Murder at the Christmas Curtain: Master Plot Bible

The salt truck had passed twice already by the time I gave up pretending the morning was going to be quiet. I sat in the front window of Second Stitch with a man's wool overcoat across my knees, taking in the hem by an inch I'd pinned twice because he kept insisting he wasn't that short, and I watched the gritty slush pile up along the curb in gray windrows while the radiator ticked under the sill. December in Thimble Cove came down hard and fast once it decided to arrive, and this year it had decided early.

The bell over my door didn't so much ring as announce, the way it always did when someone came in fast, and I looked up to find Liam Archer filling the doorway with three garment bags draped over one arm like a man who had never in his life considered that he might be interrupting something.

"Sophia Bellamy," he said, in the voice he probably used to open curtain speeches, warm and a little too large for the room. "Tell me you have twenty minutes. Tell me you have twenty minutes and a kind heart, because I am about to ask you for both."

I set the coat down on the cutting table and reached for a pin to hold my place. "I have the twenty minutes," I said. "The kind heart depends on what you're about to say."

He laughed like I'd told the funniest joke he'd heard all week, which I suspected he did for everyone, and shouldered the door shut behind him against the cold. He was the kind of handsome that worked on you slowly, not all at once, a face you noticed was good-looking only after you'd already agreed to something. I'd seen him around town before, always moving fast, always trailing some crisis that seemed to resolve itself the moment he smiled at it.

"The Lantern Playhouse," he said, laying the garment bags across my counter like offerings, "is bringing back The Lantern Keeper's Christmas. Fifteen years dark, and this December we're putting it back on that stage for the whole town, same as it ran before everything went sideways." He unzipped the nearest bag to show me a flash of deep green fabric, heavy and old-fashioned. "And I need someone who actually understands cloth, not just a seamstress who can run a hem. I need Sophia Bellamy."

"You've got a vintage wardrobe," I said, already moving closer despite myself, my fingers itching toward the open bag the way they always did around good fabric with history in it. "From the original production?"

"Pulled from storage this week," he said. "Everyone in this town has been telling that wardrobe's story like gospel for fifteen years, how it all got stolen and ruined, how the whole thing was a disaster nobody could fix. Turns out most of it survived just fine, tucked away where nobody thought to look." He said it lightly, like a punch line, and moved on before I could ask who had tucked it away or why. "The budget is, and I want to be honest with you because I respect you too much not to be, a community theater budget. Which is to say it barely exists. But the exposure, Sophia, the exposure for someone with your gift would be worth ten times what I could pay you even if I had it."

I should have said no right there. I knew the shape of a sentence like that one, had heard enough versions of it from brides and theater parents and well-meaning neighbors to recognize the setup, and some old tired part of me even opened its mouth to decline. But the green fabric was sitting there under the shop lights looking like something out of a storybook, and I had grown up backstage at smaller houses than this one, had loved the smell of greasepaint and dust before I'd ever threaded a needle for money, and Liam Archer was watching me with the patient, certain look of a man who already knew how this would end.

"Show me what you've got," I said, and he smiled like I'd handed him the whole production.

The Lantern Playhouse, when we walked over together through the cold, smelled the way old theaters always smell, dust and velvet and something like the inside of a cedar chest, and backstage I met Noah Caldwell, who was crouched over a clipboard with the specific posture of a man doing the work of three people. He had a quiet, careful face, and he shook my hand without quite looking up from his list.

"You're the alterations woman," he said. It wasn't unkind, just tired. "Watch what he asks you for in writing versus what he asks you for out loud. They tend to be different sizes."

Liam laughed it off, already turning toward the racks of costumes along the back wall, and I filed Noah's warning away the way I filed most things, carefully, for later.

It was the lead actor's coat that stopped me, an emerald velveteen with a high collar and a shoulder seam gone soft and frayed from age, exactly the kind of damage I was being paid to find. I turned it over in my hands to check the lining, and the moment my fingers crossed the torn seam, something came through the fabric and into me like static off a doorknob, sharp and cold and unmistakable.

It wasn't a memory exactly, not words or a face. It was fear, somebody's fear, pressed into the thread so hard it had outlasted the person who felt it, a creative panic with a metallic edge underneath it that tasted like betrayal on my tongue. Fifteen years old, at least. Maybe older.

"Sophia?" Liam's voice came from somewhere behind me, bright and easy. "Everything all right with the old boy there?"

I made my face do what it needed to do, composed and professional, and set the coat gently back over my arm. "Just checking the seam," I said. "This one's going to need real attention."

He grinned, already moving on to the next crisis, and I stood there a moment longer with the cold still sitting under my skin, wondering exactly whose terror I was holding, and what had happened to make it stay this long.