DIRE THREADS.

by Janet Bolin.

To the original Edna and the original Naomi, who loved creating with thread.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Many thanks to my supportive critique partners, Krista Davis, who writes the Domestic Diva Mysteries, and Avery Aames, who writes the Cheese Shop Mysteries. I couldn't have done this without you.

I really appreciate the enthusiasm of my first agent, Jacky Sach, then at BookEnds, and my acquiring editor, Sandy Harding, then at Berkley Prime Crime. Jessica Faust of BookEnds never ceases to amaze me for the time she's willing to devote to my projects. Faith Black, my editor at Berkley Prime Crime, took my manuscript and turned it into a book. Thanks to all of the people at Berkley who helped her, particularly Robin Moline, who created the beautiful painting for the cover, Annette Fiore Defex, the cover designer, and Tiffany Estreicher, the interior text designer, who added touches that make the book even more special.

I also have to thank Bill Richardson and Shelagh Rogers of CBC radio for their encouragement over the years and for understanding my humor and making it funnier in the way they read my stories aloud on their radio programs.

Sisters in Crime, especially the Guppies Chapter, have been very helpful, including Lorna Barrett, Sandra Parshall, and Annette Dashofy. I loved hanging out with other members of the New York /Tri-State Chapter when I lived in New York. Those dinners in Greenwich Village made me feel like a real writer. Besides, I learned important things like the mechanics of getting published, and that authors, agents, and editors are approachable. Also that shouting, "Let's kill him!" in a restaurant can get one some funny looks. And no, I wasn't the one who did the shouting.

Thanks to all my friends at www.KillerCharacters.com, where the characters of our books carry on a dialogue (and just plain carry on). Thanks to Avery Aames, Lorna Barrett, Krista Davis, Betty Hechtman, and Mary Jane Maffini for taking time to read my manuscript and comment.

And thanks to my friends and family for engaging in some rather peculiar conversations about murder and how to solve it. We're nice people-really!

Last but not least, thanks to my readers. You're the greatest.

1.

FOR THE FIRST TIME, MY NEW BOUTIQUE, In Stitches, was officially part of the Threadville tour, which was both exhilarating and daunting. What if the ladies from today's tour avoided my shop, or worse, hated it?

But the first person to enter In Stitches on its opening day was a man. Mike Krawbach was gorgeous, if you liked icy blue eyes and an underfed look that made a certain type of woman want to take him home and fatten him up. I didn't trust him. He always talked to me like I was two years old, for one thing. He tossed an envelope onto a bistro table displaying my embroidered white linen tablecloth. "Here you go, Willow. My decision on your application to renovate that shed at the back of your property."

Shed? Blueberry Cottage was a Victorian confection of curlicues and gingerbread trim. Small, made of wood, and quaint. Definitely not a shed. Renting it to others would help ensure my financial survival, but it needed work. "You mean Blueberry Cottage."

Mike stretched his neck up as if to make himself taller and remind me that he was the village's zoning commissioner, and I wasn't. "It's been called that grandiose name since my granddad was a boy. It's a shed, and it's on a flood plain, too close to the river for us to allow a building permit. You can paint it, inside and out, but you can't do anything structural, like replace leaky plumbing. Or leaky windows."

I resisted the urge to peek at his feet. He was tall, but even standing on his tippy toes, he wouldn't be able to loom over me as much as he might like. I argued, "The hiking trail is between it and the river, and that trail is wide. The Elderberry River couldn't rise that far."

Mike shrugged. "The decision is final. Take it or leave it."

That was a choice? He strode out, leaving me seething. In Stitches hadn't had a customer yet, and I was almost ready to return to investment counseling in Manhattan.

Almost, but not quite. Outside, the Threadville tour bus arrived, and ladies streamed from it. Their handmade hats, coats, mittens, and scarves outshone ice crystals dancing in the pale February sunshine. Women disappeared into The Stash, Batty About Quilts, Tell a Yarn, and Buttons and Bows.

Threadville's real name was Elderberry Bay. The village had been heading toward ghost town status until my best friend, Haylee, had fled Manhattan, opened The Stash, and inveigled other people to open other textile arts boutiques. Now, crafty women flocked to this small village on the Pennsylvania shore of Lake Erie to browse, take courses, find inspiration, and spend money.

