A Fatal Yarn

by Peggy Ehrhart

  Chapter 25

  On Monday morning Bettina arrived with more eggs, this time presented in a charming basket.

  “What will I do with them?” Pamela exclaimed. “I’m already going to be busy with the eleven from your Easter egg hunt.”

  “Twelve of those now,” Bettina said. “We found number twelve after you left last night.” She fingered a vivid orange egg perched atop the others, whose shells were muted shades of turquoise, green, and pink. “It was on the sofa, nestled against an orange throw pillow. Wilfred sat on it but luckily it didn’t break.”

  “Where did these others come from then?”

  They were standing in Pamela’s entry, which was bright with April morning sun. Pamela was still in her robe and pajamas, but Bettina was dressed for the day in a fetching yellow and white checked shirtdress paired with her red sneakers. She’d added a red cardigan to ward off the slight morning chill.

  “Jack Delaney brought them over first thing. He was on the porch when Wilfred went out to get the Register, so Wilfred invited him in. He was going to just leave them with a “Happy Easter” note—like he said he did with Diefenbach—but Wilfred offered him coffee and he became quite chatty.”

  The mention of coffee reminded Pamela that she’d been just about to fill a rose-garlanded cup with her first coffee of the day when the doorbell’s chime had summoned her.

  “Come on in here,” she said, taking the basket of eggs from Bettina’s hand and leading her through the kitchen door. Penny was sitting at the table drinking coffee and finishing up a piece of toast and jam.

  Bettina started to fetch an extra chair from the dining room, but Penny jumped up and drained her coffee cup in one long swallow. “I’m just leaving,” she said, giving Bettina a hug.

  As Penny’s feet echoed on the stairs, Pamela poured two cups of coffee. “Catching up with her school friends on her smart phone, no doubt,” she commented, “but now you can tell me all about Jack Delaney without Penny getting curious.” She served Bettina her coffee. Penny, being relatively new to coffee-drinking, didn’t share her mother’s taste for black coffee, so Pamela’s cut-glass cream and sugar set was already on the table. Bettina added cream and sugar to her cup and Pamela returned to the counter.

  “Are you making toast?” Bettina asked hopefully.

  “Of course.” Pamela laughed and slipped two pieces of whole-grain bread into the toaster.

  “Jack liked my interview with MacDonald,” Bettina said. “He thought it was very fair. He liked it so much that he said he forgave me for sending Clayborn after him.”

  “So Detective Clayborn did follow up.” Still on her feet, Pamela sipped at her coffee. It was quite hot.

  “Of course.” Bettina raised her chin. Her brightly painted lips—red today—formed a smug smile. “Clayborn values my advice.”

  With a kerchunk, the toast popped up. Pamela delivered a buttered slice to Bettina on a small plate of wedding china, prepared one for herself, and joined Bettina at the table.

  “Do I see jam?” The wild blackberry jam from the previous day sat on the table near the cream and sugar set.

  “Help yourself.” Pamela nudged the jam closer to Bettina and got up to fetch her a knife.

  “Jack does have a girlfriend,” Bettina said, “and he was with her the night Diefenbach was killed, and she vouched for him, and if you had let me continue in the direction I was going that day we talked to him . . .” She gave Pamela a meaningful look and opened the jar of jam.

  “I’m sorry,” Pamela said. “But I guess we can cross him off our list of suspects for sure now.”

  Bettina was concentrating on the jam, spreading it liberally on her slice of toast, but she glanced up. “And that leaves?” she inquired.

  Pamela shrugged. “The neat freak? But why would he have poisoned Cassie?”

  It was Bettina’s turn to shrug.

  “There have to have been two killers,” Pamela said. “Despite the jam connection. Somebody poisoned Cassie and somebody clunked Diefenbach on the head with a heavy object. And they weren’t the same person. But the one who killed Diefenbach definitely isn’t Jack Delaney or Cassie, and probably isn’t MacDonald or Eloisa.”

  Bettina nodded.

  They ate their toast and drank their coffee then, chatting about their respective plans for the day. Bettina had an event to cover at the middle school, and Pamela’s early morning check of her email had revealed five articles waiting to be evaluated for Fiber Craft.

