Thread and Buried (7 page)

13

O
F COURSE NAOMI WOULD KNOW IF A ROLL
of quilt batting wasn’t there. No one could misplace something that large. Ever the great interrogator, I asked her, “When did you last see it?”

She squinted toward the window overlooking the parking lot. “Friday afternoon, shortly before our Midsummer Madness Sidewalk Sale. I was cutting smaller pieces off that roll for table runner kits when I heard a customer come in, so I left the end of the batting just hanging here, and ran to the front of the store. After the sale that night, I noticed that I’d neglected to lock my back door.” She tested it. “It’s been locked ever since.”

“Was the batting there then?”

Lowering her chin, she pursed her mouth. She was obviously giving herself a silent scolding. “I didn’t notice. You’d think I would have. But that must have been when they took it. No one could have carried it out through the front of the store without my noticing them.”

True. But why would anyone steal quilt batting? Because they needed it for a quilt?

Or because they had a more devious plan for it?

I told Naomi, “The batting around the body was pinned together with knitting needles.”

We traded glances and ran from that room, past long-armed quilting machines and the rainbow of fabrics in the next room, through the gallery where Naomi showed off her students’ work, and out through her front door.

We jogged past Edna’s shop and burst into Opal’s. Usually, the first thing Opal’s cat did was purr around my ankles and beg for a cuddle. This time, Lucy opened her mouth and stuck her face against my shin, her method of sniffing where the kittens had been. I picked her up. She purred.

Since it was June, most of the yarns Opal had on display were cottons, linens, and silks in whites and pastels. Pretty and very tempting, but I was still working on a scarf I’d started months before, and I was determined to finish it before I bought more yarn. I did my knitting on Friday evenings at Opal’s storytelling events, and the scarf was taking a while.

Smiling, Opal came out of the back room she used as her dining room and also as a cozy meeting place for classes and storytelling night. She was wearing a skirt and top she’d pieced together from flowerlike granny squares crocheted from pink, lavender, and white cotton.

Naomi surprised me with her directness. “Are you missing any knitting needles?”

Opal cocked her head. “It’s the strangest thing. I put out a bunch of needles at the sidewalk sale, and seven pairs disappeared. All of my size three aluminum needles. No other size. Not the bamboo size threes or the double-pointed or circular needles. Only the size three aluminum needles. I must have put them somewhere, but I can’t figure out where. How could I lose seven pairs?”

My shoulders tensed. Lucy squirmed. I offered her to Opal. “What colors were the seven pairs of needles?”

“Purple.” Opal snuggled the cat against her shoulder. “All of them. All seven pairs.”

Naomi looked at me and lifted an eyebrow.

“I know where they are.” My voice came out dead flat. I explained it all to Opal.

Opal stroked her wriggling cat. “So someone shoplifted those needles during the sidewalk sale. I wondered but didn’t want to believe it.” Lucy butted her head against Opal’s jaw and increased the volume of her purring.

Naomi asked in her usual gentle way, “How would someone hide knitting needles?”

“Seven
pairs
,” Opal repeated. “Fourteen needles. And they were in packages.”

“Maybe they put them in a violin or gun case,” Naomi suggested.

I asked, “Did either of you see anyone carrying either of those?”

They hadn’t, and neither had I.

“Maybe they stuck them up a sleeve?” I guessed.

Naomi raised a foot and pointed at her ankle. “Or into a sock.”

Opal’s trill of laughter was always contagious. “I hope whoever did it got
poked.
I hate to think of anyone shoplifting in Threadville. It can’t be our usual customers. They never do anything like that.”

There could always be a first time . . .
“Remember those women fighting over remnants at Haylee’s table?” I asked.

“I didn’t see them,” Naomi answered, “but I heard them.”

“Harpies.” Opal seldom sounded that disgusted.

I reached out and chucked Lucy under the chin. “Do you know who either of them was?”

“No,” Opal said. “And after Haylee offered them similar fabrics, they both left without buying anything.”

I told Opal and Naomi that one of those women had seized a spool of thread before Georgina could close her hand around it. “But when I said I’d get Georgina an identical spool, the woman suddenly didn’t want thread or anything else. She went off—and I think she joined the woman she’d been fighting with earlier. It was like they were going around causing disturbances just for fun.”

Opal stroked Lucy. “Maybe they had a reason, like, I don’t know. This sounds silly, but what if they caused the disturbance at Haylee’s sale so that another accomplice could grab knitting needles from my table?”

“That doesn’t sound silly, Opal,” Naomi reassured her. “That’s as good a theory as any.”

