by Janet Bolin
Haylee opened a box and whistled. “Come see this, Willow.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Old linens. The pair of tea towels on top were decorated with hand-embroidered candlewicking, the real kind, made with genuine candlewick. Gently, I lifted the towels and peeled back the edges of linens below them. Heritage linens. I could buy the whole box. My students and I could copy some of the old-fashioned embroidery techniques and designs with our software and embroidery machines.
Mona joined us in our booth to see what we were oohing and aahing over.
She and Haylee helped me remove folded linens from the box. Luckily for me, some of them were stained. Mona shook her head. “Ugh. Old things. You can have them.”
At the bottom, we found a cross-stitched family tree. The earliest dates were in the 1700s.
“This could be an antique,” Mona exclaimed. “I could get a nice price for this in Country Chic.” Naturally, as she spoke, she shook her head, and the end of the tie she didn’t know she was wearing tickled her ear again.
Before Mona could snatch the supposedly antique linen from me, Haylee pointed at names and dates in the top branches. “Look—triplets born in 1994. Anderson, Sam, and Mary.”
Mona said, “Someone in 1736 could have been predicting the future.”
I pointed at the lower corner. “She signed it in 1995. Marian Hartley.” The name seemed familiar. Someone I’d met in or around Elderberry Bay?
Mona was not easily dissuaded. She fingered the lace ruffle sewn around the sampler. “This lace could be antique, maybe from 1736. I could remove it and have my seamstress—I mean I could sew it onto a pillow.”
Hiding a grin, I put the family tree into the box and covered it with tea towels, guest towels, dresser scarves, doilies, and napkins, all hand embroidered. “I’m buying the whole box.” I left no room for argument.
A wily look came into Mona’s eyes. “You two better make sure Isaac charges you good prices for the stuff you took.”
I nodded. To keep her from rifling through my treasures, I balanced the carton on my good arm, carried it to my car, and locked it in.
I returned to the firefighters’ booth in time to hear Mona ask Haylee, “Which one of you two pushed me?”
“Pushed you?” Haylee asked Mona. “When?”
“Right before that carton fell on my head. Someone pushed me.”
Haylee and I looked at each other, mystified. “We couldn’t have,” Haylee said. “You were in your booth.” She sidestepped a couple of paces. “I was right here, and Willow was over there, two feet from the tarpaulin.” Two feet from where the tarpaulin continued to intrude on the space that was supposed to be occupied by the firefighters’ booth, in fact.
Mona brushed at the end of the tie again, then folded her arms. “Someone pushed me. I felt it.”
“Show us where you were in your booth when this happened,” I suggested.
She led us to the back corner where we’d found her sitting with the carton overturned on her head. “I was right here, putting this love seat in place, and someone pushed me.” She pointed at the wall of the tent. “From there.”
I said, “Whoever it was had to be outside.” I nodded at the frame holding the tarpaulin. “We were inside the tent, next door in the firefighters’ booth.”
Mona stared at where the tower of cartons had been, then at the side of the tent. “I suppose you’re right.” She shook her head. “AAAAACK! What is it?” Swatting at her ear, she cavorted like she’d been stung. “A snake? Get if off me!”
“Stop dancing around,” Haylee, ever the diplomat, suggested.
With my unbandaged left hand, I lifted the tie off Mona’s head and gave it to Haylee.
Mona, however, was still frantic. “Someone was outside the tent pushing me? Who? Go see if they’re still there and tell them not to do it again.”
I hadn’t seen anyone in that vicinity moments ago when I put the box of linens in my car, and the person who had done the pushing, if any pushing had actually been done, would be long gone by now. However, to placate the nearly hysterical Mona, Haylee and I ran outside and around to the tent wall near Mona.
No one was there. “Mona?” I called. “I’m touching the tent. Can you see where my hand is? Is this where the push came from?”
“Yes!” She slapped the tent. Fortunately, I’d been using my uninjured hand.
Haylee and I went back inside.
