Blackwork (5 page)

“It’s good news for me, I suppose, that there aren’t a lot of pattern designers in the area.” Shelly was about thirty-five, more striking than beautiful, with lovely big eyes and masses of brown hair pulled into a careless bun. Her figure was voluptuous and there was a long string of brokenhearted third and fourth graders in her educator past. She was divorced, childless, and she shared her house with a sweet dog, and, currently, with her live-in boyfriend, Harvey, whom Betsy had not met.

Shelly turned from her examination to say, “I actually believe Ryan has a guardian angel who specializes in drunks and fools. Of course, he’ll tell you it’s the hundred and one protective charms he carries.”

Betsy said, “I should have been suspicious when Lars asked for Ryan’s keys and Ryan pulled that little ring out of his shirt pocket. But he said there were only charms on the big ring. I wonder how long he’s been carrying two sets of car keys?”

“For about a week less than people have been demanding his keys when he’s drunk—which is for the last two years, at least. How much for the projector?”

Betsy named a price a fraction over her cost, then said, “I bet you’re right about the angel. When he climbed out of that smashed car and did his little dance, I was just amazed. But I had to laugh when Lars reached out and took hold of him. He looked so surprised—I guess his talismans aren’t proof against police officers. I heard he was charged with driving under the influence, resisting arrest, driving with a suspended license, and failure to yield. The bail on that should be substantial. Maybe he won’t be able to afford it.”

“I wish. I know he called Harv to ask him for a loan, but I happened to pick up the other phone when he called, and I told Harv he better not spend one nickel on that man.” Shelly sniffed in frustration, not anger. “But Ryan will manage. He always does. He’s a senior auto mechanic and they make good money. You know, that surprised me.”

“What, that he’s held on to a good job?” Betsy was leading the way to the cash register.

“No, that he got drunk last night. After Luella threw him out, he really seemed determined to quit. He’d been sober for almost two weeks—I wonder what happened?”

“Now I think about it, at that meeting he’d been praised for getting that fire truck fixed and coming up with the idea of ghostly firefighters. So it’s funny he fell off the wagon, isn’t it? And why did you take him in anyway? Because he promised to stay sober?”

“I didn’t want to take him in at first. I was too mad at him on Luella’s behalf. She’s a nice woman and Ryan gets really ugly when he’s drunk. But Harv and Ryan went to community college together. Who would’ve thought the ‘old school tie’ mentality reached all the way down to a community college?” She laughed just a little, mostly at herself for sounding like such a snob. “But I agreed to it because Ryan swore up and down he’d quit drinking for keeps. I think Luella making him leave home was a real wake-up call for him. He loves her, and loves his kids.” She paused as if to gather her thoughts, then shrugged away whatever those thoughts might have been. “What’s the total?” she asked, gesturing at the items on the checkout desk.

She’d selected two pieces of canvas, three colors of canvas paint—the kind that doesn’t rub off easily or run when it gets wet—three squares of eighteen-count linen, a square of fourteen-count Aida cloth, a tablet of graph paper, and a pair of Gingher scissors.

“Do you need floss?” asked Betsy.

“No.” Shelly leaned forward to murmur, “A manufacturer is supplying the floss.”

Betsy’s eyebrows lifted, then she smiled and guessed, “Hershner’s?”

“Kreinik. But you didn’t hear me say that.”

“Of course not. But will you let me see it before you send it?”

“All right. I’ll want your opinion, and maybe Goddy’s, too. That should be in about a week; it’s almost done. But you must both promise—”

“Of course, not a word. How exciting for you!”

“This is my
third
commission!”

Betsy quoted, “‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is a conspiracy.’”

Shelly laughed. “May it never end!” She paid for her selections and left. Betsy gazed after her with a happy look, but then her expression grew troubled. Ryan was sleeping in Shelly’s sewing room, a room that Shelly hoped to make the center of a new career. How disruptive was that? She wondered how Harv had persuaded Shelly to permit it. The house was Shelly’s, after all, not Harvey’s. She must be really smitten with him. No matter, Shelly wasn’t going to put up with this invasion of her workspace for long—especially now that Ryan had fallen off the wagon.

