Hanging by a Thread

by Sophie Littlefield

  And this past July third, a high school girl named Amanda Stavros disappeared without a trace. As time went by and no evidence of her was found, she was presumed dead.

  Dillon’s death was reported all over California. We watched it on the news up in San Francisco—the footage of the road above the sheer cliff, the grieving parents at the funeral service. Mom knew the mother slightly, but she’d still been in middle school when Mom went off to college.

  When Amanda disappeared, we were glued to the TV night after night. After police let it slip that they thought the deaths could be connected, the story made national news. Grim-faced newscasters reported that the crimes were suspected to be the work of a serial killer, and predicted that it might happen again. There were interviews with detectives and criminal psychologists. Rewards were offered, federal agencies called in, tips followed up on, persons of interest interviewed, but no arrests were ever made.

  Mom and I had watched it all. She had made a clean break from Winston, but she’d grown up here, as had I, and we couldn’t take our eyes away from reports showing familiar scenes of town. Also, she’d gone to high school with Mrs. Stavros, though they hadn’t been close friends. Mrs. Stavros had been popular and beautiful—she’d even modeled for a while after graduation, and her magazine photos ended up in the news, along with details of her husband’s business dealings. Reporters camped out in front of their house, the coffee shop where they were known to go in the mornings, even the salon where Mrs. Stavros got her hair done.

  As the months went by, the story kept coming back on the news whenever details emerged: The little boy was suspected of having been beaten before his body was tossed into the sea. Amanda’s boyfriend had been questioned by the police. Her father had hired independent detectives. Rewards were doubled, then doubled again.

  As we were getting settled in after the move, Newsweek ran an article with the headline “One Year Later: Town Braces for the Worst,” making it sound like the killer was expected to show up for the third year in a row. But the Winston Chamber of Commerce was fighting back. The Independence Day festival was taking place on July third, to draw attention away from the anniversary of the murders, and the town was pulling out all the stops to attract tourists. There would be entertainment, food, and a fireworks display to rival San Francisco’s. And there were rumors that the town had hired tons of security, both plainclothes and uniformed.

  “You can’t be too careful,” Nana said. “Besides, he’s going after kids like you.”

  “Like me?”

  “The stars. The best and brightest. The cream of the crop.”

  “Oh, Nana …” I knew what she was implying: Dillon had been a star baseball player, even at the age of ten. He’d been on a team that went to the Little League World Series the year before he was killed. And Amanda had been pretty and popular and a good student. She’d been captain of the JV cheer squad and a member of the Gold Key Society, an exclusive girls’ service club at Winston High, which must have been a good human-interest angle because the newspapers ran stories about it. “No one knows me here, and besides, I’m hardly a star.”

  “Clare, you’re wonderfully talented, and beautiful! Look at you!”

  It was the sort of thing Nana always said, and there was no way I was going to convince her otherwise. “Okay. I’ll be careful. I’ll come straight home from the festival and lock myself in with Mom. We’ll bar the doors and get out the shotguns. Happy?”

  “You just make sure you do that. And call me. Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  She finally seemed to relax. “Now show me what you made this week.”

  Nana was my number-one fan, and she was also the only other person in my life who knew anything about sewing, so I loved showing her my work. I made clothes and bags from other people’s castoffs, taking them apart and sewing them back together again, tailoring sleeves and hems and necklines, and adding trim and embellishments.

  This week I’d altered a coral-pink jacket that came from a suit my mom hadn’t worn in years. I’d added bright orange piping around the lapels, and replaced the buttons with vintage stamped-metal ones from the sixties. As a final touch I’d sewn on a pink and coral fabric flower that came from one of my old headbands.

  A pair of jeans—size 2, three sizes too small for me or I would have kept them for myself—now sparkled with bugle-bead curlicues starting on the back pockets and trailing down the outer seams of the legs.

  And finally there was a tote bag stitched together from pieces of an old brown and pink quilt I’d salvaged. The quilt had been falling apart—someone had used it so many times that the binding had frayed and some of the patches had holes—but there were sections that were perfectly good. I carefully cut these out, sewing them to brown corduroy panels cut from a pair of men’s Levi’s. I’d added a heavy-duty zipper with chrome teeth and handles made from leftover corduroy. When I’d finished it the night before, I thought it had a funky charm, but now I wondered if it was just plain ugly.

  “You’ve outdone yourself!” Nana laughed as I slipped my creations into my backpack.

  I wasn’t sure that was a good thing. Nana’s style was the last thing I wanted mine to resemble. Still, she complimented everything I did—I could make a skirt out of a garbage bag and she’d tell me it was gorgeous—so I let it go.

  “I have to run, Nana,” I said. “I’m meeting Rachel at ten.”

  “Just remember what I said.”

  I promised her yet again, then waited until I heard her car puttering down the hill before I wheeled my bike out to the street.

  Be careful. Stay in groups. Lock the door.

