Crewel Yule (17 page)

Jill said, “That’s been taken care of. An ambulance crew managed to climb the hill on foot a couple of hours ago.”

“Oh?” Cherry brought her hands down to show a surprised blank. “I didn’t know that,” she said. “I went down for lunch and saw she was still there, and I came right back up here and didn’t go out again. So I didn’t know.” She looked around the room, as if for the complaint she had unexpectedly been relieved of. “Where . . . where did they take her?”

“I’m sure they’re holding the body at the morgue in case they decide to do an autopsy.”

“Why? I mean, if they thought it was an accident . . .”

“Well, they’re probably going to wait until I report in,” said Jill. “And I’m quite sure it wasn’t an accident. So let’s continue. How did you come to be partners?”

Cherry looked at her for a few moments, a little surprised. But Jill had asked another question and now she hastened to answer it.

“I was looking to invest some of the money I got in a settlement after my accident. A lot of it went into safe places, but I’m young and I plan to live to a ripe old age, so I want to grow my money. Belle had worked in this shop for a long time, and I came in a lot so we knew each other. She told me it was for sale, but she didn’t have the money to buy it. Every time I came in, there were other customers, especially on weekends. She thought it was a good investment, and so did I.”

“But it wasn’t?”

“Well, not as good as I hoped. I guess I didn’t understand that owning a small business isn’t exactly like planting a money tree.”

“You got that right,” Betsy said in a dry voice.

Cherry made a sound like a chuckle being strangled at birth, then cleared her throat and became serious. “This is so strange,” she said.

“What is?” asked Betsy.

“We’re sitting here making jokes about owning a business, and at the same time we’re talking about Belle’s death. And you”—she looked at Jill—“you’re saying it wasn’t an accident. Do you really think it was suicide?”

“Seriously? No.”

Cherry’s mouth opened, but then she froze. “
No
? What do you mean, no?”

“I mean I’m not sure it was a suicide, either.”

The color drained from Cherry’s face, and she looked at Betsy. “What does she mean?” she asked, though it was obvious she knew the answer.

“She means she thinks Belle might have been murdered.”

“
No!
” shouted Cherry. “That’s impossible!” She turned on Jill, angry and frightened. “You’re crazy! All of a sudden you’re talking like you’re crazy! This is stupid, I can’t listen to this! You’re going to have to leave, right now!”

“All right.” Jill stood.

Betsy didn’t stand, but said, “You know, if someone murdered Belle, I’d think you’d want to know who. And, since you were her partner, why.”

“Why?” Cherry echoed. Her puzzled frown suddenly smoothed away. “Oh,
why
. I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe you shouldn’t go, then. Maybe I could keep answering your questions.”

And Betsy made another brief note:
Scared.

Seventeen

Jill turned back, sat down, and asked, “Was anyone you know mad at Belle?”

There was a pause, then Cherry murmured, “God, I hate this.” She sighed and wrung her hands, and Betsy was struck by the play of powerful muscles in her forearms. “All right. Like I said, Belle was a bit of an airhead. She made it cute, part of her charm, but it sometimes meant things didn’t get done and customers would be disappointed.”

“Any customer in particular?”

“Well, Judy Neville, who was supposed to bring a marriage sampler to a friend’s wedding, but Belle put the due date down wrong and it wasn’t ready on time. Judy was angry and said she wasn’t going to bring anything else to us to be finished ever again. She was pretty steamed about it.”

“I don’t suppose Judy Neville is here at the Market today,” mused Betsy, and Cherry laughed uncomfortably and agreed that she wasn’t.

“We mean someone here at Market who was angry at Belle,” persisted Jill.

“Yes, I know, I understand,” said Cherry. She wheeled back a foot and forward again. “Lenore King,” she said at last. “She’s here and she’s pretty upset.”

Betsy wrote the name down while Jill said, “She’s the one with the Christmas tree sampler, isn’t she?”

