Thread and Buried

T
hread
and
B
uried

Janet Bolin

PRAISE FOR
THE THREADVILLE MYSTERIES

Threaded for Trouble

“A wonderful amateur sleuth that showcases the close relationships between the small village shop owners who watch out for one another as friends and as a smart business model . . . The heroine’s actions make for an enjoyable whodunit.”

—
The Mystery Gazette

Dire Threads

“Newcomer Janet Bolin embroiders a lovely tale of Willow Vanderling, her pooches, and her shop, In Stitches, in charming Elderberry Bay, Pennsylvania.
Dire Threads
will have you saying Tally-Ho and Sally-Forth as you venture back to Threadville again and again.”

—Lorna Barrett,
New York Times
bestselling author of the Booktown Mysteries

“A wonderful debut, embroidered seamlessly with clues, red herrings, and rich detail. And though the mystery will keep you guessing until it’s sewn up, Willow and her friends will leave you in stitches.”

—Avery Aames, national bestselling author of the Cheese Shop Mysteries

“What a great start to a new series. Janet Bolin has stitched together a colorful cast of characters and wound them up in a murder. The cop car alone is worth the read. Lots of fun and machine embroidery, too.”

—Betty Hechtman, national bestselling author of the Crochet Mysteries

“A deftly woven tale embroidered with crafty characters who will leave you in stitches!”

—Krista Davis, national bestselling author of the Domestic Diva Mysteries

“Quirky characters, charming town, and appealing sleuth are all beautifully stitched together in this entertaining first mystery.”

—Mary Jane Maffini, national bestselling author of the Charlotte Adams Mysteries

“[A] winner right from the beginning. With a vast cast of personable, likable characters populating a lively, mesmerizing story line, Bolin keeps the action moving along and the humor bubbling as well. This will certainly be a great, fun series to keep your eye out for.”

—
Fresh Fiction

“With a winning cast of characters, Bolin should be able to stitch together quite a series for Willow and her fellow shopkeepers.”

—
Library Journal

“
Dire Threads
has everything a cozy lover wants in a read! A craftily clever mystery, an engaging amateur sleuth who leaves you wanting more, a cast of memorable secondary characters, the dogs, the tips, and of course . . . a really fun read.”

—
Mystery Maven Canada

“A delightful cast of characters, crisp writing, entertaining dialogue, and a bonus for this quilter, envisions of crafting projects.”

—
The Cozy Chicks

“
Dire Threads
is a must read for those who love mysteries with a ‘craft’ theme . . . [A] lighthearted mystery full of eccentric women who have a great time turning their hobbies into a livelihood.”

—
The Merchant of Menace

Berkley Prime Crime titles by Janet Bolin

DIRE THREADS

THREADED FOR TROUBLE

THREAD AND BURIED

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group, visit penguin.com.

THREAD AND BURIED

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2013 by Janet Bolin.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.

BERKLEY
®
PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

ISBN: 978-1-101-62382-4

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / June 2013

Cover illustration by Robin Moline.

Cover design by Annette Fiore Defex.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

To the librarians and booksellers who know which books we love and help us find more . . .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Welcome back to Threadville!

As always, I thank my friends and mentors, Krista Davis and Daryl Wood Gerber, who also writes as Avery Aames. They always have time for my questions, plot problems, and silly remarks. And Daryl was the first to suggest the title
Thread and Buried
.

Many thanks to my friend, Sgt. Michael Boothby, Toronto Police (Retired) for his comments and suggestions. Any errors are mine—and maybe my characters’.

Thanks also to Sisters in Crime, especially the Guppies Chapter and the Toronto Chapter, and to Crime Writers of Canada.

And then there are the conferences where I meet so many supportive and (yes) very funny fans and mystery writers—Malice Domestic, Bloody Words, and Scene of the Crime. I wonder if the volunteers who put these conferences together understand how much we appreciate all the hard work they do.

I couldn’t have written this without the capable aid of my editor, Faith Black, and my thanks go to her as well as to the talented Berkley team, including Annette Fiore Defex, who is responsible for the cover design, and Tiffany Estreicher, who designed the interior text.

