Crewel Yule (6 page)

“That’s good. Do you know the woman’s name? The one who fell?” She was looking scared. Maybe it was someone she knew.

Marveen replied, “She was wearing a name tag that said Belle Hammermill.”

“I don’t know her,” Samantha said, relieved. “I noticed her because she was standing up there all alone, with her hands on the railing, looking down like she was the president or something.” She cleared her throat and gestured.

Sergeant Larson was writing. Marveen hoped she was really a cop. She must remember to ask for identification later. There was a new noise from the atrium and all three of them looked over and saw two young men in black trousers and white shirts pushing wheeled screens across the atrium.

Good idea, thought Marveen, wondering who had ordered them. She looked back at Ms. Wills and asked, “She didn’t look sad, or scared?”

Samantha thought hard, her round face clenching with the effort. “I don’t remember that. Maybe I couldn’t’ve told; she was kind of far away. Anyway, I wasn’t paying close attention. I just noticed her up there and then . . . she was falling.” Samantha swallowed and grimaced, her eyes suddenly sad.

“Well, when our police get here, they’re going to want to talk to you. But the weather out there is making travel difficult, and there have been a lot of other accidents, too, so it may be a while.” She thought. “Look, there’s no reason why you have to sit here till they come. Let me write your name and room number down.”

“I don’t want to go back to my room to wait. I’ll go crazy. But I’ve got a cell phone.” She fumbled into a belly bag and produced it.

“Well, then, that’s fine. Can you give me the number?” Marveen noticed that Sergeant Larson wrote it down, too.

She doesn’t know I’m here, Eve Suttle thought, as she hung her clothes in the closet of her suite. She thinks she’ll never see me again. But I’m gonna get her back in a corner and punch her lights out. If she pretends she doesn’t know why, I may strangle her. Because she knows why, and she needs to know it’s time she got over herself. She thinks being cute means she can behave any way she wants. She thinks saying “I’m sorry” is the same thing as, “This never happened, so erase all memory of it.” She’s a whore. No, she’s worse than a whore—she’s not doing it for the money but because she wants to hurt me.

Eve nodded, liking that explanation, and started in a replay of all the hurtful things Belle had done to her, something she had done over and over for months. She nurtured her anger with the painful memories, and she liked to keep it burning bright. Belle always expected people to forgive her, and usually they did. But this time she had gone too far—way too far.

Eve started by remembering when Belle was her friend. She had been happy working for Belle in her shop. With her humorous approach to everything, Belle made work fun. And she had seemed both generous and kind. When Eve made a mistake, Belle was quick to forgive her, and when Belle made a mistake, she had a cute way of admitting and even exaggerating it, which made you laugh and get over being annoyed, even when she did it over and over.

Eve had at first thought Belle’s worst fault was forgetfulness. “Oh, my brain’s a sieve!” Belle would say. “I’d forget my head if it wasn’t fastened on!” And her customers would laugh and forgive her for not sending in a special order.
Most
of the time. Lenore didn’t forgive her that last time. Eve had a special feeling of kinship with Lenore. Because it wasn’t forgetfulness with Lenore, it was something weird and much worse—a kind of sick envy. Belle had liked Lenore so long as Lenore was a struggling artist, but once she showed real promise, Belle couldn’t handle it.

And it was the same with Eve. So long as Eve was a fat and plain woman with a sickly kid and no husband, Belle was her friend. She showed Eve how to be the loyal, competent employee, and in return Eve rescued her boss from one scrape after another. Eve was grateful and she thought Belle was, too. But being competent gave Eve the nerve to lose sixty pounds, get a new wardrobe, color her hair, and win a really handsome boyfriend. Which Eve was sure added up to make Belle jealous. Things started to turn sour about then at Belle’s store. Eve wasn’t praised for her competence anymore, and her smallest mistakes were noted—and loudly. Then one day Eve came in to work and she overheard Belle saying to a customer, not knowing she was there, “I’m so sorry. I know Eve was supposed to handle this, but I guess she forgot.”

