Dire Threads (7 page)

Beaten, Dr. Wrinklesides concluded in the cold, moonless night.

What if someone had been trying to murder me, had come into my dark yard, and had attacked the wrong person?

Would he return to make another attempt on my life?

6

H
AD THE MURDERER SEEN MIKE IN THE dark and mistaken him for me? Mike was almost as tall as I was. Maybe, in a bulky winter coat, he could have passed for a woman. It wasn’t a pretty thought.

Besides, who would want to kill me? The only person I could think of was Haylee’s and my former boss, Jasper, now incarcerated in a white-collar detention center for his financial crimes.

Two hours had passed since Mike’s ATV had awakened me. It was only six, but there was no point in trying to sleep. Uncle Allen had said to stay out of my yard, and I had no desire to venture into it, but he hadn’t said I should stay off the trail. Maybe, before Uncle Allen could return with a team of investigators, I’d see something in the pre-dawn that hadn’t been noticeable in the dark. I slipped my flashlight and digital camera into pockets, leashed the dogs, took them outside through In Stitches, and walked them down Lake Street to where the trail met the sidewalk. The ATV had been parked facing upriver and had probably crossed this sidewalk, but I couldn’t see tracks from ATV tires on the sidewalk or in the street.

The pickup truck that Uncle Allen and I had seen creeping around the corner could have come from this spot or from the beach, at the foot of Lake Street. The only vehicle in sight was my car, parked halfway to the beach. Though tempted to dash to it, I walked the dogs to the trail and turned toward Blueberry Cottage. I searched for ATV tracks, but the ground was frozen solid and I couldn’t see any tracks, not even from Uncle Allen’s cruiser.

I peered over my locked gate. The door of my shed still hung open, and the gas can and my canoe paddle hadn’t moved. How had that paddle ended up near Mike while the dogs and I were inside calling for help? Maybe Mike had leaned the paddle against branches, and it had fallen. I photographed everything as well as I could from my vantage point, which wasn’t easy with two dogs pulling at leashes looped over my wrist. I didn’t let the dogs anywhere near the ATV, and I stayed away from it, too.

I hurried the dogs back along the trail and up to Lake Street. I felt paralyzed, not only from the cold. I didn’t know which direction Mike’s attacker had come from or where he might have gone.

He knew where I lived, and although he might not have planned to kill me in the first place, he might think I’d seen him, and he would come after me. Perhaps he was lurking around even now. Didn’t they say that criminals sometimes returned to the scene of the crime?

And there was my car, a half block away on Lake Street, near the beach. I could be a moving target instead of a stationary one, which was hardly reassuring.

At least I wouldn’t have to drive around aimlessly. Recently, I’d been commissioned to embroider a rural scene on a large piece of linen, and I hadn’t yet taken the photos for it. This morning’s snowless dawn would be perfect. I’d gotten the job through my website, where I offered my designs for sale and also advertised my custom work, like the kitten portrait I’d shown my students yesterday. Custom work could be the most fun—and the most challenging. My software would translate my digital photos to embroidery designs.

Sally and Tally didn’t mind running with me the rest of the way to the car and jumping into the backseat. They curled up and covered their noses with their fluffy tails.

Checking my mirrors for pursuers, I drove out of the village and east on Shore Road. The sky in front of me began to pale. Vehicles, most of them black pickups, were parked in driveways, but no one else was on the road. I meandered along, searching for the sort of scene my client wanted.

And fighting to shut my memories of the night into a less accessible part of my brain.

Embroidery. Focus on embroidery . . .

Unlike most of my clients, who wanted portraits of their pets, homes, and cottages, my latest client wanted me to design the entire thing, and also wanted the wall hanging to resemble stumpwork, a centuries-old technique, similar to appliqué, of layering embroidery over stuffing or wood. Lately, machine embroiderers had copied stumpwork by using thin, dense foam for the stuffing. They called this method puff embroidery or three-dimensional embroidery. I preferred the antique sound of stumpwork.

Traditional stumpwork also incorporated flexible, narrow-gauge wires into smaller embroidered pieces that would represent objects like leaves, petals, or animal ears, and would be fastened to the original design for the third dimension. Starting with a photo would give the design realistic light and shading. I would need to devise a way for my embroidery machine to stitch wires into place reliably without breaking needles.

