Murder, She Knit

by Peggy Ehrhart

  “What?” Pamela said, startled.

  “Now that woman in the store knows you have it. And you gave her your phone number, your landline. Anybody who has the phone number for a landline can find the address where it’s located. Why didn’t you just give her your cell phone number?”

  “Habit,” Pamela said. “I’ve had a landline longer than I’ve had a cell phone.” She paused. “Anyway, this is silly. There were only four skeins of that yarn. No matter what it might be worth, even a hundred dollars a skein, five hundred dollars a skein, nobody would kill a person for that.”

  “Probably not,” Bettina said. “Nobody here. But two thousand dollars could be a lot of money for somebody from somewhere else.”

  “What if the yarn was being used to smuggle something into the US?” Pamela said. “Something from Peru.”

  “Or Colombia,” Bettina said. “The Andes are in Colombia too.”

  “You’re not thinking it could be drugs, are you?” Pamela looked at Bettina in amazement. The bridge curved upward as it crossed the water. They were reaching its crest, and Bettina’s eyes were fixed on the asphalt ahead. “Amy would never have been involved with drugs.”

  “You’re probably right,” Bettina said. They were on the down side of the crest now, gazing at the gray ribbon of the expressway as it curved toward a cluster of high-rise apartment buildings, reddish-brown, with the George Washington Bridge coming into view beyond.

  “But here’s an idea,” Pamela said, suddenly excited.

  “Hang on!” The driver of a giant semi speeding past on the left had apparently realized that the exit he wanted was actually coming up on the right. He swerved in front of Bettina with inches to spare as she pumped her brakes. The driver in the van behind her honked frantically. The semi changed lanes again, and Bettina sighed in relief.

  “Good reflexes,” Pamela said.

  Bettina sighed again and laid a hand over her heart. “Can you hear it thumping?” she asked. Both hands back on the steering wheel, she glanced over at Pamela. “So—what’s the idea?”

  “Maybe something else is wrapped up in the skeins,” Pamela said.

  Headlights were coming on in the lanes of oncoming traffic as the sun set to the left of them. The Manhattan skyline was silhouetted against a sky streaked with orange and pink and yellow.

  “Like what?”

  Pamela gazed past Bettina’s profile at the dramatic view. “Have you ever looked around Nell’s house when Knit and Nibble met there?”

  “Sure,” Bettina said. “She and Harold have lots and lots of stuff.”

  “From their trips, starting right out of college when they’d hitchhike around Europe. Souvenirs of all kinds.”

  “What does this have to do with the yarn?”

  “She told me that one time when they were in Peru building a school for some village she bought a little silver llama from a booth on the village market day. All the luggage is x-rayed on the way out of the country and it turned out the llama was a valuable antiquity. She had to leave it behind. The locals sneak into archeological sites and dig up things that should really go to museums.”

  “Something would have to be awfully small to be hidden in a skein of yarn, and awfully valuable to make it worthwhile.”

  “It was tiny, according to Nell. The Incas buried them in graves, lots of them. So their kings would have plenty of llamas in the next life. And collectors pay a lot for things like that, because they’re hard to get ahold of if you’re not a museum.”

  “Well,” Bettina said, “I know what we’re going to be doing tonight.”

  “You’re right,” Pamela said. “I can’t wait to see what’s inside those skeins.”

  * * *

  “Let me just run in and tell Wilfred we’re back,” Bettina said as they pulled into her driveway. “I’ll be over in a couple of minutes.”

  Pamela hurried across the street to her own house, averting her eyes from the trail of garbage that still stretched along the side of her neighbor’s yard. It was completely dark now, but the streetlamp gave enough light to reveal that the arrangement of orange peelings, yogurt containers, and crumpled paper was undisturbed. At least he seems to eat healthily, Pamela said to herself—no evidence of fast food, or even take-out pizza.

  She fumbled at the lock, at first unable to find the keyhole on the dark porch. Once inside, she switched on the porch light for Bettina and started to push the door shut. But then she noticed Catrina poised against the railing, gazing at her as if unsure even after all this time whether the better choice might be to flee.