  And don’t end up being Winston’s third Independence Day murder victim.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I RODE MY BIKE DOWN THE HILL to a restaurant called the Shuckster. Rachel couldn’t pick me up in her Nissan 370Z because our sales booth took up her passenger seat. Its wooden legs jutted straight up, and whenever the canvas top caught the wind, she had to hold on to it with her free hand to keep it from flying out of the car and into traffic. It had taken a lot of work to convince Rachel’s mom that Adrienne, Rachel’s nine-year-old sister, had outgrown her puppet theater and wouldn’t mind if we used it to sell my one-of-a-kind creations. And it had taken ten bucks to convince Adrienne, which put me in the hole for this venture before we even started.

  When Rachel found out we were moving back to Winston, it had been her idea to start a business together. She’d seen the things I made the few times I had visited her, and thought we could make a lot of money selling them. Of course, she didn’t need the money—but she did need a summer job, because her mother insisted she do something other than lie around the house all day.

  The puppet theater “storefront” had been her idea, and she did the merchandising, too. The way she figured it, people were a lot more likely to stop and look at our wares if they were displayed at eye level. We hung my creations from nails we pounded into the theater’s frame, and on the front we displayed the sign we had made on Rachel’s computer and laminated at the copy shop. It had turned out great—the words “NewToYou” in bright pink curlicue font on a pale orange background. We’d thought about adding a second line of text beneath the name—“Everything old can be new again” or “New life from old duds,” but neither one got across the message we wanted.

  Which was cool. We wanted people to think restyled vintage clothes and accessories were cool. It didn’t hurt that Rachel was a trendsetter at Winston High; if she put her seal of approval on something, everyone else liked it too. I’d been skeptical at first, but when some of her friends stopped by our stand last week and bought things, I had to admit that Rachel’s idea had been brilliant.

  “Hey hey, Cee-Cee girl!” Rachel yelled as she swerved in next to the curb, the stand bobbing dangerously in the passenger seat. I ran to steady it, grimacing at Rachel’s nickname for me.

  I really wanted to be known by the name I’d had since I was born sixteen years a
nd three months ago. But Rachel’s whims were as contagious as they were unpredictable. Already, half the kids I knew had started calling me Cee-Cee too, and since I’d met them all through Rachel, odds were they’d keep doing it as long as she did.

  “You’re only ten minutes late this time,” I said as we got the stand out of the car. “That’s some kind of record.”

  “Yeah, but that’s because I had to take Adrienne to camp. Mom said if I was late again she was going to make me volunteer there. God, can you imagine—twenty fifth-grade girls doing crafts?”

  She made a face, thoroughly disgusted by the idea, so I didn’t bother to point out that what I did was just a more sophisticated version of the loopy potholders and dishtowel pillows the girls made. When I was their age, I loved those crafts; anything that involved a needle and thread had captivated me as far back as I could remember, ever since Nana started letting me play with her boxes of scraps and buttons and bits of ribbon and lace.

  I hauled the stand out of the car, and the big plastic storage tub out of the trunk, and started setting it all up. First I hung all the things that hadn’t sold last Saturday, using the curved safety pins I got at a quilt shop. They were thin enough not to damage any of the fabrics, and the shape made it easy to attach them to the canvas or hook over nails. I hung hats and bags along one side, tops and skirts along the other, the fabrics overlapping to make a crazy rainbow that flapped gently in the breeze.

  Once all the older pieces were displayed, I dug into my backpack for the three new pieces I’d made this week, hanging these along the top crossbar of the stand.

  Rachel was watching me, hands on hips.

  “So, what do you think?” I said, stepping aside to give her an unobstructed view.

  “We’ll sell those jeans by ten-thirty,” Rachel said without hesitation. “The jacket’s going to take longer, but we’ll get some lady from the suburbs down here for the weekend. But that bag? It’s like someone was smoking crack at the quilting bee, Cee-Cee, are you serious?”

  I touched the soft, worn patchwork of the bag. So maybe the plastic elephant head I’d used for a closure—I found it at a garage sale and drilled a hole in it so I could sew it on—was a little over the top.

  But over the top was what I did. It was who I was.

  “I’ll bet you a Hoff run,” I said, straightening the bag. “Someone’s going to love this.”

  Rachel snorted. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you’re so sure …” She dug into her purse for a Sharpie and wrote on one of the pink cardboard tags we’d made one night while watching Princess Bride for the millionth time. Rachel did the tags because she had prettier handwriting.

  When she held it up she looked smug. She had written $55, and I shook my head as she carefully attached the tag to the bag’s strap and then curled the tag’s silvery ribbon with a pair of safety scissors.

  “If I can get fifty-five bucks for it by noon, the Hoff run’s on you.”

  “Just because I said someone is bound to love that bag doesn’t mean you can price us out of the market,” I complained.

  “You said you were sure,” Rachel reminded me. “Besides, someday you’re going to be famous, and this’ll be worth a fortune.”

  The jeans sold first, just as Rachel predicted—a woman with giant sunglasses bought them for one of her two cranky daughters, bargaining us down from thirty to twenty-six dollars. But the crazy quilted bag wasn’t far behind. At eleven-forty-five, after we’d been in business for less than two hours, an older lady with short white hair walked by the booth with a small brown fluffy dog on a leash—and did a double take.

  “Monkey puzzle!” she exclaimed.