I was a little stunned when about twenty of them poured into my shop. Their coats were decorated with every form of embellishment known to woman, except one-machine embroidery. They were coming to me to round out their education, and I had optimistically put five chairs around the table holding my computer and sewing machine.

A woman frowned at the logo I had embroidered on a suede vest trimmed with fun faux fur. The logo was my own design, a stylized weeping willow. Uh-oh. Didn't she like my work? The willow was supposed to help new students remember my name. "Tut, tut," she said. "Willow for sorrow." The name Rosemary was emblazoned in sequins across the front of her sweater.

Rosemary for remembrance, I thought. "Willow's my name." I'd been Willow all my life and had never known sorrow. Except, perhaps, during Mike's visit a few minutes before. But I wasn't going to let Mike Krawbach ruin my first business day in my new shop.

"Maybe your sorrow will be trying to stay willowy all your life. You're doing a good job, so far." She lowered her voice to an ominous murmur. "Luckily, you can get away with wearing poufy fun furs, especially with your long legs and those tight jeans, but wait until you hit thirty and middle-aged spread. And you don't even color your hair, you lucky girl."

Choking down a laugh at all these personal comments from a stranger, I touched my hair. It was fine and straight, flyaway with static electricity at this time of year. "How do you know I don't color it?"

"No one would dye their hair that mous-" she began. Flushing, she attempted to pull her foot out of her mouth. "People with light brown hair usually choose a more vibrant color. But the brown goes so nicely with your blue eyes."

Without admitting that I was already a couple of years beyond thirty and suddenly tempted to color my hair, I retrieved more chairs from my storeroom and set them up. My students crowded around the woodstove, warmed themselves with mugs of hot cider, and eyed my embroidery boutique.

It looked great, and I was proud of it. A hundred years before, this building had been a brand-new home. Recently, someone had converted it into a store, and Haylee had called to tell me I had to come and see it. Someday, I hoped to meet whoever had done the renovations and built the store's oak cabinets and shelving, which perfectly matched the building's original Arts and Crafts style. The shop was charming, especially the antique walnut floor and wainscoting, which together were probably worth more than my mortgage.

The merchandise I offered for sale was appealing, too. Sleek new sewing and embroidery machines would make mouths water and pocketbooks open. Bolts of natural fabrics brightened one corner of the shop, while my classroom area occupied another. My notions were specific to embroidery-stabilizers, spray-on adhesives, hoops, and scissors with funny, curved blades. My favorite displays, the ones I always lingered over, were the racks of embroidery threads. Gleaming in nearly every color imaginable, machine embroidery thread came in shining metallics, lustrous rayon and silk, sparkling polyester, and subtle, rich cotton.

If my customers or I needed anything else, all we had to do was meander across the street to the other boutiques. I loved Threadville, and I loved my new life in it. Except for Mike Krawbach, of course. There had to be a way around his high-handed decision.

Students left the woodstove to examine samples of my work. Rosemary pointed at one of my favorite projects, a patchwork backpack embroidered with mythical beasts. "That's what I want to make."

I unfolded the last chair. "We'll get there." Judging from the clothing these women had sewn for themselves, we'd get there quickly.

With a gentle tinkling of sea glass and driftwood chimes, the front door opened enough for a thin woman to sidle into the shop. Pulling her coat tightly around herself, she perched on a chair in the back row. She was dressed all in black, her gray hair hung limply, and her face was lined with sadness. I hid a shiver. She should be the one wearing the willow.

I opened my mouth to begin the day's lesson.

Behind me, the glass in my chimes clashed, and the front door banged open.

"Ladies," a man called out in a rich, deep voice. "Good morning."

I turned around. Of all the gall. Mike Krawbach was back. I glared at him.

He beamed as if he were bringing these ladies a long-awaited treat. "You all adore Threadville, right?" he asked.

My students nodded and shouted their agreement, except for the sorrowful woman, who must have dropped something. She bent over and scrabbled her hands over the floor.

Mike displayed his teeth in a smile gauged to make each of the ladies think it was meant personally for her. "Then you'll want to sign this petition to show Threadville how much you love it. Your husbands will want to come here, too, and will drive you here. Often."

What a throwback, acting like women couldn't drive. I suspected that many of the Threadville tourists chose the bus because they reveled in their all-day outings with other textile enthusiasts.

"Ooh," one woman breathed. "That would be great."

