Night of the Living Thread (A Threadville Mystery) Read online

  Isis stared at Patricia blankly at first, and then her eyes widened. “You! You’re nothing but a copycat.”

  A patchy flush rose up Patricia’s neck and face. Clamping her lips together, she pushed her wide-rimmed glasses up her nose and backed away, into Juliette.

  Isis caught sight of Juliette. “A fortune-teller,” she scoffed. “You make things up!”

  Juliette challenged, “And you don’t?”

  Isis raised her chin. “The original Book of the Dead is older than time.”

  Dare laughed in a scornful way.

  For some reason, which I hoped had nothing to do with a desire to chomp on any of us, Floyd, the 1930s zombie, had come into the fire station. Leaning against a wall just inside the workroom, he appeared to be watching the drama. How did he manage that lackluster, dead look in his eyes—with contact lenses?

  Brianna surprised me by slouching up to Isis and announcing, “I’ll write a book and call it The Book of the Thread.”

  Isis taunted, “Copycat! You’re all a bunch of copycats without an original thought in your heads.”

  Brianna shrugged and slunk away, out into the garage where the fire trucks were.

  Floyd shambled toward us and sneered at Isis. “And I’m writing The Book of the Living Dead. It’s about zombies.”

  Slinging an almost triumphant glance my way, Isis brushed a hand against her throat. “Stop following me around. I can be dangerous. You knew that last night when you accused me of casting spells on you. My spells are potent.” Her previous night’s fright seemed to become more speakable by the moment.

  At his sides, Floyd’s hands became fists. “Then stop cursing people, alive or undead.”

  Isis taunted him, “I’ll do as I please. I have powers that none of you can guess at. Besides, zombies don’t exist. I know. I have studied the curses that usher the dead into the afterlife, and I have contributed new ones, also, and the available afterlives don’t involve zombies.”

  A pulse throbbed at Floyd’s whitened temple. “Then what am I doing here?” The streak of “blood” on his chin glistened wetly in the fire station’s bright lighting. “Zombies are real.” Baring his teeth, he lurched toward her.

  Isis stomped out of the workroom and into the garage. “You’re a fake,” she called over her shoulder. “You’re all fakes and copycats. Don’t underestimate what I can do to all of you.”

  Dare Drayton called after her, “Be careful, or I’ll kill you in my next book!”

  But she must have kept going. I heard her sandals patter past the fire trucks.

  A strangely rueful look on his face, Clay came over to me and murmured, “Is the skirt ready? My cousin came to help roll it to the park.”

  I stepped closer to him so I could whisper, “Your cousin? Floyd the zombie?”

  His teasing smile was almost enough to melt me. “I don’t know if I’m related to any zombies. Come meet Dare.” One hand on my elbow, he guided me to Dare Drayton and introduced us.

  I stammered something vaguely friendly. The appropriate thing to say might have been, “I love your books.” But I couldn’t—I hadn’t read even part of one.

  Dare looked past me. “What is that monstrosity?” He turned to Clay. “Is that the thing I’m supposed to help move?”

  Someone had unplugged the skirt, so it was no longer merrily flashing lights, but it was still a glaring white. Opal and Naomi crawled around it, weaving glow-in-the-dark thread through the lace and frills on the gown.

  The warmth left Clay’s face. “You don’t have to help,” he told Dare.

  “How reassuring. I’ll go see what other excitement your little world has to offer. See you at your truck.” The way he emphasized “truck” made it obvious that he thought riding in a pickup truck was beneath him. “I knew I should have driven over here from your place.” Heels hitting the concrete floor, he strode out.

  “Sorry about that,” Clay said.

  “Your place,” I repeated. “Is he staying with you?”

  “Yes. My mom said I had to put up with him. She and his mother are cousins, and have always spent lots of time together. My mother always drummed into me that I have to be nice to Dare because he had a difficult childhood. My childhood was difficult, too, when he visited us, which wasn’t every day, or I’d be a fiend.” His grin was anything but scary. “So now, I not only have to put up with him, I have to put him up while he does research for his next book, Terror on Lake Erie, or something like that.”

