Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_03 Read Online Free Page A

materials. I’m sure we could raise the money to pay you.”
    â€œOh, that’s all right. It won’t break me to donate a few yards of tan wool. How old is this tapestry?” The style of the design made Betsy think of the 1950s or early ’60s.
    Patricia said, “Ten or twelve years. But it has never been displayed that I know of. Lucy Abrams designed it and worked on it with other members of Trinity. I called her daughter, and when I described it, she said she remembered her mother and some other women working on it shortly before she died. She said she thought it was lost, thrown away.” Patricia explained to Betsy, “Father Keane Abrams was Father John’s predecessor, and one of the best-loved rectors we’ve ever had. Lucy was his wife.”
    â€œWhat a character he was!” said Martha. “A diamond in the rough, certainly, but a twenty-carat diamond, at least. His sermons were down to earth, addressed to the common man, which made us refined types sit up and take notice. Pithy, that’s how we described his sermons.”
    Jill said, “My father liked him. But my mother thought he was probably a reformed burglar who should be a chaplain down at the jail.”
    Patricia, laughing, said, “The first time he stepped into the pulpit, I thought, O Lord, what have we got here? He looked like a longshoreman or a retired boxer. But in five minutes, I was thinking how wonderful he—” She broke off, blinking.
    â€œWhat?” asked Betsy.
    Patricia continued, “He wasn’t here long, and retired from Trinity all of a sudden, saying he hadn’t felt well for awhile, and he had a massive stroke a week later at home. His wife Lucy found him and apparently tried to help him up off the floor and had a heart attack. She was found dead beside him by their daughter Mandy. It was dreadful, just dreadful. Mandy went to live with an aunt, and Father Keane has been in a nursing home ever since. Can’t talk, can’t walk, can’t feed himself.” Real tears glittered on her eyelashes.
    â€œIt was awful for her to come home to that, just awful,” agreed Martha. “So sad.”
    Patricia said, “Father John agrees that if we restore this tapestry and persuade the rest of the vestry, he will not object to it hanging in the officially renamed Reverend Keane Abrams Library.”
    There was a gleam in the woman’s eyes that shone through the tears. Betsy exchanged a smile with Jill and Martha, who actually winked. They all knew Patricia. Even if Father John objected, the deed was all but done.
    When Betsy walked out of the church hall after the meeting, snow was coming down again, blowing sideways in a stiff wind. It stung her cheeks, flapped the skirt of her long coat around her legs, and made her walk crabwise. She staggered down to the corner of Second and Water, where it blew even harder. Her hat lifted itself, and she barely grabbed it before it went sailing out into the street. She’d seen snowstorms like this on television, after an afternoon at the beach. She unwrapped her scarf from her neck and tied it over her head.
    It was a struggle, those few blocks down Water, then a lesser one up Lake to her shop and home. Once safely inside, climbing the stairs to her apartment, she was suddenly overcome with a feeling of elation, as if she’d climbed a mountain. She remembered blizzards in her youth in Milwaukee, and she found it even more exciting now in her maturity to discover they still couldn’t over-match her.
    Â 
    The snow stopped by bedtime, and plows must have worked all night, because by Saturday morning the streets were clear. Snow was piled along the curbs, in mountain ranges so high that from inside the shop, Betsy could see only the roofs of cars as they went by. She cleared the sidewalk yet again, adding her own peaks to the Himalayas. Then she cut a narrow passage through to the street so customers