by Janet Bolin
We all crowded out the door behind her and Mike. Cold stabbed through my turtleneck, jeans, and fun fur-trimmed vest.
Rosemary yelled, “I didn’t sign the petition, either.” Nudging me, she murmured, “We come here to get away from them.” I guessed she meant men. Threadville had become a haven for shopaholic and fabriholic women. Did it bother Mike that the men around Elderberry Bay were becoming outnumbered?
I called after Mike, “You can’t just say my cottage is blighted and steal the land it’s on.”
Mike whipped around to face the crowd. “It’s encroaching on village property.”
“That’s impossible.” I tried to lower my suddenly shrill voice. “I have a survey.”
Mike’s smirk became self-righteous. “Your survey’s outdated. Ice jams cause floods during every thaw. Last year, ice knocked your shed an inch onto village property, and then you went and built your fence right on the trail. They both have to come down.”
I could have the fence moved, I supposed, but bulldozing Blueberry Cottage because it encroached a whole inch? I thought of myself as a nice, law-abiding citizen. Mike was carrying the law a little too far, and I couldn’t help wondering what his real agenda was. Besides, wouldn’t ice push the cottage away from the river, not toward it?
Sam Fedders, the octogenarian who owned the hardware store next to In Stitches, shouted out, “The river very seldom comes up that high, Mike Krawbach, and you know it.” Around him, retired farmers who spent their winter days around the potbellied stove in Sam’s store nodded their heads.
His eyes colder than ever, Mike glared at the crowd milling in the street and on both sidewalks. “If anybody wants to argue with the decisions of the zoning board, just go right ahead, and if you ever want permits to renovate your own properties, I’ll make certain you have a fight on your hands you won’t soon forget.”
“Mike, Mike, Mike,” Sam cautioned softly. “Don’t you be threatening us, now.”
Haylee spoke up. “The hiking trail will be ruined if motorized vehicles are allowed on it.”
Mike shot back, “Members of the ATV club won’t agree. They’ll love it. They bring more money into this town than a trickle of birdwatchers and dog walkers.”
How, by buying gas?
“You want to destroy Threadville,” Haylee accused.
That was too much for Mike. “And you want to destroy everything.”
Haylee laughed, the old farmers snickered, and warmth finally came into Mike’s eyes. Heat, actually. Anger flamed in them.
He obviously guessed that nearly everyone in the village knew about Haylee’s high-heeled hike home from his pickup truck that time, and that she had refused subsequent dates.
The Threadville tourists must have seen the flare in Mike’s eyes. Murmuring, the women crowded around Haylee, Opal, Naomi, Edna, and me. No one could be more protective than sisters-in-thread.
“Give us Haylee’s petition,” they demanded. “We want to remove our names.”
The woman in mauve raised her voice only slightly, but her words could be heard all up and down Lake Street. “Return Willow’s guest book pages to her.”
I turned in frustration to the cop. “He stole those pages from me. Either make him give them back or arrest him.” Arrest? Maybe I was getting a little too steamed up. Or not steamed up enough. I was about to freeze.
“C’mon, kiddo,” Uncle Allen finally said, taking Mike’s arm and escorting him toward the cruiser. To arrest him?
Uncle Allen merely let Mike help him into the driver’s seat, then drove away, his siren beginning its slow, sad mooing.
Mike swaggered to a black pickup truck and got into it. He still had the petition Haylee had crumpled up and the pages he’d torn from my guest book.
I imagined horrible, smelly restrooms at the foot of my backyard instead of a charming cottage. “If he knocks Blueberry Cottage down, I’ll kill him.” I didn’t realize I’d said it aloud until Haylee elbowed me. Kill him? I didn’t usually let anger get the best of me.
As if to rescue me from the crowd, which now included men wearing ATV club patches on their baseball caps, Opal looked at her watch and acted surprised. “We’re late for our classes.”
The women who attended my afternoon lesson were as attentive and enthusiastic as the morning’s students. Afterward, the Threadville tourists had time to browse before their bus was scheduled to leave. I demonstrated machines to potential customers, and one woman bought a top-of-the-line sewing machine to lug home on the bus. Judging by the competitive light in her friends’ eyes, I would soon sell more machines.