  I laughed. “Our mothers must be alike. Wait until you meet the person my mom foisted on me.”

  “Someone’s staying with you, too?”

  “Brianna. She was here in the fire station, but she left.”

  “The scared one in the glasses? Supposedly writing The Book of the Treadle?”

  I glanced around the room. Patricia was gone, too. “No, that was Patricia, Opal’s guest.”

  I didn’t see Patricia out in the garage, but Juliette’s bright skirt, presumably with her still inside it, swished past a tanker truck and disappeared toward the street.

  Apparently, none of our houseguests were eager to push a bright white hoopskirt through the streets of Threadville. Or maybe the women were chasing Dare Drayton for autographs. Or they wanted to talk to Floyd the zombie. He was gone, too.

  I answered Clay’s question. “Brianna is the petite blonde. She threatened to write The Book of the Thread.”

  Clay frowned. “That girl is staying with you?” He put both hands on my shoulders. “I caught her giving you a nasty look, as if she didn’t like you.” He squeezed my shoulders. “Hard to believe.”

  “She’s young.”

  “I didn’t like the way she looked at you.” His concern nearly unhinged me.

  I tilted my face up toward his. “Was it worse than the way Dare talks to you?”

  “Dare has always been like that. Do you think they really are writing all those books?”

  “Not Brianna,” I guessed. “And I suspect that some of the others were jumping into the fray, also, having fun making Isis angrier.”

  Why? Her original rage had been directed at Dare, though he claimed he’d never heard of her. And Floyd the zombie obviously had a bone to pick with Isis. But why had Patricia, Juliette, and Brianna decided to annoy her? Although their crafts seemed a little farfetched for our Get Ready for Halloween Craft Fair, Isis, Patricia, and Juliette had all come to Threadville to participate in it. Isis knew that Juliette was a fortune-teller, as if she might have met her before. Patricia’s and Isis’s reactions to each other had made me wonder if they had met before, too. But what about Brianna?

  Troubled, I looked up at Clay. “They ganged up on Isis. Like bullies.”

  His mouth was grim. “I thought Dare had outgrown that.”

  “Isis did attack him first,” I pointed out. “But the others seemed to revel in making her angrier.”

  “He was always good at manipulating others to do his bullying for him.”

  “I’ll bet you never let him make you do that.”

  Clay brushed the side of my face with his fingertips. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. I learned to ignore him.”

  “And that made him try harder?”

  “Eventually, he had to give up.”

  I had to look away for fear Clay would see how much I admired his toughness. And his tenderness.

  Luckily, Opal provided a distraction. “Come check out our finished masterpiece, Willow!” She snipped glow-in-the-dark thread from its spool.

  I joined Opal and Naomi beside the overskirt. “Edna will love it! It’s perfect.”

  Naomi leaned forward and studied one of the big lightbulbs. “Not quite. Do we have time to scrape the lettering off the lightbulbs?”

  Opal slapped at her. “No. Tiny signs like ‘twenty double-u’ add to the mystique. Besides
, we’d better get this art installation in place so Gord won’t have to keep finding ways to prevent Edna from looking toward the park.”

  Naomi, Opal, Clay, and I wheeled the ungainly skirt toward the garage in the front section of the fire station. I kicked something that rolled away from me.

  It was my spool of thread. I set it on a ledge with my thread nippers and packet of needles. I’d walk the dogs later, pick up my sewing supplies, and lock the fire station. At the moment, my hands were full of tulle and satin. I tried to clutch the jigsaw stand beneath all the fabric without harming our glorious creation or breaking any of its many lightbulbs.

  Outside, Floyd, Juliette, Dare, and Patricia had all disappeared, but underneath the streetlight near the driveway, Brianna wrote in a small book like a checkbook, tore out a page, and handed it to Isis.

  Opal called to them, “Want to join the fun?” Her voice brimmed over with smiles.

  Barely glancing at us, Brianna and Isis refused. They walked quickly toward Lake Street.

  The wedding skirt’s casters rumbled along, bumping over the sidewalk seams in a beat that made us laugh. At Lake Street, I couldn’t see Isis, but Brianna turned toward the gate leading to my side yard. Carefully, we eased the mammoth skirt off the curb.

