Patterns in the Sand

by Sally Goldenbaum

  “I’m surprised to see Billy this morning at all, much less hiking up a hill. He must be feeling horrible.”

  “One would certainly think so. He must have a cast-iron constitution.”

  “Did you tell Ben about last night?”

  Nell nodded. “He plans to talk to Billy later today. There were too many other people in that bar who could misinterpret what he said. Better Billy and Ben talk to the chief before someone else does.”

  “I’m sure he’ll explain it away in two sentences.” Izzy leaned back and craned her neck to see if anything more was happening. “Jeez. Aunt Nell, look.”

  Nell turned on her chair and looked down through the trees at more movement on the trail.

  Her hands were wrapped around a walking stick nearly twice as tall as her five-foot frame, but it didn’t slow the determined walk. Dressed in long shorts, a red sweater wrapped around her shoulders, and her cap of snow-white hair gleaming in the sunlight, Birdie resolutely and steadily made her way up the path, her eyes glued to the figures a short distance ahead.

  “What is she doing?” Izzy said in hushed tones, hoping the Sunday Times had enough news to hold Sam’s and Ben’s interest.

  “She was having breakfast with Jane and Ham down at their place earlier today. She must have spotted Billy. Maybe she wanted to make sure he was okay.”

  “Or wondered why he was walking up behind Aidan’s house, is more like it. Sometimes you’re just too nice, Nell.”

  Ben looked up from the paper. He’d pulled out the sports section and given it to Sam. He looked from Nell to Izzy and back again.

  “You two look like you’re up to no good.”

  Izzy and Nell started eating their eggs.

  “I mean it, Nell. I can see the wheels turning in your head.”

  “Ben, you know that the wheels turn slowly in Sea Harbor sometimes. Maybe it’s not a bad thing we’re turning our own.”

  “They may turn slowly, but they turn, Nell. Jerry Thompson is on this one.”

  “Nothing’s happening, Uncle Ben. Nothing at all.” Izzy ran her fingers through her hair.

  “We need to do something. And talking to Billy Sobel is right up there on the list. We need to know what he was talking about last night.”

  Ben pushed his chair back and stretched his legs. “Here’s what I think you need to do. I think you need to cool your heels. And that goes for Cass and Birdie, too. This isn’t a game of Clue, Nell. Someone murdered Aidan Peabody. Intentionally.”

  Sam folded up the paper and set it aside. “So are you thinking Bill Sobel is involved in this?”

  Ben scratched his head. “Well, at the last there are some questions that need to be asked.”

  “He’s a nice guy. He’s handled some of my photographs for me. Did a great job with the last exhibit. But I guess none of us knows what another guy—”

  “Or gal,” Izzy dropped in.

  “Okay—or gal”—Sam offered Izzy a grin—“will do when pushed too far.”

  “That’s right,” Ben said. “And unless a stranger came into town, murdered Aidan, and then disappeared, that someone—that murderer—is probably someone we know.”

  “And maybe even someone we like,” Nell added.

  The thought sobered the group and they sat in silence for a minute.

  Nell turned away, her gaze drifting over the treetops. The murderer could be an acquaintance, someone she rubbed shoulders with at the market, or had coffee with, or was on a committee with. An awful thought, not easy to digest. Leave it to Ben to sprinkle them with a little bit of realism on a sunny Sunday morning. But she knew exactly what he was doing—building a case for caution. Protecting those he loved. And even when she found it irritating, she loved him dearly for it.

  “Take Willow, for example,” Ben went on, his voice low and even. “We’re so quick to defend her—and count me in there among the best of the defenders. I happen to think the lovely young woman couldn’t kill a slug. But it’s because we like her, and we somehow feel responsible for her. If we’re really being objective—and I’m not saying we should be—but the real facts are that we don’t know much about her and what she might have done or not done. We don’t know what went on between her and Aidan. And she doesn’t talk much to us. Willow is still a mystery.”

