by Janet Bolin
He was barely off my porch when Susannah asked, “What are you doing applying to the volunteer fire department? That could be dangerous.”
Susannah used to be full of fun. Her caution since her divorce saddened me.
“I’ll stay out of danger.” Slipping the card like a bookmark into the manual, I dislodged a bright pink flyer for a flea market during the Harvest Festival.
Laughing, I showed Susannah the ad. “Now I understand why they’re recruiting new members. They’re raising funds for new fire-fighting equipment and need volunteers to run the flea market.”
“Fine,” Susannah retorted. “Help with that. But don’t go fighting fires. It’s not safe.”
“I’ve heard that by the time the fire trucks arrive in rural areas, there’s hardly anything to do besides watch.”
She stepped back. “There’ve been lots of fires lately. People are saying they may have been set.”
“We’ve had barely a drop of rain all summer. The fields are tinder dry. Anything sets them off, including the lightning that zaps out of thunderclouds without bringing us any water.” The story was the same all over the Midwest. “I want to help. Don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”
Susannah looked down at her hands, which were clutching each other in seeming desperation. “It’s just that—” She raised her head and met my gaze. I was certain I saw the remnants of fear in her eyes. “Our house burned down when I was eight. I don’t think people realize how powerful and terrifying fires are. They scare me just thinking about them.”
The day’s students came pounding into the shop, eager to start our lesson. Susannah, who was a very accomplished seamstress, was still learning about embroidery. She helped wherever needed, but like the other students, she took her turn on one of our wondrous machines and stitched the design she’d created during the week.
She must have been silently fretting about fires all afternoon. Before she left for the evening, she pointed at the outlet in the dog’s pen, the one that had malfunctioned on Wednesday. “Did you get that outlet fixed?”
I hid a sigh. “Not yet. I guess I should.”
“Definitely. Call Clay Fraser. It could start a fire.” Then as if a fire were beginning that very moment, she ran outside.
Great, call Clay and act needy again. I liked him, but I’d had a chance with him and lost it.
Besides, I never used that outlet, and everything had worked fine since that one glitch. Witch-glitch, I thought, picturing Felicity. She’d probably put a curse on the outlet.
The phone rang. Dr. Wrinklesides wanted me to visit him in his office.
That was odd. Usually, patients phoned doctors and asked to be seen, not the other way around. And Dr. Wrinklesides wasn’t my official doctor. His fresh-out-of-med-school colleague was, and I hadn’t seen her recently or gone for tests that would require a doctor to ask me to visit him. Especially not after work on a Friday.
10
AT SEVEN, OPAL WOULD HOLD HER WEEKLY storytelling night in Tell a Yarn, but that was more than an hour from now. I told Dr. Wrinklesides I’d be there in a few minutes.
His office was three blocks from In Stitches, so I leashed the dogs and walked down Lake Street. We passed the other Threadville shops, Sam’s hardware store with its old wrought-iron sign, The Ironmonger, and Mona’s Country Chic. At The Sunroom, the new, upscale restaurant, diners sat on a glassed-in balcony where they could watch both the Elderberry River and the beach. Across the intersection, cottagers and year-round residents thronged the outdoor patio of Pier 42, the village’s popular restaurant and pub.
Folks fresh from a day at the beach lined up for treats at the hamburger truck and ice cream stand on Cayuga Avenue. The bakery, bank, library, and post office were closed for the evening. No vehicles were outside the fire station, and its big doors were rolled all the way down. Through trees beyond the fire station, I caught a glimpse of the sun, a red ball close to the northwest horizon where sky met lake.
The dogs and I turned south onto Jefferson Avenue, lined with Victorian and Arts and Crafts homes. Both architectural styles featured capacious front porches, and people were lounging on porch swings, sipping from tall glasses, watching children play, reading, working on needlecrafts, calling to each other, and waving at me and the dogs.
Outside Dr. Wrinklesides’s office, I fastened the leashes to a sturdy railing. I’d be able to see Sally and Tally through the waiting-room window.
