Night of the Living Thread (A Threadville Mystery) (8 page)

A
strident voice came from the foggy trail. “What’s going on?” A flashlight shined on the bottom half of a long, swishing skirt, and I recognized the voice.

Juliette, the fortune-teller who had helped me add glow-in-the-dark thread to Edna’s wedding skirt, aimed her light toward Haylee, the dogs, and me.

Patricia, the sewing machine historian, was a half step ahead of her on the riverside trail.

I beckoned to them. When they were close, I pointed toward the group near Isis’s body. “I’m afraid Isis, the woman with the handmade books she calls
The New Book of the Dead
, has drowned.”

Both women gasped, covered their mouths, and backed a step away.

Juliette waved the beam of her flashlight toward the solemn people inside the crime scene tape, but as if afraid of seeing what was actually there, she turned off the flashlight. “What happened? Did she go for a midnight swim?” She scratched at her throat and tucked in a tag that had popped out at the ruffled neckline of her turquoise, red, and orange peasant blouse.

She was wearing the blouse backward.

Had it been like that at the fire station, too? Or had she changed into dark pants and jacket and then back into her dress?

And I would suspect everyone?

Haylee answered, “She must have tried on the overskirt we made. It had casters. It rolled into the river.”

Patricia stared at the fog-layered dark river. “How?”

“Why did she try on Edna’s skirt?” Juliette asked. “Anybody else’s skirt? That doesn’t make sense.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand, either.” Isis must have gotten into the overskirt willingly. Donning it involved crouching and stepping over a steel brace. Forcing someone into it would have been difficult, if not impossible.

But Isis had told me it was not “ordained” for me to wear someone else’s skirt. Had she thought
she
was ordained to wear it? I tried not to tremble.

Juliette peered back toward the dark, misty trail. “Here comes Dare Drayton.” Her voice was warm with appreciation. “He’ll know what to do.”

It seemed to me that the emergency responders were already doing everything possible.

In his black jeans, turtleneck, jacket, and loafers, Dare sauntered into the park and waved toward the crime scene tape, the people clustered near the form on the stretcher, and the drenched white wedding skirt now lying in a sodden mass on the riverbank. “What’s all this?”

Where had Dare been when Clay was waiting for him in his truck? And when Isis was being pushed into the river?

Yes, I would definitely suspect everyone.

“Someone drowned,” Juliette answered.

“That Isis person,” Patricia added.

Dare shook his head. “Why am I not surprised? She wasn’t the brightest incantation in the book.”

Juliette scolded, “You should speak nicely of the dead.”

He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Why? She wasn’t nice when she was alive.” He seemed to focus on the group around Isis. “What’s my cousin up to now, playing fire chief and undertaker’s assistant, too? That guy is starved for attention. I wouldn’t be surprised if he pushed her in just so he could strut around—”

I interrupted him. “Well,
I
would!”

Dare only looked amused. “My cousin has a loyal supporter? Someone actually has a crush on him? How quaint.”

Haylee said evenly, “Clay Fraser has many admirers.”

Battling the desire to say what I thought of Dare and his conjectures and judgments, I looked down to conceal my heated face.

And to check out Dare’s loafers.

They appeared to have hard soles. Like Floyd’s, Dare’s shoes could have been the ones I’d heard hitting the pavement. Juliette had turned off her flashlight, but in the uncertain light from the emergency vehicles, I saw spots of mud on their toes. Had the mud splashed onto his shoes because he’d pushed that overskirt—with Isis inside it and screaming at him—into the river?

As long as I was studying feet, I glanced at Patricia’s and Juliette’s. A light-colored, sequined slipper stuck out beneath the hem of Juliette’s floor-length tiered skirt. Patricia wore jeans, a jean jacket, and sneakers. Juliette and Patricia had also come from the trail, but if any mud stained their shoes, I couldn’t see it.

Either of the two women could have changed their shoes after pushing Isis in, but Dare’s callous boorishness and his mud-spattered shoes made me wonder if he had murdered Isis. Why would he, though? Why would anyone?

As she left the fire station, Isis had warned everyone that she had unusual powers, which I took to mean she planned to curse anyone who teased her or made fun of her book. Dare hadn’t seemed concerned.

Floyd the zombie, however, had appeared determined to prevent Isis from casting spells on him.

Suspecting everyone would be cautious and sensible. And a good defense, besides . . .

Lights flashing, a state police cruiser joined the other emergency vehicles on Lake Street. Dare stifled a yawn that looked totally fake. “Well, ex
cuse
me! It looks like my well-admired cousin’s about to enjoy more adventure. I’ll leave you small-town folks to your small-town excitement and go wait for my cousin to finally drive me home. I could have walked there by now.”

Why hadn’t he?

He turned and strolled up the hill, right next to the crime scene tape.

