Thread End: An Embroidery Mystery

by Amanda Lee

  “Yeah. Thanks. I’ll call her.” He turned around and stalked toward the door.

  “All right. I do think that’s your best bet.”

  He didn’t answer and he didn’t turn back. He just went out the door and once again headed toward Nellie’s shop.

  I immediately called Ted. As soon as he answered, I told him about my visit with Special Agent Brown.

  “Why he thought Nellie and I were Mr. Rogers and . . . whoever Mr. Rogers’s neighbors were is beyond me,” I said.

  “Why he feels the need to go into the woman’s shop without her being present is beyond me,” he said. “Special Agent Brown is getting ready to have some backup whether he wants it or not. Sit tight and stay in your shop. Manu and I are on our way.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I saw Ted and Manu arrive at Nellie’s shop. I so wanted to know what was going on. I hurried to the bathroom and got a paper towel and some window cleaner. The door was so smudgy! Well, it was!

  As I cleaned the window—I did!—I saw Nellie and Clara arrive at Scentsibilities. I wondered who’d called them, Special Agent Brown or Manu and Ted.

  “Good morning, Marcy!”

  It was Christine Willoughby coming from the direction of MacKenzies’ Mochas.

  “Hi!” I went back inside and held the door open for her.

  “What’s going on up there?” she asked.

  “Oh, is something going on?” I took one last look in the direction of Nellie’s shop. “I have no idea.”

  “But you’re dying to know, aren’t you?”

  “Yes!” I said.

  We both started laughing.

  “I came to get a couple more of those angel ornament kits,” she said. “I got the hang of it and really enjoyed it. In fact, I finished it up last night and wanted to get one the same style to make for my neighbor and a different one for myself.”

  As Christine was picking out her ornaments, George Vandehey came in.

  “Hi, George. I’ll be with you in just a minute.”

  “Thanks.” He went to the sit-and-stitch square and sat down. “Where’s Angus?”

  “I was wondering that very thing,” Christine said.

  I explained to them that I’d had somewhere to go before work this morning and didn’t have time to go home and get him. “Ted said he’ll pick him up for me at lunchtime.”

  Christine paid for her angels, told me to hug Angus for her, and then she left.

  I joined George in the sit-and-stitch square. “How are you this morning?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have some exciting news. I went by the police station before coming here, and I was told that Manu and Ted were out,” he said. “When I saw Ted’s car, I hoped he was here.”

  “He and Manu both are up the street at Nellie Davis’s shop at the moment. I’ll text him and ask them to come talk with you when they finish up.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  I took out my phone and sent the text.

  George leaned forward. “There was something else on the flash drive . . . something I’d dismissed before.”

  “Having to do with the Cézanne?”

  “No. It had to do with the theft of the Padgett Collection.” He spread his hands. “Here’s what happened. I opened the file when I first started decoding the information on the drive. It was all text, and I went on to the photographs. I was so eager to find something to at least partially exonerate my father that I latched onto the photos and the coded messages that corresponded to each one.”

  “Of course,” I said. “That’s perfectly understandable.”

  “But then last night as I was thinking I needed to get back home, I missed Dad so much. I wanted to remember him and dwell on some of the good memories we had.” He paused, collecting his emotions. “Anyway, the message in that first file was composed using a double-transposition cipher.”

  “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “It’s one of the most difficult ciphers to decode, but Dad taught me and my best friend how to do it when we were in middle school.” He smiled. “It let us send notes to each other about girls without the fear that anyone other than the two of us would know what was being said.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “It is. In fact, my friend and I still send Christmas greetings to each other using the cipher every year. But I’m getting myself off track. I immediately recognized Dad’s message as a double-transposition cipher. It took a few hours, but I was eventually able to crack the code.”

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  “It’s odd. With the exception of the title, the message is actually a series of quotes from Act III, Scene I of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.” He took a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Here. Take a look.”

  At the top of the page was written Treachery—Anderson Padgett Textile Collection.

  Beneath that was this passage:

  Caesar: The ides of March are come.

