Needle and Dread (10 page)

“Looks can be deceivin'.” Margaret Louise balled the foil inside her free hand and placed the brownies in the center of the table. “But once a person bites into one, they just start talkin'. Been that way since the very first batch I made 'bout fifty years ago. Why, Leona, don't you remember Lucy Mae eatin' one and then spendin' the
next thirty minutes tellin' us 'bout the way her older brother was sweet on you?”

Leona's eyes narrowed. “
Fifty
years ago, I wasn't even
alive
, Margaret Louise.”

Rose and Tori each took a step back, with Tori palming Charles's shoulder and pulling him to safety, too.

“Fifty years ago, I was almost thirteen, and considerin' you and me were born a minute apart, I'm quite sure you were thirteen then, too.”

Dead silence descended across the room as Tori, Rose, and Charles braced for the fallout of Margaret Louise's words, but Leona simply turned and faced them. “Remember when word got out that Mac Saunders wasn't going to run for a councilman spot before he was ready to announce it?”

Tori and Rose nodded in unison.

“That was my brownies!” Margaret Louise announced.

Leona kept going. “And remember when the truth came out about Van Morgan's wife and Mary Sue's husband?”

Again Tori and Rose nodded.

“That was my brownies, too!” Margaret Louise waved her hand over the plate of chocolate squares and then rocked back on the heels of her Keds as Leona took the floor again.

“And that time when we were trying to find out what Georgina wanted for her birthday but she was playing coy and wouldn't tell anyone?”

Tori stared at Margaret Louise. “That was your brownies?”

“That was my brownies.”

“And that's only the tip of the iceberg, dear. There are many,
many
more examples of their power.”

“They really work
that
well?” Tori asked as she looked from Margaret Louise to Leona and back again.

Charles rose up on the balls of his feet, pointed out the front window to the approaching bus, and then clapped his hands like a sugared-up cheerleader. “It looks like we're about to find that out right now.”

There was no denying the oddity of looking across the living room and finding four veritable strangers sewing. And based on the occasional glances she fielded from just about every member of the Sweet Briar Ladies Society Sewing Circle at some point during the first twenty minutes or so, Tori wasn't the only one who felt that way.

Still, she couldn't have been prouder of the way Lucinda, Gracelyn, Samantha, and Minnie had been welcomed into the tight-knit fold from the moment Travis and Miranda dropped them off at the curb.

As expected, Debbie had gravitated toward Lucinda, patting her far away from Paris and over to the pair of Adirondack chairs Milo had pulled inside for the evening. Based on the snatches of conversation Tori could make out between the pair, books were still the favorite topic.

Gracelyn was bookended on the couch by Dixie and
Georgina, all talk of current affairs tabled for the time being by a new commonality—hems. Who was going to win their passionate debate over the best technique to use when hemming a knee-length skirt though, remained to be seen.

“I still can't believe I'm here. Me—Charles. At a Sweet Briar Ladies Society Sewing Circle meeting,” Charles whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “Pinch. Me. Now.”

Tori shifted her focus from Gracelyn to her spiky-haired friend and pointed her needle at his right hand. “I didn't know it was possible to snap while holding a needle.”

“It's not, unless you're a”—he readied himself for a triangle encore—“snapmaster. Like. Me.”

“A snapmaster, huh?”

“You know it, sugar lips.” With a quick stick of his needle into the side seam of his jeans, Charles brought his hand to his mouth and pretended to yawn. “I've been dreaming of this moment since I first saw you ladies on
Taped with Melly and Kenneth
last spring.”

She guided his focus back down to his leg. “I'd be happy to give you one of my pincushions, you know.”

“Why? My jeans work fine.”

Why indeed . . .

“Suit yourself.” She cut a piece of emerald green thread from its spool and guided it through her own needle. “As for this meeting, are you forgetting the one you came to just before my wedding?”

“That wasn't a real sewing circle meeting, Victoria. That was just a bridal shower disguised as one.” He turned his wide eyes on her as horror dawned across his face. “Not that the bridal shower wasn't fabulous—because it
was. Minus, of course, the whole ring announcement Leona made that got everyone even angrier at her.” He stopped, took a breath, and continued on, his recollection of events impressive. “The fur was really flying there at the end, wasn't it, sugar lips? There was a moment when I actually thought Dixie was going to throw a punch. And if she had, Leona's plastic surgeon would have been fit to be tied, that's for sure.”

