Thread and Buried

by Janet Bolin

  She was back long before that. When our afternoon workshop ended, we stitched new designs with our embroidery machines. Our fervor nearly always intrigued browsers. Ashley had a flair for describing the features of all of our fun machines, so I let her do that while I measured, cut, and sold natural fabrics, gave advice about embroidery-gone-wrong, and helped match thread colors to designs.

  Usually, the Threadville tour buses left shortly after our shops closed, but it was the summer solstice, and Threadville was staging its first Midsummer Madness Sidewalk Sale. Both busloads of Threadville tourists, one from Erie, and one from eastern Ohio, were staying for the evening.

  After our customers took off for supper, Ashley and I gathered and priced items for the sale, then set up long, folding tables in the opening between the pillars near the top of the porch steps. Ashley left for supper, and I went downstairs to eat with Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho.

  Haylee phoned. “I got the strangest invitation today.”

  “Going to the lodge’s opening gala with Clay and me? I hope you can make it.”

  “Don’t you want to be alone with him?”

  She knew me pretty well.

  “I might run out of things to say! Come on, it will be three friends going out together.”

  “Okay.” She quickly got to the important stuff. “What are you going to wear?”

  “I’ll think of something.” I told her that Clay and I had been allowed to help make an inventory of the jewels.

  “Wow,” she said. “I’d loved to have seen them. And touched them.”

  “You had customers.”

  She heaved a sigh. “You’re right. See you at tomorrow’s picnic, if not before.”

  I finished my supper, then leashed the dogs and took them out through the patio door. Smallwood waved at us from the other side of the police tape. Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho whimpered, but Smallwood didn’t come closer. From the sounds, I guessed the chief was watching people dig with shovels. Clay’s front-end loader, with Clay’s shovel still leaning against it, sat alone and unneeded.

  I urged the dogs up to the gate. From the front yard, we could see the shops across the street. Tables were set up in front of The Stash, Tell a Yarn, Buttons and Bows, and Batty About Quilts. On our side of Lake Street, tables waited for merchandise on the sidewalk in front of the old-timey hardware store and the home décor boutique.

  We headed down the hill. Threadville tourists thronged Pier 42’s outdoor patio, and several of them were having picnics in the park that connected the sandy beaches along the river with the more extensive Lake Erie beach. A few hardy people braved the cool June waters.

  I took the dogs home and then carried sale items to the tables on my front porch. Ashley returned and helped me arrange them.

  At eight, the Midsummer Madness Sidewalk Sale began.

  At five after eight, the sale lived up to the madness part of its name.

  6

  ACROSS LAKE STREET, SHRILL VOICES rose in anger. I grabbed a porch pillar and stood on tiptoe to see over the crowd.

  At Haylee’s table in front of The Stash, two women tugged at opposite corners of a remnant. The stouter one with the maroon curly hair wore a red polo shirt. The taller woman’s long blond hair straggled down the back of a teal tank top, but that was all I could see of the women. I didn’t recognize them.

  Opal, Haylee’s mother, left her sale tables at Tell a Yarn, eased into the melee next door, and must have said something calming. The shouting stopped.

  Haylee went into The Stash and came out with a bolt of fabric in each arm, obviously a peace offering.

  Opal returned to her tables, and I went back to selling embroidery hoops, precut stabilizer, adorable little scissors shaped like birds, and embroidery thread in luscious colors. Making room for new merchandise was always a bonus.

  Several of the regular Threadville tourists oohed and aahed over embroidery thread I was offering at half price. “It’s old stock,” I warned them. “Thread can dry and become brittle. I’ve kept it out of sunlight and dust, but it may be more likely than new thread to fray and break.”

  They were happy, anyway. One of the problems with machine embroidery, if we could call it a problem, was that each design seemed to require colors we didn’t have, and we had to buy more.

  “Fishing line?” a man asked in a deep voice. Tom Umshaw showed me the spool of gray monofilament nylon thread in his hand. He was one of the fishermen who sold their catches down at the wharf. I’d bought a batch of Lake Erie yellow perch fillets from him recently.

  “Maybe if you’re angling for minnows,” I joked.

