Murder, She Knit

by Peggy Ehrhart

  Mr. Gilly took over, leading the officers to the fence that hid the trash cans and directing them to the opening at the end. Officer Sanchez approached Pamela and pulled a small notebook from a pocket in her padded navy blue jacket.

  “Was it you who found the body?” she asked. Pamela nodded. “The murder last week occurred in your front yard,” she added. Pamela nodded again. Officer Sanchez wrote something on the notepad. “Do you know this individual?” The emphasis on the word “this” made it clear that Officer Sanchez remembered all the details of her conversation with Pamela on that sad night.

  “No,” Pamela said, nodding decisively. She didn’t add that there was something oddly familiar about the woman. She had wanted to ask Mr. Gilly if the woman lived in the building, but the chance for private conversation with him had come and gone. A ribbon of yellow crime-scene tape now stretched across the opening in the fence and all along the fence’s length, and the other officer was talking to Mr. Gilly and making notes on his own small notepad.

  There wasn’t much more to talk about once it was established that Pamela had no idea who the victim was and had only looked behind the fence because people sometimes threw away interesting things. “And Mr. Gilly will tell you I stop by here and take a look almost every day,” she added.

  The look on Officer Sanchez’s face suggested that rummaging in other people’s trash struck her as an eccentric thing for someone who lived on such a nice street to do.

  Officer Sanchez explained that Detective Clayborn would be arriving soon and that he would want to talk to Pamela about her discovery of the body. But first he would want to make sure the crime scene was secured. She looked closely at Pamela, whose teeth had begun to chatter from cold and nervousness. The wail of a siren announced that a second police car was rounding the corner, and a minute later it pulled up next to the first one. The siren subsided into a groan, then was abruptly quiet.

  “You live just down the street,” Officer Sanchez said. Pamela nodded. “Detective Clayborn can talk to you at your house. I’ll drive you home and wait there with you till he arrives.”

  Officer Sanchez explained to her partner and the other officers where they were going, and they were on their way. After less than a minute, Officer Sanchez veered toward the curb and braked. Pamela’s nerves were so on edge that she turned to Officer Sanchez in alarm. The young woman touched Pamela’s arm reassuringly.

  “Were those your grocery bags leaning against the fence?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes!” Pamela clapped her hands. “Thank you.”

  Groceries retrieved, they made their way down the street again. At home, Pamela settled Officer Sanchez in a chair at the kitchen table while she put away her groceries. It seemed ages ago that she’d been browsing happily along the aisles of the Co-Op, deciding what size bag of pecans to buy, choosing an assortment of yogurts, and standing at the deli counter sampling a slice of ham before placing her order. Now she handled the items like souvenirs from another life.

  “Shall I make coffee?” she asked.

  “No, thank you,” came the answer. Perhaps police weren’t allowed to accept food from people they were interviewing about crimes. Maybe Bettina would know if that was true, because she’d gotten to know them from talking to them for the Advocate.

  When the doorbell rang, they both hurried toward the kitchen door, nearly colliding. “I’ll let him in,” Pamela said. “Please have a seat in the living room, or . . . do you need to stay?”

  But Officer Sanchez had continued on ahead, carrying her padded navy blue jacket. When Pamela reached the entry, Detective Clayborn was already stepping through the front door. He conferred briefly with Officer Sanchez, both talking in such low voices that Pamela couldn’t make out anything they were saying. Then Officer Sanchez was on her way.

  “There was a cat out there,” Detective Clayborn said, the faintest smile tugging at his lips. “But it ran away. Is it yours?”

  “Sort of,” Pamela said.

  He offered his hand. “Detective Clayborn.”

  “I remember,” Pamela said. She also remembered his face, comforting in its homeliness, like a faithful spaniel.

  He unwrapped a scarf from his neck and peeled off a bulky three-quarter-length coat. The outfit underneath struck Pamela as identical to the one he’d worn the last time, even to the green tie with the pattern of brown squiggles. She reached for the coat and scarf and laid them on a chair in the entry.

