Threaded for Trouble (25 page)

It was still dark when Chief Smallwood told Haylee and me we could go home. “I’ll want you back here, Willow, after they determine the house is safe to go into. You’ll have to show me where you found Felicity.”

Haylee picked up on one word. “Safe?”

I had conveniently not found time to tell her about the risks I’d taken.

To avoid a scolding, I waved good-bye. “Tell you later.” I ran to my car. Smallwood had been right about the dark sedan I’d seen on the shoulder beside the Coddlefields’
woods. It was no longer there. I drove back to the village. Haylee followed me in her pickup.

The attempts on Tiffany’s and Felicity’s lives had unnerved me, so instead of parking on Lake Street near the beach as I usually did, I pulled into the lot behind Opal’s, Edna’s, and Naomi’s shops. Haylee parked behind me, hopped out, and as I feared she might, accosted me. “Safe?” she repeated. “You went into that house without knowing it was safe?”

“It
was
safe.” It had turned out to be, anyway. “The kids told me that a lady was in the house, and I was afraid it might be you.”

“What would I have been doing there in the middle of the night?”

“Observing how fires were fought, like I was.”

“Is that what Felicity was doing?”

“She said she was trying to figure out who damaged the first Chandler Champion, though it seemed more like she was trying to prove that
I
did it.”

“That woman,” Haylee declared, “is not the sharpest needle in the pack.”

“And her head wound didn’t help. I hope she and Tiffany both recover soon.”

“Me, too,” Haylee said. “And that they catch the person who did this to them.”

“They,”
I repeated, “can do the catching. We will stay out of it.”

Haylee gestured toward the apartments where her three mothers were undoubtedly asleep. “And we’ll keep them out of it, too.”

Easier said than done.

Haylee’s lopsided grin told me she was thinking the same thing. We parted, urging each other to be cautious.

I was afraid the dogs would think it was time to get up, but when I let myself into our apartment, they raised their noses and sniffed. Tally growled, probably at my smoky aroma. I spoke, and they plunked their heads down onto their front paws.

I threw my clothes into the wash, showered, crawled into bed, and lay there, still wired.

Who had assaulted Felicity and Tiffany, and
why
? Although I’d assured Haylee that I’d been perfectly safe going into that house, I admitted to myself that in my panic about Haylee, I hadn’t been thinking clearly. I should have let someone know where I was going.

But if I had, the wrong person might have followed me inside, and Felicity and I could both be dead. I had done the right thing, I told myself. Besides, in the future, I would always think and plan carefully.

Next thing I knew, my cell phone was performing its wake-up-bright-and-early song. Yawning, I let the dogs into the backyard.

A piece of brown corrugated cardboard lay in a flowerbed near the door. Even at first glance, I knew what that cardboard was.

Felicity’s missing “interfacing.”

T
HAT’S WHAT FELICITY HAD MEANT ABOUT leaving her interfacing at my place? Had she been in my yard last night before she went to the Coddlefields’? She must have felt that her mission was so important she had to climb over one of my gates—quite a feat—and peek in through my windows. No wonder the dogs had barked.

I almost picked up the piece of cardboard, risking adding my fingerprints to it. I left it among the marigolds, took the dogs inside, and phoned Chief Smallwood. She didn’t answer. I left her a message.

At midday, she walked in behind Susannah, who rushed to help Ashley frame her IMEC entry. Had Susannah been driving away from the Coddlefields’ early that morning? I was certain she wouldn’t want me asking her about it, not with Chief Smallwood right there.

Smallwood’s face was sooty. Wisps of hair escaped from underneath her chief of police cap. Her eyelids and the corners of her mouth drooped. She must have come directly from the Coddlefield farm.

Sorry for her, but admiring her dedication, I led her
down to my apartment and outside, without the dogs, who gave me reproachful looks through the glass door.

I showed Smallwood the cardboard beneath my window. “That’s the interfacing Felicity Ranquels said she was missing this morning. Remember, she said she lost it, pointed at me, said ‘at your,’ and then clammed up?”

Smallwood held up a hand. “Whoa! How much sleep did
you
get last night?”

I grinned sheepishly. “Not much.”

“Me, neither. So take it slowly.” Heaving a sigh that was just short of a yawn, she opened her notebook.

