Murder, She Knit

by Peggy Ehrhart

  Gary Grainger’s voice cut through her musings. “It took a long time to get these photographs hung,” he said. “Chad did all the work though, because Dorrie had to be somewhere. However in love Chad might have been with his model, he’s devoted to his wife too.”

  “How long has the show been up?” Bettina asked.

  “Just a week, since last Wednesday morning. Chad worked here Tuesday till after closing time.”

  Pamela looked at her watch. It was edging past five, and they’d hit Turnpike traffic for sure. They had to be at Jean Worthington’s for Knit and Nibble at seven. “You’ll be wanting to close,” she said. “You’ve been very kind to spend all this time with us.”

  “Oh, no problem,” he said. “I stay open till seven.”

  Outside the sky was darkening and lights were coming on along the street. Bettina waited till they were settled in the car, the painting in its plastic wrapping stowed safely in the back seat. “Well,” she sighed. “I guess he’s got an alibi.”

  Pamela smiled a half smile in the dark. “But she doesn’t.”

  She wasn’t sure Bettina had heard. Bettina had started the engine and was beginning the delicate process of extracting her car from a parking spot that had required all her skill to squeeze into. She eased back, then forward, twisting the steering wheel as far as it would go in each direction. Headlights approached from behind and she paused. The headlights paused too.

  “Waiting to claim the spot, I think,” Pamela said.

  “I hope he stays out of my way.” Bettina jerked the steering wheel to the right and pressed on the gas. The car lurched from the space as Pamela cringed, expecting to hear a squeal of metal as fender scraped fender. But they were on their way.

  Bettina turned left and then left again, then cruised up Washington Street toward the cross street that would take them away from Hoboken.

  Ten minutes later they were heading north on the Turnpike, moving faster than Pamela had expected, multiple lanes of brake lights like glowing red ribbons stretching ahead of them. “We’re doing fine,” Pamela said after checking the clock on Bettina’s dashboard. “We’ll have plenty of time to eat before we’re due at Jean’s. I don’t want my only dinner to be gourmet cookies and coffee.”

  Bettina gave a noncommittal grunt. She braked as the car in front of her slowed. When the traffic picked up again, Pamela spoke.

  “You’d have to be very skilled with an ice pick to make those ice sculptures of Dorrie’s,” she said.

  “Very.” Bettina nodded.

  “Amy had a knitting needle sticking out of her chest.”

  “That’s true,” Bettina said. “It wasn’t an ice pick, though I see the similarity. And if my husband had been hopelessly in love with my sister, I’d be tempted to look for a remedy too.”

  The image of the thoroughly domesticated Wilfred pursuing anyone made Pamela smile. And besides, Bettina didn’t have a sister.

  “Dorrie definitely has a motive,” Pamela said. “We don’t know where she was last Tuesday night, but we know she wasn’t at the gallery hanging pictures for her show. A gallery show is kind of a big deal. Wouldn’t she be there working unless she had something very very important to do?”

  “Like kill her sister”—Bettina paused to maneuver quickly out of the lane that was hastening them toward the exit for Newark Airport—“with an ice pick?” she concluded when the glowing ribbons of brake lights once more stretched ahead.

  “She wouldn’t have to have done it with an ice pick,” Pamela said. “But if you were used to handling an ice pick, you could do an awful lot of damage with a metal knitting needle too.”

  “Possibly so.” Silhouetted against the glare of headlights from traffic in the oncoming lanes, Bettina’s head nodded slowly. “Possibly so,” she repeated.

  “What if we did have to survive on gourmet cookies and coffee for dinner?” Pamela asked, suddenly excited.

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Haversack is sort of on the way back to Arborville. Dorrie lives there or has a studio there or something. I remember the address from that business card she left when she gave me Amy’s bin of knitting supplies. It’s on Railroad Avenue, right near that big thrift store I like.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “What are we going to say to her?” Bettina asked as they cruised along. “We just thought we’d drop in and ask you if you killed your sister?”

  “I’m working on an angle,” Pamela said. “I’ll start off with the painting. We’ll see how she responds.”