  “Hardly.” Tall and broad-shouldered, he had a deep tan and creases beside his eyes from time spent in the sun and on the water. His hair was prematurely salt-and-pepper, and so thick it probably wouldn’t lie down even if he wore a fisherman’s cap over it all day. His gray eyes seemed bleached by the sun, yet accustomed to searching the horizon for signs of storms. “What’s this stuff for? Do you sew with it?”

  “Sometimes,” I answered. “If we want our stitches to be almost invisible on dark fabrics.”

  He bought the thread. This past winter, when ice prevented him from going out in his commercial fishing boat, he had enrolled in Haylee’s sewing classes. She’d told me that he had started calling himself a “seamster” and was very good at the actual sewing, but ignored the instruction sheets that came with patterns. He claimed he liked the challenge of figuring out how the pieces should go together. Maybe I could interest him in machine embroidery next time he had to tie up his boat for the winter. Machine embroidery had more to do with manipulating pictures on a computer screen than reading fine print.

  “How was that perch?” he asked me. “Did you cook it the way I told you?”

  “It was fine.” The fish had been great, but even though I’d followed his (verbal, not written) instructions, it had curled and the batter had fallen off and made odd little dumplings in the hot oil. Both men and women could become seamsters, but I suspected that men were, somehow, better at frying fish.

  “Cookies, anyone?” Smiling, Neil Ondover, the owner of La Bakery, held out a platter of yummy-looking treats. I loved peanut butter cookies, and although I baked them nearly every week, I couldn’t resist one of Neil’s. Ashley turned him down, but everyone else helped themselves.

  Tom took a handful. “Thanks, bud,” he said. “When are you coming out in the boat with me?”

  Neil looked a little green around the gills. “Never.”

  “What’s wrong?” Tom laughed. “The waves go up, the waves go down. You get used to it.”

  Neil, who was short and wiry, grinned up at his friend. Neil appeared to be in his mid forties, while Tom looked a little more weathered. It was easy to see that they’d been teasing each other for years. Neil challenged, “You come to La Bakery and bake and decorate a wedding cake, and I’ll go out in your boat.”

  Palms up as if to ward off evil, Tom backed away. “Huh-uh, no. Don’t give me anything to do with weddings.”

  Neil laughed. “One of these days, one of your babes will net you.”

  Tom shook his head. “Nope.” He joined the crowds milling in the street.

  Carrying his tray of cookies, Neil ambled off toward the hardware store. Most evenings, local men gathered inside The Ironmonger, but tonight they hung around outside. Like the beaches, restaurants, snack bars, and souvenir shops, the hardware store was a refuge for those who, for some incomprehensible reason, weren’t interested in sewing, knitting, crocheting, quilting, embroidering, home décor, or the latest Threadville offering, costumes.

  Georgina, one of my regular customers, approached our table. She lived in Elderberry Bay, and always seemed to dress in only one color at a time. Tonight’s elegant outfit was a silvery tunic and matching slacks that she had embroidered all over with a machine she’d bought from me. She reached for a spool of magenta silk embroidery thread.

  A skinny blonde in a teal tank top jostled her and
grabbed the spool.

  Goose bumps spiked up the back of my neck. I was almost certain the blonde had been one of the two women involved in the ruckus in front of The Stash.

  Georgina usually said what she thought, but this time the thin line of her mouth and the flush on her cheeks made her self-control obvious. Without saying a word, she stepped back, away from the thread and the straggly-haired blonde.

  I told Georgina, “I’ll get you another spool of thread like that from inside.”

  The blonde flung the spool down and drifted away without buying anything. I gave Georgina the thread.

  In the crowd, I caught a glimpse of the blonde talking to a maroon-haired woman in a red polo shirt. Were the two women friends now, or about to start another fight? A shorter woman joined them, but I could see only part of her back. She had short, light brown curly hair and wore a pink plaid shirt. Together, all three of them drifted down the hill toward the beach.

  Across the street, Haylee and Opal and the two women who had helped Opal raise Haylee were still selling everything from fine crochet cotton to cozy, high-loft quilt batting.