She felt her mouth go slack a half second before Charles's skin blanched beneath his spray tan. “You're hallucinating, Victoria. You did
not
just hear that.”

Leona's plastic surgeon?

“I—I . . .” Tori's stammering fell off as she glanced toward the dining room and the always stylish, always perfect Leona. On Leona's lap was her precious Paris. In her hands was the latest travel magazine.

“Please, Victoria,” Charles whisper-pleaded. “I'm begging you. You did not hear that.”

“I—I mean I always . . .
wondered
. Everyone does. But—”

Charles pitched his upper body over his knees, pulled a familiar powder blue bag from his satchel, and brought it to his mouth.

“Charles? What are you doing?”

“I need air,” he said between dramatic gasps.

She grabbed the bag from his hand and thrust it onto the cushion between them. “What? Do you think I have some sort of death wish?”

For what seemed like an eternity, he merely stared at her as if searching for something. When his breathing was finally normalized enough to speak, he did. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I'm sure. Your secret is safe with me.”

“
Leona's
secret,” he corrected.

“Leona's secret.”

Clasping the base of his neck, he slumped back against the couch and shuddered. “I can't believe I said that. I'm a locked vault of secrets.”

“No worries—wait!” She pointed at the empty plate on the closest end table and studied her friend. “Did you happen to eat one of Margaret Louise's brownies?”

He bolted upright. “That's it! It was the Truth Serum Brownies!”

“Shhhh . . .” She took in the plate of brownies on the dining room table and then swung her gaze back to Charles. “So they really work?”

“I just blabbed Leona's biggest secret, didn't I?”

It was Tori's turn to flounce against the back of the couch, her threaded needle still untouched on her lap. “Wow. Just wow.”

“I know Samantha took one when we were over at the table together,” he whispered.

Tori fixed her attention on the redhead bent over one end of Jake Junior's scout uniform while Margaret Louise worked on the other. “What's your take on her?” she asked. “Besides being in her late fifties or early sixties?”

“She knows forensics, that's for sure.”

“Forensics?”

He nodded and reached for his last bite of Rose's lemon square. “When I was over at the table, she was poking holes in that new crime show
Cause of Death
.”

“What kind of holes?”

“The kinds of things the quote un-quote accomplished killer left behind in the first episode that tied him to the
crime. She said an accomplished killer would know to wipe their fingerprints off the murder weapon. The fact that he didn't cheapened the whole show in her eyes.”

“Anything else of note?”

“You mean other than the way she followed up her hole poking with ways an accomplished killer might actually opt to murder someone? No. That's it.”

“Huh.”

When the lemon square was gone, he elongated his neck to afford a view of Samantha and Margaret Louise's corner of the living room and then tapped the face of Tori's watch. “Unless the brownie on that plate between them is Margaret Louise's—which I doubt because it's still there and she knows its effects—it appears as if Samantha has another bite or two to go. I'm putting the time between when I finished my brownie and the padlock on my lips malfunctioning at about ten minutes. So, assuming there's no variation in effects based on age or gender, I think I'm going to trade my needle for a pen and another lemon square for our notebook of suspects . . .”

She registered most of what Charles was saying, but some of it she was pretty sure she missed as her gaze shifted from Samantha and Margaret Louise to Minnie and Rose. Two days earlier, she'd been drawn to the eighty-year-old woman by many of the same things that drew her to Rose. But now, as she considered Minnie's hands and the fact they didn't shake as much as Rose's, she couldn't help but wonder about their strength.

Were they strong enough to kill another person? Especially if that person was only five or six years younger than Minnie?

“I don't know about the rest of you, but I really didn't like that Opal Goodwin.”

Charles's elbow hit just below Tori's rib cage and brought her attention back to Samantha Williams. “Oh, oh, oh, here we go. Lights. Camera. Action.”

One by one, hands stopped threading needles, and fingers stopped moving them in and out of fabric. Samantha looked at each and every person before scooting Jake Junior's uniform off her lap. “She was mean and nasty for the sake of being mean and nasty, and she's been that way for as long as I've known her.”

Margaret Louise turned a knowing eye in Tori's direction and winked.

Leona turned a knowing eye in Tori's direction and smiled smugly.

