A Stitch in Time, A Knot in Crime

Chapter 1 A Quiet Morning in The Yarn & Needle

The morning light fell across the counter in a long, clean rectangle, catching the edges of the newly arranged skeins and turning the merino wool the color of toasted honey.

I stood back from the display and considered it with the particular satisfaction that comes from a small task done well.

The shop smelled of lanolin and the faint, clean scent of the cedar boards I had oiled the previous week, and somewhere beneath both was the steady, familiar note of the electric kettle warming in the back room.

The Yarn & Needle had been mine for nearly eight years now, and I still felt a quiet pleasure every time I turned the sign in the window from Closed to Open. The bell above the door gave its little silver chime, and the morning began.

Mrs. Albright from the post office was my first customer, a woman of unvarying habits who came in every Tuesday for two skeins of the same undyed Shetland wool she had been using for the past three years to knit a blanket for a grandchild who was now old enough to ask why it was not yet finished.

She paused by the new display and ran a thumb over a skein of the madder-dyed yarn, a deep brick red I had ordered from a small mill in Yorkshire.

"That's a bold color for you, Mrs. Albright," I said, coming around the counter.

"I was thinking of a scarf," she said, and then, lowering her voice though we were quite alone in the shop, "Did you hear about the Martins' cat?"

I had not, and I told her so, and by the time she left with her two skeins of undyed wool and a single skein of the madder red, I knew that the cat had been found asleep in the vestry of St. Mary's after three days of anxious searching, that the vicar had been the one to discover it, and that Mrs.

Martin had declared it a sign of divine intervention, though the vicar himself had pointed out that the vestry window had been left open and the cat had simply climbed through.

This was how news traveled in Meadowbrook.

It arrived in fragments, carried in with the morning customers like leaves blown through an open door, and I had learned to listen not only to what was said but to how it was offered.

The way a person held a skein of wool while they spoke, the small hesitation before a name, the glance toward the window that meant the story was not quite finished.

I did not think of it as a skill, exactly.

It was simply the habit of years, the natural attention of someone who had spent more time listening than speaking.

The morning settled into its familiar rhythm.

A young woman I did not recognize came in looking for circular needles in a size she could not quite remember, and I helped her measure the gauge of the project she carried in her bag, a half-finished baby sweater in a soft sage green.

Two sisters from the far end of the village arrived together and spent twenty minutes debating the relative merits of alpaca and cashmere before buying neither and leaving with promises to return.

Through it all, the light shifted across the floor, and the kettle clicked off, and I made a mental note to brew a fresh pot before Eleanor arrived.

Eleanor Finch came through the door at half past ten, which was her usual time on a Tuesday, and the shop seemed to settle into a deeper quiet with her presence, the way a room does when someone enters who carries their own stillness with them.

She wore a tweed skirt in a soft heather gray and a cardigan I had knitted for her the previous Christmas, a deep blue that suited her coloring.

Her white hair was pinned back neatly, and her eyes, behind their tortoiseshell spectacles, moved across the shop with the calm, cataloging attention of someone who had spent her working life among books and their proper ordering.

"Penny," she said, and her voice was as precise as ever, each syllable given its full weight. "Your window display is new. The madder is a fine choice. It catches the light beautifully from the street."

"Mrs. Albright thought so too," I said. "She bought a skein."

"Did she indeed." Eleanor raised an eyebrow, and the small smile that followed was one I knew well. It meant she had heard something worth sharing, and it meant she would share it when she was ready and not a moment before. "Shall I put the kettle on?"

We retreated to the small back room, which held a narrow table, two wooden chairs, and a shelf of tins containing the teas I kept for visitors.

The room was not large, but it was warm, and the single window looked out onto the narrow strip of garden that ran behind the shop, where the rosemary had grown tall and woody and the lavender was beginning to show its first pale shoots.

I filled the kettle and set out two cups while Eleanor settled herself in the chair nearest the window.

"Gareth is joining us at The Daily Loaf this afternoon," I said. "He sent word this morning. Something about a new pastry he wants us to try."

"I received the same message," Eleanor said. "He left a note with my newspaper. I believe the word 'transcendent' appeared twice."