Dr. Wrinklesides was alone, sitting at the receptionist’s desk. He stood and belted out an Italian aria. I assumed the words were welcoming, because he held out his arms like a father joyful at the return home of a long-lost daughter. I couldn’t help smiling.
He broke off and bowed. He loved opera. And he had a great voice.
He had an operatic build, too, though he was shorter than I was. He held out a hand for me to shake. “Glad you could make it, Willow. I wanted your advice.”
Outside, Tally whined.
Dr. Wrinklesides gazed toward the door. “What’s that?”
“My dogs.”
“Bring ’em in. The janitors will be along later. They’ll disinfect and sterilize everything.”
He was probably exaggerating, but I brought the dogs inside and held on to their leashes. They didn’t seem inclined to make pests of themselves, though. They leaned against my knees. Maybe they thought that Dr. Wrinklesides, in a white coat with a stethoscope draped around his neck, was a vet.
“Come see this, and tell me what you think.” Dr. Wrinklesides led the dogs and me into an examination room, snapped off the light, and showed me an X-ray in a light box. He’d placed a piece of paper with a hole cut out of the middle over the X-ray. He pointed to a thin white object. “That white thing is metal,” he told me. “What’s it look like to you?”
He handed me a magnifying glass, but I didn’t need it. “It’s the pointy end of a sewing machine needle. There’s its eye.”
“Why does it bulge like that on both sides of the eye? Did someone pound it flat?”
“It was made that way on purpose. It’s called a wing needle. It’s like a double-edged sword, with blades on both sides that cut into the fabric to make holes beside the stitching.”
He opened his eyes wide as if I’d amazed him, but I could see a teasing glimmer in their pale blue depths. “Holes! What would my patients think if I sewed them up and left big holes beside my stitches?”
I laughed. “Not much, probably.” His patients adored him. “Unless they wanted a new sort of embellishment. In sewing, we make those holes for decoration. People who embroider by hand widen gaps in the weave. They pull out threads running one way…”
“The warp,” he said.
“And they wind embroidery floss around the threads running the other way…”
“The WOOF,” he shouted to the dogs. They wagged their tails and licked his fingers.
I heaved a hugely fake sigh. “I’ll doggedly continue my explanation. The process of eliminating warp threads and tying woof threads together makes neat rows of little holes. It’s called hemstitching. You often see it on linens.”
He gazed toward the wall, but that was obviously not what he was seeing. “Yes,” he murmured. “I remember. My grandmother’s linen napkins.”
“Some of us like the effect, but are too lazy to do all that stitching and thread-pulling by hand. So we fit our machines with wing needles and they make tiny holes, fooling the casual observer into believing we painstakingly tied embroidery floss around threads in the fabric.”
Dr. Wrinklesides tapped the X-ray viewer. “I got this X-ray from the coroner’s office. How did this needle get into Darlene Coddlefield’s arm?”
I took an involuntary step back, bumped into Tally, then bent to pat him. His warm fur comforted me. I managed, “Is that what killed her?”
“No, not at all. Her sewing machine fell on her.”
“Fell on her?”
“It appeared that she crawled underneath her sewing table, and
it collapsed under the weight of the machine.”
“What was she doing underneath her sewing table?”
“Attempting to unplug the sewing machine, apparently. It was too heavy for the table it was on. It really was a killer sewing machine.” After years of helping county coroners, he deserved his dark sense of humor. “But it doesn’t explain how the needle got into her arm.”
“That’s only half of the needle. It must have broken,” I told him. “The other part, the shaft that gets clamped into the machine, is missing. Maybe she sewed over a pin, and the needle snapped. The sharp fragment pierced her.”
“Where’s the other fragment?”
“She probably left it in the machine. She could have been distracted by the piece in her arm.”
Dr. Wrinklesides pulled the corners of his mouth down in a skeptical frown and glowered at the X-ray. “Instead of going for help, she crawled underneath her sewing table?”
