by Janet Bolin
“Leave it alone,” I said. “It’s evidence that someone tried to hurt you.”
“Someone? You.” Felicity plucked at the cloth. “Or that fireman.”
Smallwood gazed at the trucks and volunteer firefighters milling around them. “Which fireman?”
“The one who attacked the nanny, then came after me and dragged me out onto Darlene Coddlefield’s front porch.”
I gasped. “A fireman attacked Tiffany?”
“What did he do to Tiffany?” Smallwood asked. It worried me that her notebook was still in her pocket.
“He hit her!” Felicity yelled as if we weren’t right beside her. “And when she fell, he grabbed one of the pieces of a little dress that Darlene had cut out. He ripped off a strip of fabric.” Felicity thrust her arm toward Smallwood. “Like this. Take it off.”
“Not yet.” Chief Smallwood spoke in a surprisingly calm voice. “I’m sorry it hurts. Let me have a look.” Smallwood aimed her flashlight at the pale pink calico, then handed me her flashlight and took out her notebook. “Shine this so I can see to write, please, Willow. Felicity, first of all, what were you doing here tonight?”
Felicity glared at me. “Someone had to find out who sabotaged the sewing machine I gave to Darlene Coddlefield.”
Smallwood let that pass. “When did you arrive here tonight, Felicity?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t sleep. I was worrying about someone”—again, she turned an evil eye on me—“getting off scot-free while a Chandler was being blamed for a death. So I drove here. I must have gotten here around one.”
“Where did you leave your car?”
Felicity waved toward the south. “On a farm road just past the driveway.”
“Okay, Felicity, you arrived around one, snuck into the house, and you saw a fireman rip a piece of fabric off a child’s dress—”
“The dress wasn’t sewn together yet.”
Smallwood continued her calm questioning as if Felicity hadn’t interrupted her. “What did the fireman do with the strip of fabric?”
Felicity gave Smallwood a look like she should have understood. “He tied it around the nanny’s wrist and to the leg of a sewing table. Then he lifted the heap of fabrics off the Champion—”
“Whoa,” Smallwood said. “Run that past me again.”
“The fabrics!” Felicity waved her arms as if she could clear smog from Smallwood’s brain. “The nanny had been smothering the Champion with a pile of fabric.”
“Smothering a champion?” Smallwood was clearly at a loss.
“Sewing machine,” I explained. “A Chandler Champion like the one we examined together in my store.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” Felicity was more impatient than ever. “The Champion had caught fire. That nanny was trying to put the fire out. But after this fireman tied her to a table leg, he took the fabric off the Champion and it burst into flames.” Talk about bursting, Felicity’s eyes glimmered like she was about to weep. “I was about to rescue it—”
“Not Tiffany?” I demanded.
Smallwood shushed me with a quick flip of the hand holding the pen.
But Felicity was off on another tangent. “A Chandler Champion was on fire! In case you don’t know anything about fire, you have to put the fire out before you can rescue anyone.”
Clamping my lips together, I managed not to say anything.
“But I couldn’t rescue the sewing machine or that nanny. The fireman saw me, ripped another strip of fabric off the dress piece, and started toward me. I ran down to the second floor. That fireman rushed down from the attic and pushed me into a small room, and the next thing I knew, I was lying on the porch outside and the fireman was coming after me again.”
Felicity was missing a big chunk of time.
Smallwood wrote quickly. “Did you recognize him?”
Felicity pointed at me. “I think it was her.”
“You said it was a fireman,” Smallwood reminded her.
“Well, a fireman can be a woman. And she”—she pointed at me—“is tall, like a man. And when she chased me down from the attic, she had that piece of fabric in her hand. She must have tied it on my wrist. My hand will get gangrene. Now will you take it off me?”
“Can you bear to wear it for a few minutes more while I talk to Willow?” Smallwood spoke surprisingly gently.
Kneeling, Isaac patted Felicity’s shoulder with a large but gentle hand.
Felicity flinched away and shouted at Smallwood, “Arrest everyone. They’ve all been attacking me.”
Smallwood held up her hand. “Give me time.” She beckoned me a few paces away. “Okay, Willow, let’s hear your side. First of all, how did the nanny—Tiffany—get hold of another sewing machine like the one we took as evidence?”