  After they left the Turnpike at its northernmost end, Pamela guided Bettina to Haversack and the stretch of Railroad Avenue where her favorite thrift store was to be found—and nearby, hopefully, Dorrie Morgan. But as they cruised along with railroad tracks on one side and buildings on the other, they saw nothing that looked remotely like a place where a person would live, or even create and photograph ice sculptures. They passed a few low, dark buildings that could have been small factories, a business that offered pool chemicals, another whose impressive sign announced that it supplied and installed commercial plate glass, and one that sold marble and granite, cut to order. But they were all closed.

  “Here’s the thrift store,” Pamela said. Bettina slowed and pulled off the road. The thrift store was dark too, with the neat parking spaces marked off across the building’s front occupied by only one lone car. A display, feebly illuminated by a light on a high pole near the street, featured a sofa, a coffee table, and a few jauntily dressed mannequins.

  “You’re sure it was Railroad Avenue?” Bettina said. “This doesn’t look promising at all—and there’s nobody around to even ask.”

  “Let’s just drive a little bit further. The address was definitely something in the hundreds, and the thrift store is 102.” Pamela leaned past Bettina to squint at the number posted over the thrift store’s door.

  “You’re sure it was Haversack?” Bettina said. “Sometimes numbers start over at the border of a new town.”

  “It was Haversack.” Pamela nodded decisively. “And look—something’s going on at this next place. Start the car up again.”

  The small patch of asphalt that supplied parking for the thrift store merged into a much larger lot. Bettina followed Pamela’s instructions, and they joined several nondescript cars parked in a ragged row. A much larger building set further back from Railroad Avenue was bathed in a cheerful fluorescent glow. People laden with bulging plastic bags were making their way through a pair of automatic doors and heading toward cars.

  “It’s a discount grocery place,” Pamela exclaimed. “I forgot it was here. The Haversack Wholesale Food Depot.”

  “How does it bring us closer to locating Dorrie?” Bettina asked, sounding a bit grumpy.

  “At least there are people. I’ll find out if there are any apartment buildings along here, or places where Dorrie could rent a work space.” Pamela reached for the door handle. “There’s a guy collecting shopping carts. I’ll ask him.”

  As Bettina watched, Pamela hurried toward a bright patch of asphalt where a small man in a puffy jacket was tucking shopping carts into one another to create a long chain. She leaned toward him. He looked up, and there was a quick flash of teeth as he smiled. He pointed toward the automatic doors. Pamela nodded, suggesting she was pleased, though Bettina could see only her back. The man seemed quite entertained by the message he was conveying, even pausing once to laugh. Pamela nodded again.

  Bettina rolled down her window when Pamela was a few steps away. “What on earth?” she said. “You certainly made his day—or night.”

  “She’s in here,” Pamela said. “They all know her. Come on. And let’s grab that painting.” She paused when they got to the entrance and pointed to the store hours posted near the automatic doors. “Open till ten p.m. every night,” she said. “Alibi—or not?”

  Inside, the air smelled spicy. They hurried down a long aisle between crowded shelves, giant bags of rice on one side and cans of fruit and
vegetables on the other. Pamela held the painting close at her side. Near the end of the aisle a butcher counter came in sight, with glistening cuts of meat in parallel bins behind a sloping panel of glass. To the left of the butcher counter was a door.

  “Behind that door.” Pamela stepped forward and reached for the knob.

  They entered a small room crowded with wooden crates stacked in towers of various heights and filled with round and oblong produce in shades of green, yellow, purple, and red. The spicy smell had been replaced by the smell of fruit and vegetables, some of them decaying, as witnessed by the trash bins arranged along one wall.

  Somehow space had been found for a table. On the table was a large block of ice, and facing the block of ice but with her back to the door stood Dorrie Morgan. Pamela recognized her dark no-style hair and her baggy jeans, complemented this evening by an equally baggy sweatshirt.

  “Dorrie?” Pamela whispered it. If Dorrie hadn’t heard the door open, she must be deep in thought.

  Dorrie whirled around, eyes and mouth both open wide. “You!” she gasped. “What—?” She paused to compose herself. “How did you find me here?”

  “You gave me your business card,” Pamela said. “‘Dorrie Morgan—Fantasies.’”

