by Janet Bolin
And now . . . what?
Lifting his knees high as if afraid of what the soles of his shoes might touch, he came inside.
Dora didn’t say a thing, which was unusual for her.
His face inscrutable, Detective Neffting pulled a manila envelope out of a leather portfolio. “Can you help me with some questions, Willow?”
“Sure.” I bit my lip to prevent myself from making a smart-alecky response. What questions would you like me to ask?
Neffting strode to my cutting table. “May I?”
I swept aside scissors, measuring tapes, and a couple of bolts of fabric. “Be my guest.”
Dora stayed beside me.
Neffting slid a stack of papers from the envelope. The top one was from Saturday night’s silent auction. Had he bid on some of the clothing? Maybe an outfit that I had made? I had to bite my lip again, and my tongue, or I might have laughed.
He pointed at the top sheet of paper. “Can you tell me who this woman is?”
“I can,” Dora announced.
He gave her a cold look. “I’m asking Willow.”
Dora folded her arms and stepped back. I couldn’t see her face, but I could imagine it. She was undoubtedly thinking of things she could say to deflate the man’s confidence.
The photo featured Naomi in the first outfit she’d worn in the fashion show. Although I knew that Neffting had questioned Naomi about a murder last October and should have known the answer to his question, I gave him Naomi’s name and told him she owned Batty About Quilts. The next three photos were also of her. With Dora sighing and huffing in her attempts to be silent, I also identified Edna, Haylee, Opal, Mona, and Ashley in each of their four outfits, and, finally, myself. Surely, he could have figured that out. Judging by Dora’s grunts, she was dying to tell him to stop playing games.
Maybe because the reception had been cut short before people had progressed from cookies and wine to the auction table, not many people had bid on the outfits. The one that had won me the “award” for gluttony had received no offers. Maybe Neffting wanted to buy it.
I had to bite my lip, my tongue, and the inside of my cheek.
He fanned the four pictures of me on the table. “Can you tell me where these clothes are now, Willow?”
“Last I knew, they were still at the Elderberry Bay Conservatory, where the fashion show was held. TADAM students were going to gather them, clean and mend them, and then give them to the highest bidders.”
Those pale eyes were unwavering. “Exactly where did you last see the clothes you wore in Saturday night’s fashion show?”
“In a curtained-off cubicle backstage at the conservatory. We were told to leave the clothes in the cubicles where we changed. By now, TADAM students and staff should have collected them.” Maybe someone had stolen the clothes since Haylee and I saw them last night, and Detective Neffting was now investigating thefts instead of homicides.
However, I suspected that Antonio had been intentionally harmed, and it was probably his death that Neffting was investigating. Instead of babbling everything I knew, though, I let the detective do the talking.
“What about the shoes?” He tapped the picture of me in my mud-hued Ambitious Attire dress and jacket. “For instance, these brown ones?”
My stomach began acting like it was on the down elevator while I was on the up. “They were lent to us—to TADAM, really—by Threadville’s new shoe store, Feet Accomplished.”
“And where are these brown shoes now?”
“They’re either still in the cubicle, or in the TADAM mansion, or they’ve been returned to Feet Accomplished.”
The coffeemaker beeped. Dora stomped to it. “Willow,” she called, “coffee’s ready.” She held up the carafe. “Would you like some, sir?”
Neffting frowned down at the picture. “No, thanks.” I wondered if he knew that he’d worn his charcoal pin-striped pants with a jacket from a different suit, a greenish one with black flecks woven into the fabric. He asked me, “Did you leave anything in those shoes?”
“Yes. Wadded-up tissues. The shoes were too big. Macey, one of the modeling students, gave me tissues to stuff into the toes to help keep the shoes on.”
“Could you have left anything else in your shoes?”
“I didn’t. But someone else did, between the time I left the cubicle Saturday night and went back into it Sunday morning.”
“Sunday morning? Why did you go back then?”
I tapped the picture of myself in the revealing gown. “We were requested to wear our evening outfits to the reception Saturday night after the fashion show, and to bring them back and leave them in our cubicles Sunday morning. And when I did, I saw someone’s allergy medication in the toe of one of those shoes. The medication hadn’t been there Saturday night. I called the police about it and a trooper came and questioned me. I’d have taken him to see it and a package of candy-covered almonds inside a briefcase that someone had also put into my cubicle, but the trooper said not to bother.”
Neffting’s eyebrows rose as if he were skeptical of my story, and he also flushed as if he were feeling guilty or annoyed.
Dora plunked my mug of coffee on the table in front of me and took a sip of hers. “Mm,” she murmured.
Neffting shuffled the papers and then pointed at the one of me in the Ambitious Attire outfit again. “You were carrying a briefcase.”
“Everyone was, for that segment of the show.”
“Where did you leave yours?”
“There weren’t enough to go around, so I passed it to the next person in line who didn’t have one.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, but when I dropped my evening outfit off in the cubicle Sunday morning, one of the briefcases—there must have been about eight of them in total—was in my cubicle. It bulged strangely, so I peeked in, and there was that package of candy-covered almonds. I explained it all to the state trooper, and he told me he was going to go check it out.” Maybe this time, Neffting would tell me whether the trooper had followed through.