  The shadow that fell over the table wasn’t carrying a tray or pot of coffee, and Nell knew instinctively, even before looking up into those familiar dark eyes, whom she’d see standing at the table’s edge.

  Willow Adams was alone, her dark hair pushed back haphazardly behind her ears, and her black eyes troubled. She seemed even smaller, Nell thought, than the sleeping, tired girl they had found in Izzy’s window all those days ago.

  “I shouldn’t have been listening,” Willow said. “I just came over to say hello.”

  “Willow, you need to understand the context,” Nell began.

  Willow held up one hand to stop her explanation. “No, you’re right. All of you. I know your words aren’t meant to be hurtful. You’ve been nicer to me than anyone in my whole life. But you don’t know much about me—that’s true.” A wry smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “The truth is, there isn’t very much to know. I am what I am. But you need to know this much—and I swear on my mother’s grave that it’s the truth—I didn’t kill my father.”

  Willow sucked in a lungful of air, as if the last statement had depleted her supply. She rested her palms on the table, and then she continued, her voice strong and in charge. “But you need more from me than that.”

  “No, Willow. That’s enough. We believe you.” Nell reached over and put her hand on top of Willow’s.

  Willow shook her head, her hair moving in slow motion, back and forth across her shoulders. The black in her eyes deepened and looked into Nell’s.

  “No, it’s not enough. What I need to do is help you find the person who killed Aidan Peabody. I owe you that.”

  Ben had started to rise as soon as Willow approached the table. This time he made it all the way up.

  Nell couldn’t tell who made the first move, Willow or Ben, but in the next minute his arms were wrapped around Willow tight, and Willow hugged him right back.

  A ruckus down the deck drew them apart, and Ben looked over the top of Willow’s head to a table a short way away.

  D. J. Delaney sat with a huge plate of eggs and bacon in front of him, and directly across the table were two of his foremen, eating oversized portions of Annabelle’s Sunday special.

  “They wanted double orders,” Stella whispered, coming up to their table. “Can you believe anyone could eat that much?”

  But it wasn’t the food that had the other outdoor diners staring at the table.

  It was Natalie Sobel, dressed in a pink lace blouse and standing tall on matching heels. She looked at the construction workers as if she were going to kill them.

  “Our house is sinking,” she screamed at D.J.

  D.J. continued to chew on a bite of English muffin, his fork shoveling into a mound of eggs. His brows lifted and he smiled quizzically at the two men across from him.

  “Don’t you look away from me, D. J. Delaney,” Natalie screamed. “And wipe that smirk off your face. We know what you are. You are a crook. A crook,” she yelled.

  And then she took a deep breath of air, calmed herself, and dug into a shiny black purse hanging from a gold chain across her shoulder.

  “It’s done. We’ve just finished the paperwork,” she said.

  “For what?” D.J. asked, finally looking at Natalie.

  “For suing the pants off you, you poor excuse for a human being.”

  And with that, she slapped an envelope right in the middle of his eggs and stomped out of the restaurant, her fine skinny heels tapping across the room.

  The front door slammed shut and several cups rattled on a tray.

  Stella pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her nose. “Sundays at Annabelle’s,” she said, half to herself. Then she pushed a pencil be
hind her ear, shrugged, and walked off to fill some empty water glasses.

  Chapter 20

  Izzy walked across the back room of the knitting studio. Outside, the sky was overcast, casting dark shadows across the room.

  “Birdie, you can’t be doing things like that,” she scolded, her flip-flops slapping the floor more soundly than usual. “You’re seventy-, eightysomething—you shouldn’t be following people up hills, pretending you’re Kinsey Millhone or Jessica Fletcher.”

  “Izzy, my dear, when will you begin to understand that age doesn’t dictate actions. What is that saying Hallmark is so fond of—it’s not how old you are but how . . . Oh, dear, I never get it right. But what matters isn’t how old you are but what you do with those years. And if I chose to live them proving that a sweet young girl is innocent, then I shall jolly well do so.” Birdie’s voice was unusually caustic.

