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By the time Di finally got home that night and was able to take part in his weekly, online video hangout with the guys he was closest to from his Men Who Stitch Facebook group, he was worn out and completely confused.
Dragging him along as her far-less-intelligent sidekick, Mac had made sure that they’d headed back to the fête to find a way to question all of her chosen suspects. Although, since it was only Mac and Di doing it, fortunately, none of them had realized they were under suspicion.
Working on a small, blue, plush doggie now—as a whole day with Mac was seriously playing with Di’s heart and making him remember how long he’d been in love with her—he’d been bringing his friends up to date on all the latest, weird events.
“So, what’d the mayor’s ex-girlfriend have to say?” Boomer prompted him.
Boomer was a seriously buff, tall white guy with short brown hair and was crocheting an adorable baby cap with antlers on it. He’d apparently started crocheting as therapy after he’d been hit by shrapnel from an IED in Afghanistan, when he’d been in the army. The scars he bore were visible ones, as his arm still showed, but he’d now fully regained the use of his fingers.
Of course, half the men in the wider group had stories like this. Most of them weren’t the secret, shameful threadheads Di had been all his life.
Still, Di nodded toward the baby cap, rather than answering the question—desperately wanting to run away from all the events of the day.
“Is that one for your niece?”
Most of Boomer’s first works of art had been for the new baby of the family, until his sister’s friends had seen them and started begging for their own. Now, along with having some connections to various Prospector’s Rest stores as well as ones in his native Aspen, Boomer had a thriving Etsy side hustle.
“Nah,” Boomer grinned. “This one’s on commission. Why the happy couple wants to turn their son into a deer, I don’t know, but I’m okay with taking their money to help them out.”
Smiling, Di was working on embroidering little pawprints onto his doggie’s feet, but Boomer clearly wasn’t going to let him off the hook.
“Now, spill. There’s only so much cute baby stuff I can do before I want to hear something grittier.”
“Hear, hear,” Randall agreed.
He was a cheery white man in his mid-sixties, with white hair and gold-rimmed glasses, who was working on his usual stock-in-trade: embroidered sayings which played to a largely gay clientele—although they apparently went down well with divorcées of a certain age, too. His current one was, “Life is a cabaret, so bring on the Cabernet.” He was working on the flourishes at the moment—a top hat and wine glass.
“I’ve been grading Freshman English papers all day,” Randall sighed. “Get to the gruesome details.”
Knowing when he was beaten—and deciding that the men’s insights could be useful—Di did.
“Well, we tracked Hilary down at her booth at the fête, where she’d run out of everything which wasn’t yellow yarn.”
“Need supplies?” Kennedy lifted up a basket. “I could overnight some to you.”
He was the youngest of their small, breakoff group at sixteen and really enjoyed knowing that there were older guys who liked this stuff, as well. The first American-born child of Chilean immigrants who had named all their kids as homages to people from U.S. history, he apparently had siblings called, Frederick Douglass, Shirley Maclaine, Nikolai Tesla, and Lizzy Borden.
His parents were weirdly diverse in their choices.
He was kind of skinny with short, dark hair, medium-brown skin, and dark eyes. The fact that he hadn’t exactly physically flourished yet wasn’t helping him out at school, so all the guys tried to help keep up his spirits.
Kennedy hadn’t discovered his real voice in his crafts yet, either, trying out what all the other guys were doing to see what felt right. At the moment, despite the basket of yarn, he was actually following Randall’s example and was creating an embroidery which said, “Baby, You’re a Firework.” He was working on the exploding firework background now. Randall had offered to sell his works without commission on his Etsy page to help him out.
Still, Di shook his head.
“Nah. I always prebuy all my stuff a month before the fête to be sure. But thanks,” he nodded to the kid, who seemed pleased to be acknowledged.
“Details! Details!” Crusher demanded.
As an ex-biker gang member who’d ended up helping out a federal case on his crew, he was a bit intimidating. While he’d admitted once to Di that he’d made himself be okay with a lot the crew got into, once that started veering into trading actual people and hanging out with Nazis, he was done. He’d apparently been an informant on the crew which had gotten the VanRowe kid jailed, too.
Still, he was probably the one people would least question the masculinity of. After all, he was gigantic—at least as tall as Di with muscles which could choke a horse. White and vaguely middle-aged—though no one dared to ask for numbers—he had dyed black hair and was always dressed in black, too.
