Embroidered Truths 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

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Directions for Tlatolli Pattern

  Praise for Monica Ferris’s Needlecraft Mysteries

  “Ferris’s characterizations are top-notch, and the action moves along at a crisp pace.”—Booklist

  “A comfortable fit for mystery readers who want to spend an enjoyable time with interesting characters.”

  —St. Paul Pioneer Press

  “Filled with great small-town characters . . . A great time . . . Fans of Jessica Fletcher will devour this.”—Rendezvous

  “Colorful and humorous . . . perfect.” —BookBrowser

  “Delightful . . . Monica Ferris is a talented writer who knows how to keep the attention of her fans.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Another treat from Monica Ferris.”—Mysterious Galaxy

  “A fun read that baffles the reader with mystery and delights with . . . romance.”—Romantic Times

  “Fans of Margaret Yorke will relate to Betsy’s growth and eventual maturity . . . You need not be a needlecrafter to enjoy this . . . Delightful.”—Mystery Time

  Needlecraft Mysteries 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

  Anthologies

  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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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

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  South Africa

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

  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.

  EMBROIDERED TRUTHS

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2006 by Mary Monica Kuhfeld writing as Monica Ferris.

  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.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-0-425-20612-6

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Acknowledgments

  Mexico City is wonderful. Godwin is right, John is wrong, it’s a great place to vacation. The places I mention down there are real, except for the night club—I was privileged to see and hear a flamenco guitar performance in a private home. Maru is real, she designed the tlattoli pattern in the back of this book. The places described in Excelsior and Minneapolis are real, except that a sushi bar has replaced the Waterfront Café. I wish to thank Ellen Kuhfeld, my own private editor, sounding board, and idea person. Also Berkley Prime Crime and my agent, Nancy Yost. Needleworkers everywhere: I am more grateful than I can say.

  Toda es segun el color del cristal con que se mira.

  Everything depends on the color of the glass you see through.

  —Spanish saying

  One

  IT was a glorious spring morning in Excelsior. Trees were showing off their bright new leaves, and while tulips were dropping their petals, lilacs and lily of the valley were sweetening air already throbbing with the call of robins. Betsy would have left the door of Crewel World open if her shop manager, Godwin, had been there.

  Uncharacteristically, he was late, so she had to keep it closed so its Bing! would warn her of a customer’s entrance—she was busily rearranging the back of the shop. The idea came from Susan Greening Davis, whose newsletter had become Betsy’s Great Guide. The layout of a shop should be changed at intervals of, say, six months, suggested Ms. Davis. Regular customers typically went to the same spot to look at familiar stock, and moving merchandise to a new spot would make them hunt around, and perhaps discover a new designer or even a new skill. One of the happiest things a shop owner can hear is a customer crying, “I didn’t know you had these!”

  Interestingly, rearranging the layout would often bring a similar cry from an employee—occasionally even a shop owner. Of course, if something has been on a shelf so long even the owner has forgotten it, it should go into the deep-discount basket by the cash register forthwith.

  On the other hand, there is, or should be, a pattern to a shop layout, a way of drawing the customer in, teasing with a spinner rack of cute and inexpensive charts, then another one of new flosses, and yet another of the familiar and popular, and so on, building desire, until the customer finds herself standing before a display of expensive kits, the hunger to buy at a peak.

  Or so Betsy hoped. She was standing on a little ladder, reaching to rearrange one of the track lights so it shone on the lovely new Kreinik silks when she heard, “Betsy? Betsy, are you in here?”

  The voice came as something of a shock, because she hadn’t heard the door make its annoying Bing!

  Betsy jumped down and hurried out between the two stacks of box shelves that divided the needlepoint-knitting area from the counted cross-stitch area. “Here I am! Oh, hello, Mrs. Wells. How—I mean, when did you come in? I didn’t hear the door.”

  Mrs. Wells, a regular customer, turned to look at it. “You know, I didn’t either. Do you suppose . . . ?” She went to the door, opened and closed it again. It did not emit its harsh ring. �
��How about that?” she said, then, “I’m here to pick up my Spectrum canvas.”

  “Oh, wait til you see it, it looks wonderful!”

