How to Knit a Murder
Page 25
“Fit as a fiddle. He’s a dear, even when he isn’t.”
Nell laughed.
“I wanted to tell you that sweet Rose Woodley came into the shop the other day. She mentioned how you and the others had taken her under your wing, and she has a job with Stella. She’s a dear girl, Nell, one of my special ones, and I wanted to thank you for being caring. This is such an awful time. And she’s been through so much.”
“I didn’t realize you had a connection to Rose.”
“She came in to the store all the time when she was young. I loved watching her mind open as she sat curled up, reading Ray Bradbury and others. Danny was in when she stopped by and he remembered her, too, much to her surprise. And she was even more surprised when she learned that Cass and Danny were married. There’s something special about that girl.”
“I think you sense those who need to be protected, Harriet.”
“Maybe so. She was so quiet when she was young. So shy. And I’d see her almost cower when some of the louder kids came into the store. But I had no idea how badly she’d been treated. Not then. And I should have.” Harriet’s smile drifted off, and her mind, too, as if she was remembering things that pained her deeply.
For a moment, Nell wondered if she, too, had suffered as a child. And then she remembered why she had wanted to talk with Harriet. “I know others came in here, too. I think you created a safe place for them. Books and cookies.”
Harriet smiled. “Many came in and out. A few were very special.”
Nell suspected Harriet knew the question before she asked it. Another little girl seeking a safe haven or a warm cookie. Or Harriet’s smile.
Harriet nodded and thought back to those sad days, then remembered the things that had made the teenager smile.
“She died too young,” Nell said. “She was ill?”
Harriet looked at Nell for a long time, and then she said with a slight, sad smile, “We’re a small town, Nellie, you know that. But we can keep our secrets.”
She asked Nell to sit. And seemed almost relieved to have shared one of them.
Chapter 32
Nell had the yearbooks spread out on the coffee table.
Ben and Sam had gone out to the Northshore Mall for some sailboat equipment and the house felt empty.
She had made it back to the cheese store and arranged a few rounds on a tray, a bowl of crackers. But her heart and stomach weren’t in it, and she suspected the tray would go untouched.
Cass and Birdie walked in, their moods matching Nell’s. “If only it were Thursday and we were sitting down with food and yarn and a fire,” Cass said.
Izzy showed up a few minutes later and headed for the books, but before she could begin, Nell took out the chart and the article, and then she shared Harriet Brandley’s sad story.
They were quiet for a while, moving around the island carrying their own thoughts.
Izzy went back to the yearbook, finding it difficult to think about.
There was no happy ending here.
The middle-school yearbook didn’t tell them much more than what they now knew. The three students who competed in the Math Olympiad, the one who lost. The one who survived. And the one who didn’t.
Cass picked up a book they hadn’t looked at before and frowned. “I wonder why Stella has this one. She had already graduated.” She checked the year again and then opened it up, checking the name in front. It was written in the familiar scrawl that teenager girls adopt. “This isn’t Stella’s, that’s why. Stella said Gus dumped these in her office quickly and had accidentally included some of his own things.” She looked at the name in the book again, and passed it around.
It was Gus’s daughter’s book, her junior year. The year Hallie McGlucken died.
Cass found Hallie’s photo in the junior-class section and looked at it for a long time. When she finally passed it along, she reached for a tissue, and then asked if there were more books that weren’t Stella’s.
Nell had already found one. It was the year Rosie was a freshman, and Hallie a year ahead.
And Spencer Paxton, a senior.
Nell turned to the back of the book, where she found more comments—not too many, but enough to know that Hallie McGlucken had a few friends who loved her and who hated the taunting and pain she had suffered from a boy who seemed to have everything. And every single one mentioned the initials SP along with a pencil sketch of a devil, and nonsensical things about him that they thought would make her laugh and help her survive.
They were huddled around Nell now, reading along with her.