No luck. Neffting asked, “When did you put the briefcase into your cubicle?”
“I didn’t. Why are you asking all these questions?”
Dora murmured an encouraging, “Mm-hm.”
An image of Kent flashed into my head. He had taken the photos that Neffting was showing me. Before we’d left the conservatory Saturday night for the reception, Kent had headed toward the stage. Maybe to hide something temporarily until he had more time and could go back and move it to someone’s cubicle?
And then, early Sunday morning, someone had been wielding a flashlight inside the conservatory, and the door had been propped open. Minutes later, I’d seen Kent on the street, near that door. Maybe he had come outside immediately after hiding things in cubicles, mine or someone else’s. If not mine, maybe seeing me in the vicinity had prompted him to go back inside and move the incriminating evidence into the cubicle I’d used. After taking all those pictures of us, he should have been able to figure out whose cubicle was whose by the outfits in them.
Loretta could have been coming from the conservatory, by a circuitous route, when I saw her enter her apartment building that night. But I’d seen that light inside the conservatory after I’d seen her go into her building. Maybe she’d gone back, taking the shortcut through the park.
I might have known that Detective Neffting would ignore our questions. Rocking forward on his toes, he half closed his eyes. “Let’s go back to Saturday night.”
Fortunately, that was impossible. Saturday night would never win awards as my favorite evening.
Though I gave him no encouragement, Neffting added, “To the end of the fashion show. Mr. Drudge—”
I asked, “Who?”
“Anthony Drudge. Apparently, when he decided to open the Threadville Academy of Design and Modeling,
he began calling himself ‘Antonio,’ just one name.” Neffting frowned in apparent disapproval. “His widow told us that Mr. Drudge believed the single name was more artistic and would attract more students.”
Dora muttered, “Lothario might have been more appropriate.”
Detective Neffting went on as if she hadn’t spoken. Maybe he hadn’t heard her, which was probably just as well. “At the end of the fashion show, Mr. Drudge said some unfortunate things to some of his models.”
I suggested, “The seven threadly sins?” Antonio and his silly stunts were beginning to amuse me.
Neffting merely stared at me.
I corrected his earlier statement. “Antonio, um, Mr. Drudge didn’t actually say those things to his modeling students, but to those of us from Threadville—”
Now it was Neffting’s turn to do the correcting. “Elderberry Bay.”
Dora proudly informed him, “Everyone calls this village by its nickname, Threadville.”
I ran my forefinger across the photos Neffting had spread over the table. I gave up trying to call Antonio “Mr. Drudge.” “Antonio made those comments to all seven of us in these photos, people from the shops in the section of Elderberry Bay known as Threadville. He said we’d each committed what he called a ‘threadly sin.’ Seven of them, altogether.”
“Total nonsense,” Dora stated.
Again, Neffting ignored her. He asked me, “What did you think of that, Willow?”
“It was clever, but it was also mean, because he was the one who had—so he said—designed the outfits and told us how to make them. This, for instance . . .” I picked up the photo of me in the mini-dress concocted of tiers of pale blue and white ruffles. “This was supposed to be a cocktail gown. I would never have worn that hideous thing outside of a costume party—”
“Or a fashion show.” Neffting was fond of sticking to the facts, I noticed.
Dora had her own version of the facts. “You looked cute in that, Willow.”
This time, I was the one who ignored her. “The fashion show was for a good cause, so I followed Antonio’s instructions.”
Neffting asked, “What was the cause?”
“Scholarships to TADAM.”
Mug to her lips, Dora made a raspberry. I was a little surprised that she didn’t spray coffee. “If I were young, I would not attend that so-called academy, if it really is a school,” she said.
She’d been more than willing to go to the free class. I managed not to grin. “Anyway, Antonio said the dress made me look fat, and therefore, I had committed the sin of gluttony.”
Neffting tilted his head in a way he probably thought would look empathetic but was more likely to put him in danger of toppling over. “How did you feel when he said that?”
I warmed my hands on my coffee mug. “I was last in line, so by the time he got to me, I was expecting an insult. I pretended I thought it was funny.”
He eyed me. “You were upset?”
“Not for myself, but he was unfair, especially to my seventeen-year-old assistant.” I showed Neffting the picture of Ashley in her fabulous Ambitious Attire jacket. “Antonio said that Ashley couldn’t do her own designing, which she very definitely can, and that she had copied other people. Again, he had given her sketches and told her what to make. Ashley’s facing some challenges right now, and ordinarily, she might have laughed. But I was afraid she would be hurt and lose her self-confidence. Antonio doesn’t—didn’t—seem to know how to motivate young people. Ashley was thinking of applying for one of those scholarships.”
Naturally, Neffting latched onto the one thing I should not have mentioned.
18
Neffting demanded, “You said your assistant is facing challenges?”
I rubbed a finger across the grooves of the ruler that was part of the cutting table’s surface. “Her father lost his job, her mother had to go back to work, and Ashley has to look after her younger siblings even more than she used to. Knowing she might not be able to afford to go to college without a substantial scholarship, she’s stressed right now.”
