Death Threads (27 page)

But it fit. Perfectly.

For as wonderful a cook, sister, and friend as she was, everyone around Margaret Louise knew that her son and his family were her true pride and joy. She spoiled each of her seven grandchildren with love, yet respected Jake and Melissa’s top role and number one standing in their lives.

Tori claimed a tan rattan chair positioned in the westernmost corner of the large sunporch, the last of the day’s lingering rays making it one of the primo places to sit for that evening’s circle meeting. The chair was set slightly back from the rest of the seating choices, yet still had access to an electrical outlet—a must if using one of the group’s portable machines.

“Being antisocial this evening, Victoria?” Rose asked as she shuffled into the room wearing a soft gray housecoat with a thin white cotton sweater thrown over her shoulders. In her hand was a stack of fabric in varying color schemes and patterns.

She stood and walked over to her friend, their quick embrace revealing yet another drop in weight for the retired schoolteacher. Alarmed, Tori stepped back and studied the woman, her gaze playing across the deflated cheeks and bony hands. “Rose? Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine, Victoria. I’ve just been fighting a cold is all and my appetite hasn’t been very good.” Rose patted her hand and then gestured toward a love seat not far from where Tori’s chair was. “I think the sun on my body will do me some good though . . . ewww . . . that smell is awful.”

“Smell?”

The woman’s nose scrunched in disgust. “You don’t smell that? It smells like a litter of pent-up cats.”

Come to think of it, she had noticed a strange odor when she walked through the door, her nose instinctively chalking it up to the children that came and went all day long.

“One of the kids probably left a juice cup somewhere and forgot to tell their grandmother. Another day or two and she can’t help but find it. Now here, let me help.” She reached for the woman’s pile of fabric only to get her hand smacked away.

“I’m not an invalid, Victoria, I can do it.” The woman shuffled over to the sofa, aligned the back of her thighs with the cushion, and slowly lowered herself down, her voice dropping to a near whisper. “But thank you anyway.”

She meandered over to her own chair aware of a sudden tightness in her throat. Although she’d only been in Sweet Briar a relatively short time, the women of the circle had become her family in many ways—people she relied on for opinions, advice, help, and friendship. The thought of one day losing one of them was a pain she hadn’t considered.

Shaking her head free of the sad turn to her thoughts, Tori reclaimed her chair and pulled her tote bag onto her lap. As much as she was looking forward to the gossip-infused conversation that was synonymous with their circle meetings, she had a number of book bags to make. Just that afternoon alone, a representative from the nursing home had phoned in four more request lists from their residents—titles Nina had diligently set aside for the next day’s first-ever book delivery.

“I made eight. Some bigger for hardcovers, some smaller for paperbacks.” Rose’s arm rose into the air, her sweater slipping down from her wrist and revealing an arm that had become much too frail. In her hand was the fabric Tori had tried to hold for the woman. “I made some for women and some for men.”

“I made a few, too,” Georgina Hayes said as she strode into the room with her trademark straw hat atop her dark brown hair. “The only fabric I could find, though, had sprigs of flowers on it . . . so mine would be better for women.”

“I have some, too,” Margaret Louise’s voice boomed across the room from her position in the center of the doorway. “I’d hoped to get a few more done but things have been a little extra crazy lately with tryin’ to perfect the recipe and gettin’ the bakery back up and runnin’ for Debbie.”

Tori closed her eyes briefly as she thought back to her visit with Colby’s widow that afternoon, the woman’s swollen eyes and pink-tipped nose etched in her mind with startling clarity.

“And we ran it like two professionals if I must say so myself, didn’t we, Margaret Louise?” Rose’s eyes looked enormous behind her thick glasses as she nodded at her bakery cohort and the evening’s host. “I dare say we would have made Debbie proud.”

Margaret Louise nodded, her smile nearly splitting her face. “I agree.”

Tori pulled her sewing box out of her tote and opened the lid, her hands intuitively finding the thread she needed to complete her latest bag. Removing the spool from the box, she set it on one of the small snack tables Margaret Louise had scattered throughout the room for the meeting. “I saw her today.”

Georgina peered over her portable sewing machine as it zipped along the first side of her bag. “Saw who, Victoria?”

