Night of the Living Thread (A Threadville Mystery) (2 page)

M
aybe I was being irrational, but for my own peace of mind, I needed to warn Edna about possible threats from her guest. I forced myself outside again, into the sinister, foggy night, and ran up through my sloping side yard.

My friends’ Threadville shops and apartments were in a row of stores on the ground floor of a Victorian building on the other side of Lake Street. Under the streetlights, the building’s red bricks looked almost black.

Like the other shops, Edna’s notions boutique had large front windows. Edna’s lights were on, and I could see her inside Buttons and Bows. Gord was there, also, on a ladder, apparently helping his fiancée arrange reels of trims on upper shelves, packing them together upright like books in a library. I ran across the street and opened the door, setting off Edna’s
Buttons and Beaux
tune, an old vaudeville one that had, I’d been told, slightly risqué lyrics. As always, Edna’s shop dazzled, with buttons totally covering one wall, ribbons, braids, lace, and fringe covering the other, and an aisle down the middle between glass display cases.

From high on his ladder, Gord waved a bolt of purple ball fringe at me. “Hi, Willow! I’m having a ball up here.”

Edna hugged me. She was a cute little birdlike person, short compared to my height of almost six feet. She was barely over fifty, and though her hair was still naturally brown, she had colored it silver for her wedding. Not the silver of graying hair, but metallic silver. She’d grown it to a shoulder-length bob. At the moment, she’d added nothing sparkly to it besides the color, but I was sure that on the day itself, she would be a vision of crystal, an ice princess in October. She asked. “Did you come to help us, Willow?”

“In a way.” I felt my forehead crease. “I just saw something disturbing.”

Gord took a step down the ladder toward me. “What’s wrong, Willow?” I half expected him to whip out a stethoscope and rush the rest of the way down the ladder to check my heartbeat.

In Edna’s cheerful shop, my story sounded a little silly, and I couldn’t blame Edna and Gord for their skepticism.

Still on his ladder, Gord peered toward Edna’s front windows. “Fog?”

Our section of Lake Street was high and free of fog at the moment. I mumbled, “There’s plenty of it down by the river.”

He felt his way down another step. “Yes, some evenings are like that. Romantic, right, my little chickadee?”

Edna beamed up at him. “Right. And I’m not worried.”

Gord inched down to the next step. “I’m not, either, but thanks for your concern, Willow.”

Edna’s
Buttons and Beaux
tune played again. Isis dashed into the store, pulled the door shut faster than it wanted to go, and stood panting, her back to us and her palms on the door frame as if she were trying to prevent a wild animal from coming inside with her.

I couldn’t see anything on the other side of the door.

She turned around. She was older than I’d first believed, in her late fifties. Maybe she only looked older because the corners of her mouth were turned down and her pupils were dilated. “Gord!” she shrieked. “I just had the most unspeakable fright!” Her gown was made from a light nylon knit, as if she’d taken a nightgown and dressed it up with a scratchy gold cord tied around the empire waistline.

Again the picture of concern, Gord took another step down the ladder. “What happened?”

Isis took a deep shuddering breath and clutched at her throat. “A zombie attacked me.” Apparently, the fright hadn’t been entirely unspeakable.

Gord put his left hand up to his ear and hung on to the ladder with only his right, which, considering that I was standing below him, was about to give
me
an unspeakable fright. Not that Isis’s sinister curses on the riverbank hadn’t already scared me enough.

Gord asked her, “Did you say a zombie? Attacked you? Want us to call the police?”

She trilled a little laugh that seemed incongruous after her
unspeakable
fright. “He didn’t attack me physically, but he had some notion that I might be casting a spell on him, and he told me to stop it or he would . . . I’m not sure what, but he looked violent.”

I should find this zombie as a possible ally to help me convince Gord and Edna to be wary of Isis. Maybe the zombie was the big-shouldered one I’d seen in the dark suit. Or had zombies been all over the park while Isis was shouting into the fog, and I hadn’t seen the others? While the dogs and I were fleeing Isis and her curses, someone else, apparently not the zombie in the 1930s suit, had run through the bandstand and away from the park.

Gord reassured Isis, “The zombies visiting Elderberry Bay aren’t real.”

“I know that,” she said seriously. “But this guy’s threat was.”

