Night of the Living Thread (A Threadville Mystery)
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PRAISE FOR THE THREADVILLE MYSTERIES
Thread and Buried
“This is a great story that I could not put down and I look forward to more crime-solving in the next book in this charmingly appealing series.”
—Dru’s Book Musings
“I have loved each and every trip to Threadville. Bolin just keeps getting better and better at keeping us In Stitches. This time she pulls out the stops with a village legend that gives us a mystery tangled in another mystery and then some.”
—Escape With Dollycas
Threaded for Trouble
“A wonderful amateur sleuth that showcases the close relationships between the small village shop owners who watch out for one another as friends and as a smart business model . . . The heroine’s actions make for an enjoyable whodunit.”
—The Mystery Gazette
“Willow is smart, witty, and charismatic, and the amusing banter between her and her group of friends will keep you in stitches.”
—Two Lips Reviews
“Filled with all the elements of a perfect cozy and a perfect escape.”
—Escape With Dollycas
Dire Threads
“With a winning cast of characters, Bolin should be able to stitch together quite a series for Willow and her fellow shopkeepers.”
—Library Journal
“Newcomer Janet Bolin embroiders a lovely tale of Willow Vanderling, her pooches, and her shop, In Stitches, in charming Elderberry Bay, Pennsylvania. Dire Threads will have you saying Tally-Ho and Sally-Forth as you venture back to Threadville again and again.”
—Lorna Barrett, New York Times bestselling author of the Booktown Mysteries
“A wonderful debut, embroidered seamlessly with clues, red herrings, and rich detail. And though the mystery will keep you guessing until it’s sewn up, Willow and her friends will leave you in stitches.”
—Avery Aames, national bestselling author of the Cheese Shop Mysteries
“A deftly woven tale embroidered with crafty characters who will leave you in stitches!”
—Krista Davis, New York Times bestselling author of the Domestic Diva Mysteries
“Quirky characters, charming town, and appealing sleuth are all beautifully stitched together in this entertaining first mystery.”
—Mary Jane Maffini, national bestselling author of the Charlotte Adams Mysteries
“[A] winner right from the beginning. With a vast cast of personable, likable characters populating a lively, mesmerizing story line, Bolin keeps the action moving along and the humor bubbling as well. This will certainly be a great, fun series to keep your eye out for.”
—Fresh Fiction
“Dire Threads has everything a cozy lover wants in a read! A craftily clever mystery, an engaging amateur sleuth who leaves you wanting more, a cast of memorable secondary characters, the dogs, the tips, and of course . . . a really fun read.”
—Mystery Maven Canada
“A must read for those who love mysteries with a ‘craft’ theme . . . [A] lighthearted mystery full of eccentric women who have a great time turning their hobbies into a livelihood.”
—The Merchant of Menace
Berkley Prime Crime titles by Janet Bolin
DIRE THREADS
THREADED FOR TROUBLE
THREAD AND BURIED
NIGHT OF THE LIVING THREAD
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
USA • Canada • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
penguin.com
A Penguin Random House Company
NIGHT OF THE LIVING THREAD
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2014 by Janet Bolin.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.
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For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-62377-0
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / June 2014
Cover art by Robin Moline.
Cover design by Annette Fiore DeFex.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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To everyone who lovingly creates one-of-a-kind wedding gowns for themselves, their friends, or their family members
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Welcome back to Threadville again, and thank you for returning!
Many thanks to Krista Davis and Daryl Wood Gerber, who also writes as Avery Aames, for the friendship and support dating all the way back to when all three of us were unpublished but hopeful—and stubborn. Oops, I mean determined. Special thanks to Daryl, the punning title guru, who came up with the title Night of the Living Thread. And thanks to all my mystery writer friends. You are some of the most helpful people around.
Again, many thanks to my friend Sergeant Michael Boothby, Toronto Police (retired), for his excellent comments and suggestions. I’m afraid that my characters do not always follow Mike’s advice . . .
Jessica Faust of BookEnds, LLC, continues to be my dream agent.
Berkley Prime Crime is a wonderful publisher. Thanks especially to my editor, Faith Black, and to the department that comes up with cover ideas. Robin Moline’s paintings of Threadville are fabulous. If I didn’t already “live” in Threadville—I often feel I do, anyway—I’d want to dive into her paintings.
