by Janet Bolin
Barely aware of Gord’s voice thanking Juliette for her good wishes and thanking all of us for attending the dinner, I looked across Clay’s empty seat at Haylee. She stared back at me with her eyes wide open.
Encircled in light . . .
I had guessed that whoever had written about breaking a curse by encircling someone in light could have been the person who had “stapled” thread to the ground with my thread nippers near the bridge, and had then unspooled it all the way down the trail past my place and into the park. I had also theorized that the person had seen Isis putting on the wedding skirt and had thought of a more certain method of putting a stop to Isis’s curses.
The person I’d seen on the trail could have been Juliette. It was easy to believe, based on the mud on her jeans and the way I’d seen her tuck that tag in, that she had changed out of her flowing peasant outfit into dark slacks and jacket, and then back into the peasant outfit.
The person who didn’t stop running away from the scene of the crime when I yelled for help had been wearing hard-soled shoes that had slapped loudly on the concrete sidewalk. When we saw Juliette that night, she’d been wearing pale satin party shoes embellished with sequins.
Cradling her crystal ball against her, Juliette started toward our table, but stopped when a woman reached out to touch the crystal ball.
Juliette was close enough that I could tell she was again wearing those sequin-covered shoes.
I leaned toward Haylee. She scooted her chair closer.
“We need to find a way to take a good look at the soles of her shoes,” I murmured, “to see if the soles are hard enough to make the footsteps I heard after Isis went into the water.”
Haylee nodded.
Gord told us all good night and turned off the microphone. Lights came on.
Chairs scraped against the floor. Patricia stood quickly, gathered her dull brown evening bag, and almost raced out of the hall.
With a sardonic nod at Haylee and me, Dare left our table. Brianna followed him.
Juliette returned and eased the crystal ball into its bag.
“Great speech, Juliette,” I told her.
Zipping the bag, she smiled. “I always do that. It’s my little gift to the couple. It helps them get started on the right track.”
“I love your dress,” Haylee said. “Did you make it?”
“No, but I added the ribbons for a festive touch. I got them from Edna’s shop. Another way of helping make the evening special for her.”
I asked, “Did you buy the sequins for your shoes from her, also?”
She obligingly lifted the hem of her dress a little to show off the shoes. “Aren’t they cute? They came like this.”
I bet they didn’t come with water stains on the toes, and only on the toes . . . I could hardly breathe. “Where did you get them?” I asked.
“Who makes them?” Haylee added.
Juliette frowned. “I forget.” She reached down, slipped one off and tilted it, peering into the inside of the heel.
The soles were hard leather.
They could have made those footsteps I’d heard shortly after Isis was pushed into the water.
A sequin fell off Juliette’s shoe and clinked down onto my dessert plate.
With an apologetic smile, Juliette said, “They weren’t expensive. I guess that’s why the sequins are falling off.”
Haylee peered closer at the sequin on my plate. “Those shoes really are cute. They must be for meditation. The sequin has OM written on it.”
Juliette nodded. “They’re my special fortune-telling shoes. I find that reflective surfaces help me see into the future. See you two at the wedding tomorrow, if not before.” She picked up her bowling bag and headed for the door.
As soon as she was out of earshot, I whispered to Haylee, “OM?”
“I wanted to make sure you noticed.”
“I did. And that this so-called sequin has no hole for sewing it on.”
“It’s not ‘OM.’” She tilted her head, waiting for me to finish the sentence.
I did. “If we read it upside down, it’s ‘zero double-u,’ part of the printing on a lightbulb. It once said ‘20W’ and the lightbulb was on the flashy skirt we made for Edna. Those bulbs had been lit for a while, so they were hot when they hit the cold water. I heard them shatter. And a piece of one of them must have landed among the sequins and gotten stuck on the wet toe of a satin shoe.”
Haylee clutched my wrist. “And the wearer of the shoe had to be very, very close to those lightbulbs when they shattered. The pieces were small and lightweight and couldn’t have flown far.”
I craned my neck to search among the people milling around saying their good-byes. Detective Neffting and Vicki had left their table.
I caught a glimpse of tangerine-colored chiffon near the door leading into the lobby. “Wait here,” I told Haylee. “Don’t let anyone take my plate away. I’ll bring Vicki back to see this.”
“Did you bring your phone?” Haylee asked. “I didn’t bring mine.”
I pulled it out of my evening bag and handed it to her. “Vicki’s on speed dial. I’ll probably catch up with her, but if I don’t bring her back here in ten minutes, call her and tell her what we found.”
I draped my shawl over the back of my chair and left it and my phone and evening bag at the table with Haylee, my dessert plate, and the incriminating glass fragment.
Wishing I’d chosen more comfortable shoes than these high-heeled sandals, I headed toward the doorway leading from the dining hall into the lobby. A group of chattering people clogged it. I peeked over and between heads.
Juliette was in another bottleneck at the lodge’s front door.
Neffting and Vicki were in the crowd behind her. I didn’t want to shout or whistle, and possibly alert Juliette, who was on her way outside. Should I run back across the dining room and leave via the wide porch facing the lake? I’d be able to teeter around to the front of the lodge with hopes of intercepting Vicki and Detective Neffting.
