Let it Sew (12 page)

Sure enough, the woman’s hand emerged from the purse with a cat-shaped key chain and
an assortment of keys. “As sweet as they’d always known Brian to be, I don’t think
Parker ever really believed Brian could learn much beyond simple daily tasks. But
Jerry Lee proved otherwise. I think it woke Parker up to the notion that people like
Brian could do a lot if they were exposed to more things. So he funded the opening
of the center and turned over the creative side of the venture to Jerry Lee, who,
from what I’ve been told, has done incredible things with it over the last few years.”

Tori thought back to the center and its various rooms and offerings, her head automatically
nodding as she did. “Margaret Louise, Leona, and I took a tour of it not too long
ago. It really is something special. You should drive out there one day and see for
yourself. The audiobook room Jerry Lee set up is absolutely amazing.”

With a quick zip of her purse, Dixie collected the rest of her belongings and pushed
the stool into its proper position beneath the keyboard tray of the branch’s main
computer. “Then I guess I better get out there soon. Before the audiobook room and
everything else disappears.”

“Disappears?” Tori echoed.

“Now that Parker and Charlotte are both dead, the Prince will be taking the throne
any day now. And if there was one thing Ethan despised more than being wrong, it was
watching his father put more faith in Brian than in him.”

“And so he’ll strike back by closing down a center that has nothing to do with him?”

“If he owns the company that’s backing it, he will,” Dixie mused en route to the front
door. When she reached it, Dixie turned and offered a smile. “So I’ll see you tonight
at Rose’s, right?”

Tori closed the gap between them in anticipation of bolting the door in the woman’s
wake. “I’ll be there. With our Christmas sewing project.”

“The way you’re incorporating Margaret Louise into our event is mighty kind, Victoria.”
Dixie tightened her grip on her car keys. “Mighty kind, indeed.”

“I don’t know about kind, I just hope it helps make her a little happier. Like volunteering
her cooking expertise at the Devereaux Center will.”

A cloud passed across Dixie’s face. “If Ethan does what I think he’s going to do,
closing that center is going to hurt a lot of folks besides just Brian and folks like
Brian.”

“You mean like Margaret Louise?”

“Yes . . . and Frieda, too.”

She drew back in surprise. “Frieda?”

Dixie pushed against the metal lever and stepped outside, stopping the answering close
of the door with her back. “Now that Charlotte is gone, Frieda no longer has a patient
to look after. And if Ethan closes the center without so much as a look backward,
she won’t be able to go back and volunteer there as an onsite health professional
while she waits for work again, either. Which gives him a two-for-one in the revenge
department.”

“Ethan didn’t like Frieda?” she guessed.

“He despised her, quite frankly.” Stepping forward, Dixie jangled her keys at Tori
in a makeshift wave. “But trust me, the feeling was more than mutual.”

Chapter 15

There was something about the sound of women’s chatter that had always made Tori smile,
whether she was hiding behind a sofa listening as her great-grandmother played pinochle
with the ladies from the neighborhood or simply sitting next to a table teeming with
old high school chums at a coffee shop in Chicago. She’d always assumed it was the
memory of her great-grandfather covering his ears and his refusal to rat her out that
had caused the reaction. But the man had been long gone by the time she’d moved to
Chicago and he most certainly wasn’t winking at her in the middle of Rose Winters’s
sewing room, either.

Now, looking back, Tori knew it had had nothing to do with anything besides the sound
of friendship. It hadn’t mattered that she was merely a witness at the time. Happiness
was happiness, and it had a way of making a person smile.

Yet now that she was part of the friendship sound, she couldn’t help seeing the difference.
Her smiles of old had been based on hope, while the smile on her face at that very
moment was based on insider knowledge. An insider knowledge that filled her heart
and made her whole.

“Would you get a look at Victoria, Mama?” Margaret Louise crowed. “She looks as happy
as a clam at high tide, don’t she?”

Tori looked to her left in time to see Annabelle Elkin nod her head slowly, the elderly
woman’s pronounced cheekbones a near perfect match to those of Margaret Louise’s twin
sister, Leona, and the youngest grandchild bouncing on Melissa’s lap in a far corner
of the room.

“Happy,” Annabelle repeated in a whisper. “Happy as a clam at high tide.”

“My sister is right. You’re looking even happier than normal, dear,” Leona proclaimed
from her spot between Georgina and Beatrice on the sofa beneath the plate glass window
overlooking Rose’s famed garden. “Is there something we should know?”

“No, I’m just—”

“Perhaps you’ve rethought the color of our bridesmaid gowns to something more flattering?”
Leona lowered her travel magazine to her side and rested a hand atop a sleeping Paris,
peering at Tori above the rim of her stylish glasses as she did. “If not, may I suggest
a royal blue? I look magnificent in royal blue. Or even a hunter green, which would
play up the hint of green in Paris’s eyes?”

“Victoria is not going to select her wedding colors based on a rabbit,” Rose hissed
from her cozy armchair beneath the gooseneck lamp. “And you’re one of
eight
bridesmaids, Leona. What looks spectacular on you might not look spectacular on me
or Beatrice or Debbie or Melissa or Dixie or Georgina or Nina or your sister.”

