Seven Threadly Sins

by Janet Bolin

  Without pausing in his concrete-block-tossing, he ordered through clenched teeth, “Willow, get out.”

  “The doors are blocked,” I told him as calmly as possible. “And I can’t climb out windows without cutting myself.” And probably tearing open an artery. I slipped the phone into a pocket and started flinging concrete blocks out of the way, also.

  It was amazing how much we could accomplish when we were facing a life-threatening deadline.

  “Okay,” he said. “Put your face in that hole and breathe.”

  Sure, and keep the fresh air from getting to him? “You do it. I’m going to get my battering ram and enlarge the hole.”

  “Willow . . .”

  “Clay . . .”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I, Clay. Please get some of that fresh air into your lungs while I get the pitchfork.”

  He was in no position to stop me, and besides, I wasn’t sure he was capable of much more than lying down again.

  Smashing at the building’s interior cladding and exterior siding with the pitchfork, I asked Clay, “Any chance that your truck will run out of gas soon?”

  “The tank’s full.”

  I pulled off a panel of cladding and loosened two of the outer boards.

  “Crawl out,” he ordered. “Go for help.”

  “It’s on its way. Hear?”

  Above the increasingly distressed-sounding voice issuing from the phone in my pocket, I heard the comforting siren of one of our fire trucks. It was coming closer.

  This time I obeyed Clay. I threw the pitchfork out onto the bumpy, unkempt lawn and crawled out after it. Outside, I gained more leverage and pulled the boards farther from the wall. Nails screeched.

  So did the dispatcher on the phone, but I didn’t have time to reassure him. I flopped down on my stomach and reached for Clay. “Give me your hands.”

  “They’re yours. They have been since the day I met you.”

  The poor guy was delirious with pain.

  Still, he stretched his arms toward me, and we grasped each other’s wrists. I somehow managed to get my feet underneath my hips. In a crouching position, I backed up, pulling Clay, who helped move himself with his one good leg.

  Then we were both outside, lying on our sides, facing each other, and gulping in big breaths of air.

  The dispatcher’s voice in my pocket became frantic. “How are you?”

  “We’re outside!” My shout was jubilant. “In the fresh air!”

  And what did the man who was delirious with pain do then?

  He reached for me, grasped my head with both hands, pulled my face to his, and started kissing me. And it was more than a start.

  37

  Clay and I were doomed to have that particular type of conversation interrupted yet again.

  From the sound of it, firefighters wearing big, heavy boots were thumping down that three-track concrete driveway toward the carriage house.

  “Willow! Clay!” Haylee’s voice was shrill with fear.

  I tore myself away from Clay and his insistent hands and lips. “We’re back here!” I scrambled to my feet.

  In her firefighting gear, Haylee charged around the corner of the carriage house and stopped short. “What happened?”

  “Clay’s hurt,” I said unnecessarily. “An ambulance is on its way.”

  She ran to him and knelt beside him. “Your leg . . .” Her voice dwindled.

  “I’ll be okay,” he said.

  Haylee turned to look over her shoulder at me. Her eyes filled with compassion. She shook her head and raised her eyebrows.

  Dressed to fight fires also, Ben yelled, “Hey Fraser, where are your truck keys? The engine’s running and the doors are locked.”

  Clay said to Haylee and me, “I guess my keys are in the ignition.”

  Haylee patted his arm and rose to her feet. “Do you have another set?”

  “At home.”

  She started toward Ben. “I’d better tell them. There’s probably nothing they’d like better than smashing windows with their firemen’s axes.”

  “Don’t let them,” Clay said between teeth clenched in obvious pain. “But don’t let anyone go inside the carriage house, either.”

  “Don’t worry.” She disappeared around the corner.

  Clay grasped my ankle in one strong hand. “Why are you way up there? Have a seat. Sorry I can’t offer anything better than the ground.”

