“Hello, Ginny,” Lia said as she slipped behind her counter after retrieving her cashbox from Olivia. “How’ve you been?”
Ginny refolded the lacy scarf she’d been looking at and returned it to its place atop several others. “Oh, I’m fine. Lovely scarf,” she said, patting it. “Just not my color.”
Lia refrained from pointing out the other color choices beneath it. Ginny, of course, was not really shopping.
“Quiet in here today,” Ginny said, glancing around. “I guess because of what happened last week, huh?”
“Probably.” Lia might have said more, but Annie Bradburn’s story still filled her head. An actual customer stepped forward and asked about sweaters for five-year-old girls, and Ginny wandered away as Lia pulled up a collection from below her counter for the woman to look through.
Lia was pleased to make that sale—a pretty yellow cardigan with a knitted white duck on the front that fellow Ninth Street Knitter Tracy Kaufmann had made—but a glance around the sparsely populated barn hinted that it might be her final one of the day. Hayley returned from a long chat with baked-goods vendor Carolyn Hanson.
“I’m thinking cupcakes might not be a good choice, I mean if I was going to strike out in a new career. Carolyn clued me in about all the time it takes, and she has daughters who pitch in. I’d just have me, unless . . .” Hayley wiggled her eyebrows at Lia.
“Don’t look at me. I’m a knitter, not a baker!”
“Just kidding. But the more she described her schedule and other things, the less it sounded right for me.”
Thank you, Carolyn.
“So I’m leaning toward baskets. No perishable-type worries if the weather keeps customers away or if there’s any, you know, murders.”
“Not a joking matter,” Lia said, though not really scolding. She knew what Hayley’s feelings were. “Things are really slow today. I’d like to circulate a little myself and talk to a few people. Want to come along, or have you had enough?”
“Oh, I’ve barely started!”
Lia didn’t bother Olivia about keeping an eye on her booth. The craft barn was empty enough for her to do that herself. She set her back in a minute sign on the center of her counter before coming around to join her daughter.
They passed a few unmanned booths, whose sellers had apparently grown as weary as Lia of waiting for nonexistent customers. As they neared Joan Fowler’s area, Lia could hear the artist complaining loudly to the vendor on one side of her.
“This craft fair has been horribly managed from the start! Frankly, I don’t know why I’ve stayed this long.”
A surprising statement, since Lia had seen crowds gathered around Joan’s booth on most weekends, eager to buy her watercolors and drawings. Joan’s sounding board, scenic photographer Mark Simmons, was surely just as aware of her steady success and looked just as puzzled. But the wiry artist’s negativity only grew, the wide sleeves of her vibrantly patterned top flapping as she gestured and groused in a voice that carried well beyond the immediate area.
“Belinda doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing,” she insisted. “She’s a totally disorganized mess!”
Hoping to at least tone down the volume, Lia approached to say, “Actually, I think Belinda’s been running the craft fair very well.”
Mark’s eyes widened. Perhaps one of the most mild mannered of the craft fair people, he quickly moved to the far side of his booth to busy himself with straightening and shifting his photos.
Joan drew a deep breath, but instead of letting out an expected blast, she responded in an ominously low voice, her eyes narrowed to slits. “You’re entitled to your opinion, but you’re sadly mistaken. Look around you. Is this pitiful turnout a sign of a well-run fair?”
“It’s had negative press,” Hayley said, pitching in. “That’s bound to hurt business for a while. You have to give it time to calm down.”
“And whose fault is that bad press?” Joan asked, turning her steely eyes on Hayley. “Belinda Peebles!”
“You can’t blame the murder on her,” Lia said.
“I can’t?”
“No, you can’t,” Lia restated firmly. “If the police haven’t, neither should the rest of us.”
“It was her ex-husband, my dear. If she hadn’t married the scoundrel in the first place and then divorced him, he wouldn’t have had the least interest in buying this barn. He wouldn’t have been anywhere near this barn to be murdered in it. Her stupid decisions have had far-reaching consequences. For all of us!”
Lia was stunned into silence by the woman’s convoluted logic.
Joan took Lia’s silence as victory and smugly turned away.
Hayley drew Lia away from the artist’s booth with a head jerk. “What an awful woman,” she said once they were out of earshot, “which is so weird, ’cause her artwork is really beautiful. It’s like everything good in her got used up in her paintings, isn’t it?”
“She has a point, though.” Ginny Norton’s voice coming from her left startled Lia, who hadn’t noticed her there. “I mean about Belinda’s marriage—or rather, her divorce—bringing on a lot of this trouble. But, you know, Joan and Belinda have always had their problems.”
“They have?” This was the first Lia had heard that, though with two such bullheaded women it wasn’t hard to believe. “What, exactly?”
“You’d best ask Belinda about that,” Ginny said, suddenly prim. “Not really my business.”
Lia, though frustrated, nodded. Better to get information from the horse’s mouth. Ginny wandered off in the direction of Lou Krause’s metal creations, and Lia turned to Hayley.
“Mind taking over my booth for a minute? I’ll see what I can pry out of our very closemouthed manager.”
Lia headed down the side hall to Belinda’s office and knocked once before trying the knob. The door was locked. She knocked again.
“Go away!” Belinda barked.
“It’s me, Belinda. Let me in.”
“I’m busy.”
“You’re always busy. I’ll just take a minute. Let me in.”
Lia waited, then heard a chair scrape and the clomp of footsteps. The lock clicked and the footsteps retreated, leaving Lia to open the door herself.
“Nice welcome,” she said, walking in. Belinda’s face showed signs of fatigue, including dark circles under her eyes, which helped Lia overlook the rudeness. She got straight to the point. “What are the problems between you and Joan Fowler?”