  “It’s okay,” Pamela whispered soothingly. “I won’t hurt you, and I’ll be right back with food.”

  She tossed the canvas bag on the sofa, and the skein of yarn slipped out. In the kitchen she opened a fresh can of cat food and retrieved the plastic container she’d designated the official cat-food dish. The doorbell interrupted her preparations, and she stepped into the entry. Through the lace curtain on the door she recognized Bettina.

  “You’re still feeding that little cat?” Bettina said as she slipped inside.

  “Trying to,” Pamela said. “Is she out there?”

  “Something furry tore down the steps as I was coming up. I didn’t mean to scare her away.” Bettina glanced toward the sofa, where the yarn glowed brightly against the teal blue of the sofa’s upholstery.

  Pamela spooned half a can of cat food into the plastic dish and set it against the railing where Catrina had last been seen. “Would you like something to eat?” she asked as she stepped back inside. “I’m starving.”

  “I never say no to food,” Bettina said. “But just a bite. Tonight is sausage and sauerkraut night, and Wilfred is looking forward to it.”

  “I have some interesting cheese from the Co-Op and a loaf of their good whole-grain bread.”

  They ate at the kitchen table, quickly, because they were anxious to pursue the idea they’d hatched on the drive back to New Jersey. Then Pamela went to fetch the rest of the Brooklyn yarn from the bin on top of the washing machine.

  When she got back, Bettina was sitting on the sofa squeezing the skein of yarn they’d taken to Brooklyn. “I don’t really feel anything,” she said. “And the yarn is so soft I’d think a lump inside would be really obvious.” She continued squeezing, then slipped the skein out of the wide band of paper that encircled it. The yarn held together, an intricately twisted mass the shape of a very large cruller.

  “Give me the end,” Pamela said. Bettina tugged it loose, and Pamela seated herself in a rummage-sale chair with a carved wooden back and needlepoint seat. As Bettina turned the skein this way and that, Pamela pulled at the yarn, which stretched between them like a thin golden cord. She wound it around her fingers until she had a small nubbin, and then she began to wind it around itself, forming a ball that grew larger and larger. But the process revealed nothing in the skein of yarn except yarn and yet more yarn.

  She smoothed the tail end of the yarn from the first skein onto the ball and placed the ball between them on the coffee table. They repeated the process with skeins two, three, and four, finding nothing hidden in them at all.

  “Well,” Bettina sighed, and she slumped against the sofa back. “It was an idea.”

  Pamela nodded. “It was an idea.” She added the fourth ball to the three already lined up on the coffee table. “Do you want more cheese and bread?”

  “I really have to get back home,” Bettina said. “And I hope you’ll have more for dinner than just cheese and bread.”

  Pamela leaned forward in the chair. “Don’t leave quite yet,” she said. “Some more details in that article about vicuñas are coming back to me, details that could explain the yarn—”

  She was interrupted by a mournful howl from the front porch. Bettina sat upright, startled.

  “It’s the cat,” Pamela said. “Sometimes she wants seconds.” She hurried to the kitchen and emerged with an open can of cat food and a spoon.

  Settling b
ack in the rummage-sale chair, she said, “Back to the vicuñas. The local Andean people use them in fertility rituals.”

  “Interesting, but what does that have to do with the yarn?”

  “That woman in the yarn store looked like her biological clock might be running out.”

  “And she’s trying to get pregnant by doing some ritual with special yarn?” Bettina laughed.

  “People believe all kinds of things. That shop was full of strange potions.”

  “Well,” Bettina said, pushing herself up off the sofa. “I hope she doesn’t show up here wanting to take the yarn back—and not willing to accept no for an answer.”

  “How could she even find me?” Pamela asked.

  “You gave her your landline number. Remember?”

  Chapter Nine

  “Well, this is just the end.” Pamela said it aloud. She didn’t usually talk to herself, but the spectacle she was viewing through her kitchen window that Sunday morning called for more than silent disapproval. The sound of her kettle whistling called her back to her own tidy domain, and she quickly measured freshly ground coffee beans into a paper cone and added boiling water. As the rich coffee smell wafted up from the pot, she returned to contemplation of the sight that had provoked her irritation. Not only had the garbage mess she’d been studying for several days not been cleaned up, but some animal—probably a raccoon—had tipped over a second garbage can, torn open another plastic garbage bag, and added an assortment of vegetable trimmings, Styrofoam trays, and wadded-up paper towels to the original mess.