Gord asked her again if he should call the police.

“No, I guess I was just being a big silly-pie.” Her coy smile showed off a dimple in her cheek. “What are you doing up there on that ladder, Gord?”

“Coming down.”

She cooed, “That ladder doesn’t look safe.” I could have sworn she batted her eyelashes at him.

He patted his belly. “You mean I’m too portly.”

Her “silly-pie” laughter put my teeth on edge. “I mean that ladder looks flimsy.” The woman was an accomplished simperer.

I felt ill.

Edna was obviously miffed. “It’s a perfectly good ladder.”

Isis shaded her eyes against the shop’s sparkling beads, buttons, sequins, and crystals. “Oh, hullo.”

Maybe Isis hadn’t seen me, either, beside Edna on the other side of Gord’s ladder. I stepped into the center of the aisle. “Hi, I’m Willow. I own the machine embroidery boutique across the street, In Stitches.”

Isis covered her mouth and tittered. Where had she learned these old-fashioned mannerisms? “Willow! What an apt name for such a beanpole. Do you weep, too?”

I was about to . . . Or hurl.

Edna stepped closer to me. “Willow is lovely and slender.”

Isis eyed me up and down. “Yes. I see. Is she another of your ‘daughters’?” She made air quotes with her fingers.

Edna smiled. “She does look a bit like Haylee, doesn’t she—tall, slender, and beautiful? But no, my girlfriends and I didn’t raise Willow, though we’d gladly take credit for her.”

I flashed Edna a smile.

Gord said, “In Threadville, they’re all like family.”

Edna’s chin came up. “They?”

He let out his warm boom of a laugh. “We. I guess we’re done here, Edna, and we should let you and your guest get some sleep. C’mon, Willow, I’ll walk you home.”

His message was clear. I wasn’t supposed to confront Isis about what the zombie, whoever he was, and I had seen. I wasn’t sure what it meant, anyway, and I wasn’t about to embarrass Gord and Edna by starting an argument. In a way, Isis was the guest of all of Threadville, and as the owner of one of Threadville’s shops, I should be hospitable.

But I still wanted to hurl.

The little tune started when Gord opened the door for me. I thought I heard Isis ask something like,
Didn’t she say her shop was only across the street?

After the door closed and we were in the middle of Lake Street, I turned to Gord. “She was flirting with you!”

He stopped walking. Luckily, no traffic was around. “Was she?”

“You didn’t notice? Being flirted with must be an occupational hazard for doctors.”

“I suppose so.”

It had to be a hazard for Gord, anyway. He was genuinely thoughtful, and couldn’t help being charming. And almost grandfatherly toward both Haylee and me. He was considerably older than Edna.

“She
was
,” I insisted.

“The woman barely knows me. She had dinner with us last night. She was in Edna’s apartment when I picked Edna up, so I invited her, and she came. The woman spent one entire evening in my company—hardly enough time for anyone to work up a proper crush.”

I teased, “You’re fishing for compliments.”

He staggered playfully, hand over heart. “You’ve wounded me.”

Laughing, I pulled him to the safety of the sidewalk in front of my shop. “You’ll be responsible for
all
of your injuries if your dramatics get you run over.”

“Good thing I’m a doctor.”

“You’re incorrigible.”

He pointed. “Your shop looks great.” Trying to distract me, no doubt.

He succeeded, at least for a moment. I loved In Stitches. Night-lights inside the shop drew my gaze away from the building’s classic Arts and Crafts architecture and through the windows to the merchandise inside—sewing machines and their embroidery attachments, natural fabrics, racks of embroidery thread, and all the other supplies and accessories needed for machine embroidery. Still, I made one last attempt to sway Gord. “I’m worried about Edna alone with that woman.”

He patted my shoulder. “My little chickadee is one of the strongest people I know.”

“Yes, but . . .” I spoke the rest of the sentence in a rush. “What if that woman thinks she can harm Edna and have you for herself?”

“She can’t.”

“She may not know that.”

“Willow.” The kindness in his voice softened the rebuke I suspected was coming. “Isis, or whatever her name is, can go to the river in the fog and mutter all the curses she wants. None of them can harm Edna or anyone else. Besides, some zombie obviously thought that Isis was casting a spell on him, not on Edna or me.”

