Read Online The Drowning Spool (A Needlecraft Mystery) by Monica Ferris - Free Book Online Page B

the photo on her Facebook page was a match. Her parents have been notified—they live out of state.”
    “That pregnancy could be a motive, couldn’t it?”
    “Sure. That’s probably where Mike is focused.”
    “But now we know Ethan didn’t kill her, right? This will be such a relief to Bershada and his parents! Or do they know? Has anyone from the police spoken to him?”
    “I don’t know. This changes the way this case has been handled up till now, but I don’t know who is telling who what.”
    An hour later the phone rang, and Godwin picked up. “Crewel World, Godwin speaking, how may I help you?” He cocked his head, listening. “Certainly. Hold on.”
    Godwin called Betsy to the phone. “It’s Thistle Livingstone.”
    Betsy took the phone. “Hello, Thistle. What can I do for you?”
    “Wilma Carter has asked me to ask you if you can get her a counted cross-stitch pattern called A Psychic Enters a Flower Garden.”
    “Does Wilma do counted cross-stitch?”
    “She told me she does. Or did.”
    “Hmm,” said Betsy. Perhaps that was a skill she had retained. “I don’t think I know of that pattern. I don’t suppose she knows the designer or manufacturer?”
    “She didn’t mention one.”
    “Let me do a search. I’ll call you back, okay?”
    “Thanks.”
    Betsy was pretty sure the pattern wasn’t called A Psychic Enters a Flower Garden, but she did an online search anyway. She wasn’t surprised when it didn’t come up.
    “Goddy,” she called at last, “did you ever hear of a cross- stitch pattern called something like A Psychic Enters a Flower Garden?”
    Godwin came out from the back of the shop, where he’d been putting a new shipment of patterns into a display. His expression was thoughtful. “‘A Psychic’—are you sure?”
    “I’m sure that’s not the name of the pattern, but it’s tickling my memory somehow.”
    “Try Psyche,” said Godwin. “Isn’t there a pattern about Psyche and Cupid’s garden?”
    “Ah, you’ve got it! And so, I think, do we.” She called up the shop’s inventory, and sure enough there was the pattern, already in the shop. Psyche Entering Cupid’s Garden was a big, elaborate pattern, 188 stitches wide by 300 stitches tall, done in 92 shades of DMC floss, designed by Abracraftdabra. It was a close copy of a painting by Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse, and depicted a woman in a pink, sort-of-ancient-Greek gown, pushing open a wooden door in a cut-stone wall into a garden with a temple in the background. The detail was exquisite. It was not something Betsy would even attempt to do herself.
    “Want me to kit it up?” Godwin asked.
    “I don’t think so.” Surely Wilma couldn’t stitch this. Maybe it was something she had done before she became ill, and she was just remembering it.
    “Who’s it for?”
    “Wilma Carter. She apparently used to do fine needlework. I know people with Alzheimer’s sometimes retain old skills, but whether she is one of them, I don’t know. I feel bad about her botching the class on punch needle, so I’d like to do this favor for her. But let’s not pull the floss for it until I make sure it’s something she can do.” The chart was only twelve dollars—twenty in large-print format—but ninety-two skeins of DMC floss would bring the price up to something like a hundred and fifty dollars.
    Betsy put the large-print version into the attaché case she took to the stitching class. She wanted to talk with Wilma.
    Then she called Bershada and invited her to meet for lunch at Sol’s Deli, right next door.
    They sat together over thick sandwiches of three kinds of lunch meat and two kinds of cheese. Betsy asked, “Have you heard the autopsy results?”
    “Have they got results? What do they say?”
    “The woman, whose name is Teddi Wahlberger, didn’t drown in the therapy pool, but in a bathtub full of lavender-scented bubbles.”
    Bershada put down her sandwich hastily, as if fearful of dropping