Crewel Yule

by Ferris, Monica

  Eve hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Do you know Lenore King?”

  “You mean the designer? Yes, I remember her from Milwaukee. Belle was always telling her she should try to sell her designs. Good to see she finally did.”

  “You didn’t see her up on nine, did you?”

  Eve squinched her eyes at Betsy. “No, why?”

  “No reason.”

  Jill asked, “Did you think Belle had been murdered?”

  Eve looked briefly from Jill to Betsy. “No, I thought—I knew—she had jumped. I just didn’t want to be blamed for it.”

  Betsy asked, “Why are you so sure she jumped?”

  “Well, it is funny that she did, because Belle never struck me as the suicidal type. And I don’t think anyone who knew her would believe she jumped. But you see, there wasn’t anyone up there with her, so she must’ve jumped. Was Lenore mad at her, too?”

  Jill said, “We haven’t talked to her yet. What about that dark shape you saw?”

  “Oh, that couldn’t’ve been a person, it was too short and too”—she gestured with her hands—“you know. People are tall and narrow, this was, er, boxy.” Her hands moved again, defining a square shape.

  “But you didn’t go for a look,” said Jill.

  “No. I decided I would go quietly down the stairs and back to my room. I went down two flights, I was sure I went down twice, and when I came out, I felt faint and had to sit down on the floor. And then I started to cry. It was wonderful, crying like that, like I was watering my dried-up soul. Then you”—she lifted her chin at Betsy—“came along and told me I was on the eighth floor, not the seventh. It was weird, but everything was weird right then. Weirder than usual, and weird was usual for me, for a long time. You were so nice to me, and you walked me down to my room and told me to lie down for awhile. So I did, and Mrs. Entwhistle came in at noon and found me, and was she ever mad, because I was supposed to be shopping, and I only went into four places before I went up to wait for Belle.”

  “Is Mrs. Entwhistle still angry with you?”

  “No. I explained, a little, about how I used to work for Belle and was waiting for her to come down and see me when this happened. That’s one of those lies of omission, you see.” She smiled slyly. “The kind where you leave out certain parts.”

  Betsy was feeling uncomfortable with this still-weird person. But she continued with her questions. She asked, “Apart from this boxy shape you saw moving down the gallery, did you see anything else unusual?”

  Eve thought briefly. “Does a door closing count?”

  “You saw a door close?” asked Betsy.

  “I . . . think so.” She raised her eyes to the ceiling, frowning.

  “Which door?”

  “I’m not sure. A door to a suite not far from the middle, but not in the middle. I think. It wasn’t on the end.”

  “Are you sure you saw the door move?”

  “I’m not sure about anything, no. I just kind of think I saw something that may have been a door closing the last two inches just as I looked. It could have been the way the light was coming through the skylights. The snow was making the light kind of twinkle, wasn’t it?” She shrugged.

  “You didn’t see someone going into that room and closing the door,” prompted Jill.

  “No, no, nothing like that. I didn’t see anyone at all. What I think it was, was someone heard the scream and peeped out, but when no one was there, they just closed their door again.”

  “Would that person have been in time to see the ‘rolling thing’?” Betsy asked.

  Eve blinked at her. “Well, yes, I suppose so. But they would have to be crazy like me, wouldn’t they?”

  As Jill and Betsy went back up to their suite, Jill said, “Okay, Miss Sleuth, tell me what you think of Eve.”

  “She made me uncomfortable. It’s dangerous to feel you’re living in a dream or a novel, because the rules and restraints of real life don’t apply. A person who felt nothing was real would be capable of anything.”

  Jill, after a silence of several seconds, said, “That’s as damning a statement as I’ve heard from you about this.”

  Betsy drew her shoulder up a trifle. “I know. And while she was talking about me helping her yesterday, I suddenly remembered what she was wearing.”

  “What was that?”

  “Dark slacks and sweater. The sweater had silver metallic threads woven into it. I noticed when I helped her to her feet how the bright silver twinkled against the dark wool.”