T
HE Monday Bunch, six strong today—Emily, Bershada,

Jill, Alice, Phil, and Doris—gathered at Crewel World on Monday afternoon. They came in shivering, shaking rain-drops off their umbrellas and coats, complaining about the weather.

“You’d think we’d get just one good fall weekend!” lamented Emily. “Morgana Jean’s play group has been trying to have a fall picnic since the beginning of September! Poor thing, she’s so disappointed!” Since Morgana Jean was barely four, it was likely that the disappointment lurked more in the heart of her mother than in her own.

“It’s the middle of October, so we probably won’t be able to have it outdoors now,” she continued. “Hi, Betsy,” she added as she settled down in her chair.

“I’ve got spiced apple cider heating up in back,” said Betsy. “The coat rack’s back there, too,” she added, and Jill led the way to the tiny back room, where the coffee urn waited, along with the tea kettle—currently heating apple cider spiced with cinnamon and cloves—and china and paper cups and mugs.

“Well, Leona did say we were going to have a cold, wet fall,” said Bershada, coming back with a cup of steaming cider. She said it lightly and without looking at anyone as she led the way to the big library table in the front area of the shop. She sat down, lips slightly pursed, still not looking at anyone, and got out a wooden frame holding a large rectangular piece of counted cross-stitch. It was a half-completed alphabet sampler featuring bright-colored flowers, from amaryllis to zinnia. A retired librarian, she was doing it as a gift for the Excelsior Public Library.

There was a little pause while Bershada put on the magnifying glasses that rested near the tip of her small nose and the others seated themselves around the table and mulled over whether to take the bait being offered.

Alice, as bold as she was blunt, said, “I do hope we aren’t going to talk about Leona and her witchcraft.” She was a widow and the oldest member of the group. Well into her seventies, she was nevertheless a vigorous woman, big-boned and broad-shouldered, with a deep voice. She sat down, opened an antique carpet bag, and produced yarn, a crochet hook, and a half-completed afghan square.

“Why not? Our television weatherman said this past weekend would be partly cloudy with a slight chance of rain,” said Godwin. “Leona is always better than he is at predicting the weather.” It had, in fact, rained steadily all weekend. Betsy raised an eyebrow at him. He had been hoping to hear what the Bunch thought of the Ryan McMurphy incident, but Betsy didn’t want hurtful gossip aimed at Leona. He wasn’t sitting at the table himself, but was standing at a rack of counted cross-stitch patterns with religious themes, setting in new ones by numbers the shop had assigned.

Betsy was seated at the big old desk that served as a checkout counter, carefully punching credit card numbers into her laptop. The shop’s card reader had unaccountably died on Friday, and she had instructed her staff to write down the numbers by hand. A replacement machine wouldn’t arrive until Wednesday, so now she had the task of sending the information over the Internet.

She was muttering bad words under her breath because one number wasn’t being accepted. It had been written down wrong—and it was a number Betsy had taken down herself. Already two other credit card holders had gone over their limit and Visa was not accepting the charges.

Hearkening to the sounds of angst, Jill twisted around in her chair. “When you get tired of mere words,” she said to Betsy, “you can ask Leona Cunningham for something more potent, you know.”

There were stifled gasps and giggles around the table. Godwin contributed a patently false gasp and a shake of his blond head in a denial of his own.

“Oh, posh!” said Jill, turning back and fixing them with a cool blue stare. “Isn’t that what we’re leading up to here? Witchcraft as practiced by Leona Cunningham?”

“No, of course not!” said Emily, but her cheeks were pinking. “None of us believes in that stuff.”

“I think some of us do,” said Doris in her pleasant sandy voice. She and her beau, Phil, sat side by side, no longer pretending in public to barely know one another. They were each working on a needlepoint Christmas stocking. “It’s been all over town that Ryan McMurphy taunted Leona—and Billie—in The Barleywine on Friday, then got hit by a truck three minutes later. I’d say half the people in town think the two things are connected.”

“No, they think it’s fun to pretend the two are connected,” said Bershada. “Like going to a scary movie: you’re scared, but not really. Phil, for example, doesn’t really think Leona Cunningham put a curse on Ryan McMurphy that came true.”

