Night of the Living Thread (A Threadville Mystery) Page 3

  I turned to look at her. The top of her head barely came past my elbow. “I should hope so! But I love thread and trying new kinds and colors.” I set her sample case beside my racks of threads and headed for the dogs’ pen. “I hope you don’t mind dogs.”

  “Do they bite?”

  Who could look at Sally’s and Tally’s sweet faces and possibly think the little charmers would bite? At the moment they were whimpering and clamoring for attention, and their tails were wagging at about a hundred miles an hour. “No. The black-and-white one is Sally-Forth and the brindle-and- white one is Tally-Ho. They’re brother and sister. I adopted them from a rescue organization when they were about a year old. They’re very friendly.” I opened the gate and told the dogs to sit. They did, but their tails swished across the floor, and their mouths hung open in happy grins.

  Brianna hunched her shoulders and pulled her fists to her collar. “They have a lot of teeth.”

  I showed her how to let the dogs sniff the backs of her hands, but she wouldn’t try.

  Sally closed her mouth, leaving the tip of her tongue out, a particularly endearing pose. She tilted her head, obviously bewildered. Usually, people wanted to stroke her glossy fur. I rubbed both dogs behind their ears so they’d know that I still loved them, even if Brianna was less than impressed.

  Yowling and scratching erupted from the stairs leading down to my apartment.

  Brianna jerked her head around to stare at the apartment’s closed door. “What’s that?”

  “My kittens. They’re almost full-grown.”

  “How many cats?” She sounded wary.

  No wonder. They were making a terrible ruckus. “Only two.”

  “Two dogs and two cats for one apartment?”

  I wondered what, if anything, Brianna actually liked. Her threads, I hoped. “The apartment has two bedroom and bathroom suites,” I countered. “You get your own. The pets will stay out of it.”

  She didn’t look convinced.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “I need to shower, dress for work, and have breakfast. How about if I show you the outside way to the apartment? I’ll shut my pets into the master suite with me, and you can carry your stuff inside without tripping over animals.”

  She yawned. “Okay.”

  Leaving the dogs where they were for the moment, I led her out through the shop’s front door. She yawned again.

  I asked, “Where did you stay last night? You got here very early.” It had to be somewhere nearby. Maybe the Elderberry Bay Lodge wasn’t quite overflowing with zombies yet.

  She mumbled, “I drove all night.”

  “You poor thing!” That could explain her lack of enthusiasm. “Let’s get you settled. Maybe you’d like a nap before you show me your threads.”

  “Okay.” Still no sign of interest.

  At her car, I couldn’t help staring in concern. She had brought a surprising amount of luggage. Her trunk and her backseat were crammed to the top.

  Moving in, my mother had said . . .

  Carrying a garment bag and an overnight case, I led the way down the sidewalk to my gate. Behind me, Brianna rolled a large wheeled suitcase. She grunted when she had to pick it up on the grassy hill outside my bedroom windows. My guest suite, the one that would be hers, looked out on the other side yard, but I didn’t have a gate on that side, and the sliding glass patio door was in the middle of the rear of the building, anyway.

  My serene backyard should help my young guest feel refreshed after her all-night drive. Below Blueberry Cottage, my newly seeded lawn and flower gardens sloped down to my back fence and the riverside trail beyond it. Tall cedars on both sides of my yard had bushed out, and almost hid the chain links. Maples above us were turning gold and red. A puffy blanket of early-morning fog on the river gave the entire vista a dramatic and mysterious feel. I took a deep breath of contentment. Autumn even smelled good.

  Brianna yawned.

  I led her to my patio. The wheels of her suitcase rattled across the flagstones. At the sliding glass door, Mustache and Bow-Tie stood on their hind feet and pawed at the glass. I made certain the garment bag and overnight bag wouldn’t fall over. “I’ll imprison the cats,” I told Brianna, “so we won’t have to worry about them escaping if you want to bring in more.” Between the two of us, we’d hauled enough luggage from her car in one trip for at least a two-week stay.

