Night of the Living Thread (A Threadville Mystery) (15 page)

M
ore loud and jarring music began in Brianna’s room, but between pieces, I had definitely heard the patio door close.

Who had closed it? Brianna? Had she been going out or returning?

Or had someone else come in?

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth, which did nothing to slow my racing pulse. I wanted to lie in the dark under my warm comforter and not think about intruders, but Tally-Ho was whining at my bedroom door.

Was someone on the other side?

“Speak,” I whispered to Sally-Forth, but she didn’t. I pushed the comforter aside, fumbled for my pink fuzzy slippers and robe, and staggered to my bedroom door. I halted the onslaught of pets with one hand while easing the door open with the other.

The light above the stove was on again. I had turned it off.

Leaving my pets shut in my bedroom suite, I slipped through the great room to the patio door. Someone had unlocked it.

I was tempted to lock it in case Brianna had gone out without her key, but if someone else was inside, I wouldn’t want to slow his or her exit.

My phone’s light showed that the line was in use, but I didn’t hear Brianna’s voice.

I put my nose almost on the glass and shielded both sides of my face to block out the light above the stove, but I didn’t see anyone outside. Had someone gone up through the side yard to the street?

About the only complaint I had about my apartment, other than my current houseguest, was that I couldn’t see the street from it.

I crept upstairs and opened the door a crack. In Stitches seemed to be the way I’d left it, with one night-light burning. If intruders were inside my shop, I couldn’t see or hear them, though for me to hear intruders over Brianna’s music, they’d have to stomp, shout, and throw things.

I tiptoed between rows of fabrics to a front window.

Brianna was on the other side of Lake Street.

Her hand on the doorknob of Edna’s front door, she was peering through the glass.

I was all set to traipse across the street in my pink fuzzy robe and slippers and ask her what she wanted in Edna’s shop, which had closed for the night long ago, but Brianna turned around, trotted to the sidewalk, and hurried down Lake Street toward the beach.

If she wasn’t going to listen to her music, I shouldn’t have to, either. I ran downstairs and knocked on her door. I didn’t know who I thought might answer. No one did.

I opened the door. Every light was on. I strode down the hallway into the bedroom. Aghast, I stopped in my tracks. She was worse than Juliette. How could anyone create such a mess in less than forty-eight hours? She’d thrown candy papers and torn-off crusts from buttered toast on the carpet. No wonder she’d fled even though it was the middle of the night.

Groggily rubbing my eyes, I stepped over and around clothes, shoes, CDs, and cases of thread. I wanted to turn the music off, but she’d only turn it on again, so I lowered the volume to a level that might not sound loud in my suite.

My phone was on the night table. I picked it up. Someone was reciting the weather forecast for Sydney.

Sydney?

Australia, I guessed, judging by the accent. Was this Brianna’s method of creating alibis for herself? Dial a number that would stay on the line for hours, and then go out and do whatever she wanted? Glad I had a toll-free long-distance plan, I set the cordless phone down without disconnecting it. She would discover I’d been in her room and had turned her music down, but she didn’t need to know I’d listened to her call.

I was about to sneak out when I saw a checkbook.

Okay, that was really snooping, but about an hour before Isis was pushed into the river, I’d seen Brianna hand her something that could have been a check.

Nervously listening, wishing I had locked the patio door, I opened the checkbook. It was the kind that created carbon copies of checks.

The most recent check had been made out to Isis Crabbe for two hundred dollars. In the portion marked
Memo
, Brianna had written,
Curse against WV
.

“WV” could have meant lots of things, but those were my initials. My mother’s, too.

Feeling angry, violated, and hurt, I no longer wanted Brianna to take the hint about the loud stereo. I didn’t want her to know I’d been in her suite, not that she couldn’t have guessed I might enter it whenever I wanted. I turned the volume up, but not quite to the ear-splitting levels where she’d left it.

What if she was on her way back? She could be near the patio door. She would see me leave her suite.

I skedaddled as quickly as my pink-slippered feet and the mounds of her belongings on the floor let me.

Leaving the light on above the stove, I dashed into my suite, locked the door, sank down on the carpet with my back against my bed, and cuddled Sally-Forth and Tally-Ho. Mustache and Bow-Tie jumped around on the bed and swatted at my hair.

Why had Brianna paid Isis two hundred dollars to write or utter a curse, possibly against me or my mother? The two-hundred-dollar curses on Isis’s price list had been the bad ones. Earlier, I’d guessed that the pieces of willow that Isis had cut might be for a boat to “drown” a toy zombie, but maybe she’d planned to cast spells against me. Or against both Floyd and me.

