Knitting Bones by Monica Ferris Page B

chicken patterns, if you counted the guinea hen as one; and another painted canvas of a Picassostyle hen—Sharon had the counted cross-stitch pattern of Picasso’s rooster at home.
    “There, that should keep me for a while!” she enthused at the checkout desk.
    Godwin happily added up the charges and was happy all over again when Sharon did not gasp at the total cost or groan or decide to change her mind about some of the patterns. But as he was bagging up her purchases, she said in a much more sober voice, “Goddy, you were at the EGA convention banquet, weren’t you?”
    He paused to look at her. “Yes, I was. I got Betsy’s ticket because she was in the hospital. Why, were you there, too?”
    “Yes. I sat at a table with my mother and four other relatives—it was a combination stitch-in and family reunion at my house all that week. But we heard about the Heart Coalition man running off with the check for the money we raised, and I wondered if Betsy is involved in the investigation.”
    “She wants to be, but her broken leg is keeping her at home for now.” Godwin leaned over the big, old desk that Crewel World used as a checkout counter and murmured, “But I’m helping. I’m talking to people who know something about it and bringing the information to her.”
    “Really?” Sharon breathed, eyes widening. “I’m glad to hear that, because I think my mother has something important to tell you.”

Ten
    T ONY was going desultorily through his mail. It had piled up a bit—he wasn’t ever very interested in mail, unless it had a check in it, his or someone else’s that he could glom onto, or unless there was a big sale on at Macy’s, which used to be Marshall Fields, which used to be Dayton’s. Odd how even the big companies merged and split nowadays. He could remember his grandmother’s intense loyalty to Dayton’s. Today you couldn’t be loyal for long to any department store.
    He quickly put aside a notice from the management company that ran his apartment building. He’d stopped paying rent a couple of months ago in anticipation of fleeing the country, but now he’d have to do something about getting caught up. That wouldn’t happen until he closed that phony Heart Fund account, and getting out and around was too painful right now. His eye was caught by an envelope with a return address of the Minneapolis Impound Lot.
    Oh, hell, his car . Which he’d been driving when he’d had the accident. Now he remembered how, once he’d been sitting up and paying attention in the hospital, he wondered what had happened to his car. And where it had gotten to. “Call the police,” his nurse had advised him. “They’ll know.”
    But Tony, for several good reasons, didn’t like talking to the police. Besides, if the accident was so serious they’d had to cut him out of his car, then probably his car was not just toast, it was burnt toast, and he was no longer interested in it.
    But maybe not.
    He opened the envelope hopefully—and gave a sincere groan of despair. His car had been towed, the form letter inside informed him, and they were charging him eighteen dollars a day to keep it until he came to claim it. And it wasn’t just the storage fee he owed them, there was also their “heavy-duty tow” charge of a hundred seventy-five, and their ninety-dollar “winch time” money.
    “Huh!” Tony muttered, tossing the form letter on the coffee table. They could go whistle for their money.
    But the notion of rent and now these car charges made him uneasily aware of the thin state of his finances. He’d called the airline where he’d bought his ticket and spun the sad story of his car accident, but had they forgiven him the price of his ticket? Of course not; hadn’t he been informed that the special bargain price he’d bought it for was absolutely not refundable?
    And the twenty-four grand? That turned out to be a hatful of smoke. He wished he could remember what went wrong! He clenched his good