Seven Threadly Sins (9 page)

H
aylee had appeared uncomfortable when she told me that Clay had left the mansion. Maybe she’d noticed him with Loretta, and she hadn’t wanted to tell me.

Later, I’d seen Loretta and Clay together in the carriage house. Not only together, I reminded myself. Hugging each other.

Usually, Haylee and I talked to each other at least once a day.

I took all four pets out, then ushered the cats inside. Sitting on my picnic table with my feet on the bench, I watched Sally and Tally play and explore. In many ways, I envied those two dogs for their happy, uncomplicated lives.

Half surprised that Dora didn’t come out of Blueberry Cottage to chat, I called my dogs and we went inside. I fed my pets and told them, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.”

No response from the dining animals.

“For fabric,” I prompted them.

Still no response. Obviously, fabric stores excited me
more than they excited my funny little animals. I phoned Haylee and asked if I could visit her shop.

Of course she said yes.

I went upstairs, let myself out of In Stitches, and ran across the street to The Stash.

It was only mid-September, and lots of people must not have decided yet what costumes to make for Halloween. Haylee had filled tables near the front of her store with Halloween fabrics.

Mutely, I stared at them. Colors and patterns jumbled together.

Haylee asked, “Do you need anything in particular?”

Haylee was my best friend, but suddenly, I didn’t know how to tell her about Loretta and Clay.

“Willow?”

Running my hand down glossy black fabric embellished with metallic gold spiders and their webs, I blurted, “Clay has found someone else.”

I didn’t look at Haylee, but her silence said everything.

I stroked the golden filaments on the cloth in front of me. “You knew, didn’t you?”

She cleared her throat. “I don’t
know
anything like that. Besides, I doubt that you’re right.”

“You could sound more convinced.”

“Clay likes you, Willow. He wouldn’t suddenly change his mind.”

Still without looking at Haylee, I moved down the row to dancing skeletons embossed on velvet, soft underneath my fingers. “You saw him with her, didn’t you?”

“Who?”

“Loretta from TADAM. When Ben was trying to revive Antonio, I asked you where Clay was and you avoided answering.”

“I did see them together, but I didn’t think it meant anything. She barged into the kitchen when Antonio was telling Clay how much better his contractor had done than Clay could have—as if! Loretta stared at Clay for a few seconds, and then she very dramatically asked him if he
was Clay Fraser. When he said he was, she threw herself at him and claimed she recognized him from fourth grade. You know Clay. He never wants to hurt anyone. I didn’t think he remembered her, but he disentangled himself and they talked for a while, then they went out the back door together, and I didn’t see either of them again. What makes you think he’s fallen for her? He seemed to be politely attempting to ditch her so he could return to you.”

“But he didn’t.” Finally, I raised my head.

Her mouth was a small o. “He didn’t? What happened after Ben and I left?”

“I . . . I saw them. Together. They were in the carriage house, and they were hugging each other. Then she took him by the hand and pulled him back to the mansion. Dora and I were in the kitchen when they came in. Loretta explained that Clay had been her first love, and he said that they’d been discussing ways of turning the carriage house into an apartment. Probably a love nest for the two of them.” I meant it as a joke. Clay had built himself a large home on acres in the country.

Haylee laughed at my rather flat attempt at humor, but it wasn’t exactly a hearty laugh. “What did Clay have to say about that?”

“Not much. They must have been out there together at least forty-five minutes.”

“Huh . . .” It was more like a sigh than a word, almost a resigned belief that Clay had fallen for Loretta.

I immediately leaped into denial mode and tried to give Clay the benefit of the doubt. “He did seem to want to get away from her. He said he’d walk the rest of us home, but Loretta wanted him to stay behind and help her lock the mansion.”

“And he did?”

“No. Vicki had Antonio’s keys. She said she’d help Loretta, instead.” I grinned at the memory of Vicki’s adept treatment of Loretta. “So Loretta had to stay with Vicki, who sent the rest of us, including Clay, away.”

