Blackwork Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Witchwork

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Monica Ferris

  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

  Anthology

  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

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  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

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  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

  LEONA 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 buildin
g. 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.

  Meanwhile, she would continue brewing beer. For one thing, it was organic. And it was old, old, old. The earliest example of writing, a clay cuneiform tablet, proved to be a Sumerian inventory of warehoused beer. The ancient Egyptians, on break from building pyramids, drank beer.

  Beer and wine were safer than untreated water, knowledge people treasured down the centuries.

  Benjamin Franklin said that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. Leona had done a counted cross-stitch of that motto and hung it up at The Barleywine, even though she didn’t believe in the God old Ben was talking about.

  One good thing about having a partner in business was that Leona occasionally had time to indulge another one of her passions: needlework. She directed a mental blessing at Betsy Devonshire and her shop, Crewel World. Nice to have it local, well run, and well stocked with lots of counted cross-stitch patterns.

  Too bad poor Betsy thought she had to spend Sunday morning in church, praying that her shop continued to do well. All owners of small businesses—Leona included—often walked in unsafe proximity to bankruptcy.

  But Leona liked Wicca because it wasn’t a petitionary religion. The Christians and Jews were encouraged to ask their God for favors. In Leona’s mind, this put them in the position of children—and Leona had resented being treated like a child even when she was one. Wicca maintained that people had power within themselves; they just had to learn how to plug into it. It had taken years, and there had been and still were failures. But when it worked, it was like riding Pegasus, soaring upward on the wings of that power. A few falls had taught Leona to go carefully, wisely, and to build shields against the unexpected.

  She was amazed by atheists, even more so than by Christians. Didn’t they see how alive the world was? How full of invisible influences? She checked her watch, rose and went into the house, and came back with two big bags of ice cubes. She sliced the bags open with a pocket knife and poured the ice into her biggest cauldron.

  After giving the boiling cauldron a final stir, Leona unhooked it from the tripod and set it with a loud hiss into the icy cauldron, stirring and stirring to make sure it cooled quickly and evenly. She dipped into it with a quart-size glass pitcher and set that aside on a flat rock.

  Then she cleared her mind of residual angry or resentful thoughts about Billie Leslie, her perforce partner. And while she was at it, her anger at Ryan McMurphy, who while sober was a fine, upstanding citizen but while drunk, a disgusting and angry bigot. It could spoil the brew to make it while unhappy; and to allow angry or unhappy thoughts to take up residence could lead to thoughts of hexes and curses. That way madness lay.

  When her mind was sweet and calm, she recited a brief charm to bless the living yeast and added it to the pitcher, stirred thoroughly, then added it to the cooled cauldron, stirring and stirring. The yeast would eat the sugar released by boiling the grain, turning it into alcohol. She had put in just enough hops to give it the familiar bitterness of beer—American beers, in her opinion, were generally overhopped—and now added a little anise for exotic flavor.

  She siphoned the wort—there were about three gallons—into a big glass jug and put an airlock on it that would allow gasses to escape while preventing outside air from slipping in to contaminate the brew.

  If she liked the dark ale that resulted, she would make a full-size batch in her microbrewery at The Barleywine. She turned the yard light off and just stood awhile, looking up at the dark sky. Ancient peoples had been afraid of the dark; modern peoples drove it away with streetlights and lamps. But Leona had never been afraid of the dark. In her mind’s eye she could see the big glass jug sitting on the earth, the earth turning toward the darkness as the yeast began its stealthy work.

  She would call it Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark Ale.

  One

  IT was a dark, blustery afternoon.

  In October an occasional raw day was expected, sometimes even welcome after a hot, dry summer. But it had been a cool summer, and now it was a dark, wet, cold autumn. Godwin had turned on every light in the shop to keep the depressing outdoors at bay, but it pressed against the big front window, dimming the bright colors of the knitting yarns on display. A different kind of rainy autumn—with rackety thunderstorms that left the air sharp and clean and shiny—wouldn’t have been so miserable. But since mid-September, the days had grown short and gloomy, with chilly rain dripping from clouds that rarely parted to let the sun shine in.

  Like today. Thin streamers of water dribbled down the big front window of Crewel World like the tears of a child whose dog has died.

  Godwin sat down at the big library table, on a chair that faced the well-lit back, away from the tears. He picked up a piece of cross-stitch he’d been working on, a Mike Vickery chart of three brilliant Amazon macaws sitting in tropical foliage. He was stitching it on fourteen-count linen in the brightest colors DMC offered. Betsy wasn’t there, so he’d put a Jimmy Buffet album in the CD p
layer—Betsy allowed only soft jazz or classical when she was in the shop—and was nodding in agreement while Jimmy sang about winding up in some tropical bay and wailed, “You need a holllllllliday!”

  The door made its two-note announcement that someone was coming in. Godwin put down his stitching and hopped up to greet her—the shop sold needlework and needlework supplies, so naturally most of its customers were women.

  Only this time it wasn’t. A slim young man stood just inside the door shaking water off his stylish gray fedora. He was dark, a little over Godwin’s height—Godwin was five seven—an extraordinarily handsome Spaniard, with thick black hair and bright brown eyes. Even his smile was handsome.

  “Rafael!” exclaimed Godwin. “What brings you out in this weather? Not that I’m not happy to see you!” He reached to take the man’s hand but was drawn instead into an embrace.

  “¡Mi amigo!” said Rafael with a chuckle.

  “Oh, hey, you’re all wet!” protested Godwin, anxious about his brown and green alpaca sweater.

  “So I have been told on occasion,” said Rafael in the slightly formal tone that came so naturally to him. He released Godwin and stepped back.

  Godwin looked up to see if his friend was really hurt, and saw a warm smile. He continued looking, now to admire Rafael’s clothing.

  His gray wool overcoat with the tie belt was a perfect match in color for the fedora. Around his neck he wore a gold-colored, loosely knit scarf so enormous it was practically a shawl. With all this, plus his narrow trousers and thin black shoes, he looked like an illustration in an upscale magazine article entitled, “What the Fashionable Man Is Wearing.”

  “Are you not glad to see me?” he asked, the smile starting to fade.