by Janet Bolin
“You had keys, Loretta, yet you didn’t know how to lock the doors?” Vicki managed to make her question sound innocent.
“I didn’t know every single step.”
Right, Loretta would be totally helpless, especially when Clay was around.
Kent scoffed. “Insert key, turn key, remove key. Very difficult.”
Fearing that my attempts not to laugh might be heard, I eased farther from the kitchen.
Hands over their mouths, Haylee, her mothers, and Dora tiptoed down the hall with me. Ashley scooted to the sign-up sheet and wrote her name. The rest of us signed up, too, but instead of leaving, we stood near the front door, even though at that distance, eavesdropping would be difficult.
We weren’t given a chance. Vicki popped her head around the kitchen doorjamb. “You can leave now, folks.”
Vicki and the state police communicated about what went on in Threadville when Vicki was off duty. She should know that I’d told a state trooper about my suspicions regarding Antonio’s death. She should also know that the people who knew Antonio best—his wife and his two employees—could have been the most likely people to have harmed him. And Vicki was proposing to remain in the mansion with those three people.
I made an exaggeratedly frightened face and raked one finger across my throat. “And leave you here alone with—”
Vicki’s mouth twitched as if she were trying to hide her amusement. “I’ll be fine, Willow,” she said.
“There!” Dora announced. “We’ve all signed up for the course.”
“Arrest them!” Paula yelled.
Haylee opened the front door. “I think that’s our exit cue.”
I hated leaving Vicki alone with three argumentative people, at least one of whom, I suspected, may have added candy-coated almonds to Antonio’s stash of mints, and then hidden Antonio’s medication from him in a deliberate attempt to murder the man. But even when not in uniform, Vicki usually had a radio and a weapon with her. And if any of the three adversaries had harmed Antonio, he or she—or was it they?—would be foolish to attack Vicki. They might as well confess to having murdered Antonio.
Out on the front walk, Ashley checked her watch. “Perfect timing. I need to pick up my sister from band practice.”
“Where?” Dora demanded.
Ashley pointed. “The conservatory.”
“I’ll come with you,” Dora said. “Are you coming, Willow?”
“Yes.”
Haylee cast an amused grin down at the woman she insisted on calling her grandmother. “I’ll come, too.”
15
Opal, Naomi, and Edna hurried down the sidewalk toward their shops. Most evenings, they convened in one of their apartments to work on handcrafts and sip wine. Gord sometimes joined them and was teased about his sewing ability. “Not sewing,” he’d once corrected us while pretending to be miffed, “suturing.”
Brandishing a clipboard, a teacher opened the conservatory door. “I see that you’re picking up Isabella tonight, Ashley, but . . .” She peered at Dora, Haylee, and me. How could she see through the smudges on her glasses?
Ashley told her, “This is my boss and our friends. They’re going to walk Isabella and me home. My dad didn’t want us out alone at night.”
The teacher held out the clipboard. “I’ll need all four of you to sign in.”
We did, then headed toward the conservatory’s main room, where children were laughing and shouting. Apparently, band practice was over.
The runway was gone, and the only chairs in the vast space were arranged in concert band formation, not on the stage, but in front of it. The blue velvet stage curtains were closed.
Instruments in cases had been relegated to the sides of the glass-domed room, along with jackets, sweaters, and backpacks. A game of indoor soccer was going on in the middle of the conservatory’s beautiful tile floor. The soccer “ball” was a wad of crumpled paper held together with rubber bands.
A miniature version of Ashley broke from the game and ran to Ashley. “Want to be goalie?”
Ashley only laughed. “It’s time to go home.” A few parents stood around watching the game and gossiping with a man I assumed was the band teacher. Other parents urged their kids toward the door.
Isabella begged, “Five more minutes?”
Ashley pointed to a trumpet case, a pink jacket, and a backpack that looked almost bigger than Isabella. “Now. Get your things.”
I said quickly and quietly, “I’ll go see if the TADAM students collected our garments from backstage.”