“There’s no need to worry about the ones no one will be looking at, you old goat.”
Leona rolled her eyes skyward before bringing them back down to focus on Tori. “I
can see that now is not the time to talk details, so if it’s not wedding plans, what
has you looking so . . . so
gleeful
.”

Tori nibbled back the laugh that would surely land her in hot water with Paris’s mother
and opted instead to simply finish the answer she’d been trying to give when Leona
cut her off in the first place. “I’m just happy to be here. With all of you.”

“And the feelin’ is mutual, Victoria.” Margaret Louise pushed her feet against the
hardwood floor and scooted her wheeled chair still closer to the couch Tori shared
with Annabelle. “Can we tell ’em?”

Ignoring the eight sets of eyes she felt trained on her face, Tori waited for Margaret
Louise to explain her question.

“You know . . . about”—Margaret Louise looked toward Melissa and Molly Sue and lowered
her voice a notch—“Mrs. Claus and the cookies and the decorations?”

“And the stockings,” Dixie reminded. “Don’t forget about the stockings. We only have
two weeks to get them all done.”

She felt the smile as it spread across her face and knew it matched the one Margaret
Louise sported. “Ahhh, yes. The library’s very first Cookies and Books with Mrs. Claus
event.” Pulling her gaze back to the center of the room, Tori took a moment to look
at each and every one of her friends before sharing the details of the upcoming family
event. When she was done, she pulled Dixie’s stocking sample from her tote bag and
held it up for all to see. “Margaret Louise and Dixie were thinking that it might
be neat to have a little stocking like this to give to each child who comes to the
event.”

Debbie squealed. “Oooh, can we put things inside it? I think a candy cane or two and
maybe a small crayon box would fit in one of those stockings.”

“That’s what we’re thinkin’, ain’t it, Victoria?”

“If we can get some donations, sure. But first we’re going to need to make about fifty
of these stockings to be on the safe side. Do we think that’s doable?”

“I think we should make closer to a hundred.” Rose pointed at the stocking then motioned
for Tori to send it around the room for everyone to see. “Better to be safe than sorry
when children are involved. If we have extras when it’s over, we can decide what to
do with the leftovers then.”

Rose was right. Too much was always better than too little.

And besides, the stocking pattern was a simple one.

“Looks just like one I made last week.” Margaret Louise turned the sample stocking
over in her hands before handing it across the circle to her daughter-in-law, Melissa.
“We got enough fabric?”

Tori nodded. “I had two full bolts of Christmas fabric in my bin at home, so I brought
one of them with me tonight. If we cut carefully, there should be more than enough
to make a hundred stockings.”

That was all it took for the divvying of tasks to begin. Debbie volunteered to cut
appropriately sized sections from the bolt, Rose shuffled off to her personal copier
to make copies of the simple pattern, and all remaining members of the circle began
searching through their sewing boxes to locate a pair of scissors and the best thread
for the project.

For the next hour they pinned and cut and sewed one small stocking after the other,
adding those they finished to the ever-growing pile on Rose’s coffee table. Ideas
for the event were batted around, peppered, of course, with talk about the atrocious
decorations springing up around Sweet Briar and the woman behind it all.

“I was at the school the other day, dropping off Luke’s lunch, when I saw who I think
was this Maime woman.” Beatrice’s needle-holding hand stilled above the red-and-green-checked
stocking in her lap. “She was bringing lunch to the councilman’s son and she was rather
horrid to him.”

“I don’t know how that woman can look at herself in the mirror,” Rose groused. “Anyone
who can be so nasty toward a child is harboring a very cold heart.”

“Not much we can do, though, when Councilman Jordan is so blind.” Debbie bent atop
her latest stocking and knotted off the final stitch. “I just wish there was something
we could do to wake him up.”

Dixie scooted to the edge of her chair and rested yet another completed stocking on
the pile. “That woman is very careful not to show him what the rest of us have seen.”

“The key is setting her up so that he sees what she’s so cleverly hiding from him.”
Leona flipped to the next page in her magazine, her voice emerging from behind its
glossy cover. “It’s easy for him to pretend it’s everyone else right now—their jealousy,
their reluctance to embrace the new woman in his life, et cetera. But if he can see
it with his own two eyes, he can no longer pretend it’s everyone else. Once he does,
her
horrible behavior becomes
his
horrible behavior if he then
knowingly
looks the other way.”

It made sense. It really did. But as enticing as the notion of seeing Maime Wellington
get her comeuppance was, Tori was much more concerned with the effects on the councilman’s
son now. She said as much to the group, sharing the hurt and pain Kyle had exhibited
over Maime’s decision to do away with his mother’s ornaments in favor of electronic
ones that danced and talked from the branches of a virtual tree.

A round of tsks and a series of snorts made their way through the room until they
were silenced by a sharp intake of air from the town’s mayor.

“Ms. Wellington may have taken the annual tree-lighting ceremony in a different direction
this year, but that doesn’t mean she did away with the remnants of previous holidays.
Those things belong to the town, not an individual person.”

