Crewel Yule

by Ferris, Monica

  They parked and got out. The temperature had dropped, and there was a brisk, cutting wind that hurried them up the aisle toward the nearest entrance. Though it wasn’t quite snowing yet, the sleet was thickening with the promise of it.

  “I thought Tennessee was in the South,” complained Betsy, pulling her raincoat’s collar closed around her neck. Godwin, behind her, hunched his shoulders and shoved his hands into the pockets of his beautiful camel-hair coat.

  “I hear there are frost warnings as far south as central Florida,” said Jill, comfortable in just a Norwegian sweater and knit cap. But Jill didn’t put a coat on until the thermometer dropped below zero.

  The entrance they were heading toward was glowing with thousands of fairy lights on tall shrubs. The shrubs were iced over, blurring the pinpricks of light into a single glowing mass, very pretty. But Betsy didn’t slow to appreciate the scene. She pulled one of the wide double doors open by its highly polished brass handle and stepped into the warmth of a broad hallway filled with the sounds of caroling.

  The walls were lined with displays of fresh pine trees decorated for Christmas, and the air was sharp with their scent. Jill came in behind Betsy and the three stood a moment, while Betsy unclenched her shoulders and unbuttoned her raincoat. Jill and Betsy were fond of Christmas. Both grew up in homes where Christmas trees were real, and just the scent set off a Niagara of nostalgia. Godwin noted the arrangement with his artisan’s eye and pronounced it a bit over the top, “just like it should be.”

  Jill made a face at him, pulled her cap off, said “Come on,” and led the way down the corridor.

  At its end they walked into a totally different climate. Though the air was still filled with the music of Christmas, it was also moist and heavy with the scents of earth, flowers, and tropical plants. A high earthen bank was set with stones and blooming plants. Betsy looked up and up and up. Mighty palm trees growing from the top of the bank made gentle parentheses around a space three and four stories high—and there was open air above them.

  “Oh, my,” she murmured, as she craned her neck.

  “Told ya,” said Godwin, inhaling happily.

  Jill turned left, and they set off down a broad walkway that descended gently. On their right the bank continued. On their left were small verandas in front of what looked like row houses a door and one window wide. There were balconies on the second and third and fourth and . . . again Betsy’s eyes went up and up. Wreaths decorated the doors, and candles were in all the windows.

  “Oh,” she said. “Are these the hotel rooms?”

  “This is one neighborhood of them,” said Jill.

  They walked for a while, then the path curved into an opening in the earthen bank to cross a bridge over a canal wide enough for two rowboats to pass one another easily. Fairy lights twinkled on the bridge railings and statues of carolers stood in little groups under old-fashioned street-lights along the canal bank.

  “Isn’t it romantic?” sighed Godwin.

  The canal wound away under another bridge before it vanished from sight behind more plantings. Another different set of apartment-like hotel rooms rose on either side and still more were glimpsed beyond the trees in the distance. “How big is this place?” Betsy wondered aloud.

  “Beats me,” said Jill. “I’d have to live here for a month to really learn my way around. Come on, the New Orleans section is this way.” She started up a walkway bordering the canal. Betsy took off her raincoat. Godwin shed his overcoat, then rehung it carefully over his shoulders.

  Several walkways came together in a complex of arches over the canal and on the other side was a broad street lined with shops that offered dolls and teddy bears, or collectibles, or candy. One seemed to be a kind of old-fashioned general store. The shops were actual buildings, with roofs and chimneys, two stories high. On the sidewalk was a popcorn vendor with a wheeled cart; the scent evoked summer even more than the flowers and shrubs. Around the corner was a small, cobblestone square with the canal—or maybe a different canal—on one side of it, and on the far side were more buildings, pale gray stucco on their blank sides, heavily ornamented with wrought iron on their fronts. From one came the hot, stirring sounds of a jazz trumpet. The canal ran around back and on the other side of it was a sloping bank covered with small trees and flowers in front of still more hotel rooms. Betsy remarked, “While I love jazz, I’d hate to be a really tired traveler who got assigned one of these rooms.”