I agreed. “They left the sale with a smaller woman in a pink plaid shirt. Cassie, Neil’s new assistant at the bakery, was wearing a shirt like that on Saturday.”

Opal stuck a forefinger up into the air. “Aha! Could Cassie be their accomplice and our shoplifter?” Lucy stretched out her neck and rubbed her gums on Opal’s finger.

Naomi looked pained. “I’ve only been in the bakery a few times since Cassie started working there, but she seems like a sweet girl. I can’t picture her shoplifting.”

“Or carrying a whole roll of batting,” I pointed out.

Naomi turned a shade of pink that matched some of the triangles on her pieced dress. “It wasn’t a whole roll.”

“Was there enough left to wrap up a . . . you know, a
person
?” I hated to use upsetting words like “corpse” when talking to Naomi. She was too likely to take on other people’s worries and cares.

“There would have been enough for
that
.” She clapped her hand across her mouth and said between her fingers, “I hope Chief Smallwood doesn’t think that Opal or I had anything to do with killing anyone!”

“She couldn’t possibly,” I said.

Opal nodded and kissed the dark gray M on Lucy’s forehead.

But as I crossed the street toward In Stitches, I looked down the hill at the spot where Vicki’s yarnbombed cruiser had been parked. Detective Gartener hadn’t seemed positive that Opal was innocent of that yarnbombing.

Even worse, someone had fled that scene wearing a blotchy, whitish cape that floated like fabric.

Quilt batting?

I knew for certain that Opal and Naomi weren’t murderers, but would the police believe they weren’t involved?

Was someone trying to frame my friends for murder?

14

I
DASHED THE REST OF THE WAY ACROSS
the street, opened the gate, and started down into my side yard. Perched on the front edge of one of my Adirondack chairs near th
e
foot of the hill, Vicki looked tiny and alone. I called to her and she ran up to me.

Knowing I needed to open In Stitches soon, I babbled about Naomi’s stolen quilt batting and Opal’s missing purple knitting needles.

Predictably, Vicki reminded me that I wasn’t supposed to be sticking my nose into a homicide investigation. Then she took out her notebook and had me go through it all again, slowly, while she wrote it down. “Can you describe the two women who caused the disturbances during the sidewalk sale?” she asked.

“The street was crowded, so I only caught glimpses. One of the fighting women was sort of scrawny, but a ropy sort of muscled kind of scrawny, and very tan. She wore a teal tank top and had straggly long blond hair. I got a look at her when she fussed about some thread I was selling. Her face was drawn, and her eyes were calculating and mean-looking.”

“What color?”

“I didn’t notice. The other woman’s hair was curly, an odd shade of maroon that clashed with her bright red polo shirt.”

“And you think these two women, the one with the maroon hair and the blonde, may have staged a fight to create a diversion so that a friend could steal quilt batting and knitting needles?”

I nodded. “And I think the friend may have been wearing a pink plaid shirt like the one Cassie, Neil’s new assistant at La Bakery, was wearing last night when she came to offer a free trial of cookies to Haylee and me. She was wearing a jacket over it, but—”

Vicki’s face went still, and she blanched. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned food to her quite yet. She again stared at my tall and bushy cedar hedge. “You know your fabrics—I suppose you’ll be telling me the fiber content of Cassie’s shirt next.”

I grinned. “When you were a little girl playing with toy guns and police cars, I was making doll clothes. The pink plaid shirt or shirts were mostly cotton, I’d guess, from the way the fabric draped.”

She rolled her eyes up to the sky before aiming that cool, direct gaze at me again. “Okay, but are you
sure
that the plaid you only glimpsed in a crowd on Friday night could be the same plaid you saw worn under a jacket last night?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “And from the little I’ve seen of Cassie, she doesn’t seem like a shoplifter.”

“Trust me, lots of people don’t
seem
like shoplifters. Or other criminals. We solve cases using facts and evidence, not appearance and hunches.”

I had to agree that her method was better. “But what woman wears the same shirt two days in a row? It can’t be Cassie.”

“You spout the oddest theories, Willow. Maybe it
was
Cassie, and she’s like me and wears identical shirts every day.” She paged through her notebook. “Okay. The batting and knitting needles apparently went missing Friday evening.” She pointed her pen down the hill toward the excavation. “But the body didn’t appear for at least twenty-four hours. I was sick when you and Haylee brought me through your backyard after the picnic last night, but I would have noticed a corpse.”

“I would have, too. And because of the dogs, I would have also noticed if the snow fencing had been knocked down.”

“It wasn’t,” she agreed. “And I saw the victim alive and well at the picnic. But that was a couple of hours before you brought me here.”