I laughed, and the sound was easy and unforced.

Gareth Davies had been delivering his baked goods and his enthusiasm to the village for as long as I had lived in Meadowbrook, and his capacity for finding joy in a well-laminated dough was one of the constants I had come to rely on.

He was the third point of our small triangle, Eleanor and Gareth and I, and our afternoons together had become a ritual I looked forward to with a quiet, steady pleasure.

The kettle boiled, and I poured the water over the leaves, and the scent of Earl Grey rose up warm and familiar. Eleanor accepted her cup and held it for a moment without drinking, her gaze resting on the window.

"I stopped by the Lavender Lane Bookshop on my way here," she said. "I wanted to return a volume I borrowed last week. Mr. Blackwood was in his usual state of preoccupation."

I smiled. Silas Blackwood was the village's bookseller, a man of such precise and unwavering habits that the local children had invented a game in which they tried to predict, from the far side of the lane, exactly where in the shop he would be standing at any given hour.

He was known for arranging his stock not by genre or author but by some private system that no one had ever managed to decipher, and for his refusal to sell a book to anyone he deemed insufficiently serious.

I had once watched him decline to part with a volume of local history to a tourist who had referred to it as "that old book with the green cover."

"What was he preoccupied with this time?" I asked.

"A shipment from a dealer in Bath. He was cataloging the new arrivals and would not be interrupted."

Eleanor took a sip of her tea and set the cup down with a small, precise click.

"I left the book on the counter with a note. He will find it when he is ready, and he will return it to its proper place, and no one will ever know precisely where that place is."

"I've always found his habits rather endearing," I said. "There's something reassuring about a man who cares so deeply about the order of things."

"Order," Eleanor said, and the word hung in the air for a moment, "is a relative concept. What Mr. Blackwood calls order, the rest of us might call something closer to obsession. He keeps a record of every book that passes through his hands, you know. Date of acquisition, date of sale,

the name of the buyer. He once told me he could account for every volume in the shop going back thirty years."

I considered this. It was an impressive feat of record-keeping, the kind of meticulous attention to detail that I associated with scholars and archivists and the very best kind of librarians.

But there was something in Eleanor's tone that gave me pause, a faint note of reservation that I could not quite place.

"You sound as though you disapprove," I said.

"I do not disapprove." She turned from the window and met my eyes. "I simply find it curious. A man who keeps such careful track of his books but so little track of people. I have been visiting that shop for twenty years, and I do not believe he has ever once asked me how I am."

I opened my mouth to reply, but the bell above the shop door chimed before I could speak, and a moment later a familiar voice called out from the front of the shop.

"Penny? Eleanor? Are you hiding in the back again? I've brought sustenance."

Gareth Davies appeared in the doorway of the back room, his round face pink from the short walk across the lane and his apron dusted with a fine layer of flour that had also found its way into his hair, giving him the appearance of a man who had been caught in a very small, very localized snowstorm.

He was holding a paper bag in one hand and a croissant in the other, and he was beaming.

"I couldn't wait until this afternoon," he said, setting the bag on the table and pulling out a chair with his free hand.

"I've been experimenting with a new lamination technique, and I needed impartial opinions. Well, impartial enough. You're my friends, so you'll lie to me kindly if it's dreadful, but I trust you to lie well enough that I'll know the truth."

He tore the croissant into three pieces and pushed them across the table toward us, and the butter-rich scent of the pastry filled the small room. I took a piece and bit into it, and the layers shattered against my tongue in a way that required no kindness at all.

"Gareth," I said, "this is extraordinary."

"Is it? You're not just being kind?"

"I am being entirely honest. Eleanor?"

Eleanor chewed her piece with the same deliberate attention she gave to everything, and then she nodded. "The lamination is excellent. You've achieved a remarkable depth of flavor. What did you change?"

Gareth's face opened into a grin that seemed to take up most of his round cheeks.

"Longer cold fermentation. I left the dough in the walk-in overnight, and I think it made all the difference. I've been up since four this morning, but it was worth it."

He leaned back in his chair and dusted some of the flour from his apron onto the floor, where it settled in a fine white drift.