I’m lucky that Robin Moline does the paintings that become my cover art. Many readers have told me the paintings alone make them want to read the books. Thank you, Robin!

I’m still pinching myself about landing the always-helpful Jessica Faust of BookEnds, LLC, as my agent.

Joyce of Joyce’s Sewing Shop in Wortley Village, Ontario, again provided the first tip at the end of the book. Thank you, Joyce, both for the tip and the laugh.

I thank my family and friends. They’re beginning to understand why I do sinister things like plot, predict doom, and envision worst-case scenarios.

And I thank you for returning to Threadville. Welcome back!

1

C
LAY POINTED AT A SQUARISH, RUSTY thing
sticking out of the sand near the bottom of the excavation. “Do you know what that is, Willow?”

“A box?” At noon on the first day of summer, the sun was hot and directly overhead, but I shivered. How long had this mysterious box been hiding underneath my backyard?

Clay grinned down at me. I loved having to look up into a man’s face. I was nearly six feet tall, and Clay was taller. He asked, “Shall we find out?”

“Sure.” Another of the many things I liked about Clay was the way he was willing to include me in his schemes. And to play along with mine.

He threw a shovel into the hole and offered me a hand. “Will you be okay in those sandals? There could be nails and glass down there.”

His grip was firm, his hand warm and callused. Fortunately, I’d worn jeans, not a skirt, to work at my machine embroidery boutique, In Stitches, that morning. We skied, scooted, and leaped down the slope into the excavation where Blueberry Cottage used to be.

The cottage was now on a sturdy new foundation higher in my backyard, finally safe from floods. Clay had been burying the old foundation stones when his front-end loader had scraped against metal, and he’d fetched me from my apartment underneath In Stitches. I’d been about to fix lunch.

He picked up the shovel and eased it into the earth. The muscles in his bare arms bulged. Could he have found the long-lost Elderberry Bay Lodge treasure?

Yesterday, one of his employees had unearthed skeletal remains on the grounds of the newly renovated lodge. This morning, the women in my machine embroidery workshop had discussed almost nothing besides that skeleton. They said it had been found with a silver belt buckle engraved with
Z
s. Everyone guessed that the remains were Snoozy Gallagher’s.

Snoozy had owned the Elderberry Bay Lodge. About thirty years ago, when he’d been in his sixties, Snoozy had disappeared along with the contents of the lodge’s safe—a substantial amount of cash along with several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry belonging to the lodge’s patrons.

The heist had occurred during the afternoon
before
the final banquet at a jewelers’ convention, and each of those jewelers’ wives had arrived at the lodge prepared to outshine all the others.

It must have been an interesting evening.

For years afterward, everyone assumed that Snoozy had fled the area, but yesterday’s dreary discovery showed that he’d been buried on his own property, instead. Could his treasure have remained in Elderberry Bay, also, underneath the cottage that I’d bought, along with my shop and apartment, only a couple of miles from Snoozy’s lodge and final resting place?

Clay gently brushed sand off the box. It was almost big enough to hold one of the sewing and embroidery machines I sold in my shop.

He stood back and leaned on the shovel. “I found the chest on your property,” he said. “It’s yours. You open it.”

The sun beat into the sandy pit. I knelt beside the box. Above us, Clay’s front-end loader stood silent, its bucket high and filled with soil. Without the gallant hero by my side, I might not have tried to budge the warped lid off the chest—I was afraid of finding someone’s bones.

I was even more afraid when I saw the wadded-up black plastic garbage bag inside the box. Swallowing hard as if gulping could give me courage, I touched the twist tie. It broke and fell away.

Barely breathing, I eased the top edges of the bag apart.

I smelled the mildew before my eyes adjusted to the gloom inside the bag, and then I couldn’t believe what I saw.

The bag seemed to be full of small leather and velvet pouches, discolored and thinned by damp.

Carefully, I lifted out a black velvet bag. It was heavy considering its size. I unlooped a fraying silken cord and peeked inside.

One thing about platinum and diamonds—they don’t tarnish or disintegrate, even after thirty years of being tied in a plastic bag and buried in a steel box in the sand.