Dire Threads

by Janet Bolin

  “Did Smythe Castor run around with Mike and his buddies?” I asked.

  “I may have seen him with them once or twice. I think he’s younger than the ringleaders.”

  “What about Clay Fraser? Was he one of Mike’s gang?”

  “I can’t remember. There were so many of them. Different ones at different times. But always Mike spurring them on.” She seemed to fold in on herself. “You be careful around all of them, and don’t let them blame you for things they did. And that includes Uncle Allen DeGlazier. He’s wilier than he looks.”

  “You be careful, too.” I tried to keep doubt from my face. Was she warning me against Mike’s friends for my sake or to deflect suspicion from herself?

  Looking satisfied at accomplishing her mission, whatever it was, she sidled out. Was agreeing to sell her weavings a mistake? If fear was contagious, I might catch it. But the linens were beautiful. I didn’t want to display them near the front windows where they might fade. I moved the bistro table farther back. Dawn’s colorful work contrasted nicely with the heritage designs I’d stitched on the white tablecloth.

  The Threadville tour bus trundled past. Minutes later, my morning students charged into my shop.

  “What happened? Why is that cop car outside again?” Rosemary asked.

  “A man died in my backyard early this morning.”

  Yesterday’s artistic woman, the one who’d said she lived in Elderberry Bay and had drawn a picture of Blueberry Cottage in a few deft strokes, was dressed head to toe in chocolate brown today. She raised her chin. “I heard it was that snirp—”

  Rosemary interrupted. “What’s a snirp?”

  “You know, a twerp in a snit, like that Mike Krawbach who was in here yesterday trying to pack a petition with illegal signatures. If anyone was asking to be killed—”

  “Now, Georgina,” the woman beside her scolded. Susannah, the other local?

  The somber mood lightened as everyone poured themselves cider and showed off their homework. Following the instructions I’d given them yesterday, they had bought floral fabrics at The Stash and had hooped fabric and stabilizer together, but any resemblance to each others’ work ended there. They’d chosen a variety of fabrics, colors, and stitches, and had ended up with deliciously different embroidered flowers.

  In addition to flaunting unique designs, each student made it her mission to describe how she planned to use her completed homework. Several motifs were destined to be sewn onto babies’ and children’s clothes. Some would decorate quilts. One woman was going to use hers to patch a sheet that had suffered an unfortunate clash with a sofa bed. Another planned to use hers to beautify an apron for her mother. Two women pranced around in vests, one quilted pink twill, the other black velvet, both embellished with their homework. These women were a traveling fashion show.

  Rosemary cut their show-and-tell short. “What are we making today, Willow?”

  I held up an embroidery hoop that fit one of my embroidery machines. I had loaded it with stabilizer and a square of sage green felt. “We’re going to embroider with machines.”

  They cheered.

  Grinning at the enthusiasm the women must have fanned into flames during their bus ride from Erie, I showed them a small memory card. “In addition to pretty designs, this contains several fonts.” They gathered around while I inserted the card into the attachment and demonstrated choosing letters, resizing them, and centering them in the hoop.

  I started the machine. It wrote Willow in—what else?—willowy script. My students loved it.

  Georgina asked, “What about those threads between letters? They show.”

  They did, barely. “You can clip them. Very carefully.”

  “Won’t your name unravel?” Susannah asked.

  “Not if you don’t cut the threads on the back of the design,” I answered.

  They dispersed to machines around the shop. Judging from their chatter and triumphant yelps, they had a wonderful time, especially Rosemary, Georgina, and Susannah, working together in a back corner of the store. Their laughter drew the rest of us to them.

  “We’re making mottos,” Georgina explained. “Mine’s for my sewing room.” She eased away so we could see what she’d stitched. So Many Fabrics, So Little Time.

  “I’m putting mine above the bed.” Susannah showed us bright red felt, cross-stitched in eye-zapping royal blue. She Who Hoards The Most Fabrics Wins. I couldn’t blame her for substituting “hoards” for the usual “dies with.”