Eve hadn’t forgotten, Belle had forgotten.

Belle apologized so strenuously for that she cried. “I’ve been working terribly hard lately, and I guess this customer was getting on my last nerve. But I shouldn’t have said that, it was terribly unfair, and after you’ve been so helpful and loyal.” By the time she had finished, she had Eve crying, too.

But now Eve was sure that wasn’t the first time Belle had blamed a failure of her own on Eve, because it sure wasn’t the last.

And it got worse after Eve married Jack. Belle became more distant, and her remarks about Eve’s occasional need to take time off to take Norah to the pediatrician were sometimes unkind. This from a woman who closed the shop whenever she needed a “mental health” day!

Belle had flirted with Jack when he was just Eve’s boyfriend, and she continued even after they married. “Oh, he’s so handsome!” she’d said when Eve dared to remark on it. “I just have to flirt with him a little bit!”

Eve was yet to discover Belle’s true depravity, her sense of entitlement, her depth of resentment at Eve’s blossoming. It happened when Eve was visiting her husband at work and casually logged onto his e-mail account to send a message—and found a whole set of red-hot, lusty exchanges between him and Belle. Jack didn’t deny it. He said Belle understood him in a way Eve didn’t. Jack packed a bag and left home that night.

And Eve, four months pregnant with her second child, wept until, sick and frightened, she had a miscarriage.

She quit Belle’s, of course, and even moved back to her home state of Georgia with Norah. People were kind, and they all thought she was doing fine and even had mostly gotten over Jack, especially when she got a job at another needlework shop.

But the truth was, she’d gone insane.

It was true, Eve knew it. She hadn’t told anyone, and no one guessed. But if anyone had asked, she would have told them, and proudly. Being insane was like being given a gift, because it didn’t hurt anymore. She was strong, and the hardening of her heart was a blessing. She didn’t mourn the lost child, not when she had a real, live person to blame for it. A real, live person who could be made to pay.

Six

BritStitch on the fifth floor featured British designers. To Betsy’s eyes, all their patterns were different, some dramatically so. One big model fairly leaped to her attention. It was of sheep standing in a stone-walled field of tall grass, with fields in the background. The fibers were shaggy wool or fine silk and there was an attractive slapdash, almost impressionistic, look to the pattern, rather than the precise placements of cross-stitches. One of the three fields in the background was freshly plowed, the rows indicated by chain stitches; another was covered with young green growth of satin stitch, and the third was a rough blend of golden-browns, like wheat or oats after the combine has gone over them.

The branches of a tree bordering the pasture were tufted here and there with red and brown, as trees would be in late autumn after losing most of their leaves.

“Wow,” breathed Betsy, not very originally. Then the penny dropped. “Why, it’s
crewel!
” There were smaller landscapes done in similar style, including a ravishing brook-under-a-stone-bridge scene. Betsy went quickly from one to the next, smiling and smiling. “I thought nobody was designing crewel patterns anymore!”

A tall, thin man with a white mustache smiled back at her. “Rowandean does,” he said with a British accent. “And we’re proud to offer it. We even have Jacobean crewel.” He gestured at a set of framed models done mostly in deep reds and royal blues, stylized stems of flowers with cross-hatching filling in the outline stitches. This was a style of needlework very popular in the seventeenth century.

Betsy was so pleased she bought two Jacobean patterns, and four of the big sheep kit, though its retail price of seventy-five dollars would give sticker shock to her counted cross-stitch customers and the blank outlines would bemuse her needlepoint stitchers who were used to detailed paintings on canvas. She bought three other kits—a winter scene, the stone bridge, and another version of sheep in a meadow. She also took a catalog so that if the patterns went well she could buy more. She made a note on the catalog to check the types of wool required for the patterns. She didn’t want to find herself unable to supply her customers if the kits didn’t have all the wool needed to redo unsatisfactory stitches. Betsy was herself a famous frogger—“rip it, rip it!” was her motto.