Currently, he was creating a pair of costume bat wings for his dog. A tiny Pomeranian he’d renamed Harley, the pooch had been left behind by a girlfriend who’d walked out on him after he’d sided with the police. After that, Crusher had discovered an entirely new life online creating Halloween and dress-up outfits for dogs. But nothing made him happier than gruesome police details.
“Anyway, while Mac and I couldn’t question her officially, I see why she suspected Hilary of something,” Di went on. “She was still angry at the mayor, even now that he’s dead.”
“Not a wise thing to tell a cop, though, if you’ve been involved in making him that way,” Randall pointed out.
“Well, it was Mac she was talking to,” Di shrugged. “And everyone forgets that she’s sort of close to the force. I was just background she barely noticed.”
The last member of their group, Fuchsia, had caused a bit of a divide in the Men Who Stitch world, as she . . . well, they . . . were non-binary. Still, Di’s group had voted and agreed to invite he—. . them . . .
Pronouns aren’t usually this much trouble in Prospector’s Rest.
. . .to join.
Anyway, Fuchsia, who was large, African-American, and . . . well, biologically a woman . . . put in, “Sounds difficult to do. You’re kinda hard to overlook.”
Fuchsia had been sweet on him ever since joining, although had mostly gotten the point that he was taken—in spirit if not in fact. Currently, Fuchsia was working on creating a cape out of what appeared to be very velvety-looking purple cloth.
“Meh, around here, I’m not,” he assured them, shrugging. “Besides, she knows my secret, so I think she figures I’ll keep quiet, no matter what.”
“Anything else she let slip?” Crusher wondered, bringing them back to the point.
“Not really. Honestly, though, I think if she were going to kill anyone, it’d be the woman the mayor took up with, not the mayor himself.”
Fuchsia’s eyes rolled.
“Yeah, that would ruin her chances of taking up with him again.”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“What about the others?” Boomer wondered, fiddling with one of the baby antlers. “Did Mac take you along to question them, as well?”
“Sorta. Adeline Perry, the marijuana brownie maker, was pretty much baked out of her mind . . .”
Which, his mind went on. . . . is probably a good way to deal with hours of selling at the fête.
“. . . but I think Mac’s wrong there. Adeline might have been angry at the mayor, but she mostly can’t keep too much rage going for long.”
“Too toasted?” Crusher asked.
“Pretty much,” Di agreed.
“And the rich guy? Was he at the fête?” Kennedy pressed.
“Only to come by the Sheriff’s Department booth and complain about the noise and traffic, as though everyone in town didn’t know the fête was coming for months and exactly what that meant.”
Rolling his eyes, Di began embroidering a small pink nose onto his doggie.
“I don’t think he was around when the mayor collapsed, though, and according to everyone who’d seen him, Pocket was holding court at the local diner before that.”
“Did you get anything else from the coroner on what happened to him?” Boomer pressed.
“Well, nothing specific, like ‘here’s the exact poison’ or anything.”
Suddenly, every man was staring at him, and he knew he had to go on, although he’d been trying not to think about the details. Although he didn’t admit it, Mac had been the one to listen to them all and then translate them for the squeamish.
Is it any wonder why that woman is NEVER going to return my feelings? Not to mention, I make a REALLY bad homicide detective.
“Buuuuuut?” Fuchsia prompted.
Trying very, very hard not to hear the details his mouth was saying, Di rolled his eyes.
“But he was apparently asphyxiated and his stomach was inflamed.”
“Definitely poison, then,” Crusher confirmed. “That’s not ‘hey, heart attack!’ territory.”
Sighing, Di agreed.
“Yeah, Doc MacDougal has insisted that the body be sent to the medical examiner in Asheville to see if they can find exactly what was used. They’ve got more resources,” he shrugged, when they stared at him.
The others still seemed to be waiting, before Randall wondered, “Does the town know about this yet?”
“Actually . . .”
Di thought about it for the first time.
“I’m not entirely certain anyone besides me and Mac do. Oh, and Doc MacDougal’s son, but he knows when to keep his mouth closed. Mostly.”
“That it?” Boomer prompted.
“Well, and maybe the new, temporary mayor.”
“And who’s that?” Kennedy wondered, eyes lighting up like he was following an exciting spy novel.
Actually that had been the weirdest detail of the day.
“Velveteen.”
When several of them seemed bemused, he went on. Most of them had at least heard of her and several sold in her store.
“Yeah, I don’t think anyone expected it, including her, but she was made the honorary deputy mayor last year, as a sort of celebration of her 15th year of being head of the Chamber of Commerce.”
“And that makes her the new mayor?” Kennedy wondered.
“Well, no one else is, that’s for sure.”