  Fairy lights in trees added a celebratory touch, while Threadville’s streetlights, with their gas lamp styling, were charming. However, by ten o’clock, when we’d scheduled the Midsummer Madness Sidewalk Sale to end, none of the outdoor lights were bright enough for making change or checking signatures against charge cards, and the Threadville tour buses chugged away. Women waved and called through open bus windows.

  Haylee and her mothers tidied the sidewalks in front of their stores. People meandered down Lake Street toward the beach, where the almost full moon and puffy clouds could be putting on quite a show. Ashley and I had sold most of what we’d offered, so we had little to do besides fold the tables and lug them back into the storeroom.

  Before long, I would need to start opening In Stitches for a full day of Saturday browsing and sales. I loved my store and my life in Threadville, but not for such long stretches. This June’s midsummer madness was over. What a relief.

  And Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho wanted relief, too. I leashed them and we walked Ashley home.

  I watched until she let herself into her house and turned to wave good-bye, and then the dogs and I started back.

  On Lake Street, Haylee and all three of her mothers had put everything away, and their flower gardens again dominated the fronts of their stores. Spirea and roses glowed under streetlamps. Although Haylee’s mother and her friends had lived together from the time Haylee was born, looking after Opal’s fatherless child together, taking turns going to school and work, they now each had their own apartments above their stores, and Haylee’s store and apartment were the largest. All four apartments were lit with a homey glow.

  Opal and her two best friends had met in kindergarten. When they read Macbeth in junior high, they began calling themselves the Three Weird Sisters. Haylee naturally referred to them as The Three Weird Mothers, which didn’t bother them at all. They thought Haylee was just about perfect. They were very perceptive women.

  As always when I thought about Haylee and her three mothers, I smiled. I wasn’t sure that Haylee’s mothers always remembered that I wasn’t also their daughter. Having these four good friends living across the street was wonderful—and often comforting, especially when things went wrong in my yard or my shop.

  I took the dogs through the gate and down the slope to the patio outside my great room. In the warm night air, the heady sweetness of linden blossoms was almost overwhelming. Blueberry Cottage waited quietly for renovations that Clay and I would have to delay until the investigators were done with my yard.

  None of the investigators were around at the moment, but beyond the tape-festooned snow fencing, a man and woman sauntered along the riverside path. The moon glinted in patches on the river. The couple turned toward the water, and she rested her head on his shoulder.

  Only seven more days, I thought. An evening with Clay.

  7

  I’D FALLEN ASLEEP THINKING ABOUT CLAY and my date with him. I woke up counting the days. This was Saturday. Our date was next Friday. Six and a half more days. But I would also see him and his band at the community picnic, only hours away. Fraser Construction had grown since I’d first met Clay. Discovering that nearly every one of his employees played an instrument, he’d started a band. Clay played the trumpet.

  All morning and afternoon, everyone in my shop was in a holiday mood, looking forward to the picnic and crowing about the bargains they’d bought at the sidewalk sale.

  After my last customer left for the evening, I closed In Stitches, leashed the dogs, and took them out to my backyard. We were able to stay on the correct side of the police tape and go through the back gate for a quick stroll along the riverside trail.

  When we returned, I eyed Clay’s front-end loader. Digging holes in my yard with that thing could be fun.

  The dogs probably had similar ideas, though they might prefer slightly more primitive tools. I took them inside.

  I put on jeans, sneakers, and a navy blue T-shirt with the Elderberry Bay Volunteer Fire Department logo on the front and FIRE screen-printed in huge white letters across the back. Leaving my dogs behind, I took off for the picnic.

  The temperature was perfect. I wouldn’t swelter in the firefighter’s outfit I’d promised to wear for the first part of the evening. From the hill above the beach, the aromas of vanilla, cinnamon, and boiling oil—the good kind—whetted my appetite for funnel cakes and French fries.

  The picnic appeared to be a hit with children. They shouted inside a bouncy castle, petted baby farm animals in a pen surrounded by hay bales, and ran around with their faces painted to resemble cats, flowers, and superheroes. Emergency medical technicians gave tours of the ambulance. Chief Smallwood sat in the driver’s seat of her cruiser, showing excited kids the gadgets built into the car. She must have found time to buy supper. Plates of deep-fried Lake Erie yellow perch fillets, asparagus salad, and strawberry shortcake balanced on her dashboard.

