Laine and Sybil were both tall, like their rangy father, and Penny seemed all the smaller now (and suddenly younger, to her mother), dwarfed by the three much larger beings now sharing the entry with her. Both Laine and Sybil were devotees of vintage clothing, and had introduced Penny to the joys of thrift-shop treasure-hunting. Laine assembled her finds to create an effect of urban sophistication, while Sybil’s look veered toward bohemian chic.
Pamela could catch up with her daughter over dinner, she knew, so she smiled and waved as Penny and her friends headed for the stairs and Penny’s room beyond. Then she set Ginger back down and wheeled Penny’s suitcase through the kitchen and down the hall into the laundry room.
As she was passing back through the kitchen she heard feet on the stairs, and Penny greeted her when she reached the entry. Penny was holding the lilac tunic, her arms stretched out before her and a hand grasping each of the tunic’s shoulders.
“It’s just beautiful, Mom,” Penny said, her pretty lips parting in a wide smile.
“Merry Christmas.” Pamela smiled back. “I’m anxious to see it on you.”
“I’ll wear it when we go to Bettina and Wilfred’s on Sunday.” Penny turned and started for the stairs, but then swiveled back around to add, “Laine and Sybil think it’s amazing.”
When Penny was gone, Pamela hesitated in the entry. It was too early to start dinner, and no new assignments from Fiber Craft had appeared in her inbox since she returned the edited article on Hmong story cloths. What useful thing could she do?
After a bit more thought, she settled down on the sofa, near where her knitting bag reposed on the carpet. Catrina approached curiously, as if puzzled at this variation in her mistress’s routine. With rare exceptions, Pamela was normally on her feet, cooking or doing household chores, or she was sitting at the kitchen table or at her desk in her office upstairs. The sofa was for relaxing after dinner. But when Pamela reached into her knitting bag and extracted the beginnings of the infant cap she had begun under Nell’s tutelage the previous Tuesday, Catrina scaled the heights of the sofa with a graceful bound and sprawled out along Pamela’s thigh.
* * *
An hour later Pamela was standing at her kitchen counter chopping an onion. Two carrots and two stalks of celery waited their turn nearby, and the free-range chicken from the Co-Op had already been cut up into serving pieces. She was so absorbed in her task, and the prospect of the crisp onion dice with their pungent odor soon transforming to pliant sweetness as they sautéed, that she was startled when an equally startled voice spoke up behind her.
“Mo-om! You’re not cooking!” Pamela turned to see Penny, looking contrite, with Laine and Sybil hovering behind her, their faces puckered with distress as well.
“I thought I might.” Pamela turned from the onions. “It’s your first night home, and you always loved stewed chicken with parsley dumplings.”
“You didn’t have to, Mom.” Contrition twisted Penny’s lips. “We were just going to get pizza.”
“We came out to spend the weekend with our dad,” Sybil explained, and Laine added, “but he has a date tonight.”
Pamela wished she hadn’t turned, and was still facing the counter and gazing at the small pile of chopped onions. “Oh,” she said, focusing instead on one particular floor tile. “So you’re sort of at loose ends.”
Though she didn’t notice their nod because her head was still bent toward the floor, she looked up and made her suggestion anyway. “Let’s all eat here then. There will be plenty of chicken.”
Chapter 22
So many elements of the scene were familiar. In the dining room, a long table was piled with yarn in every color and weight. In the kitchen, cluttered counters held a lifetime’s worth of pots, pans, and cooking utensils. In the living room, tables offered china, crystal, knick-knacks, and travel souvenirs to buyers eagerly elbowing each other out of the way. There was even an attractive young woman in attendance, wearing a striking, obviously hand-knit, sweater.
But the young woman wasn’t Haven. The young woman was Penny. And she was knitting, something like a long—very long—sack. Its festive patchwork of colors suggested that it was being fashioned from the yarn leftovers piled on the table.
Somehow, though in a part of her mind Pamela knew the young woman was Penny, she approached the young woman as if she were a stranger and mustered her social smile.
“That’s an interesting project,” she said in a pleasant I’d-like-to-make-your-acquaintance sort of voice.