Even if I’d worn sneakers, I’d never make it. People were waiting there to go outside, also. The lobby would be faster. I tried not to show my impatience. Ducking, I peered out the front windows.
Juliette disappeared behind rhododendrons lining the path to the parking lot. What if she chose this moment to leave Elderberry Bay?
Vicki and Neffting had made it through the doorway and were underneath the roof of the porte cochere. They were behind Juliette, but they couldn’t know what I knew, and they didn’t seem to be in a particular hurry. I was certain they weren’t following Juliette on purpose.
They were, however, getting away from me rapidly, and the people between me and the door seemed reluctant to end their enjoyable evening.
Finally, I was outside, clopping across the pavement under the porte cochere. People dawdled along the path to the parking lot. In my heels, I wouldn’t be able to race past them on the grass, either.
Behind me, someone whispered, “Willow!”
41
I whipped around. No one was on the path behind me.
Who had whispered my name? Haylee?
Or was I hearing things? The haunting of the graveyard on the hill above me was seeming all too real.
Something rustled in the rhododendrons beside me.
I could run back to the lobby if I had to. I could scream.
I could hurry to the parking lot. Maybe Vicki and Neffting would still be there.
But maybe they wouldn’t be.
I took a half step toward the lodge.
“Willow!” The whisper came from the rhododendrons. “Don’t go away. Wait. I need help.”
I wasn’t about to wait. Was Juliette ambushing me?
I eased away.
Clawing strands of hair from her eyes, Patricia staggered out of the rhododendrons. “Is she g
one?” Her voice trembled.
“Who?” Was Patricia hiding from Vicki, or from . . .
“Juliette.” She pulled a twig out of her hair.
I backed out of her reach. “I thought you two were friends.”
“I thought so, too, but now I’m not so sure. Are you on your way to the parking lot? Can I walk with you?” She twisted her hands in the skirt of her faux suede dress.
She was as tall as I was, and wearing flats. I wouldn’t be able to outrun her unless I kicked off my heels, and I couldn’t simply kick them off. They were buckled on. But I also wasn’t going to stay here, out of sight of everyone else, with a woman who, for all I knew, was a murderer. What if Patricia had borrowed Juliette’s shoes long enough to push Isis into the water that fateful night, and had given the shoes back to Juliette before I saw the two tall women emerge from the trail? “Okay.” I didn’t sound very gracious. “Why?”
“I’m afraid of Juliette. I think she pushed that woman into the water to drown.” Her voice dwindled until I could hardly hear her. “On purpose.”
I started toward the parking lot again. “Why do you think that?”
She kept up. “It goes back a long time, and is a long story. I went out with a boy in high school once or twice. I decided for lots of reasons that I didn’t like him. We went to different colleges, and he died in his freshman year. The police came questioning me at my school about where I’d been and who his friends were. That was really scary for a seventeen-year-old. Luckily, lots of people had seen me in the town far away from him when he died.”
I was almost positive she was talking about Isis’s son, Heru Crabbe, but I wasn’t about to suggest it. I reminded myself that she could be making up stories to hide the fact that she’d murdered Heru. And had murdered his mother, too.
However, the details seemed real enough, and talking about it seemed to boost Patricia’s confidence. Her words tumbled out. “Fast-forward to this week. Juliette acted strange the evening that Isis was murdered. I went outside for a walk before bedtime, and saw her ahead of me on the trail. She kept stooping over as if putting things down or picking things up. She had a flashlight, and I didn’t. I was behind her, but staying back because the ending of the book I’d been reading had gotten to me, and I didn’t feel sociable. And then I sneezed. She quickly bent down as if shoving something underneath the fence beside her, and then she stood again and came back toward me. She asked what I was doing out there in the dark without a light, and I made some dopey reply like I just got there and was thinking I should turn back. She said she would come with me to light the way, and . . .” Patricia stopped walking and bit her lip.
“And?” I prodded.
“Do you ever get stubborn and want to do something because someone expects you to do the opposite?”
I muffled a laugh. “Um, lots of times . . .”
“So do I, that time, anyway. I said I would keep going because there should be lights in the park, and I’d get to that lit area sooner than I would if I retraced my steps to the street near the bridge. But get this—she stood in my way. The trail is wide, but whenever I tried to go around her, she seemed to step to the side and block me. She was making suggestions like the trail was more interesting the way I’d come because wildlife might be coming to the river for a drink. But that didn’t make sense. Wildlife would be as likely to come from the park as from people’s backyards.”
Mine, for instance. “I don’t understand why that would make you afraid of her.”
“It didn’t, at first. It was only tonight. She said something that made everything fall into place. Two things. The first was during dinner. She said that she’d gone to the same college where the boy I’d dated had died. And I might as well tell you, he was Isis’s son. So I had to wonder if Juliette had played a part in his death, and maybe she was afraid that Isis knew that, or would figure it out.”
I mumbled something agreeable. I recognized this reasoning, having used it myself when I theorized that Patricia could have been the double murderer. Ahead, lights flickered between trees. We were almost at the parking lot. And I still wasn’t positive that Patricia hadn’t killed Isis, and maybe her son, also.
