by Janet Bolin
“I think Chief Smallwood is going to want their names.”
“Why?”
“She found a body wrapped in quilt batting in the excavation in my backyard this morning.” Did I have to be so blunt? Naomi would have found a tactful way of saying it.
“Oh, Willow, no! Not on your property again. You poor thing!”
She was, as always, very sweet, but I wasn’t the one who needed sympathy. “I’m much better off than the guy in the batting. I don’t know who he is, or was, but Chief Smallwood said he was male, and not one of my close friends.” I quickly added, “And I just saw Clay. He’s fine.”
“What about—” She bit her lip. Tears glistened in her eyes.
“Gord Wrinklesides,” I finished for her. If anything had happened to Gord, Edna would be devastated.
Naomi picked up her phone, dialed, and asked the person who answered if she’d seen Dr. Wrinklesides during the past few minutes. Naomi nodded, thanked the person, disconnected the call, and smiled at me. “His receptionist must have thought I was peculiar, but she said she was looking right at him. So that’s okay.” Her eyes even shinier, she shook her head. “Wrapped in quilt batting . . . That means . . .” She hugged herself. “Did someone do him in?”
“Chief Smallwood’s treating it as suspicious.”
She perked up. “Maybe the quilt batting didn’t come from my store! I don’t keep track of names unless they charge their purchases. Come into the back room with me. Maybe if I’m surrounded by my rolls of different types of batting, I’ll remember who all besides Duncan bought some recently.”
Walking between bolts of colorful fabrics toward her back room was a bit like touring the inside of a rainbow. The quilt fabric that Naomi sold was cotton, lightweight, and dyed in luscious colors with prints that could be put together to make striking quilts.
Monster rounds of batting hung on industrial-strength rods fastened to shelves in Naomi’s back room. She touched each roll as she passed. Near the steel-clad door leading to the parking lot, she stopped, put her hand on a bare metal shelf, looked up at the empty cardboard tube on the rod above her, and let out a little gasp.
“Someone took all the batting off that tube,” she said. “I didn’t.”
13
OF COURSE NAOMI WOULD KNOW IF A ROLL of quilt batting wasn’t there. No one could misplace something that large. Ever the great interrogator, I asked her, “When did you last see it?”
She squinted toward the window overlooking the parking lot. “Friday afternoon, shortly before our Midsummer Madness Sidewalk Sale. I was cutting smaller pieces off that roll for table runner kits when I heard a customer come in, so I left the end of the batting just hanging here, and ran to the front of the store. After the sale that night, I noticed that I’d neglected to lock my back door.” She tested it. “It’s been locked ever since.”
“Was the batting there then?”
Lowering her chin, she pursed her mouth. She was obviously giving herself a silent scolding. “I didn’t notice. You’d think I would have. But that must have been when they took it. No one could have carried it out through the front of the store without my noticing them.”
True. But why would anyone steal quilt batting? Because they needed it for a quilt?
Or because they had a more devious plan for it?
I told Naomi, “The batting around the body was pinned together with knitting needles.”
We traded glances and ran from that room, past long-armed quilting machines and the rainbow of fabrics in the next room, through the gallery where Naomi showed off her students’ work, and out through her front door.
We jogged past Edna’s shop and burst into Opal’s. Usually, the first thing Opal’s cat did was purr around my ankles and beg for a cuddle. This time, Lucy opened her mouth and stuck her face against my shin, her method of sniffing where the kittens had been. I picked her up. She purred.
Since it was June, most of the yarns Opal had on display were cottons, linens, and silks in whites and pastels. Pretty and very tempting, but I was still working on a scarf I’d started months before, and I was determined to finish it before I bought more yarn. I did my knitting on Friday evenings at Opal’s storytelling events, and the scarf was taking a while.
Smiling, Opal came out of the back room she used as her dining room and also as a cozy meeting place for classes and storytelling night. She was wearing a skirt and top she’d pieced together from flowerlike granny squares crocheted from pink, lavender, and white cotton.