  “They do some kind of trick with acoustics. Once you’re more than twenty yards from the place, you can’t hear the music,” said Godwin.

  Betsy nodded. She hadn’t heard the music until she came around the corner. A neat trick, that. She wondered if it could be applied to outdoor construction. What a gift that would be! But it probably required a specially designed roof over the whole area, like here.

  The scent of highly spiced food was also coming from the building with the jazz trumpet, and Betsy’s mouth watered. “I hope this is where you’re taking us,” she said.

  “Sure,” said Jill.

  The music was even better than the food, and they stayed late to listen.

  Their minds were still on the hot, lazy feel of New Orleans when they came out of the Grand Ole Opry Hotel into the shock of winter. Real winter, now. Snow was coming down so hard they couldn’t see more than a few yards ahead. It had piled up three inches deep, but there was no sign a plow had been through. Under the snow was ice, and they found themselves sliding helplessly into one another and the backs of parked cars as they blundered up the aisle.

  “What kind of car are we looking for?” asked Betsy, who had forgotten.

  “A black, four-door Sable,” said Jill. “Rental plates.”

  Betsy chuckled. It was dark and all the cars were so heavily coated with snow it was almost impossible to see their color. Their license plates were covered as well—not that it mattered, Betsy had no idea how to identify rental car license plates.

  “It was somewhere around here,” said Jill at last, stopping to peer around. Betsy wondered how she could possibly know that. But when Jill took the keys from her pocket and pressed a button, a car only a few yards away honked and its taillights flashed. “There it is.”

  An excellent driver, Jill nonetheless drove very gingerly out of the parking lot. She had the wipers going and the defroster on full blast. The headlights barely penetrated the heavy swirl of snow ahead of them.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t take us back,” said Betsy, as the car slithered out onto the street—which hadn’t been cleaned off, either. “We can double up with you, or get another room and go back in the morning.”

  “No,” said Jill, after a moment. “No telling if this will be any easier tomorrow, and I don’t want to be out here with a lot of traffic.”

  There was almost no one else out right now, the natives being nobody’s fools.

  Jill, by keeping her speed under twenty and starting to brake half a block early, was able to stop at a red light.

  “This is scary,” remarked Godwin, the first time the normally chatty man had spoken since they left the parking lot.

  “Are you sure we should continue?” asked Betsy. She glanced over to see Jill purse her lips and shrug her shoulders slightly to work out the tension. She looked back in time to see the light turn green. Jill gave it the Minnesota pause (Minnesota drivers, among the most dangerous in the country, take a traffic light’s turning yellow as an invitation to floor it), and then took another three seconds to gain traction.

  A few blocks later, an intersection offered a light that was already green, and Jill, having gotten up to a grand eighteen miles an hour, didn’t slow. They had gotten barely halfway through when a pickup, traveling helplessly sideways, its driver showing them his appalled, gape-mouthed face, gave her right front fender a glancing blow with his own front bumper. With a horrible bang, the Sable’s airbags inflated. Powder filled the air inside the passenger compartment as their car spun completely around. The bags bega
n to collapse immediately, and Jill, anxious not to be struck again, drove out of the intersection in the direction from which she’d come.

  She pulled up to the curb and said, “Everyone all right?”

  “I think so,” said Godwin from the back seat. “Yes, all present and accounted for. Except my tummy’s bruised.”

  “I’m all right,” said Betsy after taking a few seconds to hear reports from distant limbs. “Are you?”

  “Yes.” They got out and Betsy went with Godwin to see how bad the damage was.

  “Wow,” he said, looking at the seriously crumpled fender and smashed headlight.

  “But we’re not leaking steam or oil,” Betsy pointed out. The engine purred quietly behind the cracked grill, and the tire under the damaged fender seemed fine.

  “Where’s Jill gone to?”

  Betsy turned around, peering through the thick snow. “There she is.”

  Jill had gone back to the intersection to look for the pickup, which had also spun around and was now resting against the curb facing the way it had come. The driver, a stocky young man, was slipping and sliding through the snow toward Jill, his eyes still very wide. Betsy and Godwin went to stand beside Jill.

