Chapter 12 Vanishing Evidence
The shop had been closed for hours, and the silence of The Yarn & Needle at night was a different creature from its daytime quiet.
During opening hours the air held the memory of voices, the soft click of needles, the hiss of the kettle in the back room.
Now, at nearly eleven o’clock, the stillness was complete enough that I could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator behind the counter and the occasional creak of old timbers settling against the cold.
I had not been able to sleep. The conversation with Constable Finch earlier that day had left me restless, and the weight of what I had not told him pressed against my thoughts with a persistence that made lying still impossible.
I had come downstairs in my dressing gown, the thick wool of it familiar against my skin, and made a cup of tea that now sat cooling on the counter while I stood before the storage room door.
The key to the back room lived on a hook behind the till, a small brass thing that I turned now with a click that seemed louder than it should.
The door swung inward, and I reached for the light cord.
The bare bulb came on with a tired flicker, illuminating the narrow space with its shelves of surplus yarn and the small wooden cabinet where I kept the shop’s accounts.
I had moved the ledger there two days ago, after my return from the bookshop with the second button.
The handkerchief with both buttons had been tucked beside it, behind a stack of old inventory sheets that no one had reason to touch.
It was not a hiding place of any real cleverness, but it had seemed sufficient.
The shop was my home. The thought of needing more than a closed door and a locked cabinet had never occurred to me.
I knelt on the cold floorboards and opened the cabinet. The ledger was there, its dark green cloth cover worn soft at the corners, the spine cracked from decades of Silas Blackwood’s fastidious record-keeping. I lifted it out and set it on my lap, and then I reached for the handkerchief.
My fingers found only the smooth wood of the cabinet shelf.
I pulled the inventory sheets aside and looked again.
Nothing. I stretched my hand into the far corner, where dust gathered in a thin grey film.
Nothing. I sat back on my heels and stared at the empty space, and for several seconds my mind simply refused to assemble the facts into a shape I could understand.
The handkerchief was gone. Both buttons were gone.
I rose to my feet and checked the cabinet again, lifting every stack of paper, opening the small drawer beneath the shelf where I kept a tin of paperclips and a spare roll of receipt tape.
I checked the floor around the cabinet, in case the handkerchief had slipped.
I checked the pockets of the cardigan I had worn that afternoon, though I knew I had not put the buttons there.
I checked the counter, the till drawer, the shelf behind the register where I sometimes set things down without thinking.
Nothing.
I returned to the back room and stood in the doorway, and the cold that moved through me had nothing to do with the October night. Someone had been in my shop. Someone had known where to look.
I closed my eyes and forced myself to think.
The last time I had seen the buttons was the previous afternoon, when I had taken the ledger from its hiding place to show Eleanor the entry for October first.
I had lifted the handkerchief out, unwrapped it, and let her examine both buttons under the light of the worktable lamp.
Then I had wrapped them again and returned everything to the cabinet before walking to The Daily Loaf to speak with Gareth.
That meant the buttons had been taken sometime between late yesterday afternoon and this moment. A window of perhaps thirty hours.
I walked back into the main shop and stood in the centre of the room, letting my gaze move slowly across the familiar space.
The front door was locked. I had checked it myself before coming downstairs.
The windows were intact. The back door, which opened onto the narrow passage that ran behind the row of shops, was bolted from the inside.
I had not opened it since the morning’s delivery of new wool stock.
And yet someone had been here.
The realization settled into my bones with a clarity that was almost physical.
I thought of Florence Albright’s smooth, cultivated voice, the way she had looked at me across the counter of her antique shop with those careful, assessing eyes.
I thought of the hidden key to the bookshop, the trampled hedge beneath the upstairs window, the button carved from horn with its pattern of interlocking circles.
I thought of the fact that Florence had been in The Yarn & Needle more than once in the past week, browsing the yarns, asking after the knitting circle, her presence so polished and so plausible that I had not questioned it.
She had been looking. She had been waiting.
