Free Thread and Buried by Janet Bolin Page B

bolt of batik between others already on her shelves, and smiled at me like I was a long-lost daughter. “Willow, I’m glad you didn’t catch the flu that’s been going around.”
    “Not yet. Have you recently sold quilt batting to anyone?”
    She was too polite to comment on my abrupt change of subject. “Lots of people, but Duncan was probably the most recent. He said his dad wanted it to pad a dinosaur costume. That boy’s so shy he could barely whisper his request. Why do you ask?”
    “I think Chief Smallwood is going to want their names.”
    “Why?”
    “She found a body wrapped in quilt batting in the excavation in my backyard this morning.” Did I have to be so blunt? Naomi would have found a tactful way of saying it.
    “Oh, Willow, no! Not on
your
property again. You poor thing!”
    She was, as always, very sweet, but I wasn’t the one who needed sympathy. “I’m much better off than the guy in the batting. I don’t know who he is, or was, but Chief Smallwood said he was male, and not one of my close friends.” I quickly added, “And I just saw Clay. He’s fine.”
    “What about—” She bit her lip. Tears glistened in her eyes.
    “Gord Wrinklesides,” I finished for her. If anything had happened to Gord, Edna would be devastated.
    Naomi picked up her phone, dialed, and asked the person who answered if she’d seen Dr. Wrinklesides during the past few minutes. Naomi nodded, thanked the person, disconnected the call, and smiled at me. “His receptionist must have thought I was peculiar, but she said she was looking right at him. So that’s okay.” Her eyes even shinier, she shook her head. “Wrapped in quilt batting . . . That means . . .” She hugged herself. “Did someone do him in?”
    “Chief Smallwood’s treating it as suspicious.”
    She perked up. “Maybe the quilt batting didn’t come from my store! I don’t keep track of names unless they charge their purchases. Come into the back room with me. Maybe if I’m surrounded by my rolls of different types of batting, I’ll remember who all besides Duncan bought some recently.”
    Walking between bolts of colorful fabrics toward her back room was a bit like touring the inside of a rainbow. The quilt fabric that Naomi sold was cotton, lightweight, and dyed in luscious colors with prints that could be put together to make striking quilts.
    Monster rounds of batting hung on industrial-strength rods fastened to shelves in Naomi’s back room. She touched each roll as she passed. Near the steel-clad door leading to the parking lot, she stopped, put her hand on a bare metal shelf, looked up at the empty cardboard tube on the rod above her, and let out a little gasp.
    “Someone took all the batting off that tube,” she said. “I didn’t.”

13
    O F COURSE NAOMI WOULD KNOW IF A ROLL of quilt batting wasn’t there. No one could misplace something that large. Ever the great interrogator, I asked her, “When did you last see it?”
    She squinted toward the window overlooking the parking lot. “Friday afternoon, shortly before our Midsummer Madness Sidewalk Sale. I was cutting smaller pieces off that roll for table runner kits when I heard a customer come in, so I left the end of the batting just hanging here, and ran to the front of the store. After the sale that night, I noticed that I’d neglected to lock my back door.” She tested it. “It’s been locked ever since.”
    “Was the batting there then?”
    Lowering her chin, she pursed her mouth. She was obviously giving herself a silent scolding. “I didn’t notice. You’d think I would have. But that must have been when they took it. No one could have carried it out through the front of the store without my noticing them.”
    True. But why would anyone steal quilt batting? Because they needed it for a quilt?
    Or because they had a more devious plan for it?
    I told Naomi, “The batting around the body was pinned together with knitting needles.”
    We traded glances and