Crafting for Sinners

Chapter 1

Stab.

Strangle.

Pull out the guts.

Ruth repeated this refrain in her head as she worked her stitches across the row. Her knuckles ached from the repetitive motion, but she had a deadline.

Her phone buzzed on the couch next to her.

“It better not be another message from Charlie,” she muttered under her breath. He’d been sending her text messages all week, saying he was sorry about how things went down, that he had a daughter now and it made him re-evaluate. That he wanted to make things right—whatever that meant.

He’d been her fiancé, and they’d broken up just a few months before their would-be vows, but that was years ago—and felt like a lifetime ago. She’d ignored every single one of the fifteen messages he’d sent so far.

Would it be possible to get the blanket tomorrow? I can pay extra.

Shit. Not Charlie—her client. Holding the stitches in place on the needles, Ruth lifted the partially finished blanket aloft. It wasn’t even at the halfway point. Not only did the commissioner want it by tomorrow, but just last week she’d asked if it would be possible to make the blanket larger. The woman had asked for a baby blanket, but then decided she wanted something the kid could grow into. Of course she’d pay extra, she’d said. Ruth had almost been finished with the thing. It took her nearly an hour to unravel the work she’d already knit, rewind the skeins, and cast on with three times the number of stitches.

She could maybe finish by tomorrow if she knitted literally every second up to the moment it would be picked up, assuming she had enough yarn. But she had to try. She really needed the money.

The “moving fund” mocked her from the mantel: an oversized ceramic jar with only a few crinkled bills and pennies in its belly. On the outside, thorny, fruit-bearing vines had been hand-painted. Inscribed on the lid were foreign characters of some unknown language. Ruth and her girlfriend Abigail had started the fund soon after Abigail’s mom passed, both hoping to move to a more progressive area, one where they didn’t have to pretend to be roommates or keep the curtains closed if they wanted to dance in the kitchen or kiss each other goodbye. Instead, they were stuck in a town of twelve thousand that boasted the largest Christian congregation in the entire state, some flashy new sect calling themselves New Creationists.

The jar became a chicken-and-egg situation. It would be easier to fill it if they could move away and get higher-paying jobs in a place with more opportunities—but they needed the jar to be full in order to move away and get those jobs. So they were stuck in Kill Devil, taking temp gigs, odd jobs, and the occasional crafting commission, the internet too slow to do anything remote. And Ruth constantly had to pull painful paper guts from the jar to pay for insulin or syringes or test strips.

“How’s the blanket coming?” Abigail asked, sitting on the couch next to Ruth.

“I’m making a dent, I guess,” Ruth replied. She leaned against Abigail, lifting her face for a kiss.

But Abigail didn’t lean back. Instead, her eyes flitted across the room, lasering in on every window. A habit she’d inherited from her mother. Ruth followed her gaze as Abigail leapt from the couch. One set of curtains was not fully closed, a sliver of midmorning light poking in, a glimpse of a single tree trunk from the untamed land that lined their yard in view. Abigail pinched them shut.

Ruth rolled her eyes. “Like mother, like daughter.”

Abigail’s mom, Judy, had always been deeply paranoid—the insane column of locks that still lined the inside of their front door was a testament to that. Now Ruth had begun to notice some similar inherited qualities in Abigail.

“One of us has to be cautious,” Abigail said. “There’s always that weird birder hanging out by the woods. What if he sees us kissing through the window? What if your old manager from New Creations finds out where you live? Didn’t they fire you over it?”

“He’s known for ages and hasn’t done anything,” Ruth said. She’d been let go nearly three years ago. “Why would they start now?”