  Brianna didn’t exclaim over my kittens’ cuteness as I scooped up the warm little squirmers. I shut them inside the master suite, returned to the patio, and brought Brianna and her luggage into my great room.

  My kitchen and dining area took up the left half of the great room, and a comfy seating area was on the right. Behind us, the patio door was centered in a wall of glass that made the room bright and airy. Again, most people told me the apartment was lovely with its white walls and upholstery and its touches of colorful machine embroidery.

  Brianna didn’t say a thing, maybe because of the racket the kittens were making on the other side of my bedroom door.

  My suite was ahead and to the right. The laundry room door was straight ahead. The door to the left of the laundry room opened to the hallway leading into the guest suite. Brianna would have her own bedroom, bathroom, and a large walk-in closet, but most of the guest closet was taken up with sewing supplies. I tried not to let my stash grow too much, but although I sewed a lot, I always seemed to purchase ahead of what I could finish that week. Or that month. Or that season . . .

  The stairway to In Stitches was to the left of my guest suite, between it and the kitchen area. I thought my apartment was perfect for one person and the occasional guest.

  Brianna must have been really tired. She didn’t speak when I ushered her into the guest suite with its white furnishings, including a duvet cover I’d embroidered. Maybe Brianna didn’t care for ruffles, even the restrained, tailored ones I’d added to the bedding and curtains.

  As we left her suite, I pointed to the stairway. “When you feel like showing off your thread samples, go up to In Stitches. People come to Threadville every day by bus, car, and on foot. All of the Threadville store owners give workshops. I’ll have one this morning and another after lunch. Besides, other customers come and go all day. I’m sure the women attending my workshops would love to see your samples.”

  “Okay.” How could a thread distributor sound so bored about thread? “I’ll go out for another load,” she said in her monotone, “then crash for a while.”

  “Want breakfast? I can scramble eggs and make toast and coffee. Or there’s cereal.”

  “Maybe when I wake up.”

  “I don’t have much food on hand.” I would have, though, if my mother had told me in time that Brianna was coming. “For lunch, I usually grab a peanut butter or grilled cheese sandwich and some carrots and an apple, and there’s plenty of that for you, too. If that’s not enough, go north on Lake Street—that’s down the hill toward the beach—and you’ll find a couple of restaurants. The Threadville tour ladies who don’t bring their lunches usually eat at Pier 42.”

  “Okay.” She yawned, turned around, headed into her suite, and closed the door. Maybe she’d be more companionable after her nap.

  I collected the dogs from upstairs, showered, and dressed in jeans, an orange T-shirt, and a jean jacket I’d embellished with machine-embroidered pumpkins and fall leaves.

  Brianna didn’t come out of her bedroom or join me for breakfast. After a brief outing, the kittens went back into my suite and the dogs and I trotted upstairs to In Stitches.

  We’d left one of Brianna’s heavy cases in the shop. I carried it to the storeroom, turned the embroidered Come Back Later sign in my glass front door to Welcome, filled the dogs’ water dishes, and petted the dogs until the Threadville tour buses arrived and my morning students crowded into In Stitches.

  I wasn’t actually teaching classes tha
t day. I was helping with a project that Rosemary, who drove the bus from Erie, had suggested. “Everyone loves Edna,” she had said, “so why don’t we make a wedding quilt for her?”

  Naturally, everybody associated with Threadville, except Edna, who didn’t know about it, loved the idea. At In Stitches, we had embroidered blocks for the quilt.

  The women in my shop helped themselves to cider and cookies and then commandeered embroidery machines.

  I glanced out my big front windows. Other Threadville tourists were inside Buttons and Bows, learning how to decorate everything they made with every possible trim. Little did Edna know that some of the decorations she’d sold to my students had been brought to In Stitches to be added to a quilt for her.

  To the left of Edna’s shop was Tell a Yarn, where quilt blocks were being knit and crocheted for Edna.

  Many of the fabrics and some of the embellishing techniques and yet more quilt blocks came from Haylee’s fabric shop, The Stash, at the far left end of the row of Threadville shops.

