Hanging by a Thread (2 page)

“Mom.”

She stopped midsentence and gave me a crooked frown, hugging herself. For a moment she looked worried and fearful, nothing like the polished professional I was used to
seeing walk out the door in the morning, dressed in her boring power suits, with her heavy bag over her shoulder.

“I’ll be careful, okay? Promise.”

Mom hesitated for a moment. I knew she wanted to say something else, but we’d made a habit of not saying some of the most important things. And when she hugged me, her familiar perfume seemed tinged with the scent of regret.

I
T TOOK ME LONGER THAN USUAL
to get dressed, which is saying something, since I always put a lot of time into choosing what I wear. Not just because I make a lot of my clothes myself, but because someday my look will be my brand. Kind of like Betsey Johnson—if you look at pictures of her from the eighties, you can see the inspiration for everything she’s designed ever since.

But I’d be downtown, where everyone in Winston could walk by and see me. Did I really want to give them more reason to think our family was different? Maybe I could ease slowly back into my own style after starting out like everyone else. I went through my closet, picking out my most conservative clothes, which were basics I hadn’t gotten around to altering yet: plain black canvas shorts, a gray tank top I layered under other clothes. I dressed and stared at myself in the mirror, hating the way I looked.

I knew my mom had struggled when she was my age.
She didn’t talk about it much, but I got the impression that Nana had embarrassed her, and she’d spent her teenage years trying to simply disappear. It was different for me. I wanted to fit in but not blend in.

Stripping off the boring clothes, I tried again. I picked a fringed black ultrasuede miniskirt to go with a halter top I’d sewn from blue gauzy fabric that I’d gathered and twisted and then stitched into place. I borrowed my mom’s cameo necklace and added a clip I’d made out of a long blue feather and a few strands of fake electric blue hair.

Way better. Now I felt like myself again.

The doorbell rang, and as I went to answer it, I checked myself out in the hall mirror and was satisfied with what I saw. Maybe my look wasn’t for everyone, but it represented what I did best, and it would promote my business. Besides, a few of Rachel’s friends had already asked me if I could make them one-of-a-kind pieces, so I knew there was a market for what I had to offer. Nana had been telling me for years that if I did what I loved, success would follow. It was yet another thing that drove my mom crazy—but then, she’s an accountant, so her motto would probably be something more like “Do what pays the bills, and financial security will follow.”

I opened the door to find Nana standing there. “I was just thinking about you!” I said, giving her a hug and pulling her inside with a guilty pang. I wanted to get her off the porch so people wouldn’t see her—although the red VW bug covered with bumper stickers parked in front of our house was a dead giveaway.

Nana was impossible to miss. Her hair was a mass of silver ringlets that came down to her shoulders—unless she put it up to get it out of the way, in which case it burst out of the top of her head in all directions. She was a startling dresser, but unlike me, she didn’t put a lot of thought into her outfits. I think she put on the first thing she grabbed in the morning, but since she had a fondness for bright colors and shiny fabrics and ethnic details and bought most of her wardrobe from the Indian import shop, the effect was usually blinding. And she’d been this way forever; in pictures from when my mom was little, Nana looks pretty much the same, except her hair used to be brown and her face less wrinkled.

She had a fondness for bright orange lipstick too, and I automatically wiped where she had kissed me, knowing from experience that she left marks. “Mom made coffee, I think. Want some?”

“Yes, better pour me a cup. She makes the best coffee anywhere—glad she hasn’t given that up too.” Nana loved my mom’s cooking. When my parents split up, Nana told her she ought to become a chef or start a catering business—to do what she loved—which I could have told her would pretty much ensure Mom would never cook again.

We took our coffee out to the back patio. “I see your mom hasn’t made much progress on the garden yet.”

That was an understatement. The renters had left the tiny yard and flower beds alone; they were tidy but bare. “That’s your thing, Nana. Mom’s working so much I wouldn’t be surprised if it stays like this for years.”

“I could put in some bare-root roses this fall. You know what would be great along the fence? Some canna, maybe red ones—”

“Nana,” I interrupted. “Mom would kill you.”

