Blackwork

Table of Contents

 

 

CREWEL WORLD
FRAMED IN LACE
A STITCH IN TIME
UNRAVELED SLEEVE
A MURDEROUS YARN
HANGING BY A THREAD
CUTWORK
CREWEL YULE
EMBROIDERED TRUTHS
SINS AND NEEDLES
KNITTING BONES
THAI DIE
BLACKWORK

 

 

 

 

PATTERNS OF MURDER

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,
South Africa

 

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

 

This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

 

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.

Copyright © 2009 by Mary Monica Pulver Kuhfeld.

 

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

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Ferris, Monica.

eISBN : 978-1-101-14517-3

1. Devonshire, Betsy (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Needleworkers—Fiction. 3. Women detectives—Fiction. 4. Halloween—Fiction. 5. Minnesota—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3566.U47B57 2009

813’.54—dc22 2009022186

 

 

Acknowledgments

Mark Pasquinelli, Blake Richardson (the owner of Herkimer’s Microbrewery), and the brewmasters at Granite City in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, taught me about beer making. Fiona MacGregor and Ann Peters helped me learn about Wicca (and Betty Noel, too). Dr. Robert Sherman helped me with some technical details. The song sung by Leona Cunningham is “Savage Daughter,” by SCA bard Wyndreth Berginsdottir, aka Karen Kahan. I thank Alix Jordan for creating and naming Conner Sullivan. And thanks to Kreinik Manufacturing for the beautiful, appropriate pattern in the back of this book.

And particular thanks is given to my wonderful editor, the bestseller-maker Jackie Cantor; my agent, the bargain-broker Nancy Yost; Berkley Prime Crime’s art director George Long, and the illustrator Mary Ann Lasher, who together come up with my beautiful covers; and my informal editor, the one who keeps me from sending a manuscript off to New York full of bloomers, Ellen Kuhfeld.

Prologue

L
EONA Cunningham hovered over a medium-size black cauldron suspended from a tripod above a fire in her backyard. She was a slim woman, a little taller than average. Her long dark hair, well streaked with silver, was pulled back in a careless knot. She was dressed all in black: black sweater, black jeans, black boots. It was early evening, and the sun was so low that its beams came through a thick stand of trees at the back of her lot. In the low-angled light, the flames of her fire were more felt than seen, casting a warm aura across the beaten earth that surrounded the fire pit. The warmth was welcome; it had been a chilly fall day, with deeply gray skies that had broken open only a few minutes ago.

The weather had started turning cool in late summer. If the signs were right, it was going to be a chilly, wet fall that would turn into a cold, snowy winter.

Leona Cunningham knew how to interpret the signs because she was a witch. She had practiced Wicca, the New Age form of a very old earth-worshipping religion, for decades. One of her gifts in Wicca was understanding the weather. She was rarely wrong in predicting a season.

She stirred the mixture in the pot, which was giving off a fragrance like hot cereal. This wasn’t surprising—it was a mash consisting of ground roasted barley and water, a prelude to beer. Leona pulled some of the burning wood away from the cauldron so it wouldn’t boil. She’d been doing this for so many years she didn’t need a thermometer to know how hot the mash was. Still . . . “Double, double, don’t cause trouble, fire burn, but mash don’t bubble,” muttered Leona, stirring some more. She tried a cackle, but it was a failure. “Darn it, I just can’t get that ratchety sound no matter how I try,” she lamented to herself as she broke into a genuine chuckle.

Moving skillfully, she lifted the cauldron off the fire, poured its contents through a big strainer into another cauldron, then put the liquid on the fire. Murmuring a charm, she tossed in a measure of dried hops to cut the sweetness. She added wood chips to the fire to bring the liquid, now called
wort
, to a swift, rolling boil, then stepped back to fan her brow with the hot pad. It being autumn in Minnesota, dusk had turned to night with the swiftness of a closing trap door, so now the red and yellow flames were brightly visible.

In the chill of the night, Leona’s face cooled quickly. She went up to her back porch and turned on a bright light, then returned to look at the boiling cauldron and stir some more. It wasn’t really smart to do serious brewing over an open fire; she should be using propane. But Leona was a traditionalist—a real traditionalist, reaching back centuries for her methods.

For the next hour, between stirring the wort and adjusting the fire—boiling was good, boiling over was disaster—she sat on the top step and let her mind ramble.

Leona was the senior partner in Excelsior’s microbrewery-pub, The Barleywine. Thirty years earlier, it had begun as the Waterfront Café. She and her late husband, John, had founded and operated it. After his death three years ago, she kept it open, but slowly added items to the menu—herbed potato salad, soy bread wraps, and flavored teas—to augment the tuna melts and french fries some customers still demanded. Most of the recipes were her own creations, and the herbs came from her own garden.

Two years ago the little beauty shop next to the café went out of business and Leona bought the building. She started a second business, Natural Solutions, selling herbal soaps, candles, shampoos, and cooking ingredients. But she was soon overwhelmed by the amount of time it took to make the many little products, time taken from the established business of her restaurant. She couldn’t afford to hire a company to make the herbal products for her, wouldn’t buy artificial ingredients, and buying natural products to sell seemed a duplication of effort. She began to think that acquiring the building had been a mistake.

Then a friend complimented her on a potion she had made. Not a tea, not a medicine, but beer. Leona’s husband had made beer—he’d learned how from his grandfather, who had made it during prohibition. Leona had been surprised at how easy it was, and how natural. Like her other herbal preparations, there was nothing artificial in it. Barley, water, yeast, and hops formed the basic recipe. Her friend said Leona’s brews tasted even better than her husband’s had.

So she continued to experiment with the many varieties of hops and yeasts, the occasional sugar or herbal flavoring, and brewing at higher and lower temperatures, until she had four or five different brews that were really, really good. Two had won blue ribbons at the Minnesota State Fair.

When Leona found out a microbrewery in Saint Paul was closing and the equipment was to be offered at auction, she went over for a look at it. It was good-quality stuff, well cared for. She put in what she was sure was a too-low bid—and won.

Then she went to cash in some investments to pay for the remodeling of the herb shop—only to discover that most of the money had gone missing. From the holes in his story, she theorized that her dishonest investment counselor had taken it to cover some earlier thefts.

Leona had already mortgaged her house to transform Curl Up & Dye into Natural Solutions, and she feared that she would lose everything—until a friend, Billie Leslie, came forward with a proposal. Billie had experience in restaurant management and wanted to try ownership. For a share in Leona’s place, she would contribute an amount equal to the purloined funds. After a short hesitation, Leona agreed.

Although as a rule she didn’t like sharing, Leona was pleased to find that Billie worked just as hard as she did in The Barleywine, and at present that work was paying for itself. Still, it would have been nice to be sole proprietor, to make all the decisions herself—and quickly. Billie took forever to make up her mind about things.

Why couldn’t I have stayed with herbals, like a good, traditional witch?
she asked herself as she sat on her back porch, watching the clouds close in again and feeling a fresh breeze spring up. But she knew the answer to that. From an early age she had marched to the beat of a different drummer. Her parents, good Lutherans, had been amused at first, then bemused, then disappointed in their younger daughter. So had Leona’s elder sister, Judy. It had taken Judy years to come around, but her parents never did. Leona’s daughter, Willow, practiced Wicca, but very subtly. Good thing Willow’s husband was agnostic. It would be interesting to see what beliefs they transmitted to their children when—if—they ever had any.