Haylee said, “I’ll help.”
Dora must have recognized the conspiratorial expressions on our faces. She murmured, “I’ll yell ‘Thread!’ if anyone follows you.”
Haylee stopped. “Thread?”
“Can you think of something better?” She gave Haylee a shove. “Hurry.”
Haylee and I climbed to the stage and pushed our way behind the blue velvet curtains. The area beyond the curtains was still lined in red-curtained dressing cubicles.
“I thought they were taking those down yesterday,” Haylee said.
“So did I.” I’d heard someone leap up onto the stage and say he was going to try to figure out how. Apparently, he hadn’t succeeded.
We peeked inside cubicles. The clothing and shoes were still in them. When would the people who had bought the outfits receive them? Without Antonio, was nothing being done at TADAM besides teaching?
In my cubicle, I showed Haylee the briefcase with its odd bulge and the tissue-stuffed shoes. If the trooper I’d sent had seen the “evidence,” he had neither taken it with him nor cordoned off the area to keep others out.
Haylee grinned. “We could move those things into the extra-large cubicle that Loretta was using as storage.”
I let out an unladylike snort. “Not a good idea, since I told a trooper I’d seen them in my cubicle.”
Out in the main room, Dora yelled, “Thread!”
Early yesterday morning, I had handled the candy package and the vial. Could I grab them, use one of the tissues to wipe away my fingerprints, and stuff the package and vial back where they’d been, before someone came and found us here?
A man asked, “Can I help you?” His voice was warm and polite, with no hint of suspicion in it.
We bumbled out between the polyester curtains. “We were in Saturday night’s fashion show,” Haylee explained. “We were checking to see if the garments were still here.”
The man I’d guessed was the band teacher tilted his head. His eyes held a smile. “Are you the people who are supposed to clear out all this stuff? No big rush, but we’ll need the stage before the concert on Friday.”
I had finally recovered from being startled by his silent approach. “TADAM is supposed to take care of it.”
The band teacher winced. “And their director died. No wonder there’s a delay.” He followed us to the stage.
Haylee swerved to the podium. “I think I left something here.” She patted the shelf and pulled out a piece of paper. “I did.” While I tried not to stare, she shoved the paper into her bag.
I backed away, gently poked my foot at one of the red curtains surrounding Loretta’s storage area, and lifted the curtain an inch or two. I hoped to see one of Antonio’s mints, which might mean I had kicked that, and not his medication, out of sight.
The part of the floor I could see was bare.
We rejoined Isabella, Ashley, and Dora. Isabella skipped to the main doors and won a race that the rest of us didn’t know we’d entered. Ashley and Isabella led us out of the park along a pathway that took us past the back of the TADAM mansion. Trash cans, recycling bins, and old lumber and bricks were piled beyond the fence behind TADAM’S carriage house.
The path ended across the street from the apartment building that Macey, Samantha, and Loretta had e
ntered. Early Sunday morning, Loretta could have been scooting back and forth using this shortcut while I was prowling around on sidewalks and steering clear of the sinister-looking TADAM mansion. Antonio had told us that Loretta would unlock the conservatory at nine yesterday. Maybe she had also unlocked it several hours earlier, and had wedged the door open. Maybe she and Kent had been inside the conservatory together, moving evidence that Antonio had been deliberately harmed into my cubicle. Or Loretta could have been planting the evidence while Kent kept a lookout.
On the other hand, Macey knew I’d stuffed tissues into the brown shoes, and she’d also been wandering around that night. Then again, maybe Loretta or Paula had seen Macey give me the tissues. Any of them could have gotten the idea of hiding the vial in a shoe and covering it with a tissue.
Haylee, Dora, and I escorted Ashley and Isabella safely to their front walk.
Ahead of us, two boys were kicking the paper soccer ball down the sidewalk. It rolled into the gutter. Leaving it there, the boys ran off.
