Cutwork by Monica Ferris Read Free Book Online Page A

quarrel was earlier. Two men shouting. It wasn’t very loud or very long.”
    “Could you hear what they were fighting about?”
    “No. I think I heard one man say, ‘You can’t have it,’ or maybe it was, ‘You can’t take it.’”
    “‘It,’ not ‘that’?”
    Irene reflected while sipping her tea. “Yes,” she nodded. “I’m almost positive he said, ‘You can’t have it.’”
    “And there wasn’t any sound like even one shout when Mickey Sinclair went past Mr. McFey’s booth?”
    “No. That’s why I was so surprised when I went down there to look at his lion carving and found him.” Her hand with the cup came down involuntarily, the fingers twitching. “There was a great deal of blood, it was very disturbing. Even Mike Malloy, though he’s a policeman, was upset by it. When I tried to tell him to talk to you, he was rude to me.” She turned those shining eyes on Betsy. “But there’s no reason I can’t talk to you, and now I’m sure you’ll be able to discover who really murdered poor Mr. McFey.”
     
Betsy was in her shop after closing that night. A large box had been delivered right at five by UPS, and she decided to unpack it before going upstairs. Her super-size cat, Sophie, didn’t approve of the delay. The animal was in the back room beside the door to the back hallway, whining at intervals for someone to take her up to the apartment and feed her. Betsy ignored the whine.
    She had tried to forbid food in her shop, both because it soiled fibers and because Sophie too often succeeded in garnering a share. In the last few months, by strenuous enforcement of the no-food rule, Betsy had reduced losses thirty percent and helped Sophie reduce her weight to nineteen pounds; the cat’s role had been to complain that she was fading away to a wisp. But the shop’s customers complained and so many persisted in bringing food along, especially when shopping during their lunch break, that Betsy had loosened the reins. And apparently believing Sophie’s complaints, they resumed slipping the occasional tidbit to the cat. Just this afternoon, Betsy had seen Sophie eat a corner of a Hershey bar, a quarter of a sugar cookie, and a fragment of lettuce leaf coated with ranch dressing. God knew what else she’d eaten without Betsy noticing; certainly over the past few weeks she had regained two of the lost pounds.
    So while Betsy still fed Sophie her official dinner scoop of dry cat food, she felt no urgency in getting upstairs to do so.
    In the box Betsy was unpacking were a variety of baskets. When her sister Margot Berglund had owned Crewel World, she had used baskets to display items such as skeins of yarn and small needlework accessories. The baskets had grown shabby, and some had become a source of snags for anything placed in them. Baskets were expensive, so Betsy tried to ignore the problem. But then a customer had indignantly displayed the splinter in her finger. The customer, a Band-Aid on her finger and a free skein of overdyed silk in her bag, had departed only somewhat mollified—and Shelly Donohue had come in with a basket on her arm.
    Shelly was a good friend as well as a sometime part-timer in Betsy’s shop. She had a curvaceous figure, beautiful hazel eyes, and a great deal of light brown hair worn in a fat bun at the nape of her neck. A divorcee, she hadn’t married again, and Betsy sometimes wondered why.
    The basket was neatly woven, about fifteen inches deep and with an unusually high handle. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one like that,” Betsy had said. “Where’d you get it?”
    “In a place called Dell Rapids, South Dakota,” replied Shelly. “I collect baskets, and I used to just display them, but lately I’ve been using some of them. This is just right for a quick trip to the grocery store. I no longer have to choose between choking a fish or killing a tree.”
    Betsy chuckled dutifully at the worn jest, and asked, “What were you doing in Dell Rapids, South