Phil said, “Now, ordinarily I wouldn’t believe such a thing, especially of such a nice woman as Leona. But Ryan is such a terrible drunk, and after the way he behaved in The Barleywine, maybe he’s not wrong to be worried.” He wore a superior sort of smirk as he said this, and Doris nudged him in rebuke.

Emily said, “If Ryan is scared, he’s taking a funny way to show it. Did you hear he broke through the screen into Leona’s back porch and trashed it? She had flower pots and bundles of dried flowers stored back there, and he kicked and smashed and threw stuff everywhere.”

“When did this happen?” asked Betsy, surprised.

Phil looked at Doris. “Saturday night?” She nodded. “Yes, Saturday night. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it.”

“You sound pretty sure Ryan did this, Emily,” noted Jill, glancing also at Phil. “How do you come to think that?”

Jill used to be a police officer, and she still had that polite but implacable look a traffic cop can summon at will. Confronted by her cool stare, Emily confessed, “Well, I’m just assuming it was Ryan. But really, who else could it be?”

“What do the police think?” asked Phil.

“They’re investigating it as a hate crime,” admitted Jill, who would know, of course. Her husband was Police Sergeant Lars Larson.

“Poor Leona!” said Emily.

Bershada said, “I wonder if those were not dried flowers, but dried herbs. Leona has a wonderful herb garden, so this must be like she lost her whole summer.”

Emily said, “I bet she was
furious
!” Then she looked guilty.

“Now, Emily—” said Betsy in a warning tone.

But Doris said, “I’d be furious if someone got into my needlework stash and tore things up.”

“Yes, but
you
can’t throw a hex on the person who did it,” said Phil.

“Neither can Leona,” said Alice. “Nobody can, there’s no such thing as hexes.” Her late husband had been an extremely orthodox Lutheran minister.

Betsy stopped entering numbers long enough to say, “I agree. Plus, I think you’re all in danger of being cruel and stupid to say such things about Leona, even in fun. She’s a very nice woman, and most of you know that.”

“Of course we don’t really believe in hexes!” said Godwin. “That’s why we’re joking about it.”

“I suppose that’s true,” said Phil. He took a thoughtful look at his stocking—a present for Doris. It depicted Mr. and Mrs. Claus in the front seat of a Stanley Steamer, a stocking specially designed and painted to his order by local needlepoint artist Denise Williams. Doris, retired herself, had a boiler license and they shared a knowledgeable interest in Lars Larson’s Stanley.

Phil leaned sideways to admire her stocking. It depicted Santa driving a steam locomotive—Phil was a retired railroad man. The stocking in her hands was, of course, a present for him.

They had become accepted as a couple in town, seen everywhere together, without passing through that publickissy-face stage. Perhaps because they were seniors, it had been an old-fashioned courtship; since they were only engaged, not married, they even maintained separate residences. Doris gave a fond glance at the sapphire and diamond ring on her finger.

Jill said, “Some people believe in curses.” She was nearing the end of stitching a counted cross-stitch pattern, of a black cat sitting on a jack-o’-lantern while licking its paw. “That’s why what happened to Leona is being investigated as a possible hate crime.”

Bershada said, “I heard Ryan invoked Adam Wainwright’s name in The Barleywine when he was raving at Leona about hexes. And you have to admit that what happened to Adam was very strange.”

A little silence fell around the table. Adam Wainwright had been a financial counselor in Hopkins, and Leona had invested fifty thousand dollars of her husband’s life insurance with him. A couple years later, needing the money to set up the microbrewery, she discovered that all but a few thousand dollars of it had disappeared. Adam told an investigator that Leona had instructed him to invest in high-risk stocks and the money was lost when the investments went sour. Leona denied Adam’s story, but the man produced documents with Leona’s signature on them and so he was never charged with a crime. Soon after, he was driving his classic Corvette convertible around Lake Minnetonka when an eagle flying overhead dropped a huge bass, which landed squarely on Adam’s face, causing him to swerve off the road. The car was totaled, and fish scales got into his eyes and caused an infection that essentially destroyed his vision. It was a shocking, weird accident, and some of Leona’s friends felt it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.