Threaded for Trouble (21 page)

“I suppose you’re right.”

I followed her gaze to the front door. No one was there. “The longer you take to explain the whole thing to the police, the worse it could look for you.”

She heaved a tremulous sigh. “I know. And I’ve
already
taken too long.”

And so had I—for the dogs’ outing. Tally-Ho whimpered.

After the dogs had their run, Susannah was more like her old self. Browsers milled around us, though, and I couldn’t ask if her better mood was due to a determination to confess about that letter. She returned to The Stash for the rest of the afternoon.

My afternoon students put finishing touches on their IMEC entries. Ashley had made great use of the linen she’d bought from me. She had disabled the feed dogs in her mother’s sewing machine so those little pointy teeth couldn’t push the fabric forward or backward. Then she had hooped the linen in a regular old-fashioned embroidery
hoop and carefully moved the hoop while her mother’s sewing machine stitched. She had created a misty moonlight scene showing a wistful unicorn standing alone in a forest of bare trees. She called the piece
Waiting for True Love
. Hmmm. Autobiographical embroidery? Sweet.

And my entry was
Flame, Candle, and Fire
. Very original. And not autobiographical, I hoped, especially since I hadn’t finished the firefighters’ exam.

However, after the last customer of the day departed, Isaac tiptoed in. “I came at lunchtime, but you weren’t here.”

“Sorry I missed you.” Apparently, he hadn’t frightened Susannah too badly—she hadn’t been quaking with fear when I’d returned, and she’d forgotten to tell me he’d been looking for me. “How did the firefighting go last evening when you all had to dash away from training?” I asked him.

“We were too late. The barn burned to the ground.”

“Anyone hurt?” My mouth went suddenly dry. I managed to croak, “Animals?”

“Nope, nobody hurt, and the barn was used for storing machinery. Most of the tractors and stuff seemed to be elsewhere, however.”

“That was lucky.”

He combed his hand through his hair, making it spikier than ever. “Yes, very.”

“Very convenient, too?” I asked. “Is it being investigated as a possible arson?”

“Plug says it wasn’t.”

“So what caused it?”

“Plug says faulty wiring.” Isaac toed at the floor and ducked his head. “You didn’t turn in your test paper last night.”

“I didn’t finish.”

“The guys did.”

“Haylee and I left earlier.” About a half minute.

“I’ll wait while you finish it now.”

I wanted to refuse. I definitely preferred sitting at a
sewing machine to broiling in heavy clothing at a fire. Besides, what if Russ and his friends were as wild with their firefighting as they were with their driving? Haylee and I might end up in a heap of coals.

Maybe we didn’t need to learn more about Plug and his son, anyway. Darlene’s death could have been a freak accident.

My hesitation must have shown on my face. “We need you,” Isaac pleaded.

Gartener and Smallwood didn’t seem to believe that Darlene’s death had been an accident. And neither did I. Someone had tampered with the sewing machine and maybe the table it was on as well. Someone, possibly her husband or her son, had planned to at least injure her. If I passed the test, I’d have more opportunities to watch those two, maybe catch them in a lie about Darlene and her sewing machine.

Isaac urged, “Those kids may work out, but maturity is helpful on the force.”

I admitted, “I’ve seen Russ Coddlefield do some pretty crazy and dangerous things in his truck.”

Isaac stepped closer. His eyebrows went up. “Like?”

Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it. “Oh, you know, the sort of careless driving lots of teenagers do.” I hadn’t been a model teenager, but I had never run anyone off the road.

Isaac leaned against my cutting table and fiddled with my scissors. “Thing is, his dad wants him on the force. Thinks he can make a man of him, but I’d rather we had people who were already men…er…adults.”

Isaac slouched around the store, touching fabrics. Maybe I could turn him into a fabriholic. He backed against a row of homespun linen, faced me, and folded his arms across his chest. “Plug says the boys passed the written test with flying colors but he wouldn’t listen to me when I pointed out that no one monitored them.”

An undercurrent of distrust always seemed to run between Plug and Isaac.

Isaac controlled his obvious anger with a loud gulp. “The boys each missed one question. With the same wrong answer.”