I pulled my dressing gown tighter around me and sat down on the stool behind the counter.
The ledger was still in my hands, the only piece of Silas Blackwood’s puzzle that remained to me.
I opened it to the final pages, where the coded entries gave way to the last notation in plain English: the cross and the word “missing” beside the October first date.
The killer knew I had evidence. The killer had walked into my home and taken it.
My breath came shallow and quick, and I made myself slow it down.
I set the ledger on the counter and pressed my palms flat against the wood, feeling the grain beneath my fingers.
The shop was still the shop. The yarn still sat in its cubbies along the wall, the madder-dyed skeins glowing a deep brick red in the low light.
The worktable still held the half-finished jumper I had been knitting for Eleanor’s birthday.
Everything looked as it always looked, and that was the most unsettling thing of all.
The violation was invisible. It left no mark.
I thought of the people who had been in the shop during those thirty hours.
Eleanor, of course, but Eleanor had been with me when I put the buttons away.
Gareth had stopped by that morning with a box of pastries from The Daily Loaf, but he had never gone near the back room.
Constable Finch had not set foot in The Yarn & Needle since the day after Silas’s death.
There had been customers, a handful of them, women from the knitting circle and a tourist who had bought three skeins of undyed wool and asked directions to the Lavender Lane Bookshop without knowing it was closed.
And Florence Albright. Florence had come in on Tuesday afternoon, two days ago, while I was reorganizing the display of autumn yarns.
She had admired the new stock, asked after the pottery class, and purchased a small quantity of the madder-dyed wool.
She had stayed for perhaps fifteen minutes, and I had not left her alone in the shop for more than a moment.
But a moment was enough. I had gone to the back room to fetch a fresh pot of tea. I had been gone for no more than two minutes. Long enough to fill the kettle and set it to boil. Long enough for someone who knew exactly what she was looking for to slip behind the counter and try the cabinet door.
Only the cabinet had been locked. I was certain of that.
I had locked it myself after returning the buttons, and the key had stayed on its hook behind the till.
I crossed to the till now and looked at the hook.
The key was there, small and brass and unremarkable.
But the cabinet had been locked when I opened it tonight.
I had used the key myself, and the lock had turned with its usual stiff resistance.
So Florence had not taken the buttons that afternoon. She had found the cabinet locked and had been forced to wait, to plan, to find another way in.
Or someone else had taken them.
I did not want to consider that possibility, but it pressed at the edges of my thoughts with an insistence I could not ignore.
I had told no one about the buttons except Eleanor.
I had not even told Gareth the full extent of what I had found.
But Eleanor had a nephew who was a constable, and constables asked questions, and Eleanor was not a woman who lied easily to the people she loved.
I pushed the thought away. Eleanor would not have taken the buttons without telling me.
Whatever her loyalties to Alistair, she had been my friend for eight years.
She had sat at my worktable every Tuesday morning and taught me more about the village than I had learned in my first twelve months of living here.
She had deciphered Silas Blackwood’s ledger at half past four in the morning because she believed in what I was doing.
No. The buttons had been taken by someone who did not want me to have them. Someone who had a key to my shop, or who had found another way in.
I stood up and walked to the back door. The bolt was still thrown, the metal cold under my fingers.
I checked the lock on the front door. It was a simple deadbolt, the kind that could be picked by anyone with a steady hand and the right tool.
I had never thought to upgrade it. Meadowbrook was not the sort of village where people worried about locks.
I returned to the counter and picked up the ledger.
The dark green cloth was warm now from my hands, and I held it against my chest as if it were a living thing that needed protecting.
It was all I had left. The buttons were gone.
The hidden key to the bookshop was still in my possession, tucked into the pocket of my winter coat upstairs, but without the buttons it proved nothing.
Anyone could have a key. Anyone could have trampled a hedge.
The telephone sat on the counter beside the till, a heavy old rotary model that had come with the shop. I looked at it for a long moment, and then I picked up the receiver and dialed Eleanor’s number.