  The least I could do was distract him from the pain. I sat beside him and massaged his shoulder. Where was the ambulance?

  “Yoo-hoo! Willow, Clay!” Edna’s voice. “Why is there a fire truck here? Did you write a fire truck into your play, Mona?”

  “No, but I will!” Mona’s voice. “Has anyone seen Kent? He should be here by now.”

  Maybe Kent had run off with Loretta.

  Ben, Haylee, and the rest of the fire department were out of sight beyond the corner of the carriage house, probably contemplating breaking into Clay’s truck.

  Mona, Dora, and all three of Haylee’s mothers surrounded Clay and me. When they found out that I was uninjured, they turned their attention to Clay.

  Edna took one look at his leg and phoned Gord.

  I looked up at Dora, standing beside me. “I thought you wanted to stay away from the smell of skunks.”

  “Sirens,” she answered. “I like to follow the fire trucks so I can keep an eye on you and Haylee and your friends.” She frowned down at Clay. “Looks like I was a little late to help him.”

  “You’re a comfort, anyway, Dora.”

  She patted my head.

  Running shoes thumped on concrete. Ashley and Macey jogged down the driveway to us. Macey demanded, “Do you folks need help?”

  “We seem to have plenty,” I answered.

  Ashley pushed her hair out of her eyes. “You look terrible, Willow.”

  A few days before, she’d told me I was acting weird. “Thanks, Ashley,” I said, “for yet another compliment.”

  She gasped. “I didn’t mean—”

  I gave her my best attempt at a smile. “I know.”

  Macey stared down at Clay. “Anyway, he looks much worse than you do, Willow.”

  “He is.”

  Clay responded by pretending to punch my knee. His knuckles were gentle. I grabbed his fist and held it tightly.

  Mona did a little dance move with her hips. “There’s Kent!”

  Dressed in black jeans and a black muscle shirt, Kent strode past the fire truck to us. “What’s up?” He looked beyond me and must have spotted Clay. “Can I call for help for you, sir?”

  I said, “An ambulance is on its way.”

  Proudly, Edna added, “A doctor, too.”

  Mona looked from me to Clay and back again. “Did you two have a fight?”

  I still didn’t trust Kent. I stood up and positioned myself between him and Clay. “No.”

  Kent widened his stance and folded his arms across his chest. “My boss was killed. His wife was arrested. Now the man that Loretta was hanging around has been injured, by the look of things. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I see one person, and only one, connecting those three people.”

  Only one? What about Kent himself?

  Kent must have seen the distrust on my face. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “Yes, I was outside the conservatory on Saturday night after the fashion show and reception. I saw you. But do you know who else I saw? Someone who had just come out of the conservatory, but didn’t see me?”

  Paula, I thought, but I shook my head.

  “Loretta. She had the key to the conservatory, and apparently, she used it to go back inside long after the fashion show was over, and long after Antonio collapsed, too. Why did she go in there at that time? I suspect she was searc
hing for something, and I suspect I know what. I think Antonio took a video with his phone of at least one meeting between him, Loretta, and me. At first, the school was going to concentrate on fashion design only. At this particular meeting, Antonio suggested adding models to the school. Loretta liked the idea. She said we could tell the models that TADAM would help them break into modeling careers and land great contracts with national magazines and TV ads. I hadn’t said a thing up to that point, but I had to ask how those two, him with no experience running a school of any kind, and her with only some experience in fashion design, were going to make these modeling contracts and TV ads become a reality. Antonio didn’t answer, and Loretta just stared at me. I decided the meeting was over, and got up and left.”

  Yes, I could imagine Kent doing that.

  He could certainly string lots of words together whenever he wanted to appear innocent. “But I’d barely gone out the door when I heard Loretta tell Antonio that the modeling contracts and TV ads wouldn’t matter. They could just keep stringing the kids—that’s what she called them, kids—along, telling them they needed to perfect their skills by taking more courses.”

