Sins and Needles
Needlecraft Mysteries by Monica Ferris
CREWEL WORLD
FRAMED IN LACE
A STITCH IN TIME
UNRAVELED SLEEVE
A MURDEROUS YARN
HANGING BY A THREAD
CUTWORK
CREWEL YULE
EMBROIDERED TRUTHS
SINS AND NEEDLES
Anthologies
PATTERNS OF MURDER
Sins and Needles
Monica Ferris
BERKLEY PRIME CRIME BOOKS, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr. Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
SINS AND NEEDLES
This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2006 by Mary Monica Kuhfeld writing as Monica Ferris.
Cover art by Mary Ann Lasher.
Cover design by George Long.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-0608-9
This book has been cataloged with the Library of Congress.
Contents
Acknowledgments
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Flag of the United States of America
Acknowledgments
The idea for this book came from Todd Warner, of Mahogany Bay in Orono, Minnesota. I can’t tell you more about it here, because that would give too much of the plot away. I would also like to thank Marge Scheftel and Jean Deggerdorf, who live on the Big Island of Lake Minnetonka. And Tanya Dee Smith for looking just like someone else I know when the sun is at her back. Oh, and Luci Zahrey, Texan.
One
IT was mid-June, and the sun was at its northernmost position in the sky. Its beams filled the big front window of Betsy Devonshire’s needlework shop, Crewel World, drowning the careful effects of the lighting inside, especially near the front.
Betsy was sitting behind the checkout desk, shielding her eyes from the glare with one hand while going down a list of customers signed up for a knitting class. Most were beginners who had knitted all the simple scarves in exotic yarns they could possibly use and wanted something more challenging.
So Betsy had hired Rosemary Kosel to teach her famous beginner sweater class, and her store manager, Godwin, to teach the fine art of knitting socks. Rosemary’s class, already full, was to begin the last Thursday of next month, but Godwin’s was starting in a few days, and he needed another student to make the class pay for itself. Instructors were worthy of their hire, but Betsy could not afford to pay for instructors out of shop profits. Godwin was charging forty-five dollars for three ninety-minute sessions. In that time, quick students would have one sock finished and everyone else would know how to finish it.
Betsy checked the mail to see if there was another registration. There was, but it was for Rosemary’s class. She sighed and went over the list of both classes to see that she had the mailing address, phone number, and e-mail address of each student. Well, Mrs. Shipman had no e-mail address; she wouldn’t even have a computer in her house. Betsy was about to put the stack into her desk drawer when the door chimed. She looked up to see who was coming in.
With the strong sun behind her, the woman was barely more than a silhouette, but Betsy recognized her sturdy outline and the blond tumble of curls around her shoulders. “Well, good morning, Jan! That twenty-eight count Laguna fabric came in. Do you still want a piece?”
The woman entered the shop, speaking in a Texas drawl. “I’m not Jan. I’m Lucille Jones. Remember me, from Trinity Church on Sunday?”
Betsy’s eyes widened. “Why, of course, Mrs. Jones! I’m so sorry! But you wore your hair up on Sunday—even so, funny I didn’t see how remarkable the resemblance is.”
Now she remembered Lucille Jones and her husband—what was his name? Robert, that’s it. The first words out of his mouth over coffee after the service, spoken in an even more pronounced drawl than his wife’s, had been, “Call me Bobby Lee. Everyone who knows me does.” He was tall, deeply tanned, good looking, and he’d worn to church what every good ol’ country Texan does: stiff new jeans, a western shirt, cowboy boots, and a clean black cowboy hat, held in one hand. It was probably rude of Betsy to be so surprised to learn he was a surgical nurse at a prestigious hospital in Houston.
His uncommon costume and disarming manners drew her attention, which was another reason she hadn’t paid close attention to his wife.
Lucille was standing at her checkout desk right now, waiting for her to stop woolgathering. When Betsy’s eyes came back into focus, Lucille smiled. “I take it this Jan is a regular customer?”
“Oh, yes, she’s in here a lot.”
“But you still thought I was her.” Lucille had a twinkle in her blue eyes. “I must look a whole lot like her.”
“Well, I can tell the difference now that you’re not outlined by the sun coming in the window, but you do look alike.” Both were in their forties, had sturdy builds, curly blond hair, and DMC floss color 996 blue eyes.