“She just died. I’ve been knitting non-stop,” the young woman replied, not lifting her eyes from her busily clicking needles. Pamela felt her head jerk back slightly and she blinked.
Condolences were certainly in order. As Pamela was searching for the appropriate words, the young woman spoke again. “I keep remembering things about her,” she said mournfully. “Just silly little things—like how she always used to pick up coins if she was walking and found one on the sidewalk.”
Someone else had joined them, as if from nowhere. Pamela felt a sense of foreboding, though the newcomer—an elderly woman wearing a belt with a zippered pouch—seemed kind.
“Her mother died yesterday,” the woman whispered to Pamela. “Penny is knitting her shroud.”
* * *
Pamela raised a hand to push back whatever was tickling her cheek. It was soft, like a drift of yarn, but the shroud couldn’t be enfolding her so soon. Penny was still working on it, and from the looks of the project, several inches of knitting remained if it was to accommodate Pamela’s five-foot eight-inch body.
She opened her eyes and another familiar sight greeted her, a welcome sight: her own bedroom ceiling. And looming in the foreground was a furry, heart-shaped face, lustrous black with glowing amber eyes. Catrina was stroking Pamela’s cheek with one of her paws. The dream, for that was what it had been, evaporated, the last image to vanish being a glimpse of the festive shroud.
The white eyelet curtains at Pamela’s bedroom windows were bright with spring morning sun. She rolled onto her side to consult the clock on her bedside table. It was after nine o’clock! No wonder Catrina had gotten impatient enough to climb up from her comfy spot cuddled along Pamela’s thigh and notify her mistress that the time to be lazing in bed was long past.
* * *
Laughter rippled up the stairs as Pamela, slippers on her feet and a fleecy robe over her pajamas, stepped out into the hall. Then from downstairs she heard a voice, Penny’s voice. Was Penny talking to herself? Or to Ginger?
Catrina had bounded ahead and now stood on the landing. She glanced back at Pamela and then continued on her way. Downstairs, a cheery voice that wasn’t Penny’s chimed in. Pamela hurried after Catrina, negotiating the stairs and darting through the entry to reach the kitchen door.
Bettina looked over from her seat at the kitchen table. “I’m not here to see you,” she said, winking at Pamela. “I came by to catch up with your fashionable daughter.”
At the moment Penny didn’t look like the fashionista she was gradually becoming under the influence of Bettina, Laine, and Sybil. She was still in her robe and pajamas, and her hair showed a more recent acquaintance with a pillow than with a comb.
Bettina, on the other hand, was already dressed for the day, in an ensemble the same tender green as the leaves just unfolding from their tight buds on the trees outside. A double-breasted jacket with a wide notched collar topped sharply tailored pants. The linen fabric suggested that the forecast called for warm weather.
Catrina scurried across the tile floor to the corner where the cats were accustomed to receive their meals and applied herself to the large scoop of cat food already set out in the food bowl. Penny had evidently taken care of that early-morning chore, and Ginger had already eaten and gone on her way. The half-finished cups of coffee before Penny and Bettina, and the fragments of toast, testified that the human breakfast had been managed as well.
Penny jumped up from the table and in a moment
had slipped two more slices of whole-grain bread into the toaster.
“I can do my toast,” Pamela said, joining Penny at the counter. “And I’ll get my own coffee. Go ahead and sit back down.”
“Have some of the jam,” Penny said before returning to her chair. “It’s that jam Wilfred and Bettina brought us from Vermont—wild blackberry. Bettina found it in the cupboard. You hadn’t even opened it.”
There was no need to wonder how two chairs would accommodate three people because, with a last long swallow of coffee, Bettina stood up. “I’m off to cover the Easter egg roll at the county park,” she announced, dusting a few toast crumbs from the front of her jacket. With a toss of her head that set her Faberge egg earrings swaying, she gave Pamela another wink. “See you at about four-thirty?” she whispered.
Pamela saw Bettina to the door and returned to the kitchen to find Penny regarding her with a mixture of suspicion and concern. Her usually smooth forehead was furrowed and her lips shaped a grim half-smile.