Cass suggested going to the class page, where they all hoped to see a smiling Hallie. But she wasn’t smiling. The photo was circled with a permanent marker, a giant heart with an arrow leading to the bottom of the page.
“I will love you forever, Sis. And I will see you soon.”
Cass held the book up to her face and smelled the ink. “This is new,” she said. She flipped to the senior page.
Spencer’s picture was there. Only it wasn’t. The same marker had effectively erased his face from the page.
“The attempted robbery,” Nell said softly. “He needed to get these books back.”
But the bigger concern was the note and heart around Hallie McGlucken’s class photo.
* * *
Nell called the police, while Birdie called Gus, wondering how she could reach Robbie. Nothing important, she just wanted to chat with him. Gus was busy, and quickly rattled off a cell phone number, but said he hadn’t seen Robbie in a week.
Detective Tommy Porter didn’t answer Nell’s call, but he returned her voice message almost immediately. She quickly relayed the information they’d gathered. It fit into their own investigation, he said, but expanded it, filling in some important holes, for which he was grateful. Yearbooks hadn’t factored in.
Then Nell read him the note that they thought Robbie had written, and he shared her concern. And her urgency.
Sea Harbor was small. It should be easy to find someone in a leather jacket on a motorcycle. They knew the police would have better methods, but none of them could sit still, so they piled into Nell’s car and drove down Harbor Road. But it had been days since anyone had seen Robbie McGlucken tearing up the road.
About to give up, Cass suggested one more place they should try. “It’s where I would go,” she said. The cemetery.
Birdie remembered where the McGlucken plot was, and that’s where Hallie would have been buried. A plot in St. Mary’s cemetery, close to the Favazza plot, near an old oak tree at the top of a hill. A beautiful spot that overlooked the ocean.
They knew it was a long shot, but worth the short drive to the edge of town.
No one knew Robbie McGlucken very well, but they knew one thing. He loved his sister Hallie more than life itself—and he hated what had been done to her.
And now they were worried about what he might do to himself.
Nell had left a message for Ben, filling him in and leaving Izzy’s diagram on the kitchen island. Finally completed.
And Izzy had texted both Sam and Ben from the car to tell them where they were.
They drove through the cemetery entrance, then up a small hill to the office. Nell pulled into the small parking lot beside the stone building while Birdie pointed farther up the hill to a stand of pine trees. “If memory serves me, it’s right near those trees.”
She got out of the car and turned toward the office door. “I wonder if Henry Staab is still around. He was the caretaker out here for a hundred years. Absolutely devoted to the families.”
“And to you, if I remember correctly,” Nell said.
They laughed, and Birdie explained to the others that “a thousand years ago” Henry Staab had proposed to her. Out of the blue. And while she was engaged to her Sonny.
They all looked toward the office, liking the diversion and thought of a young Birdie being chased by not one, but two men.
As if lured outside by their memories, the door op
ened and a small, gnome-like man walked out, more hunched over than the last time Birdie had seen him. Tiny wisps of white hair, scattered willy-nilly across a nearly bald head, flew in the breeze. He hobbled over to them, supporting himself on a gnarled cane that matched the shape of his body.
“I knew you’d come back to me,” he said to Birdie, grinning.
“Henry, you’re still here,” Birdie said, allowing his thin, bent arms to wrap around her in an unusually vigorous hug.
“Where else would I be?”
“Well, out there somewhere.” Birdie waved toward the winding rows of well-tended graves.
Henry gave one short laugh, and then pulled nonexistent eyebrows together, squinting at her. “You’re looking for the boy,” he said, his gravelly voice barely audible. “He knew you’d come.”
It was then they noticed a motorcycle parked around the side of the stone building.
“Is this where he’s been staying?” Birdie asked.
“He’s come up here every day of his life since the day we put his poor sister in the ground. Every day. When he and the dad had a fracas, I told him, sure, he might as well blow up one of those newfangled beds and move in. Stay close to her.” He nodded toward the pine trees. “So he did.”