Like a couple of girls stalking a teen idol, Patricia and Juliette followed several paces behind him.

I glanced farther up the hill and nudged Haylee. “Your reluctant grandmother is still here.”

Haylee grinned up toward Mrs. Battersby, sitting on a bench beside Edna at the top of the hill. “She did predict that she’d need to rest during her climb to Lake Street.”

A uniformed state trooper and a man in a suit got out of the state police car, marched down toward the river, and joined Chief Vicki Smallwood beside Isis’s body. The trooper and the other man bent over the stretcher.

Our police chief left them, ran up the hill, passed the bandstand, and, much to my dogs’ delight, came all the way down to the riverbank and rubbed their ears. She straightened and gave me an earnest look. “Willow, in a few minutes, I’m going to let a trooper guard the scene until the rest of the investigative team comes, and then Detective Neffting and I will talk to you about what you witnessed.” She gave Tally-Ho one last pat, took a step away from us up the hill, and then turned around and warned us, “Oh, and by the way, it would be better if you two and your friends don’t call me ‘Vicki’ around Detective Neffting. He’s a stickler for protocol and formality.”

Guessing that warning had been her entire reason for coming to talk to us, I saluted. “Yes, ma’am.”

Vicki flapped a hand at me. “No need to go overboard, either.”

Haylee smiled at Vicki. “Too bad we didn’t get our usual detective.”

Vicki adjusted her hat, a clever way of hiding her face at the mention of the state trooper who had once been her work partner. When Toby Gartener was promoted, Vicki left the state police to become Elderberry Bay’s police chief. She tried to pretend that she and Detective Gartener were not romantically involved, but she didn’t fool me. She lowered her ringless left hand. “He’s not on duty tonight. Neffting is good.” Her tone lacked conviction. She ran up the hill, passing Clay on his way down.

The dogs were even more ecstatic at being with Clay again. We ended up in a group hug, Haylee, Clay, and me, with the dogs in the middle. We humans asked each other if we were all right, and we all said that we were. Our sympathy was with Isis and her family and friends, whoever they were.

“I hate losing anyone,” Clay said.

“She’d been dead when she came out of the water, hadn’t she?” Haylee asked.

“Yes. In her attempts to get out of that skirt, she must have tangled a piece of it around her neck. It seemed too late, but we tried to revive her.”

“A piece of the skirt,” I repeated. “A frill was trailing from the overskirt when I first saw it underwater.”

Haylee studied my face. “We sewed that skirt together securely.”

I grabbed the leashes more tightly. “Someone must have used a lot of force to undo our stitches.” Shuddering, I peered up at the bandstand, now only slightly obscured by mist. “Remember the quilted label that said
Edna’s Wedding Skirt
? Naomi draped it on the overskirt just before we called Edna.”

Haylee and Clay both nodded.

I went on, “After I saw the skirt underwater, I ran up to the bandstand and unplugged Clay’s extension cord. That label was lying on the floor, but Naomi had strung it on a ribbon and I don’t think the ribbon was with the label.” I focused on Clay’s face. “Could Isis have been tangled in that ribbon? It was white satin.”

“How wide was it?” he asked.

I held my thumb and finger about an inch apart.

“No,” he said decisively. “The thing I saw was more like two or three inches wide, and it had lots of stuff on it.”

I prompted, “Embroidery, crocheted lace, glow-in-the-dark thread?”

“Could be,” he answered. “And ruffles—or is it tucks? And those shiny things that Edna loves.”

Vicki led the detective lower down the riverbank to the drenched white thing that had been Edna’s joke wedding skirt. They examined it for a few seconds, and then Vicki raised her head and called, “Willow! Haylee! Can you both come here, please?”

V
icki swept her hand to point to us, then to the bandstand, and then back to the tape tied to a tree near her. She didn’t need to gesture to Haylee and me to stay out of the taped scene. Even under these stressful circumstances, we’d have remembered.

“I’ll hold the dogs,” Clay offered.

I handed him Sally’s and Tally’s leashes. His fingers brushed mine. I wanted to cling to his hand, but Vicki—Chief Smallwood—was waiting.

Haylee and I ran up the hill and waved at Edna and Mrs. Battersby. Edna waved back. I hesitated at the uphill side of the bandstand long enough to shine my flashlight on the bandstand’s floor. Clay’s extension cord was gone, and the only things left were the sheaf of willow wands, the half-full spool of thread, and the white satin rectangle that I had embroidered and Naomi had quilted.

“No ribbon,” Haylee summarized.

We ran down the hill on the other side of the crime scene tape. In a sort of salute and farewell, I glanced toward Isis’s covered body. She had upset me, but she couldn’t have harmed Edna or anyone else with her curses, and she hadn’t deserved this horrible death.

Vicki lifted the crime scene tape so we could scoot underneath it and meet the man in the suit. She introduced him as Detective Neffting.