“Yes. Have you seen her model? It’s kind of a mess.”

“And she blames Belle for that,” suggested Jill, glancing at Betsy, who flashed her a replying look meaning
yes, yes, I understand.
She had no intention of letting Cherry know they’d already talked with Lenore.

“Yes. And she’s right, it was Belle’s fault. Lenore brought her model to us in early August, before INRG announced the change of date. God, it was a beautiful thing, you could see that even when it was in eight pieces. So Belle sent it to Marj with a February 4 due date. Then the Market got changed to December.” Cherry drew a breath and let it out, and said, reluctantly, “And Belle didn’t call Marj to tell her Lenore needed that piece before Lenore left for Nashville. She knew, she had to know; Lenore had done nothing but talk about how she was going to introduce it at Market. She bragged about how Bewitching Stitches was going to publish the pattern, and worried over how it had to sell well if she wanted to become a professional pattern designer. So every employee and regular at Samplers and More knew this was happening at Market, we even had customers talking about it when Lenore wasn’t there.”

“Did Lenore come in and specifically tell Belle that she needed the pattern in December instead of February?” asked Betsy.

Cherry started to smile, but it got twisted up in her look of exasperation and distress. “No, she came in and told
me
. I wrote a note to Belle and put it on the checkout counter right beside the phone. She told Lenore she never saw the note.”

Betsy nodded as she wrote,
Same story.
Meaning it agreed with what Lenore had said.

“Well, then it seems to me the person Lenore would be mad at is you,” Jill pointed out.

“And it would have been if Lenore hadn’t watched me write the note and put it where Belle couldn’t have missed it. I think it annoyed Belle just a little that she couldn’t make me share the blame.” This time the smile won, if barely.

“Did she do that once in a while?” Betsy asked. “Dump the blame on you?” Her tone was sympathetic.

“No!” said Cherry, too sharply. She realized that and winced, then amended, “Oh, all right, once in a while,” her tone reluctant. “Sometimes I would think she was like the half of the population that believes people with spinal cord injuries have major brain-cell loss, too.” She shrugged. “But then she’d do something so nice, so sweet, I’d remember that we really were partners, and we’d be friends again.”

Jill asked, “Is it possible Belle deliberately failed to contact your finisher about Lenore’s model?”

Cherry hesitated. “Why would she do that?”

“Maybe because there was a quarrel of some sort,” suggested Betsy, “between Lenore and Belle.”

Jill turned to Betsy. “That can’t be right, Betsy, because if there was, she could’ve taken it to some other finisher.”

“No, for two reasons,” said Cherry. “First, we’re the only cross-stitch shop in Milwaukee. Second, we have a wonderful finisher. People who move away will sometimes mail us projects for Marj to finish. I’m sure it wasn’t on purpose, it’s just that once in a while Belle would mess up. This time it turned out really, really bad for Lenore.”

“Up to that point, had Belle been encouraging Lenore’s efforts?” Betsy asked.

“Oh, yes. She put some of her early patterns in our newsletter, and helped her find a good computer program to print out new ones, and encouraged her to enter her work in competitions. Then as Lenore improved, she made copies of her patterns, to give to customers as freebies. And later she was all cheers for Lenore when she sold a pattern to a magazine. But then Lenore got this idea for a Christmas tree sampler, and when Belle saw how great it really was, all she could do was criticize it. If Lenore hadn’t brought it to a guild meeting and heard all the raves, she might not have sent it to Bewitching Stitches.”

Betsy asked, “You think it was sabotage?”

Cherry nodded wordlessly.

“But why would Belle do that? Had Lenore done something to make her angry?”

Cherry sighed and didn’t reply right away. But Jill and Betsy held their tongues as well, so Cherry said, “This is hard to explain. Belle liked helping people, she really did. But if they shaped up better than she thought they would, you know, became actually successful, she was . . . like jealous, or something. Does that sound too weird?”