  Mrs. Wells had recently finished stitching a needlepoint canvas using a chart rather than stitching over a canvas with the pattern already painted on it. Painted canvases cost hundreds of dollars, while the chart was a mere twenty-five dollars. Plus materials, of course. Betsy had seen an ad for the Amybear chart in an issue of Needlework Retailer and ordered it on spec. Mrs. Wells’s glad cry on seeing it on Betsy’s shelf prompted Betsy to order two more.

  Now, Betsy went behind the big desk that was her checkout counter and picked up a fourteen-inch square wrapped in brown paper. She carefully picked the tape away from one end of the package to disclose a framed circle of twelve segments, each segment a different color done in squares and rectangles of different stitches. Like a proper color wheel, the colors ranged from cool purple and blue to hot red and orange.

  It was the stretching, matting, and framing Mrs. Wells was here to pay for today; she had selected an antique gold frame that was a perfect choice.

  “Wow!” said Mrs. Wells, reaching for her checkbook.

  “You did a great job,” agreed Betsy. “And so did Heidi.” Heidi was Betsy’s finisher.

  “Where’s Godwin this morning?” asked Mrs. Wells a few minutes later, as she stood at the door looking around, the retaped needlepoint piece under one arm.

  “He’s a bit late this morning,” said Betsy. “I expect him any minute.” She tried to keep the concern out of her voice. Godwin was rarely more than a few minutes late, and then he always called to say what had happened and when he’d be in. But today the shop had been open an hour with no sign or signal.

  Mrs. Wells left, and Betsy went back to the track lighting.

  “Betsy!” Again she was startled by the voice of someone in her shop without the warning Bing! But it was Godwin’s voice, and it sounded distraught.

  “Goddy?” Betsy hurried out to the front of her shop to find her store manager leaning on the library table that stood in the middle of the floor. He was unshaven and wearing the same clothes he’d had on yesterday, now badly rumpled—and Godwin was a very fastidious dresser.

  “What on earth’s the matter?” she said.

  “It’s John. He’s thrown me out.” John was Godwin’s lover.

  “Again?” Betsy regretted the query the instant it came out of her mouth. Godwin was a good man, but very sensitive.

  Still, John had thrown Godwin out on several other occasions—and they had always made up after a few days or a week.

  “It’s different this time, this time he really means it,” said Godwin in a low voice.

  It was always “different this time,” but this time Betsy held her tongue.

  He fell into a chair and rested his forehead in his hands. “He wouldn’t take two minutes to explain what the problem was, he wouldn’t even let me take a change of clothes, just tossed me out on my ear. I drove around for awhile, then I went back home and thought I’d park in front with the top down so he’d look out the window and feel sorry for me. But he didn’t, so I slept the whole night in my car.”

  That explained his appearance.

  “At least he didn’t throw your clothes out into the street this time,” Betsy pointed out.

  “Yes,” agreed Godwin. “But you know something? The time he did that, he was mad for a reason. I don’t know why he’s mad this time. He’s been getting crankier and crankier all week. Nothing I do suits him. And last night was the final straw. He yelled at me for doing the dishes—I am serious, for doing the dishes! He hates coming into the kitchen in the morning and seeing dishes in the sink, but last night he didn’t want me to do them. That was the last thing in a string of things he didn’t like. He didn’t like the shirt I wore to work yesterday, he didn’t like the music I put on for dinner—and it was one of our favorite albums!—and then he stomped in to shout about the dishes. It’s like he was looking for a fight! So I thought fine, and gave him one. And he ordered me to leave. ‘Out!’ he said, just like that. And I don’t know why, I just don’t know why.”

  “Poor fellow,” said Betsy, and meant it. She came to put a hand on his shoulder.

  “What am I going to do?” he cried, grabbing her hand and wetting it with his tears.

  Betsy thought about it. “First of all,” she said, “you are going upstairs to wash your hands and face, then borrow a razor and clean yourself up. Then you are going out to buy a change of clothes. You know you always think more clearly when you look good, and besides, our customers expect it of you. Possibly by the time you get back down here, John will have come to his senses and phoned looking for you. It will be a good lesson to him if you aren’t waiting for that call.”

  Godwin stopped sniveling to think about that. “I think you may be right,” he said.

  “Of course I’m right.”

  Heartened, Godwin stood and hugged her. “You are the best friend I’ve ever had! Where do you keep your razor?”

  “Take a fresh one out of the linen closet in the bathroom.”