  Wearing her firefighter’s jacket unbuttoned over her official department T-shirt, Haylee helped a squirming toddler up into the fire truck’s passenger seat.

  I opened one of the truck’s storage lockers, grabbed a pair of firefighter’s pants, stepped into them, and snapped my suspenders. Kids laughed. I toed my sneakers off and slid my feet into the clumsy boots. Like Haylee, I didn’t bother fastening my jacket. Finally, I plopped a helmet on my head without bothering to tuck my hair underneath it. The kids found that funny, too.

  Our new fire chief blasted the siren for a second. Haylee and I jumped. Our pint-sized audience laughed harder. “It startles me every time,” one mother said.

  We lifted children into and out of the fire truck until every kid at the picnic who wanted to sit in a fire truck had done it, some of them several times, and the fire chief announced that it was the truck’s bedtime. Haylee and I stowed our gear. Everyone under four feet tall rowed up along the curb and gazed wistfully as the bright red fire truck, siren blaring and lights strobing, roared up the hill toward the fire station, a little more than a block away. The ambulance left, too, at a speed that caused the children to lose their bereft expressions and jump around in impromptu dances.

  Eating strawberry shortcake, Chief Smallwood leaned against her cruiser. She waved a fork. We waggled our fingers at her and took off toward a tent labeled Tom’s Fish Fry.

  Tom piled fillets of fried perch on my plate.

  “That looks lots better than when I cooked it,” I admitted.

  He pointed his slotted spoon at his deep fryer. “Nothing beats deep frying. You have to cook these suckers really fast. A little light breading, then into the pot, and right back out.”

  I ordered onion rings to go with mine, and Haylee chose sweet potato fries. We bought drinks and wended our way between families to Opal, Naomi, and Edna, who were beckoning to us from a table close to the beach.

  Opal had given birth to Haylee when Op
al and her two best friends were only seventeen. Haylee’s three mothers had celebrated their fiftieth birthdays recently, but they were fit and always teasing each other, and appeared much younger than they actually were.

  Opal was almost as tall as Haylee and looked a lot like her, complete with the long blond hair, but while Haylee tailored her own clothes from fabrics she sold at The Stash, Opal knit or crocheted every garment she owned. Tonight, she wore a pale aqua T-shirt and matching slacks that I’d seen her crocheting with cotton yarn during her Friday night storytelling evenings at Tell a Yarn. She stared at our firefighter T-shirts in pretend shock. “Willow and Haylee, those are lovely T-shirts! So creative and original.”

  Edna, the shortest of the three women, almost never ventured out without some of the embellishments she sold at Buttons and Bows. With red and blue tapestry trim running down the outside seams of her red capris and tank top, she resembled a toreador. A headband she’d made from the tapestry trim corralled her hair, sort of. Crimson and navy points of hair stuck up all over the top of her head. She pointed her fork at me. “Printed, Willow, not machine embroidered?”

  I had to grin. Although I tried to restrain myself, I used my machines to embroider almost every garment I owned. I thought of it as marketing. Neither Haylee nor I were advertising our shops at the moment, but the white FIRE across my back made me feel important. If anyone needed help at the picnic, they could easily find Haylee or me.

  Naomi, who always stood up for everyone, complimented us. “No one else looks as good as you two do in jeans.”

  I could think of someone who looked much better in jeans. I would soon see him in his shiny band uniform . . .

  I thanked Naomi. She owned Batty About Quilts, and nearly everything she wore had been pieced together from several colors and patterns of fabric. For winter, she added batting and backing, and quilted all the layers together. For summer, she simply sewed the cottons together in interesting ways. She wore a long skirt, all pastel batiks, with a pale yellow cotton T-shirt she had crocheted during storytelling evenings. Despite Edna’s frequent hints and suggestions about hair colors, Naomi was letting natural gray highlight her brown hair. She had, however, obtained big sequins from Edna and had stitched them to both her top and her skirt, so she wasn’t completely immune to Edna’s brand of flamboyance.