She sighed. “I know, I know, and I’m trying to keep my distance and wait for an invitation. But you know, you’re welcome to come on up the hill anytime, even without your mom.”

I couldn’t meet her eyes. I’d only visited twice since we moved back, and we both knew I’d been avoiding her. But I wasn’t sure if Nana understood how much rode on this summer, on me making new friends before the start of my junior year. And there was no way for me to explain without her knowing the truth, which was that I didn’t want to be associated with her, at least not in public. Not until I had gotten established here.

“Are you going to the festival?” I said, changing the subject.

“Yup, I’m going to be at the loggerheads booth in the morning and then we’re protesting at the dedication of the new gazebo in the afternoon.”

“Oh, Nana …” My heart sank. Nana and her weird friends had made the papers before, half a dozen old hippie types carrying signs and marching around downtown. “What is it this time?”

“Have you seen the corporate sponsor list?” she demanded, outraged. “Taking money from big oil? Defiling our most precious resources just so we can spruce up the town for a bunch of tourists?”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” I said, making a note to be elsewhere during the ceremony.

“But that’s not why I came over,” Nana said, her expression softening. “Listen, honey, I know you’ve heard it a million times, but you have got to be careful this week. Lock the doors at night, stay in a group, call me or your mom if you need a ride.”

“Oh, Nana, not you too.”

“It’s not just me. Everyone in town is worried about you kids.”

“Nana, that’s all hype. The media just wants to stir things up for ratings.”

On July third the last two years in a row, terrible things had happened in Winston. Two years ago, a ten-year-old boy named Dillon Granger had been killed. It was made to look like an accident—his body had been found next to his mangled bike on the rocks below a sheer cliff—but forensics revealed bruising and damage to the bike that suggested he’d been pushed. An anonymous 911 caller reporting an accident along the cliff road was considered a suspect, but the recording of the call, made from a local truck stop pay phone, was muffled and unclear. They couldn’t determine anything about the caller’s identity, not even age or gender.

And this past July third, a high school girl named Amanda Stavros disappeared without a trace. As time went by and no evidence of her was found, she was presumed dead.

Dillon’s death was reported all over California. We watched it on the news up in San Francisco—the footage
of the road above the sheer cliff, the grieving parents at the funeral service. Mom knew the mother slightly, but she’d still been in middle school when Mom went off to college.

When Amanda disappeared, we were glued to the TV night after night. After police let it slip that they thought the deaths could be connected, the story made national news. Grim-faced newscasters reported that the crimes were suspected to be the work of a serial killer, and predicted that it might happen again. There were interviews with detectives and criminal psychologists. Rewards were offered, federal agencies called in, tips followed up on, persons of interest interviewed, but no arrests were ever made.

Mom and I had watched it all. She had made a clean break from Winston, but she’d grown up here, as had I, and we couldn’t take our eyes away from reports showing familiar scenes of town. Also, she’d gone to high school with Mrs. Stavros, though they hadn’t been close friends. Mrs. Stavros had been popular and beautiful—she’d even modeled for a while after graduation, and her magazine photos ended up in the news, along with details of her husband’s business dealings. Reporters camped out in front of their house, the coffee shop where they were known to go in the mornings, even the salon where Mrs. Stavros got her hair done.

As the months went by, the story kept coming back on the news whenever details emerged: The little boy was suspected of having been beaten before his body was tossed into the sea. Amanda’s boyfriend had been questioned by
the police. Her father had hired independent detectives. Rewards were doubled, then doubled again.

As we were getting settled in after the move,
Newsweek
ran an article with the headline “One Year Later: Town Braces for the Worst,” making it sound like the killer was expected to show up for the third year in a row. But the Winston Chamber of Commerce was fighting back. The Independence Day festival was taking place on July third, to draw attention away from the anniversary of the murders, and the town was pulling out all the stops to attract tourists. There would be entertainment, food, and a fireworks display to rival San Francisco’s. And there were rumors that the town had hired tons of security, both plainclothes and uniformed.

“You can’t be too careful,” Nana said. “Besides, he’s going after kids like you.”

“Like
me
?”

“The stars. The best and brightest. The cream of the crop.”