"Ha!" another said with scorn. "I couldn't buy a yard of fabric or a skein of yarn with hubby looking over my shoulder."

Mike gave her a special smile. "If you sign my petition, he'll be too busy to look over your shoulder, I promise you." In a boyish gesture that looked calculated to me, he pushed a lock of hair off his forehead. There was something furtive in the way he set a sheaf of papers and a handful of pens on my embroidered tablecloth, as if he hoped I wouldn't notice and my students would.

Rosemary leaped up to defend my handiwork. "Ink can stain this sumptuous white linen." She moved the pens and papers to my measuring and cutting table.

Making a mental note to clean that table before I unrolled fabric on it, I studied Mike's expression of affected innocence. What was he planning, a bar where husbands played pool and watched TV while their wives shopped? Why would that require a petition? He winked at my students in a way that made me more uneasy than ever, then marched out, wide shoulders, narrow hips, and all. Working in his vineyard had given him a physique that any man might envy.

I heard several sighs. Nostalgia? Many of the women were old enough to be Mike's mother, maybe his grandmother.

I reclaimed my students' attention by asking them when they had first become interested in embroidery. Like me, most of them had been given a simple embroidery project as soon as their fingers could hang on to a needle.

One woman, dressed head to toe in mauve, summarized it. "I worked my way up from satin and cross stitches to needle weaving and cutwork, but-"

Rosemary laughed. "Hand embroidery is beautiful but life's too short."

I held up a stitched portrait of a long-haired tortoiseshell kitten. "How long would this take by hand?" I asked.

"Weeks," the lady in mauve said.

Rosemary groaned. "Decades."

Everybody laughed. "The actual stitching," I said, "was done in about an hour." I patted my computer monitor. "I started with a digital photo that the kitten's owner e-mailed me. My software transformed it to an embroidery design. The most time-consuming part was changing the thread for each new color."

Rosemary shouted, "I want one of those machines!"

The class was off to a perfect start. However, I had to tell them they could have fun with machine embroidery without purchasing a shiny new machine. "Today, I'll show you how to embroider with your sewing machine, even if all it does is straight stitches." I hoped that, after a few lessons from me, many of my students would discover they needed embroidery machines and would purchase them from me. I distributed pens containing water-soluble ink and asked my students to draw something with straight lines, like a building, on squares of felt.

A few of them copied the Blueberry Cottage design I had embroidered on towels. The woman in mauve stationed herself at the back window. With a few simple lines, she sketched an elegant version of the cottage. These classes were going to be wonderful. I would learn at least as much as I would teach.

I demonstrated how to load felt, backed by stabilizer to support it and prevent it from puckering, into the kind of embroidery hoops our ancestors might have used, golden brown oak laminated in concentric circles.

Rosemary looked skeptical. "Don't we need special hoops for machine embroidery?"

"Not for freehand embroidery." I thumped a finger on the felt in the hoop. "Tighten the hoop, but don't stretch the felt, and don't tear it."

The women laughed and nudged each other, welcoming me into their jovial community. We had all experimented with threads and fabrics. We knew how adding one more layer to our creativity could lead to instant disaster.

I held up a spool of thin nylon thread. "If the stitching on the back won't be seen, you can save money by using lingerie thread in your bobbin instead of embroidery thread."

I touched the little teeth below my sewing machine's needle and presser foot. "These are called feed dogs. Usually, they move the fabric. Today, we're the ones deciding which direction the fabric should go, so we have to lower them out of the way." With the machine I was using, it was easy. I pushed a button.

"They don't lower out of the way on my machine at home," a woman in a beribboned sweatshirt commented.

I beckoned her closer and popped my stitch plate out. "You can remove your feed dogs, but be careful. Don't lose the screws."

She smiled happily. "I've got enough loose screws already." When the laughter died down, she added, "Now I'm certain I need a new machine."

I snapped a spring-loaded presser foot especially suited to embroidery onto my machine, and everyone wanted to know where to purchase one.

"From me," I said. "Tell me your sewing machine's model, and I'll look for one or a method of adapting one."

I chose an ornamental stitch from my machine's many possibilities. Five more women began murmuring about new machines.

My students watched me guide the hooped felt so that the needle followed the lines I'd drawn. After a few changes of thread color and lots of stitches, the drawing became an embroidered motif.