So much for the zombie, whoever he was, helping me convince Gord that he and Edna could be in danger from Isis and her incantations. “I suppose you’re right. But I’ll be glad when you’re married and that woman is gone from town.”

His smile outshined the streetlight above us. “I’ll be glad when Edna and I are married, too. You have a good night, now.”

“You, too.”

He strode down the street. As he passed Edna’s shop, he raised his head and sang toward the windows of her second-floor apartment. Gord loved opera and had an amazing voice.

I hoped that Isis didn’t think his love song was aimed at her.

If it hadn’t been late, I might have let myself into my shop and spent a few hours playing with software, thread, and fabric. Instead, I opened the gate and walked down the hill toward my apartment door.

Below my apartment, Blueberry Cottage, a curlicued Victorian gem painted dusty teal, brooded in the darkness. The cottage had been moved up the hill from its original 1890s position, which had been too close to the river. Now that it was finally safe from possible floods, I could rent it to tourists as soon as the renovations were done. The interior had been taken down to the bare studs.

Farther down the slope, my yard disappeared in low-lying mist. I couldn’t see my back gate, or the riverside trail leading to the park where Isis and an unknown number of zombies had been, or the Elderberry River, or the backdrop of the state forest rising on the opposite bank.

My pets greeted me with their usual zeal. Settling the two dogs for the night was easy. They’d spent the day upstairs in their pen in the rear section of In Stitches, where they’d watched everyone browsing and learning. The two kittens, however, must have snoozed most of the day in my apartment. After I got into bed, they tussled with each other and pounced on my head.

But that wasn’t all that kept me from falling asleep. Unease drifted through my mind like the swathes of fog down by the river. What was Isis up to? How could anyone dislike Edna or want to harm her? And why had a zombie taken Isis’s curses personally? Had the zombie really threatened her, or had she only been flirting with Gord?

Eventually, I managed to sleep. And then the sharp ringing of my phone startled me. A phone call in the early morning usually meant I needed to respond to an emergency with the village’s other volunteer firefighters. But the siren on the fire station’s roof was silent.

Who was calling me? The clock beside the bed said six thirty. I could have slept another hour and still had plenty of time to shower, dress, walk the dogs, have breakfast, and open In Stitches for the day. Mentally muttering, I fumbled for the phone.

“Willow?” My mother. Why was she phoning me at this hour?

Was something wrong? My breath caught. Was my dad okay? He was quiet and uncomplaining, but I always feared he would hurt himself in his workshop way out in their woods, and no one would realize for hours that he was missing.

My mother purred, “I need a favor.”

I’d learned not to grant my mother a favor before asking questions. Whenever she was in the midst of a political campaign, she seemed to forget that I couldn’t abandon In Stitches and run home to arrange a dinner party or fund-raiser.

“What?” Between my caution and grogginess, my question undoubtedly came out sounding surly or peeved.

“I need you to let someone stay with you this week.”

“Here?”

“Where else?” She sounded amused.

“This week is, um, kind of busy. Our village is putting on a pre-Halloween craft show, and helping friends with their wedding.”

My mother’s Southern accent became as thick and sweet as corn syrup. “I don’t ask much of you, Willow, honey, now do I?”

Well, she did, but I’d had to decline, again and again. I clutched the phone tighter and gulped. “No.”

“And you’ve often told me that you have a guest room where you could put your father and me up.”

“I do, but—”

“Brianna Shrevedale is coming to see you, and she needs a place to stay, so you’ll want to be her hostess,” my mother said.

“Who is Brianna Shrevedale and why is she coming to see me?”

My mother was good at patient encouragement. “Brianna’s a thread distributor.”

I pointed out, “Sales representatives aren’t usually the houseguests of shopkeepers.” In my early years, my mother had drilled Southern hospitality into me, so of course I felt guilty. Apparently, I’d lost some of those old Southern attitudes, along with most of my accent, while living in New York City, and I hadn’t regained them up here in northwestern Pennsylvania.

“Don’t you follow my career even the itsy-bitsiest bit?”

I could tell she was trying to hide her disappointment in her only child, which made me feel worse, but I managed to defend myself, more or less. “I know you’re in the South Carolina House of Representatives and that you’re running for the state senate.”