Naomi surprised me with her directness. “Are you missing any knitting needles?”
Opal cocked her head. “It’s the strangest thing. I put out a bunch of needles at the sidewalk sale, and seven pairs disappeared. All of my size three aluminum needles. No other size. Not the bamboo size threes or the double-pointed or circular needles. Only the size three aluminum needles. I must have put them somewhere, but I can’t figure out where. How could I lose seven pairs?”
My shoulders tensed. Lucy squirmed. I offered her to Opal. “What colors were the seven pairs of needles?”
“Purple.” Opal snuggled the cat against her shoulder. “All of them. All seven pairs.”
Naomi looked at me and lifted an eyebrow.
“I know where they are.” My voice came out dead flat. I explained it all to Opal.
Opal stroked her wriggling cat. “So someone shoplifted those needles during the sidewalk sale. I wondered but didn’t want to believe it.” Lucy butted her head against Opal’s jaw and increased the volume of her purring.
Naomi asked in her usual gentle way, “How would someone hide knitting needles?”
“Seven pairs,” Opal repeated. “Fourteen needles. And they were in packages.”
“Maybe they put them in a violin or gun case,” Naomi suggested.
I asked, “Did either of you see anyone carrying either of those?”
They hadn’t, and neither had I.
“Maybe they stuck them up a sleeve?” I guessed.
Naomi raised a foot and pointed at her ankle. “Or into a sock.”
Opal’s trill of laughter was always contagious. “I hope whoever did it got poked. I hate to think of anyone shoplifting in Threadville. It can’t be our usual customers. They never do anything like that.”
There could always be a first time . . . “Remember those women fighting over remnants at Haylee’s table?” I asked.
“I didn’t see them,” Naomi answered, “but I heard them.”
“Harpies.” Opal seldom sounded that disgusted.
I reached out and chucked Lucy under the chin. “Do you know who either of them was?”
“No,” Opal said. “And after Haylee offered them similar fabrics, they both left without buying anything.”
I told Opal and Naomi that one of those women had seized a spool of thread before Georgina could close her hand around it. “But when I said I’d get Georgina an identical spool, the woman suddenly didn’t want thread or anything else. She went off—and I think she joined the woman she’d been fighting with earlier. It was like they were going around causing disturbances just for fun.”
Opal stroked Lucy. “Maybe they had a reason, like, I don’t know. This sounds silly, but what if they caused the disturbance at Haylee’s sale so that another accomplice could grab knitting needles from my table?”
“That doesn’t sound silly, Opal,” Naomi reassured her. “That’s as good a theory as any.”
I agreed. “They left the sale with a smaller woman in a pink plaid shirt. Cassie, Neil’s new assistant at the bakery, was wearing a shirt like that on Saturday.”
Opal stuck a forefinger up into the air. “Aha! Could Cassie be their accomplice and our shoplifter?” Lucy stretched out her neck and rubbed her gums on Opal’s finger.
Naomi looked pained. “I’ve only been in the bakery a few times since Cassie started working there, but she seems like a sweet girl. I can’t picture her shoplifting.”
“Or carrying a whole roll
of batting,” I pointed out.
Naomi turned a shade of pink that matched some of the triangles on her pieced dress. “It wasn’t a whole roll.”
“Was there enough left to wrap up a . . . you know, a person?” I hated to use upsetting words like “corpse” when talking to Naomi. She was too likely to take on other people’s worries and cares.
“There would have been enough for that.” She clapped her hand across her mouth and said between her fingers, “I hope Chief Smallwood doesn’t think that Opal or I had anything to do with killing anyone!”
“She couldn’t possibly,” I said.
Opal nodded and kissed the dark gray M on Lucy’s forehead.
But as I crossed the street toward In Stitches, I looked down the hill at the spot where Vicki’s yarnbombed cruiser had been parked. Detective Gartener hadn’t seemed positive that Opal was innocent of that yarnbombing.