It rang four times before she answered, her voice thick with sleep but sharpening quickly when she heard mine.
“Penny? What’s happened?”
“The buttons are gone,” I said. “Both of them. Someone’s been in the shop.”
There was a pause, and I heard the rustle of bedclothes and the click of a lamp being switched on. “Tell me everything,” Eleanor said, and her voice was the voice of the woman who had been the village librarian for thirty years, precise and calm and utterly focused.
I told her. I described the locked cabinet, the empty shelf, the window of thirty hours.
I told her about Florence’s visit on Tuesday, the two minutes I had spent in the back room, the locked cabinet door.
I told her about the deadbolt on the front door and the bolt on the back and the fact that neither showed any sign of forced entry.
“Someone has a key,” Eleanor said when I had finished. “Or someone knows how to get in without one.”
“Yes.”
“You must call Alistair.”
“I can’t,” I said. “Not yet. I have nothing to show him. A missing handkerchief and a story about buttons he’s never seen. He’d think I was imagining things.”
“Penny.” Eleanor’s voice softened, and I heard the worry in it. “Someone has been in your home. That is not a matter for amateur investigation. That is a matter for the police.”
“I know.” I pressed my palm flat against the ledger’s cover. “But Alistair is already frustrated with me. He knows I’ve been holding things back. If I go to him now with nothing but a story about stolen evidence, he’ll dismiss it. He’ll think I’m trying to distract him from my own involvement.”
Eleanor was quiet for a moment. “Then what do you propose to do?”
“I need to find out who else knew about the buttons,” I said. “And I need to find out who has a key to this shop besides me.”
“The landlord,” Eleanor said. “Arthur Penhaligon. He owns the building, doesn’t he?”
“Yes.” Arthur Penhaligon was a quiet man in his fifties who ran the record shop two doors down and owned three of the buildings on Lavender Lane.
I had rented The Yarn & Needle from him for nearly eight years, and in all that time I had never thought to ask whether he kept a spare key. “I’ll speak to him in the morning.”
“And Florence?”
I drew a breath and let it out slowly. “Florence is the most likely person. She had motive, she had opportunity, and she knew I was asking questions. But I can’t prove it was her. Not without the buttons.”
“Then you must be careful,” Eleanor said. “If Florence took those buttons, she knows exactly how close you are. She will not stop at theft if she feels cornered.”
The words settled into the quiet of the shop, and I felt the weight of them in my chest.
Eleanor was right. The theft of the buttons was not just an attempt to destroy evidence.
It was a message. A line drawn in the dark.
The killer was telling me that she could reach into my life whenever she chose, and that I would not see her coming.
“I’ll be careful,” I said. “But I’m not stopping. The ledger is still here. The key to the bookshop is still here. She hasn’t won yet.”
“No,” Eleanor said, and I heard something like pride in her voice. “She hasn’t. I’ll come by in the morning. We’ll make a plan.”
“Thank you.”
“Get some sleep, Penny. Or try to.”
I hung up the telephone and stood in the silence of the shop, listening to the hum of the refrigerator and the creak of the old timbers and the sound of my own breathing, which was steadier now than it had been.
The fear was still there, a cold presence at the base of my skull, but it had been joined by something else. Something harder.
I carried the ledger upstairs to my living quarters and placed it in the drawer of my bedside table.
Then I checked the lock on the door at the top of the stairs, a simple hook-and-eye that I had never used before.
I slid the hook into place and stood for a moment with my hand resting on the doorframe.
The game had changed. I was no longer an observer, a curious shopkeeper following a trail of clues. I was a target. And the woman who had killed Silas Blackwood knew my name, knew my shop, and knew exactly where I slept.
I turned off the light and lay down in the dark, and I did not sleep.
I listened to the sounds of the old building settling around me, and I thought about buttons and keys and the careful, cultivated smile of a woman who had walked into my home and taken what was mine.
Somewhere in the village, Florence Albright was waiting for me to make my next move. I intended to make it count.