Crewel Yule

by Ferris, Monica

  Belle Hammermill was a smooth-tongued liar. And their store, Belle’s Samplers and More, was leaking money, melting money, hemorrhaging money. Cherry’s money—and that was the Big Rub, wasn’t it? Belle brought the expertise, Cherry brought the money, a perfect match.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Cherry wasn’t ordinarily a trusting sort; she’d had that knocked out of her by her first husband and his amazing family. But Belle was a sweet person, charming and funny. And really smart. She’d worked in retail all her life, and for the last four years in a needlework shop. So what wasn’t to like, and trust?

  And Cherry wanted to put a chunk of her money to work on an idea of her own—and herself, too. She had gotten a heck of a settlement from the city’s insurance company after her accident. Which wasn’t exactly hard. During rush hour a city bus had caught her in a pedestrian walkway and mashed her into a squad car. Broke her left elbow, left tibia, and the sixth cervical vertebra in her spine. Tore the cord without severing it, so after some therapy she had control of her sphincter and bladder and could tell when something touched her legs—though, oddly, she couldn’t feel pain in them. She could wiggle her toes and move her left foot, but she couldn’t stand, except in chest-deep water. She was far from helpless: she had two lovely wheelchairs to get around in. She could swim, run wheelchair marathons, and drive her nice van anywhere with its hand controls. Above the waist she was perfectly healthy—in fact, her upper body strength was considerable—and her brain worked just fine, thank you. She had developed a particular dislike of people who saw her in a wheelchair and assumed she was a drooling idiot.

  But she’d been taken good by Belle Hammermill. And the attorney she’d consulted said that there wasn’t much she could do about it. The partnership contract they’d signed could be broken easily by mutual consent—but Belle liked things as they were, with Cherry continuing to pour money into the shop while Belle wasted it. And once Belle realized Cherry knew what was going on, her wastrel ways had become even more blatant.

  So there had to be a way out. There just had to be. Cherry had money in other funds, but this was her first venture into hands-on investing and it was infuriating that she was being taken like this. If it continued, she was going to have to dip into other, secure, resources, and eventually she might find herself without the money to pay for the very expensive continuing therapy, or the new van she’d need in a year or two. Cherry knew a start-up business lost money its first few years and she was prepared for that; but Belle’s Samplers had been bought as a going concern, and was now in its fourth year under her and Belle’s management, and was deeper in the red than it had been its first.

  Belle said it was because of the special requirements Cherry brought to the place, which was a steaming heap of bull dung. It was because Belle kept rotten records, took money out of the till, kept messing up special orders, and closed the shop whenever she felt like a day off. And she hinted to people that most of the shop’s problems were Cherry’s fault. But what could you expect when you took a cripple as a partner? When Cherry learned Belle had actually said that to a customer, she’d had to excuse herself to go into the bathroom and throw up. She had thought Belle was a friend!

  This couldn’t go on. Cherry had to find a way out.

  Five

  Saturday, December 15, 10:27 A.M.

  The operator who answered after about a dozen rings sounded exasperated. “What is your emergency?” she demanded.

  Marveen said, “We have a guest who fell into our atrium from one of the upper floors. She’s dead.”

  In an oh-that’s-different voice, the operator asked, “Who is this calling, please?”

  “I’m Marveen Harrison, night manager at the Consulate at 7311 Harmony Drive.”

  “That one at the top of the hill?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “Are you sure the person is dead?”

  “Oh, yes, there is absolutely no doubt about that. We’ve got an eyewitness who saw her fall from the ninth floor. It’s really terrible, she’s a terrible mess, and she’s really, obviously past any need for life support.”

  “Ohhh-kay. So not a life-and-death emergency. Which is good, all our emergency vehicles are out on calls, with other calls waiting. Your witness is sure it was an accident? She fell?”

  Marveen glanced over at the woman, who was looking shaken but not excited or eager to garner the attention of a television reporter. “Yes.”

  “So you have no reason to think this is a homicide,” the 911 operator was saying.