His paunch was too round for his thin body. His head, bulky at the sparsely haired crown and narrow at the chin, seemed to balance precariously on his long neck. He stared down at what was left of Edna’s once-fabulous wedding skirt, now a wet and sorry-looking thing lying on its side, its lightbulbs smashed and its wet flounces drooping over electrical wires, a hula hoop, and a cut-down jigsaw stand. Detective Neffting’s face was completely unreadable. “Chief Smallwood said you two could explain what this thing is.” His voice was high and nasal, making him sound boyish, though I guessed he was over forty.

We attempted to explain why and how we’d made the gigantic wedding overskirt, but I suspected he was having trouble understanding it all. Building a skirt on a jigsaw stand would seem a bit odd, along with wiring the skirt for sound and lights and attaching casters so that the person wearing it could move it around easily.

He kept referring to our creation as “this death trap.” He and Chief Smallwood scribbled notes. Finally, he scratched the baldest part of his head, peered at me, and said, “Now let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You two and a couple of other women—people you refer to as your mothers, Haylee—got together and made this rather . . . er . . . strange object as a prank.”

Haylee nodded.

“For the wedding of another one of your mothers, Haylee?”

She nodded again.

“How many mothers do you have?”

“Three.”

He scratched his head again and muttered, “Last I knew, most of us have only one or two.” He raised his voice to a conversational tone again. “Okay, so you made this death con
trap
tion and then you forced someone to get inside it—”

I broke in, “We didn’t force anyone to do anything.”

“Okay, so then the victim, for reasons unknown, got inside the death contraption and wheeled herself down into the river.”

“I think she was pushed,” I said. “I heard a woman yelling, ‘Don’t push me!’”

“A woman . . .” His words hung in the air, not quite a question.

I answered, “I wasn’t sure who it was. She sounded terrified, but the voice was definitely a woman’s.”

“So it could have been the victim being pushed or someone being pushed
by
the victim, or someone else entirely, who had nothing to do with this death contraption?”

“All of the above,” I agreed. I aimed my light at the frill that had come loose from the dress and now trailed across the grass. “We sewed that piece of fabric firmly to the skirt. It couldn’t have come undone by itself. Someone took it apart.”

“How?” Neffting asked. “Was it torn, frayed, cut, or what?”

I studied the end of the frill. “It appears to have been cut off in a hurry, but I can’t tell if it was cut by a knife or scissors. Can you, Haylee?”

She examined the end. “No.”

Detective Neffting nodded in a smug way. “For your information, the very end of it, the part you were examining so closely, was cut by a knife wielded by one of the divers, to free the victim so they could raise her to the surface in hopes of reviving her.”

“What about farther back?” I shined my light down the length of the now ungathered frill so that Haylee and I could get a good look at it. “That was cut, also,” I concluded. “The stitching’s still there, attaching the gathered part of it to the skirt. The rest was cut. But I can’t tell you with what. Could be a knife or scissors.”

“Or a razor blade,” Haylee contributed.

“Even a rotary cutter,” I said.

“What’s that?” Detective Neffting asked.

“A circular, rotating blade in a handle—quilters use them, but so do picture framers, for cutting mats—”

Neffting half closed his eyes and nodded. “Okay. Got it.” He opened his eyes to their widest, which made them seem to bulge in an intimidating way. “You really think it could have been one of those—rotary cutters, I think you said?”

I shook my head. “No, for a rotary cutter to work, you need to press against something hard. The skirt would have been too soft.”

But Haylee disagreed. “Some rotary cutters, the ones that don’t automatically retract, can slash. I’ve seen people injure themselves and each other with them.”

Neffting merely stared at her.

Haylee added, “Accidentally.”

Vicki Smallwood asked, “What about manicure scissors? See the curved and jagged edges where it was cut?”

I explained, “That would be because the fabric was gathered before it was sewn to the skirt.” I shined my light along the fabric. “See? The part closest to the seam is still here, and the cuts along the seam are straighter than manicure scissors would do, but because the fabric was bunched up, the top of the part that was cut off is uneven.”

Neffting asked, “How can one side be straight and the other uneven?”

I answered. “The part next to the seam only looks straight. If we undid the threads holding it to the skirt, the edge would be as ragged as the part that was cut off.”

He nodded. “And the two ragged edges would fit together?”

“You got it,” Haylee told him.

I added, “Either scissors or a knife could have made the cuts. I’m guessing it was scissors.”

“Why?” Neffting asked.

Haylee answered for me. “I don’t see any nicks in the fabric below where it was cut. It would have been hard to be that neat with a knife. Or with a razor blade or rotary cutter.”

I added, “Especially if someone was in a hurry.”

Neffting demanded, “What makes you keep saying they were in a hurry?”

I answered with a question of my own. “Aren’t attacks usually done in a hurry?”