Even worse, someone had fled that scene wearing a blotchy, whitish cape that floated like fabric.
Quilt batting?
I knew for certain that Opal and Naomi weren’t murderers, but would the police believe they weren’t involved?
Was someone trying to frame my friends for murder?
14
I DASHED THE REST OF THE WAY ACROSS the street, opened the gate, and started down into my side yard. Perched on the front edge of one of my Adirondack chairs near the foot of the hill, Vicki looked tiny and alone. I called to her and she ran up to me.
Knowing I needed to open In Stitches soon, I babbled about Naomi’s stolen quilt batting and Opal’s missing purple knitting needles.
Predictably, Vicki reminded me that I wasn’t supposed to be sticking my nose into a homicide investigation. Then she took out her notebook and had me go through it all again, slowly, while she wrote it down. “Can you describe the two women who caused the disturbances during the sidewalk sale?” she asked.
“The street was crowded, so I only caught glimpses. One of the fighting women was sort of scrawny, but a ropy sort of muscled kind of scrawny, and very tan. She wore a teal tank top and had straggly long blond hair. I got a look at her when she fussed about some thread I was selling. Her face was drawn, and her eyes were calculating and mean-looking.”
“What color?”
“I didn’t notice. The other woman’s hair was curly, an odd shade of maroon that clashed with her bright red polo shirt.”
“And you think these two women, the one with the maroon hair and the blonde, may have staged a fight to create a diversion so that a friend could steal quilt batting and knitting needles?”
I nodded. “And I think the friend may have been wearing a pink plaid shirt like the one Cassie, Neil’s new assistant at La Bakery, was wearing last night when she came to offer a free trial of cookies to Haylee and me. She was wearing a jacket over it, but—”
Vicki’s face went still, and she blanched. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned food to her quite yet. She again stared at my tall and bushy cedar hedge. “You know your fabrics—I suppose you’ll be telling me the fiber content of Cassie’s shirt next.”
I grinned. “When you were a little girl playing with toy guns and police cars, I was making doll clothes. The pink plaid shirt or shirts were mostly cotton, I’d guess, from the way the fabric draped.”
She rolled her eyes up to the sky before aiming that cool, direct gaze at me again. “Okay, but are you sure that the plaid you only glimpsed in a crowd on Friday night could be the same plaid you saw worn under a jacket last night?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “And from the little I’ve seen of Cassie, she doesn’t seem like a shoplifter.”
“Trust me, lots of people don’t seem like shoplifters. Or other criminals. We solve cases using facts and evidence, not appearance and hunches.”
I had to agree that her method was better. “But what woman wears the same shirt two days in a row? It can’t be Cassie.”
“You spout the oddest theories, Willow. Maybe it was Cassie, and she’s like me and wears identical shirts every day.” She paged through her notebook. “Okay. The batting and knitting needles apparently went missing Friday evening.” She pointed her pen down the hill toward the excavation. “But the body didn’t appear for at least twenty-four hours. I was sick when you and Haylee brought me through your backyard after the picnic last night, but I would have noticed a corpse.”
“I would have, too. And because of the dogs, I would have also noticed if the snow fencing had been knocked down.”
“It wasn’t,” she agreed. “And I saw the victim alive and well at the picnic. But that was a couple of hours before you brought me here.”
I held my breath, hoping she’d tell me who the victim was, but she didn’t. “The method of disposing of the body sounds premeditated,” I suggested.
“It sounds positively weird.”
I wanted to tell her that the yarnbomber might have worn a cloak made of quilt batting when he fled, but Gartener had asked me not to tell Vicki about the yarnbombing. She hadn’t been home yet, so she wouldn’t have seen whatever surprise he might have arranged for her. I clamped my lips shut.
The gate near the street clanged. Half expecting a murderer disguised in a quilt batting cloak, I whirled, but Detective Gartener strode down the hill toward us. “Need a ride home yet, Chief?” he asked Vicki. He turned his head so she couldn’t see his face but I could. He winked.