Not wanting to tattle on Russ more than I already had, I tried to keep my face neutral. I was certain that Russ had originally positioned himself to read Haylee’s and my answers, and all four boys had been comparing answers when Haylee and I got up from the splintery bleachers. After we all drove away, Russ and his friends could have collaborated.

Isaac whipped another test out of his pocket. “C’mon, Willow, give it a try.” He nodded across the street. “Haylee passed it.”

Okay, I had to take the exam. Not only that, I had to pass, or I’d never hear the end of it from Haylee.

“She got all the answers right,” he said. “And I was watching her. She didn’t cheat.”

I laughed. “Of course not. She wouldn’t.”

A boyishly eager look on his face, Isaac advanced on me. “If you choose the same wrong answer the kids did, maybe we can give them the benefit of the doubt.” He frowned. “Not that Plug isn’t already giving it to them, anyway.” His voice was dark with frustration or with the anger I’d glimpsed earlier.

Those teens and their careless and possibly dangerous pranks—if Haylee was on the force, I needed to be, too, so I could watch her back.

My fingers shook only slightly as I accepted the exam from Isaac.

A
S ISAAC HAD WARNED, THE QUESTIONS on the firefighting test were harder than “What is a fire truck?” Circling
a
s,
b
s, and
c
s, I kept thinking about Plug on Thursday, standing by his SUV, his hand underlining the words “fire chief,” and the threat that Edna and I had inferred—if we wanted our shops and apartments to be safe from fires, we’d better leave him and his family alone.

Chief Smallwood lived in Elderberry Bay. Was she afraid to investigate Plug for fear of reprisals? She seemed too confident to consider such a thing, but maybe her reluctance to suspect him stemmed from a subconscious need to protect herself.

I circled my last
b
and checked my answers.

Isaac was sitting at one of the Chandlers but not touching it. The dogs kept his hands occupied. He stopped petting them to take my exam paper and pull a sheet of paper from his pocket.

I’d expected him to mark my exam later, somewhere else. Failing the test could be embarrassing. On the other hand, passing it could be, too.

“You only missed one.” He stood up and shook my hand. “Congratulations. And welcome to Elderberry Bay’s volunteer fire department.”

I had a feeling I was supposed to be enthusiastic, not burdened by dread. “So what do I do?” I asked. “Like when the fire siren goes off?”

“Drive to the station. If you get there in time, hop on the truck with the rest of us. If not, you’ll see directions on the message board. Don’t speed, though, before you get yourself one of those flashing blue lights. You could be pulled over and miss most of the fire.”

I had visions of Chief Smallwood lurking near the fire hall in hopes of catching speeding firefighters. What had I gotten myself into?

Isaac went on, “The first few times, you’ll be observing and learning. We’ll expect you for training drills at the old ball field the next three Tuesday evenings. After that, you’ll be full-fledged, whether you attend fires in the meantime or not.”

My dread began to resemble panic. “Did I give the same wrong answer the boys did?”

“Nope. You missed a different question.” He showed me my error and told me the correct answer. Not
millions
of pounds of pressure per square inch in those hoses—it would only feel like that. He gave me an encouraging nod. “And I’ll bet you’ll be better than they will at actually coming to fires.”

“I won’t be able to fight fires when my shop is open,” I warned him.

“You can help out nights and Mondays when your shop is closed.”

“There’ve been a lot of fires recently, especially at night. Do you suspect arson in any of these fires?”

He looked down at his feet. “Plug says none of them are arson,” he mumbled.

“What about you?”

“He doesn’t look at the evidence, says he trusts his gut.” He shrugged, displaying the palms of his hands. His fingers
were long and narrow. “Gut. Ha. That’s no way to investigate fires. But as he points out, if someone throws a cigarette from a car when the fields are dry, is it arson? Or litter with unintended results? What about careless use of candles or do-it-yourself wiring? Are those arson, or unfortunate circumstances?”

I asked, “Have you seen any of those things causing fires?”

“Yes. And sometimes we get investigators in from the state to verify it. There are so many ways that fires can start.” He threw his arms out to his sides like he was measuring something huge. “And they can go out of control. This happens in rural areas. Firefighters sometimes have to travel far.”