  He stepped toward the living room. “There’s a better chair,” Pamela exclaimed, flustered. She remembered how the rummage-sale chair with the carved wooden back and needlepoint seat had squeaked in protest the week before as he shifted from side to side. She gestured toward a substantial armchair.

  “I’ll be going over some of the things you told Officer Sanchez,” he said, settling into it and producing a notepad and pen.

  That was what he had said the last time. Perhaps it was a script they learned in detective school.

  “It was you who found the body?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you look behind the fence?”

  “I sometimes find interesting things back there. You’d be amazed what people throw away.” Pamela pointed toward the shelves, cabinets, and tabletops that held her treasures.

  He nodded, as if this was a sufficient explanation.

  “Two people have been killed on your street within a little over a week.”

  Pamela nodded.

  “You knew the first victim.”

  “Amy Morgan,” Pamela whispered.

  “Did you know this individual?” She’d already answered that question for Officer Sanchez. But this was probably part of what they did—ask the same questions to see if they got the same answers. If she said no, would he be able to tell that she was holding something back, the fact that the woman had looked so vexingly familiar?

  “Am I a suspect?” Pamela’s heart began to thump, so loud she was sure Detective Clayborn could hear it. “She wasn’t killed with a knitting needle.”

  Something tightened around his eyes, and he didn’t look so homely anymore. He wonders how I know that, Pamela realized with alarm. Maybe his faithful spaniel expression was just an act, a way to make people open up and not feel threatened. “There was a slit in her sweater,” she added. “Like from a knife. Anybody would have noticed it.”

  He nodded and wrote something on his little notepad, then he looked back up, but didn’t say anything.

  “She looked familiar.” Pamela said it in a resigned way, as if confessing to something she’d given up trying to hide. “But I have no idea why. She’s not somebody I knew from town, and she wasn’t dressed the way most women her age dress in Arborville. So it’s just a mystery.” She paused. “Did she live in that building?”

  The look on his face said she should have known he couldn’t answer that even if he knew. Pamela went on. “If she did, she must have just moved in recently.” His expression didn’t change. “That was Amy Morgan’s building,” Pamela said, watching his face closely for any hint he thought the crimes were related.

  The interview veered off to topics less close to home, like how well Pamela knew Mr. Gilly and what the garbage collection schedule was like on Orchard Street. “Oh, yes,” Pamela murmured. “Maybe the killer thought the body would be undisturbed there and he could take it away later and hide it someplace where nobody would ever find it.” Detective Clayborn wrote something on his notepad.

  At last he put the notepad and pen away and rose. Pamela led him to the entry, handed him his coat and scarf, and saw him out the door. On the porch she looked for Catrina, longing for contact with any comforting presence, even a skittish cat. But there was no sign of her. Nor were there any cars in Bettina’s driveway. She’d have to wait to confer with her friend about this latest development.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Pamela was thankful she still had chores to do. Her mother’s solution to any problem had been to find something that needed cl
eaning and clean it, and over the years Pamela had been grateful for her mother’s example. But the house was already clean. There was cooking to do though—meat sauce for tonight’s spaghetti and the pecan pie for Thanksgiving.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table comparing pecan pie recipes in three different cookbooks when the doorbell rang. Not Detective Clayborn again, she prayed, and please not reporters clamoring to interview the person who found the body. She edged toward the kitchen door and peeked around into the entry. Through the lace that curtained the oval window in the front door she could make out a silhouette that was not tall enough to be a man, so it wasn’t the detective. A face loomed close to the glass. The face was topped by a reddish-orange cap or . . . red hair. It was Bettina.

  She hurried to the door, pulled it open, and swept Bettina up in a hug.

  “Uh-oh,” Bettina said when Pamela had let her go. Her forehead wrinkled with concern. “I was going to tell you something’s happening at the corner—police cars, an ambulance, and people swarming all over. But I suspect you already know.”

  “I do.” Pamela led her friend to the kitchen and took her coat. “Shall I make coffee?” she asked.