  “Oh, that is bad. Puts her at the top of the list, doesn’t it? Do you think she’s insane?”

  “I think she believes she is.”

  Jill fell silent again for a bit. Then, “She says Belle took her husband from her because she fell in love with him. Cherry says it’s because Belle was jealous of Eve. That’s a contradiction. Who’s wrong?”

  “I’m not sure either one is. They’re both telling the truth about what they think motivated Belle. Either way, the result was the same: Eve lost her husband to Belle.”

  Jill fell silent for nearly a minute. “It’s like The Twilight Zone, trying to get inside Eve’s head. Do you suppose she crawled on all fours down the gallery after she threw Belle over and now remembers it as if she saw it from a distance?”

  Betsy’s eyebrows lifted. “I wonder if that’s not exactly what happened. What’s the term? Disassociation, when the crazy person sees someone else doing a deed they actually did themselves.”

  Jill sighed. “We don’t seem to be making a lot of progress, do we? Cherry is lying and her emotions are all over the place; Eve thinks she’s crazy, and actually may be. We now have two really good suspects.”

  “Maybe we’ll do better with Lenore,” said Betsy, pulling out the card that opened the door to their suite. Again, Jill made the phone call.

  Lenore King wasn’t in her suite, or at least not answering her phone. Jill and Betsy went down to Bewitching Stitches and found her there, very animated, talking to three customers at once. Her dark brown hair was in a casual knot on top of her head; tendrils drifted down her temples and in front of her ears. She wore a sky-blue, long-sleeved knit dress with winter birds, chickadees and cardinals, stitched in silk on the sleeves and yoke.

  The model was droopier than ever, but Lenore seemed able to ignore its failings while pointing out its interesting arrangement of stitches and the cleverness of its design as a Christmas tree. As they approached, Lenore looked up at them.

  “Oh, hello!” she said. “I’m sorry, but I’ve talked to so many people today that I’ve forgotten your names, which is too bad, because I especially want to thank you”—she addressed this to Jill—“for telling me to get back on the job. People have been so kind, and we’re selling lots of my Christmas tree sampler.” She picked up a pen and scribbled her name on one of the patterns and gave it to a customer, who smiled and thanked her. “And here’s a free chart, just for you,” she added, handing a sheet of paper to the customer.

  “I’ll take two of the Christmas tree, if you’ll autograph both of them,” said the second, and Lenore, blushing prettily, complied. She even autographed the freebie, since it was another of her designs.

  The third buyer was with the second and they went to pay for their purchases together.

  “This is so much better than I’d hoped for,” Lenore said, happily. But then her face tightened and she added in an angry undertone, “I’m only sorry Belle can’t be here to see it.”

  “How sure are you that Belle deliberately failed to get your model ready on time?” asked Betsy, also speaking quietly.

  Lenore looked around for eavesdroppers, and Betsy stooped to bring them more nearly face to face. Lenore murmured, “I’m positive. She knew what I was designing; she knew what I wanted to do with it; she knew Bewitching Stitches wanted to sell it here at the Market; she knew the Market was moved back two months; and besides all that I came in and left her a note! What else could it be but deliberate?” she concluded
.

  Jill also stooped and asked quietly, “Where were you when Belle died?”

  Her tone was matter of fact, but Lenore could not have been more taken aback if Jill had struck her in the face. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing except what I’m asking: Where were you when Belle died?”

  Lenore looked around again and lowered her voice even more, so that Betsy more read her lips than heard her say, “I don’t want to talk about that here.”

  “Fine,” Jill said, rising. “Come on out of here with us. This will take maybe five minutes.”

  “But I can’t . . .” She looked around again.

  Jill turned toward the table being used as a checkout counter and said to the man sitting there, “Lenore’s taking a little break with us. We won’t be gone long.”

  He looked up from filling out an order, waved his pen at her, and said, “Fine, fine.”