“These field fires. Have they been close to each other, or spread out?”

He tilted his head. “Spread out. Not to the north, because that’s the lake.” He flashed me a goofy grin. “You’ve given me an idea, though. I’m gonna plot this summer’s fires on a map. If they’re clustered near one particular farm…” He flushed.

Was he thinking about Russ Coddlefield and his friends? One of them had said that
somebody
had given them extra time to finish the exam—had he meant the teen who left the training session early? Had they expected their friend to cause a diversion? I asked, “Can some of our training sessions be about things like detecting arson?” Maybe I could actually be useful to the fire department.

“Plug likes them to be more about physical things, like, you know, actual practice. People donate wrecked cars, and we practice cutting them open, then we torch the cars, then we put the fires out.” His eyes shone with a glee he probably didn’t know he was showing.

“What about obvious arson? Can’t investigators tell by the way the fire burned if someone used gasoline or another fuel?”

“Could be, but who’s to say someone didn’t accidentally kick over a can of gas? Someone could ignite a pile of oily
rags and say the rags caught fire by themselves. Or they could light a match to old, dry timber in their shed and drive off to town. By the time we respond, the matchstick would be long gone, along with the rest of the shed.”

So much detail, like he’d spent a lot of time thinking about it. “Have you ever suspected anything like that in fires you’ve fought?”

His eyes lit up as if from fires within. I was obviously asking questions he’d been hoping to hear. “Not
fought
. No.”

“Or seen after it was too late to fight?” I prompted.

“There was one like that. Last summer. Plug lost a barn. Got quite an insurance settlement out of it, too, judging by the two bigger barns that replaced it. Strange, huh?”

I nodded. Plug had also, if I’d understood Chief Smallwood’s hints correctly, purchased large amounts of insurance on his wife’s life, and then she had died under suspicious circumstances.

Isaac went on. “Now that you’re on the force, you’ll want to be sure not to miss a fire except when your shop is open. Tell you what. I recently installed a system that automatically dials volunteers whenever there’s an alarm. Very handy for firefighters who live out of town or who sleep too heavily to hear the siren on the fire hall. We’ve got your phone and cell numbers, of course, from your application. Want me to add you to our system?”

His enthusiasm was contagious, so I agreed, though I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of being awakened by both a siren and an insistent phone.

“Great! Plug says the phone system won’t do a lick of good, but we’ll show him!” Judging by the width of his smile, he was overjoyed. “And can we depend on your help setting up the firefighters’ booth at the Harvest Festival on Friday evening?”

“I can help for a few hours, but the Threadville store owners have a booth, too, and we’ll be putting it together at the same time.”

“No problem. Our booth is next door to yours.”

“In the handcrafts tent?” Did rummage qualify as handcrafts?

“It’s a big tent.” He beamed. “When I found out that you and Haylee might join the firefighters, I pulled some strings so our booths would be together. It will be easier for you two.”

His innocence was boyish and charming. To hide my grin, I bent over to leash Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho. “That was very thoughtful.” I pointed at the leashes. “The dogs need a walk.” We all went out the front door.

Isaac got into a black pickup truck, made a U-turn in the middle of Lake Street, flashed his blue light, waved at me, and then sped away.

I half expected Opal, Edna, and Naomi to trot out of their apartments to ask what Isaac had been doing in Haylee’s and my shops, but they didn’t. The dogs and I took a leisurely trip to the beach and back. After supper, I played with them in the backyard before we finally went to bed.

It seemed like only minutes later that Sally and Tally woke me up. They bounded out of the bedroom and raced to the back windows. I jumped up, followed them, and turned on floodlights. No one was out there.

The dogs ran to the door to the stairway leading up to the store. We all barged into the shop. As far as I could tell without opening the front door and going outside, no one was anywhere near.

“False alarm,” I told the dogs. They trotted downstairs and pointed their noses at the cupboard where I kept their treats. “Yes, you deserve these,” I said. Wagging their tails, they took the treats in their soft, gentle mouths.

We all went back to bed. I awoke to the sound of thunder. I got up, hoping to see rain. Nothing.

I fell asleep, but apparently the night was destined to be an interrupted one. Another noise socked me out of a deep sleep.