  Dorrie grunted. “Odd time for a social call. I was really concentrating. The ice has to tell me what’s locked inside.” She flourished the ice pick in her hand.

  “It’s not really social,” Pamela said. She didn’t think it was necessary to mention that her first meeting with Dorrie had occurred when Dorrie crawled out of her shrubbery at eight a.m. “I have something for you. To thank you for giving me the bin with Amy’s knitting supplies.” She swung the wrapped painting around so it faced Dorrie. She loosened the plastic bag and watched Dorrie’s face as the bag slipped to the floor.

  Dorrie screwed up her face in an expression that seemed almost comic, twisting her lips into a zigzag and wrinkling her lump-of-dough nose. “Yeah?” she said.

  “It was in the trash behind Amy’s apartment building. Mr. Gilly seems to have been a little too zealous in his cleanout. I was sure you or your parents would want it. It’s been damaged somehow. I guess he handled it kind of roughly, but I think a canvas like this can be repaired.”

  “We don’t want it, actually,” Dorrie said.

  Bettina caught Pamela’s eye and tapped the wrist where she wore her watch. But Pamela was only getting started.

  “This is an unusual work space,” she said.

  Dorrie frowned. “Duh. Freezer, of course.” She pointed at a broad metal door in the side wall. “I pay them for space to work and space to store my creations. It’s a win-win. And that other door goes right out to the loading dock. Handy when I’ve got something to deliver.”

  “The store stays open late,” Pamela said. “Do you often work late?”

  “If I have something that needs to be finished.”

  “Do you have to check out with somebody when you leave, or do you just leave?”

  “Why do you care?” Dorrie regarded the block of ice and then the ice pick. “Look,” she said, “I’m really busy. I’ve got a deadline for this.” She nodded past them at the door they’d entered. “And please shut that door behind you when you go out. I don’t like curious people wandering in while I’m at work.”

  Pamela took a few steps back and eased the door closed, even though she had no plans to leave quite yet. Dorrie continued to glance back and forth between the block of ice and the ice pick, then she put the ice pick down and picked a larger tool out of a wooden box on the floor. Pamela didn’t know very much about tools, but this one looked like a cross between a chisel and a narrow putty knife.

  Maybe it hadn’t been so wise to close the door that led back into the grocery part of the store. Dorrie could dispatch them both and escape through the loading-dock door. She hefted the new tool in her hand then began to wave it back and forth, pacing in a small circle and humming.

  Bettina edged closer to the door. She touched Pamela on the arm and mouthed the word “Go?” raising her eyebrows to emphasize the question.

  But now Dorrie seemed more focused on her project than on her visitors. She was still waving the chisel-putty knife, but she’d turned back toward the table. The waving motions were directed at the block of ice as if she was planning where to attack.

  Pamela gave Bettina a small smile and waved her fingers in a “don’t worry” gesture. She stepped up next to Dorrie. “I guess the ice carving is the ‘Fantasies’ on your business card.”

  “Got it in one try,” Dorrie said, waving the chisel-putty knife in wider and wider arcs. She paused to take a glossy postcard from a stack in the wooden box and hand it to Pamela. It was the same card Gary Grainger had showed them at the gallery. On one side was the caption “New work by Dorrie Morgan—Meet the artist 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., Wednesday, November 16, at the Grainger Gallery” and on the other a stark black-and-white image of an ice sculpture.

  “Art doesn’t pay the rent though,” Dorrie said with a disgusted laugh. “So I do other stuff too. Party services, basically. I’ll get two hundred dollars for this, when it’s done.” She poked at the block of ice with the chisel-putty knife.

  “You must be very good.”

  “I am,” Dorrie said, sounding a little more friendly. “But that means I’m in demand. Last Tuesday was just murder.”

  Behind her, Pamela heard Bettina gulp.

  Dorrie went on, warming to her subject. “It was a bachelor party and they wanted a stripper, and then to get home and find out my sister had been killed.” She paused, screwed up her face in the odd expression again, and then laughed. “Forget I said Tuesday was murder. Freudian, I guess. I mean, it really was murder, for Amy, so I shouldn’t have—uh, used that word.”