“Who was it?” Mona demanded.
Haylee said, “No one was out there.”
“Why did they push me?” Mona asked.
“Your guess,” I said, “is as good as mine.” Better, probably, since I was picturing her distending the tent with her rear end and believing the tent’s natural resistance was a push. If she’d wanted a larger booth, she should have rented one instead of ramming the tarpaulin and tent walls in directions they didn’t want to go.
I was still trying to figure out where I’d heard Marian Hartley’s name. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I hadn’t heard her name. I had read it.
On a computer screen. When I was skimming through names of donors to Darlene Coddlefield’s charities?
I took out my phone and logged onto the Internet.
Marian Hartley had donated to Koins for Kids several years ago.
I showed Haylee. “She must live around here,” Haylee said.
“Who?” Mona asked, shaking her head.
I pocketed my phone. “The woman who embroidered that family tree. Marian Hartley. Do you know her?”
“Never heard of her. But I haven’t lived around here as long as you two have.”
“And neither of us have been here very long, either,” Haylee said.
She was undoubtedly thinking the same thing I was. Chief Smallwood had said that investigators were checking on donors to those charities. If they didn’t make an arrest soon, I would nudge them, especially about this donor. Then again, maybe all of the donors were from around here, people Darlene had known.
Music started nearby. Then a voice. A square dance? And the roar of engines.
“What’s all that racket?” Mona asked.
Haylee and I raced out of the tent and up Brussels Sprouts Boulevard to an outdoor arena surrounded by bleachers.
The square dance was unlike any I’d ever seen or imagined. All eight of the dancers, guys and gals, were driving red farm tractors from the 1950s.
Skirts, crinolines, bloomers, and long hair flying, the four women wheeled their tractors around, braking, turning, reversing in speedy but careful choreography with their partners, who wore cowboy shirts matching the women’s full-skirted dresses—the head couple in chartreuse, a couple in royal blue, a couple in orange, and the fourth couple in purple.
The “women” had beards, mustaches, hairy arms, bony knees, uniformly large busts, and wigs in colors that would have inspired Edna in the best of her hair-dye experimentation days.
Eight tractors going full speed in a small space, and no collisions? I’d spent some quality time on lawn tractors, but had never had to worry about other tractors. With the gathering crowd, Haylee and I laughed, clapped, and cheered them on.
“Promenade around the hall!”
Two by two, the tractors circled.
Haylee gasped, nudged me, and jerked her head to one side, a sure indication that I was to look beyond her but not make it obvious.
What was Jeremy Chandler doing at Elderberry Bay’s Harvest Festival?
41
I HADN’T THOUGHT ABOUT JEREMY SINCE he’d called to assure me that he’d arrived safely in New York. He hadn’t seemed enthralled by this corner of Pennsylvania, and I hadn’t expected him to return soon. Or ever.
Haylee and I clambered out of the bleachers and caught up with him near the handcrafts tent.
“Willow!” What a phony, acting surprised to see me on my home turf. He’d gone native, sort of, in designer jeans and a blue button-down chambray shirt with neat creases showing that it had been
removed from its packaging only minutes before. “Have you thought more about my offer?”
“What are you doing here?” I asked ungraciously.
“What happened to your hand?” he countered.
I put it behind my back. “Nothing. How come you’re back so soon?” Had he been visiting Felicity?
He leaned toward Haylee and me like a conspirator. “Don’t tell anyone.” He pressed a finger to his lips. “I’m one of the judges. I meck.”
It took me a second to understand. Jeremy wouldn’t know that my students and I jokingly pronounced the initials for the International Machine Embroidery Competition “I make.”
“I’m checking things out beforehand,” he confided.
How odd.
“Excuse us,” Haylee blurted. “We need to talk to someone.”
We did?
She grabbed my good wrist and hauled me toward the square-dancing tractors.
“See you later, Jeremy,” I called.
Sauntering down Cabbage Court toward the brightly lit carnival area, he waved over his shoulder without turning around.