  “Come on,” said Jill, in that cop voice that did not even consider disobedience. Even Betsy could not resist. She rose and followed Jill out the open door of the suite, not in the least surprised to find Lenore behind her once out in the hall.

  “Where shall we go?” asked Betsy, because the crowd pressed in on all sides.

  “Our suite,” said Jill, and she turned toward the end of the gallery and again down toward one of the stairwells in a back corner.

  Up they climbed, and up, Jill tirelessly, Lenore almost as carelessly, Betsy laboring behind. Water aerobics three mornings a week were obviously not enough if there was all this stair climbing in her future, she thought despairingly.

  At last Jill opened a door and they were on eight. Betsy tried to keep her breathing as effortless as Jill’s and Lenore’s but couldn’t, and so lagged a bit behind so they wouldn’t hear her unhappy lungs trying to catch up. Still, she was almost back to normal by the time they reached the suite, which was a good thing, as the other two kindly waited for her.

  In the sitting room, Jill headed for the coffeepot and said over her shoulder, “May I offer you a cup of coffee, Lenore?”

  “No, thank you. Let’s get this done, okay?” She went to the couch and plumped down unhappily.

  Jill poured herself a cup and pulled a chair away from the round table, giving it an expert flip so it turned on one leg to face Lenore. She sat down.

  Betsy hastily took the other chair at the table and opened her booklet to a blank page. At the top of the opposite page was printed: Get Them Talking and Keep Them Talking! And below that a list of open-ended questions designed to get a prospective employee to reveal him- or herself. Because there was only silence in the room, Betsy read one of them out loud: “What’s the worst decision you ever made?”

  Lenore snorted faintly. “What kind of question is that?”

  “It’s an interesting question,” Jill said. “Could you answer it?”

  “The worst decision I ever made? Listening to Belle Hammermill!”

  “Why?” asked Betsy.

  “Because she was only pretending to be my friend! She didn’t give a rat’s bee-hind about my designs! She was just setting me up!”

  “For what?”

  “For this! So I’d work myself half to death and then come here without the one thing I needed to—” She cut herself off with a sob, and covered her eyes with one hand, waving the other at them to ask them to wait while she pulled herself together.

  “That doesn’t make any sense, does it?” she asked at last. “She didn’t know I would come up with a design that complicated, how could she? And yet, it seemed as if she was just waiting for me to do something really great so she could spoil it! God, I was so angry! I’ve never been that angry before, it made me sick, literally. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. Thank God for Priceline’s cheap airfares, I was in no shape to drive to Nashville.”

  “Did you see Belle after you arrived here?” asked Jill.

  “No.” Lenore shook her head just a little longer than necessary to underline the negative.

  “Did you try to?” asked Betsy.

  “Oh, God!” said Lenore, and covered her eyes again. The silence grew and grew.

  “Yes.” It came very quietly. “I was sitting in Bewitching Stitches, and my working model looked like it had been played with by cats under a dusty bed. I just knew it would be a failure. You don’t know—” She looked up at them suddenly. “You don’t know, do you? I’m a stay-at-home mom. I love it, I don’t think there’s any job on earth I’d like as much or find as rewarding. But we can’t afford only one breadwinner, and with both kids in school, I’m running out of excuses. I told Cody I had this great idea, that maybe I could sell it to a company that would pay good money for it. That maybe it could be the start of a real career as a pattern designer. And he said, all right, if you can sell this pattern for a decent price, you can try your hand at designing instead of going back to standing behind a cash register all day.”

  “So this was really, really important,” said Betsy, “and Belle knew it.”

  “Of course she knew it! If it wasn’t important, she wouldn’t have bothered to”—she held up two fingers on each hand to scratch quote marks in the air—“forget to change the due date.”

  “Did you do something to make her angry at you?”

  “Obviously. Problem is, I have no idea what it was. We were friends, she was so helpful and encouraging, she was behind me all the way, then suddenly she wasn’t. Suddenly she didn’t think the pattern was ready to submit; suddenly she was sure Bewitching Stitches wasn’t the right place to send it; suddenly I was a little idiot to think I could turn out a piece worthy of professional handling—suddenly, suddenly, suddenly! And suddenly I didn’t have a model fit to bring to Nashville.”