The tour bus left shortly after five. While the pups sniffed, ran, and wrestled in my backyard, I checked on Mike’s allegations that Blueberry Cottage encroached on municipal land. The board and batten siding stuck out about an inch beyond the foundation in front, but in back, the siding was even with the foundation’s edge. Maybe the cottage had been built that way in the first place, and Mike had made a wrong assumption. If he was right, though, my fence encroached more than the cottage did.
Erected between the trail and Blueberry Cottage, the fence had been good at keeping the dogs in but hadn’t been as successful at keeping vandals out. Sometime during the past twenty-four hours, someone had thrown about a half gallon of paint over the fence and onto Blueberry Cottage’s front porch, and now a thick and ugly aqua blob marred the porch’s gray floorboards I wondered where they’d thrown the can. Not in the river, I hoped. I planned to repaint the entire cottage after the renovations. First, I would have to find a way of overturning Mike’s zoning decision.
Far away, up the river, dogs barked.
Sally and Tally were no longer snuffling in the underbrush.
Worse, the gate separating my yard from the trail was wide open.
I panicked. “Tally-Ho! Sally-Forth!” Did they know their names yet? Calling, whistling, and rattling treats in my pocket, I sprinted upriver, the direction the barking had come from. I’d been warned that if the two littermates ever got away, they’d feel secure with each other and might not realize they were lost until too late and they could no longer find their way home to me. That probably explained how they became strays in the first place, something I never wanted to happen to them again. They had looked at me with their matching amber eyes, trusting me completely, and I had given those two darlings my heart.
And then someone opened my gate and let them escape.
It had to be Mike or one of his buddies from the ATV club. Mike had driven away early in the afternoon, but he wouldn’t have needed to go far to sneak back to the trail behind my place. He was the one who supposedly knew my property so well that he could tell when ice pushed my cottage an inch onto public land.
He could be miles away by now. So could my two innocent little dogs. “I’ll kill him,” I repeated, startling a pair of hikers. “Someone opened my gate and let my dogs out,” I explained.
The hikers hadn’t seen my dogs, but a flock of birders had. This time, my accusation was more specific. “Mike Krawbach helped my dogs escape from my yard.”
“Are your dogs wearing tags?” a woman asked.
“Yes, and my address is on their collars, so if you find them . . .”
“The poor dears.” She wiped at her eyes. “If we see them, we’ll bring them back.” Elderberry Bay had its share of sympathetic citizens.
But what if the dogs lost their collars? Or some horrible person like Mike Krawbach took them home and didn’t pamper them?
It was too dark to see. Telling myself that Sally and Tally could have returned home, and also telling myself not to think about the treacherous ice patches in the river, I jogged back. I’d left my gate open so the dogs could come in. I called them, but all I heard was my shop phone ringing. I ran up the hill and answered the extension in my apartment. Nobody. No messages, either.
Where were Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho? Staring out into the darkness toward the river, I kicked myself over and over.
I sho
uld have padlocked my gates. I didn’t dare leave to buy locks right now, though. The dogs might return, find they couldn’t come inside, and blithely run off.
Upstairs in my shop, the doorbell rang.
3
I CHARGED UP THE STAIRS AT A BREAKNECK pace. Sally and Tally pressed their noses against the glass of my front door. Breathless with relief, I threw the door open. They galloped inside, towing a man behind them. Without a glance at the man, I knelt and buried my face in cool fur, first Sally’s, then Tally’s. The wriggly pups whimpered and kissed me until my cheeks were wet from more than their kisses.
I forgot the man until the door latched, closing him and the dogs inside my shop with me. “I take it these two scamps belong to you,” he said.
I rose from my emotional greeting with my pups and blushed. Not because the man’s warm brown eyes radiated kindness and concern, but because I’d neglected to thank him for bringing the inquisitive pooches home. He knelt to cuddle the dogs. Luckily, he didn’t seem to mind being slobbered over.