  “Richard Larkin actually came outside to put more trash in the second can and never even noticed what had happened to the first.” She said that aloud too. Then she put a piece of whole-grain bread in the toaster, poured a cup of coffee, and sat down at the kitchen table, in the chair that faced away from the window.

  I’ll write him a note. She said this to herself and began to read the newspaper.

  Toast eaten, coffeepot drained, and newspaper perused, she rummaged among her stock of the free notepads that arrived with solicitations from various charities. She chose one with a border of flowers. “Dear Neighbor,” she wrote. “You may not have noticed, but raccoons have tipped over your garbage cans and made quite a mess. I hope you will clean it up soon since it is the view from my kitchen window.” She signed it, “Your neighbor to the west, Pamela Paterson.” She would drop it in his mailbox when she went out for her walk.

  She stepped toward the counter, coffee cup and toast plate in hand. Her eyes strayed toward her neighbor’s house just in time to see an attractive young woman stepping out onto his porch. The girlfriend. She clucked disapprovingly. Time for girlfriends but no time to keep his yard clean. And . . . Pamela studied the young woman. She wasn’t even the same girlfriend. The first girlfriend had worn a chic ensemble of skinny jeans and a belted jacket, her hair in a shiny blond bob. This young woman was dressed in a flowing skirt, topped with a knitted poncho. Her blond hair was long and tousled.

  Richard Larkin was a complete lothario.

  In the living room Pamela released her irritation by grabbing the throw pillows that had gotten bunched up at one end of the sofa as she’d lounged with her knitting the previous night. She fluffed each one into shape and distributed them in a neat row, making sure the one with the needlepoint cat wasn’t deployed so that the cat was standing on its head. As she tucked it into place, a gleam of metal caught her eye. She leaned closer to discover a knitting needle nestled in the groove formed by the welting on the middle sofa cushion.

  It had to be one of Karen Dowling’s needles, gone astray the night she rummaged in her bag to hand them over to Roland. She plucked it out and set it on the coffee table. Surely the other one could not be far away. Finding it would put to rest once and for all the terrible fear that sweet little Karen Dowling was Amy’s murderer.

  Pamela tossed all the throw pillows on the rug and ran her finger along the welting on all three sofa cushions. No knitting needles emerged. Then she pulled the cushions free and tossed them on the floor. Under the cushions were a few stray coins and many dust balls and crumbs, but no knitting needles. She examined the welting on the cushions that made up the back of the sofa and probed between the cushions with her fingers. Finally, for good measure, she examined each throw pillow carefully, just in case she hadn’t noticed a knitting needle partly embedded in their fabric.

  But in the end there was only one knitting needle. What could it mean if Karen had arrived at the meeting with one of the metal needles already missing?

  She needed a destination for her walk, aside from delivering her “Dear Neighbor” note. She decided to pay a visit to Karen Dowling. She’d drop off the lone knitting needle and maybe have a little chat.

  Fifteen minutes later, Pamela had slipped the “Dear Neighbor” note into Richard Larkin’s mailbox and was striding up Orchard Street enjoying the crisp fall day. There had been a frost the night before. The remains of the black-eyed Susans in several yards were shriveled and brown. Flower beds that had held on even into November with bits of greenery or at least spots of fading rust and gold were bleak jumbles of broken stems. She grasped the ends of the violet mohair scarf that had been her project before she started the Icelandic sweater and snugged it up more securely against her throat.

  Karen and Dave Dowling lived a few blocks above Arborville Avenue, up a slight hill, on a street that paralleled Orchard. Their house was wood frame, like Pamela’s. It was nearly as old, and in just about the same state of disrepair that Pamela’s had been, that long-ago time when she and her husband had taken on the task of making it beautiful again.