  Something slithered against the leg of my jeans and over the toe of my sneakers.

  Opal gasped. “Is that a snake?”

  Clay apologized. “It’s my extension cord.”

  The cord had been unwinding from the reel inside the skirt. Clay jogged back, unsnared the plug from the base of a utility pole, and returned, holding the plug in his hand like a trophy.

  “Why is that cord so long?” Opal asked him.

  “That’s what I had. Short extension cords aren’t very useful at construction sites. And this one is rated for outdoors.”

  Clay and I rewound the cord on its reel until only the plug dangled outside the skirt.

  Figuring that if we tried to push the skirt over the lawn, the casters would ensnare themselves in the grass or dig trenches in the earth, we guided the overdecorated wheeled jigsaw stand the long way around, down the road leading to the concrete boat launch ramp, and from there along the accessibility boardwalk zigzagging up the hill to the bandstand.

  Yelping, Opal whipped her right hand from our ruffled concoction.

  We all asked her what was wrong.

  “We must have left a pin somewhere in that skirt. Something pricked my right thumb.” A sly grin crossed her face. “‘By the pricking of my thumbs . . .’” She poked at one of the skirt’s many flounces. “‘. . . something wicked this way comes.’”

  Naomi laughed. “I think you mean ‘something stitched this way comes.’” She gave “stitched” two syllables so that it almost rhymed with “wicked.”

  With great drama, Opal made the universal bad-pun groan. “That’s not what the second Weird Sister says in Macbeth, and you know it.”

  Naomi gave the skirt a push. “Lead on, Macduff!”

  Opal muttered, “Macbeth said, ‘lay on.’”

  Naomi rationalized the misquote. “No one in this century says ‘lay on.’”

  Joking and teasing each other, we shoved the ridiculous overskirt up the hill as quickly as it would go. The skirt shimmied whenever its wheels hit another plank. By the time the casters clattered into the bandstand, Opal, Naomi, and I were howling with laughter at the dress’s lifelike antics, and Clay was grinning.

  The only lights in the bandstand were the twinkly fairy lights, but it was easy to see Dare leaning against one of the white-painted pillars.

  He asked Clay, “Are you chasing me with that thing, cuz? You realize that I’m at your mercy to take me back to my laptop and the book I’m working on.” He stared straight at me, but there was no warmth in his eyes. “It’s my twelfth, and will be a bestseller like the others.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  Naomi clapped her hands. “You must be very talented.”

  Opal agreed. To someone who didn’t know them, they probably sounded completely sincere.

  Clay told Dare, “I’ll be ready to go in a few minutes. I want to see Edna’s face when she catches sight of this.”

  Dare scowled at him. “Meet you at your truck.”

  “It’s unlocked,” Clay told his departing back. I threw Clay a sympathetic look. Frowning, he watched his cousin stroll up the grassy hill toward the sidewalk.

  Naomi threaded a white ribbon through loops on a quilted satin label and tied the ribbon around the top of the skirt. She made a pretty bow and adjusted the label so that anyone coming down the sloping lawn from Lake Street could read the words that my machines had embroidered in pewter-colored metallic embroidery thread: Edna’s Wedding Skirt.

  Opal pulled a phone from her pocket, fingered its screen, and said, “Okay, Gord. We’re ready. Bring her to the bandstand.”

  7

  From our perch in the bandstand, Naomi squinted down toward the river. Wisps of mist inched toward us. She shivered. “I don’t know why people think fog is romantic. They even create it with machines at wedding receptions! Fog is cold and wet. Anything could be hiding in it.”

  Opal stuck her right thumb up. It wasn’t noticeably bleeding. “Let’s hope it rises this far. From up on Lake Street, Edna won’t know what she’s seeing.”

  Haylee arrived first, in a black suit she’d tailored for herself. She shortened her strides to accommodate the tiny woman by her side. “This is Mrs. Battersby,” she told Clay and me. “She’s Edna’s mother.” Haylee had always called all three of her mothers by their first names. Opal and Naomi, who must have known Edna’s mother since the Three Weird Mothers were little girls, greeted Mrs. Battersby warmly, but, it seemed to me, cautiously.