Dora tsked. “Litterbugs.” When we reached the ball, she scooped it up. Outside the post office, she was about to chuck it into the trash can.
I stopped her. “Who knows what might be in that ball? Maybe we’ll find Antonio’s fashion show script, along with a clue about who didn’t like him.”
“Ha,” Dora said. “Who did like him? Besides, all you’d find would be fifty pages with nothing but the words ‘lovely’ and ‘beautiful’ on them.”
I laughed. “You noticed that, too?”
Dora cupped a hand around her ear. “I’m not hard of hearing or of understanding.”
Haylee patted her bag. “I’m dying to go where we can’t be watched or heard so I can see if the page I found in the podium says anything besides ‘lovely’ and ‘beautiful.’ My place or yours?”
“Mine,” Dora said. “Bring your dogs and cats, Willow.”
We walked up Lake Street to my gate and down through the side yard.
By the time I ushered all four pets into Blueberry Cottage, Dora had a fire going in the fieldstone fireplace in the great room, and Haylee was boiling water for tea.
She stopped what she was doing, though, and with great drama, opened her bag and pulled out the sheet of paper she’d taken from the podium. “It’s Antonio’s list of seven threadly sins, along with our names. Handwritten.” She flipped the page over and slid it onto the table where Dora and I could see it. “Can you read what’s written on the back?”
The printing was faint, as if the marker someone used had been nearly out of ink, and the letters were stringy and sheer in places, but the printing itself was forceful, and the message almost seemed to buzz with anger. I read aloud, “‘You won’t get away with it.’”
Haylee asked, “Was that a warning to Antonio, or a warning from him that he didn’t deliver?” She scrabbled in her bag. “Here’s the slip Paula gave me with my name on it and the words Ambitious Attire. It looks like it was written by the person who wrote the list of seven threadly sins.”
Dora checked the two pieces of paper. “Scrawled, you mean.”
I bent to compare them. “The scrawls do look alike, and like the note I received telling me to wear Distinguished Dressing to the award ceremony. The scrawl also resembles Antonio’s signature on the thank-you letter. But why would Antonio have written his list on the back of a warning, whether it was meant for him or someone else?”
Dora held the paper up to the light from the fire. “The warning’s so pale you can’t see it from the other side of the page. Maybe he thought he was writing the list on a blank sheet of paper.”
“The printing on the warning doesn’t look at all like Antonio’s scrawl,” I concluded. “So who printed the warning?”
Dora grunted. “That superhero female with the mess of auburn hair. She yelled at Antonio for accusing all of you of committing sins.”
Haylee poured boiling water into the teapot. “If Loretta printed the welcome message on the easel, she probably did not print the warning. I’m not sure that Loretta can print without adding swirls or curls.”
I thought back to the sketches that Antonio had given me, claiming he’d drawn them. “Someone printed instructions on the sketches that Antonio gave me for the outfits I was to make and model in the fashion show, and if I’m remembering the printing correctly, it was decorated with little flourishes. At the time, I believed him, but the printing of the instructions on those sketches was nothing like the scrawled list of threadly sins, and was a lot like the printing on that easel. Do you think that Loretta made the clothing design drawings, and Antonio was only pretending they were his?”
“Very likely,” Haylee said.
Dora reminded us, “We didn’t see who printed Welcome to TADAM, but we did watch Loretta draw the dress, and she printed a few words around the dress, here and there. With curlicues.”
I guessed, “Maybe Paula wrote the warning, but would she print with anything like the bold flare of the warning? Despite the faintness of the worn-out marker, the warning looks like it was printed by an artistic, yet angry man.”
“That pretty well describes Kent,” Haylee said, as Dora and I nodded.
Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho sniffed at the paper ball on the coffee table, but cautiously, as if something might jump out of it. Mustache and Bow-Tie pawed at a basket of yarn between Dora’s spinning wheel and her loom. I moved the basket to the top of one of the cabinets that Clay had built flanking the fireplace. Dora gave each cat a crocheted catnip mouse. After that, nothing in the cottage she rented from me was in danger from my cats, except their own dignity, but they didn’t seem to mind.