Patricia went on, “I’m not sure, but I think that Juliette and Isis have been going to the same craft shows and psychic fairs for years. So I started wondering if, you know, they could have been stalking each other to find out what the other one knew about Isis’s son’s death? Like, if one of them killed him, was the other one trying to find evidence? Did Juliette think Isis was about to kill her, so she struck first?”
It all made sense. We didn’t know which of the two might have killed Heru Crabbe, but I was guessing it would be a girl his age, not his mother. And we certainly knew that Isis, and not Juliette, had been murdered. It was all circumstantial, though, except for that piece of glass on my dessert plate. I hoped Haylee was guarding it well.
I suggested, “You said that Juliette said something else that made everything fall into place for you?”
“Yes. When she was up at the microphone with her crystal ball, she said something about Gord and Edna being circled by light, and I understood what she’d been doing on the trail, and I guessed that she had also killed Isis.”
I stayed silent.
As I’d hoped, Patricia kept talking. “And I remembered the way she’d blocked the trail and she’d thought up reasons for me not to go to the park, but in the end, she decided to go with me. At the time, I thought it was strange that she shined her light to the left of the trail, not right on it. And I still didn’t figure it out when she kept asking me if I’d seen any of your glow-in-the-dark thread. Except she didn’t call it that, she called it bright thread or light thread or thread that shines like the sun.”
“And that’s frightening?” I pressed. Shines like the sun?
“Not on its own, but in addition to craft shows and psychic fairs, Juliette takes that crystal ball to bridal shows. Brides actually hire her to come to their receptions and tell fortunes. I think it’s creepy, but maybe that’s just me.”
“I agree with you.”
“Juliette had already told me something about someone ruining one of the predictions she’d made at a wedding reception. Juliette had told a fortune of great fame and beauteous happiness—I picked up on the word ‘beauteous’ because it’s so old-fashioned—and that night, this person had stood on a riverbank below the banquet hall, and had cast a spell on the bride. The marriage hadn’t lasted, and word somehow—courtesy of the person who had cast the spells, I guess—went around the bridal show circuit that Juliette was a fake, and Juliette wasn’t hired for as many weddings.”
My giggle was more from nerves than from amusement. “Don’t tell me that all of the other couples Juliette made those predictions for lived happily ever after!”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? But she seemed really angry about this person—I’m guessing the person was Isis because of what Opal read aloud from Isis’s book—who had ruined her reputation.”
“Why would Isis try to ruin Juliette’s reputation? It seems to me that casting spells on brides would do more harm to the person casting the spells than to the person telling good fortunes.”
“I don’t know, but it fits my theory of the two of them following each other around, going to these shows, and trying to make trouble for each other. Maybe Isis thought she could force Juliette to admit to murdering Heru? Or maybe she couldn’t prove that Juliette killed him, so she was getting revenge. Maybe she had more planned.”
And that’s why she had brought her craft of handmade books and her spell-casting skills to Threadville? She’d known Juliette was coming to our Get Ready for Halloween Craft Fair, and Isis planned to exact more revenge?
“Meanwhile,” Patricia continued, “Juliette had learned somewhere that she could circle a couple with light and prevent that person’s curses from working. And
I thought she meant thinking good thoughts that would send virtual beams of light to people, you know?”
My nod in the darkness was enough to keep Patricia talking. “She seems caught up in believing in her powers and wanting others to believe in them, also. Last night, when we were talking to her here at the Haunted Graveyard, I joked that she could have predicted that jumping out from behind tombstones at people would startle them. I didn’t mean to upset her, but she seemed angry.”
I nodded. “I thought so, too, but I wasn’t sure if your suggestions set her off or if seeing Dare and Brianna together did it. However, this afternoon at the craft fair, she asked Dare when he’d seen you, and she asked you when you’d gone for your walk. Maybe she was trying to figure out how much you saw of what she was doing on that trail.”
“All she was doing was walking and stooping and walking and stooping. I never would have concluded from that alone that she’d murdered Isis. She could have been gathering dewdrops, for all I knew. But just now when Juliette said that thing about encircling someone with light, I thought about her obsession with your glow-in-the-dark thread on the night Isis was murdered, and I remembered that she’d helped sew some of that thread to the big wedding skirt that was supposed to be Edna’s. I wasn’t sure what it all meant, but I was afraid she would guess how much I’d figured out about her. I probably should have stayed inside with the rest of you—safety in numbers and all that, but I got scared and ran out of the lodge.”
“You had a good head start. Why didn’t you just get into your car and drive away?”
“I was afraid that Juliette might be right behind me, so I decided to hide in the bushes. I drove her here, but I don’t want to drive her home. I guess that’s rude, but . . .”
“Under the circumstances,” I said. “Understandable.” I hid a smile at the idea of Patricia worrying about offending a murderer by fleeing from her. “I’ve walked from downtown Threadville to the Elderberry Bay Lodge and back many times. It’s not far, and Juliette’s wearing flats.” I wouldn’t want to try it in the heels I was wearing.