  To the right of Edna’s shop was Batty About Quilts, where the blocks would be sewn together, the quilt top would be stitched to the batting and the backing, and the entire quilt would be bound.

  Threadville was a wonderful place. Everyone gave everyone else moral support. Besides, if I ran out of anything, one of my friends in the other stores was sure to have what I needed, or know who did.

  Edna loved bright colors, sparkle, and glitter, and all the women in my shop were going wild.

  Using water-soluble stabilizer and my embroidery software and machines, I had made 3-D lace bride and groom dolls, like wedding cake toppers, to attach to my block. I had even used silver metallic embroidery thread for the bride’s hair.

  For the 3-D effect, I had made an almost-circular skirt for the bride, which would fasten in back with loops and tabs that I’d built into the embroidery design. The groom, with his cylindrical pant legs and tuxedo, was a little more complex.

  I’d soaked the figures in warm water to dissolve the stabilizer, then, without rinsing all the dissolved stabilizer out because I wanted it to remain as starch in the lace, I’d assembled both the bride and groom, complete with a tab on his hand and a loop on hers so they could hold hands, and had hung them to dry on a doll-sized clothesline I’d set up on the low wall surrounding my front porch. By now they should be dry enough to take apart, iron, and put back together. I crossed my fingers that by letting them dry while assembled, I’d kept the loops and tabs in the right places, and her skirt wouldn’t be hiked up, and his legs would be close to the same length.

  Eager to see how the cute couple had fared, I went out to the front porch to get them.

  The little clothesline was where I’d left it, tucked behind one of my rocking chairs.

  The bride and groom dolls were gone.

  4

  The tiny clothespins were still clipped to the line. Could the miniature bride and groom have blown away? I hadn’t noticed anything resembling a strong wind since the afternoon before, when I’d hung my freestanding lace creations. I ran down the porch steps and around to the side.

  The bride and groom weren’t among the hostas and mums in the flower bed below the porch, either.

  Trudging up the steps, I shivered, even though it was a warm morning for October.

  Last night, Isis had put a couple of objects into the river and called out Edna’s and Gord’s names. Surely, she wouldn’t have stolen the lace dolls as part of a curse against Threadville’s favorite bride and groom.

  However, there was a bright side to missing crafts—the need to make replacements. I could show a different group how to make 3-D lace with machine embroidery.

  I went inside and invited all who were interested—which turned out to be everyone in the shop—to gather around my computer monitor to see how I’d drawn the original design. “Basically,” I told them, “you have to make certain that each element of the design is attached to other elements with enough stitches that the design won’t change shape after you rinse out the stabilizer.” If I hadn’t done that, my bride and groom could have stretched to long, thin, unrecognizable shapes.

  Two women who had already finished their quilt blocks volunteered to make the new bride and groom dolls. They transferred my designs to sewing machines with embroidery attachments, stitched new bride and groom dolls, and soaked them in a basin of hot water to partially dissolve the stabilizer. We hung the cute little bridal pair up to dry—in the restroom, this time.

  We were so busy that I forgot I had a houseguest until Rosemary took over for me at lunchtime.

  Sally-Forth, Tally-Ho, and I clattered downstairs to our apartment. Discordant music reverberated from the guest suite through the closed door. Not to be outdone, Mustache and Bow-Tie created their own clashing harmonies from my bedroom. An opened jar of grape jelly with a knife sticking out of it, a plate of toast crumbs, and a glass containing about an inch of orange juice were on the counter near the sink.

  I let the kittens into the great room. They rubbed against me and the dogs while Sally-Forth sniffed them all over. She looked up at me, then pointedly at the glass door, her signal that it was time for all four animals to go out. As usual, Sally curtailed any exploring tendencies the kittens showed, and wasn’t ready to play with Tally until after I took the kittens inside again. I tidied away the remains of Brianna’s breakfast, made my lunch, shut the kittens into my suite, and ate at the picnic table on the patio while the dogs wrestled and explored.