“That does seem odd,” I agreed. “Maybe she heard some of that thunder that seems to come every night. She may have wanted to protect her machine from electrical surges, and would have called for help with the needle if she’d lived. She took better care of her machine than she did of herself.” I probably would have done the same thing.
“She couldn’t have known that her sewing machine was about to land on her neck.”
On her neck?
Dr. Wrinklesides gave me time to get over my shock. He knelt and crooned to my dogs. Apparently, they were opera aficionados, too. Or maybe they liked the way he ruffled their ears.
“I have wing needles for sale in my shop,” I said when he paused to take a breath and I’d regained mine. “If you ever want to see one.”
Using the base of the examination table as a lever, he rose. “I could come now, if it’s a good time for you.”
“Sure.”
He shed his white coat and stethoscope, double-checked doors and windows to make certain they were locked, then reached for a leash. I handed him Sally’s, since Tally was more likely to lunge. If one of us was going to be knocked off our feet and end up with a broken leg, it made sense for it not to be the doctor.
Strolling along in his lemon yellow polo shirt and khaki chinos, he could have been on his way to play golf. “A beautiful evening,” he said, “beautiful dogs, and…” He burst into song.
He was older than my father, and charming, and I enjoyed being with him. I had a feeling that if I understood Italian or knew more about opera, I’d be blushing. He sang all down Jefferson, and all along Cayuga. Still no signs of life at the fire department, but his singing did turn heads at the hamburger truck and the ice cream stand. On the patio at Pier 42, people waved frosty mugs and hollered, “Hi, Doc!” A man and a woman in The Sunroom gazed at each other over candles on their table. It would take more than an operatic aria to divert their attention.
I was serenaded all the way up Lake Street. Windows opened in Naomi’s, Edna’s, and Opal’s apartments. Dr. Wrinklesides stopped singing after we entered my shop.
I led him to the display of needles, opened a packet of wing needles, and showed him one.
He peered at it. “Yep, sure looks like the X-ray.”
“You can keep that.”
“Sure. I’ll put it in my shirt pocket and it’ll puncture me and all the hot air will come out. Pfffft. Then how will I tell my patients what to do?”
He was an odd sort of doctor. I could be silly, too. “How do your patients speak after you give them a shot?”
“That’s different.”
I had a feeling I was being set up, but I fell for it, anyway. “How?”
“Hot air rises. I insert their inoculations farther down.” He held an imaginary syringe in his fist, ready to plunge it into an imaginary patient. “Don’t you know the old saying? ‘Bend over and touch your toes. I’ll show you where the needle goes.’”
I covered my mouth to prevent a snort of laughter. Dr. Wrinklesides no longer shocked me, but he could still surprise me. “I’ll give you a picture of a wing needle. It won’t puncture you and let out all that hot air.” I tore a photo from a catalogue and gave it to him.
He left with the picture, not a needle, in his shirt pocket.
The dogs and I had a quick dinner, then I kissed them good-bye and ran across the street for storytelling, undoubtedly mixed with a bit of gossip, at Tell a Yarn.
11
MEOWING, OPAL’S CAT, LUCY, GREETED me at the door of Tell a Yarn. The gray tabby usually had so much to say that I often wondered if she thought it was her job to tell the stories.
Loving the feel of her warm, silky fur, I gathered her into my arms. She revved up her purring.
The cat and I discussed the tempting yarns, hand-dyed in wintry colors, on Opal’s diamond-shaped shelves. Opal must have heard us. She trotted out of the room she used both as a dining room and as a comfy place to gather with her students while she taught knitting and crocheting. As usual, Opal wore a handmade outfit. She’d used white cotton and a shell stitch to crochet tonight’s knee-length skirt and matching top. Both featured scallops around their hems. The outfit was very pretty, and I told her so. She gave me a big hug. “Finish your scarf, and I’ll teach you how to start something else.”
Certain that I didn’t need another reason to accumulate more fibers to make into things, I’d been reluctant to try knitting, but Opal had overruled my objections, in the nicest sort of very insistent, Opal-ish way. She had given me needles and a skein of alpaca yarn, and then had patiently taught me the basics. Every Friday I brought the same scarf to storytelling and increased it by a few more stitches. If I ever finished it, maybe I’d let her show me how to crochet.