“It sounds like something that might happen, I suppose,” Jill said doubtfully.

But Betsy nodded and said, “Oh, yes.” She’d seen it in action once, long ago, in a college professor.

Cherry continued, “It’s like she would bust her buns to help people, but it’s also like she wanted them to always be needing her help. And she’d find a reason to run them off if they didn’t need her help anymore.”

“Not a nice person,” Betsy murmured.

Cherry’s face twisted in pain and she said, “No, she
was
a nice person! I want you to understand, this hardly ever happened! People would take her help, and move on, grateful. Others . . . Well, most people who are a mess stay a mess, you know!”

Betsy, amused at this hard truth baldly stated, said, “Yes, I know.”

“So Belle could be patient and nice and helpful all she wanted, and they’d stay grateful and hopeful. It was nice of Belle, even though it was also kind of like a game she almost never lost.”

“Nice of Belle, but not a very nice game,” said Jill.

Cherry sighed. “Well, maybe not. But like I said, she didn’t end up running people off very often.”

“Was Lenore a mess?” Betsy asked.

“Yes, but not a bad one. She wanted to stay home with her kids, and the only talent she had that might let her do that was stitching. No one, not even Lenore, ever thought she could design patterns well enough to earn any money at it, not until Belle started encouraging her to think so. And then all of a sudden, Lenore comes up with this gangbuster idea. Belle told me it was a great idea but that Lenore would never be able to work it out, because it was too complicated. But she kept encouraging Lenore to keep trying. And then, what do you know, Lenore solves all the problems and finishes her charts of it. And it’s fabulous! Belle told her it needed more work, but Lenore sends it off to Bewitching Stitches and they like it. So then Belle says Bewitching might try to cheat her, that maybe she should take it back and try selling it to a magazine, but by then, everyone else was cheering her on. And Lenore was getting excited about another sampler idea.”

“Did you think to warn Lenore about Belle’s little game?” asked Betsy.

“No. Because I didn’t really realize she was playing it on Lenore until the model didn’t come back on time. The look on Lenore’s face . . . She, she was just . . .
demolished
. But the look on Belle’s . . .” Cherry rubbed her cheeks with both hands. “It was weird. It was sick.” She looked shamefaced at Betsy. “But I didn’t say anything, not to either of them. I couldn’t think what to say.”

“If you knew how important this was, and you knew about this problem with Belle, why didn’t you call Marj yourself?” asked Jill.

Cherry snapped, “I
told
you, I didn’t know Belle was going to do that to Lenore!” She took a calming breath. “And anyway, finishing was separate from Samplers and More. Belle kept the records, drew up the bills, and split the money it made with Marj. It was its own business, and not a part of Samplers and More.”

“That’s funny, that isn’t the way it works in my shop,” said Betsy.

“No? Well, I thought it was odd; but Belle said it was better for tax purposes, and anyway the old owner did it that way, too,” said Cherry.

Betsy, making a note, said, “The name of your shop is Belle’s Samplers and More, and she kept a part of it separate from you. How much of a partner were you in the business?”

“Fifty-fifty!” Cherry said sharply, almost angrily. “I told you, I put up the money, Belle brought the expertise!” She heard the tone of her voice and, with a visible effort, unclenched her jaw.

“We went back and forth about the name. The original owner’s name for the store was Samplers and More. I thought keeping the old name would be a good thing, since she had a good customer base, but Belle wanted to call it The Silver Thimble. So we cut cards to see who got to name the store, and she won. And instead of a new name, she called it
Belle’s
Samplers and More. She called it a compromise, but my name didn’t go on the sign, only hers.”

“Were you angry about that?”

Cherry laughed harshly. “Oh, yes! I was really, majorly angry. But a bet is a bet, and I lost. But in our Yellow Pages ad, I made sure it said ‘Belle Hammermill and Cherry Pye, proprietors.’”