A red pickup truck with white lettering on the door was parked underneath a streetlight outside. I stammered my thanks, adding, “I hope they didn’t track too much mud into your truck.”
“They were good. It was hard to see over the two of them, though. They sat on my lap.” He stood. I’m tall, but he had to look down to see into my face. His teasing grin made me wonder if he was telling the truth. If he was, my dogs had good taste in men. He untangled a rope looped through both collars, then held out his right hand. “Clay Fraser.”
I let his warm hand engulf mine. “Willow Vanderling.”
“You’re freezing.” He frowned toward the back of the room. “Your woodstove’s nearly out.”
So it was. I turned on lights, strode to the stove, and tossed in a piece of firewood. The cider on the stove’s soapstone top still radiated heat. “Want some cider?”
“Sounds good.”
I poured us each a mug and passed him a plate of molasses cookies, my favorite recipe.
“Your shop looks great,” he said, chowing down. “You’ve arranged everything the way I pictured it.”
The way he pictured it? Understanding beginning to dawn, I dodged past bolts of cloth for a better look through my huge front windows at the words on his truck. Fraser Construction. “Did you have anything to do with the renovations here?” I asked.
“Haylee described what you wanted, and I carried it out.”
I had to admire Haylee’s nerve. The first time I ever heard about this building was after it had been renovated, when Haylee told me I had to fly up from New York to see this store that had just come on the market. I arrived the next day, and as Haylee must have planned, I’d known immediately that I’d needed to open the embroidery boutique I’d always dreamed of owning.
In Threadville.
I’d fallen in love with the empty store and with my dogs at first sight. I sternly told myself I wasn’t about to fall in love with any man at first sight.
However, if I ever changed that rule, this might be the man I’d want to catch sight of. It was too late for first sight, I supposed, but I could fake it.
Standing near this obviously strong and capable man, I felt brave enough to tackle anything. “Would you be interested in renovating my cottage, the one beside the hiking trail?”
“Blueberry Cottage? Sure, if the inside’s anything like the outside.”
“Falling into disrepair?” I prompted.
“Architecturally important. It’s a great example of carpenter gothic.”
Important, Blueberry Cottage? How dare Mike Krawbach deny me that building permit!
Apparently, Clay knew about that, too. “I’ll help wangle permits. Krawbach gave Pete DeGlazier, Uncle Allen’s brother, a permit to build a gazebo upstream. That gazebo is on the flood plain. It’s also closer to the river than Blueberry Cottage is.”
That figured. Mike’s real reason for rejecting my application had been to commandeer some of my land for outhouses.
“We’ll go over Krawbach’s head,” Clay said.
“You can do that?” No wonder Haylee kept this man a secret.
“Mike was appointed zoning commissioner by the mayor, Irv Oslington. We’ll tell Irv about Mike’s favoritism.”
I shoved the plate of cookies at Clay.
He polished off the cookies and let the dogs lick his hands. “How did these two escape?”
“Someone opened my gate.” My voice became hard. “Mike Krawbach, probably. I wish the hardware store wasn’t closed for the night. I need padlocks so he can’t let my dogs out again.”
“In the evenings, the hardware store is more like a men’s club, but you can buy things. I’ll come with you.”
I wasn’t used to leaning on anyone and would have to be very stern with myself about relying on Clay Fraser. “Okay,” I said, planning to be stern with myself later, like maybe tomorrow. I locked the dogs into my apartment and zipped my parka. “Did you renovate the downstairs apartment, too?” I suspected I knew the answer.
Clay tilted his head like he was trying to figure something out. “Haylee relayed your instructions, and I followed them. Do you like it?” He opened the front door and held it for me.
“It’s gorgeous, all that white and natural light.” I was going to have to talk to Haylee about how she had “just happened” to find a shop and apartment I was sure to love.