I’d driven farther than I’d planned, almost ten miles. Curving, the road emerged from a small wood. The perfect panorama for my project opened before me. A field, tan with last summer’s broken cornstalks, was in the foreground, in front of hazy, gray blue woods, all of it underneath a pink-tinged sky. A hunter wearing a camouflage jacket and a neon orange hat added a speck of color to the woods. I pulled off the road and snapped picture after picture.

When I could no longer see the hat among the trees, I drove on. The sky in the south brightened from pale apricot to delicate azure. The road ran along bluffs above Lake Erie, covered with ice resembling a quilt stitched together from patches of peach, periwinkle, and lime. I parked again and got out. Some of the photos I took showed the lake as if no human had ever touched it, but when I aimed the camera in another direction, I captured images of ice fishing huts dotted over the frozen bay. Smoke swirled from the chimney of one. An ATV was parked beside it.

Boom!

I dove to the ground beside the driver’s door. Had the murderer followed me out of the village to take potshots at me?

The noise rocketed out onto the lake, too prolonged for a gunshot. The thick lake ice must have developed a sudden, and very long, crack. I had to admire one thing about ATV club members. Riding an ATV onto that ice took courage. Or, perhaps, a blithe disregard for danger.

If the lake was going to scare me half to death every few minutes, I was done taking pictures. I opened the door, slipped into the car, drove back to Elderberry Bay, and parked near the beach again.

I hesitated on my shop’s front porch. In Stitches usually felt like home, but I didn’t relish being alone, and my customers weren’t due for at least an hour.

I turned around and surveyed the windows of the apartments above the shops across the street. Could I barge in on Haylee or one of her mothers?

Haylee came out of The Stash and beckoned. I lifted a hand to show I’d be there in a minute, put the dogs into the stairway leading down to my apartment, locked my shop, and ran across the street.

Haylee met me in the doorway. “Come for breakfast,” she said.

I needed no further encouragement. We could talk and talk about last night and never completely get the horror out of our systems, but we could try.

The last time I had been in her store, less than twenty-four hours before, Mike was alive and we were both angry at him and his arrogance. My anger had evaporated, but it was strange seeing those same fabrics displayed on racks as if nothing had happened.

Haylee’s store was the largest in town, with rooms and rooms of beautiful fabrics, and her apartment above the store was huge, loft style, with arched windows, vast open spaces, light hardwood floors, and high ceilings. Her furniture was spare, comfortable with no fussy decorations. I loved the look, but her mothers often suggested she should add their unique sorts of embellishments, and I usually teased that she needed embroidered touches. At the moment, I didn’t feel like teasing.

She led me to her minimalist, uncluttered kitchen and handed me a knife, a small onion, and a red pepper. “You chop those while I beat the eggs,” she said. “Let’s make as much noise as we can.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Noise?”

She shrugged. “Whatever. Noise. Activity. Pounding, chopping. To help us cope with . . . earlier this morning.”

“Did you sleep,” I asked. “After?”

“Not much. Did you?”

Tearing seeds and white membranes from the pepper, I told her about my explorations.

“You should have asked me to come with you. Or any of my mothers.”

“Maybe they managed to sleep.”

She banged her whisk through the eggs and against the sides of her stainless steel bowl. “We should have all . . . gotten together to sew or something, instead of going back to our own apartments and lying awake.”

“I didn’t like him,” I said. It wasn’t a change of subject.

She agreed. “No, he was full of himself and he had a mean streak. But . . .”

“There was no reason to kill the guy,” I finished for her.

“As Opal would say, ‘live and let live.’” Haylee called the women who raised her, including Opal, her birth mother, by their first names. “Who would have done such a thing?”

“Uncle Allen suspects me.”

Haylee snorted. “He doesn’t know you.”

I waved my knife in the air. “I did say, in front of half the village, that I’d kill Mike if he bulldozed my cottage. And I have the impression that Uncle Allen is looking for revenge, not justice. I’m an outsider, a convenient scapegoat.”