“I heard that,” she said, “and I saw the wink. And Bettina told me about Roland.”
“Yes.” Pamela strove to adopt a conversational tone. “It’s been quite hard for Roland and Melanie, but I’m sure the police will untangle things and figure out who’s really guilty.”
“You and Bettina aren’t up to some kind of secret sleuthing?” Penny’s expression hadn’t changed.
“Not at all,” Pamela said gaily, crossing her fingers behind her back. “Not at all.”
“What’s happening at four-thirty then?” Penny crossed her arms over her chest and the furrows in her forehead deepened. Pamela had not considered herself a fearsome authority figure as a mother, but she reflected that Penny must be modeling this inquisition on some episode remembered from childhood.
“A tag sale,” she answered. “Just up the hill. It’s the last day, so there are bound to be bargains—especially right at the end.”
Pamela wasn’t sure if Penny was satisfied but, after a last swallow of coffee, Penny announced that she was heading upstairs to get dressed for a mall outing with her friend Lorie Hopkins.
“Will you be seeing Aaron while you’re here?” Pamela didn’t like to pry into her daughter’s romantic life, but when Penny was home at Christmas she’d seemed quite smitten with an attractive Wendelstaff College student she’d met.
“He’s cooking dinner for me at his house tonight,” Penny said, trying unsuccessfully to hide a smile.
After Penny was gone, Pamela transferred the carafe with the remaining coffee to the stove to reheat. The extra toast Penny had launched had long since popped up and grown cold, but Pamela buttered a piece anyway. She considered adding a layer of wild blackberry jam, but breakfast habits were breakfast habits, and Pamela had always eaten her toast with butter alone.
She left the jar of jam in a prominent spot on the counter, however, to encourage Penny to help herself to Wilfred and Bettina’s gift while she was home. The Register, no doubt retrieved by Bettina, waited on the table, still in its plastic sleeve, and soon Pamela was crunching toast and sipping coffee as she leafed through its pages.
* * *
An hour later, Pamela was standing at the kitchen counter again, showered, dressed, and with email checked, hard at work. She had set her oven to 325 degrees and greased and floured two round cake pans. Her favorite mixing bowl, heavy caramel-colored pottery with three white stripes circling the rim, stood ready, along with measuring cups and spoons and her old, slightly rusty, flour sifter.
The first order of business, however, was the lemon. It reposed on the counter before her, recalling a small oval sun in its yellow brightness. Lemon-yogurt cake called for half a lemon’s worth of grated rind and juice, so Pamela cut the lemon in half. Industrious as she was, she had no patience for grating that much lemon rind. She used a potato peeler to shave fragrant strips of the bright rind from the lemon half, strips so thin they were nearly translucent and bore none of the bitter white part that lurked beneath.
She set the peeled lemon half, no longer gleaming yellow, aside to yield up its juice later. The next step was to lay the strips out on a cutting board and mince them with a chef’s knife, going over them again and again and again, until they resembled a small pile of very fine sand, bright yellow and glazed with lemony oil.
Now the sifter and the caramel-colored bowl came into play. Pamela often made a loaf-shaped version of lemon-yogurt cake, like a quick bread. She had served it to the knitters at meetings of Knit and Nibble, and she and Bettina had had many morning or afternoon chats over coffee and slices of lemon-yogurt cake. The creation she envisioned for the Frasers’ Easter dinner, however, would be worthy of a festive holiday meal. She planned to bake the cake in two round cake tins and then complement its deliciousness with cream cheese icing.
For the cake, she sifted flour, salt, baking soda, and baking powder into the bowl and stirred in sugar, using a large wooden spoon. She cracked two eggs into a smaller bowl, beat them lightly with a whisk, added a cup and a third of plain yogurt, and whisked the yogurt with the eggs until the result was smooth, creamy, and pale yellow. She used her thrift-store juicer, a shallow glass round with a ribbed dome rising from the center, to juice the peeled half-lemon, and whisked the juice into the egg-yogurt mixture, along with the minced rind.