  “Correct.”

  “I’ll send a squad over as soon as one is available, but with the city streets so bad, I don’t know how long it will be. Have you been able to clear the road up to your hotel for vehicle passage?”

  “No, just the unloading area in front of the covered porch. We sent two of our maintenance people out this morning to shovel the parking lot, and one fell and sprained his wrist, and the other fell and hurt his back. It’s terribly slippery out there.” Marveen felt she was babbling and closed her mouth firmly while she took a breath. “But you will come, right? I mean, we have a situation here, a really, really horrible situation.”

  A tall blond woman wearing a winter coat over a nightgown came into the lobby from outdoors and stopped to stamp snow off her slippers. Tried to use the stairs instead of the elevator, Marveen thought. Didn’t realize you couldn’t get to the lobby via the stairs.

  “Have you got a place a helicopter can land?” The emergency operator’s voice brought her attention back.

  This question came up two years ago when a guest had had a heart attack. “Not really. I mean the parking lot is big enough, but it’s full of cars; we have a full house. What isn’t parking lot is hotel and trees. And the roof isn’t suitable, most of it is glass.”

  “Okay, I’ve put the call out. But we’ve got a huge backlog and the streets everywhere are really slick. I hope you can be patient with us.”

  “I can, I guess. But I don’t know about our guests.” Marveen hung up and turned to the heavyset woman in the navy stretch pants.

  “I hate to keep you just standing there, but I need to inform my boss.”

  “Yes, all right,” said the woman. But her voice was thin with stress, and she was wringing her hands as she looked over her shoulder at the crowd in the lobby. Down the stairs, all Marveen could see were heads, but she didn’t see the blond one; the woman in the winter coat had apparently gone on past the crowd.

  Marveen had to look up the emergency contact number for the owners of the hotel—a good sign, really, because it showed how rarely it got called. She had to persuade the answering service that this was a truly genuine emergency that could not be handled by giving a message to be forwarded to the unfortunate individual on duty this weekend. The answering service connected her directly; Marveen did not have to dial a new number.

  “Mr. Singh? This is Marveen Harrison, night manager at the Consulate. We have had a serious incident here, and one of our guests is dead.”

  She explained the situation, concluding, “No, sir, I understand, I’ll instruct my staff not to talk to reporters. But I can’t restrict the guests, of course. No, sir, I don’t think you need to try to get over here, I understand the city is about closed down and I’ve got things under control here, pretty much.” She extracted a promise from Mr. Singh that he would let the rest of management know what was going on. With a little sigh, Marveen hung up.

  The woman in the winter coat had come back and had taken the plump woman over to one of the couches. Marveen sighed again, for a different reason, and came out from behind the counter.

  “Thank you for waiting,” she said, to call her attention away from the blonde. She used her kindest voice. “May I ask your name?”

  “Sure,” she croaked, and cleared her throat. “I’m Samantha Wills, owner of The Silver Needle in Clarksville. This is Sergeant Jill Larson, a police officer from Minnesota.”

  Whoops, that was dif
ferent. Marveen shifted immediately from thinking her a disorganized, nosy nut, to considering the possibility that she was dressed like this because she responded in a hurry to the emergency.

  Sergeant Larson had gotten a thin pad of paper and a pen from somewhere, and she lifted them in a kind of greeting. “I thought I’d start collecting information until the local police arrive.”

  “Great,” said Marveen, only a little doubtfully. “But can I speak with Ms. Wills now?”

  “Of course,” said Sergeant Larson, stepping back, but not quite out of earshot.

  Ms. Wills said, “This is my first Market. You don’t always have this kind of thing happening here, do you? I mean, that railing arrangement made me nervous when I first saw it.”

  Marveen recognized the question as a need for reassurance. “No, of course not,” she said lightly. “Never before, so far as I know.”

  “That’s good. Do you know the woman’s name? The one who fell?” She was looking scared. Maybe it was someone she knew.