I held my breath, hoping she’d tell me who the victim was, but she didn’t. “The method of disposing of the body sounds premeditated,” I suggested.

“It sounds positively
weird
.”

I wanted to tell her that the yarnbomber might have worn a cloak made of quilt batting when he fled, but Gartener had asked me not to tell Vicki about the yarnbombing. She hadn’t been home yet, so she wouldn’t have seen whatever surprise he might have arranged for her. I clamped my lips shut.

The gate near the street clanged. Half expecting a murderer disguised in a quilt batting cloak, I whirled, but Detective Gartener strode down the hill toward us. “Need a ride home yet, Chief?” he asked Vicki. He turned his head so she couldn’t see his face but I could. He winked.

I managed not to laugh, but my smile might have been a little big. If he had put that car sweater on her cruiser in her garage, or maybe on her couch in her living room, his mind was on that yarnbomber, and he would likely connect the quilt batting with the yarnbomber’s escape getup. If not, I’d make sure he did, later. Or that Vicki did, after she saw the hand-knit creation, which, judging by the mischief I’d detected in Gartener’s wink, would be as soon as he could possibly engineer it.

She gave him a bleak smile. “I wish. Come down to the foot of Willow’s yard and see what I found.”

Dismissed, I charged up the hill, through my apartment, and to the shop’s front door in time to let Ashley in.

A venturesome kitten, the one with the bow tie, peered around the corner from the stairs leading to my apartment. Ashley swooped down, picked it up, and crooned to it. “Where did he come from?” she asked me.

The one with the mustache dashed to Ashley and began climbing her jeans. She picked that one up, too. Sally-Forth sat at Ashley’s feet and gazed up into her face.

I explained that Sally had found the two strays and brought them inside during the night.

Ashley’s eyes widened, maybe because Bow-Tie was clinging by his little claws to the top of her head and gnawing on her ponytail. “I thought your yard was a crime scene. Did Sally go out there?”

“I forgot and let her out. But I won’t forget again. Now it’s a worse crime scene than yesterday.”

“Huh?”

“You don’t want to know.” But I relented and told her.

Naturally, she was frightened and wanted to know who the victim was. She’d lived all of her sixteen years in Elderberry Bay, so if the victim was from the area, she probably knew him. We all probably did.

To distract her, I suggested, “Let’s make posters about the kittens.” We worked together until we got an adorable snapshot of them, then Ashley sat down at my computer and whipped up a poster. That girl had oodles of design talent.

Assuming that someone would be frantic about losing the kittens, I sent Ashley out to visit other stores and put up posters while I took over teaching the morning class. I loaded the kittens’ pictures into my embroidery software, then my students and I used the photos to create embroidery designs. We had great fun trying different fill stitches to make our embroidery resemble fur.

During our break, my students helped themselves to lemonade and cookies and greeted Sally and Tally, who had learned not to beg for cookies but had
not
learned to turn off their particularly cute and hopeful expressions.

The dogs’ pen kept them corralled. The kittens could easily slip out between the upright spindles supporting the railing. Whenever they did, though, Sally whimpered, and they returned to her. Soon, looking extremely pleased with herself, my motherly dog had the kittens snuggled next to her on her doggie bed, which was now a doggie and kitty bed. I didn’t dare think about what would happen if the kittens’ owner claimed them. Sally might bring home baby skunks or porcupines to fill the void.

Ashley returned and phoned animal rescue organizations and local newspapers. I loved having a full-time assistant, especially one as capable as Ashley. I would miss her in September when she started eleventh grade and would be available to work only after school and on weekends.

Concentrating on my students’ many creative ways of making lifelike stitched designs of kittens, I almost forgot about the batting-wrapped body, but when I glanced out the back window, the morning’s horror came back in a startling rush. Strange-looking aliens covered from head to toe in baggy white outfits were wandering around my yard.

Of course my students noticed my pained grimace, and once again, I had to admit that a crime had been discovered on my property.

Rosemary, the driver of the Threadville tour bus that came from Erie, asked, “Crime? A death?”

I managed a curt nod.

Rosemary suggested that death didn’t necessarily mean murder. “Maybe someone collapsed from this flu that’s been going around.”

I asked her, “Has the flu been going around Erie, too?”

She gestured at the group surrounding us. “Not as far as I know, but I heard on the radio that lots of people in this corner of the county came down with stomach flu.”

“You’re all very brave,” I told Rosemary, “coming here when something may be infectious.”

“Ha! Nothing short of the plague could keep us away from Threadville.”

I grinned. Rosemary had a way of making me feel better. And of encouraging everyone to return to their embroidery machines.