  “So you decided to go have it out with her,” said Jill.

  “Yes, dammit, yes! I knew she was here, I saw her at breakfast. So I spilled coffee on myself in Bewitching Stitches’ suite to give me an excuse to leave. I went up to my suite and changed clothes and my hairstyle, and washed my makeup off. I went to the door, yanked it open, and closed it again—with me still in the room. I opened it again, and closed it again. I think I did that about five times before I decided I didn’t have the nerve to go after the woman. I was so mad at myself! My babies, my wonderful babies, put into the hands of base-wage, daycare strangers! And it was all that ugly witch’s fault! And why? Why? I couldn’t understand why she would do that to me! And I couldn’t understand why I didn’t have the courage to go and stomp her into the floor like the cockroach she was!” Lenore’s hands were shaking and she began to cry.

  Jill walked out of the room into the back.

  “So you didn’t go after her,” said Betsy.

  “No, I didn’t. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was that I didn’t.”

  Jill came back with several sheets of tissue, which she handed to Lenore.

  “Thanks,” said Lenore, dabbing and then blowing. “What a wreck I am! And a cowardly wreck to boot!”

  “How did you find out Belle was dead?”

  “I heard this noise, like a scream or yell, then a lot of voices shouting. I was sitting on my couch at that point, crying and ashamed, so at first I didn’t care. But the shouting got louder and people were sounding really scared and I kept remembering that scream, like someone falling, so I finally came out. And when I looked over the railing, I could sort of see someone down on the floor with lots of people standing around her. I’m nearsighted but I don’t like to wear glasses except for driving, so I couldn’t see who it was. I remember I actually said to myself, ‘A shame that isn’t Belle.’ Because she’s the kind of person nothing bad ever happens to.”

  “When did you find out it was actually Belle who had died?”

  “When I went back down to Bewitching Stitches to get my model. Someone in there was talking about it, and said it was a shop-owner from Milwaukee who had died. I turned around and went right back out again, back up to my room, and I stayed there until lunchtime. I want to thank you, Jill
, for getting me back to work. They were wondering where I was, a lot of people had questions about the pattern.” She sniffed and blew one last time, and then suddenly she smiled through her tears. “You know, I almost think that horrible model has turned into a selling point. People just have to stop and look to see if it’s as bad as it looks. So when I was there to talk about how the real model didn’t get finished in time and this was the working model, that gave me a chance to explain how I figured out the pieces. And people were interested! We’ve sold enough that Mr. Moore says he hopes my new design is as clever as this one.” She nodded once, sharply. “I don’t know if it’s as clever as the Christmas tree, but it is clever, and it’s almost ready for me to send to him.”

  She looked at Jill, then Betsy, her eyes shining. “I’m glad I’m a coward, isn’t that strange?”

  Betsy said, “All right, it wasn’t you. Who else is here who was mad at Belle?”

  Lenore drew a big breath and held it while she thought. “Well, Cherry is, I think. I mean, she’s never said anything, but sometimes I’d come in and the atmosphere was pretty frosty. You could just tell they’d had words.”

  “What about?” asked Jill.

  Lenore shrugged. “Cherry never said. Belle kind of hinted that Cherry wasn’t pulling her weight, but she never said anything specific to me. But I think the strain was getting worse between the two of them.”

  “Very good,” said Jill with a nod. “All right, who else?”

  Lenore thought. “Someone who’s here? I can’t think of anyone.”

  “Did you ever hear of an employee named Eve Suttle?” asked Betsy.

  “There used to be someone who worked for Belle and Cherry named Eve. I remember her because she really got her act together while she was working for them. There was some kind of kerfuffle with her after she got married, but I don’t know any details. And she left a long time ago, she doesn’t work for them anymore.”

  Twenty-Two

  Sunday, December 16, 10:00 A.M.