Free The Long Stitch Good Night: An Embroidery Mystery by Amanda Lee Page B

Blake, Ted, Mr. and Mrs. Van Huss, Andy, Mark, Roberto, Charles, Graham…Oh, thank goodness! He hadn’t been murdered after all. Everything would be all right now. I smiled and said, “Am I glad to see you!”
    Suddenly, Mark clanged Graham over the head with a dumbbell. Graham crumpled to the floor as Mark handed the dumbbell to Blake.
    No!
    The scene shifted, and Graham was once again standing among the crowd. He smiled at me, and I returned his smile, relieved again that he was still living.
    “You need to get out of here,” I told him, my smile fading. “Somebody wants to kill you.”
    “I know,” he said.
    As he uttered those words, Charles took a large number two pencil from his shirt pocket and used it to shoot Graham.
    Before I could react, the scene shifted to Roberto, who had a prop gun. The gun actually opened to a flag with
BANG
written on it when the trigger was pulled. And yet, this, too, killed Graham.
    Andy bent over Graham’s motionless body to strangle him with calculator tape while Blake and Todd laughed.
    The fog rolled in, obliterating the scene. I tried to get back to Graham, hoping to revive him, to makeeverything okay somehow. But when the fog cleared, I was once again standing outside the Brew Crew. This time I was behind the barrier erected by the Tallulah Falls Police Department and the major crime team.
    “They didn’t do this,” I said. “Todd and Blake are innocent.”
    “Tell that to him,” said a uniformed policeman, pointing to Graham Stott, who was standing but still had the calculator tape wrapped around his neck.
    Graham looked at me sadly. “He’s got a point. How do you explain it? It’s almost your quintessential closed-door mystery. Two men are in the room with a dead body and a murder weapon. One of the men has to be the murderer, right?”
    “No. It isn’t right! The murderer had to get out of that room somehow. Or maybe he—or she—never went in. I just have to figure it out.”
    And that’s when I woke up. I got out of bed and went to the bathroom for a cup of water. While I ran the tap water into my cup, I peered at myself in the mirror. If someone else had access to that back room, how
did
he go undetected by both Todd and Blake? After all, if they’d seen the actual killer, they’d have told the police and wouldn’t be in jail now. Right?Unless they
had
seen the killer and would rather go to jail than say so.
    I drank the water and returned to bed. As I settled back under the covers, it dawned on me. There was a bathroom just to the left of that back room. Had the murderer shot Graham Stott, dropped the gun, and then slipped into the bathroom unnoticed? After the shot, both Todd and Blake’s attention would have been on Graham. They would have had a delayed reaction to the shooter while their minds processed the fact that Graham had collapsed and was dying, right? Could that delay have given the killer enough time to blend into a crowd or duck into the bathroom? It was worth looking into.

Chapter Seven
    I awoke the second time to the phone ringing. My half-open eyes caught sight of the clock, and I saw that it was almost ten on Sunday morning. I could hardly believe I’d slept so late.
    “Hello.” I tried not to sound groggy but failed big-time.
    “Marcy, this is Robbie. Did I wake you up?”
    “Actually, yes, but I’m glad you did. Otherwise, I might’ve slept all day.”
    “Are you still up for meeting for brunch?” he asked.
    “Of course. Can we meet at MacKenzies’ Mochas in an hour?”
    “I’ll be there,” he told me.
    I replaced the receiver and hopped out of bed. Why hadn’t Angus woken me up hours ago?
    When I stepped into the hall, I saw why—he was lying there on his back still half asleep. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one in the Singer household having trouble dealing with the late hours and emotional turmoil of the past couple of days. He rolled over and yawned.
    “You and I need some major R and R,” I told him,