Mostly, it had happened in bits as the day went on. All the townspeople had been muttering about who was next in line, and everyone remembered Velveteen’s ceremony last year. Thus, when decisions had to be made which no one else wanted the responsibility for, they’d turned to her, until, around 6 p.m., the County Judge had been called over to swear her in in front of the town, with a general agreement that there’d be an election in six months to choose someone more permanent.
“Do you think she’s a suspect?” Kennedy asked, wide-eyed, clearly warming to this investigation.
“Actually, she was less-than-pleased by the whole thing and very upset that she had to turn over her booth and her store mostly to her assistants, who, according to her, are idiots. She only agreed after they both swore under pain of death by knitting needle that they would text her if they had any questions, especially about prices.”
For the moment, everyone had stopped creating and stared at him, although he wasn’t certain why.
“So, who do you think did it?” Boomer asked finally, and Di blinked, his mind answering.
I’M actually involved in figuring this out?
Mostly, he’d merely been following around Mac because she’d asked him to.
For a second, Boomer rolled his eyes.
“Di, you’ve got more sense than anyone else who’s officially on the force there, and you’ve got a good relationship with the doc and the new mayor.”
Pondering the fact that, only this morning, Velveteen had been threatening to destroy one of his plush toys, since he wasn’t defending her right to take over Nora’s space, Di didn’t answer, and Kennedy piped up.
“Dude, yeah! Don’t you see? Your girlfriend was just coming up with some possibilities to get you into the groove. Clearly, she wants you to step up and solve this.”
“Not my girlfriend,” Di muttered, although none of them ever seemed to believe him.
Besides, he was a little dazed to realize they were right. All of Mac’s options hadn’t been anyone who was all that likely, but they got him out and talking to suspects and thinking of this case as his.
Dang. That woman has got me on a leash.
What was worse was that he’d have moved in and put his food bowl down in her kitchen in a heartbeat if given anything like a chance.
Before he could answer, Randall looked at his watch.
“Sorry, guys. I promised Harry I’d take him out to dinner. I don’t want hubby mad at me.”
As their usual time to call it a night had definitely come, everyone else agreed, but Kennedy chimed in, “Hey, think about it, big guy, okay? You can figure this out.”
Um, does it matter that I don’t want to?
But Kennedy and everyone else had already said goodbye and signed off—well, except for Boomer, who was staring at him knowingly.
“You gonna lecture me, too?” Di groused, though—as usual—fairly good-humoredly. He’d never had it in him to be the angry guy.
“About tracking down this case? Nope. Clearly, you’re gonna do that, or Mac is gonna stare at you till you do.”
Rolling his eyes, Di had to silently admit that this would have made him give in instantly.
“What I want you to do is finally admit to that girl you’re in love with her,” Boomer insisted.
As Di started to open his mouth, Boomer went on.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard your excuses, and I know you think you’re not worthy of her and that she just tolerates you because you’re decent and not one of the creeps she’s usually around, but listen.”
His light green eyes bored into Di.
“When you love a woman as much as you do that one, it’ll drive you nuts if you try and keep it to yourself. Look at me and Emily when I came back from the army. She nearly had to stand on me to get me to admit my feelings, and that was a good twelve months when we could have been happy together.”
“Yeah, but . . .” Di started, although Boomer shook his head.
“Even if she isn’t into you, that’s okay. You’ve said it. She knows it. If she’s not into you, you back off and stay a friend. But you’ll both feel better for not having to walk on eggshells. Even if that happens, she’ll know you can accept her, even if she doesn’t love you like that, and you’ll know that, if she ever changes her mind, she won’t have to wonder how you feel.”
He held up a hand.
“Believe me. It’s better that way.”
Although he actually appreciated the concern, Di played it off.
“Yeah, yeah, old man. Go back to your hottie wife and leave us single men out of it.”
Getting it, Boomer chuckled.
“Fine. But when this investigation is over, I’m going to check on you.”
He pointed at his watch.
“Clock’s tickin’, brother.”
Then he too left the chat, making Di let out a sigh.
Great. Now I not only need to investigate a murder—which I have ZERO abilities or training for—but I need to confess to Mac at the end of it, or Boomer will NEVER let me hear the end of it.
However he looked at it, his to-do list was starting to look like: “1. Pick up a Yeti and strap it to your back. 2. Climb Mt. Everest yodeling the Hallelujah Choir.”
But, giving in, while putting the finished doggie aside, and starting on a plush abominable snowman, Di knew he was probably gonna have to do it, nonetheless.