  At nine-thirty Bettina lifted her wrist to consult the pretty face of her gold bracelet watch. “I must be off,” she commented, and rose. But as Pamela escorted her toward the kitchen door, she turned back toward the table with a quick intake of breath.

  “I just thought of it,” she said. “All that apricot jam in Cassie’s kitchen cupboard is likely full of cyanide, and Marjorie probably doesn’t realize it. Luckily, she had a NOT FOR SALE sign on the shelf, but I guess that means she’s saving it for herself. Somebody should tell her not to eat it.”

  “If Detective Clayborn conferred with her to find out how to track Haven down, he must have mentioned the poisoned jam,” Pamela said.

  * * *

  After seeing Bettina to the door, Pamela returned to her kitchen. She stared at the jar of jam on the table. It was blackberry jam, not apricot like the jam on the shelves in Cassie’s kitchen, but thoughts involving apricot jam invaded her mind.

  When they visited Eloisa in her shop, she said Cassie had given Diefenbach a jar of jam. It must have been the poisoned jam. Haven said the jam was homemade, a gift, and there was more of it than Cassie wanted or could use. But Cassie didn’t know the jam contained poison. If she had, she wouldn’t have eaten it—that was clearly what had killed her. And she wouldn’t have given a jar to Diefenbach.

  Who would know the jam contained poison?

  Pamela didn’t pause to rinse the coffee cups before running up the stairs and dressing. She detoured past the bathroom to call to Penny, who was in the shower, that she was going out on a quick errand, then she was on her way. Was the errand she contemplated a life-saving errand, or something else? She wasn’t sure, but she tucked her cell phone in her pocket just in case.

  True to her word, Marjorie was on duty at Cassie’s house, still engaged in the challenging task of emptying it out so it could be sold. When Marjorie opened the door, Pamela could see an assortment of cardboard boxes ranged behind her.

  At first Marjorie looked surprised, her raised brows and half-open mouth animating her aged face. Then she said, not unpleasantly, “The sale’s over. There’s nothing left that anyone would pay money for.”

  Pamela smiled a smile that she intended to be disarming. “Could I persuade you to change your mind about selling that apricot jam?” she asked. “It’s always been my favorite kind, and homemade makes it all the better.”

  “The jam is not for sale,” Marjorie said, her voice still pleasant.

  “I think I know why.”

  “Oh?” Marjorie cocked her head and completed the syllable with a close-lipped smile.

  “It’s the rest of the poisoned jam that killed Cassie.” Pamela stepped closer to the door. From there she had a clearer view of the cardboard boxes. Curiously, Marjorie seemed to have been emptying them rather than filling them.

  “Oh my heavens! What terrible news!” Marjorie raised one of her large, well-shaped hands to her cheek. She retreated from the doorway, as if in shock. Pamela reflected that Bettina’s acting, overdone as it seemed at times, was infinitely more convincing.

  “You knew the jam was poisoned because you made it.” Pamela’s voice was calm. “You even told me how much you enjoyed preserving food. The apricot flavor provided a cover for the taste of cyanide and maybe you even got the cyanide from the pits.”

  Marjorie’s manner suddenly changed. “I did make the jam,” she said, “and it’s not poisoned.” She retreated farther and swung the door all the way open. “Come in! Come right in, and you can buy
all you want.”

  Marjorie was tall, and she looked strong for her age. But Pamela was tall and strong. She wasn’t exactly sure why Marjorie wanted her to come in, but she was curious about the boxes in the entry. She patted the back pocket of her jeans where she had tucked her cell phone and stepped over the threshold into the house that so resembled her own.

  The puzzle pieces of the mystery’s solution were coming together, in the same way that the pieces Pamela had knit for the lilac tunic had come together to form the pretty gift for her daughter. But a major piece of the puzzle was still missing, as if the tunic had turned out to be, let’s say, backless.

  As Pamela surveyed the room she had just entered, however, she recognized the missing puzzle piece. The contents of the cardboard boxes Marjorie had been emptying proved to be stacks of yellowing papers, bulging file folders, and bundles of clippings from newspapers and magazines.

  “The Arborville town archives.” Pamela pointed toward the boxes.

  Marjorie nodded.

