Free Blackwork by Monica Ferris

his keys, and I watched him stumble up the steps and go inside.”
    “Do you remember the address?”
    “No.” But when he described the house and its general location, Mike recognized it as the Donohue residence.
    About then it occurred to Waylon to ask, “What’s this all about anyway?”
    “Ryan McMurphy was found dead in that house around noon on Monday.”
    Waylon straightened and pulled his hands out of his pockets. “He was? What happened?”
    “We’re not sure yet.”
    “I bet he fell.”
    Again that alert feeling. “What makes you say that?”
    “A friend of mine took a guy home who he thought was drunk, and the guy died in his bed, and it turned out he had fallen earlier in the day, smacked himself good on the head. He died in his sleep from bleeding inside his brain. He’d fallen down. He wasn’t drunk at all.”
    Mike opened his notebook. “To your knowledge, did Ryan suffer a fall?”
    “No.”
    “Did he tell you he’d fallen?”
    “No. But listen, I wasn’t with him all evening. He came into the Happy Hour already drunk. Or else having a stroke.”
    “Did he smell like alcohol?”
    “Hell, yes! But that could be why he fell, because he was drinking.”
    Mike wrote that down because it could be true, thanked the man, and left.
     
     
     
     
    B ETSY had been assembling little holiday cross-stitch kits—each with a poinsettia pattern, fabric, floss, six gold beads, a needle—to sell at her checkout desk when Billie Leslie came in. Billie was an avid stitcher and, like most, always working out of season. Betsy was glad to be able to tell her that a kit she had ordered had come in. Bee’s Magic, it was called, and by the photograph on the outside of the packet, it was a surreal marvel. Worked on black, it depicted a broken-down picket fence entangled in morning glories and raspberry canes with a strange mix of birds, bees, butterflies, mice, and even a hedgehog sitting on a mushroom—a fantasy of a hot summer at nightfall.
    “Would you consider letting me display this when it’s finished?” Betsy asked. Well-done models created orders, and Billie was a very competent stitcher.
    “Well, let’s see how it comes out first,” said Billie. “It’s kind of at the far end of my skill, working on black. Listen,” she went on in a different tone, “I want to ask you what you’d think if the parade—”
    She was interrupted by a bing-bong! as the doorbell chimed and in came a short woman with nervous mannerisms and black hair that stood up in little curls all over her head. She paused inside the door to look around, her shiny dark eyes alert.
    “You’ve changed things around,” she said in a sharp, accusing tone.
    “Hello, Irene,” said Billie in a cool voice. To Betsy, she added, “I’d better get going, I’ve got errands to run.”
    “Thank you, Billie,” said Betsy, waving good-bye as the woman left. “Hello, Irene!” she continued. “You haven’t been here in a while.”
    “Haven’t needed to,” said Irene briefly, still looking around.
    Betsy came out from behind the big desk that was her checkout counter. Her smile of greeting began to feel a little false. “What can I do for you?”
    “It’s what I can do for you,” replied Irene, pleased to have thought that retort up all by herself. She opened a flat, black canvas bag and brought out a piece of folded linen dyed in uneven shades of purple. She brought it to the table and unfolded it. The darkest shades were at the top, fading quickly to uneven swirls of pinky lavender across the middle. It was an angry sky dotted with little clusters of X’s, like leaves blown in a stiff wind. Near the top, just under the darkest purple dye and cradled in a thin, uneven line of purple cloud, was stitched a white sliver of moon.
    “I dyed it myself, and I can get you all the yardage of it you want,” she said.
    The bottom quarter of the fabric was also stitched—mostly cross-stitches—in browns, tans, and grays scattered