  “Um … excuse me?” I had been reading an article titled “What He’s Thinking When He Gets Dressed” in the June issue of Glamour. Mom brought old magazines home from the office whenever new issues arrived. Her accounting business was located in a bungalow that also housed a dental practice, and I guess none of the staff wanted the old magazines.

  “This quilt block—its name is Monkey Puzzle. My grandmother made a quilt like this—well, not like this, exactly.” The white-haired woman laughed, her raspy voice warm and friendly. “My grandmother probably never would have thought of using an elephant.”

  I blushed. Okay, so maybe the elephant head hadn’t been my best idea ever.

  “Uh, well, we have some really sweet little zipper cases that are also made from salvaged quilts,” I mumbled, sorting through the rack. “Perfect for holding makeup, or eyeglasses—”

  “Oh, no, honey, I like this one.” She laughed again as she handed the bag to Rachel to wrap up. “You’ve got quite an eye. May I ask where you find your merchandise, girls?”

  “Clare sews each piece herself,” Rachel said proudly. She called me by my real name in front of adults, for which I was grateful. “Everything’s made right here in Winston.”

  The lady raised a silver eyebrow. “Clare Raley?” she asked. “Lila’s granddaughter?”

  I smiled uncomfortably. “Clare Knight, ma’am, actually. But yes, Lila Raley is my grandmother.”

  “Oh, of course you wouldn’t be a Raley, what was I thinking? Your mother married that boy she met in college.”

  “Joe Knight,” I said, blushing harder as I got ready to tell my usual lie. “Although my mother and father are amicably separated.”

  “Yes. Yes. Well.” She didn’t stop smiling, even as her expression slipped just a bit. Rachel counted out change and handed it over. “I should have known your creativity runs in the family. Lila’s quite a character, isn’t she.”

  That was code for “eccentric.” People had a lot of different ways of saying it, but I knew what they meant—my grandmother was weird. I sighed. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And so active locally, with all her causes. Now if we could just get her to put some of her energy into restoring that lovely historic home of hers, hmm?” She gave me a smile to mask the fact that she’d just insulted Nana’s house. Many Winston residents thought Nana had turned the old Raley mansion into an eyesore. “You be sure to give her my regards, all right? And your parents, too.”

  As I watched the woman walk away with her new tote bag tucked under her arm, I wondered what she would think if she knew that I hadn’t seen my father, Joe Knight, in almost a year, despite the fact that he lived only three hours away. Or that Nana was planning to paint her front door purple.

  Or that while I was cutting up the corduroy jeans that became the handle of her new bag, my mind had filled with visions of the man who’d worn them the night he’d robbed a convenience store.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CLOTHES SPEAK TO ME.

  Not all clothes. And not all the time. It’s been happening since before I was old enough to understand what my visions meant. No, strike that—I still didn’t always understand what I saw, even after Nana shared what she knew about the gift she had passed down to me. She believed that what happened long ago on the night when Alma died was the direct result of a terrible kind of justice. Or rather, the physical manifestation of a lack of balance created when there is an injustice.

  Those were her words, and I can still hear her saying them all these years later. I was twelve when she told me. I’d just started seventh grade and had my first vision, a silver-sparkled, hazy episode, when I borrowed my friend Gayle’s sweater and, slipping it over my school uniform in the coatroom, got so dizzy I had to sit down. In the blurry moments that followed, feeling like I was watching a grainy television in my mind, I discovered that Gayle had dropped her mother’s favorite vase out of a second-story window after she was grounded.

  That night, I tried to talk to my mom about what had happened, and she lost it. She started yelling, and then she apologized, making me promise to forget what had happened and to tell no one about it, ever. She said it was like a disease, but if I ignored it, it would go away.

  So when we drove down to Winston for Thanksgiving a few weeks later, I waited unt
il my mom was busy with her laptop in the den, and whispered my forbidden questions to Nana. She took me into the kitchen with a worried look and, after cutting me a slice of pumpkin bread, told me that she’d always known I was special. That was when I found out what really happened to Alma.

  “The baby who was born the night Alma died was my mother, Josie,” Nana said after telling me the story of Alma’s murder.

  “Did she have it? The … gift?” I wasn’t sure what I thought of Nana’s term for it yet, especially since Mom’s reaction had convinced me it was something terrible.

  “I’m almost certain she did, though my memories from that time aren’t very reliable. She died when I was still in my teens. But Mama always seemed to know things about people in town. And why wouldn’t she? People brought clothes to the shop all the time. She’d take up a hem or alter a neckline or a sleeve, and once in a while she’d learn something about the person who wore it. I remember there were some families she wouldn’t sit close to in church … a few kids whose houses she wouldn’t let us go over to.”

  “Didn’t you wonder why?”

  “Well, I had bigger things to worry about. People said that our family was cursed. They started up all that nonsense about the shop being haunted. Kids at school used to tease me and Mary and Agnes; they said they could see Alma’s ghost following us around, that kind of thing. I thought Mama was just trying to spare our feelings. After all, she grew up an orphan—she was raised by one of her aunts—and she was determined to give us a loving childhood.” She smiled sadly. “I still miss her sometimes. Lord, but it’s been a lot of years.”