“Felicity mentioned the interfacing right before she fainted and Detective Gartener said her head was bleeding. How is she? And how is Tiffany?”

“Both of them will be in the hospital for a while.”

I gulped. They must have been in worse shape than I’d feared. “Why?”

“Concussions. Both of them appear to have been clobbered with a wooden thing we found in the house. It looked like a toy wooden ironing board, but with one end sharpened to a point. Maybe you know what it is. I certainly don’t.”

“That sounds like a point presser. It’s used for pressing small areas when an ironing board or sleeve board is too big. I have one.” Where was it? In my guest room closet? “Haylee probably sells them, and like any other tailor, she would have one of her own, as would an avid seamstresses like Darlene.” I didn’t remember seeing one in Darlene’s sewing room, but she may have kept it out of sight in one of her many enviable cabinets. She’d had a great sewing room. Was it and everything in it now ruined? Sad. Sad for all the plans she’d made, projects she’d hoped to complete, children she’d wanted to see grow up, grandchildren she would never know.

“Maybe you can show me your point presser after you enlighten me about Felicity leaving cardboard in your yard.”

“Okay.” I didn’t want to take time for a complete sewing
lesson. “Lapels need more body than fabric has by itself, so we insert a stiffer material we call interfacing between the layers of fabric.”

Fingering her shirt collar, Smallwood nodded.

“Felicity used corrugated cardboard to stiffen her lapels.”

Smallwood scratched her head, dislodging more of her ponytail. “How do you know that?” I couldn’t blame her for being skeptical.

“When she was in my shop last week, a piece of corrugated cardboard fell out of her lapel. It was the same shape as this one.”

“And you’re guessing she dropped her cardboard again? In your backyard?” Smallwood removed an evidence bag from a pocket and stepped into my flower garden. The marigolds released a pungent odor that made me sneeze. Smallwood’s hand was just big enough to grab the cardboard by its edges. She began slipping the cardboard into the bag.

She couldn’t see the side that had been facedown in the flowerbed, but I could.

Someone had written on it.

“Turn the cardboard over!” In my excitement, I came across as bossy and aggressive again.

With another dramatic sigh, Smallwood complied.

It was definitely Felicity’s interfacing. Around the edges, stray marks from a blue ballpoint pen showed where she’d traced around the lapel pattern. But she’d also printed a message on the cardboard, pressing down so hard that her pen had repeatedly punctured the cardboard, like a spray of minuscule blue-ringed bullet holes, which made it difficult to decipher the words:
The Chandler Champion never hurt anyone. Somebody tampered with it, and I’m going to prove it if it’s the last thing I do. If anything happens to me, check out that woman who owns the embroidery store. She’ll stop at nothing to put down Chandler machines in favor of her other machines.
Felicity must have felt really adamant. She’d jabbed her pen down hard on the period at the end of that sentence, punching an even bigger hole into the card-board.
Then she’d added a sentence fragment, with no period after it at all, as if she’d been interrupted in a thought:
That woman who wins all the embroidery contests…
What, if anything, had Felicity meant to add to that?

Smallwood slid the interfacing with its hand-printed note into the evidence bag. “Ooooo-kay, this looks like some sort of evidence, all right.” Of course she had to remind me of Felicity’s accusations. “She obviously suspected
you
of tampering with that first machine.”

“Before I knew Darlene was dead, Felicity called and accused me of killing her.”

“When was this?”

“Last Thursday, about eight thirty in the morning. I don’t know how she knew about Darlene’s death that soon, unless she’d been at the Coddlefields’ that morning, too. And if Felicity
was
at the scene of that crime…”

“She wasn’t. She saw it on the morning news.”

“You’re taking her word for that?”

Smallwood sighed again, showing me she didn’t really have to answer. But she did. “Don’t forget that we know for certain that someone tried to harm
her.
How likely is it that two people are playing these deadly pranks?”

“So you’re ruling out Felicity. And Tiffany, too. That leaves Plug and Russ.” I thrust my hands into the pockets of my khakis.

“And a couple of others.
You
must be the woman who owns the embroidery store. There aren’t any others for miles around, are there?”

“I don’t win all the embroidery contests.” It came out like the sullen defense of a desperate person.