The hardware store was so old that the sign above its door was made of wrought iron and said The Ironmonger . Inside, nothing besides merchandise seemed to have changed in a century. Even the lighting was dim, as if whoever had installed the bulbs had decided that anything brighter than the original gas lanterns might be too luxurious. The effect was cozy, giving the natural woodwork a charming patina. As in my shop, the floor was black walnut. The walls were lined with oak drawers, each with a handle above a small metal square framing a slip of paper with the drawer’s contents handwritten on it.
Several of the men sitting around the potbellied stove had witnessed my lunchtime fight with Mike. Two much younger men, Irv Oslington, the mayor, and Herb Gunthrie, our hunky postman, had now joined them. Herb waved his good arm and threw me one of his heartstopping, devil-may-care grins.
Haylee’s three mothers, who usually ate dinner together, taking turns in each other’s apartments, scooted into the hardware store right behind us. They were very protective of Haylee and, as I’d seen this afternoon when they streamed into my shop in my defense, had decided to protect me, too. Having seen Haylee roll her eyes at their lack of subtlety, I grinned to myself. Who or what were they trying to guard me from now?
I told Sam I needed two padlocks.
“Betcha I can find you a pair that use the same key, so’s you’ll only need to carry one. They stamp secret codes on the packages. Here, I’ll show you.”
Apparently, he’d owned The Ironmonger for so long he didn’t need much light to find his stock. He hauled packages of padlocks from a deep drawer underneath the counter and held one up where I could see it. “See this four digit number printed up here in this corner? All’s we have to do is find two packages with matching numbers and eureka! The locks will have matching keys.” He dumped packages of locks on a table near the old-timers and Irv and Herb. They immediately started shuffling through the packages and shouting numbers at each other.
Clay poked around in barrels of nuts and bolts.
Opal hugged me. “I guess we showed that Krawbach creature, didn’t we?” I wasn’t so sure. She looked me up and down. “Have you made an appointment with Dr. Wrinklesides yet?”
“Why?” I asked, startled. Had my anger at Mike turned my face permanently purple?
“He’s got lots of experience. He’s so good the coroner calls on him for assistance.”
How reassuring. With any luck, I wouldn’t need a doctor.
Edna sidled up to me. The top of her bright orange head came almost to my shoulder. “We were discussing you over cocktails,” she whi
spered. “You’re too thin. Like Haylee. You’re both wasting away. You could have an eating disorder.”
If I did, it was the same as Edna’s and Opal’s—being too fond of food.
Naomi, the bony one, edged between us. “Haylee and Willow both look great.”
Clay had moved on to spools of twine, chain, and wire. He had his back to us but must have heard every word. His shoulders shook. I wanted to laugh, too. The urge came out as a huge smile, which undoubtedly would have encouraged the three women to continue with their nagging if they hadn’t been distracted by the arrival of a tall, muscular, blue-eyed blond man.
“Ooh,” Opal whispered. “Now Willow really will have to go see Dr. Wrinklesides.”
“Why?” Edna asked.
Opal elbowed her. “She’s about to break out in hives.”
Edna looked bewildered, but Naomi giggled. Shielding her mouth with her hand, she stage-whispered, “It’s that beekeeper, the one who’s sweeter than his honey.” The three women gathered around me and a carton of windshield scrapers.
Throwing an apologetic glance at my fierce chaperones, the beekeeper spoke to me over Edna’s head. “I’m sorry about my cousin. He doesn’t have any manners.”
Edna’s lips thinned. “You’re that Mike Krawbach’s cousin?”
“Smythe bought his hat and gloves at my store,” Opal said. “They look great, Smythe.”
The hat was a whimsical stocking cap, knit in yellow and black stripes, complete with a hand-knit stinger at the crown. “Smythe Castor,” he introduced himself, removing his yellow and black striped gloves and looking deep into my eyes. “Haylee told me all about you.” Trust Haylee to know all the handsomest men in the county.
“What’re you doing here, Smythe?” Herb yelled. “I thought you were in Erie.”
Smythe smiled. “I’m on my way there this very minute.”
“And you said to hold your mail for three days?” Herb asked.
“That’s right.” Smythe’s yellow parka perfectly matched the yellow stripes in his hat and gloves.
