Threaded for Trouble Page 20

  Smallwood’s face was sooty. Wisps of hair escaped from underneath her chief of police cap. Her eyelids and the corners of her mouth drooped. She must have come directly from the Coddlefield farm.

  Sorry for her, but admiring her dedication, I led her down to my apartment and outside, without the dogs, who gave me reproachful looks through the glass door.

  I showed Smallwood the cardboard beneath my window. “That’s the interfacing Felicity Ranquels said she was missing this morning. Remember, she said she lost it, pointed at me, said ‘at your,’ and then clammed up?”

  Smallwood held up a hand. “Whoa! How much sleep did you get last night?”

  I grinned sheepishly. “Not much.”

  “Me, neither. So take it slowly.” Heaving a sigh that was just short of a yawn, she opened her notebook.

  “Felicity mentioned the interfacing right before she fainted and Detective Gartener said her head was bleeding. How is she? And how is Tiffany?”

  “Both of them will be in the hospital for a while.”

  I gulped. They must have been in worse shape than I’d feared. “Why?”

  “Concussions. Both of them appear to have been clobbered with a wooden thing we found in the house. It looked like a toy wooden ironing board, but with one end sharpened to a point. Maybe you know what it is. I certainly don’t.”

  “That sounds like a point presser. It’s used for pressing small areas when an ironing board or sleeve board is too big. I have one.” Where was it? In my guest room closet? “Haylee probably sells them, and like any other tailor, she would have one of her own, as would an avid seamstresses like Darlene.” I didn’t remember seeing one in Darlene’s sewing room, but she may have kept it out of sight in one of her many enviable cabinets. She’d had a great sewing room. Was it and everything in it now ruined? Sad. Sad for all the plans she’d made, projects she’d hoped to complete, children she’d wanted to see grow up, grandchildren she would never know.

  “Maybe you can show me your point presser after you enlighten me about Felicity leaving cardboard in your yard.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t want to take time for a complete sewing lesson. “Lapels need more body than fabric has by itself, so we insert a stiffer material we call interfacing between the layers of fabric.”

  Fingering her shirt collar, Smallwood nodded.

  “Felicity used corrugated cardboard to stiffen her lapels.”

  Smallwood scratched her head, dislodging more of her ponytail. “How do you know that?” I couldn’t blame her for being skeptical.

  “When she was in my shop last week, a piece of corrugated cardboard fell out of her lapel. It was the same shape as this one.”

  “And you’re guessing she dropped her cardboard again? In your backyard?” Smallwood removed an evidence bag from a pocket and stepped into my flower garden. The marigolds released a pungent odor that made me sneeze. Smallwood’s hand was just big enough to grab the cardboard by its edges. She began slipping the cardboard into the bag.

  She couldn’t see the side that had been facedown in the flowerbed, but I could.

  Someone had written on it.

  “Turn the cardboard over!” In my excitement, I came across as bossy and aggressive again.

  With another dramatic sigh, Smallwood complied.

  It was definitely Felicity’s interfacing. Around the edges, stray marks from a blue ballpoint pen showed where she’d traced around the lapel pattern. But she’d also printed a message on the cardboard, pressing down so hard that her pen had repeatedly punctured the cardboard, like a spray of minuscule blue-ringed bullet holes, which made it difficult to decipher the words: The Chandler Champion never hurt anyone. Somebody tampered with it, and I’m going to prove it if it’s the last thing I do. If anything happens to me, check out that woman who owns the embroidery store. She’ll stop at nothing to put down Chandler machines in favor of her other machines. Felicity must have felt really adamant. She’d jabbed her pen down hard on the period at the end of that sentence, punching an even bigger hole into the card-board. Then she’d added a sentence fragment, with no period after it at all, as if she’d been interrupted in a thought: That woman who wins all the embroidery contests…What, if anything, had Felicity meant to add to that?