  Macey broke in. “Antonio and Loretta did tell us that, which was strange so near the beginning of the term.”

  Kent flashed Macey a look that might have contained empathy. “Sorry, Macey. I should have warned you and the others.”

  Why hadn’t he? As far as I was concerned, Kent was about as sleazy as Antonio and Loretta.

  He didn’t seem to notice the accusing expression I was undoubtedly unable to hide. He explained, “Loretta said that the important thing was to collect as much tuition from the students as possible. So I wonder if she was in the conservatory that night searching for the video he must have taken of that discussion.”

  Although Loretta was the one who had tried to kill Clay and me, I still didn’t quite believe that Kent was totally innocent of everything else, including Antonio’s murder. I asked Kent, “Why would she murder Antonio over that? Didn’t he implicate himself in that same discussion?”

  Kent’s glance of dark derision made me glad that friends surrounded me. “There was more. Antonio kept promising that Loretta and I would be paid, but we weren’t. We confronted him together and told him we would leave TADAM and get jobs teaching fashion design somewhere else, but he said he could reveal our secrets and keep other schools from hiring us. I didn’t care.”

  Really?

  Kent seemed to simmer with barely concealed rage, but he managed a shrug that looked almost casual. “Prospective employers might discover that I had a criminal record from when I was twenty-three. It wasn’t that big a deal, and I’d been falsely accused. Besides, I wasn’t all that keen on teaching. I’d rather design full-time, and that’s probably what I’ll do now. But Loretta claimed that she had a great offer from another school, and that she was going to leave TADAM to teach there. Antonio told her to go ahead and try, but she’d be sorry—he had proof that she’d said she was only interested in the modeling students for their tuition, and that she had no intention of helping them succeed. She told him that she didn’t believe he had proof. He said he did. She claimed she’d only meant that learning to model wasn’t easy and that the students would need to take lots of courses before they could hope to land major contracts. Antonio suggested that she could buy the video from him. She got a funny look on her face and said, ‘Prove it. Show it to me.’ But all he would say was that it was in a safe place.” Kent socked one fist into his other palm. “So I’m guessing that, instead of giving in to his blackmail, she silenced Antonio and then set out to find the video.”

  That white envelope that Clay had found, the one that Loretta must have taken with her, had probably contained the DVD she’d been searching for, both this evening and Saturday night when she first took Clay to the carriage house with her. And now she was most likely on her way out of the area.

  Sweat droplets stood out on Clay’s forehead and his face had paled. Where was the ambulance? And where were the police?

  Looking enormous in his firefighting gear, Ben ran to us. “We unlocked your truck without breaking anything, Clay, and we turned off your engine. We didn’t touch the note on the driver’s seat though. We don’t think that Willow wrote a suicide note combined with a confession about murdering Antonio.”

  “I certainly did not!” I exclaimed.

  Haylee had followed Ben. She grabbed my elbow. “The note was in Loretta’s printing, curlicues and everything.” She threw her arms, which were somewhere inside that bulky firefighter’s coat, around me. “She tried to kill you two and make it look like you had committed suicide and murdered Clay!”

  I pushed her away. “No need to get all mushy over it. She didn’t succeed.”

  “Thanks to Willow,” Clay muttered from the ground.

  Suddenly, there was a screeching that would rival any long-lost ambulance or police car, and Paula came storming and flapping around the corner of the carriage house. “What are all you people doing here? Get out of here, all of you!”

  Gord was close behind her. “Ma’am, sit down. Don’t get yourself worked up.” He pointed to a rickety-looking wooden bench under a crab apple tree that had outgrown some former gardener’s pruning. “Sit down and take a deep breath. Everyone will leave, eventually. I promise.”

  “Gord!” Edna called. “I’m glad you’re here! Come see what you can do for poor Clay! His leg shouldn’t look like that.”

  Gord strode to Clay and stared down at him for a second. “No, it certainly shouldn’t.” He knelt beside Clay.