They walked together toward the top of the hill with Birdie, and old Henry leaning on his cane, leading the way. A soft wind tugged deep red and orange leaves from tree branches, scattering them like offerings over the graves and granite head stones.
At the top of the hill, Henry nodded to the right. They saw the leather jacket first, the serpent on the back protecting a hunched-over Robbie McGlucken. He sat cross-legged on the ground, leaning forward, absently pulling strands of grass from the ground, and speaking softly. Without turning around, he held up one arm to silence the footsteps behind him.
Then, for minutes that seemed like hours, he continued to talk to his sister, soft affectionate words, an occasional laugh, as if Hallie had said something in response.
In the distance, Nell heard another car, then glanced at her phone and a message from Ben. Jerry Thompson was waiting at the stone house. He and Gus were there, too.
Finally Robbie pushed himself off the ground and turned toward them, acknowledging Henry first, and then the others.
“He was a bad man,” was all Robbie said, and he began walking slowly down the hill to the cemetery office.
* * *
“It was almost as if Robbie had rehearsed his confession,” Nell said. They were gathered around the kitchen island, a pan of Harry Garozzo’s lasagna heating in the oven.
Robbie had held nothing back, even after the police chief suggested they wait until they got back to the station to talk. It was as if once he got started, he couldn’t stop. He just kept talking.
There was little in what he said that the women hadn’t imagined or hadn’t known for a fact. He’d found his sister’s old yearbooks in the storage room and read the notes from Hallie’s friends, and he put it all together.
The same yearbooks his father had mistakenly dumped off in the real estate office.
Finally, with the yearbook messages ringing in his head, Robbie had confronted his father, who for all these years had protected Robbie from how Hallie had died. There was no heart condition—unless you counted a broken heart. Robbie had demanded to know everything, and Gus explained how she’d waited until he was safe in school—then taken a rope and hung herself in the garage.
Birdie pulled back thoughts of those days. She remembered bits and pieces, but mostly she remembered how the town had wrapped Gus close, how his friends Mario and Harry Garozzo and even Father Northcutt had managed to celebrate Hallie’s life—and how they had buried the painful secret of her death along with her.
“Did Gus know why she did it, I wonder?” Izzy said.
“I don’t think so. Hallie left a note that said she loved them. And she was sorry. That was all,” Ben said. He checked the oven and pulled out the pan.
“I know it was the yearbook note that got him thinking. But I wonder . . .”
“What?” Nell asked.
“I wonder if Robbie didn’t have some idea in the back of his head somewhere that Hallie had taken her own life. And maybe he blamed himself somehow?”
But Robbie hadn’t touched on such personal things.
“Hopefully a good prison psychiatrist will be able to help him sort it out,” Danny said.
“I don’t think it was premeditated,” Ben said. “Spencer had told Robbie where he was going that night. I think Robbie went over to the Bianchi house for answers.”
Izzy agreed. “Imagine how tangled his thoughts must have been. He read the yearbooks and all the references to someone with the initials SP, along with Hallie’s friends’ comments about what she’d been through.”
“It’s exactly what Patricia said—reporting bullying is disastrous,” Cass said. “So Hallie had kept it silent, and even her friends were afraid to step up.”
“And not reporting it can be deadly,” Birdie said.
“I can’t imagine the thoughts that ran through Robbie’s head,” Nell said. “Questions and confusion—and all that he really wanted was to find out he was wrong, that this man he trusted would tell him it had never happened. None of it.”
“And he had perfect access to the Bianchi house,” Birdie said. “Mario was so proud of their secret entry. They all were.”
Sam laughed. “I can’t believe Anthony’s wife didn’t know about it. Those four guys were something else.”
“Gus built the secret staircase,” Ben said. “But Robbie had helped fix the door a couple times. Getting up to the third floor was no problem. That was one of the things that had the police stumped. Stella had been meticulous about who had the keys. But someone had obviously made their way up.”
