Crewel Yule (3 page)

It was coming up on ten-thirty, and Marveen was checking the employee list to see who was here and who wasn’t. They were going to be operating seriously short-staffed, all right. This would have to happen on a weekend when they were more than fully booked. Chef Brian Selph was here, that was one blessing; but the head of maintenance wasn’t, nor was her lead housekeeper. Kayesha was next senior housekeeper, she would do—

The sound of a descending scream interrupted her planning. It cut off as something big hit the atrium floor. One of the birds started to shriek, and then people joined in. There were shouts of alarm, too.

Marveen froze. Her mind tried running in all directions, but every direction was blocked by denial. That couldn’t be what it sounded like.

When she first came to work at the Consulate, she’d been concerned that there was only a railing between the guests walking in the halls—
galleries
was the correct term, but she thought of them as halls—and the great open space of the atrium. Suppose someone fell over a railing, and came smashing down on that hard tile floor? she’d asked. Couldn’t happen, she’d been told. No way.

“Oh, my God,” she murmured, keeping her voice down only with an enormous effort. She just stood there a few seconds, trying to remember how to breathe, listening to her heart knocking on her breastbone really hard.

Then her training and experience kicked in. She picked up the desk phone—and put it down again. She couldn’t call anyone yet because she didn’t know for sure what had happened, or how bad it was. Maybe it was a big old suitcase. Maybe it was only a broken leg.

Those thoughts gave her hope. She came out from behind the counter and hurried, reluctantly, to see.

There were three sets of doors leading from the lobby into the atrium. The one on the left was blocked by a huge Christmas tree, the one on the right led to a ramp for wheelchairs. The center doors were always open and Marveen stopped short just through them. Right at the foot of the carpeted steps was a solid mass of people all looking at something, all talking at once. Marveen heard words like
awful,
and
ambulance,
and even
dead.
She gathered herself and, starting down the stairs, asked in her most authoritarian voice, “What happened here?”

“She fell,” said a woman in a pink fleece jogging suit.

“From the top floor,” added a woman in a deep-red sweater with a pattern of white snowflakes on it.

“I saw the whole thing,” said a third, an older woman whose navy knit slacks were stretched to their limit over her tummy and thighs. “I was on the elevator and I saw her way up there, looking over the railing. Then she just went over and . . .” She touched her lips in a tentative way, apologizing with her eyes, clearing her throat as if to dislodge the words stuck there.

Marveen reached out to touch her on the arm. “Could you do me a really big favor and wait for me over by the front desk? I want to talk to you.”

“Hr-um. Hem. All right.”

Marveen turned and used her height and voice to make her way through the crowd. There was a little clear space in the center. No one wanted to touch the body, which was a body, all right—a woman. The inside border of the crowd was boiling like a pot. People wanted to see. Then they wanted to get away from the sight. As they went away, they were replaced by others who wanted to see, and then didn’t. Marveen forced her attention away from the boiling to the body.

She had once seen a deer that had been hit by a big truck. That was what the woman looked like. Blood on a white sweater and broken bones in red slacks and blank eyes over an open mouth. Oh horrible, oh Jesus have mercy on that poor soul. Marveen looked away. But then she steeled herself and looked again, more closely. The woman was in her late thirties, maybe. Her hair was a bright blond. She wore one of those clear plastic card holders the people running the stitching event issued. It had twisted several times on its black elastic cord, but was, thank you, Jesus, face up. BELLE HAMMERMILL, it read. BELLE’S SAMPLERS AND MORE, MILWAUKEE, WI.

Marveen straightened and pushed her way back through the crowd, then ran to the front of the check-in desk, snatched up the phone, and dialed 911.

Lenore was packing, her mind running on a well-worn track. Belle deserves to die. She should fall off a cliff. She should drink poison. She should go swimming where sharks can rip her into pieces and eat her down to her toenails. She should be hit by a train, which should back up and run over her again, just to be sure.

Lenore could not believe she could hate someone this way—but she did. Belle was evil. She loved doing wrong, hurting people, ruining their lives. She was the worst person on earth; she was wicked, a devil.

“Sorry about that,” she’d say, but she wouldn’t lift a finger to make it right. “Sorry about that,” with her sickening smirk, but she wasn’t sorry. She bragged to her friends about how lazy she was, about how she was always messing up orders, forgetting it was her turn to open early or stay late. “I guess I must be the silliest girl to ever own her own business,” she’d say and actually giggle, like it was something to be proud of. Cow.

But now Lenore’s chance at becoming a successful designer, at making a living doing what she loved, was destroyed, smashed to ruins, and Belle, smiling, shrugging, was “sorry about that,” too. As if Lenore would get another chance like this. As if Lenore should smile and shrug back, as if Belle deserved to keep on shrugging, being sorry—or breathing.

It all began when Lenore started fooling around with a piece of dark teal Cashel linen. She was thinking of making a sampler, yes, a holiday sampler in red and gold. Use Kreinik metallics, seed beading, Soi Cristale silk, and yes, Rainbow Gallery’s Precious Metals Mini-Garland.