Melted butter, seven tablespoons’ worth, was the last ingredient for the cake. Pamela took a stick of butter from the refrigerator, sliced at the mark on the wrapper that indicated she was removing one tablespoon from the stick, unwrapped the larger portion, and set it to melt in a small saucepan with her stove’s simmer burner turned to the very lowest flame.
While the butter melted, she added the moist ingredients to the dry ingredients in the large caramel-colored bowl and stirred the batter smooth with the large wooden spoon. Finally, she mixed in the melted butter, divided the batter between the greased and floured cake pans, and slid them into the oven. She set the timer for 35 minutes.
* * *
Bettina rang Pamela’s doorbell at four-thirty sharp. Pamela was sitting in the chair in her entry, wearing her tan twill jacket and holding her car keys. Penny had returned from the mall, but she had her date with Aaron that evening, so Pamela didn’t need to worry about how long the adventure she and Bettina planned would take.
When she heard the bell, she jumped up to greet Bettina and they headed for Pamela’s car. As Pamela steered up Orchard Street, she said, “More of those knitted things have appeared on some of the trees above Arborville Avenue. I noticed them yesterday when I walked to the Co-Op and I forgot to say anything this morning.”
Bettina leaned forward in her seat and stared through the windshield. “Tiny though,” she commented. “Like the trees are just wearing little bras.”
“Wide enough to cover red X’s though.” Pamela braked for the stop sign at the corner and waited until Arborville Avenue was clear to cross. Once through the intersection, she drove slowly along the few blocks before the turn for Cassie’s street, passing several trees that sported the colorful knitted bands. “Whoever’s doing this seems really in a hurry now.”
A few cars at the curb directly in front of Cassie’s house indicated that even in its waning hours the sale still had patrons, and the sign that had announced the sale the previous week was in place on the door: “TAG SALE TODAY. COME IN.” But Pamela drove past the house, nearly to the end of the block. She made a U-turn and parked facing Cassie’s house, so she and Bettina could watch for Haven to come out.
“So,” Pamela said, as they headed back toward Cassie’s house, “we’re going to make sure Haven is here, and we’re going to look around a bit to make it seem we just came for last-minute bargains. Then we’re going to go back to the car and wait for Haven to leave. If we can figure out where she actually lives and/or what she actually does, maybe we can make some progress with the question of whether or not she has an alibi for the night Diefenbach was killed.”
“What about Cassie’s death?�
�� Bettina squeezed the words out between pants. Anticipation was making Pamela’s normally long strides even longer, and Bettina was struggling to keep up.
Without slowing, Pamela answered. “If Haven has an alibi for the night Diefenbach was killed, that probably means she isn’t the person who poisoned Cassie.”
* * *
As she and Bettina stepped inside the house, Pamela felt a shiver as details of her dream, in which she had so accurately recalled the house’s layout, came back to her. To the left was the living room, with tables now holding only odds and ends that hadn’t succeeded in catching anyone’s eye.
Where was Marjorie? she wondered. The woman had been such an enthusiastic hostess on the busy sale days the previous weekend, stationed in the entry with her zippered pouch at her waist. Pamela ventured into the living room, not sure whether she wanted to encounter Marjorie or not, given Marjorie’s role in the unsettling dream.
A few women were browsing along the tables, and a bearded man was examining a brass candle-holder that he’d picked up from the mantel, where its mate waited. The sofa and matching armchairs now had SOLD tags taped to them, as did the small hooked rug before the fireplace. Pamela shivered again when she glanced toward the dining room.
A slender dark-haired woman wearing an interesting hand-knit sweater was sitting at the table. She was intent on a knitting project, so intent she didn’t notice Pamela regarding her. The woman was Haven, not Penny, the sweater was the same bright color-block sweater Haven had been wearing the previous weekend, and the project wasn’t the long, sleeping bag-like object that in Pamela’s dream Marjorie had identified as a shroud—a shroud for Pamela herself. But Pamela’s shiver intensified nonetheless.
Haven was knitting frantically on a swath of knitting about a foot wide and three feet long, drawing from a fat ball of fuzzy gray yarn perched among the odds and ends of yarn still littering the table. She was muttering to herself, “One more almost done . . . just a few more rows then time to cast off . . . hurry hurry hurry.”
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