  Smallwood slid the interfacing with its hand-printed note into the evidence bag. “Ooooo-kay, this looks like some sort of evidence, all right.” Of course she had to remind me of Felicity’s accusations. “She obviously suspected you of tampering with that first machine.”

  “Before I knew Darlene was dead, Felicity called and accused me of killing her.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last Thursday, about eight thirty in the morning. I don’t know how she knew about Darlene’s death that soon, unless she’d been at the Coddlefields’ that morning, too. And if Felicity was at the scene of that crime…”

  “She wasn’t. She saw it on the morning news.”

  “You’re taking her word for that?”

  Smallwood sighed again, showing me she didn’t really have to answer. But she did. “Don’t forget that we know for certain that someone tried to harm her. How likely is it that two people are playing these deadly pranks?”

  “So you’re ruling out Felicity. And Tiffany, too. That leaves Plug and Russ.” I thrust my hands into the pockets of my khakis.

  “And a couple of others. You must be the woman who owns the embroidery store. There aren’t any others for miles around, are there?”

  “I don’t win all the embroidery contests.” It came out like the sullen defense of a desperate person.

  Smallwood folded the top of the bag. She was not as precise with pleats and tucks as Gartener had been. “Maybe Felicity was talking about someone else winning embroidery contests. Any idea who?”

  “The only person I can think of was Darlene Coddlefield, since she won the Chandler Champion competition, but Felicity can’t be accusing Darlene of causing her own death.” I opened the door. “Come inside and I’ll find my point presser.” I was hungry, but I’d worry about lunch later.

  “How many embroidery contests are there?”

  I fended off my welcoming dogs, then led Smallwood to my guest room. “Probably hundreds, all over the world, though we can probably narrow it down to machine embroidery contests in this case. But there would still be hundreds.” The dogs curled up on the carpet. I gestured to the armchair beside the window. “Have a seat.”

  “No, thanks. I’m all smoky and would smudge your upholstery. White, when you have dogs. You’re brave.”

  “They don’t get up on furniture.” They’d been surprisingly easy to train. I’d told them “no” once, and they’d been good about it ever since. Keeping the guest bedroom door closed most of the time helped, too.

  Smallwood asked, “Have you won any embroidery contests?”

  I opened the closet door and ran my fingers down labels on plastic boxes. “Small ones. And I was one of many runners-up in the previous IMEC contest.”

  Smallwood smiled with her lips, not her eyes. “So according to the note Felicity probably wrote—we’ll check her printing, by the way—I should ask you where you were last night when she was attacked.”

  Of course the box with the point presser would be on the bottom. “I don’t know when she was attacked.”

  “Don’t be difficult.”

  I suppressed an annoyed sigh of my own and began removing the top boxes. “The fire siren woke me up. You can check with the fire department what time that went off. My clock said it was two. When I was on my way to the Coddlefields’, I heard another siren, probably the ambulance with Tiffany in it. I must have arrived at the Coddlefields’ shortly after two thirty. You can check what time they rushed Tiffany to the hospital.”

  Smallwood pulled a plastic box containing fabric remnants out of the closet for me and set it on the floor. “And you found the victim when?”

  “Between ten and fifteen minutes later.”

  “Did anyone see
you during this time?”

  “I spoke to the Coddlefield children. The oldest girl must be about fifteen. The youngest girl, Darla, told me a lady was still in the house. Actually, she said that a ‘nasty lady’ was in the house. She had referred to Felicity Ranquels as a nasty lady before, but it didn’t occur to me that Felicity, who lives in Cleveland, could be there at that time of night. Haylee’s also a new volunteer in the fire department, and I hadn’t seen her at the fire. I can’t imagine anyone calling Haylee nasty, but what if Darla had meant Haylee? I needed to find out if Haylee was trapped in that house.”

  Her eyelids closed to slits, Smallwood appeared to be half asleep. “I’ll give the cardboard with the note on it to Gartener.” Planning to see the handsome detective again seemed to perk her up. “Would you have called me if you’d seen what she wrote?”

