Stitch Me Deadly by Amanda Lee

Author:Amanda Lee [Lee, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780451232519
Publisher: Signet
Published: 2010-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

After lunch, Mom minded the store while I went into the office and worked on the sampler history. I’d learned that the first known dated embroidery sampler was made in 1598 by a woman named Jane Bostocke. Jane had made the sampler to commemorate the birth of Alice Lee, presumed to be her daughter or niece. Today that sampler is part of a collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I included information about Jane’s sampler and added the fact that samplers predated pattern books and traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East from person to person. The samplers were used to preserve information, as well as to teach the various stitches.

I then took out the information Cary had given me on Louisa and her great-grandmother. Louisa’s great-grandmother had enjoyed a colorful—albeit hard—life. She’d come to Oregon as part of the Great Migration of 1843. She was a fifteen-year-old bride. She and her husband had settled in the Willamette Valley, and he’d obtained work as a blacksmith.

Louisa came of age on the Oregon coast in the 1930s. She’d volunteered at the orphanage that would later become her home when she was seventeen. After that, she went to Seattle to study. She came back a couple years later, married Frank, and they later bought the orphanage and turned it into their private residence.

Fairly pleased with my narrative, I put a decorative floral border around the page and printed it out. I then took the piece to Mom to get an objective opinion. She was sitting at the counter, thumbing through her script and making notes, while Angus dozed in his bed at her feet.

“Would you read this and tell me what you think?” I asked.

“I’ll be happy to.” She perused the page and then looked up at me. “Sounds great. It does make me wonder what her great-grandma’s original verse was.”

“Me, too. And I wonder why Louisa tore it out.”

“I guess we’ll never know . . . unless someone saw the piece before Louisa took the seam ripper to it.”

I nodded at her script. “How’s that coming?”

“It’s coming along fabulously,” she said, grinning broadly. “It’s a period piece set in midcentury Louisiana, and as I read through the script I can almost feel the lush fabrics I’ll be working with. It’s going to be so much fun. I’ve already spoken with Rob, the director, and we share the same vision on it . . . which makes things a lot easier when I’m planning out my costumes, jewelry, accessories, shoes. . . .”

I smiled. “It’s nice to see you like this. I’ve missed seeing you get all excited over a new project and then go through your various stages of loving it, then hating it, then loving it, then—”

She tapped me on the arm with her pen. “Then come home. We can replicate this charming shop, you can have your own house. . . . You can get a fresh start away from memories of Timothy Enright and Louisa Ralston .

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