Free Crewel Yule by Monica Ferris, Melissa Hughes

pushed the call button. It took a little while—the elevators were very busy—but at last one came. There was only one person in it, and she moved out of Cherry’s way only when Cherry brushed up against her. Her expression was perfectly calm.
    “What’s going on?” Cherry asked. “What’s all the yelling?”
    “I don’t know,” the woman said vacantly. She had that “shopper’s hypnosis” stare, and she got out at six without saying anything else. More people got on, laden with plastic bags. Cherry hated crowded elevators, everyone standing so tall and close. It was like being in a well full of elbows.
    Two women were talking about the beautiful charts in the Pegasus Originals suite. “So romantic,” sighed one. But the other three squeezed past her to stare out and down through the glass walls of the elevator. “See it?” whispered one.
    “God have mercy, I’ve never seen anything like that,” said one from behind her hand.
    “She’s dead, she’s got to be,” murmured the third, and there was a horrified silence, as the Pegasus admirers turned to stare.
    Cherry turned her chair just a little so she could look between fleece-covered elbows. She saw a golden-haired woman on the floor, her body flat, her limbs all wrong. She was surrounded by a fast-thickening wall of people staring or gesturing in alarm. Cherry’s breath stopped until she looked away, and even then she had to force her diaphragm to operate.
    The elevator stopped. Two women got off, three others managed to get on. The elevator went down. Cherry looked out and down again. The angle of her view of the atrium floor had changed. Now she mostly saw a big group of spectators.
    “Do you know who it is?” asked one of the murmurers, still looking.
    “No, do you?” replied another.
    “No.”
    The elevator stopped at three and its doors opened. No one got off, so none of those waiting could get on. The doors shut on their disappointed faces.
    Cherry looked out and down again, watching as a tall black woman pushed her way out of the crowd and ran up the carpeted stairs and into the lobby. Must be going to call an ambulance, or the police. Or both. Soon the place would be swarming with police and emergency medical techs.
    The elevator moved downward. The dead woman was invisible behind the crowd, but Cherry knew who she was. She said nothing. She rode the elevator down to the ground floor, got off last, and wheeled her chair up and over the little bridge across the miniature brook. She started to follow the others toward the crowd around the body, paused, then turned away and went down toward the glass tables and iron chairs. She stopped at the first table she came to, and put one clenched fist on the table. She heard a quiet sound of lament and lifted her head to look around before she realized it was coming from her.
    How could she be sad? She hated Belle! But tears spilled from her eyes. That sight of her, broken like that, was too much, too awful.
    A slender, blond-haired young man sat down across from her. He looked blurry through her tears. “Do you know who she was?” he asked, his voice as kind as it was curious.
    She nodded. “Her name was Belle Hammermill. We were partners in a store in Milwaukee.”
    “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry,” he said. He rose swiftly and went away, only to return seconds later with a handful of paper napkins. “This is all I could find,” he said, putting them on the table in front of her.
    “Thanks,” she said, taking one and wiping her eyes. She took a second and blew her nose. They were the good, thick kind of napkins, soft as tissue.
    “Can I get you anything else? A glass of water? There’s someone in the bar, maybe I can get you a brandy.”
    She found herself smiling at him, even though her forehead was pinched by her eyebrows hiked upward and together. He had nice, old-fashioned manners, offering the two treatments old-fashioned men thought good for shock or loss.
    To her surprise, she