  As she turned the corner onto the Dowlings’ block she could see a figure kneeling on the sidewalk. As she got closer she realized it was Karen. Karen was bundled in a down jacket that had definitely seen better days, and she was digging industriously at a patch of dirt around a tree between the sidewalk and the curb. Beside her was a cluster of misshapen brown and ivory knobs—tulip bulbs, Pamela guessed.

  “I admire your ambition,” Pamela said when she was a few steps away.

  Karen looked up with a startled expression. “I didn’t hear you coming,” she said and rocked back into a sitting position.

  “Those will be beautiful in the spring,” Pamela said. “Tulips, I think.”

  “Tulips.” Karen nodded. “I always dreamed of having a yard where I could plant things . . . and a house to fix up.” She twisted and gazed back at the house. Its porch sagged alarmingly, and the paint on its narrow clapboards was the faded blue of much-washed denim. But Pamela could see its potential, and she said so.

  Instead of answering, Karen turned back toward the street and lowered her head. She wiped her cheek with a grubby hand, and when she looked up again, it was with a smudge of dirt under one eye. A tear dripped from the other.

  “We might not even be here when these come up,” she said, her mouth twisting and the words barely squeezing out. “It all seemed so wonderful. Dave’s job offer. The chance to put down roots in a nice town like this.” She made a sound like a cross between a laugh and a sob. “Wendelstaff College. I wish we’d never heard of it.” She plunged her garden trowel into the soil, excavated a narrow hole, sighed deeply, and sniffed. “I hate to waste the bulbs,” she said, her voice calmer. “Someone will enjoy the flowers.”

  Pamela lifted the knitting needle out of her bag. “I found this hidden in my sofa,” she said. Karen looked up. The needle glinted in the sun. “I couldn’t find the other one though.”

  Karen shrugged and reached for the knitting needle. “I can’t stand these metal things, but I guess one of them won’t do Roland much good.” She stared at it as if wondering what to do next, then stuck it in the ground next to the hole she’d just dug.

  “So your husband isn’t staying at Wendelstaff ?”

  Karen nodded. “Not past the end of the year.” She was still on her knees, face turned up toward Pamela.

  “Had you met Amy Morga
n?”

  The tears that had been held in abeyance returned with a gasp and a wail. Karen covered her face with one hand, rose clumsily to her feet, and retreated toward her house. She almost tripped as she hurried up the steps that led to the sagging porch, but she regained her balance, pushed through the front door, and vanished.

  Pamela extracted the knitting needle from the ground and tucked it back in her bag. Perhaps the police would want to compare it with the one that had been found in Amy’s chest.

  On her way down the hill Pamela decided a visit to the Wendelstaff campus might be useful. She’d say she was researching interior design programs for her daughter. That way she could get in front of some of the people Amy had worked with as head of the School of Professional Arts. Amy herself had implied she was having problems there—and Dorrie had confirmed it. Maybe Dave Dowling was one of the problems. Today was Sunday though. The next stage of her sleuthing would have to wait until Monday morning.

  At the corner of Orchard Street and Arborville Avenue she hesitated. There was plenty of food at home, but a crisp fall day like this one called out for something roasting in the oven. She’d roast a chicken, with sage stuffing from her own sage plant, and the leftovers would provide many more meals.

  Pamela had always cooked, a real dinner every night, even after she and Penny were the only ones to eat it. And she’d set the table with her wedding china and cloth napkins. With Penny in college now, some meals were simpler and the china didn’t always come out, but cooking was rather like knitting—though it could get repetitious, even the repetition was soothing, and the result was so satisfying.

  She turned right instead of heading straight down Orchard. Even though it was Sunday, she had resolved to put in several hours of work for the magazine—she’d spent too much time away from her desk in the aftermath of Amy’s murder. But a roast chicken for dinner would provide a nice reward after a long editing session.

  The door to the Co-Op Grocery swung open, and Jean Worthington emerged. She was pushing a cart piled high with Co-Op Grocery bags. Pamela recognized Jean’s Volvo at the curb. Its subtle gray sheen had always struck her as exactly the sort of finish Jean would pick.