Sally-Forth backed away from the paper ball and watched the cats roll around on the catnip mice. Tally-Ho galumphed up the stairs to the cottage’s tiny second story, and thumped down again with a dog toy in his mouth. He deposited it in front of his sister, then ran upstairs again and came back with another toy, which he tossed around the living room. The cats continued their blissful and undignified rolling.
Dora set oatmeal cookies on a platter and poured the tea into pretty china cups—hers. I’d rented the cottage unfurnished except for Clay’s many built-ins.
Clay. Everything reminded me of him. I was not going to think about him. I ate a cookie and sipped my tea.
We removed rubber bands from the ball. It unfurled into a heap of crumpled paper. The kids had outdone themselves collecting paper from, it appeared, their backpacks and the conservatory’s recycling bins. Flyers advertising fertilizer and watering systems had been wadded with arithmetic worksheets and drawings of animals and autumn leaves. Kids had written notes to each other. Zack likes you, one said.
I felt almost nostalgic until I thought of Clay and Loretta in fourth grade. Back then, had someone written, Loretta likes you? And maybe Loretta had received notes saying Clay likes you. And maybe it had been true.
Maybe it was still true. Or about to be true.
Stop it, Willow.
Haylee was staring at me as if reading my thoughts.
“I’m not finding anything useful,” I said. “Are either of you?”
Dora ironed one page with her hand, read it, and looked up at us. Her eyes were sad. “What happened to the innocence of children? Now they’re blackmailing each other?” She read aloud, “‘Pay up or else.’ It’s typed, so maybe an adult, not a kid, sent it to someone.”
Haylee reminded her, “Kids have computers and printers.”
The piece of paper forming the core of the ball was stuck to a small label. We unstuck the paper from the label and the label from itself as well as we could without tearing it. It was a prescription from a doctor in Buffalo.
The patient’s first name started with “AN.”
We couldn’t read the rest of the name, the name of the medicine, or the doctor’s name, street address in Buffalo, or phone number. I hadn’
t told Dora my guesses about the almonds and allergy medicine. She concluded, “That must be the label from Antonio’s heart medication! But where are his pills? Someone must have thrown them out so he wouldn’t be able to find them.” She frowned. “This is all circumstantial evidence, isn’t it?”
Haylee and I agreed. We had nothing conclusive to report to Vicki or anyone else.
“Besides,” I admitted, “Vicki’s going to be very annoyed if she discovers we removed possible evidence from a crime scene.”
Haylee corrected me. “A possible crime scene. At this point, she would tell us that it wasn’t one.”
The trooper I’d sent there must have decided that.
Dora nodded in a birdlike way that reminded me of her daughter Edna. “And we weren’t the ones who removed this supposed evidence from the conservatory. I liberated that paper ball from a gutter.”
We finished our tea and cookies, and then Haylee and I gathered my pets and escorted them up the hill and into my apartment.
Haylee cuddled Mustache in her arms. “Shall we take Sally and Tally for a walk later?”
“Snooping where there is no known crime? Vicki couldn’t possibly object.”
Haylee suggested, “Let’s check out the trash cans and recycling bins at the back of TADAM’s carriage house. Maybe we’ll find samples of printing or typing.”
“Just lying on top of everything else, so we won’t have to disturb anything.”
Haylee set Mustache, who had begun wriggling, on the floor. “Don’t be snarky. When Loretta arrived at Design 101, she came from the front door, while Kent came from the kitchen, so he could have been in the TADAM mansion before we got there, writing out Welcome to TADAM, and then silently sorting through bolts of cloth in some upstairs room. Both Kent and Loretta are artistic and can probably print in lots of styles.”
“Maybe we’ll be lucky and find that they autographed samples of their printing.”
“You are snarky tonight.” Her grin said she was teasing.
