The Wishing Thread by Lisa Van Allen Read Free Book Online

was gray. Although she’d been knitting in the Stitchery since before she could tie her shoes, she’d rarely had to deal directly with the clients. She sighed.
    Ruth leaned an elbow on the counter and narrowed her eyes. “We Ten Eckyes have been in this town long enough to know what you Van Rippers are up to.”
    “All right,” Aubrey said. “So what is it that you’d like?”
    “What would I like?” Ruth said. She shook her head in annoyance. “What I would like is for you to knit something that will help my poor Todd!”
    Aubrey crossed her arms, considering. Ruth Ten Eckye was the wife and partner of the late Charles Ten Eckye, of the Ten Eckye Center for Culture and Art. The Ten Eckyes owned buildings all over Tarrytown—mostly commercial properties and apartments that the family paid a management company to handle so they would not need to dirty their hands with a task as undignified as collecting rent.
    Ruth was viciously judgmental—politically, socially, ecumenically. Ensuring that a Ten Eckye had the corner on Brom Bones probably meant something sacred to her; or at the very least, it bolstered the dominance and visibility of her old patroon bloodline. She had good friends where it mattered and enemies where it suited her. Aubrey had seen Ruth snap at the handicapped boy who bagged her groceries, and she knew that Ruth called the animal shelter the instant, the very instant, she spotted a cat that did not have a collar within fifteen feet of her garage.
    And yet Aubrey could find things to like about her. Mariah had told her:
It’s wrong to knit for a person you dislike
. Sure, Ruth had been on the board that forced the library to remove all vampire young adult novels from the shelves, but she’d also chaired the committee that kept wreaths on veterans’ graves. She practically owned the community food pantry: Tarrytown’s homeless ate like royals. She had backbone—and that was something. She cared about her family like a mother wolverine. Ruth, like anyone, had her strong points and weakpoints—and that, to Aubrey’s mind, made her a good enough candidate for a spell.
    “Have you talked to Mr. Scott, to tell him how you feel?” Aubrey asked.
    “Obviously I tried that,” Ruth said.
    “What about someone at the school?”
    “I talked to everyone. There is simply no other way. Believe me, Aubrey Van Ripper. The Stitchery is my last resort. My very, very last.”
    It always is
, Aubrey thought.
    Most people who came to the Stitchery arrived because they’d been following the faint scent of a rumor, the tail end of a last chance. Normally, clients approached timidly and with shy questions that weren’t technically questions except for the tone they were spoken in:
Someone told me that these are, um, unique yarns? I heard that you offer a knitting service? I’ve been having this problem and I was told to see you?
    People came to the Stitchery for help because they had no choice left but to shuck their common sense and dignity to try something completely unbelievable. Aubrey imagined the feeling must have been similar, in terms of desperation, to an adult putting a tooth under her pillow in an effort to help pay her bills.
    She pulled her cardigan tighter around her midsection. Light slanted through the window muntins, beams of squared silver bent to the wood floor. The furniture—two wooden stools, the counter, a low wicker coffee table—was dusty gray, the finest film covering all the bulbs of yarn in baskets and the thick hanks of yarn that hung from pegs on the walls. The look on Ruth’s face gave the impression that she was counting the minutes until she could leave the Stitchery to go shower off, as if it might somehow contaminate or infect. Certainly Aubrey had every right to turn her out, to say—perhaps witha dose of Ruth’s imperiousness thrown in for good measure—
How dare you come into this house while we mourn?
Mariah had not yet been dead for three whole days. The obituary