As she went out the door of the suite, merry laughter caught her attention. Two men and three women were standing near the railing. One of the men was bouncing up and down on his toes as he said rapidly, “Throw the ball, boss! Throw the ball! Throw the ball!” And the others laughed again.

One of the women said in a scratchy voice, “I’m sick of crackers, give me a walnut.” And they laughed some more.

The man who wanted a ball thrown glanced over and saw Betsy. “It’s all right, we’re not crazy,” he said. “We’re trying out what it would be like if our pets could talk.”

Betsy thought about her beautiful but fat and lazy cat Sophie, and said, in a low and furry voice, “Honey, peel me a mouse.”

More laughter. One woman glanced at her name tag and said, “Say, I know you from RCTN! You’re the one with the shop near Minneapolis; I helped you out one time when you wanted to know about freebies. I’m Judy Baker of Stitchin House in Moline, Illinois.”

Betsy came forward, rearranging her purchases so she could put out a hand. “Hi, it’s good to meet you. Thank you for your advice.”

Judy said, “This is Mike, Kathy, Phil, Mary, and Jean.”

“How do you do?” said Betsy, shaking hands all around. “Are you having a good market?”

The consensus was, not bad, not bad. Though it was strange to be here in December, it was definitely better than not holding the Market at all. Reminded of the work they were there to do, the group broke apart. Betsy would have gone on her way, too, but first she wanted to check her Market Guide to see who else she wanted to see on this floor. Whiskey Creek was along here; Betsy loved their boxes. She closed the guide and would have turned away, but her gaze was caught upward by a woman standing against the railing on the top floor. She was a very fair blonde, wearing a big, loose-fitting white sweater, an eye-catching subject against the darker background of the hall behind her. There was an air about her, of chin-up arrogance perhaps, or even triumph.
She’s like a queen greeting her people after an important victory,
thought Betsy.

The woman turned her head to the left, and suddenly her right hand slipped forward off the railing. To Betsy’s horror, the woman kept going right on over, shoulder first. A scream broke from her, and her hands grabbed futilely at the ivy and then at the huge emptiness of the atrium as she fell.

Betsy gasped and her eyes fled upward. She would not, could not, look down. Up to the empty railing on nine, she fastened her eyes, until the scream was cut off by a horrid smack.

Feeling weak in the knees, Betsy reached for the railing in front of her—no, no, no! She backed away from it, eyes closing. No.

But now everyone was shouting and running and she was afraid of standing there blind, so she opened her eyes. People were rushing in both directions along the hallway, or crowding in front of her to gape downward. The air was filled with an uproar of excited and frightened voices. A man brushed her shoulder as he reached to point downward. “Oh, gosh, look at her!” But Betsy turned her head up and away.

And there was Jill. She was standing by the railing on the eighth floor, looking down—but Betsy wasn’t going to look down. She kept looking at Jill until the impulse to drop her own gaze passed.

Then Betsy knew what she wanted, and she wanted it right now: to stand in the aura of Jill’s strength. Jill wouldn’t be wanting to break into screams, or tears; Jill would know what to do.

Betsy knew there were stairs, but what if they were strictly for emergencies? What if you could get into the stairwell but not out again until you were at the bottom, where the dead and broken woman was? No. She saw a pair of elevators down the gallery, not far away. She joined the current of people going that way.

A car took a long time to come, and when it did, it wanted to go down, so she had to let it depart and wait for one to come up. People were all around her, saying, “Did you see it?” “Did you see her?” “I did, it was
sickening!
” “Who is she?” “Is she dead?” “I saw her, she’s
got
to be dead!” “How did it happen?” “Where’s that elevator?” “Come on, let’s walk down!” But Betsy clenched herself shut, and waited for an elevator to come, to take her up, out of this.