Moonlight in the Morning Read online

  “Oooooh,” Jecca said and felt herself drawn to the cave of colors.

  “I thought you’d like that,” Lucy said. “Please come in and look around.”

  “I don’t mean to bother you.”

  “You aren’t. I hope you don’t mind if I keep working. I’m trying to fill orders for the shop.”

  Jecca went to the closet and ran her hands across the bolts of fabric. They were mostly cotton, the kind used in quilts. But there were also white, ecru, and pastels in the softest fabric she’d ever felt. She looked at Lucy in question.

  “Swiss batiste,” Lucy said. “Livie only uses the finest fabrics. The insertion and entredeux are in those drawers below.”

  Jecca pulled one out and inside were cards of what looked to be the most boring trim she’d ever seen. It seemed to be a tiny ladder bordered on both sides by plain cloth. She looked at Lucy.

  She held up a baby garment. Near the hem, the laddered design had been sewn in, and Lucy had threaded the holes with narrow pale pink ribbon.

  “Very pretty,” Jecca said, but her interest was still with the bolts of colored fabric. “What do you do with all these?”

  “Not much,” Lucy said. She was cutting out what looked to be a tiny bodice. “When I first came here I wanted to quilt, so I bought a machine, then went crazy buying bolts of fabric. But then I got involved with Livie’s shop and . . .” She shrugged.

  “So you didn’t come here to work with Mrs. Wingate?”

  “Oh, no,” Lucy said but didn’t volunteer any more information.

  “Didn’t you know her before you came to Edilean?”

  “No,” Lucy said, and there was caution in her voice.

  Jecca knew when to back off and decided to change the subject. “I was wondering who a man in the photo albums is. He was with Tristan a lot when he was a boy, but then the man just seemed to disappear.”

  Lucy glanced toward the door and lowered her voice. “I don’t know. c#828221 Odd that you’d pick him out. I did too and I asked Livie about him. She said he was just the gardener, but she had a funny look when she said it.”

  It seemed that Lucy was quite willing to talk about Mrs. Wingate, but when it came to herself, she clammed up. “What happened to him? The gardener, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said. “I asked Livie that and she stopped talking. Actually, she looked really sad. Would you hand me that—”

  Jecca knew she wanted the pincushion so she pushed it to her. “I heard something about Mr. Wingate.”

  “Me too,” Lucy said. “Not that Livie ever told me a word about him, but Armstrong’s—that’s the local grocery—is a hotbed of gossip. He was an uptight old man, quite a bit older than Livie. He was constantly aware of what he called his ‘social status’ and demanded that his young wife live up to it.”

  “No pole dancing?”

  Lucy smiled. “He must be turning over in his grave. Good!” When she reached across the counter for her rotary cutter, Jecca picked it up. “Would you like for me to cut that for you?”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m from generations of hardware store owners. They haven’t made a hand tool I can’t use.”

  “How wonderful! If you’ll cut those, I’ll put on the ruffler.”

  “What’s that?” Jecca asked.

  Lucy held up an intricate-looking metal object the size of a bar of soap. “It pleats fabric.”

  “This I have to see,” Jecca said, and Lucy demonstrated. When Jecca was in high school and making her own clothes, to make the pleats, she’d had to mark them, pin them, fold the pins to each other, press, baste, then sew. The little machine attachment did it all as fast as Lucy fed it through. “Magic!”

  Jecca turned to look around the room at all the machines. “So what do all these things actually do?” she asked.

  By the time Lucy had demonstrated the Baby Lock Evolution serger and the way it not only sewed a seam but also trimmed it, it was time for lunch. She and Lucy went downstairs, made sandwiches, and took them upstairs to look at the Sashiko machine.

  Jecca ate and listened to Lucy’s history of Japanese quilting—for which the machine was named—then saw that it had only a bobbin, no upper thread. This meant there was a blank space between stitches that gave them the appearance of being hand sewn.

  “In my world hand is a four-letter word,” Lucy said, and Jecca laughed.

  There was a huge machine on a cabinet along the far wall. It was for embroidery, and Lucy spent nearly an hour showing Jecca software where she could take any photo, drawing, or painting, and reproduce it at any size in colors of thread.

  “Amazing,” Jecca said as she thought of the possibilities of what could be done. She’d studied fiber arts in school, but it had been the basic ceeno each ots with a four-harness loom. As with most art schools, it was believed that a student should learn from the bottom up.

  Jecca said, “If our fiber arts teacher wanted to use a sewing machine, it would be with a treadle. He didn’t like anything electric.”

  “And that brings us to Henry,” Lucy said and she sounded as though she was speaking of a lover.

  She went to the center cabinet to a huge sewing machine with a computer screen built into the arm. It was a Bernina 830. Lucy caressed the top. “When I first bought this guy I had so much trouble with him, I named him Henry. Only a man can cause a woman that much agony.”

  Jecca laughed. “But it looks like you two have come to terms.”

  “The first year was difficult. I hauled all fifty-eight pounds of him back to the shop eight times. I was sure he was defective. He’s just precise. If he’s threaded correctly, has the right foot, the right needle, and his tensions above and below are correct, Henry can perform miracles. Want to see my feet?”

  Jecca didn’t know what she meant until Lucy opened a drawer to show her forty-two different presser feet for the sewing machine. “What in the world do they all do?” she asked.

  “Well,” Lucy began as she pulled out a bolt of muslin and cut off a half a yard, “this one is a tailor tack foot, and besides doing what it was designed for, it makes tiny fringe.” She demonstrated. As Jecca was marveling over the row of fringe, Lucy said, “And these are for pintucking. They—”

  “What is pintucking?”

  While Lucy was showing the use of a double needle and inserting a strand of pearl cotton in the ridge created by the needles, an alarm went off.

  “Time for exercise,” Lucy said.

  “It’s three already?”

  “It is,” Lucy said and gave a wistful look at the pile of fabric on her big cutting table. Because of spending the afternoon with Jecca, she was even farther behind in her work.

  “If today’s workout doesn’t kill me, afterward I’ll help you,” Jecca said.

  “Would you?” Lucy asked. “I’d love the help, but the company would be even more welcome. There are only so many movies a person can watch.”

  So much for Lucy being shy and reclusive, Jecca thought. “Let me change clothes and—”

  “Oh no!” Lucy said. “We have clothes for this session downstairs.”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “We have belly dancing costumes complete with veils and lots of gold coins.”

  Wait until I tell Tris about this tonight, Jecca thought, and followed her down the stairs.

  Eight

  Jecca was outside and waiting for Tristan as soon as the light faded. It was the last night of full darkness, and she feared that it would be their last truly secret meeting.

  She was afraid to walk too fast or she might run into the heavy lawn furniture. Maybe instead of spending today with Lucy she should have gone to the playhouse so she could find it in the dark. She could have waited for Tristan there.

  She heard a sound to her left. “Tristan?” she whispered, but there was no answer. But then she felt his hand on hers. His fingers closed around hers and tugged—and she followed him.

  He di