Neffting wasn’t ready to stop bombarding me with questions. “This is the Ashley who claimed that Mr. Drudge made unwanted advances?”
Dora thumped her emptied mug down onto the table. “He did. I’m not certain that he pinched Ashley, but he definitely pinched the girl with her, a student named Macey. I saw him do it, the despicable slimeball. Ashley pushed his hand away, but neither of them retaliated with any force.”
This time, Neffting responded to Dora. “That either of you witnessed.”
I admitted, “The night before, at the rehearsal, I heard Macey slap someone in the dressing cubicle next to mine. A man responded, saying something like if she was going to be a model, she had to get used to people helping adjust her clothing. He had lowered his voice in a phony sexy growl, so I wasn’t sure who it was at the time. Later, she told me it was Antonio.”
Dora repeated, in even more colorful words, her opinion of Antonio.
Neffting acted like he hadn’t heard her. “Did you see the man?” he asked me. “Were you able to make a positive ID?”
“No. I heard him head toward the podium, though, and a minute or two later, that’s where Antonio was.”
“And you’re sure that this Macey said it was Mr. Drudge?”
“Yes.”
“Could she have misspoken, or could you have misunderstood? There is a male teacher at TADAM.”
I shook my head. “It was clear that we were talking about Antonio.”
Dora chimed in, “I wouldn’t put anything past that Kent guy, though.”
“His last name is Quarrop,” I said.
Detective Neffting asked Dora, “Did you see Mr. Quarrop touch anyone?”
She placed her fists on her hips. “No. But the man looks about to murder anyone and everyone at the drop of a pin or a needle.”
Neffting wrote in his notebook. I made a mental note to try to find out why Neffting appeared to suspect Kent of something. Murder?
Dora was less reticent. “Why? Does Kent have a history? A criminal record?”
In my limited contact with detectives, I’d noticed that they almost never showed what they were thinking. I couldn’t read Neffting’s change of expression, a subtle narrowing of his mouth, but I suspected he was struggling to hide his surprise. Had Dora guessed correctly?
He asked her, “Why do you say that? Have you been checking up on him?”
Aha.
She managed to appear insulted. “Of course not.”
Possibly mortified that he’d accidentally let us see the truth about Kent, Neffting suddenly changed the subject. “Willow, do you have allergies?”
“No.”
“What about your assistant?” he asked.
“Not that I know of.”
He took a clear plastic bag out of his leather satchel and held it up. A medicine vial was inside the bag. “Recognize this?”
“That looks like the vial I found in one of those brown shoes. Someone had taken out a tissue, put the vial into the shoe, and poked the tissue around it. But the tissue was sticking out, which was not the way I’d left it.”
Dora leaned forward to peer across the table at the bag. “Has the prescription sticker been torn off it?”
He smoothed the plastic bag over white residue left from a sticker. “Could be. The medicine is not yours, Willow?”
“No. Why?”
Without answering, he shoved that bag back into his satchel.
Did Neffting believe my theory about Antonio’s death? Could we have helped Antonio if we’d known to give him his medication? And had been able to find it?
Dora was nearly jumping up and down in excitement. “I know where the rest of the prescription sticker is!”
Apparently, Neffting wasn’t used to coping with
anyone quite like Dora. His eyes opened wider for a second before he controlled his expression to its customary neutrality. “Where?”
“In my cottage. Willow’s cottage, really.” She pointed at the back windows above the snoozing dogs. “We . . .” She faltered as if not wanting to admit we’d been snooping. “We picked up some litter, including a wadded-up sticker that looked like a prescription label.”
“Where did you pick it up?”
“On Jefferson Avenue. Kids had been playing with a paper soccer ball in the Elderberry Bay Conservatory, and two of the boys kicked it down Jefferson, then left it in a gutter.”
Neffting flipped to a new page in his notebook and wrote quickly. “The ball had been inside the conservatory?”
Dora nodded. “Lots of people saw it there, including my granddaughter, Haylee Scott, who lives across the street.” She pointed at The Stash.
“And the prescription sticker was on this ball?”
“Inside it. We took the ball apart.”
He again lost control of his face, but detectives probably allowed themselves to look inquisitive.
Dora tossed her head. Her short brown curls stayed in place. “I have a fireplace in Willow’s cottage. I can use single sheets to start fires, but a soccer ball’s worth might cause a conflagration. There were other things we found that you might like to see, too. Haylee discovered a piece of paper in the podium that Antonio—Anthony Drudge—had used. Mr. Drudge had made a list of the seven threadly sins. A threat was hand-printed on the back of it.”
Neffting repeated, “A threat?”
Dora turned to me. “What did it say, again, Willow?”
“‘You won’t get away with it.’ It wasn’t signed. The printing was stark and brisk, like the person who had printed it was angry. Maybe he was, if only because the marker wasn’t working well.”
Dora pointed out, “The words by themselves were angry. The printing was very masculine, but stylish, as if an artistic man had printed it.”
I retrieved the quarter sheet of paper with the words “Glitzy Garb” on it and gave it to Neffting. “I think the printing—”