During my lunch hour, I took all four animals out to the upper section of my yard, the only part that wasn’t off limits. I kept Tally-Ho and his energetic exploring habits on a leash, but Sally-Forth spent the whole time keeping the kittens from straying and didn’t need a leash.

Shortly after our customers left for the day and we closed In Stitches, Ashley kissed all four animals and went home. We were both disappointed that no one had called about the kittens and they couldn’t yet be reunited with their owner.

Opal charged into the shop. “Where are the kittens from the poster that Ashley brought me?” She hardly needed to ask, since both of the tiny charmers were attacking her sandals and toes. She picked them up. “Aren’t you two naughty little ones?” She said it lovingly, and they responded by purring. “When you get a spare moment, come over, Willow. I’ve got things they can use.” She handed them back to me.

Inside their warm fur, their bones felt hardly more substantial than needles, which strengthened my desire to protect the kittens. “Maybe their owner will claim them—”

“Sure, sure.” With a wave, she was out the door.

After Sally and Tally helped me give the kittens another outing, I left them all in the apartment and ran across the street.

As usual, Lucy was Tell a Yarn’s official, and very vocal, greeter. Opal gave me a small bag of kitty litter, six cans of cat food, a package of cat kibble, and four toy mice that she had knit and filled with catnip from her garden. Lucy’s comments became louder.

Opal cooed, “Now Lucy, you have a dozen catnip mice scattered around the shop. Why don’t you see if you can find them? You might have to actually look
underneath
things.” She bundled everything into a grocery sack. “Do you have a disposable baking tray you can use for a litter box until you get a real one, Willow?”

“I do. Good idea. It won’t be for long. Someone is sure to claim the kittens.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“How old do you suppose they are?” I asked her.

“About two months. They’re just babies. Shame on people for dumping them.” She turned away, and the emotional pain of her situation hit me like a blow to the lungs. When she was sixteen and became pregnant with Haylee, Opal’s parents had kicked her out.

I thanked her for the kitty supplies and ran back to In Stitches, which still needed its evening tidying. I let my entire menagerie into the shop and began dusting sewing machines.

My front door chimes jingled. Long before I’d met him, Clay had made the chimes from driftwood and sand-roughened glass that he’d found on the beach, and I pictured him nearly every time I heard them.

But he wasn’t my visitor. Vicki was. Both kittens galloped to her and began ascending her pant legs. Sally nudged the kittens as if warning them against hurting the police chief.

Vicki whisked a bouquet of small red roses from behind her back. The roses contrasted nicely with her navy uniform and made her look younger than ever. “Listen, Willow, I can never pay you back for all you did for me. If you do catch the flu, let me know and I’ll look after you.”

“Flu?” I asked. “Wasn’t it food poisoning, from something you folks ate at the picnic?”

“It would be easy to jump to that conclusion, but people who didn’t attend the picnic were rushed to the hospital with similar symptoms, but worse than mine. Ambulances were busy all night.” The kittens batted at the roses. Vicki handed them to me. “My cottage has climbing roses blooming everywhere, so I cut some for you.”

Thanking her, I rubbed Sally-Forth’s ears. “Even if I do get sick, I’ve got my little nursemaid dog.”

Vicki smiled. “She is really something. Both of your dogs are great.”

I agreed.

“But these little guys . . .” She captured the kittens on her bulletproof vest before they could vault onto her shoulders and into her hair. Holding them against her cheeks, she demanded, “What do you know about yarnbombing?”

I realized with a start that she was talking to me, not the kittens. “Not much. Have you—” I had to figure out how to word it without spoiling any of the surprises Gartener could have left for her. “Ever
seen
any yarnbombing?”

“Ha! As if you didn’t know! My car was bundled in a hideous yarn
thing
when I got home.”

“How would that have happened?” I asked, all innocence. “Who could have gotten into your garage?”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “So you
do
know.”

“I know you asked Detective Gartener to park your car in your garage.”

“He did. And then he yarnbombed it.”

“Oh, but he wouldn’t,” I said. “He knew you could be called to an emergency.”

“He made certain he was with me when I saw the car. He helped me take the thing off it.
After
he took a picture of me gaping at it.”

I burst out laughing. “I’d like to see that picture.”

She glared.

I could tell she was faking her outrage, but I changed the subject anyway. I pointed toward my rear windows. “What’s going on with the crime scene?”

“They’re sifting through it for clues. They’ve taken the body away.”

“Do you know who he was?”

“Yep, and I might as well tell you, now that we’ve contacted his family. All he has . . . all he
had
was his mother, in Florida. It’s Neil Ondover. The baker from La Bakery.”