  Marveen replied, “She was wearing a name tag that said Belle Hammermill.”

  “I don’t know her,” Samantha said, relieved. “I noticed her because she was standing up there all alone, with her hands on the railing, looking down like she was the president or something.” She cleared her throat and gestured.

  Sergeant Larson was writing. Marveen hoped she was really a cop. She must remember to ask for identification later. There was a new noise from the atrium and all three of them looked over and saw two young men in black trousers and white shirts pushing wheeled screens across the atrium.

  Good idea, thought Marveen, wondering who had ordered them. She looked back at Ms. Wills and asked, “She didn’t look sad, or scared?”

  Samantha thought hard, her round face clenching with the effort. “I don’t remember that. Maybe I couldn’t’ve told; she was kind of far away. Anyway, I wasn’t paying close attention. I just noticed her up there and then . . . she was falling.” Samantha swallowed and grimaced, her eyes suddenly sad.

  “Well, when our police get here, they’re going to want to talk to you. But the weather out there is making travel difficult, and there have been a lot of other accidents, too, so it may be a while.” She thought. “Look, there’s no reason why you have to sit here till they come. Let me write your name and room number down.”

  “I don’t want to go back to my room to wait. I’ll go crazy. But I’ve got a cell phone.” She fumbled into a belly bag and produced it.

  “Well, then, that’s fine. Can you give me the number?” Marveen noticed that Sergeant Larson wrote it down, too.

  Friday, December 14, 8:56 A.M.

  She doesn’t know I’m here, Eve Suttle thought, as she hung her clothes in the closet of her suite. She thinks she’ll never see me again. But I’m gonna get her back in a corner and punch her lights out. If she pretends she doesn’t know why, I may strangle her. Because she knows why, and she needs to know it’s time she got over herself. She thinks being cute means she can behave any way she wants. She thinks saying “I’m sorry” is the same thing as, “This never happened, so erase all memory of it.” She’s a whore. No, she’s worse than a whore—she’s not doing it for the money but because she wants to hurt me.

  Eve nodded, liking that explanation, and started in a replay of all the hurtful things Belle had done to her, something she had done over and over for months. She nurtured her anger with the painful memories, and she liked to keep it burning bright. Belle always expected people to forgive her, and usually they did. But this time she had gone too far—way too far.

  Eve started by remembering when Belle was her friend. She had been happy working for Belle in her shop. With her humorous approach to everything, Belle made work fun. And she had seemed both generous and kind. When Eve made a mistake, Belle was quick to forgive her, and when Belle made a mistake, she had a cute way of admitting and even exaggerating it, which made you laugh and get over being annoyed, even when she did it over and over.

  Eve had at first thought Belle’s worst fault was forgetfulness. “Oh, my brain’s a sieve!” Belle would say. “I’d forget my head if it wasn’t fastened on!” And her customers would laugh and forgive her for not sending in a special order. Most of the time. Lenore didn’t forgive her that last time. Eve had a special feeling of kinship with Lenore. Because it wasn’t forgetfulness with Lenore, it was something weird and much worse—a kind of sick envy. Belle had liked Lenore so long as Lenore was a struggling artist, but once she showed real promise, Belle couldn’t handle it.

  And it was the same with Eve. So long as Eve was a fat and plain woman with a sickly kid and no husband, Belle was her friend. She showed Eve how to be the loyal, competent employee, and in return Eve rescued her boss from one scrape after another. Eve was grateful and she thought Belle was, too. But being competent gave Eve the nerve to lose sixty pounds, get a new wardrobe, color her hair, and win a really handsome boyfriend. Which Eve was sure added up to make Belle jealous. Things started to turn sour about then at Belle’s store. Eve wasn’t praised for her competence anymore, and her smallest mistakes were noted—and loudly. Then one day Eve came in to work and she overheard Belle saying to a customer, not knowing she was there, “I’m so sorry. I know Eve was supposed to handle this, but I guess she forgot.”

  Eve hadn’t forgotten, Belle had forgotten.