Brianna had disliked me from the moment I went outside to help her unpack her car. I hadn’t treated her like a long-lost best friend, but I’d given her a place to stay, had provided meals and snacks, and had cleaned up after her. I’d invited her to sell thread at our craft fair. It wasn’t that I needed to be liked, but I didn’t understand why she would want to harm me or my mother.

I wanted to go out into my great room, put the bar across the patio door, and let Brianna in only if she promised to pack her things and drive far, far away.

But I could imagine what my mother would say.

The longer I huddled on the floor with my warm pets, the sillier I felt for being upset over a curse. If Isis had been as powerful as she’d seemed to think she was, she could have prevented her own death. She couldn’t have hurt me or my mother. Or Edna or Gord or Floyd the zombie.

The dogs fell asleep with their heads on my lap, and the kittens gave up attacking hair that barely attacked them back. Purring, they sat at my shoulders like sphinxes guarding a pharaoh’s tomb.

I gently crawled out from under my slumbering dogs and climbed into bed. Brianna’s music thumped on the other side of the wall. I listened for her to come in, but if she did, I didn’t hear her.

I didn’t know how long I’d slept when my smartphone rang.

Apparently, Vicki was on duty. In a businesslike voice, she identified herself as Chief Smallwood. “Your landline’s busy,” she said.

“Brianna must be talking to her boyfriend again.” I tried not to sound half-asleep, but was sure I didn’t succeed.

“Brianna’s with me. Where are you, Willow?”

“At home. In bed. It’s . . .” I checked the time. “After one.” I didn’t mean to be rude and abrupt.

Vicki laughed. “That hasn’t stopped you from wandering around before.”

I had to smile. “I must be getting old.”

Her voice became serious again. “I need to come over and talk to you.”

“Um, okay. The patio door should be unlocked.”

“Put a kettle on.”

V
icki disconnected the call, leaving me staring at my phone in disbelief.

She’d asked me to put a kettle on. At one fifteen in the morning. What an odd time for her to come to tea.

At least she liked my animals. I let them into the great room and started heating water.

Maybe pink and fuzzy wasn’t quite the right look for when a police chief came calling. I ran into my bedroom and threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. However, the dogs barked, someone rapped on the frame of the patio door, and I thrust my feet into the pink fuzzy slippers and shuffled out to the great room.

Before I could reach the door, Brianna shoved it open. She appeared to be drenched, hair, shoes, and everything between. Her eyes looked bruised and angry. She clutched a thin, silvery survival blanket at her neck. It rattled as she walked.

Behind her, Vicki ordered, “Wait!”

“I live here,” Brianna snarled. “I can come and go whenever I want.” She marched toward her suite.

In my slippers, I skated past her to help Vicki round up my animals before they could wander outside on their own.

Vicki was doing a fine job of it by herself. Yipping with excitement, Sally and Tally licked her hands and wagged their tails. The kittens launched themselves toward her pant legs. By the time Vicki and I had convinced all four animals to stay inside, Brianna was about to shut herself in her suite.

Vicki called out, “Brianna, hang on a second.”

Brianna turned around and glared.

“Take a hot shower, put on dry clothes, then come out here and warm up with some tea.”

“I don’t want tea.” Brianna’s eyes glittered with brittle fury. What was wrong with her?

“Then come out here after you’ve showered, anyway,” Vicki demanded. “We’ve got to straighten this thing out.”

“What’s to straighten?” Brianna demanded. “You just do your job. Don’t tell me what to do.”

By straightening her back only slightly and thinning her lips, Vicki became amazingly formidable. “Part of my job is looking after people, and that includes you. If you won’t follow my advice and warm yourself up, I’ll have to call an ambulance.”

Brianna only glowered and slammed herself into her guest suite.

Realizing I was gaping at where she’d last been, I closed my mouth and turned toward Vicki. “What’s happening?” I didn’t feel quite awake yet, which didn’t help me understand it, whatever
it
was.

The music in the guest suite stopped.

Vicki eased onto one of the stools at the counter and massaged her forehead.

I grabbed a plastic bag of homemade molasses cookies from the freezer. “You need cookies.”

“I need more than cookies.” She fished her digital camera out of a pocket. “Turn your face so you’re looking at your fridge again,” she said.

“What?” But I did it.

She took a couple of pictures.

I put the cookies on an ovenproof platter and turned on the oven. “What’s going on?”

She backed toward the sitting area of my great room. “Stay there. I want a picture of you in that outfit, complete with bedroom slippers.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Are you taking up blackmail?”

She snapped more photos. “Nope. I’m looking after people. You, this time.”

“Why?”

She lowered the camera. “To prove my case.”

“
Your
case? I’m beginning to think it’s mine.”

She squinched her mouth to one side and nodded. “Don’t worry. It’s her word against yours, and I don’t think she’s telling the truth.”