  “Are you all right?” he asked breathlessly. “I am soooo sorry! I hit my brakes but the truck just ignored it. Are any of y’alls hurt?”

  “No, we’re okay,” said Jill. “Are you hurt?”

  “No, ma’ am.”

  “Good. May I see your driver’s license, please?”

  This was said so crisply, the young man frowned at her. “I beg y’all’s pardon?”

  “Sorry, force of habit. Back home I’m a police officer. I hope you’re insured?”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus, a cop. Yes, ma’am, I’m insured.”

  They exchanged identification and insurance information. Jill made careful notes and the young man, seeing her do so, went back to his car for a notebook so he could do likewise. Betsy felt her feet getting wet and cold, so she went back to the Sable.

  Jill and Godwin joined her a few minutes later. “Jill,” began Betsy.

  “I think we’re closer to your place than mine,” said Jill.

  They were, though not by much. And the Consulate was at the top of a very steep, winding road. The Sable tried, and Jill was good, but at last she wrestled it to the side and set the front wheel tread firmly against the curb. “I’m afraid we have to walk from here.”

  “And you’re staying with me tonight,” said Betsy. “These people have no idea how to drive in this stuff, and I couldn’t stand it if you got into another accident trying to get back to your place.”

  “I was going to ask to stay if you didn’t offer.”

  They stopped at the check-in counter to get Jill a room. But the night clerk, a tall black woman with a kind voice, said they were full. “The couch in your suite pulls out into a bed,” she said.

  Jill said, “I’ll take it.”

  “No, I’ll take it,” said Godwin. “Girls of a feather and all that.”

  Betsy registered Jill as a third party and the night clerk, on looking at Betsy’s credit card said, “There’s an envelope for you.”

  Betsy opened it in the glass-sided elevator going up to nine. It was a slim booklet of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper with a plastic comb binding on one side. The front cover read “Management and Hiring” and was ornamented with a round gold sticker with EARTH THREADS and BETSY C. STINNER printed on it in black letters.

  “Oh, this must be the handout from one of the classes we missed!” said Betsy. “How nice of her to get it to me.”

  She flipped through the booklet, which consisted of lists of rules stated in simple language and printed in bold type. Picking one at random, she read, “Never ever put off a problem. Problems put off only tend to get larger. Get to the root.” Well, that was true enough.

  The night clerk had given Jill an emergency kit of toothbrush, toothpaste, comb, and deodorant. Betsy had brought a nightgown as well as pajamas, so she loaned Jill the former.

  But tired as everyone was, they were too shaken by the ride back from the Grand Ole Opry Hotel to go right to bed. They sat up and watched the Weather Channel exclaim over the massive winter storm that had stalled over the Midwest. Airports were closed from Denver to Indianapolis, and from Chicago to Nashville.

  Godwin, gorgeous in magenta silk pajamas and matching robe, said, “Good thing we came back when we did, boss, or we’d never get to spend a dime at the Market.” He added, to Jill, “I’ll bring you some catalog sheets tomorrow and you can pick out some stuff. We’ll let you buy it for whatever they sell it to us for.”

  “Thanks,” Jill said. “Maybe they’ll have the main streets plowed by tomorrow afternoon and I can get back to my hotel.”

  Godwin snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding. This is the south, darlin’. There’s a probably not a for-real snow plow in the whole city. When it snows, everyone stays home till it melts, which it usually does the next day. They get maybe one snowfall a winter, and never anything like this.”

  Jill looked at the window. “What, never?”

  Godwin, on cue, sang the HMS Pinafore captain’s reply, “Well, hardly ev-ER!”

  Betsy shut off the television and they went to bed.

  Four

  Saturday, December 15, 10:20 A.M.