  “I’ll do it,” Bettina said. “You sit down and tell me what’s going on.”

  While Bettina busied herself at the counter, Pamela described checking behind the fence for cast-off treasures and coming upon the body.

  “I suppose you’ve talked to Clayborn.” Pamela nodded, though Bettina couldn’t see her, because at that moment Bettina was opening cupboard doors looking for coffee beans.

  “Above the stove,” Pamela said.

  Bettina turned.

  “Yes, I talked to him,” Pamela said. “I suppose you’ll be talking to him too, for the Advocate.”

  “Probably not for a few days though,” Bettina said. “He’s a busy guy, and when you write for the weekly throwaway there isn’t a big rush to be first with the hot story.”

  “That reporter from the County Register will probably be ringing the bell any minute. The Register tracked me down first thing the morning after Amy was killed.”

  As if on cue, the doorbell rang, and Pamela opened the door to discover that the County Register reporter had indeed arrived. It was the same reporter who had come the previous week, the energetic young woman with sparkling eyes and bright lipstick. Pamela stepped out onto the porch, coatless, and pulled the door closed behind her, hoping that this ploy would confine the reporter to only the most basic questions.

  She described once again how she happened to find the body, and was surprised to get an approving nod when she explained about looking for treasures in the apartment building’s trash. She acknowledged that, yes, she was the same person who found Amy Morgan’s body and that Amy’s murder had happened right out there in the front yard. She confirmed that Amy had been an old friend.

  “Was this most recent victim also an old friend?” the reporter asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Pamela said. Then she hugged herself, muttered “brrrr” a few times, and escaped back into the house, before the reporter could inquire whether she had recognized the victim at all.

  When she got back to the kitchen, Bettina had coffee ready and two wedding china cups and saucers set out on the table, along with two pieces of toast spread with jam.

  “This was the best I could do in the way of goodies,” she said, “but I thought you might need a bite of something.”

  Pamela gratefully ate a piece of toast and sipped at her coffee. “That dead woman looked familiar,” she said after the two friends had sat in companionable silence for a few minutes.

  “Like somebody from Arborville?” Bettina asked.

  “No . . . she was wearing a fur jacket and just didn’t have an Arborville look.”

  “Here’s the obvious question,” Bettina said. “Did the same person kill her as killed Amy? You said it looked like she’d been stabbed right through the front of her sweater.”

  “But with a knife or something, not a knitting needle. Not even an ice pick. Though there was that chisel thing Dorrie was waving around.” She grimaced.

  “Well, we already know Dorrie Morgan isn’t our killer—at least if her tale about the ice sculpture for the bachelor party is true.”

  “And who could make something like that up?” Pamela said.

  Bettina went on. “And would Karen Dowling switch over to a knife? Or Olivia Wiggens or that knitting protester? And anyway, what would this new murder victim have to do with Wendelstaff ?” She turned her coffee cup this way and that on her saucer and studied its pattern. “Of course, maybe the two murders aren’t related at all.”

  Pamela jumped up. “Wait!” She ran to the living room, returned with her knitting bag, and pulled out the knitting needle she’d found in the carpet that morning.

  Bettina reached for it. “That’s a relief,” she said. “I like sweet little Karen.”

  “I do too.” Pamela took the knitting needle back and set it on the table. “If the murders are related, this new one probably lets out that woman at the store in Brooklyn.”

  “The one you thought wanted the mystery yarn back to use in fertility rituals?”

  Pamela laughed, the first time she’d laughed all day. “That was a bit far-fetched, wasn’t it? And even if it wasn’t, this fur-jacket woman would have had to have her own batch of the mystery yarn in order to make her a target.”

  “And you said the fur-jacket woman was older.”

  “Quite old—as old as Nell, probably.”

  “So that lets out Bob Randolph,” Bettina said. “That is, if we were thinking his motive was unrequited love. But it’s odd her body ended up outside his and Amy’s apartment building.”

  “He could have had some other motive,” Pamela said. “Like maybe he thought this woman somehow knew he killed Amy and so he had to kill her too.”