  Belle apologized so strenuously for that she cried. “I’ve been working terribly hard lately, and I guess this customer was getting on my last nerve. But I shouldn’t have said that, it was terribly unfair, and after you’ve been so helpful and loyal.” By the time she had finished, she had Eve crying, too.

  But now Eve was sure that wasn’t the first time Belle had blamed a failure of her own on Eve, because it sure wasn’t the last.

  And it got worse after Eve married Jack. Belle became more distant, and her remarks about Eve’s occasional need to take time off to take Norah to the pediatrician were sometimes unkind. This from a woman who closed the shop whenever she needed a “mental health” day!

  Belle had flirted with Jack when he was just Eve’s boyfriend, and she continued even after they married. “Oh, he’s so handsome!” she’d said when Eve dared to remark on it. “I just have to flirt with him a little bit!”

  Eve was yet to discover Belle’s true depravity, her sense of entitlement, her depth of resentment at Eve’s blossoming. It happened when Eve was visiting her husband at work and casually logged onto his e-mail account to send a message—and found a whole set of red-hot, lusty exchanges between him and Belle. Jack didn’t deny it. He said Belle understood him in a way Eve didn’t. Jack packed a bag and left home that night.

  And Eve, four months pregnant with her second child, wept until, sick and frightened, she had a miscarriage.

  She quit Belle’s, of course, and even moved back to her home state of Georgia with Norah. People were kind, and they all thought she was doing fine and even had mostly gotten over Jack, especially when she got a job at another needlework shop.

  But the truth was, she’d gone insane.

  It was true, Eve knew it. She hadn’t told anyone, and no one guessed. But if anyone had asked, she would have told them, and proudly. Being insane was like being given a gift, because it didn’t hurt anymore. She was strong, and the hardening of her heart was a blessing. She didn’t mourn the lost child, not when she had a real, live person to blame for it. A real, live person who could be made to pay.

  Six

  Saturday, December 15, 9:48 A.M.

  BritStitch on the fifth floor featured British designers. To Betsy’s eyes, all their patterns were different, some dramatically so. One big model fairly leaped to her attention. It was of sheep standing in a stone-walled field of tall grass, with fields in the background. The fibers were shaggy wool or fine silk and there was an attractive slapdash, almost impressionistic, look to the pattern, rather than the precise placements of cross-stitches. One of the three fields in the background was freshly plowed,
the rows indicated by chain stitches; another was covered with young green growth of satin stitch, and the third was a rough blend of golden-browns, like wheat or oats after the combine has gone over them.

  The branches of a tree bordering the pasture were tufted here and there with red and brown, as trees would be in late autumn after losing most of their leaves.

  “Wow,” breathed Betsy, not very originally. Then the penny dropped. “Why, it’s crewel!” There were smaller landscapes done in similar style, including a ravishing brook-under-a-stone-bridge scene. Betsy went quickly from one to the next, smiling and smiling. “I thought nobody was designing crewel patterns anymore!”

  A tall, thin man with a white mustache smiled back at her. “Rowandean does,” he said with a British accent. “And we’re proud to offer it. We even have Jacobean crewel.” He gestured at a set of framed models done mostly in deep reds and royal blues, stylized stems of flowers with cross-hatching filling in the outline stitches. This was a style of needlework very popular in the seventeenth century.

  Betsy was so pleased she bought two Jacobean patterns, and four of the big sheep kit, though its retail price of seventy-five dollars would give sticker shock to her counted cross-stitch customers and the blank outlines would bemuse her needlepoint stitchers who were used to detailed paintings on canvas. She bought three other kits—a winter scene, the stone bridge, and another version of sheep in a meadow. She also took a catalog so that if the patterns went well she could buy more. She made a note on the catalog to check the types of wool required for the patterns. She didn’t want to find herself unable to supply her customers if the kits didn’t have all the wool needed to redo unsatisfactory stitches. Betsy was herself a famous frogger—“rip it, rip it!” was her motto.