  Soothsayer: Ay, Caesar; but not gone.

  Caesar: No, not gone, Langford.

  I frowned. “I don’t remember a Langford being in that play.”

  “I looked it up. The entire line is bogus,” said George. “My sister does live in Langford on Vancouver Island. That’s why at first I thought this message pertained in some way to the theft of the Cézanne, even though the title makes it clear it refers to the robbery of the Padgett Collection.”

  I was still wondering why Geoffrey Vandehey would have added an extra line to his message as I read the next passage.

  Caesar: Et tu, Brute?

  —

  Brutus: Where’s the teacher?

  Cinna: Here, quite confounded with this mutiny, as are Beatrice, Benedick, and the guard.

  “‘Where’s the teacher?’ is a misquote,” George said. “In the original, it says, ‘Where’s Publius?’”

  “So when he says ‘the teacher,’ he’s talking about himself,” I said. “He’s telling us that Anderson Padgett was betrayed by his friend . . . Simon Benton.”

  “But how could Dad possibly know that?”

  “There is no Beatrice or Benedick in Julius Caesar,” I said. “Beatrice and Benedick were tricked in Much Ado About Nothing when they overheard that each was in love with the other.” I paced as I thought. “I think your dad is telling us that during one of his visits to the museum, he overheard Simon plotting with one of the security guards. They were both spending a lot of time there prior to the exhibit opening.”

  “You’re right!” George exclaimed. “Dad had to have overheard that other man plotting against Mr. Padgett.”

  I saw Simon Benton getting ready to come inside the shop. “Mr. Benton!”

  “Yes . . . yes, that’s it,” George, whose back was to the door, said as Mr. Benton walked inside. “Mr. Benton must’ve stolen his friend’s collection with the help of at least one of the security guards.”

  “You must believe yourself to be very astute,” said Mr. Benton.

  George stood and whirled to face him. “I know what you did! You stole from someone who considers you a friend, and you killed my father!”

  “You have no proof,” Mr. Benton said.

  “I’m getting ready to talk with Chief Singh and Detective Nash, and they’re going to find enough proof to put you away for a long time,” George said. “In fact, they’re at Nellie Davis’s shop right now. What did you leave there when you threatened her? Does it have your fingerprints on it?”

  “She saw you,” I said. “That Friday night . . . Nellie looked out into the alley, and she saw you. That’s why she acted so weird every time she caught the merest glimpse of you. She recognized you.”

  “You couldn’t simply let well enough alone, could you, Mr. Vandehey? Neither could your father.” He took a small pistol from the pocket of his linen jacket. “And now you’ve dragged poor Ms. Singer into your misfortune. Ms. Singer, if you please, stand and precede Mr. Vandehey to the back door of your establishment.”

>   “Let’s talk this over,” I said. “Neither Mr. Vandehey nor I want this to go badly.”

  “Please don’t insult my intelligence by promising not to tell,” said Mr. Benton.

  He waved the gun in a gesture that I knew very well meant that I was to stop talking and start walking. I got up and began slowly moving toward the back door of the shop. I knew that George and I were in a no-win predicament. If we cried out in the hope that Ted and Manu would hear us two buildings away, we risked getting shot and having Simon Benton escape out the back. If we did nothing, we would assuredly be shot at some remote location where help was much farther away than Nellie Davis’s aromatherapy shop.

  “You don’t want to be rash, Mr. Benton,” I said. “Please take us somewhere, lock us up, and then escape. At least, give us a fighting chance.”

  “That much I can do,” he said. “Now, let’s go.”

  I wasn’t foolish enough to think he’d actually give us that fighting chance. I lifted up a silent prayer that either George or I would figure out a way to get us out of this predicament alive.

  Suddenly, from the direction of the counter, a woman screamed. In my hysteria, my first thought was that it was Jill and that she’d come to life to save us.

  The woman screamed again. It was Mom. She was calling me.

  As Mr. Benton spun around to see who was at the counter, George Vandehey saw his opportunity to wrap his arms around the slender man, pinning them to his sides. They continued to struggle as I tried to both stay out of the way of the gun and find something with which to disarm Mr. Benton.