“Good for Vicki! What did Clay say after that?”

“I don’t know. I went ahead with Ashley, Macey, and Macey’s roommate, Samantha. Dora made Clay walk with her. Then Dora must have dragged her feet on purpose. Clay couldn’t catch up with us.”

“So, knowing Clay, he escorted Dora all the way to Blueberry Cottage, and by then you were outside with your pets, and you had a chance to talk to him.”

I looked down at my feet. “I stayed out of sight until he was gone.”

“Willow!” Haylee wasn’t easily scandalized.

“Loretta’s lipstick was smeared, and Clay had a red smudge of it on his shirt.”

Haylee’s face froze for a second before she pointed out, “She was all over him! He didn’t reciprocate.”

Not when anyone else was watching.
“She made certain that everyone noticed the lipstick, too. She apologized for getting lipstick on his shirt. She offered to remove the stains.”

“Nothing like putting a man on the spot for the spots on his shirt.”

I gave her a weak smile. “I guess it is a little funny.”

“What did he do, tear off his shirt right then and there and hand it to her?”

“No. He went all stony and said
he
could take out the stains.”

“Aha. He obviously wasn’t falling for it. Or for her.”

I balled embossed velvet into one fist. “I suppose there’s hope.”

“There is. Talk to him.”

“Don’t they say that if you want something, you have to let it go?” I didn’t sound very sure of myself.

“That doesn’t seem to be Loretta’s method.”

“Meow!” I let go of the velvet. Fortunately, I hadn’t creased it, much. Something like excitement shining from Haylee’s eyes caught my attention. I asked, “What happened between you and Ben?”

“Nothing. He walked me home.”

I clapped my hands. “Great.”

She shrugged. “He’s a gentleman. He didn’t even touch me. But get this. He said he’d see me at firefighting practice Tuesday evening and when we reconvene at the pub like we always do. It’s a start, I guess, for him, actually mentioning that we’d all go out together afterward.”

“It’s almost a date!”

“Oh puh-leeze. Clay will also be there on Tuesday for practice and at the pub. The four of us always have fun together. You and Clay will be back where you were before that woman intervened.”

Maybe the best thing would be to pretend, at least around Clay, that I hadn’t seen him with his arms around Loretta. I changed the subject. “Meanwhile, want to go to the free introductory fashion design class at TADAM tomorrow evening? Ashley and I are going.”

“I heard about Antonio’s death. Too bad. He wasn’t old. But I didn’t think much of TADAM. Do we have to return there, even for a class?”

“After Antonio collapsed, his wife accused Dora and me of murdering him. But he wasn’t dead. And she was cagey about whether or not he had heart trouble.” I told Haylee about the candy and allergy medicine that someone may have planted in my cubicle that morning. “But the state trooper didn’t seem impressed by my deductions.”

“Vicki probably wouldn’t have been, either. She thinks we make things up so we can investigate.”

“Still, I wonder if Paula, who would have known if Antonio was allergic to almonds, slipped him some, and also hid his allergy medication.”

“Loretta did it!”

I wanted to believe that and wanted to hope that Loretta would be jailed for murder. But if Antonio had been intentionally harmed, we needed to look at every suspect, not only at people we wished would vanish from Threadville. “Maybe that dissatisfied-looking man in the muscle shirt arranged things so that Antonio would go into shock and maybe die.”

“Dissatisfied?” Haylee repeated. “He looked just plain mean.”

“Who wouldn’t, around the rest of that crew?” I told her about seeing him outside the conservatory shortly after I’d seen a light moving inside it and had noticed an open door that, last we’d known, had been locked. “I’d seen Loretta go into what I think is her apartment building a few minutes earlier. Then, when I went back with the dogs later, the conservatory was locked again.”

Haylee suggested, “Maybe Paula, Loretta, or Muscle Shirt hid the evidence right after the fashion show, and before the reception.”