  They sipped their coffee, and Bettina got up and refilled both cups.

  “That woman looked so familiar,” Pamela said with a sigh. “But I just can’t think from where.”

  “Where have you been lately, besides Arborville?” Bettina asked.

  Pamela shrugged. “The funeral?”

  Bettina nodded. “Maybe that’s it. I don’t remember any fur jackets, but it wasn’t that cold a day. Those people definitely looked like a fur-jacket sort of crowd.”

  “But what would she have been doing in Arborville?”

  “And who was she? I’ll see if I can get in to talk to Clayborn on Friday. Or the Register will cover the story tomorrow. Maybe that reporter who tracked you down will have gotten an ID on the body from the Arborville police.”

  * * *

  Pamela’s favorite old mixing bowl stood at the ready, heavy pottery glazed a creamy caramel color with three white stripes circling it near the rim. A pastry cloth had been smoothed out on the kitchen table. She measured out a cupful of flour, added half a teaspoon of salt, and sifted the mixture into the waiting bowl. Rummaging in her silverware drawer for knives to cut in the shortening reminded her of the scene she was trying to forget. She closed the drawer and used her fingers instead, scooping up fingerfuls of flour, pinching off bits from the lump of shortening she’d deposited in the midst of the sifted flour, and rubbing until the result was, as the pie crust recipe she’d memorized long ago had put it, the consistency of coarse sand.

  She sprinkled the mixture with a few tablespoons of cold water, tossed it with a fork, and pressed it into a rough ball with her hands. Soon she’d rolled out an uneven circle on the floured pastry cloth, maneuvered it into the speckled pie pan, and used the thumb of one hand and two fingers of the other to mold a gently scalloped pie-crust rim around the edge.

  The question now was, did she have any rum? The three recipes she’d studied differed from one another only in a few particulars. There was disagreement about the number of eggs required. Three? Or four? But perhaps the recipe with the more generous egg allotment dated from an era when eggs, like almost everyt
hing else, were smaller. And how much sugar was really necessary if a cup of dark corn syrup had already been added?

  The only difference that seemed significant was that one of the recipes called for rum, three tablespoons. Pamela prided herself on being an inventive cook and surprising people with twists on tried-and-true dishes. A little rum in the pecan pie could be just the thing to provoke delighted exclamations when the pie was sampled.

  Pamela’s liquor collection, such as it was, shared space with other bottled things, like vinegar and soy sauce, on the shelf above the stove where she also stored coffee and tea. Craning her neck, she moved bottles this way and that, clearing a path to forgotten items at the very back of the shelf. Indeed, she had rum, in a tall brown bottle with a tropical scene on the label—a long-ago gift, perhaps, from someone returning from a Caribbean vacation. She reached it down. Very little had been drunk. If rum proved to lift pecan pie to new levels of scrumptiousness, she would be able to get many many repeats of today’s pie out of this one bottle.

  Mixing the filling went quickly. Instead of chopping the pecan halves like the rum recipe suggested, she left them as they were. She liked the abstract patterns the small ovals made on the surface of the custard mixture, like a coppery mosaic. She stirred the pecan halves into the ingredients that waited in the caramel-colored bowl, gently coaxed the mixture into the prepared pie shell with her favorite spatula, and slid the pie pan into the oven. She’d wait until the pie was done before she started on the sauce for that evening’s spaghetti.

  As she’d moved around her kitchen working on the pie, the sky had gradually darkened. On these late-fall evenings night came even before six p.m., and it was getting on toward six thirty. Penny wasn’t likely to arrive for an hour or more, but Pamela certainly didn’t want her showing up to an unwelcoming house. She’d put the porch light on now just in case.

  In fact, the whole house was dark. She switched on a light in the entry and detoured into the living room to click on a lamp. As she returned to the entry, a faint sound reached her ears. It was a familiar sound, and she smiled in anticipation. Sure enough, she flipped the switch that banished the darkness from the front porch, and a tiny pair of eyes met hers through the lace that curtained the oval window in the front door.