  After my lunch, music still blasted from Brianna’s room, but she didn’t emerge. I took my hair dryer and the dogs upstairs to the shop.

  While I blow-dried and pressed the lace dolls my students had made in the morning, the after-lunch group completed their quilt blocks. It was late in the afternoon when, with lots of admiring noises, we arranged the blocks on the cutting table. The 3-D lace bride and groom, standing and holding hands in a machine-embroidered garden, made everyone smile.

  Resembling a lost soul, Brianna straggled into the shop through the front door. I introduced her to everyone. Rosemary proudly showed her the quilt blocks we’d made for Edna’s quilt.

  “Won’t it be small?” Brianna asked.

  Rosemary gave her a once-over, like a mother checking to see if a child had washed her face and combed her hair before school. “They’re making blocks in the fabric store, the yarn store, and the quilt store, too. It may end up humongous.”

  “Nice,” Brianna said in her flat voice.

  I brought her case out of the storeroom. She opened it and showed us the thread she could sell us. She still didn’t become enthused.

  The rest of us did. She had exciting new threads to show us, in many different colors, weights, and sheens.

  I picked up a box marked Glow-in-the-Dark Thread. The thread was white. “What color is this when it glows in the dark?” I asked her.

  “Kind of a yellowish-greenish white, like fireflies. They’re designing different colors every day.” She showed us a card with pictures of brighter green, blue, yellow, orange, and pink spools of thread. “These are the ones I can order now, but there will be more.”

  I didn’t need the oohs and aahs of my students to tell me to order some of each color available now, and others later.

  Luckily, Brianna had lots of the whitish glow-in-the-dark thread. Customers wanted to buy them from her, but she pointed at me. “It’s her store. She can buy them and sell them to you.”

  I bought lots of thread, including three dozen spools of glow-in-the-dark thread, many of which I sold to Threadville tourists who wanted to help make trick-or-treaters safer.

  Brianna stayed in the shop, fiddling with her threads and answering questions in a very offhand fashion while Rosemary and some of her friends carefully carried the quilt blocks off to Batty About Quilts.

  They returned with a pair of zombies.

>   In a stiff-legged walk with their arms angled ahead of them, the zombies stumbled toward the cash desk.

  Some of the women gasped and a few backed away, but most of us smiled. No one ran outside screaming, or even not screaming. In their pen, Sally and Tally stood up, stretched, sniffed, and wagged their tails.

  Both zombies were tall, with whiter-than-white skin—quite a makeup feat for the one wearing nothing besides wildly flowered surfer shorts, flip-flops, and a beach towel. He was about my age, and the clothing, or lack of it, showed off a physique that any man, undead or alive, might want to achieve. His white-blond hair lay flat against his head. I wanted to touch it to see if it was wet or merely heavily gelled.

  The other zombie’s ultra-white face was marred by a red gash running from one corner of his mouth to his chin. Red dribbled down the jacket of his disheveled black 1930s suit and smeared the tops of his black leather dress shoes. All of the “blood” looked fresh and wet. The man could have been in his early forties, but it was hard to be sure. Was he the zombie I’d seen in the park the night before, the one who had allegedly confronted Isis? Maybe lots of the zombies in the retreat resembled this one. I wasn’t about to interrogate him in my crowded shop, however. I’d watch for a chance to talk to him alone.

  Actually, I wasn’t very fond of that idea, either.

  I asked, “How can I help you two?”

  Rosemary nudged me and murmured, “Maybe you shouldn’t ask.”

  Disheveled suit displayed his teeth.

  Surfer shorts tramped closer. A rope with a sliced-off end trailed from a loop tied around one ankle. “Any fresh meat?”

  I managed not to laugh. “Sorry, no, but would you like supplies for machine embroidery? A top-of-the-line embroidery machine, perhaps?” I could always hope.

  Surfer shorts said, “We hear you have glow-in-the-dark thread. We live underground with only glowworms for light. Sell us some of your glow-in-the-dark thread and we won’t insist on raw meat.”