“Debbie.”

Machines switched off, heads looked up.

“How is she?” Beatrice asked. “How are the children?”

Tori shrugged. “I didn’t see Jackson and Suzanna, they were with Debbie’s mom. But Debbie . . . well, she’s doing as well as can be expected, I guess.”

“Did you tell her what we’re doing? With the bakery?” Rose’s voice, shaky and quiet, forced more than a few of the circle members to lean forward in their chairs just to hear. “Did you tell her how badly we feel about last week’s meeting?”

She offered the elderly woman what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “She was touched, of course.”

“Did she tell you anything more about the investigation?” Dixie asked, from her spot beside Beatrice.

“Not much. Seems all the chief has shared with her is the fact that the only prints found on the letter and the knife belonged to her and to Colby. If there’s anything else, he hasn’t shared it with her.” Tori set down her thread and sighed, heavily.

“There isn’t much else to share,” Georgina volunteered before turning her sewing machine back on. “Robert is following leads, but there aren’t very many to follow. Besides the absence of prints on the knife and the letter, the only other peculiar thing is the missing pills.”

“Missing pills?” Tori echoed.

Georgina nodded. “Debbie had given Colby sleeping pills that evening. The rest of the bottle hasn’t been recovered.”

Tori stared at Sweet Briar’s mayor, a woman who’d had her world blown to smithereens just six months earlier when her newlywed husband had been thrown into prison on murder charges—charges she, Tori, had set in motion. “Isn’t that rather odd?”

“I suppose. Though it’s possible Debbie simply forgot what she did with them. She’s not taking this whole affair very easily.”

“I’m not happy about the news trucks that have infested this town like a pesky influx of mosquitoes. They’re everywhere.” Dixie’s hands flailed wildly in the air as she continued, “You can’t walk five feet downtown without some reporter asking you how you feel about the famous Colby Calhoun being snatched from his own home.”

Heads nodded around the room followed by a few snorts of disgust.

“I think most of those reporters were former students of mine—the ones who showed absolutely no sign of remorse or compassion for anyone else.” Rose leaned back against the sofa and crossed her legs at the ankles. “If they would turn even half of their energy from how everyone feels to investigating what happened we’d all be better off.”

Tori looked down at the fabric in her lap, her desire to make more bags waning. “I’ve been trying to follow one thread—I mean, threat—at a time.” She laughed in spite of the seriousness of her intended words. “Oh boy, it’s official. Sewing has infiltrated my every thought.”

“Perhaps it was a Freudian slip, Victoria, but it’s also true.”

She met Rose’s eyes. “How do you mean?”

“Each piece of thread makes up a project . . . whether it’s a skirt, a shirt, or”—the woman lifted one of her bags into the air—“a bag. Same goes for any truth.”

“Just look at what happened with Thomas,” Georgina interjected without a shred of emotion to indicate how she felt about her former husband. “Without following each and every thread, you never would have been able to hand the police such a perfect motive behind Tiffany Ann’s murder.”

Rose nodded. “That’s right, Victoria. You’ve seen shoddy sewing. You know what happens when someone doesn’t take care with each and every strand of thread.”

What they said made perfect sense. And, in a way, it was what she’d been trying to do over the past week. She’d followed Carter Johnson’s thread from start to finish, realized his verbal thrashing of Colby was nothing more than frustration and disappointment. She’d followed Gabe Jameson’s potential culpability and discovered he was thrilled to be free of the weight of a lifelong secret. She’d followed his brother, Hank Jameson and—

She scanned the room. “Where’s Leona?”

“Leona?”

“Yes, Leona. Your sister.” Her eyes narrowed on Margaret Louise’s reddening face.

“Uh, she’s, uh, upstairs . . . taking care of somethin’. She’ll be down in a few minutes.”

“I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Margaret Louise, what is that stench?” Rose, who’d behaved herself long enough for any self-respecting seventy-nine-year-old, waved her hand in front of her face. “It’s awful.”

If Margaret Louise answered, Tori didn’t hear. She was busy putting an equation together in her head that didn’t include a sippy cup of juice. Pushing the fabric off her lap, she stood and headed into the hallway, Margaret Louise lapping at her heels. “Where are you goin’, Victoria?”