“Oh, Nana …” I knew what she was implying: Dillon had been a star baseball player, even at the age of ten. He’d been on a team that went to the Little League World Series the year before he was killed. And Amanda had been pretty and popular and a good student. She’d been captain of the JV cheer squad and a member of the Gold Key Society, an exclusive girls’ service club at Winston High, which must have been a good human-interest angle because the newspapers ran stories about it. “No one knows me here, and besides, I’m hardly a
star
.”

“Clare, you’re wonderfully talented, and beautiful! Look at you!”

It was the sort of thing Nana always said, and there was no way I was going to convince her otherwise. “Okay. I’ll be careful. I’ll come straight home from the festival and lock myself in with Mom. We’ll bar the doors and get out the shotguns. Happy?”

“You just make sure you do that. And call me. Promise?”

“Promise.”

She finally seemed to relax. “Now show me what you made this week.”

Nana was my number-one fan, and she was also the only other person in my life who knew anything about sewing, so I loved showing her my work. I made clothes and bags from other people’s castoffs, taking them apart and sewing them back together again, tailoring sleeves and hems and necklines, and adding trim and embellishments.

This week I’d altered a coral-pink jacket that came from a suit my mom hadn’t worn in years. I’d added bright orange piping around the lapels, and replaced the buttons with vintage stamped-metal ones from the sixties. As a final touch I’d sewn on a pink and coral fabric flower that came from one of my old headbands.

A pair of jeans—size 2, three sizes too small for me or I would have kept them for myself—now sparkled with bugle-bead curlicues starting on the back pockets and trailing down the outer seams of the legs.

And finally there was a tote bag stitched together from pieces of an old brown and pink quilt I’d salvaged. The quilt
had been falling apart—someone had used it so many times that the binding had frayed and some of the patches had holes—but there were sections that were perfectly good. I carefully cut these out, sewing them to brown corduroy panels cut from a pair of men’s Levi’s. I’d added a heavy-duty zipper with chrome teeth and handles made from leftover corduroy. When I’d finished it the night before, I thought it had a funky charm, but now I wondered if it was just plain ugly.

“You’ve outdone yourself!” Nana laughed as I slipped my creations into my backpack.

I wasn’t sure that was a good thing. Nana’s style was the last thing I wanted mine to resemble. Still, she complimented everything I did—I could make a skirt out of a garbage bag and she’d tell me it was gorgeous—so I let it go.

“I have to run, Nana,” I said. “I’m meeting Rachel at ten.”

“Just remember what I said.”

I promised her yet again, then waited until I heard her car puttering down the hill before I wheeled my bike out to the street.

Be careful. Stay in groups. Lock the door
.

And don’t end up being Winston’s third Independence Day murder victim
.

I
RODE MY BIKE DOWN THE HILL
to a restaurant called the Shuckster. Rachel couldn’t pick me up in her Nissan 370Z because our sales booth took up her passenger seat. Its wooden legs jutted straight up, and whenever the canvas top caught the wind, she had to hold on to it with her free hand to keep it from flying out of the car and into traffic. It had taken a lot of work to convince Rachel’s mom that Adrienne, Rachel’s nine-year-old sister, had outgrown her puppet theater and wouldn’t mind if we used it to sell my one-of-a-kind creations. And it had taken ten bucks to convince Adrienne, which put me in the hole for this venture before we even started.

When Rachel found out we were moving back to Winston, it had been her idea to start a business together. She’d seen the things I made the few times I had visited her, and thought we could make a lot of money selling them. Of course, she didn’t need the money—but she did need a
summer job, because her mother insisted she do something other than lie around the house all day.

The puppet theater “storefront” had been her idea, and she did the merchandising, too. The way she figured it, people were a lot more likely to stop and look at our wares if they were displayed at eye level. We hung my creations from nails we pounded into the theater’s frame, and on the front we displayed the sign we had made on Rachel’s computer and laminated at the copy shop. It had turned out great—the words “NewToYou” in bright pink curlicue font on a pale orange background. We’d thought about adding a second line of text beneath the name—“Everything old can be new again” or “New life from old duds,” but neither one got across the message we wanted.