Charles merely flipped open the notebook, uncapped his pen, and waited.

“You knew Opal before this tour?” Tori asked.

“Did I ever.” Samantha held up Jake Junior's ziplining patch and sighed. “I did this for the first time just this past summer. While on vacation in Virginia. I felt like I was flying . . .”

On the page devoted to Samantha, Charles wrote:

Ziplines.

“Inconsequential,” she whispered.

“You don't know that. Zipliners are proficient with ropes, are they not?”

He had a point . . .

Margaret Louise took the patch from Samantha's
outstretched hand and added it back on top of the pile still to be sewn onto her eldest grandchild's vest. “How did you know Opal?”

“God, I love that woman,” Charles mused as he held his pen at the ready. “Well, maybe not her driving, per se.”

“
Maybe
?”

“Shhhh . . . Samantha is gearing up to answer.”

Tori turned her head just as Samantha rose to her feet and wandered back to the dining room table. “A few years ago, I approached our town council about doing one of those citizen police academy programs in conjunction with our local police department. If you're unfamiliar with them, it's a chance to get a taste of what police officers do on a daily basis. You go out on calls, do simulations of real life and death scenarios, et cetera. It was something I'd always wanted to do, but didn't necessarily want to incur the costs of a hotel in some other town in order to do it.”

Samantha inventoried the various remaining desserts on the table and then helped herself to a second round of Margaret Louise's brownies.

“I don't know if you should be eatin' two of those,” Margaret Louise said, jumping up.

“Why on earth not? One can never have too much chocolate.” Samantha made her way around the room, stopping to inspect what each and every person was working on. When she saw the shirt Debbie was making for her preteen daughter, she made a few appreciative noises and then popped a piece of the brownie into her mouth. “Mmmm . . . these are absolutely delicious.”

Clearly torn between worry and pride, Margaret
Louise settled on pride. “I make them from a secret recipe I invented myself.”

Desperate to get the loose-lipped woman back on topic, Charles leaned forward with rapt interest. “So did they do it? Did your town host one of those academies?”

“No. Thanks to Opal.”

Tori, Charles, and Margaret Louise exchanged looks.

“Oh?” Leona chimed in. “Why is that?”

“Because Opal, who apparently attends every town council meeting for the express purpose of keeping everyone in line, pitched such a fit over the prospect of local tax money being used in that way, they dismissed my request completely.” Samantha crossed back to the table, plucked a carrot from the vegetable plate Debbie had brought along with a host of sinful desserts, and carried it over to Paris. “If I could have gotten away with it, I'd have leaned across the seat I was sitting on and strangled that woman with my bare hands right then and there. Fortunately for me, I had the presence of mind to realize the chief of police and two of his deputies would have seen the whole thing.”

Keeping her finger low to the couch, Tori pointed at Samantha's page and waited for Charles to stop gawking and start writing. A quiet snap eventually did the trick.

Wanted citizen police academy. Opal nixed idea. Wanted to strangle Opal.

“Good?” Charles mumbled.

“Good.” She looked up again as Leona, clearly touched by Samantha's gesture toward Paris, patted the vacant chair to her right. Samantha accepted.

“I take it there were others in the room that disliked your suggestion?” Tori asked loud enough for Samantha to hear.

Samantha gave Paris a gentle scratch between the ears and then shook her head so emphatically, Tori was actually concerned it would fall off her neck. “Quite the contrary, actually. Several residents, upon hearing my idea during the open forum, expressed interest in participating in such a thing. One gentleman even went so far as to say it could benefit the police department to have more citizens properly trained in dealing with emergencies.”

Something about Samantha's story wasn't adding up. But before Tori could craft the best question to uncover the issue, Margaret Louise beat her to the punch.

“I don't know 'bout your town, Samantha, but here in Sweet Briar, Georgina—she's our mayor and a member of our sewin' circle who ain't here tonight—wouldn't put the rantin' of one over the feelin' of many.”

“She would if that one was Opal Goodwin.”

“Why?” Tori asked, intrigued.

“Opal Goodwin is the old money in our town. Old money has deep connections and loyal followers, if you know what I mean.”

When no one spoke, Samantha continued. “In our town, it's not Springdale Elementary. It's Goodwin Elementary. And the new teen center that just opened in September? That's called the Opal Goodwin Center for Teens.”