It hardly seemed fair for the judge of an international contest to preview the entries from one small village. Would he guess that the flame stitch embroidery that matched other Threadville designs in our booth was my entry? Did he think he could coerce me to work for him by giving me high marks? He didn’t know me very well. I wouldn’t accept an unfairly awarded prize.
Still pulling at me, Haylee tucked us in among square dance fans. “Look,” she commanded.
Russ’s friends, the two teenagers I’d seen running from the handcrafts tent, were now slouching toward it. Actually, they were staggering.
A stern look on his face, Isaac followed them.
“Swing your partners high and low!”
Those drivers made their tractors appear to swing each other, four pairs of tractors circling in tight, and very noisy, formations.
I hated to leave the fun again, but Haylee and I tiptoed after Isaac and slipped into the firefighters’ booth behind him and the two teenagers.
“Why didn’t you unpack all of the boxes?” I asked the boys.
The taller one answered, “They were full of old clothes and garbage like that. Besides, we didn’t have space.”
“Hey,” drawled the other. “What happened to all the stuff we did unpack?”
I smelled beer.
Haylee tapped her foot on the bare earth. “Your tower of cartons fell down and broke most of the dishes.”
“But there was, like, more chairs and stuff.” The shorter boy looked at everything besides Isaac, Haylee, and me. He was so unsteady I was afraid he might do a face plant on a table of ashtrays.
I didn’t take my eyes off him. “Some of us already bought some of it.”
“Cool,” said the first boy, tripping over a lamp.
Isaac caught it. “You two fellows are done here, but don’t go driving anywhere until you sober up.” He dangled keys in their faces. “I have your truck keys, but I left your doors unlocked. Go sleep it off.”
Again, I asked them, “Have you two seen Russ?”
“Nope. Not since we helped put out the fire at his dad’s place.” Hands in pockets, heads down, they slunk away.
After they were out of earshot, I tilted my head at Isaac. “Did you find out where Russ is?”
He spread his hands. “No.”
“Isaac!” Mona called in an artificially husky voice. “I need your help!”
Isaac loped around the tarpaulin to her booth.
Haylee murmured to me, “Maybe she’s tied up again.”
I had to run outside to vent another case of the giggles. Haylee came, too, which didn’t help. The two boys weren’t in sight.
Mona and Isaac, each carrying one end of Mona’s recently acquired love seat, came out of the tent. Puffing with exertion, Mona said, “If you two girls aren’t doing anything, you can help us put my purchases in Isaac’s pickup.”
Isaac had probably brought everything here in his truck in the first place, and now he had to drive some of it back to Elderberry Bay. But he was good-natured about it, and we helped carry, too, even though we would have rather watched the square dancing, and Mona didn’t want me touching anything with a possibly bloody hand.
“Where’s all this stuff going?” Haylee asked as we helped Isaac pack boxes, stools, and lamps in the bed of his truck.
“My shop. My upholsterer…I mean I will reupholster and fix it all up.”
As soon as we’d removed everything Mona wanted, she turned to Isaac and demanded, “Follow me home.” She actually batted her eyelashes at the poor guy. “And help me stow this all in my workshop.” She shook her head more emphatically than usual.
“Sorry, ma’am, I can’t.” He twisted his hands like a bashful schoolboy. He was putting on an act, maybe using “ma’am” to show he wasn’t interested in a woman ten or more years his senior.
“Sure you can,” Mona encouraged with a sultry voice.
“No, ma’am, I’m sorry, but as deputy fire chief, it’s my job to stay at the festival with the fire truck until after the fireworks.” He looked at his watch. “I have to take the tanker to where they’re setting them off.” He loped to the fire truck.
Pouting, Mona watched him drive away over the furrowed ground. “He could have given you girls the keys to his pickup so you could drive my belongings to my shop.”
“We’re firefighters, too,” I said before Mona could rope us into moving her purchases from Isaac’s pickup to Haylee’s. “Remember, you wanted us to join? We also have to stay until after the fireworks.”