“Muscle Shirt and Paula were already at the reception when we got there.” I frowned. “And Loretta beat us there, too, even though she locked the conservatory behind us. I’d only just left my cubicle when she caught up to us at the main door. To have hidden things in my cubicle before she joined us, she’d have had to have been quick.”

Haylee raised an eyebrow. “She’s a fast worker, all right.”

I laughed. “Who wouldn’t be, around Clay?”

“You.”

I raised my shoulders in a helpless shrug. “I’ll work faster, if I get another chance.”

“You will. Wasn’t Loretta supposed to open the conservatory this morning at nine? She could have gone early and moved the evidence around.”

I stroked orange fleece printed with smiling yellow pumpkins. “Could be. I didn’t arrive at nine on the dot, and the door was already open. At first, I didn’t see or hear anyone. Then people—TADAM students, probably—started moving chairs in the main room.”

“Maybe Paula was the one with the flashlight in the unlocked conservatory. Vicki offered to drive both Gord and Paula home from the hospital last night, if Paula was ready to go when Gord was. Let’s find out what Edna may have learned from Gord about if and when Paula returned.”

We left The Stash. I’d be back soon, no doubt, to touch all the wools, corduroys, and flannels that Haylee had stocked for winter sewing.

Beyond Opal’s yarn store, Edna’s shop, Buttons and
Bows, had closed for the evening, but it was still unlocked, and we let ourselves in. Edna sold almost every type of button and trim imaginable. The front room of Buttons and Bows was narrow, with buttons lining the wall, floor to ceiling, on the left side of the aisle, and ribbons, lace, fringe, and trims lining the right side of the shop. Edna kept things in almost rainbow order, but many of her notions were gold, silver, or sparkled like diamonds, and had to be displayed outside the spectrum.

It was a beautiful sight.

Edna must have heard her door chimes jingle their “Buttons and Beaux” tune. She called to us from her back room. It was wider than the front room, with tables holding shallow bins of beads, sequins, crystals, and notions like bias tape and various types of fasteners. Edna held up a deep red zipper with crystal teeth like rubies. “Isn’t this lovely?”

We agreed that it was. After admiring the latest in wooden beads shaped like baby animals, I asked her, “Did Vicki bring Gord home last night?”

Edna blushed. “Yes, he arrived around one thirty this morning, the poor dear, and told me what had happened to Antonio.”

Oops. One thirty was about the time I’d been wandering around the village with the dogs. I hoped that Vicki hadn’t spotted us prowling around. I hadn’t seen her, but Vicki often noticed more than I wanted her to and may have seen us.

I asked Edna, “Do you know if Vicki also drove Antonio’s wife, I mean widow, home at the same time?”

Edna bobbed her head up and down. “She did. Gord had to sit in the backseat, which, he said, is cramped. The widow sobbed all the way back from Erie, and Vicki actually asked Gord if he carried sedatives with him. Gord told me that he thought the sobbing really irritated our calm and collected police chief.”

Haylee asked, “And did Gord have sedatives, Edna?”

“He’s not a walking pharmacy. Besides, as far as he
knew, he was only going to a fashion show and a reception.” Edna picked up a handful of tiny white pearl beads and let them flow like water between her fingers and back into their bin. Slowly, as if words were hard to find, she said, “I shouldn’t pass along gossip, but . . . being a doctor and assisting the coroner, Gord has seen his share of grief and crying over the years. He thought Paula was faking it.”

I asked, “Did Gord tell Vicki that?”

Edna raised her chin. “He couldn’t, with the grieving widow right there. Vicki brought Gord home first, and I don’t think he’s talked to Vicki since.”

However, after I told Edna about the candy-coated almonds and the medication vial missing its prescription label, she came up with the same idea I’d had. “Someone could have tucked an almond into Antonio’s pocket and hidden his allergy medicine to try to kill him, and then planted those things in your cubicle. I’ll ask Gord to talk to Vicki about the
grieving
of the new widow.”