“Well then, maybe the town should allow Kyle to borrow a few of those ornaments for
his tree at home this year.” Rose ran a trembling hand down the front of one of the
freshly cut stocking pieces lying in her lap and sighed. “After all, they seemed mighty
important to the lad.”

“You honestly think this woman would allow those ornaments on her personal tree if
she essentially moved heaven and earth to keep them off one located two blocks from
her home?” Leona closed her magazine and tossed it onto the coffee table, narrowly
missing the pile of stockings.

“It’s not her tree, Leona.” Rose narrowed her eyes on her nemesis. “It’s the boy’s
tree.”

“Which is in the house she’s hell bent on making her own,” Leona snipped back.

Reality dawned on Rose’s face, pulling her lips into a heart-tugging frown. “Oh.”

Margaret Louise pushed off her chair and began pacing the room, the occasional squeak
of her Keds against the wood floor signaling the start of yet another lap. Midway
through her fourth lap across the sewing room, the woman stopped and turned to Georgina.
“So you still have all those ornaments I put on the town tree last year?”

Georgina bobbed her head above her fifth stocking.

“I reckon that means they could be used for somethin’ else in town?”

Again, Georgina nodded.

“Mrs. Claus is goin’ to need a tree in her winter wonderland, ain’t she, Victoria?
A really pretty tree with extra special ornaments, wouldn’t you say?”

Tori dropped her threaded needle onto her lap and clapped her hands into a tight clasp.
“Oh, Margaret Louise, what a great idea.”

“And somethin’ tells me I’m gonna need some help decoratin’ that tree.”

“Kyle?” she whispered.

“He’d be the best choice,” Margaret Louise dropped back onto her chair. “Think he
might be willin’ to help me?”

“You are brilliant, Margaret Louise. Absolutely brilliant, you know that?” She glanced
back down at the stocking taking shape atop her thighs and laughed softly. “Can’t
you just see Kyle’s face when we ask him?”

“And can’t you just see Maime’s when she finds out?” Leona drawled.

Rose stamped her foot on the floor. “Must you always try to dampen everything, Leona?”

Leona’s eyes widened. “I’m not—”

“Oh, put a sock in it, would you?” Dixie stretched her arms over her head and held
them there long enough to earn a crack that echoed around the room. “No one is concerned
about Maime’s feelings because she has none, Leona. This is about a little boy.”

“I’m well aware of that,” Leona said through clenched teeth. “If the ever-charming
Rose Winters had let me finish, I’d have—”

“So what’s going on with the whole Parker Devereaux thing?” Scooting forward ever
so slightly on her chair, Rose turned her body away from Leona and toward Georgina.
“Will there be an investigation?”

“There’s nothing to investigate.”

Tori drew back in her spot. “But you have a dead body that didn’t bury itself.”

“A five-year-old dead body found based on a drawing done by a woman who’s no longer
with us, Victoria.” Georgina lifted the pile of stockings from the table to her lap
and began counting, each number easy to recite along with the woman’s lips. When she
reached thirty-six, she put them back. “Not bad for”—Georgina glanced down at her
watch—“a little less than ninety minutes.”

“I say it’s time for desserts,” Debbie proclaimed around a yawn. “I brought a new
pie I’ve been thinking about selling at the bakery.”

“But wait. What happens if someone else killed Parker?”

All eyes turned toward Tori.

“Someone else?” Georgina questioned.

“Yeah.” Now that her mouth was moving, she couldn’t stop the flow of words that came
out. Not even for the promise of chocolate or one of Debbie’s new pies. “If someone
else did it and you shut the case, that person will get away with murder.”

“Who else could have done it, Victoria?”

She looked from Georgina to Rose and back again, her internal wheels turning so fast
she could barely keep up. “I—I don’t know. Maybe Ethan?”

“Ethan?”
Dixie gasped.

“I—I don’t know. I’m just throwing him out as a possibility. I mean, think about it,
Dixie. Even you said Ethan is selfish. And Charlotte’s nurse, Frieda . . . she seems
to think Ethan is more than capable of having killed his dad if he thought it would
benefit him somehow.”

Georgina lifted her hands in the air and waved them back and forth. “First things
first. There is no love lost between Frieda Taylor and Ethan Devereaux. We know this.
So one of her fingers being pointed in Ethan’s direction doesn’t really surprise me.
But regardless of all that, there’s one major factor we can’t ignore. Charlotte’s
drawing took you to the spot where her husband was buried. A husband she told everyone
had up and left her in favor of some pretty young thing he’d met while traveling.
She made everyone believe Parker Devereaux was a cad. And all the while she was making
us believe that, she knew exactly where she’d buried his body. That’s about as cut-and-dried
as it’s going to get, Victoria.”

She knew Georgina was right. There was really no other explanation. Charlotte’s drawing
had led them to Parker Devereaux’s body.

Slowly but surely, each member of the sewing circle added their final stocking of
the night onto the pile on the coffee table and filed into Rose’s hallway, the promise
of food leading all but one down the hallway and away from Tori.

“Victoria? Aren’t you coming?” Melissa asked as she held her arms out toward Molly
Sue.