  “A stripper?” Pamela said, her eyes unconsciously straying to Dorrie’s jeans and sweatshirt. Perhaps the body they enclosed was more shapely than the clothes suggested—or the thrill of watching a stripper lay less in the body being revealed and more in the process of revelation.

  Dorrie laughed again, the disgusted laugh this time. “Not all of my work is abstract,” she said, snatching the postcard back from Pamela. “Some is quite representational. They wanted a stripper carved out of ice for the centerpiece of the buffet table. Life-sized. I had to order a giant block of ice, and I worked all afternoon, and then I had to ask a couple of those guys who collect the shopping carts to help me load it into my van, and the party was at a catering hall way down in one of those shore towns. I made it there just in the nick of time, seven p.m. on the dot.”

  * * *

  “What do you think?” Pamela asked Bettina as they made their way past the neat rows of shopping carts lined up outside the automatic doors. The smiling man who had steered Pamela to the back room where Dorrie worked looked up from a cart he was tucking into another cart and gave a cheerful wave. “Thanks!” Pamela called.

  Bettina widened her eyes and stretched her lips into a comical smile. “What do I think? She volunteered the story, so it’s not like she knew we were fishing to see if she had an alibi.”

  “The time fits,” Pamela said. “Almost too perfectly.” They stepped from the fluorescent brightness of the market’s entrance into the darkness of the parking lot. “Knit and Nibble starts at seven. Amy must have been killed shortly before that, early enough that nobody else was walking up my front walk yet. If Dorrie was pulling up outside a catering hall in a town on the Jersey shore at seven p.m., she couldn’t have been in my yard fifteen minutes earlier.”

  “No,” Bettina agreed. “She couldn’t.”

  They made their way back along Railroad Avenue, past the thrift store and the small factories, the pool chemical place, the plate glass place, and the marble and granite place, both staring ahead at the darkness past the reach of the car’s headlights.

  “I kind of like her,” Pamela said suddenly.

  “I do too,” Bettina said.

  “I’m glad she didn’t d
o it.”

  “I am too.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “How are we doing on time?” Pamela asked as Bettina turned from County Road onto Orchard Street. She raised her wrist and pushed back her jacket sleeve but couldn’t make out the tiny numerals on her watch face.

  “It’s here, on the dashboard.” Glowing numerals on the dashboard indicated that they had twenty minutes to get themselves to Jean Worthington’s. Bettina pulled up along the curb in front of Pamela’s dark house. “I didn’t know we’d be out this long or I’d have left a light on,” Pamela said, reaching for the door handle.

  “I’ll wait till you get inside, in case that woman from the yarn shop is waiting to pounce on you from the shrubbery. Then I’ll pull into my driveway and tell Wilfred to order himself a pizza from When in Rome. He won’t mind. Tuesday is usually rotisserie chicken.”

  There was time for a quick sandwich, but Pamela wasn’t the only one who was hungry for dinner. Catrina had been lurking near the steps as she came up the walk and had actually followed her onto the porch instead of waiting at a distance for food to appear.

  Once the cat was fed and she’d eaten a slice of whole-grain toast with peanut butter, Pamela hurried through her kitchen into the hall that led to her laundry room. She tipped the cover back from the plastic bin that sat atop her washing machine and pulled out one of the golden balls of mystery yarn. In the living room she slipped it into her knitting bag, atop the almost-finished sleeve for the Icelandic sweater project. Knit and Nibble sometimes had a “show-and-tell” component. Maybe someone in the group would be able to shed some light on the mystery yarn, and in any event it was so unusual that her fellow knitters would certainly enjoy seeing it and feeling its silky softness. But she didn’t think she’d tell them how it actually came into her possession.

  * * *

  Though Jean Worthington’s house was the second-grandest in Arborville, it was right up the block from Pamela’s, and it coexisted peacefully with its humbler neighbors. Its Victorian designer had undoubtedly created it as a tribute to its owner’s status, but since the original owner had lived during the late 1800s, any hint of vulgar new money had long since dissipated. Jean and Douglas Worthington inhabited it as caretakers of a bit of Arborville history, putting their considerable income to good use funding the maintenance an old house inevitably required.