Opal led me to her dining room, where open windows showed off her wildly colorful flower garden. Some of her sunflowers were taller than I was. The crowd around the table jostled their chairs to make room for me at the table.
Edna, Haylee, and Naomi were knitting. Susannah was crocheting lace from thin white cotton. Georgina was sewing buttons on a jacket she’d just made. New to storytelling night, Mimi worked some sort of magic with a ball of very fine cotton and something that resembled a hair barrette. Every few seconds, she cleared her throat.
The barrette-like shuttle and the intricate lace she was creating clued me in. “Is that tatting?” I asked her.
“Yes.” She looked justifiably proud. “My grandmother taught me, but I only learned this one pattern before she died, so all of my lace looks alike.”
Opal studied the lace Mimi had already made. “Don’t apologize. It’s beautiful. I wish I could do that. Maybe you could teach a class in my shop sometime?”
Mimi bit her lip. “I’m not sure I’m doing it right. Books might tell more…” She trailed off, looking sad.
Naomi filled the silence. “Crafts learned from grandmothers are the very best kind.” Then she glanced at Haylee, who had never met her grandparents, and blushed furiously.
Haylee dropped her knitting and gave Naomi a squeeze. “Or from mothers.”
Naomi smiled but looked appalled at what she undoubtedly perceived as her own thoughtlessness.
Mona shook her head, her way of agreeing. She never worked on a hobby during storytelling. Haylee and I weren’t sure which would win, Mona’s resolve not to do anything or Opal’s commitment to teach everyone to love yarn along with the stories we heard every week.
Jane had come all the way from Erie to be the evening’s storyteller. An expert on southern folk tales, she kept us all spellbound.
I knit another stitch—actually, I was purling, which was the only stitch I knew—then another and another. Karen, the librarian that Elderberry Bay shared with other villages, stuffed plush teddy bears. Beside her, our postmistress, Petal, knit another row of the periwinkle blanket she had been making for years. The infamous blanket was big enough to cover a king-sized bed, and weighed so much that Petal loaded it into a bright red wagon for the several-block walk to and from Opal’s shop. She joked that she’d
soon need a pickup truck. Opal, of course, encouraged her to bind off and start something new, but Petal had bought scads of that periwinkle yarn cheaply at a yard sale and wasn’t about to stop until she used every inch of it, on one project.
Jane had barely finished her last tale when Mona brought up Darlene’s death. “What a tragedy—all those motherless children.” She shook her head.
“And all that charitable work,” Susannah said.
The information plus the hint of sarcasm in her voice piqued my interest. “What did she do?”
Susannah inspected her crocheted lace. “She volunteered for a children’s charity. Fund-raising, I think.”
Mimi sighed. “The good die young.”
Susannah opened her mouth as if to say something, then clammed up and ripped out the last few stitches she’d made, though they’d looked fine to me. Had she been about to deny that Darlene was good?
Opal touched Susannah’s arm. “Why are you ripping out so much? Your stitches are perfect.”
Susannah’s only response was a small, “Oh.” She jabbed her crochet hook into her work and made more loops, but even I could tell that these new ones were too big and sloppy.
“How old was Darlene?” I asked.
“The obituary said thirty-nine,” Karen said.
That was a surprise. Darlene had appeared to be in her mid to late forties.
Mona must have thought the same thing. “All those children must have aged her. Did she have others besides the ones who came to the ceremony?”
None of us knew.
Susannah ripped out the loose loops.
Opal eyed Susannah’s work, but all she said was, “The older children didn’t seem happy.” Her usually strident voice was soft with sympathy.
“Poor things,” Naomi agreed. “It looked like they were having typical teenager problems with their mother. Now they’ll always be bothered because they’ll never be able to work those problems out with her.”
Haylee cocked an eyebrow and asked Naomi in a teasing voice, “Typical teenager problems?”