“My mothers and I are outsiders, too.”

“Great,” I said. “Uncle Allen probably suspects us all.”

“Me, especially.” She poured the beaten eggs into an omelet pan. “Everyone knows I refused to go out with Mike a second time.” She shuddered.

“You know where he lived, right?”

“Yes.” She made an exaggeratedly stern face. “But this isn’t like when we lived in Manhattan and needed evidence to convince the police that Jasper had been stealing from clients. This time, the police know there was a crime. We’ll have to let them do the investigating.”

I slid the pepper and onions into the omelet. “Do you think Uncle Allen will do a decent job?”

“I’m not sure he
can
.” She grated cheddar over the veggies and eggs. “But you and I would
never
go snooping where we shouldn’t, right?”

I loaded two slices of her yummy homemade bread into her toaster. “Never. In New York, we had a perfect right to work late at night when no one else was around. And we didn’t have to break into Jasper’s office, either.” Our boss had been so sure he could get away with his crimes that he hadn’t bothered locking his office.

Haylee gazed out the window toward her car in the parking lot behind her mothers’ shops. “Mike showed me where he kept a key to his back door. And he said I was welcome to use it anytime. As if I would have wanted to visit him unannounced or go out with him again! You wouldn’t believe the rage he got into simply because that woman in the red car drove too slowly in a no-passing zone.”

“No wonder she hid her face when Mike barged into my shop.”

“When he did pass her, I was afraid he’d force her into a ditch. He had a sudden and horrible temper.”

“I’m guessing that someone else has a worse one,” I said. “Maybe someone who drives a black pickup.”

Haylee challenged, “What if Uncle Allen fails to follow up on that truck?”

“Then we’ll . . . do something.”

Haylee only laughed. We carried our omelets and toast to her great room and sat in simple yet comfortable armchairs. She pressed a button, and flames leaped from a stainless steel slot in the hearth. This latest version of a gas fireplace would have amazed the first people who had installed gas heating and lights in this Victorian apartment.

The omelet was delicious. I asked Haylee, “Did you hear or see anything unusual when you came outside early this morning? People? Vehicles?”

“Only my mothers, who are unusual at the best of times. We were awakened by the siren, if you can call it that. We saw Uncle Allen’s cruiser in front of your place, so we all came outside.”

“How did you manage to arrive at the same time? Phone each other first?”

“My mothers have been best friends since they were in first grade, and they all raised me, so it’s not surprising when we all do approximately the same thing. My mothers are all wacky, but they’re always supportive.”

I spread grape jelly on my toast. “I really like them. You’re lucky.”

She looked down at her plate. “I know. They can cramp my style, but it’s great having them nearby.”

How many other people would invite their mothers to move to a sleepy village and help change it to a lively one where people could buy and make every sort of textile imaginable?

Haylee raised her head and the affection for her mothers in her smile lit the room. “Like anybody, I know which parent to go to for what. If I need enthusiasm for a project, I go to Opal. If I want someone one to tell me I’m perfect, I ask Naomi. And I can always count on Edna to say what she thinks. No set of parents could have loved me more.”

“That’s pretty obvious,” I said. Even before I met Haylee’s mothers, I’d been able to tell she’d been raised by loving parents.

She swept her hair off her shoulders. Her blue eyes twinkled with mischief. “They have their quirks, especially now that they own textile arts shops. They feel duty-bound to make the most creative garments possible, and actually wear them.”

I had to grin. Now that I had time to embroider almost everything, only a few of my outfits escaped touches of embroidery. I could be heading toward quirky dressing, myself. I defended her mothers and me. “We all need to advertise our stores and our talents, even you, with your expert tailoring. Your clothes look very expensive. That could be considered eccentric at our age.”

“Pooh. If anyone wants to think it, let ’em.”

“See?” I teased. “You’re getting as quirky as your mothers.”

“Maybe that’s not a bad thing.” She sat up straighter in her chair. “They’re strong. And tough.”

Haylee had acquired the same traits.

Had I? My mother was strong and tough, but she had never had time to belong to me the way Haylee’s three mothers belonged to her. My mother was a physician who had turned to politics.