We told Edna we were going to the next night’s free introductory class and asked if she planned to attend.

“I do now, after what you’ve told me. We should all go.”

I walked with Haylee back to The Stash. As we parted, Haylee said, “Stop fretting about Clay and Loretta. She won’t get her claws into him.”

“There’s no point in worrying.” I was proud of what I thought was a nonchalant tone.

“But you will, anyway.”

She was probably right.

M
ondays, the Threadville shops weren’t open. I took my animals outside, fed them, baked cookies to serve in the shop during the week, fulfilled orders for embroidery designs, planned the week’s classes, and worked on a jacket I was making for myself. Red, with petite ruffles and touches of embroidery around the hem and cuffs, the jacket would look great with jeans or a skirt during cool autumn days.

After supper, the phone rang.

Clay calling, finally?

It was Ashley. “Are you still going to the class at TADAM?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

“We should go early in case it gets crowded.”

I had to smile. Last I knew she was afraid that the course would be canceled due to lack of interest.

But now she had another concern. “I hope the class won’t go on too long. If it does, I’ll have to leave early to pick up my sister from band practice. They’re rehearsing at the conservatory. They’re having a concert there next week.”

“The conservatory is open today?”

“It’s not usually open on Mondays, but the band teacher told the kids he’d have the key.”

Maybe yesterday’s state trooper hadn’t been excited enough about my “evidence” to close the conservatory as a potential crime scene. If I helped pick up Ashley’s sister, I would have another chance to snoop backstage. I told Ashley, “I’ll come, too, even if we have to leave the class early.”

“They’ll call
that
a threadly sin, too!”

Apparently, she’d recovered from the insult that Antonio had thrown at her.

After my pets were safely inside following another outing, I put on a deep green blazer that I’d made and embellished with tiny embroidered fall leaves, went out to my patio, and locked the sliding glass doors.

Purse in hand, Dora stood on the back porch of Blueberry Cottage.

“Yoo-hoo!” she called. “Are you going to that fashion design course tonight? I’ll walk with you!” She marched to my patio. “Did you confront Clay about That Woman yet?”

Escorting her up the hill to my front yard, I suggested, “I’m not sure that confronting a man about another woman is a great ploy, unless one wants to alienate the man.”

“As long as you’re
happy
.”

“There’s not much I can do if he’s fallen for her.”

“Encourage him to fall for you, instead. You could have tried harder.”

I tried to sound indifferent. “It may be too late.”

“You give up too easily.”

Haylee hadn’t thought that Clay seemed interested in Loretta, but Haylee hadn’t seen the embrace and the lipstick. Maybe an upbeat approach would get Dora off my case. “Who knows? Next time I see him, Clay and I may be back to normal.”

“He’s special. Look at the job he did on Blueberry Cottage before I moved in.”

Laughing, I opened the gate. “It’s no wonder you like it, since most of the ideas were yours.”

She pointed to the front porch of In Stitches, then across
the street to the other Threadville shops. “And he did all of these renovations, too, and don’t forget the Elderberry Bay Lodge. Clay helped Ben restore it to its Victorian glory.” She barely took a breath before adding, “I wonder where Edna and the others are. What if the class fills up? They’ll miss it.”

“I left early to pick up Ashley. Mind going the long way around, or do you want to wait for Edna and the others?”

“I’ll come with you.”

Looking happier than she had recently, Ashley joined us near her front walk. “My dad’s lined up a couple of good job interviews,” she told us. She chattered about the potential jobs, neither of which would require moving away, until we turned the corner to the TADAM mansion.

The Threadville tour bus from Erie was parked outside it.

I stopped walking. “I wonder how they found out about the introductory course.”

A dimple showed in Ashley’s cheek. “I may have made a few phone calls.”

“I hope Haylee, Edna, Naomi, and Opal arrive in time to get in.” Dora’s voice was dark with foreboding.