Many members of the Berkley Prime Crime team help turn my manuscripts into books and put them onto the shelves of stores and libraries, and I thank all of them. Annette Fiore DeFex created the cover design, and Tiffany Estreicher designed the interior text.
Thanks to Threadologist Gail Heller Robertson for an entertaining and educational day with thread.
I had a wonderful time at needlework retreats at Brentwood on the Beach, hosted by the incomparable Joan and Peter Karsten. I loved the camaraderie of the other attendees. We laughed a lot. It was sort of like being a Threadville tourist. Besides, the other “tourists” were fabulous listeners to my readings.
I also greatly enjoyed reading at the Bony Blithe Gun Club & Quilting Bee Gala Award Reception and at the Scene of the Crime Mystery Festival, where they also let me babble about one of my favorite subjects, writing. Thank you to the organizers of both of those events.
Thanks to all of my friends, the new ones I’ve made during
this writing and publishing journey, and those who have stuck by me through all my years of being stubborn. I mean determined.
Most of all, many thanks to my readers for returning with me to Threadville. Welcome back.
Contents
Praise For The Threadville Mysteries
Also by Janet Bolin
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Willow’s Embroidered Wedding Card
Willow’s Tips
1
“Gord?” A woman’s heartfelt plea fluted through the misty night.
Who was calling Threadville’s favorite doctor in that flirtatious tone? In less than a week, Gord was marrying Edna.
That voice was not Edna’s.
Dropping to a crouch behind the branches of a weeping willow, I put my arms around my two dogs, a brother-and-sister pair who were part border collie. Taking their cues from me, they remained silent, but they tensed against me.
“Gord!” The second plea was still bell-like, but now it was a command.
Mist drifted away, and the fairy lights in the gazebo-like bandstand on the hill above us were bright enough for me to see the woman on the riverbank.
I had never met her, but I knew who she was. She called herself Isis. Like many others, she was in Elderberry Bay for the Threadville Get Ready for Halloween Craft Fair. Halloween was just over four weeks away, and Threadville tourists and customers were keen to create costumes and decorations.
Isis bound books by hand, books she titled The New Book of the Dead, which, she claimed, tied her craft to Halloween. To me, it seemed like a bit of a stretch.
Was Isis in costume? Despite the evening’s foggy chill, she wore a sleeveless white gown with a gold cord tied around the empire waistline. She raised both hands, palms up, toward the sky. I squinted, but the fog kept me from figuring out what those small objects on her palms were.
I could have gone closer and introduced myself as Willow, one of the craft fair organizers, and also the owner of In Stitches, Threadville’s machine embroidery boutique. However, I was curious about Isis’s weird behavior. Okay, maybe I was just plain snoopy. I stayed hidden with my dogs, where we could watch without being seen.
Isis glided down the concrete boat launch ramp until water had to be lapping at the toes of her sandals. She stooped, placed the object from her right hand on the surface of the river, and intoned, “When your time comes, you will go to the afterlife I have chosen for you. I will join you there, eventually.” Then she raised her voice and called out in raspy, doom-filled tones, “Edna!”
As far as I could tell in the wispy mist, Edna was nowhere near. I held my breath. Quivering in my embrace, my dogs stared toward Isis.
She thrust the object from her left hand onto the water, pushed it down, and held it underwater. “Go,” she ordered, “to the deepest, darkest river! Go to the bowels of the Earth. Fall apart. Scatter. Go where you will never rise!”
The fog thickened, hiding Isis and enveloping the dogs and me in a cold gray cocoon that would keep Isis from seeing us. I shuddered. The little scene had turned nasty.
Hanging on to their leashes, I let the dogs pull me away from Isis and toward the dark trail that would take us along the river to our hillside apartment underneath In Stitches.
Isis’s voice rang out again. “Who’s there?”
I thought Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho might bark and give us away, but they only lowered their plume-like tails and increased their pace. No one answered Isis, but I heard footsteps, as if someone were running up the wooden access ramp leading to the bandstand, up the hill from me. I stopped the dogs and turned around. Distorted in the foggy glow, an elongated shadow flew through the mist in the bandstand. Isis, or someone else?