  In the meantime, the phone kept screaming.

  I ran to the door and screamed, “Help us!” as loudly as I could. Ted came running, and Manu wasn’t far behind.

  Ted drew his gun on Mr. Benton. “Drop your weapon. Now! Don’t make me shoot you.”

  Mr. Benton dropped the gun onto the floor.

  “Mr. Vandehey, get over here out of the way, please,” Manu said as he walked over to Mr. Benton. He brought Mr. Benton’s hands around to his back and handcuffed him while Ted kept the gun trained on Benton.

  As Manu walked Benton outside and put him in the car, Ted holstered his gun and pulled me to him.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I am now.”

  Epilogue

  It was my first trip to Vancouver Island. Langford was a beautiful wooded area, and the rehabilitation center where Elizabeth Vandehey Hart resided was secluded and peaceful. Ted and I had gone to visit Libby at George’s invitation.

  The three of us stepped into the great room, where Libby awaited us. Classical music played softly over a speaker system. There was no television in this room, but George told us that the center had a projection room where residents could watch movies two or three times a week. It was believed that most of the patients would find news programs upsetting, so regular television was prohibited. George was glad of that. His sister had never learned of their father’s theft.

  That’s probably why no one at the Ridgeview Rehabilitation Center appeared to realize that the painting that hung on the wall behind the baby grand piano was a priceless Cézanne. Since the painting was stolen from an individual, and since said individual had agreed that the rehabilitation center could keep the painting, it would—at least for now—remain where it was.

  As I looked at the Cézanne, I took Ted’s hand and thought of Mr. and Mrs. Cummings . . . and Mr. Padgett . . . and Dr. Vandehey, who knew how much his daughter would love this painting.

  Sissy—or Portia—Cummings had been convicted of insurance fraud. It had been she who had given Dr. Vandehey all the details of the night they would be at Chad Jr.’s recital, the code to the security alarm, and the money. She really had detested the painting and had hoped Chad would take the insurance money and replace the Cézanne with something she found more aesthetically pleasing. There wasn’t enough evidence to convict Chad Cummings of any wrongdoing. I wasn’t sure whether or not he’d been complicit in the theft, but I was happy that Chad Jr. didn’t lose both his parents. Sissy was currently serving sixty months in federal prison while Chad was left to pay the fines and restitution. Since he allowed the painting to remain in the possession of the rehab center, he was given a lesser amount of restitution.

  Under interrogation, Simon Benton had admitted that one of the security guards had facilitated his theft of the Padgett Collection. The collection was found intact, with the exception of the kilim rug in which Dr. Vandehey’s body was wrapped, in a storage locker owned by the security guard.

  After adding his final message to the flash drive, Geoffrey Vandehey had gone to the museum to try to convince Simon Benton not to steal from his friend. As he’d done with George and me, when threatened with exposure, Benton had pulled out a gun. He’d shot Dr. Vandehey in the heart. The professor had been killed instantly. It just so happened that Mr. Benton and the security guard had been about to roll up the kilim rug and Dr. Vandehey fell onto it. They rolled him up in it and dropped his body in the alley behind the Seven-Year Stitch. They’d planned to take him farther but were afraid that his blood would leak onto the other textiles, making them worthless.

  Once the Padgett Collection was recovered, Anderson Padgett donated it to the Tallulah Falls Museum and Historical Society. Josh had been given a raise and had finally stopped being so paranoid about losing his job.

  Ted and I talked with Libby for a little while and then left her alone with her brother. We were walking hand in hand along a nature trail near the rehab center thinking about how good life was when a sudden shrill scream erupted.

  It was Mom. She was calling to see how we liked Vancouver Island.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Amanda Lee lives in southwest Virginia with her husband and two beautiful children, a boy and a girl. She’s a full-time writer/editor/mom/wife and chief cook and bottle washer, and she loves every minute of it. Okay, not the bottle washing so much, but the rest of it is great.

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