Inside the mansion, the room where Antonio had collapsed was set up as a classroom, with rows of chairs facing a long table, an easel, and a voluptuous dressmaker’s dummy with an impossibly small waistline.

Someone had written
Welcome to TADAM
in fancy, curlicued script on the newsprint pad on the easel.

Dora needn’t have worried about Edna, Haylee, Opal, and Naomi. They were sitting near the back of the crowded room.

I muttered to Ashley, “I think you drummed up enough business.”

Laughing at the dummy’s unreal proportions, she threw me a smile. “We know just about everyone here, don’t we?”

It seemed that all of Threadville plus a busload of our usual tourists had come to the introductory fashion design class. Greeting those nearest us, we sat down.

Loud footsteps sounded from the foyer, and then Loretta came swooping into the room in a stylish but impractical purple cloak. She wore it over tight black suede short shorts, turquoise tights, high yellow suede boots with an allover pattern of cutouts showing off the tights, a form-fitting black tank top, and possibly the world’s widest belt, in purple leather with cutouts matching the pattern on the boots. She stopped and posed, her face and body both expressing extreme, fake-looking amazement. “Wow! I didn’t expect such a turnout.” Her cloak swishing and her heels hammering the rock maple floor, she marched to the front of the classroom.

Beside me, Dora muttered, “I didn’t expect her
turnout
, either. What superhero does she think she is, SuperDesigner?”

I had to suppress a fit of giggles, and the people around us laughed, too. The woman in front of Dora turned around and gave her a high five.

“Tough crowd,” Ashley whispered. But she was still smiling, obviously eager to begin her education in fashion design. She’d been doodling in her notebook and had copied the
Welcome to TADAM
page perfectly, every curlicue in place.

Dora murmured to me, “I hope your young man sees her in
that
getup.”

I grinned and shook my head. In my opinion, Loretta looked better than I had last night in my Little Bo Peep dress. And after he saw me wearing that, Clay had come inside with a smudge of Loretta’s lipstick on his shirt. I hoped he wouldn’t see her in those snug shorts and tank top. He might appreciate them more than this all-female crowd seemed to.

I was sure she had designed the dramatic outfit herself. I wasn’t being catty, of course, but I thought the combination made her resemble a superhero wearing a wrestler’s trophy belt.

Someone slipped into the chair behind me and touched my shoulder in greeting. I glanced back. Our police chief,
Vicki Smallwood, who always professed to know nothing about sewing, was attending a fashion design course? Instead of her uniform, she wore jeans, a white shirt, and a camel blazer. For once, her blond hair wasn’t tied back in a ponytail but fell in a neat bob to her shoulders. I gave her a thumbs-up and faced the front again.

Loretta had been staring toward us with an unreadable but not very friendly look on her face. However, she welcomed us all. Wiping her eyes and swallowing hard, she made a speech about how much everyone at TADAM would miss Antonio. She offered her condolences to his family.

Paula did not seem to be in the mansion’s former dining room.

Bravely straightening her shoulders and raising her chin, Loretta announced, “Tonight, Kent Quarrop and I, who are teachers here at the Threadville Academy of Design and Modeling, will give you a preview of the night school course we’ll be offering the public this semester, Design 101. Kent and I have very different approaches to design, both highly successful. I’ll let him tell you about his after I finish my demonstration.” She flashed a smile at us. “But first, let me explain a little about Saturday night’s fashion show.”

Her face took on a mask of tragedy. “I’ll let you in on a little secret about Antonio, TADAM’s late director.”

Everyone in the room seemed to stop breathing. I leaned forward.

Loretta lowered her voice. “Antonio did his best to foster creativity, and one of the many ways he did it was by tricking his students into digging deep and coming up with ideas that were so original that his students often surprised themselves. He would give an assignment that sounded straightforward, and then award the highest marks to people who had
not
followed his instructions.” Her mouth twitched in another smile. “The students tended to catch on quickly.”

Dora cleared her throat, quietly for her.

