Threaded for Trouble

by Janet Bolin

  “Sure.” The boy strode away.

  Edna, her smile so wide it went with the clown costume, trotted to Dr. Wrinklesides. “Thanks for coming, Gord. I called you because Willow hurt her hand.”

  He gave her a peck on one red-painted cheek and sang something like, “I always answer your call, my little chickadee.” He strode to me. “Let me see that hand, young lady.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  Nevertheless, he took my hand gently in his, examined the bandages, and boomed out his hearty laugh. “Nice bandages. Cartoons. Who bandaged you?”

  “Haylee.”

  He cast her an admiring grin. “She did a slick job of it.” He peered at the side of my head. “Who hit you?” Without waiting for an answer, he ran gentle fingers over a very tender lump. “I’m calling an ambulance. That needs to be checked out in a hospital.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” He got out his cell and punched in three numbers.

  Smallwood continued to stand over Mimi, who would have trouble fleeing, anyway. Lying on her stomach with her hands cuffed behind her, she would have lots of trouble disengaging herself from the confining bolt of batik.

  Lights came on in the tent. Grinning, Russ returned to his father.

  Another car door slammed in the parking lot behind the tent. Susannah ran toward me, but Smallwood stopped her. “Thanks for the evidence you gave us.”

  Susannah looked down and mumbled, “You’re welcome.”

  “Evidence?” Mimi squawked.

  Smallwood stared at her as if she were a particularly repulsive beetle on the ground. “Something about Darlene’s charities not being legitimate.”

  “They weren’t,” Mimi said. “I could tell you—” She clammed up.

  Susannah sidled to me. “Willow, while I was wandering around the carnival after the fireworks—”

  “There was a fire!”

  She pushed the mane of hair from her face. “I know, and it hardly scared me. So those fireworks were good for something besides looking pretty. Anyway, I thought of something, and it could be important.” She glanced at Mimi. “But maybe it’s already taken care of.” She gave me an earnest look. “Mimi’s entry in the IMEC contest was thicker on one side than the others, with some odd stitches. Let’s get it out and look at it.”

  With Dr. Wrinklesides watching my every move, I unlocked the display case and Susannah took out Mimi’s entry. I’d already noticed the bulge on one side of the doily, and Susannah pointed at a line of hand-sewn stitches near the seam. We turned the doily over, unpicked the seam, and peeked inside.

  Candy pink piping had been stitched to the fabric, too close to the embroidered design to be cut off. Instead, Mimi had tucked it inside and pulled too hard at the fabric, puckering it, when she closed the seam with hand stitches. Another of her mistakes.

  Luckily, Threadville’s assistant, Susannah, had questioned the shoddy work.

  Isaac strode to Susannah and placed his bony hands on her shoulders. “Good job, Susannah. You really should join the fire department.”

  She looked up into his face. “You know I’m too afraid of fire.” It was a good thing she didn’t appear to know about the sparks twinkling from her eyes.

  Isaac put both arms around her. “Even after tonight?”

  “I’m no longer terrified of it, just scared.”

  He pulled her closer. “I’ll protect you.”

  She let out a long, heartfelt sigh. “Fine, but I’m not going near any fires.”

  “Okay,” he agreed, his voice muffled in her hair.

  So that’s why Susannah had been hanging around the firefighters’ training? Had she dropped Isaac off at the Coddlefields’ the night of the fire, and she’d been too shy to tell me he’d been at her place, possibly without his pickup truck, in the middle of the night?

  Isaac peered at Haylee and me over her head. “You two are staying on the force, right? Elderberry Bay needs you.”

  “Sure,” Haylee said.

  He tightened his arms around Susannah. “Good, because I’ve accepted the job of fire chief down near Butler. And Susannah’s coming with me.”

  Haylee, her three mothers, and I gazed at each other in dismay. We were losing our assistant already?

  Finally, Naomi broke the silence. “We hope you’ll both be very happy.”

  All of us agreed.

  Although still goggle-eyed about the romance that must have been going on almost in front of my nose the whole time, I realized that something about the embroidery design in my hand was familiar. I turned it over. “I should have recognized this embroidery motif!” I started to clap my good hand to my forehead, but immediately rethought giving myself another blow to the head. “It’s stitched white on white, but it’s identical to the designs that Darlene sewed on her children’s outfits. Darlene must have been practicing, with the piping and everything, and then decided to use pastel embroidery thread instead of white. Mimi stole her work to enter in IMEC.”

  “Ridiculous,” Mimi snapped.

  My thoughts, exactly. How desperately could one want to win a contest?

  I added the embroidery to the growing pile of evidence at Smallwood’s feet. “When you’re not so busy, you’ll want this for evidence. Also Darlene Coddlefield’s computer and Mimi’s computer. You’re likely to find this design in Darlene’s software, not in Mimi’s. I can help you look.”

  “I could have deleted it,” Mimi said. “I don’t keep everything I make.”

  She lay with her cheek in the dirt, her hands cuffed behind her, and bits of straw poking out of her flattened platinum hair. Despite the pity I couldn’t help feeling, I had to point out, “Most people would keep a copy of the embroidery design they enter in a contest, in case there are questions.”

  She shrugged. “I’m not ‘most people.’”

  Smallwood echoed my thoughts. “Thank goodness.”

  Gartener pulled up in an unmarked cruiser and got out. Smallwood’s police radio made a noise. Somebody started talking. I heard the name Tiffany. Smallwood smiled, asked the person on the other end to repeat what he’d just said, and turned the radio up. “Listen, everyone,” she whispered.