  On the Sunday that Pamela and Bettina had visited the tag sale together, Pamela had overheard Haven complaining that Marjorie was spending too much time dealing with the boxes of archives when there were more pressing tasks.

  “Why do the contents have to be sorted? Can’t the boxes just be passed on to whoever takes over the archivist job?” Pamela asked, though she knew why Marjorie’s answer would be no.

  One of the file folders lay open and a few clippings, brittle and discolored with age, had been set aside.

  “You must be looking for something in particular,” Pamela said.

  “No.” Marjorie shrugged. “I just always loved history.”

  “American Dream, American Nightmare,” Pamela observed, then she stooped and quickly snatched up the clippings that had been set aside. The headline on the top one read, “Triple Murder Shakes Arborville: Mistress Kills Man, Wife, Self.” In smaller letters below were the words, “Infant Spared.”

  “You were that infant, weren’t you?” Pamela said. “And you couldn’t bear the thought of your family tragedy being exposed in that macabre library exhibit.”

  Marjorie had begun to weep. “I didn’t mean to kill anyone,” she said. “I was only trying to make Cassie sick—so I could step in, help gather material for the exhibit, and destroy anything I found about my own family.”

  “And you didn’t mean to kill Diefenbach either?”

  “I didn’t. I really didn’t.” With her apparent resignation to the fact of aging—the gray pony tail and the sensible shoes—Marjorie hadn’t seemed the type to care about her appearance. But as she sobbed and gulped, she raised her large hands to hide her face. “I was trying to save him. And myself. I didn’t want him to discover the jam was poisoned.” Her voice emerged from behind her hands in a tight wail. “I was horrified that Cassie had given it to him. I was trying to get it back—but it fell and broke. And then he exploded. He had such a temper. I was just trying to keep him from hitting me.”

  Marjorie removed her hands from her face, which was smeared with tears and had turned a splotchy red color. She looked around. Despite her preoccupation with the archives, she had apparently made some progress organizing the odds and ends left from the sale. Just beyond the arch between the entry and the living room, more boxes were staged, boxes full of objects wrapped in newspaper. And kitchenware was arranged in piles, pots with pots, pans with pans, cookie sheets with cookie sheets. In one pile, cast-iron skillets and griddles were stacked atop one another.

  Pamela recalled Wilfred’s pride in the cast-iron griddle he’d used for his Easter bunny pancakes, his comic grunt as he’d lifted it to show its heft.

  “You sold the murder weapon!” Pamela exclaimed. “To that tall young man in the leather jacket at the tag sale. That’s why the police never found it. Diefenbach was killed in his kitchen. What more handy weapon to find in a kitchen, for defense or offense, than a solid cast-iron griddle?”

  Marjorie had been standing in the middle of the entry. Suddenly she darted past Pamela and grabbed up a formidable cast-iron griddle from atop the skillet and griddle pile.

  “Lucky I didn’t sell all the ones that were Cassie’s,” she proclaimed, her voice still strained with grief.

  She lunged for Pamela, aiming the griddle at her head. Pamela ducked and the griddle missed, but the threat jolted Pamela almost as much as if the griddle had made contact with her skull. Marjorie raised the griddle again and adjusted her aim.

  The kitchen was straight ahead, Pamela knew, just like in her own house, though here one turned left instead of right for the living room and dining room. She bolted through the kitchen doorway, slammed the door, and leaned against it to hold it closed.

  Through the door, she could hear Marjorie cursing, and heavy feet drawing near.

  She pulled her cell phone from her jeans pocket and keyed in 911.

  Chapter 26

  Nell was hosting that evening’s Knit and Nibble, and Pamela and Bettina were en route in Bettina’s car, climbing the long hill that led to the section of Arborville known as the Palisades. In her kitting bag Pamela carried two completed infant caps and half a skein of soft white yarn she’d found in one of the plastic bins where she stored her knitting supplies. She’d spent part of the day on Easter leafing through knitting magazines, but she still hadn’t decided what her next project would be. Meanwhile, knitting infant caps would keep her hands from being idle.

