Free Let it Sew by Elizabeth Lynn Casey

burying some of his
     things would have worked, too.”
    “Oh. Oh. Fred’s bendin’ over. He—he’s pickin’ somethin’ up.” Margaret Louise paused
     her play-by-play just long enough to lean forward and groan. “You wouldn’t happen
     to have binoculars in your office or anything, would you, Victoria?”
    Keeping her full attention on the Sweet Briar fire chief, Tori matched Leona’s lean
     and raised it with a stand. “It looks like some sort of metal plate and”—she rose
     up on tiptoes—“rod.”
    “I bet Charlotte shoved some of Parker’s favorite things in a box and buried them
     where she wouldn’t have to think about them,” Leona declared. “It makes all the sense
     in the world.”
    “Buryin’ ’em outside the library makes sense, Twin?”
    Leona’s chin jutted upward. “Burying them on her own property would have been bad
     for her home’s feng shui.”
    “Dixie
did
say that Parker loved the library. Assuming that’s true, maybe Charlotte decided to
     bury his stuff here as a sort of retaliation.” But even as she posed the possibility,
     Tori found the notion to be a stretch. Granted, she had never met Charlotte Devereaux,
     but the one commonality between everything she’d heard was that the woman had adored
     her husband to the very end.
    Adoring wives, whether scorned or not, didn’t bury their husband’s things in the ground.
     They kept them close, along with the never-ending hope that the object of their affection
     would one day rise from the dead or find his way home again after his meandering ways.
    “I’ll be right back,” she mumbled into the night. Slowly, she descended the steps
     and headed toward the diggers.
    As she approached, Chief Granderson broke free of the men and climbed out of the hole,
     holding her at bay some ten feet out. “So what made you start digging tonight?”
    She considered telling him about Charlotte Devereaux’s sketch but knew it wasn’t the
     time. That would come later. “A hunch.”
    Fred swiped the back of his hand across the sweat-dampened dirt on his brow. “Heckuva
     hunch.”
    She met his gaze and held it a beat. “There’s a body, isn’t there?” she finally asked.
    “Shallow grave. No casket. South Carolina temperatures and rain.” Fred shrugged. “I
     wouldn’t expect anything resembling a body to be left after five years.”
    Five years.
    “Five—but wait.” Choosing her words carefully, Tori posed the only question that made
     sense in light of what Fred himself had just said. “If there’s nothing resembling
     a body in that hole, what makes you think there was one?”
    “Doesn’t matter how shallow the grave or how hot the climate, metal doesn’t go anywhere.”
    “Metal?” she echoed.
    Fred took a second swipe of his face, following it up with a slow, distracted nod.
     “That’s the thing about an artificial hip. It doesn’t go anywhere.”

Chapter 7
    Somehow Tori moved through the next five days, dotting her
i
’s and crossing her
t
’s on all final preparations for the First Annual Holiday Book Extravaganza, spending
     time with Milo, and fielding have-you-heard-anything-yet phone calls from nearly every
     member of the sewing circle at some point or the other. But the waiting was killing
     her.
    It didn’t matter that Rose, Dixie, Margaret Louise, and Georgina had all confirmed
     that Parker Devereaux had an artificial hip. And it didn’t matter that Melissa, Beatrice,
     Debbie, and Leona all shared stories about the man’s favorite brown leather shoes.
     She still wanted official confirmation of what everyone was saying across Sweet Briar’s
     dinner tables, park benches, and picket fences.
    “Pink and silver? Since when are pink and silver considered Christmas colors?”
    Tori glanced up from the library’s main computer and smiled. “Good morning to you,
     too, Dixie. Don’t you look festive in your harvest sweater.”
    Dixie made her way around the information desk and tucked her