“They say everyone has a twin somewhere in this world, so maybe she’s mine.” Lucille looked around without moving. “This is pretty nice. You told me about your shop, and I came to see what you have in knitting yarn. I’m looking for something fancy, maybe that kind that looks like fur? I want to knit one of those twirly scarves for my goddaughter, who’s going into high school this fall.”
As she led Lucille toward the yarns, Betsy said, “Well, I don’t have as large a selection as Three Kittens or
Needlework Unlimited, but I do lean toward the exotic. What color are you after?”
“Something mixed, you know, three or four shades of a color. Sydney likes green or turquoise. Oh, this one is pretty!” She took a fat skein of yarn from Betsy’s hand, a dense plush in shades of medium and light green. Then her eye was caught by a group of skeins in a basket. “Say, you’ve got eyelash yarn. I just love it. Do you think it would look nice knit together with this?” She held up the plush skein.
“Yes, I do,” said Betsy.
A few minutes later, Betsy was ringing up a sale that included two skeins of the plush, two eyelash, two of a beautiful merino wool, a book of patterns, three pairs of bamboo needles in the larger sizes, and a fabric knitting bag to carry it all. Lucille handed Betsy a credit card and said, “This Jan you said I look like—what’s she like? Is she nice?”
“Well, like you, she’s a knitter. But she goes to the other end of the scale from you. She likes size zero or even double-and triple-zero needles. She knits teeny little beaded bags and lace. She also does counted cross-stitch. Her latest project is a Persian rug stitched on silk gauze, sixty count.”
“I like counted cross-stitch, too, but give me a nice eighteen-count linen. What eyes she must have!”
Betsy laughed as she handed over the receipt for Lucille’s signature. “She has excellent vision, but she also has a Dazor light.” The Dazor featured a big magnifying glass surrounded by a full-spectrum light; looking through it was like sitting in a window full of sunlight with Superman eyes. Used by advanced cross-stitchers working on high-count fabric, it was also a godsend to stitchers over forty.
“And she looks like me?”
The insistent question made Betsy frown just a little, but she obediently considered Lucille’s face and acknowledged, “You could be sisters.”
“What’s her last name? Where does she live?”
Starting to feel really uncomfortable, Betsy said, “I’m sorry, I don’t give out customers’ addresses.”
Lucille seemed instantly abashed. “No, no, it’s all right,” she said hastily. “It’s me who should be sorry. But let me explain. My mama died a year ago February—Daddy died about five years before that. I was their only child, and as I was going through their papers, I found adoption documents! Well, I was sure floored! I had no idea! But after I picked myself up, I thought about it and finally decided to search for my biological roots. I found out I was left at an orphanage in Minneapolis, but it was like hitting a brick wall trying to get further than that. I finally told Bobby Lee—he’s my husband; he was with me on Sunday—”
Betsy nodded.
“I told him we were spending our vacation in Minnesota.” She smiled in a way that showed she had had to overcome some objections on his part. “But you know something?”
“What?” asked Betsy.
“I like it up here. It’s really different from Houston, but it feels…I don’t know…right. It’s like I’ve come home, even though I’ve never been here before. Do you think that means my biological parents really are from here?”
Betsy didn’t believe in genetic memory, but she said politely, “I suppose it could mean that. How did you end up in Texas? Were your parents originally from here, too?”
Lucille laughed. “Oh, my, no! My mother was a proud Daughter of the Confederacy, and my father’s great-great-uncle died at the Alamo.” She leaned closer to confide in an amused undertone, “Though there’s a rumor that his wife’s brother fought with Santa Anna.”
Betsy laughed.
Lucille opened her wallet to put her credit card away. “I know my birth date, so I’ve been checking at hospitals, but so far I haven’t found any record of an unmarried woman giving birth on that day.”
Betsy’s eyebrows lifted. “Maybe—” She hesitated.
But Lucille broke in, her tone inviting, “What? Tell me. One of the ladies at church said you’re like a female Sherlock Holmes, so detect for me.”
Betsy, wondering vaguely which of her friends had spilled those beans, said, “Well, this isn’t detection, it’s more like deduction. Maybe your mother was married but died in childbirth. Sometimes a father feels overwhelmed and can’t deal with a newborn.”
Lucille stared at her as if Betsy had said something ridiculous. “No,” she said firmly. “My biological mother is not dead.”
Betsy did not, of course, want to start an argument, but Lucille must have read something in her eyes, because she said, touching the center of her breast, “I can feel it, right here. She is alive, she’s around here somewhere, and I’m going to find her.”
Two
BETSY said she was not angry, and she wasn’t. But she was aggravated.