Haylee added, “Especially now that the other recruits are out of commission.”
“No one should set off fireworks tonight,” Mona said. “It’s too dry. If anything goes wrong, this place could go up like that.” She snapped her fingers to show us how fast. Her vision of a roaring inferno was enough to send her scooting to her own car. She slammed herself in and drove toward the exit.
Where was Clay? Ever since I’d texted him to call me, my phone had been stubbornly silent. Just to be sure, I pulled it from my pocket. The battery was fine. I had no messages.
I turned to Haylee. “What would you like to do next?” The square dance music had ended and the tractors were silent, but there had to be something equally entertaining, beginning with finding something to eat. I was starving.
“Yoo-hoo! Willow! Haylee!” Waving white plastic shopping bags in the dimly lit night, three peculiar creatures charged down Brussels Sprouts Boulevard toward us. We were about to be accosted by a short clown with two bright red spots on her cheeks, a tall giraffe with a serious crick in its neck, and a purple furry creature resembling an overgrown teddy bear.
Beyond the amusement area, someone spoke into a PA system. The Harvest Festival’s opening ceremonies were beginning.
Haylee and I could probably have listened to the speeches from where we stood, but the clown, the giraffe, and the teddy bear herded us into the Threadville booth.
Haylee didn’t seem surprised at her mothers’ appearance. “Where did you three pick up those costumes?” she asked them. “From someone’s trash?”
The crook-neck giraffe answered in Opal’s voice, “We found a very nice man who makes and rents costumes. He’s interested in opening a shop in Threadville.”
I couldn’t help pointing out, “That giraffe costume is not exactly rentable anymore.” In addition to having a broken neck, its dark brown patches were threadbare.
Edna, the short clown, waved my complaint away. “He knows that. He said we could keep it. And besides, we think he might be a good customer for our shops.”
The purple furry creature bopped in a typical mascot dance and answered in Naomi’s sweet way, “And for the courses we teach.”
I laughed. “He could use a few pointers.”
Edna raised a finger in the air. “Exactly.”
“Why,” Haylee asked her mothers, “are you wea
ring costumes?” She took a step back as if she dreaded their answer. I prepared to run away, too.
Edna raised a hand in a signal for silence, then darted out into the aisle. We heard her run the length of the tent on the hard-packed earth, then back again.
Brushing red yarn hair out of her eyes, Edna beckoned us closer. “We found Russ’s truck,” she whispered.
42
“YOU FOUND RUSS’S TRUCK?” HAYLEE repeated.
As if she expected a crowd of eavesdroppers to materialize, Edna shushed her.
“Where?” I asked Edna.
“In a parking lot near the rides and games. We figure he’s working as a carnie.”
Opal, the threadbare giraffe, added, “If we spread out and search that area, between the five of us, we should find him.”
“Russ might recognize me,” I began.
Despite those bright red circles on her cheeks, little Edna managed to look earnest. “We have a plan.”
I might have known.
Opal took off the giraffe head, fished in one of the bags, brought out two black Stetsons, and handed them to Haylee and me. “You can hide your hair under these.”
Great. But we’d still be two women, considerably taller than average.
Naomi took off her purple furry mitts and dug in the other bag. “Look what else we bought.” Cowboy shirts. When had The Three Weird Mothers begun channeling the late Darlene Coddlefield? Or had they been watching the square dancers? However, these shirts were not pastel like the ones Darlene had made for her sons, or bright like the square dancers had worn.
Haylee spluttered, “Black? You three always tell us not to wear so much black.”
“You’ll blend into the night.” In her polka-dot, ruffled clown suit, Edna obviously had no intention of blending into anything less rowdy than a three-ring circus.
Opal the giraffe tore into the plastic around the shirts. “We bought them big so you two could pass as men.”
We knew better than to argue. While her mothers fussed about my bandaged hand, Haylee and I buttoned the black cowboy shirts over our T-shirts.