But if it was a holiday sampler, then not done on the usual rectangle, no. Cut out into a Christmas tree shape—no, wait, done three-dimensional! Cut out, yes, and laced onto cardboard stiffeners—no,
stuffed.
Like a slender pillow, only in parts, eight parts or maybe even twelve parts. And it would stand up when assembled, a table centerpiece. A Christmas tree centerpiece for the holiday table, all sparkly and twinkly.

And keep the sampler idea. Ornament it with samples of fancy stitching: Hardanger stitches, counted cross-stitches over one and two, Rhodes stitches, star stitches, satin stitches, feather stitches, French knots, bullion stitches, even surface embroidery. And couching the gold mini-garland, some of it draped from pointed branch to pointed branch. Oh, happy days, oh, beautiful!

Weeks of planning followed. Go for a realistic tree, or pull out all the stops and make it a showpiece of fancy stitches? Bigger work on the bottom, tiny work on top? Try out this, practice that on doodle cloth, and even so, lots of frogging on the actual model. Blood, sweat, and tears. It became an obsession, but it was going to be fabulous; it would be a huge hit. Lenore described her idea and showed one section to a few stitcher friends, who didn’t squeal and shout but made soft, awed sounds. And hinted that they would be honored, truly honored, to have a go at a section, pretty, pretty please?

Lenore sent a sketch and the stitched section to Bewitching Stitches, who immediately offered to buy it. And said they wanted the pattern to be introduced, with a model to display, at the INRG Nashville Market in February. And the money they offered was very, very nice.

Lenore started working on a new and better model of the piece. This one would be professionally finished—Lenore was a stitcher, not a seamstress. Like most stitchers, when it came to the washing, blocking, and framing, or the stuffing and sewing of a piece, she was barely competent. If she made a serious mistake, there were hundreds of hours of work spoiled. Besides, this important piece needed to be perfect. Good finishers were costly, but Lenore decided this piece would really have to be finished right.

She continued working on her practice model, correcting her pattern as things changed. All the while, her excitement level stayed high. It would be even more beautiful than she thought. This was going to be the design that gave her a name to remember.

And then a curt e-mail from the International Needlework Retailers Guild:

 
Could she make the new deadline? No choice—she had to. Actually, it would be better to have her new design introduced this December rather than the following February. The last time she showed the piece in progress, at a needlework guild meeting, a rival designer who had been lurking in the back of the room had left with a gleam in her eye, and Lenore’s good friend Jeanne had said, “You watch, she’ll have a pattern of her own that looks a whole lot like yours in six months.”

Any designer who comes up with something new will find imitators. But the designer who had it first gets the undivided attention of pattern publishers for any designs she may dream up thereafter.

So Lenore labored hard on the practice piece. At last it was finished. She stitched, stuffed, and assembled it herself. The fabric was roughened and distorted here and there from all the frogging—rip it, rip it!—of stitches as she changed her mind after seeing how they looked on the cloth. And because she wasn’t a tailor, the assembly wasn’t perfect; for one thing, it sagged to one side a little. And the stuffing was not evenly distributed inside all the sections. Yet, flawed as the finishing was, anyone could see how truly magnificent it could be, if it were professionally finished.

So she started in again. This time she just followed the re-worked pattern, so the stitching went rapidly.

Now, the only question was, could Belle Hammermill’s finisher get it ready in time?

Belle said, “Certainly, no problem.” The witch. The lying, lazy, slattern. The incompetent, wicked, corrupt, evil, stupid slut.

The day before Lenore was supposed to leave for Nashville, she went to Belle’s sampler shop, and Belle acted all surprised that Lenore actually expected to pick up the design. Well, no, it wasn’t ready. It wouldn’t be ready until February seventh—wasn’t that when Lenore asked to pick it up?

Lenore had been too astonished to get angry. Lenore had talked to Belle about the change in the date of the Nashville market back in August; she had told her again when she brought the piece in, back just before Halloween, that she was going to introduce her newest design at the Market. She had even called the shop around Thanksgiving to remind Belle that the new date of the Market was just over three weeks away.

“Yes, I know,” Belle had said. “Cherry and I are signed up. We’re going to have a big sale when we get back.”

But when Lenore went to pick up her model, Belle had said, with that cute little shrug she was a little too fond of, “Well, isn’t that just too stupid of me? I guess I forgot to write the new due date down. Your model isn’t here. Sorry about that.”

No, someone like Belle needed to die. Die in some grotesque, painful way.

Three

Betsy wanted badly to tell Jill she was too tired to be good company, but Godwin was beaming with eagerness. So she called and said, “We’ll be waiting in the lobby.”

Jill came in a black rented Sable. As predicted, the rain had turned to sleet, and the twenty-minute trip to the Grand Ole Opry Hotel was an exercise in driving on streets and highways full of icy patches.

As they drove into the immense parking lot, Betsy looked at the acres of white clapboard building with various pillar-marked entrances and asked, “Is the hotel in a mall?”

“No, this
is
the hotel,” Jill said. “Well, there are stores and a canal and a park and buildings inside, but they’re surrounded by hotel rooms.”

“I bet the entire population of Excelsior could stay in one wing of this place.”

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.