  Rosemary gestured like a game show host and declaimed, “Mine’s going over hubby’s widescreen TV in the living room. Now he won’t have to ask why I spend my days in Threadville.” With a flourish, she revealed, What Does “Need” Have To Do With Buying Fabric?

  Fabriholics had to be among the happiest addicts around. Not that any of us saw it as an addiction. By the time they left for lunch at Pier 42, everyone had stitched their names and a motto.

  As I ate my own lunch, Clay phoned, wanting to know if this evening would be a good time to tour Blueberry Cottage and discuss renovating it.

  I gripped the phone so hard my nails bit into my palms. “We can’t. My whole backyard, including Blueberry Cottage, is a crime scene. We’re not allowed in it.”

  Silence. Then, “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I were. Mike Krawbach somehow managed to get himself beaten up near Blueberry Cottage last night, and now he’s dead, and Uncle Allen thinks I did it.” I was probably coming across as hysterical.

  “I’ll come right over,” he said.

  And he did. He parked his truck in front of Tell a Yarn, got out, and stopped dead, staring toward my front gate. Seconds later, he was inside In Stitches. “Are you okay, Willow?” He looked so concerned and ready to console that I was tempted to say I wasn’t.

  Haylee hurtled through the front door. “Clay!” They slapped palms. She looked about to explode in mirth. “Did you notice—?”

  His shoulders shook. “Yes, I did.”

  Haylee collapsed in my chair in a fit of hysterics.

  “What’s so funny?” I demanded like a whiny little kid around her big sister and her big sister’s boyfriend and their mysterious secret society.

  “She hasn’t seen it yet, has she?” Haylee gasped.

  “I guess not,” Clay answered.

  “Come outside,” Haylee demanded. “Close your eyes.”

  8

  I WASN’T SURE THAT CLOSING MY EYES was a great plan, but I obeyed. Haylee and Clay helped me down the wide front porch steps and turned me right. I felt the relative smoothness of concrete under my shoes. We had to be on the path leading toward the gate between my front and side yards.

  “Open your eyes,” Haylee ordered.

  My expression, which must have been startled to say the least, threw her into another fit of giggles.

  Uncle Allen had festooned my fence and gate with yellow police tape. He had woven it in and out, through chain links and around gateposts. Apparently, he’d had to cut the tape to open the gate so he could leave my property. He’d made up for it by draping several more layers of tape around the cut ends. Where was he, at home eating his lunch? Waiting for a team of investigators to arrive and help him? All this tape would impress them, no doubt.

  I leaned over the gate. Because of the tall cedars parading down both sides of my yard, I couldn’t see all of my fence. What I could see of it, and of the gate at the foot of the hill, was covered in tape.

  “It’s a work of art,” Haylee managed.

  “Maybe Uncle Allen really wants to retire and take textile arts courses from the Threadville shopkeepers,” Clay suggested.

  Haylee checked her watch. “I’d better finish preparing for this afternoon’s class.” She dashed through my front yard and across the street.

  Clay came into In Stitches with me, opened the stove, threw in a chunk of wood, then poured each of us a mug of warm cider. “I’m used to making myself at home,” he said. “I worked here for so long t
hat I sometimes forget it’s not my place.”

  “Anytime,” I said with more conviction than I wanted him to hear if he and Haylee were as close as they appeared to be. I covered it with a quick, “Like some cookies?”

  Tally whined from the top of the apartment steps on the other side of the door.

  “Maybe we should take your dogs out first,” Clay suggested.

  I let the pups into the shop, snapped leashes on them, and put on my burgundy jacket. Clay took Tally, and I took Sally. While the dogs sniffed at the yellow tape woven through my fence, I told Clay about Mike’s death. I didn’t tell him what Mike’s purported last words were. For one thing, Uncle Allen changed them every time he repeated them. I concluded, “So, because Mike died in my yard and my canoe paddle and an empty gas can were near him, Uncle Allen is going around saying that Mike found me about to burn my own cottage down and I killed him so he wouldn’t report me to my insurance company.”

  “Even Uncle Allen must know that’s a stretch. He hasn’t arrested you.” Clay frowned toward two large white trucks parked near the vacant store. “What’s with the trucks?”