He tilted his garlic-shaped head on his stalklike neck. “It’s not a hard and fast rule.”

Did he expect us to laugh? I glanced at Vicki. She frowned and gave her head a slight shake.

Considering that we were discussing a death, I had no problem keeping a straight face. “In this case, I think the attack was done in a hurry,” I said. “Shortly before I heard the woman screaming, I saw someone slink along the riverside trail.”

Neffting seemed to peer into my brain. “When did you see this person? And where were you?”

“It was after nine thirty, probably close to nine forty.” I nodded toward where the trail disappeared between trees. “I was in my backyard with my dogs, about a half block away.”

He glanced toward the end of the trail and wrote in his notebook. “Chief Smallwood tells me you were the first one on the scene. What made you leave your yard and come here?”

“First, I was merely curious about why the person I saw on the trail was acting furtive, so I ran up to my apartment, grabbed my flashlight and the dogs’ leashes, and ran back to the trail.”

He scribbled some more. “How long did that take?”

“Two or three minutes. I had to encourage the dogs to come with me, plus untangle my legs from their leashes, which delayed things. We didn’t make fast progress on the trail, either. The dogs seemed spooked and kept wanting to drag me home.”

Vicki was writing, but I saw the ghost of a grin cross her face. She knew my dogs and their skittishness—or, perhaps, their common sense.

I continued, “We’d probably been on the trail for a couple of minutes when I heard a scream and saw a largish glow that must have been the skirt moving down the hill in the fog.”

“How far away were you?” he asked.

“Close enough to hear the wheels on the concrete boat launch. They’re metal and made quite a racket. But between the fog and the low-hanging weeping willow branches, I couldn’t see much. It must have been about nine forty-five when the woman yelled ‘Don’t push me! Don’t—’ That scream ended suddenly, and then I heard a splash and what I thought were lightbulbs exploding.”

He didn’t look up from his notebook. “What did you do?”

“I came out from behind the willows and felt my way through the fog to the boat launch. I called for help. No one answered, but I heard someone run south on Lake Street. Whoever it was, his shoes made a slapping noise, like hard-soled shoes, and he didn’t come to help. I didn’t have time to chase him, though. I was more worried about the woman who had screamed.” I shuddered. “And then I saw the skirt underwater. It was a whitish blur, slowly drifting downstream.”

Detective Neffting wasn’t as tall as I was, but he had maneuvered himself to stand higher on the slope. “You didn’t attempt to rescue the victim?”

I looked up into his eyes. “I tugged at the extension cord attached to the skirt, but I thought I was only unwinding it, turning the reel it was on. Maybe I should have waded in, but I didn’t want to believe that anyone would be trapped inside that skirt, and Tally—my dog—acted like someone might be in the bandstand, so we dashed up there.”

Vicki asked, “Who did you find?”

I shook my head. “No one.”

She shoved her hat up off her forehead. “What time did you last see the wedding overskirt in the bandstand?”

How long had it taken me to get home from the park? About five minutes? “It would have been around nine twenty-five.”

She asked, “And when did you hear that first scream?”

I thought of everything I’d done after I’d let the dogs and kittens out around nine thirty. “I didn’t check the time. Do you know when I phoned 911?”

Neffting stated definitively, “Nine fifty-eight.”

“I’m guessing I heard that first scream around nine forty-five.”

Nodding, Vicki wrote in her notebook.

Neffting asked, “And the last scream?”

“About five minutes later.”

He took a step closer to me. “And you didn’t call emergency for at least eight more minutes?”

I resisted the urge to back away from him. “It took me a couple of minutes to get from the trail to where the scream had come from, and then a few more minutes to assess the situation. Even then I thought, hoped, that I might be phoning in a false alarm.”

Seeming to accept that, Neffting paged back in his notebook. “Earlier, you said you saw someone slinking along the trail near your yard. Can you give me a description?”

“I thought it was a man, but I couldn’t be certain in the dark and the fog. He or she wore dark clothes, slacks, and a jacket, it looked like. The person could have been Floyd, a guy who’s wandering around this evening wearing zombie makeup and a 1930s black suit—”

Neffting nodded. “Aha. Yes. The zombie retreat.”

I told them about the night before, and Isis saying that a zombie had frightened her with his accusations about her spells. “Her description matched Floyd, the first person to join me at the boat ramp after the skirt went into the water. And earlier this evening in the fire station, Isis mentioned that Floyd had accosted her the night before, and he didn’t deny it. She warned him, and everyone else in the fire station, that her spells were potent. No one besides Floyd seemed to take her threats very seriously.”

Vicki had been watching me closely. “Could the person you saw sneaking along the trail have been anyone besides this Floyd character, Willow?”

I glanced uneasily toward Clay. His cousin had been in the vicinity and was distinctly unpleasant, but he was Clay’s cousin, and I hated to cast suspicion on the man.