I grumbled silently to myself about Loretta’s latest
defense of Antonio’s actions. The Threadville store owners had
not
been his students when he gave us sketches and instructions about the outfits he wanted us to model in his fashion show. We’d been trying to help him by doing exactly what he’d asked, even when, as in my case, we didn’t like the designs he had proposed.

It had been a trick, all right, but I doubted that he’d been trying to foster creativity. All of us were good at coming up with original designs.

Unless I was mistaken, Antonio had wanted attention. Maybe he thought of himself as a budding stand-up comic and had used us as the butt of his questionable jokes. I remembered Loretta’s anger at him on Saturday night, and how, only a few minutes later, she had tried to spin what he’d done into something commendable. Now she’d come up with a possibly more praiseworthy reason for Antonio’s behavior. Was she trying to make us forget her original display of anger?

I didn’t buy Loretta’s explanation. Worse, I suspected that honesty was not high on the list of traits she valued in herself. Maybe she lied frequently, like maybe about knowing Clay in fourth grade. She could have merely recognized him as the area’s most well-known contractor and then made up that first-love story to quickly get close to him.

I didn’t need to ask myself why she, or any woman, would want to do that. All she had to do was look into his warm, brown eyes. I stifled a sigh.

But what if she had placed those candies in Antonio’s pocket and wanted to be with someone else when they took effect, and Clay was her chosen, handy, and very tempting alibi?

Loretta grabbed a marker, turned with a theatrical swirl of her cloak, and ripped the top page of newsprint from the easel. “My design technique begins with sketches.” On the next page, she quickly drew the lines of a simple, slinky dress with a cowl neckline. “Based on my sketches and the size I want the finished dress to be, I draft a pattern. I know the measurements that go along with the size I’m
creating, and with the complicated techniques that I’ve developed, I create a pattern. In Design 101, we’ll keep things simple, and we’ll all work on drafting a pattern for a dress similar to the one I’ve sketched.”

Dora harrumphed again. “How
original
.”

Behind me, Vicki muttered, “I’ll be original, too, and design cargo pants and a bulletproof vest.”

I turned and wagged my finger at her and her oh-so-angelic smile.

Bent over her notebook, Ashley scribbled a sketch identical to Loretta’s, and then she drew several similar dresses, with sleeve, pocket, and neckline variations. Ashley could go far with design, but would TADAM offer her enough good, solid training?

Carrying a bolt of satiny silver fabric, Muscle Shirt swaggered in from the kitchen. He plunked the bolt on the long table.

Loretta smiled at him. “This will be the first time Kent sees the sketch I made, and I haven’t told him what I was going to sketch. He will show you the technique
he
uses to construct the garment I’ve sketched.”

She maneuvered one shapely, pale arm from inside the cloak and gestured toward her sketch. “Ta-da!”

Kent, aka Muscle Shirt, stared at the sketch for a moment. Did the man never smile? Or speak? Without saying a word, he unrolled a length of fabric from the bolt and pinned part of one end of it to the overly curvaceous dummy. Then he took the longest dressmaker’s shears I’d ever seen and slashed at the fabric. A few minutes of pinning, a few more of slashing, and he tossed four pieces of fabric, two for the front and two for the back, into the lap of a woman in the front row.

“Here,” he said. Apparently, he
could
speak. “Sew the front and back seams, insert a zipper, narrow-hem the sleeve and neck edges, sew the sides up, and hem the bottom. Shouldn’t take you much longer to stitch it together than it took me to cut it out.”

We all applauded. People chattered.

Ashley giggled. “I don’t think that any real person is built like that dummy.”

“Mannequin,” Dora corrected her with a glint of mischief in her brown eyes. “And I was watching him. He left lots of extra fabric at the waist.”

The woman in front of me turned around. “If he’d thrown those pieces to me, Willow, I would add some machine embroidery.”

I smiled and nodded. “Me, too.”

A woman’s voice rang out over all the others. “What is going on here?”