Thread and Buried Read online

  Contents

  Praise for The Threadville Mysteries

  Also by Janet Bolin

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Willow’s Embroidered Jewelry Pouch

  Willow’s Tips

  Thread

  and Buried

  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

  CLAY 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 Zs. 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.

  2

  I COULDN’T MANAGE EVEN ONE TINY WORD. Overwhelmed by amazement and a shocked thrill that sent tremors through my arms and legs, I pulled out a diamond necklace and arranged it on top of the pouches.

  Clay dropped his shovel and squatted beside me. “I wonder what happened.”

  Sun hammered down on the back of my neck. “Snoozy buried the treasure, and then died?”

  Clay brushed a forefinger across the necklace’s pear-shaped central diamond. “I was only about seven when he disappeared, but everyone said a detective followed his trail as far as Cleveland, where he supposedly bought a bus ticket to Mexico. Rumor had it that he didn’t take much luggage with him, and everyone watched for him to come back and lead them to his stash, but no one ever saw him around here again.”

  Until yesterday . . .

  “Maybe he did go to Mexico,” Clay continued, “and then he came back and couldn’t find his treasure. You know how ice knocked Blueberry Cottage around during winter floods?” He stood and pointed at the pit’s walls. “Snoozy could have dug under the northeast corner when the treasure was really under the southwest corner. The moral of the story? Don’t abandon your treasure on a flood plain.”

  I stood, too. “I’ll try to remember that. And Snoozy might not have been able to do a thorough search. He might have worried that someone would hear him.” The Arts and Crafts–style building that housed my shop and apartment could have been a private home when Snoozy came sneaking back for his treasure, but the buildings on either side of In Stitches would have housed stores with apartments above them, even then. Besides, people could have been living in Blueberry Cottage. “Or he might have been afraid that someone might come along the trail.” The Elderberry River hiking trail ran behind my property. Beyond the trail, the river separated the village from the state forest. The thick hedges between my yard and my neighbors’ could have been here thirty years ago, though perhaps not as tall. The jewels had been buried in a secluded, but not completely isolated, spot.

  Sparkling and glinting beneath the sun’s fierce rays, the diamonds at our feet almost seemed to dance. I itched to peek into all the other pouches.

  Clay and I both removed phones from our pockets.

  “Great minds,” Clay said. “Do you know Chief Smallwood’s number?”

  “I’ve programmed it into my phone.” A little drastic, perhaps, but I’d been known to need Elderberry Bay’s only police officer at times when the situation didn’t warrant dialing emergency.

  She answered on the first ring. “Willow Vanderling. What’s wrong?”

  What made her ask that? Did warning lights flash whenever my name showed up on her call display? “Clay and I found something in my backyard. We think it could be Snoozy Gallagher’s treasure.”

  “That’s better than some of the things you’ve found, Willow.” The tiniest of smiles eased into her voice. “I’ll be right there.”

  I thanked her and disconnected the call. “Right there” could mean a few minutes or a half hour. She had jurisdiction over the village of Elderberry Bay plus the rural area surrounding it. When
she wasn’t on duty, troopers from the Pennsylvania State Police kept an eye on things.

  In that hole in the ground, sounds from outside were muffled. My blood rushed past my ears, and although I wasn’t touching Clay, the warmth of his bare arm near mine needled my skin like sparks. He’d spent all of last fall, winter, and spring restoring the Elderberry Bay Lodge, and I’d hardly seen him. I hadn’t been inside the lodge yet, but he’d done a fabulous job of bringing the majestic inn’s exterior back to its reputed glory.

  As if he might be reading my thoughts—about the lodge, anyway—he said, “I really like Ben Rondelson, the new owner of the Elderberry Bay Lodge. He’s holding an opening celebration at the lodge next Friday night, dinner and everything. I think he and Haylee should meet each other. How about if you and Haylee go to the party with me? But let’s not tell Haylee or Ben about our matchmaking.”

  “That sounds great.” With any luck, Ben Rondelson wouldn’t be married or a criminal—one of the guys Haylee had dated had been both.

  Besides, having her along would take some of the pressure off me. I liked Clay, but we were only friends and had never gone out together. If I thought of the evening as a real date with just the two of us, something horrid could happen, like I wouldn’t be able to think of a thing to say. Haylee would keep us chatting.

  I inched away from him and pointed at the diamond necklace. “Too bad I can’t wear that.” Even though I knew the necklace would probably go from the hole in my yard to a police vault to its real owner, I was already designing the perfect black dress to wear with it, perhaps based on the pattern of the bright coral scoop-necked blouse I was wearing. I’d used one of my machines to embroider a simple flame stitch around the neckline of the blouse, but the black dress would be unadorned, to show off the necklace.

  Clay looked down at my throat. “Mmm. You look fine the way you are.”

  Men! There was no way I was going to a gala banquet in jeans. But I wouldn’t care if he wore jeans. He always looked great. I’d seen women do double takes when they caught a glimpse of his square-jawed face, chocolate brown eyes, and easy smile. He never seemed to notice the effect he had on them, which, as far as I was concerned, made him even more attractive. I inched farther from him.