I slid the platter of cookies into the oven. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

Vicki took her place on the stool again. “Why not?”

“For one thing, she waffled the other night about whether she’d gone outside, and only admitted it after you said you were going to have the door fingerprinted.” I held up a jar of dried chamomile. “Is this all right, or would you prefer something to keep you awake?”

“Chamomile’s fine. I’m supposed to go off duty soon. Any other ways she seemed dishonest?”

“At first, she said she didn’t wear my shoes, but then she retracted that, too.” I lowered a tea infuser into the pot. “And I just found out about another possible lie. Remember she said that she was on the phone with her boyfriend when Isis was killed?”

Examining my face, Vicki nodded.

I filled the teapot with boiling water. “After I went to bed this evening, Brianna’s music went quiet for a second, and I heard the patio door close.” I gestured to indicate my great room. “No one was in here, and my landline was in use. I couldn’t see anyone in my backyard, either, so I went upstairs to look out the front windows. Brianna was at the door of Edna’s shop, and she had her hand on the doorknob and her face almost against the glass, like someone trying the door to see if it was unlocked, or at least checking out the inside.”

Vicki got out her notebook and began writing in it. “Did she enter Edna’s shop?”

“No. She turned around and hurried down Lake Street toward the beach. So I thought it was my chance to turn down her music. While I was in her room, I picked up the phone and listened. A woman was droning on and on about the weather in Sydney. The woman had an Australian accent.”

Vicki gazed toward Blueberry Cottage, dark in my backyard. “Mm-hm.”

“Did you get my phone records from last night?” I asked.

“The state police did. They didn’t warn you?”

I shook my head.

She frowned. “I’m sorry. I should have told you to lock up your phone. The so-called boyfriend was actually a number in Sydney, the number people call for a recorded weather report. That call lasted for over four hours.”

I waved away her concern. “My number’s toll-free worldwide, incoming and outgoing calls.”

She blew out a relieved breath. “Glad to hear that. Sorry none of us said anything about it to you.”

“No problem. I saw something else odd in Brianna’s room, though. She had a checkbook, and I’m afraid I opened it.”

Vicki tilted her head and pursed her lips.

“I know, I shouldn’t have snooped. But as I told you, I’d seen her tear a page out of something that looked like a checkbook and hand it to Isis shortly before Isis was murdered. And now I’m sure that it was a check. Brianna’s checkbook is the kind that makes copies. She’d written a check for two hundred dollars to Isis Crabbe. Down at the bottom where you’re supposed to write a memo to yourself about what the check is for, she wrote, ‘Curse against WV.’ If those are initials, they could stand for me or for my mother.”

Vicki was silent for a second, pondering her notebook. She raised her head and gave me the full force of her honest blue eyes. “We found that check among Isis’s belongings in Edna’s apartment.”

“So that’s Isis’s last name? ‘Crabbe,’ with two
b
s and an
e
?”

She nodded. “Her wallet was in her room, too, and that was the name on her driver’s license.”

I turned from Vicki, both to pour the tea and to hide my gratification. Haylee and I wouldn’t have to confess that we’d searched Patricia’s computer and discovered Isis’s last name.

My face in control, I hoped, I faced Vicki again and shoved a mug of tea toward her. “Are you going to tell me what this wee-hours visit is about?” Water was running in my guest suite.

She shook her head. “Brianna will. In about two minutes. Even if we have to haul her out of the shower ourselves.”

“We wouldn’t dare.”

Vicki grinned, but it was a toothy, humorless grin that reminded me again that she was a tough police chief. “Yeah, you’re right.
We
wouldn’t.” She checked her wristwatch. “But if she doesn’t get out here pretty soon, I’m going in after her.”

Maybe the smell of warm cookies would tempt Brianna into the kitchen. I removed the plate from the oven and set it on the counter in front of Vicki, then poured myself a mug of tea. I loved the flavor and the comfort of chamomile, but it often made me sleepy. With any luck, the evening’s festivities, such as they were, would end before my head fell face-first into the plate of cookies.

We didn’t have to haul Brianna out of the shower. Her lower lip protruding in defiance and her hair even wetter than when she’d marched into my apartment claiming that she
lived
here, she slouched out of my guest suite, closed the door, and stood at the end of the counter, where she could see Vicki’s face.

“Well?” Brianna demanded. She was wearing one of the warm fleece bathrobes I’d embroidered for potential guests. White, not pink.

I poured another mug of tea and placed it in front of Brianna.

“Well, what?” Vicki asked. She could be very cold, almost accusing, but I was used to the official police side of her personality, and I didn’t feel threatened.

Without looking my way, Brianna snapped at Vicki, “Are you going to sit there having a tea party, or are you going to do your job and arrest her?”