  “Thanks.” He took the spare key to her apartment out of the checkout desk drawer, and went out the back door of the shop, which opened into a back hall leading to the entrance hall to the upstairs apartments.

  Betsy went back to work rearranging the aim of her track lights, but her mind was only half on her work. Godwin was a good friend as well as a first-class employee, and she was sad to see him this unhappy over a breakup with a person she personally thought not worth one of Godwin’s tears. Every time one of these rifts happened, she would secretly hope Godwin would realize he had outgrown John—and every time they’d end up back together. It was a lot like watching a woman friend unable to dig in and divorce her awful husband.

  One reason Godwin stayed with John was that John was lavish with money. He often took Godwin on weekend trips to New York or San Francisco, and, every February or March, on a week’s vacation to Cancun. A senior associate in a prestigious Minneapolis law firm, John earned a generous salary, and these trips were first class all the way. Godwin always came home from Cancun tanned, sated, and sporting a new piece of jewelry.

  But this year had been different. Because of a complex case he was working on, John kept putting off his vacation. And when the case was over, March had just turned to April, and John declared it was too late to go, because, he said, Cancun was an oven in April.

  Godwin had been sad about that. He had come in to work the next morning out of an early April snowfall, sighing that Cancun in a heat wave was surely better than Minnesota in early April. “Someone famous said, ‘April is the cruelest month,’” he said, turning to look out the window. “Was he from Minnesota?”

  Betsy laughed. “Though he was born in America, I don’t think T. S. Eliot ever even visited Minnesota,” she said.

  That was the same day Godwin cut out a color ad from the Sunday paper. He’d been clipping coupons—he adored any kind of shopping, even for groceries—but this was not just a twenty-five-cent coupon for salsa. Attached to the coupon was an ad announcing a chance to win a week in Cancun. The entry blank, which featured a rectangle in a bright-colored cubist design, was not to be mailed in, but brought to a local grocery store and put behind a decoding screen where, more than likely, the word Sorry would appear.

  But not this time. Later that evening Betsy was taken from an interesting article on Elizabethan Blackwork to answer the phone.

  “I won, I won, I won!” a voice shrieked in her ear.

  Godwin.

  “Won what?”

  “A trip to Mexico! I will never in my whole life eat any salsa but Mexicali Rose!”

  “You mean that coupon you cut out was the winner? That’s wonderful! Congratulations! This is so great! You get to go to Cancun after all!”

  “Well . . . no,” he said, turning down the volume a notch or two. “What I won was third prize, a pair of return plane tickets to Mexico Cit
y. But you see,” he hastened to add, “that’s actually better. Mexico City is up high, even higher than Denver, so it’s not terribly hot there. And we’ve done Cancun about to death, this will be a whole different place. Besides,” he added, more pragmatically, “this will be my treat, and I couldn’t afford Cancun, not the places John is used to staying at.”

  “Your treat?”

  “Yes, I’ve been really good about my credit cards lately, so I can actually afford to do this.”

  The next day, Betsy had asked, “How does John feel about you taking him instead of him taking you?”

  Godwin chuckled. “He likes it. He was surprised, of course, but I said, ‘It’s about my turn, isn’t it?’ and he said, ‘Well, why not?’ So I think he’s pleased.”

  “Good for you, Goddy,” said Betsy. “It’s especially nice of you to offer to pay for everything.”

  “Yes, well, I’ll have to get on-line and see what rates I can get for a hotel. But it is past the season, so I should be able to get something decent for not very much money. I mean, I know Mexico City isn’t Cancun, but there should be at least one nice hotel.”

  Soon Godwin reported that Mexico City, in fact, offered some spectacular hotels, well up to John’s standards—but, sadly, their rates were outside his budget, even in the off-season. John, by Godwin’s report, was amused and touched by Godwin’s efforts to please him, and said he was willing to come down a step or two, so long as he didn’t have to wrestle with a cucaracha for his pillow. So Godwin consulted with Travelocity, and found a terrific price at the three-star Hotel del Prado and booked it for five nights. “I’d go for a week, but if I did, we couldn’t afford to go sightseeing.” By then he had acquired a book on Mexico City and was thrilled to discover there were Aztec ruins nearby—“With actual pyramids! I adore pyramids!”—plus the world-famous Museum of Anthropology—“John adores museums!” And, of course, lots of night life and plenty of places to shop, which both of them adored.