  The voice said, “Tiffany Quantice became conscious and was able to tell us the name of her attacker. It was a friend of her late boss’s, someone named Mimi Anderson. Anderson is renting a cottage in Elderberry Bay for a couple of months. We’re sending a team there now.”

  “You can search the cottage if you want to,” Smallwood told her radio. “In fact, that would be great. However, with the help of some good citizens, we have already apprehended Mimi Anderson.”

  She and Gartener lifted Mimi to her feet, unwrapped the batik, and guided her into the cruiser’s backseat. I rescued the baby doll from the dirt floor and wrapped its blanket more tightly around it. Gartener headed toward the driver’s door.

  Silently, I offered him his baby doll. He stared at it for a second, then burst into a deep, warm laugh.

  Gartener, laughing? Wonders never ceased.

  Leaving me holding the doll, he folded himself into the driver’s seat.

  Smallwood told us she’d be around to talk with each of us in the morning. She pointed her finger at me. “Especially you. You did a great job.” I thrust Gartener’s baby doll at her. Wearing her cowgirl skirt, shirt, and hat, she cradled the doll. The goofiest maternal look flitted across her face.

  But she quickly regained her stern solemnity and clambered into Gartener’s passenger seat. With Mimi scowling behind them, they bumped away over the former field’s ancient furrows.

  A laugh from Gartener and a compliment from Chief Smallwood. I nearly fell over. But I couldn’t have.

  Not only was I standing right beside Clay, I was leaning into him, and he had an arm around my shoulders. Although I hated feeling or acting needy, just this once I deserved a little comfort.

  “I’m coming with you to the hospital,” he said.

  “I’m fine.”

&nbs
p; “I’m coming with you.” He tightened his arm around me and brushed a gentle kiss across the good side of my forehead. “I went in the ambulance with someone I didn’t know at all, why wouldn’t I go with someone I—” He broke off and buried his face in my hair.

  Obviously there was no arguing with him, even if I could have spoken at that moment.

  And there was no arguing with Haylee and her mothers, either. Opal removed her giraffe head, and Naomi took off the purple furry teddy bear face. Edna, her red wig with its attached hat still crooked, snuggled against Dr. Wrinklesides.

  They all beamed proudly at Clay and me.

  Dr. Wrinklesides began to sing an operatic aria. No doubt it was about undying love.

  Willow’s

  Diaphanous Fire

  Stitch Scarf

  You will need:

  Water-soluble stabilizer

  Water-soluble adhesive spray

  Bits of thread, lace, ribbons, yarn, and/or fabric in fiery colors

  Straight pins

  Embroidery thread in fiery colors

  You don’t need an embroidery machine for this project. You don’t even need a sewing machine—you can do all the stitching by hand, and it still won’t take you very long!

  You may have seen scarves like these in upscale gift or dress shops. They look lighter than air and can be very elegant.

  1. Lay out the stabilizer in the shape of the scarf you’re going to make. You can use small pieces of stabilizer and overlap them. Spray adhesive on the pretty bits and stick them to the stabilizer in an appealing pattern. Make certain that each piece is touching at least one other one.

  2. Pin more stabilizer over the top of the scarf.

  3. Carefully stitch up and down the length of the scarf in a fire stitch pattern (curved lines open at the bottom and pointed at the top to resemble fire) several times, then back and forth across the scarf. Do diagonals, too. Change thread and bobbin colors whenever the urge strikes you. Make certain you catch every teensy bit of thread, lace, ribbons, yarn, and/or fabric at least twice.

  4. Soak the scarf in warm water to dissolve the stabilizer.

  5. Lay flat to dry.

  There! You have it! A beautiful, one-of-a-kind scarf! Send a photo to Willow@ThreadvilleMysteries.com, and I’ll put it on my website: ThreadvilleMysteries.com.

  Note from Haylee: Do you ever cut off selvedges? If so, you can wind the cut-off selvedges over the stabilizer like ribbon.

  Note from Opal: For a heftier, warmer scarf, use yarn instead of thread, lace, ribbons, and/or fabric.

  Note from Edna: I like to string little beads or sequins on yarn or cord before I make one of these scarves, but you must be careful not to hit a bead with your needle and (shudder) break the needle. Sequins could damage needles, too, and probably look best without needle punctures.

  Note from Naomi: You don’t have to use a fire stitch. You can sew straight, zigzag, or curved stitches. You can incorporate free-hand designs like hearts and stars if you want. It’s like quilting…

  Tips

  1. I learned to sew from my grandmother. Her sewing machine was fastened to the top of a little desk. The table legs forced me to station myself at the middle of the sewing machine. Haylee, who tailors perfectly, came into In Stitches one day and saw me making a tank top for myself (I’d already embroidered the fabric, of course). When she stopped laughing, she pointed out that if I sat directly in front of the needle, my stitches would be less likely to stray off to one side or the other. I tried it, and she was right!

  2. Today’s sewing machines go at incredible speeds, just because they can. Embroidery machines stitch at top speed. Let them. But when you’re sewing or tailoring, take it slowly and stitch it right the first time. If you have a lead foot on your sewing pedal, or are teaching beginners, especially children, to sew, check your sewing machine manual. You may be able to lower the machine’s top speed. You can always reset it later.

  3. Take your sewing and embroidery machines to a reliable repair person for checkups annually, or more frequently if you use them a lot, like I do.

  WILLOW