Smallwood folded the top of the bag. She was not as precise with pleats and tucks as Gartener had been. “Maybe Felicity was talking about someone else winning embroidery contests. Any idea who?”

“The only person I can think of was Darlene Coddlefield, since she won the Chandler Champion competition, but Felicity can’t be accusing Darlene of causing her own
death.” I opened the door. “Come inside and I’ll find my point presser.” I was hungry, but I’d worry about lunch later.

“How many embroidery contests
are
there?”

I fended off my welcoming dogs, then led Smallwood to my guest room. “Probably hundreds, all over the world, though we can probably narrow it down to machine embroidery contests in this case. But there would still be hundreds.” The dogs curled up on the carpet. I gestured to the armchair beside the window. “Have a seat.”

“No, thanks. I’m all smoky and would smudge your upholstery. White, when you have dogs. You’re brave.”

“They don’t get up on furniture.” They’d been surprisingly easy to train. I’d told them “no” once, and they’d been good about it ever since. Keeping the guest bedroom door closed most of the time helped, too.

Smallwood asked, “Have you won any embroidery contests?”

I opened the closet door and ran my fingers down labels on plastic boxes. “Small ones. And I was one of many runners-up in the previous IMEC contest.”

Smallwood smiled with her lips, not her eyes. “So according to the note Felicity probably wrote—we’ll check her printing, by the way—I should ask you where you were last night when she was attacked.”

Of course the box with the point presser would be on the bottom. “I don’t know when she was attacked.”

“Don’t be difficult.”

I suppressed an annoyed sigh of my own and began removing the top boxes. “The fire siren woke me up. You can check with the fire department what time that went off. My clock said it was two. When I was on my way to the Coddlefields’, I heard another siren, probably the ambulance with Tiffany in it. I must have arrived at the Coddlefields’ shortly after two thirty. You can check what time they rushed Tiffany to the hospital.”

Smallwood pulled a plastic box containing fabric remnants out of the closet for me and set it on the floor. “And you found the victim when?”

“Between ten and fifteen minutes later.”

“Did anyone see you during this time?”

“I spoke to the Coddlefield children. The oldest girl must be about fifteen. The youngest girl, Darla, told me a lady was still in the house. Actually, she said that a ‘nasty lady’ was in the house. She had referred to Felicity Ranquels as a nasty lady before, but it didn’t occur to me that Felicity, who lives in Cleveland, could be there at that time of night. Haylee’s also a new volunteer in the fire department, and I hadn’t seen her at the fire. I can’t imagine anyone calling Haylee nasty, but what if Darla had meant Haylee? I needed to find out if Haylee was trapped in that house.”

Her eyelids closed to slits, Smallwood appeared to be half asleep. “I’ll give the cardboard with the note on it to Gartener.” Planning to see the handsome detective again seemed to perk her up. “Would you have called me if you’d seen what she wrote?”

The neckline of my T-shirt was trying to strangle me. I tugged at it. “Of course. Felicity is rabidly protective of her company’s machines. She was going to rescue the machine last night
before
she rescued Tiffany. Who set that sewing machine on fire in the first place, the mystery fireman?”

“How did you know it was set?”

“I didn’t.” Had Chief Smallwood just let me in on a clue? Did she
know
that arson had been responsible for the fire? “But why knock people out and tie them to furniture unless he planned to destroy all the evidence in a fire? He probably planned that Felicity’s and Tiffany’s deaths would appear accidental. Darlene’s death could have passed as an accident.”

“We were almost certain that Darlene’s death was
not
completely an accident, even before last night. There had to have been malicious intent.”

I frowned. “That’s what I thought, too, based on the number of things that went wrong with the machine.”

“And the table it was on.”

I held my breath in hopes she’d give me more information.

As if resigned to filling me in, she explained in a weary voice, “We took the table as evidence. The bolts fastening the legs were held on with wing nuts. The front two wing nuts were so loose that when the sewing machine started going top speed, the bolts worked themselves out and the front legs fell, bringing the table and the machine with them. If Darlene had been sitting at the table instead of lying on the floor trying to unplug the crazed machine, she may have ended up only with some bad bruises on her thighs. From the look of the bolts, those wing nuts had once been quite tight. Someone must have unscrewed them.”