Stopping just out of earshot of the others, Tori spun around, hands on her hips. “You never brought it back last night, did you?”

“It?” Margaret Louise asked as her head dipped forward.

“Ella May’s bunny,” she hissed before lifting her nose into the air and inhaling deeply. “It’s in this house, isn’t it?”

A thump from above the kitchen served as confirmation. She headed toward the front hallway and the wooden staircase that led to the second floor. “We tried to, we really did. It’s just that he was really, really cute.”

“It’s not your bunny, Margaret Louise,” she said over her shoulder as she took the steps two at a time, the co-bunny-napper panting a few steps behind. “You can’t just decide to keep him because you think he’s cute.”

“She has so many,” the woman protested.

Leona stepped into the hallway just as Tori hit the top step. “Hello, dear, what brings you up here?”

Pushing her way past bunny-napper number one, Tori stopped just inside the doorway of what appeared to be a spare bedroom, the moving box she’d used as a temporary home for the bunny on Sunday now equipped with blankets, carrots, water, and a stuffed animal.

“A teddy bear?” She snorted back a laugh in an effort to preserve even a shred of reproach to her voice. “What on earth does a bunny rabbit need with a teddy bear?”

“He has to sleep sometime, dear.” Leona bent over the box and wiggled her fingers at the rabbit. “How’s my little Paris?”

Her left eyebrow rose. “Your little Paris?”

“You don’t want to know, Victoria. Trust me,” Margaret Louise interjected from her spot as door sentry. “But do you see now why I agreed to keep him?”

“You mean steal him,” Tori corrected.

“Semantics, Victoria.”

“Leona! You stole this bunny.”

“If you want to get technical about it, dear, he stole me, remember?”

She rolled her eyes upward. “That’s a stretch.”

Leona stamped her foot. “No it’s not. He hopped into my bag.”

“Actually, it was my bag,” Margaret Louise reminded gently.

“Oh, shut up!” Leona gestured toward the bunny. “With me he gets the attention he deserves. With Ella May he’s one of a hundred.”

“More like a thousand.” Margaret Louise looked back toward the staircase for a moment before reestablishing eye contact with Tori. “Do you see this”—the woman pointed at Leona, then the bunny, and then back again—“this rare burst of maternal instinct here? I’ve been waitin’ to see this from my twin for years. How could I let that go unexplored?”

She returned her hands to her hips as she looked from one sister to the other. “He has to go back.”

Leona’s mouth moved in a perfect mimic of Tori’s. Margaret Louise nodded in silent, albeit slow, agreement.

“Tonight,” Tori repeated.

“Tomorrow,” protested Leona. “Or Wednesday.”

“Tonight, Leona.”

“I need to prepare him. He’s gotten attached.”

Tori rolled her eyes again. “Wednesday—at the latest. Otherwise . . .” Tori’s voice trailed off as she took one last look at the bunny before heading back into the hallway. “Do they know downstairs?”

“Rose? Georgina? Do they know? Good heavens no.” Margaret Louise shut the door behind her sister who’d reluctantly accompanied them out of the room. “Leona would be the laughin’stock of the sewing circle.”

“What is it with that word?” Tori asked in frustration. “In just the last few days I’ve heard it from Dirk, Harrison, Milo, and now you. And that’s after it was used in the death threat Colby received.”

Margaret Louise shrugged. “Common expression that is fittin’ of a lot of things ’round this town lately.”

She turned to Leona. “Any luck with Harrison?”

“No. But I have a date with William Clayton Wilder after the photo shoot on Friday.”

“They’re doing a photo shoot on Friday?” she asked Margaret Louise, who nodded proudly. “That’s fabulous. Congratulations!” To Leona she said, “But you agreed to see what you could find on Harrison, remember? I need you for this part.”

“I will. I will.” Leona led the way down the staircase, her tan pumps hitting the wood planked foyer with a telltale staccato. “Though I still say he’s much too wishy-washy to overpower a man like Colby Calhoun, sleeping pills or not.”

“She has a point,” Margaret Louise said as she trailed them back into the sewing room. Like clockwork, her voice rose to its normal booming octave as she addressed the entire circle. “How are things going in here?”