“And it was also one of the reasons the police couldn’t let go of Rose,” Ben said. “She had access, not to mention that she had been up there that night.”
Robbie had told them at the cemetery how, when he got to the top of the stairs that night, he heard voices. So he waited, hidden from sight. And he listened as Rosie calmly laid out her story about how Spencer Paxton had nearly destroyed her.
And that’s when he knew. When he heard Rose bring up Math Olympiad, something that had brought so much joy to his sister that he could still remember it, even though he was just a kid. He remembered her smile, her excitement at winning. How he’d sat with his dad and they’d clapped and clapped.
As soon as Rose left, Robbie confronted Spencer. It took one harsh laugh from Spencer—and his proud, detailed description of how cleverly he’d gotten even with the two stupid ugly girls—to send Robbie over the edge. He grabbed one of Rosie’s tools and once he started, he couldn’t stop.
Not until Spencer Paxton was dead.
“It’s sad. The whole thing is so terribly, horribly sad,” Stella said, her eyes filling up.
They all agreed. There was no happy ending. Only sadness. Nell looked across the island at Rose, sitting on a stool next to Stella, her lasagna untouched.
Rose was the saddest of all.
She’d wanted to walk in that ocean and not come back. But she had come back.
Hallie McGlucken hadn’t been able to walk herself back.
And it filled Rose Woodley with enormous sorrow.
Chapter 33
Ham and Jane Brewster were wandering through the crowd, welcoming friends and neighbors and perfect strangers to the first ever Canary Cove Fiber Arts Show opening.
Jane looked lovely, her colorful flowing caftan a Kandinsky painting come to life, her graying hair pulled back in a loose bun. Ham stood next to her, his white beard trimmed for the event, hundreds of wrinkles spreading out from his great blue eyes, welcoming folks with handshakes and hugs.
The crowd moved among Izzy’s sea urchins floating down from the ceiling, Bree’s enchanting cavern, and dozens of pieces of fiber art hanging from branches and wires and framed on the walls.
It was a happy mood. The art colony was aglow.
And the Brewsters were loving it.
“It’s a fabulous party,” Beatrice Scaglia said, doing a slight dance step as she came in the door. Ben laughed and offered her an arm to keep her balance.
“We did it,” Izzy said, coming up and giving Jane a hug. “Everyone is here. It’s amazing.” Bree was behind her, a glass of champagne in one hand and Josh Babson close to the other.
Even Josh had spiffed up for the show. A new pair of jeans and an emerald-green shirt that Bree had found for him were garnering him attention he was trying hard to ignore.
“It’s not my thing,” he whispered to Nell.
Nell smiled and stood tall, kissing him on the cheek. For a minute, he was startled. Something else that wasn’t his thing. Then he allowed a slow smile.
“Fall is here,” Nell said. “ ‘A second spring when every leaf is a flower.’”
“Let us rejoice in it,” Josh responded solemnly. And then laughed along with her.
It was a smile and laugh Josh didn’t often let out.
Perhaps they’ll come more readily now, Nell thought.
Stella and Rose were manning a table filled with cheeses, crackers, creamy dips, and baskets of fried clams. “I’m a kitchen kind of person,” Rose said to Nell with a grin. “I like being behind the scenes.”
Stella laughed. “It’s all a façade, Nell. Rosie likes crowd watching. Me too.” Then she pointed to Pete’s band, where a microphone was being tapped to quiet the crowd.
The crowd hushed, and Jane Brewster walked up, waving and blowing kisses. She thanked everyone for coming, for their huge contributions to the artists’ foundation, and for their love of the arts.
“And I’ve one more person to whom we need to give thanks. She wouldn’t come up here with me, I even had trouble getting her to approve this announcement. But this is the perfect time, the perfect night to get you all to celebrate with me. So raise those champagne glasses high.”