  The neckline of my T-shirt was trying to strangle me. I tugged at it. “Of course. Felicity is rabidly protective of her company’s machines. She was going to rescue the machine last night before she rescued Tiffany. Who set that sewing machine on fire in the first place, the mystery fireman?”

  “How did you know it was set?”

  “I didn’t.” Had Chief Smallwood just let me in on a clue? Did she know that arson had been responsible for the fire? “But why knock people out and tie them to furniture unless he planned to destroy all the evidence in a fire? He probably planned that Felicity’s and Tiffany’s deaths would appear accidental. Darlene’s death could have passed as an accident.”

  “We were almost certain that Darlene’s death was not completely an accident, even before last night. There had to have been malicious intent.”

  I frowned. “That’s what I thought, too, based on the number of things that went wrong with the machine.”

  “And the table it was on.”

  I held my breath in hopes she’d give me more information.

  As if resigned to filling me in, she explained in a weary voice, “We took the table as evidence. The bolts fastening the legs were held on with wing nuts. The front two wing nuts were so loose that when the sewing machine started going top speed, the bolts worked themselves out and the front legs fell, bringing the table and the machine with them. If Darlene had been sitting at the table instead of lying on the floor trying to unplug the crazed machine, she may have ended up only with some bad bruises on her thighs. From the look of the bolts, those wing nuts had once been quite tight. Someone must have unscrewed them.”

  Malicious intent. Why would anyone do such a thing? Feeling sick, I knelt and lifted the lid off the box that, according to my labeling system, held my point presser. I pulled out a tailor’s ham, some pressing cloths, and a box of small pressing aids. And finally, my point presser. I hauled it out. “Is this like the weapon you found?”

  36

  “YES,” SMALLWOOD SAID. “TIFFANY AND Felicity were hit with something just like that. You seamstresses own a lot of lethal tools.”

  I nestled the point presser back in its place. “Using a wooden weapon before setting a fire shows premeditation, doesn’t it?”

  “It could. And many killers expect a fire to burn up all the evidence. Fires don’t, and this one didn’t come close. The good thing about amateur criminals, if there is a good thing, is that they make mistakes and are easier to catch.”

  I tried to keep a neutral expression on my face, but she shook her pen at me. “You were lucky that other time. Don’t think of yourself as a detective, amateur or professional. Let us do the investigating.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I nearly saluted.

  She glared at me.

  Maybe she didn’t want me investigating, but even she might admit that I could come up with plausible theories. They might not be the right theories, but they could lead her and other investigators down paths that would yield results, couldn’t they? “Did you ever find Felicity’s car?” I asked.

  “Yep. It was where she said she’d left it, in a farm lane south of the house, tucked among the trees. Tell me this, Willow—Felicity reported that she saw the firefighter attack Tiffany on the third floor, and then Felicity went to the second floor, where we know she was attacked. You said that the little girl told you she saw the nasty lady sleeping in Tiffany’s room when her daddy was carrying her and her blankie outside, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, here’s the thing—Plug had his fourteen-year-old son report the fire while Plug and his two oldest teenagers evacuated the little kids. Which means that Felicity saw a firefighter inside the Coddlefields’ house before the fire was reported. How could that be?”

  “Maybe Tiffany had already called it in?”

  Smallwood shook her head decisively. “Nope. We checked with 911. No one had.”

  I shoved the plastic box containing the point presser back into my closet. “If one was going to set a fire, wouldn’t wearing a firefighter’s uniform, complete with respirator and mask, be a sensible precaution?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Maybe the actual attacker wasn’t wearing a firefighting outfit. Felicity was stunned and could have been confused about what happened before she was hit. I didn’t clobber her, anyway.” I only dragged her down a flight of stairs. “And there was that mystery fireman who must have left early, while smoke was still coming out of that house and the others were spraying water on the roof. Maybe he arrived early, too.” To attack people and start a fire? Why would someone do that?