I managed not to laugh, but my smile might have been a little big. If he had put that car sweater on her cruiser in her garage, or maybe on her couch in her living room, his mind was on that yarnbomber, and he would likely connect the quilt batting with the yarnbomber’s escape getup. If not, I’d make sure he did, later. Or that Vicki did, after she saw the hand-knit creation, which, judging by the mischief I’d detected in Gartener’s wink, would be as soon as he could possibly engineer it.
She gave him a bleak smile. “I wish. Come down to the foot of Willow’s yard and see what I found.”
Dismissed, I charged up the hill, through my apartment, and to the shop’s front door in time to let Ashley in.
A venturesome kitten, the one with the bow tie, peered around the corner from the stairs leading to my apartment. Ashley swooped down, picked it up, and crooned to it. “Where did he come from?” she asked me.
The one with the mustache dashed to Ashley and began climbing her jeans. She picked that one up, too. Sally-Forth sat at Ashley’s feet and gazed up into her face.
I explained that Sally had found the two strays and brought them inside during the night.
Ashley’s eyes widened, maybe because Bow-Tie was clinging by his little claws to the top of her head and gnawing on her ponytail. “I thought your yard was a crime scene. Did Sally go out there?”
“I forgot and let her out. But I won’t forget again. Now it’s a worse crime scene than yesterday.”
“Huh?”
“You don’t want to know.” But I relented and told her.
Naturally, she was frightened and wanted to know who the victim was. She’d lived all of her sixteen years in Elderberry Bay, so if the victim was from the area, she probably knew him. We all probably did.
To distract her, I suggested, “Let’s make posters about the kittens.” We worked together until we got an adorable snapshot of them, then Ashley sat down at my computer and whipped up a poster. That girl had oodles of design talent.
Assuming that someone would be frantic about losing the kittens, I sent Ashley out to visit other stores and put up posters while I took over teaching the morning class. I loaded the kittens’ pictures into my embroidery software, then my students and I used the photos to create embroidery designs. We had great fun trying different fill stitches to make our embroidery resemble fur.
During our break, my students helped themselves to lemonade and cookies and greeted Sally and Tally, who had learned not to beg for cookies but had not learned to turn off their particularly cute and hopeful expressions.
The dogs’ pen ke
pt them corralled. The kittens could easily slip out between the upright spindles supporting the railing. Whenever they did, though, Sally whimpered, and they returned to her. Soon, looking extremely pleased with herself, my motherly dog had the kittens snuggled next to her on her doggie bed, which was now a doggie and kitty bed. I didn’t dare think about what would happen if the kittens’ owner claimed them. Sally might bring home baby skunks or porcupines to fill the void.
Ashley returned and phoned animal rescue organizations and local newspapers. I loved having a full-time assistant, especially one as capable as Ashley. I would miss her in September when she started eleventh grade and would be available to work only after school and on weekends.
Concentrating on my students’ many creative ways of making lifelike stitched designs of kittens, I almost forgot about the batting-wrapped body, but when I glanced out the back window, the morning’s horror came back in a startling rush. Strange-looking aliens covered from head to toe in baggy white outfits were wandering around my yard.
Of course my students noticed my pained grimace, and once again, I had to admit that a crime had been discovered on my property.
Rosemary, the driver of the Threadville tour bus that came from Erie, asked, “Crime? A death?”
I managed a curt nod.
Rosemary suggested that death didn’t necessarily mean murder. “Maybe someone collapsed from this flu that’s been going around.”
I asked her, “Has the flu been going around Erie, too?”
She gestured at the group surrounding us. “Not as far as I know, but I heard on the radio that lots of people in this corner of the county came down with stomach flu.”
“You’re all very brave,” I told Rosemary, “coming here when something may be infectious.”
“Ha! Nothing short of the plague could keep us away from Threadville.”
I grinned. Rosemary had a way of making me feel better. And of encouraging everyone to return to their embroidery machines.