“It’s your own fault,” said Godwin. “If you had told me about her, I wouldn’t’ve told her about the class. But I needed one more person, and she’s a knitter, and I didn’t know.
“Anyhow, what harm can it do?” he continued, his stronger tone indicating a frailer argument. “She’s interested in meeting her twin. I’d be, too, if someone told me there was this person who looked just like me.” He drew himself up and turned sideways. “As if!” he added, sure there was not a handsomer profile anywhere.
As usual, Betsy was amused at his vanity, which got her past her annoyance. “Oh, you’re probably right. And it wasn’t as if she seemed angry or confrontational. She’s just curious. Anyway, she’s only here on vacation, so even if she turns out to be a nuisance, pretty soon she’ll go home, and it’ll all be over.”
But her own rationalizations didn’t entirely ease Betsy’s mind, so she decided to sit in on the first class to see how Lucille behaved toward Jan Henderson—and how Jan took it.
The class was scheduled to begin at six thirty. Godwin stood in the back, tugging at his light blue polo shirt, clearing his throat, smoothing his hair, buffing his shoes on the back of his khaki Dockers, preparing to make an entrance.
It was Betsy’s role to unlock the front door—the shop had closed at five—and let the students in.
First to arrive, at six fifteen, was Doris Valentine. She had the least distance to travel, as she lived in an apartment on the second floor of the building that housed the shop.
But she was followed in short order by Katie Frazier, a redhead with hazel green eyes in a sleeveless maternity blouse, and then by Jan, Katie’s aunt. After Jan came Phil Galvin, a senior citizen in jeans and a chambray shirt, the pocket of which held his four double-pointed bamboo knitting needles. In one gnarled hand he held a big ball of green lightweight yarn. “Good evening!” he said, in a loud, hoarse voice.
Last came Lucille, entering shyly, unsure of her welcome. Her bright hair was pulled back with a scrunchie. She wore a dark blue T-shirt with a loon painted on it, and she carried a lavender Crewel World plastic bag. Her blue eyes flashed to the table, then fastened on Jan.
Jan was talking to Doris, so it was Phil who first noticed her. His eyes opened wide. He looked across at Jan, then back at Lucille. He leaned a little sideways and poked Doris on the arm and said in what he probably thought was a murmur, “Lookit over there!”
Doris looked at Lucille and, with eyebrows raised, smiled in pleased surprise. “Now that is amazing!” she said to Phil.
Jan also looked at Lucille. “Hello,” she said, frowning a little at her.
Lucille stood captured in shyness, her fair complexion pinking under the stares of the others. Betsy took pity on her and said warmly, “Lucille, welcome! Come on over, there’s plenty of room!”
Lucille smiled gratefully at Betsy and came to the table. She took a seat across from Jan, next to Kate.
Phil said, “Say, Lucille—is that your name?”
“Yes, sir,” said Lucille in her western drawl, pulling out a chair. “Lucille Jones.”
“Jones—does that mean you aren’t related to Jan here?”
“I don’t think so.” Lucille studied Jan for a few moments. “But we do look alike, don’t we?”
“You sure
do!” said Doris.
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Jan.
“Suppose so?” said Katie. “Aunt Jan, what’s the matter with you? Can’t you see it’s like you’re twins?”
“Do you really think so?” Jan, like most people, couldn’t see the resemblance between herself and this other person.
“Oh, not twins,” said Lucille quickly. “But—well, sisters, maybe?”
Jan smiled. “A secret sister—there’s a concept you don’t hear much about.”
Lucille chuckled. “Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it. Unless you’re adopted, too?”
“Nope. I’m my own mother’s daughter, and I think she would’ve told me if she gave one of her other children away. I mean, what a great threat: ‘I gave your sister away, and if you don’t straighten up, I’ll give you away, too!’”
“Almost as good as, ‘I brought you into the world and I can take you out of it.’ Ah, for the happy days of having little ones in the house,” Lucille said.
Kate was scandalized by Lucille’s comment. “You never in your life said that to a child of yours!” she said.
“No. But I came close a couple of times.”
“Me, too,” said Jan. “I still might use it. My younger one is only sixteen.”
Phil, who’d been listening to all of this, spoke up. “You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked Lucille. “The way you talk and all.”
“No, I’m from Texas. But you know something?” She looked around the table. “Actually, I think I look more like people up here than back home. I mean, I never saw so many natural blondes in my life before!”
Sins and Needles Page 1