  Breathing heavily, Paula remained on the bench. Her face was more sallow than ever. I joined her on the bench. “Sorry, but Loretta and Kent wanted us to come over. Loretta wanted to renovate the carriage house into a cute little cottage. She thought TADAM could use the income.”

  Paula glared past me toward the carriage house. “It stinks. Skunks live there.”

  I didn’t know how to tactfully word my next question, so I didn’t bother with tact. “Loretta told us you’d been arrested for your husband’s murder.”

  “Loretta lied.”

  Loretta is good at that . . .

  Paula switched her glare toward me. “The police didn’t believe me about who attacked me last night, so they charged me with doing it to myself. I thought it was you and Haylee. I was kind of faint, and heard your voices, so naturally, I thought it was you two, at first. Who do you think could have done it? Loretta?” She glanced toward Kent, who was pulling bits of glass out of the frame of one of the windows I’d broken. She whispered, “Or Kent?”

  “Paula,” I said gently, “you staged the scene to make it look like someone attacked you, but it was obvious that you did it to yourself.”

  She looked down at her hands clutched tightly in her lap. “Why do you say that?”

  “Your hands were in front of you, not behind your back. You were sitting more or less comfortably.”

  “I wasn’t comfortable. It took too long for anyone to find me, and then it was the wrong—” She clammed up.

  I asked her, “Were you going to say the wrong people came to your rescue? Had you planned all along to blame Haylee and me?”

  Her only denial was a slight shake of the head.

  “You fooled us all at first. It was clever. But the police must have realized that you could have gotten out of your predicament by yourself.”

  She still avoided looking at me.

  I added, “And you also told the police about Antonio’s plans to destroy Threadville, which you assumed would make Haylee and me angry, then you hid copies of his business plan in our shops to make it look like we could have read them before he died. Why were you trying to frame Haylee and me?”

  “I was afraid I’d go to jail, maybe even be sentenced to death, for something I didn’t do.” I’d never before seen her looking fierce. “They alway
s suspect the spouse. And, besides, how could I know that you and Haylee didn’t kill my husband? It made sense that you’d be angry about his plans for Threadville.”

  “If we’d known about them, we would have discounted them. His plans wouldn’t have succeeded, and even if they could have, Haylee and I would never have killed him. Besides, the police don’t always suspect the spouse. I think they’re about to suspect Loretta, if they don’t already.”

  Still without glancing my way, Paula rubbed the insides of her wrists across her eyes.

  “You must miss him very much,” I said.

  “Anthony? Or Antonio as he’d begun calling himself?” There was no mistaking the sarcasm in her voice. “Being married to a . . . an ambitious man like that isn’t easy.”

  I wondered what she’d been about to say before she selected the word “ambitious.” Woman-chasing? No wonder her grief in Vicki’s cruiser early Sunday morning had seemed fake to Gord. It had been. And her demeanor and dishevelment at the TADAM mansion on Monday evening could have been due more to fears of being arrested than to grief. I asked her, “Why did you go into the conservatory after Chief Smallwood brought you home from Erie early Sunday morning?”

  She picked at a hangnail. “I thought that walking around might help me sleep. A key to the conservatory was with Antonio’s things. I wasn’t sure if anyone had locked the conservatory, so for something to do, I walked over there and checked. It was a good thing I did. No one had locked it. So I locked it and left.”

  Actually, someone had locked it. I’d seen Loretta do it. But then she’d gone back. I asked, “Did you see Loretta nearby?”

  She shook her head.

  “Kent?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone?” Me? Or Macey, who had told Ashley she’d seen Paula leave the conservatory.

  “I wasn’t seeing much. I wasn’t looking, either. I was just . . .” Clutching at her sides, she bent forward. “Walking around. I must have been in shock.” Slowly she straightened and focused on the group near the carriage house again. “Why is the fire department here? There’s no fire.”