Enthusiastically, the women took turns at machines around In Stitches. The thin, sallow woman in black said nothing except to demur quietly when I asked her if she wanted to try, too.

"Another time, then," I said, in a hurry to help everyone finish before the group's lunch at Pier 42, a restaurant overlooking Elderberry Bay's broad, sandy beach.

Chattering, the women donned coats and lined up to buy a surprisingly large amount of supplies so they could do their homework, creating an embroidered flower by stitching over floral fabric, carefully matching colors and contours. Many admitted that they probably had just the right fabric at home but would shop at The Stash before they left town for some of the lovely fabrics Haylee had on sale. Tomorrow morning's class, when these ladies brought their homework back, should be fun. I'd heard that most of the same women came Tuesday through Saturday on the Threadville tour bus. The women could shop, attend classes, or both. Like the other Threadville proprietors, I offered a repeat of each morning's class in the afternoon for those who had been attending other workshops or browsing elsewhere.

After my customers went to lunch, I had to tell Haylee about my successful morning. I hung my Back in Five Minutes sign-red cross-stitches on white canvas-on my glass front door. It wasn't that I had to surround myself with embroidery, it was only that I loved to create new designs and couldn't help embroidering them on anything that stood still long enough.

The other four Threadville boutiques were across Elderberry Bay's main thoroughfare, Lake Street, in a perfectly maintained two-story Victorian edifice with apartments above the stores. Unlike buildings of a similar vintage in Manhattan, this one's red-brick facade and carved limestone decorations had stayed clean and bright all these years in this village surrounded by forest and farmland on three sides and Lake Erie on the fourth. Haylee's shop faced one of my next-door neighbors, the General Store, recently purchased by a couple I had not yet met. Opal's Tell a Yarn was directly across from In Stitches. Edna's Buttons and Bows faced my other neighbor, The Ironmonger. Naomi's Batty About Quilts was across from a vacant building beyond the hardware store.

Hugging myself in the cold air, I dashed to Haylee's store. For anyone who loved to sew, entering The Stash was like coming home. The fragrance of new fabrics made me yearn to design and create. Dark wintry wools, corduroys, and fleeces beckoned, but I couldn't help touching luscious spring cottons, especially the floral prints I'd asked Haylee to show my students. I loved the quality, sheen, and heft of Haylee's fashion fabrics. They would drape beautifully. I wanted them all.

Haylee wasn't among the rolls of silks, satins, velvets, veiling, and lace for wedding and formal gowns, and I didn't see her where faux furs and novelty fabrics made a playful display. She wasn't paging through pattern books in one of the comfy chairs near the window, either.

"Haylee?" I called.

She charged out of her classroom, her long blond hair flying. Fury had replaced her usual calm amusement. "Willow! I was texting you." She grabbed a fistful of paper from beside her cash register. "Did you see this?"

"What?" I faltered, remembering my students studying Mike's petition almost as raptly as they'd studied him. I'd been too busy ringing up sales to look at the pages he'd left in my store.

"That sleazeball, Mike Krawbach, tricked ladies from the Threadville tour into signing some stupid petition while I was teaching them how to create burnout velvet. Why on earth would women from Erie want an ATV track to go through Elderberry Bay?"

So their husbands would be glad to come here, too, Mike had said.

Wait a second. An ATV track . . . "Let me see," I said.

Sure enough, Mike the sleazeball was petitioning the village to lift the ban on motorized vehicles on the riverbank trail, the one that ran behind Blueberry Cottage. My quiet life above the Elderberry River would be shattered by roaring engines and stinking fumes.

Worse, he wanted Elderberry Bay to condemn Blueberry Cottage and appropriate the land it sat on for public restrooms.

Mike wanted to bulldoze my cottage and steal my land so he could erect outhouses on it.

Outhouses!

Ten of Haylee's students had signed the petition. Haylee and I looked at each other and raced outside.

In Stitches was centered on its lot, with side yards sloping down to the back. The Arts and Crafts front porch and deep eaves made my store look especially welcoming and comfy. For once, I barely had time to admire it all. Haylee and I barreled inside.

I grabbed the petition Mike had left in my shop. Nineteen of my students had signed, probably without reading it. They'd been swayed by Mike's blue eyes.

My eyes must have turned red at that moment, because that's what I saw. I tore up Mike's petition and threw the bits into the wastebasket behind the cash register.