  Midway up the hill, they passed a vacant lot, one of the few remaining in Arborville. It was half a double lot bought long ago. The original purchaser had built a house on one lot but let the other lie fallow—except for weeds, wild vines, and volunteer maple saplings that were on their way to becoming full-fledged trees. Neighbors complained about the untended lot, in the same way that neighbors complained about Jack Delaney’s rooster. Besides the weeds and saplings, the lot attracted litter—and political signage. Since the previous fall, a row of Diefenbach’s campaign posters had valiantly trumpeted “The Future Is Now” despite their increasingly woebegone condition.

  At the moment, however, someone seemed to be addressing the lot’s unsightliness.

  “Nell?” Bettina murmured as she braked to slow the car.

  Standing at the edge of the lot, among a tangle of faded vegetation not yet revived by the advent of spring, was a tall, lean woman with a cloud of white hair. She was facing away from the street, but her bearing and clothes—loose jeans and a utilitarian jacket—were so Nell-like that Bettina swung toward the curb and parked.

  As they watched, the woman tugged up the stake attached to one of the Diefenbach posters and hurled both stake and poster into the street. It landed near a partly filled plastic garbage bag, suggesting that removing the Diefenbach posters was part of a more extensive clean-up.

  “It’s not Nell,” Pamela said. In the act of hurling stake and poster, the woman had turned and offered a glimpse of her face. She had also caught sight of Pamela and Bettina.

  “Don’t just sit there gaping,” she barked in very un-Nell-like tones. “Give me a hand with this—or do you enjoy living in a town that’s full of eyesores everywhere a person turns? Honestly, I cannot understand how people can be so sloppy and careless!”

  Pamela and Bettina looked at each other. “Eyesore! ” Bettina mouthed. And Pamela responded with “Neat freak.”

  The woman had stepped over the curb and was standing, hands on her hips and an expectant expression on her face, as if waiting for them to leap from the car and join her.

  Bettina rolled her window down. “We can’t . . . right now,” she called. “We’re on our way to a meeting.” The woman scowled. She had strong, handsome features and the effect was quite formidable. “But,” Bettina went on, “we agree with you. Both of us. We both try to be very neat. And we’ll never put our recycling out before six p.m. again.”

  * * *

  Holly and Karen were seated side by side on a loveseat that faced its mate across Nell’s coffee table.
The loveseats, upholstered in faded chintz, flanked Nell’s grand fireplace, which like her house itself was built of natural stone. Logs waited on brass andirons within the fireplace, lest spring still had a few chilly evenings in store, but in the summer the fireplace held a huge arrangement of dried flowers. A wide hearth provided extra seating, and travel souvenirs decorated the mantel, including an African mask, Indonesian puppets, and a statue of an Egyptian god carved from dark stone.

  Nell herself, the real Nell, had greeted Pamela and Bettina at the door. She had led them into her gracious living room, with its high, beamed ceiling, and urged them to make themselves comfortable on the other loveseat. Bettina’s recounting of their adventure with the neatfreak postponed by a bit the comments and questions that Pamela had known would be inevitable. But her encounter with Marjorie had happened in plenty of time for the story to feature prominently in the Register, along with the welcome news that Roland had been cleared of charges.

  She acknowledged Nell’s gentle reminder that what she had done was very foolhardy, while at the same time accepting, gracefully, Holly’s applause and Karen’s murmured, “You were very brave.”

  “I see that the heroine of Arborville has arrived!” came a booming voice from the hallway that led to the kitchen. Harold Bascomb advanced to the edge of the living room. Like his wife, he was in his eighties but enviably vigorous, with an unruly forelock of thick white hair.

  “Don’t encourage her, Harold!” The tone in which Nell offered this reprimand wasn’t as gentle as the tone in which she had addressed Pamela, but Harold simply grinned in response.

  Nell seemed about to elaborate, but Pamela jumped in with, “Have you heard from Roland?”

  No sooner had she asked the question than the doorbell chimed. Harold was closest to the door, and in a moment he had ushered into the living room not one but two DeCamps.

  Roland had come accompanied by his wife. Melanie was her soigne self once again, with perfect hair and makeup and wearing slim camel-colored slacks and a matching belted jacket over a cream turtleneck. Roland was dressed in one of his pinstripe suits, with his shirt collar and cuffs as flawless as ever. But in place of his usual briefcase he carried a very large shopping bag from the fanciest store at the mall. Melanie, on her part, carried a white cardboard bakery box.