Farther away, down toward the beach, the fog parted, revealing a figure walking with a jerky gait, his arms held stiffly in front of his body, wrists bent, and palms down. He shambled up the hill toward where I’d seen Isis. He wore a dark suit with a 1930s silhouette, broad at the shoulders, narrow at the waist and hips, and lots of fabric in the pant legs. I couldn’t make out details of his black hair or whiter-than-white face, other than he appeared to have a large wound near his chin.
For the past couple of days, zombies had been booking into the Elderberry Bay Lodge for what they called a zombie retreat.
The zombies were . . . unusual.
They weren’t half as creepy as Isis.
Seeming totally freaked out, Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho tugged me to our apartment underneath my shop. The building was on a steep slope, so the apartment was mostly aboveground.
I gave the dogs extra treats, praised them, and, with Sally’s help, gave my half-grown black-and-white tuxedo kittens, Mustache and Bow-Tie, an outing in the backyard. Sally had taught the kittens from an early age to stay close to her when outside. She supervised them while they did their duties, and then herded them to the patio door.
For once, I was too worried to relax, wind down, and play with my four pets.
Isis had just threatened Edna, who was one of my favorite people.
And Isis was Edna’s houseguest.
2
Maybe I was being irrational, but for my own peace of mind, I needed to warn Edna about possible threats from her guest. I forced myself outside again, into the sinister, foggy night, and ran up through my sloping side yard.
My friends’ Threadville shops and apartments were in a row of stores on the ground floor of a Victorian building on the other side of Lake Street. Under the streetlights, the building’s red bricks looked almost black.
Like the other shops, Edna’s notions boutique had large front windows. Edna’s lights were on, and I could see her inside Buttons and Bows. Gord was there, also, on a ladder, apparently helping his fiancée arrange reels of trims on upper shelves, packing them together upright like books in a library. I ran across the street and opened the door, setting off Edna’s Buttons and Beaux tune, an old vaudeville one that had, I’d been told, slightly risqué lyrics. As always, Edna’s shop dazzled, with buttons totally covering one wall, ribbons, braids, lace, and fringe covering the other, and an aisle down the middle between glass display cases.
From high on his ladder, Gord waved a bolt of purple ball fringe at me. “Hi, Willow! I’m having a ball up here.”
Edna hugged me. She was a cute little birdlike person, short compared to my height of almost six feet. She was barely over fifty, and though her hair was still naturally brown,
she had colored it silver for her wedding. Not the silver of graying hair, but metallic silver. She’d grown it to a shoulder-length bob. At the moment, she’d added nothing sparkly to it besides the color, but I was sure that on the day itself, she would be a vision of crystal, an ice princess in October. She asked. “Did you come to help us, Willow?”
“In a way.” I felt my forehead crease. “I just saw something disturbing.”
Gord took a step down the ladder toward me. “What’s wrong, Willow?” I half expected him to whip out a stethoscope and rush the rest of the way down the ladder to check my heartbeat.
In Edna’s cheerful shop, my story sounded a little silly, and I couldn’t blame Edna and Gord for their skepticism.
Still on his ladder, Gord peered toward Edna’s front windows. “Fog?”
Our section of Lake Street was high and free of fog at the moment. I mumbled, “There’s plenty of it down by the river.”
He felt his way down another step. “Yes, some evenings are like that. Romantic, right, my little chickadee?”
Edna beamed up at him. “Right. And I’m not worried.”
Gord inched down to the next step. “I’m not, either, but thanks for your concern, Willow.”
Edna’s Buttons and Beaux tune played again. Isis dashed into the store, pulled the door shut faster than it wanted to go, and stood panting, her back to us and her palms on the door frame as if she were trying to prevent a wild animal from coming inside with her.
I couldn’t see anything on the other side of the door.
She turned around. She was older than I’d first believed, in her late fifties. Maybe she only looked older because the corners of her mouth were turned down and her pupils were dilated. “Gord!” she shrieked. “I just had the most unspeakable fright!” Her gown was made from a light nylon knit, as if she’d taken a nightgown and dressed it up with a scratchy gold cord tied around the empire waistline.
Again the picture of concern, Gord took another step down the ladder. “What happened?”
Isis took a deep shuddering breath and clutched at her throat. “A zombie attacked me.” Apparently, the fright hadn’t been entirely unspeakable.