  “She got me twice, Dave,” Kreinik said. He was a tall, trimly built man with a receding hairline of dark and coarse curly hair, owner of Kreinik Manufacturing, which made metallics, blending filaments, and other fibers for stitchers. “First, she placed an order for all the sizes and colors of my metallics, COD. No problem with her before, so we filled it. When it arrived, she asked the UPS man to wait a minute; then she went into a back room, opened the box, and took out the order and tossed in some trash, resealed the box, marked it ‘Refused,’ and gave it back to the UPS man. By the time we figured out what she’d done, she’d placed—and quote unquote refused—a big order for blending filaments with the same trick. Last time I talked to her, she tried to argue it was a mistake on my end. It was a mistake, all right, and it happened when we shipped her that second order.”

  “Who did you say this person is?” asked Dave Stott, a round-headed man with a short-cropped beard. He asked the question in a quiet voice, as they were in the Kreinik suite, and there were customers present. But he wanted to know. Dave was the owner of Norden Crafts and didn’t want to get caught by the same trickster.

  “Her name’s Belle Hammermill. She’s from Milwaukee, owns a store called Belle’s Samplers. You know her?”

  “Never heard of her.” Dave sounded relieved.

  “You want an introduction? She came to the Market.”

  Stott, a short-legged man on crutches, snorted in disbelief. “You’re kidding. She had to know Kreinik Manufacturing would have a suite here. What are you going to do, Doug?”

  “For one thing, I’m telling this story to every supplier I can get to. She’s going to find it damn hard in the future to place an order for other than cash in advance. But what I’d really like to do is confront her, call her a crook to her face. But a woman bold as that, who knows? She might punch me in the nose.”

  “Worse, she might—”

  A sharp yell interrupted the pair, and Kreinik, facing the door, lifted his eyes in time to see something—someone?—fall past his vision out in the atrium. There was a dreadful sound of impact on the floor six stories below.

  “What the devil?” exclaimed Dave, trying to turn too quickly on his crutches and nearly falling.

  “Someone’s gone over a railing!” Kreinik said as he pushed his way past Stott and headed for the gallery.

  But the shorter man was right behind him, and they arrived at the railing together. “My God!” Stott shouted. “It’s a woman! Oh, my God!”

  There were shouts and screams from all over as Kreinik leaned out over the railing. “Holy cow!” He leaned a bit farther out, brushing against Dave, who could feel him trembling. �
��Who is it? Can you tell?” he asked.

  “No.” Dave leaned back awkwardly to look up. “Where was she standing?” The railings upward were dotted with staring faces—not many, because almost all the buyers and sellers were on the sixth floor or lower. The two men were on six. There were none at all on the top floor right above her.

  Kreinik grabbed the railing and shook it hard, but it was firmly attached. It was higher than his waist. His face was pale with shock, but his voice was calm as he remarked, “She must’ve been tall.”

  Stott wasn’t tall, but he backed away one step before looking down at the people rushing to the railings on the lower floors. They were shouting and pointing, the great hollow space was filled with noise. And far below was a body, now surrounded by spectators. He looked away and said, trying to emulate Kreinik’s apparent calm, “What—was she looking at something?”

  Kreinik looked up, then shrugged. “I don’t know. But it must have been an accident.” He looked at Dave. “You going down?”

  “Uh, no. In fact, I better get back to my place, make sure they don’t leave it unmanned.” He turned away, limping on one leg. His suite was almost exactly diagonal from Kreinik’s, but didn’t directly overlook the atrium. He was hoping all three employees hadn’t gone running out to gape over the railing, leaving his stock open to temptation.

  He wondered who the victim was. It was no one he knew—he couldn’t remember seeing a blonde in a white sweater and red slacks this morning. But he felt sick at heart for her and anyone who knew her.

  And while he was about it, for the whole Market. This was a terrible thing to happen! It was an accident, of course . . . or was it? No, of course it was an accident. Had to be. Anything else was unthinkable.

  Wednesday, December 12, 9:40 P.M.

  Cherry put a second extra change of underwear in her suitcase—she tended to take more underwear on trips than basic needs would require. She was frightened by how angry and desperate she felt. She needed someone to talk to, and not someone who would sympathize with her plight but someone who knew the law regarding business partnerships and small business operations. She wanted out—no, she had to get out. There had to be a way to break this partnership. Her sanity depended on it.