  And had Susannah been at the Coddlefields’? The mailbox door hadn’t been closed, but it wouldn’t have made sense for her to rifle through people’s mailboxes hours after the mail should have been delivered. Unsure who had been driving the car that resembled Susannah’s, I didn’t mention it.

  Smallwood had kept track of the boxes. She handed them to me in order so they’d end up where they’d been before. Her thoroughness and helpfulness despite her lack of sleep impressed me. I thanked her, shut the closet door, and added, “Maybe the mystery fireman wore a firefighter’s outfit as a disguise.”

  “It could be difficult to clomp around in someone else’s house and not be noticed,” she said. “Especially dressed as a fireman.”

  She had a dry sense of humor that I was only beginning to recognize and appreciate. “Unless it was a common occurrence,” I contributed. “Maybe Plug and his sons strut around in those uniforms frequently.” At the look on her face, I quickly added, “Maybe they do fire drills, teach the little kids about fire safety, or something.”

  “Or something,” she repeated drily. “Whatever it is, I don’t think I want to know about it.”

  “It’s your job.”

  “Thanks for reminding me, Willow.”

  Yes, she definitely had a sense of humor.

  “No problem. And anyway,” I said, “someone besides Felicity did see that fireman. Tiffany. Where was Plug when Felicity saw Tiffany and the fireman having their encounter?”

  “He claims he fell asleep in the basement watching a baseball game.”

  “I did hear a TV or radio in the basement when I ran inside. Presumably, the smaller children were sleeping in their bedrooms on the second floor when the fireman, or whoever, crept in. Where were Plug’s older kids?”

  “Russ and his two teenaged siblings, a boy and a girl, had been out driving around. They came home and saw flames shooting from the sewing room window on the third floor.”

  Or at least they said they’d been out. “So Tiffany’s attacker was able to creep up to the sewing room without anyone noticing, except Tiffany, who could have been up there working on a project. And Felicity’s entry went unnoticed, too. Even if Plug heard someone walking around upstairs, he might have figured it was Tiffany or one of his kids. But you’d think he’d have heard his smoke detectors. Not that they were making any noise when I arrived.” With all that smoke still billowing, shouldn’t they have been beeping?

  “They were out of batteries.”

  I clapped my hand over my mouth and squeaked through my fingers
, “The fire chief? Neglected to replace his batteries?”

  She waved her hand in front of her face as if trying to blow smoke away. “Someone in that household—Plug says it wasn’t him—took batteries out whenever the detectors warned that the batteries were low. They probably intended to put new ones in.”

  Maybe as volunteer firefighters, Haylee and I could go around reminding people to replace batteries in smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. We could even help them do it, and no one would accuse us of being snoopy.

  My stomach growled. I asked Smallwood, “When did you last eat?”

  “Supper last night.”

  “Come on, then.” I led her to the kitchen and set out bread, peanut butter, grape jelly, knives, spoons, and plates. We dug in and made thick, gooey sandwiches. Grapes weren’t good for dogs, so I left the jelly out of theirs.

  Smallwood asked me to give her a more detailed description of the firefighter I’d seen out on the road.

  “He was wearing full regalia, including a mask, I think, which would have been odd, since those things aren’t comfortable and he was so far from the fire. I couldn’t see all of his face. He was about Plug’s height.”

  “Why are you making that face?”

  I had squeezed my eyes and mouth closed as if someone were blowing smoke at me. “I wouldn’t want to rule Plug Coddlefield out of any of this. But I don’t think that firefighter was as heavy as he is.”

  “Why don’t you want to rule him out?”

  “He seems mean enough to hurt his wife. And he may have had a girlfriend while Darlene was still alive.”

  “The girlfriend was also attacked.” Smallwood cut her sandwiches into cute triangles. “And according to Felicity, the mystery firefighter encouraged the fire in the sewing machine. Would a father do that when his children were asleep on the next floor down?”

  “I hope not! But Felicity was wandering around inside his house in the middle of the night. I’m not sure I’d blame him for attacking an intruder he found near his children’s bedrooms.”