  “I don’t know.” I was beginning to suspect everyone and everything, including mysterious unmarked trucks, of murder.

  Clay bent down and scratched Tally’s head. “Maybe the vacant building on the other side of The Ironmonger is finally being renovated. Usually, I hear about things like that. Those trucks don’t belong to any construction company around here.”

  The dogs seemed more than willing to help investigate. They tugged us past the hardware store. I wondered what allegations about my connection with Mike’s death were swirling around that potbellied stove.

  The vacant building had been constructed from early twentieth-century concrete blocks, the ones cast with bumps to resemble stone. Once ubiquitous, these buildings were becoming rare and had a certain antique charm. Newspapers were taped in the large front windows, so we couldn’t see inside, where hammers pounded, saws whined, and a radio blared. Clay handed me Tally’s leash, strode to the door, and knocked. No one answered. Clay tried the knob. Locked. He returned to the dogs and me.

  Tally pulled him to the next building, a brand-new one with Victorian gingerbread styling, wide porches, glassed-in balconies, and many huge windows. “This is going to be a restaurant,” Clay told me. “It’s supposed to open this spring.”

  The restaurant would have a fabulous view of the village park, which included the beach, the mouth of the river, and the end of the riverside trail where I’d searched unsuccessfully this morning for tracks from Mike’s ATV.

  Pier 42, where the Threadville tourists were eating lunch, boasted a similar view, but from the other side of Lake Street, so it didn’t overlook the river. At the rate the Threadville boutiques were drawing tourists besides the usual summer sun lovers, the village would soon easily support two year-round restaurants.

  Clay helped me convince the dogs to go back to In Stitches, where we all feasted on peanut butter cookies, made without sugar for the dogs and with plenty of rich brown sugar for us. Clay stared at the corner of my shop where I kept my computer, beside the door to my apartment. “If you had a pen for the dogs here, at the top of the stairs, they could stay near you in your store, and you could leave your door open for them to wander to and from your apartment whenever they wanted to.”

  I loved the idea. “And Tally wouldn’t have to whine and whimper so much. Could I hire you to build it?”

  “You could.”

  We spent the next five minutes gobbling cookies, mapping out the penned area, and designing a gate for it. We agreed that Clay would build it on Monday, the day the Threadville shops were closed.

  Clay fished a card from the inner chest pocket of his jacket. “Here’s my number. I don’t live far away, and I’m building new houses up the river. If this place gives you problems, call me anytime, day or night.”

  I asked, “How did you know my phone number to call me just now?”

  He grinned. “The dogs told me. It’s on their tags.”

  And he’d made a note of it. Thorough.

  He knelt to tell the dogs good-bye. Unabashedly, they gave him more than his share of kisses, then rewarded me with reproachful looks for letting him leave. To add insult to injury, I closed them into the apartment.

  Halfway through the afternoon class, my students and I heard Uncle Allen’s police cruiser. We watched it lead a flatbed truck up Lake Street. The truck carried an ATV. It had to be Mike’s. Originally, it must have been black. Now, dust and road salt made it appear gray.

  IT WAS AFTER FIVE AND GETTING DARK when the tour bus left. I began tidying the store. My sea glass chime jingled.

  Uncle Allen. “I’ve taken your canoe paddle and gas can as evidence, and Mike’s ATV. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  I walked close to Uncle Allen so I could tower over him. “It wasn’t my gas can. And Mike was—” I almost said hateful. “He had a way of making enemies.”

  “Only you and your friends with your silly hobbies. Why did you all have to invade our peaceful village and start murdering folks?” He backed into a rack of sparkly embroidery threads. Spools bounced and rolled over my black walnut floor.

  I gathered errant spools of thread. “None of us harmed him. None of us would hurt anyone.” I poked spools back into their places in their rack.

  Widening his stance and placing his fists on his hips, he endangered my rack of low-gloss cotton embroidery thread. “Mike told me you women killed him.” Uncle Allen seemed determined to change—or forget—Mike’s last words. “Only a woman would use a canoe paddle to kill someone.”

