Free Crewel Yule by Monica Ferris, Melissa Hughes Page A

found the idea of a drink attractive. “Could you?” she asked him. “Brandy?”
    “Certainly.” He went away again.
    She kept wiping and blowing, there seemed no end to it. She wondered who the man was. Maybe he was gay; gay men often had nice manners. He was back in two minutes with a little snifter of brown liquid. The taste was harsh, and it was very warm in her stomach. Amazingly, it almost immediately stopped the tears.
    “Thank you,” she said, dabbing at her nose.
    “Do you want to go over there and talk to someone?”
    “No.” She was very sure about that.
    “They may be wondering who she is,” he said, but not unkindly, and he sat down.
    A small detail of the body appeared in Cherry’s mind. “She’s wearing her name tag, they can get her name off that,” she said. She put the glass down on the table with a too-hard clink. “Does that sound heartless?”
    “Well . . .” He studied her for a moment. “More cowardly, I guess.”
    A sound almost like a laugh came out of her, surprising and frightening her. “I’m not a coward!” she declared. “But they’ll make me look at her, and while I wasn’t too fond of her lately, I don’t want to do that. There’s no way I could do that, I’d start screaming or throw up. Or both.”
    “I understand,” he said. “I’m Godwin DuLac, by the way. From Excelsior, Minnesota.”
    “Cherry Pye,” she said, “from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.” She waited for the little look she always got when giving her name, but it didn’t come. Probably already read it off my own tag, she thought.
    “Can I ask you something?” he said.
    She nodded, poised to explain her father’s weird sense of humor.
    “Was Belle upset about something? Or sad?”
    Taken aback, she blinked, then said, “I don’t think so. I mean, she didn’t say anything to me. Why? Oh. . .” He was thinking Belle’s death was a suicide. She took the rest of the brandy in a single small mouthful while she thought. “Well, she has been making more mistakes than usual.”
    “What kind of mistakes?”
    “Ordering things and then sending them back. Forgetting to order things. Forgetting when it’s her night to close up or her morning to open. She’s always been a scatterbrain, but she’s been worse lately. As if something’s been on her mind. But she didn’t act depressed, she just laughed it off like usual.” Cherry thought some more. “I don’t know, I’ve been so tied up with my own problems lately . . .” She hadn’t meant to say that, she bit her lips and reached for the brandy, but the glass was empty.
    “Do you want some more?” Godwin asked.
    “No. No, thank you. That was nice of you, to think of it. It really helped.” She looked over her shoulder. The crowd was noisy; everyone giving orders. “Will you stay with me for a little while? Just until I get the nerve to go over there?” Because she really had to go over there.
    “Of course,” he said.

Nine

Saturday, December 15, 9:40 A.M.

    Lenore sat quietly on the small couch in Bewitching Stitches’ suite. She wore a long, deep-green, matte-silk skirt and a wine-colored blouse with bell sleeves. Her curly dark hair was in a loose arrangement on top of her head with tendrils that showed off her slender neck and delicate ears, and would have made her look sweet and vulnerable if she weren’t already looking sullen and angry.
    On a low, square table in front of her was the model of her Christmas tree sampler. There were two things right about it: the dark green Cashel linen it was made of—the same shade of green as her skirt—and the perfect, balanced placement of the various stitches. Everything else was wrong; most prominently, the dejected way it slumped on its base. But the roughened areas of the linen where stitches had been pulled out didn’t help, and the hasty, almost clumsy way the eight parts had been sewn together was painfully evident. Awful, she thought, how I can make a dozen perfect French knots in a