeked underneath her eyelashes at Chief Smallwood, who didn’t say anything.

  From the flicker in Smallwood’s eyes, though, I was certain she’d noticed that Susannah was trying hard to conceal her inexplicable nervousness.

  Detective Gartener’s gaze did not waver from Susannah’s face. Uh-oh. When that man had a question, he didn’t give up until he received an answer.

  But I had never known him to be mean. I would have to convince Susannah that her worries were groundless

  For now, though, I needed to concentrate on the Chandler Champion. Plug hadn’t bothered with the original packing material and had tossed the accessories and manual willy-nilly into the carton.

  Detective Gartener steadied the box while Susannah and I lifted out the gleaming machine and placed it on the table. Except for the end dangling near where the eye of the needle should have been, the machine was threaded. It struck me as particularly sad that Darlene had not lived long enough to play with other types and colors of thread. The white polyester embroidery thread I’d sent home with the machine was still on the spool pin.

  Susannah attached the foot pedal and plugged in the Chandler Champion.

  Before I could touch the power button, the machine came on by itself.

  That was bad enough.

  It also started running at top speed, its nice, bright light illuminating the work surface as the fragment of needle in the machine pounded down with dizzying speed, again and again, on the plate covering the bobbin compartment.

  14

  JOUNCING AND CRAWLING TOWARD US ON the slippery metal table, the machine seemed intent on destroying itself.

  Susannah jumped up and shrieked. I pushed the power button.

  The Chandler Champion continued its frenzied dance toward self-destruction.

  I dove for the outlet.

  Detective Gartener shouted, “Careful, Willow!”

  I yanked at the plug. It didn’t budge. Above me, the bistro table rocked.

  Susannah screamed louder.

  I pulled harder. With the disconnected plug in my hand, I rolled away from the table and stood up.

  Susannah stared at me with her hand across her mouth.

  Chief Smallwood was bracing the table, but the Chandler Champion was no longer on it.

  Detective Gartener was clutching it tightly in his arms as if restraining a crazed animal. Carefully, he put it back on the table. “Willow why didn’t you wait for one of us to grab the thing before you went flying for the plug?”

  I tried to control the tremors rippling through me. “It was about to fling itself off the table. Stitching like that, it could have destroyed itself. It’s not working right.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Smallwood contributed.

  Gartener growled. “You should have let it destroy itself. I thought we were going to lose you, too.”

  I told myself to breathe quietly and not show how unnerved I was. “It’s not likely to cause the same freak accident twice.”

  Gartener frowned, his dark eyes seeming to penetrate my brain.

  Chief Smallwood stared at the machine. Her mouth turned down in distaste. “That thing’s possessed.”

  Susannah whispered, “I think you’re right.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “It must have suffered more from its fall than I expected.” Expected? That didn’t sound good.

  I corrected myself. “More than I would have expected.” I thought some very impolite things about Mr. Chandler, Felicity Ranquels, and everyone else associated with the Chandler Sewing Machine Company.

  Chief Smallwood interrupted my silent but satisfying diatribe. “See anything wrong?” She poised her pen over her notebook. “Have you ever seen a sewing machine sew by itself like that before?”

  I shook my head. “No. Let’s get Haylee over here.” I should have thought of it sooner.

  When Haylee arrived, we told her what happened

  She grinned. “Show me?”

  “No way,” Detective Gartener said.

  “Did the victim forget to turn off the machine before she unplugged it?” Haylee asked.

  “The power switch doesn’t work,” I said. “Darlene was probably as frantic to unplug it as I was. Look at the damage it did to the stitch plate.”

  Haylee whistled. “You’re not supposed to keep stitching after you break a needle. But Darlene should have known that, right?”

  “Yep.” I fetched a screwdriver and removed the sewing machine’s casing. The machine was built of steel, and perhaps a few tons of the lead ballast I’d imagined, but the power switch was plastic. Sometime after Darlene took the machine home, the switch had snapped, and now no one could turn the machine off. It had probably chalked up less than two hundred hours of run time. So much for Chandler’s claims of the best machines for the best price.

  However, we should have needed to press the foot pedal for the machine to actually stitch. None of us had gone near the foot pedal. Was it poorly constructed also?

>   I got down on my hands and knees on the floor, which prompted Detective Gartener to issue more cautions about my safety. And to grab the table.

  I carefully lifted the foot pedal, then dropped it as if it had burned me. Scrambling to my feet, I gabbled, “Somebody fooled with it. They stuck chewing gum inside the pedal so the machine would keep stitching even when no one was pushing it.” Premeditated, I couldn’t help thinking. Had someone deliberately broken the power switch also?

  “Don’t touch the chewing gum,” Chief Smallwood warned unnecessarily.

  She and Gartener squatted and pointed flashlights at the pedal. I steadied the table.

  When they stood up, Gartener looked more serious than usual. “We’ll have to take the pedal to the lab. It could be glue, or as you say, chewing gum.” He turned to a new page in his notebook. Despite his tiny script, at this rate he was going to need a new notebook every few minutes.

  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.

  15

  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.

&n
bsp; 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.”