  It was such a cockeyed accusation that I wondered if Uncle Allen had planned it first, then attacked Mike with my canoe paddle. Uncle Allen was big, but perhaps not coordinated enough to do real damage with a canoe paddle, even one made of good, sturdy hardwood like the one that had come with Blueberry Cottage.

  I put my favorite scissors into their drawer. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Sure it does. Men have guns and knives. What do women have? Rolling pins and . . . and canoe paddles.”

  Scissors, too. I slammed the drawer. “Besides, my gate was locked when I found Mike. If someone threw him over the fence, it had to be someone strong. A man.”

  “No one had to throw Mike. Maybe you left your gate unlocked last night.”

  “I don’t dare leave my gates unlocked. Mi—someone opened one and let my dogs out.”

  “Aha!” Uncle Allen raised an index finger. “I heard that you blamed Mike for letting your dogs escape.”

  I fought to control a guilty expression. Last night, I’d told people on the trail that Mike had let my dogs out of my yard. I may even have uttered a death threat. I’d undoubtedly looked murderous. My sweet little Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho could have been lost, injured, or killed.

  “I’m sure he did open my gate. I got the dogs back, bought padlocks, and locked my gates, so I had no reason to harm him.”

  He grunted in scorn. “Your gate started out locked last night, then someone unlocked it, let Mike into your yard, beat him up, and locked the gate. Who would that be?” The finger pointed at me. “That’d be you. The woman who threatened to kill him.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I spoke in anger.” I was digging a bigger hole for myself. “I admit I shouldn’t have spoken like that, but it was just words. Besides, I was the one who called for help when he was injured.”

  He jutted his chin, which he probably hoped made him look dangerous, but really only stretched his wattles. “You didn’t mean your words. Maybe you didn’t mean to kill him, either, but when you saw how badly you’d injured him, you got scared, and called 911.”

  “I didn’t even know he was in my backyard. I never touched him, never hurt him, never would have!” I told myself to ratchet down the anxiety before it manifested itself in twitches or blushes. “Have you checked up on everybody around here who owns a dark pickup truck
?”

  “Check up, how?”

  I held my hands out, palms up. “To see if any of them had grudges against Mike. Or—” I tripped over my words. “Wouldn’t Mike have fought his attacker? Maybe someone went to the emergency room with strange wounds last night. Or visited a doctor.”

  “If they did, I’d hear about it.”

  I wasn’t so sure. “I never saw that gas can before, or touched it. Someone brought it to my place. Why don’t you dust it and the canoe paddle for prints? The paddle came with the property, and I may have touched it, but I’m sure you’ll find someone else’s prints on it. More recent prints than mine. That’ll be your man.”

  “Woman,” he jumped in. “And she . . . you . . . wore gloves. I already dusted them.”

  Everyone wore gloves or mittens last night. Overcoming my panic was becoming increasingly difficult. On the other hand, Uncle Allen seemed more interested in taunting me than arresting me. I asked, “Why haven’t the state police sent teams to help you investigate?”

  Uncle Allen puffed out his chest. “I haven’t asked them, and they can’t go butting into my jurisdiction. What would they know about Elderberry Bay? This case I’m solving myself. In all my years of policing this village, nothing like this has ever happened before.”

  All the more reason to ask for help. “They could take some of the burden. You’ll be putting in hours of overtime.”

  Somewhere among the chins and wattles, Uncle Allen had jaw muscles he could clench. His teeth made a horrible grinding noise. “I watched Mike and all the other young folks around here grow up. Whenever they had a problem, they always knew they could come to me. I was about to retire. Mike trusted me. I owe it to him to stay on until his killer is nailed.”

  Maybe he believed that being denied a building permit was a motive for murder, but I knew a better one. “Who inherits Mike’s vineyard?”

  Uncle Allen backed away as if hoping I wouldn’t recognize the grief in his eyes. “His parents are dead and he had no sisters or brothers or wife or children. He struggled with that vineyard all by himself, had to mortgage everything after a couple of disastrous winters killed his grapevines. The poor boy had nothing besides debts. He was about to get on his feet.”