“She wanted a replacement, for Darlene’s kids, she said. I gave her the one in my store. Jeremy Chandler, the company president, told me he would send me another one.”
“Now tell me what happened here tonight. This morning.”
“The littlest girl said that someone was still in the house.” I described putting on firefighter’s gear, going into the house to look for the person, finding Felicity tied to the leg of a bed, lifting the bed off the loop, and dragging Felicity out of the house. “She came to and started yelling, ‘He’s trying to kill me.’” I added quickly, “I don’t think anyone else knows I was the one who dragged her out, and I don’t want them finding out.”
“Ashamed of endangering yourself and possibly other firefighters by entering an unsafe house?”
“Yes, and…I haven’t told anyone else that she was tied there. But her attacker—the mystery fireman—knows, and I’d just as soon he didn’t find out that I know what he did. Also,” I added somewhat lamely, “I didn’t think you’d want me broadcasting the culprit’s methods.”
“You were wrong to go into the house without clearance,” she scolded, “but right not to tell anyone besides me what you found.”
“I didn’t attack anyone.” I probably sounded like I had, though.
“Did you by any chance see this mystery fireman?”
I slapped my forehead. “I did see a mystery fireman. I don’t know if it was the same one. He was leaning into a car parked out there on the road.” I pointed. “Beyond those trees.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“No. He was about Plug’s height, but not as big around.”
“His son, maybe?” she asked.
“No. I saw his two older sons only seconds later, in the tanker truck.”
She looked up from her notebook. “So where’d this guy go?”
“Maybe he’s still out there near that car?” I suggested.
“I only saw one car out on the shoulder when I came in. Yours. Everyone else parked in the driveway. Describe the car the fireman was near.”
“It was a dark sedan. Four-door, I think.”
A vehicle, its headlights blinding, jolted down the rough driveway toward us. Smallwood pointed her flashlight at its windshield. “You just turn around and get out of here, buddy,” she muttered. The driver couldn’t have heard her. “I’ve got enough to handle without sightseers in my way.”
The driver killed the headlights, and we could make out the red pickup truck. Haylee jumped out and ran to us. “Willow, are you okay?”
“Great,” Smallwood complained. “All of Threadville is about to show up and destroy evidence.”
“We’ll be careful,” I promised.
Haylee grinned. “As far as I know, my mothers are sleeping in their apartments and not about to interfere.”
Smallwood sighed. “Where is my backup? Look, Willow, I’m convinced that you rescued the victim and didn’t harm her.”
That was quite a concession. “Thank you,” I said. “I didn’t attack anyone, but I understand why she might see being dragged down a flight of stairs as an attack.”
Smallwood shook her head. “She’s obviously confused.”
“She’s not the only one,” Haylee said. “What’s going on?”
Smallwood brushed her question aside. “You two are going to have to help me. Make sure no harm comes to the victim while I get a camera. Don’t let her take off that strip of fabric. I want Detective Gartener to see it.”
“Victim?” Haylee demanded.
“Felicity Ranquels, the Chandler representative,” I told her.
“What’s she doing here?”
I filled her in as we hurried to Felicity.
“My hand’s swelling up,” Felicity wailed. “I’m going to sue you.”
“Who?” Haylee asked.
Felicity pointed her other hand at me. “Her.”
Haylee crouched beside Felicity. “Why?”
But all Felicity would say was, “Get that policewoman back here.”
An unmarked cruiser pulled in behind Smallwood’s and a man got out. Even in the dark, I recognized his height and military bearing. Detective Gartener. He was good at figuring everything out. I felt safer than I had since I’d arrived.
Her camera in hand, Smallwood brought him to us. She shot pictures of Felicity’s face and hands. Objecting, Felicity reached for her right lapel. Unlike her left one, stiff with cardboard, it was limp. “Oh, no,” she said, “I lost my—”
“Interfacing?” Haylee, the accomplished tailor, suggested.
“Yes. I must have lost it at your—” Felicity glared at me.