  Mrs. Battersby’s eyes were dark and alert, reminding me strongly of Edna’s. She darted glances behind Naomi, Opal, Clay, and me. We were doing our best to block the overskirt from view until Edna arrived.

  Opal got her wish about the rising mist. Fog enveloped us. Two forms walked carefully down from the street. Gord was in a suit. Edna wore a long silver gown trimmed with gold spangles.

  Clay plugged in the enormous hoopskirt. The twenty-watt lightbulbs came on. He flicked a switch at the back of the waist, and Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” began playing. The skirt’s lights flashed, appearing to dance over the skirt in time to the music

  Edna let out peal after peal of laughter. The rest of us joined her.

  But not Mrs. Battersby. Her voice cut through our merriment. “No wonder she wouldn’t let me see her gown. That thing is atrocious.” If Mrs. Battersby was always this critical, I understood why Opal and Naomi had been cautious when greeting her.

  I almost giggled. Mrs. Battersby’s fashion sense might not be as acute as she seemed to think. Her beige pantsuit was vintage, possibly an outfit she’d inherited from her own mother, and the elastic knit into the polyester fabric known as “double knit” had given out here and there, making the suit strangely warty.

  Edna said softly to her mother, “I’m wearing a less elaborate gown to the ceremony, but this is perfect for me to put on over my gown for the reception.”

  Mrs. Battersby argued, “You wouldn’t.”

  Now I also understood why Haylee had insisted that Edna’s mother had to stay with her instead of with Edna during the week leading up to Edna’s big day.

  Gord put an arm around Edna and pulled her closer. “Everyone, come back to my place to toast my little bride and all of her wedding gowns.” He kissed the top of her head.

  I’d given Brianna a key to my patio door, but wasn’t happy about leaving my animals alone in the apartment with her. “I’d better walk my dogs.”

  Smiling into my eyes, Clay started to say something. That he’d come with me?

  I imagined a stroll along the dark riverside trail with him, and maybe a
long walk with my two dogs. My heart rate sped up.

  However, about a block away, a horn started honking, taps and blasts likely to awaken the zombies a mile away at the Elderberry Bay Lodge. Clay jumped off the bandstand steps and loped up the hill. He called over his shoulder, “I’ll make him stop.” He turned around and added more genially, “I’ll lock the fire station while I’m at it.”

  Gord asked me, “You’re sure you won’t come with us?”

  Although disappointed that Clay couldn’t stick around, I smiled at Gord. “I’m sure. Another time.”

  Edna gazed dreamily at the white overskirt. “I guess it’s all right to leave that fantastic creation here.”

  I pointed above it to the banner strung between the bandstand’s pillars. Threadville Get Ready for Halloween Craft Fair. “It’s advertising. The police chief said she’d keep an eye on the overskirt during her regular patrols.”

  Mrs. Battersby suggested, “Maybe she could use it as target practice. She could shoot that car horn while she’s at it.” She sniffed. “I hope she arrests whoever’s making that racket.”

  Maybe she had, or Clay had caught up with whoever had been pounding on the horn. The noise stopped.

  Mrs. Battersby placed a hand on her forehead. “That thing gave me a headache. Haylee, take me back to your place so I can lie down.”

  “I’d love to come with you, Gord,” Opal said, “but Naomi and I have to go to the classroom in Haylee’s shop. Haylee’s helping us with our bridesmaids’ dresses.” They started up the hill. Gord and Edna followed. Haylee straggled behind them with Mrs. Battersby, who was grousing about people who didn’t know enough not to wake the dead.

  I jogged down the hill to the riverside trail.

  Mist parted near the river, showing a petite woman in a long white gown. Isis? She reached up among branches drooping from a weeping willow. Something silver glinted in her hand. The woman had chosen an odd time to prune willow trees.

  Fog shrouded her again and I shrugged. I suspected that I could try for years to understand Isis, but never succeed.

  I felt my way along the dark trail until my backyard appeared out of the mist. Opening the gate, I winced at the cold, dewy metal.