“My place?” I suggested. Now I was confused, too, which seemed to be a normal state for most of us during that dark and horrifying night. Felicity had dropped her interfacing, made of corrugated cardboard, on my porch the day of Darlene’s presentation, but she had shoved it back into her jacket immediately.
Felicity let out one of her little shrieks. “I’ve got to go find—” She struggled to stand, but her eyes lost focus, and she went limp.
34
GARTENER CAUGHT FELICITY, EASED HER to the ground, and placed his fingers on her neck. “Her pulse is good, but the back of her head’s bleeding.” His rich voice was unusually sharp. “She’s been hit hard. Have we called an ambulance?”
“One’s supposed to be on its way,” I said.
“See if we can speed it up,” Gartener said to Smallwood. “Let’s get her to the hospital. Possible smoke inhalation and…” He didn’t finish, didn’t have to. His dark eyes locked on mine.
Smallwood was already on her radio
“I dragged her down the stairs and out of the house by her upper arms,” I told Gartener. “I don’t think her head touched anything.”
“Even if it had, it wouldn’t have caused this injury. This was a severe blow.” I’d never seen Gartener so rattled. Usually, he kept that sort of conclusion to himself.
I explained, “She said she saw a fireman hit Tiffany—the woman who has already been taken to the hospital—and knock her out.”
After I summarized the rest of Felicity’s accusations, Gartener directed Haylee and me to stand at the end of the driveway and keep anyone from driving out. “Unless there’s another fire. If there is, you can let the firemen and fire trucks leave, but not Plug. He’ll have to stay here. We need to talk to him.”
Gartener stayed with Felicity. Slapping her leg with her notebook, Smallwood marched purposefully toward Plug.
Haylee and I walked to the end of the driveway. I filled her in on nearly everything that had happened that night.
“And those children just have to sit there?” She was more like her mothers than she realized.
“The smaller ones are cuddled in quilts on their big sisters’ laps.”
We’d barely reached the end of the driveway when a pickup truck came roaring toward us from the vicinity of the Coddlefield house.
Gartener had told us to prevent anyone from leaving. I stepped forward and tried to flag the driver down.
Russ tore past us in his maroon and white pickup truck. At the road, he turned south and accelerated. I couldn’t tell if he had any passengers.
His fifteen-year-old sister screamed at him to come back. The smaller children began crying again.
Haylee dusted off her sweater. “We’re not doing a good job of keeping people from leaving.”
I stared down the road at Russ’s taillights, two red pinpricks in the distance. “At least he didn’t ram into us. For once, he didn’t seem to be trying to.”
“He was in too much of a hurry.”
“I wonder why,” I said.
“It seems kind of suspicious, doesn’t it?”
I agreed. “But he’s only sixteen. And he’s not the fireman I spotted near a car out on the road when I arrived. I saw Russ right after that.”
“The fireman you saw may not be the fireman who attacked Tiffany and Felicity.”
Haylee was right. Felicity was confused about my role in the entire thing. What else did the cranky woman not understand?
The fire trucks’ headlights illuminated the scene near the house in a smoky, eerie glow. Chief Smallwood strode to the younger Coddlefield children, knelt beside them, reached for little Darla, and took the child in her arms.
An ambulance trundled up the driveway toward us. Gartener waved it closer, then left Felicity to the paramedics’ care and headed toward Plug.
A state police cruiser pulled in off the road. The trooper driving it seemed to take a mental snapshot of Haylee and me before he drove down the driveway toward the action. A second state police cruiser had been following the first, but it turned around and sped south, the direction Russ had taken. Smallwood or Gartener must have radioed them about Russ driving off without permission.
Haylee folded her arms. “They’ll catch him.”
Smallwood bundled the youngest Coddlefield children into Plug’s SUV with their big sisters, but the SUV didn’t go anywhere. Plug gestured angrily at Gartener, who was apparently asking questions and taking notes.
The ambulance headed down the driveway toward the road. The light inside showed a very pale-faced and apparently unconscious Felicity with a blanket strapped around her. Strobes flashing and siren silent, the ambulance turned south, toward the interstate, the quickest route to Erie. At the rate it was going, it might overtake the state police cruiser pursuing Russ.
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.”
35
THAT’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.