  “Calm down, Ms. Favazza. I’d say you live your years mighty well. Just don’t go getting yourself killed in the process.” Cass walked across the room with a bottle of water in one hand and a lumpy knitting bag in the other.

  Cass had pulled her thick hair back and tied it at the base of her neck with what looked to Nell like a piece of thin rope. Probably something from The Lady Lobster, she thought, amused.

  The late-Sunday-afternoon gathering was impromptu. It was Nell’s idea, stimulated by spotting Birdie in the woods, Izzy’s new quota to have a dozen chemo caps a week, and the emotion lacing Willow’s voice that morning, yearning for an end to the horrible mess that had put her life on hold.

  Knit caps. Regroup. Cocktail hour, the text message read. It still mystified Nell how Izzy sent lightning-fast messages with her thumbs. Her own were limited to single words, and she’d only recently learned to add periods.

  “This mess just has me seeing red,” Birdie said. “What are we missing here? People are starting to lock their doors in Sea Harbor. We’ve got to put an end to it.”

  She sank back into the sofa, her red tennis shoes barely touching the floor.

  Nell pulled her sweater from her bag. More head hugger hats were the goal, but she could easily knit up several of those at meetings she had scheduled this week. Willow’s sea sweater—as she had begun to think about it—was less portable as it grew. And besides, if truth be known, the intriguing, intricate designs that magically appeared as she worked the cable stitches running from the top of the sweater to the bottom had become something that she couldn’t put aside for long. And the texture of the yarn brought comfort to her fingers and her spirit.

  “What were you going to do if Billy or Ellen turned around and saw you?” Izzy stopped straightening up the stray scissors, yarn markers, and measuring tapes on the worktable and looked over at Birdie.

  “I would have said, ‘Good morning. Lovely day, isn’t it?’ I certainly had as much right to be there as they did. What’s the matter with all of you? A person can’t take a stroll in Aidan’s woods any longer? I think Aidan would have loved me being there. In fact, I felt him right there beside me. And I told him his path needed tending. A body could trip on those ruts.”

  Birdie was right, Nell thought. Aidan would have loved the image of the tiny white-haired woman with the huge walking stick climbing his hill. Especially if it brought them closer to finding out who killed him. And most especially if it cleared his daughter from suspicion so she could go on with her life.

  “So what’s the upshot?” Cass sat on the window seat, her legs crossed kindergarten-style, with Purl purring contentedly in the circle formed by her legs. A gusty wind blew in from off the ocean and Cass reached behind her and closed one of the windows. “Why were Ellen Marks and Billy Sobel strolling through the woods together? Did you talk to them?”

  Birdie pulled her needles from the bag. Her cap was half finished, a delicious seamless concoction of hand-spun cotton in shades of yellow, blue, and cherry. It was her fifth cap in two weeks.

  “Yes,” she said, a satisfied look spreading across her lined face.

  “Well?” the knitters’ voices rose up in the salt-scented air and melded together as one.

  Birdie’s needles clicked to the beat of Elton John crooning about dancing in the sand. Without a pause, she pulled a ball of brilliant cherry cotton from her bag and slipped a strand around the needle, beginning a new row and a new color to the body of the hat. Though it was best to keep the caps smooth on the inside so they would be soft and comfortable, she’d decided to form tiny knit flowers to sprinkle on the outside.

  “When I got to the end of the trail, they were sitting at the top on those lovely wooden benches the women’s club donated, the ones tucked off to the side, protected by that stand of arborvitae. They didn’t see me at first. Their heads were bent, but I could tell Ellen looked worried about something—Rebecca, maybe? I think she worried about her sister like a mother hen.

  “Billy was two sheets to the wind, as you might imagine. He looked like he was struggling to keep up with what Ellen was saying, so she raised her voice, as if that would help him focus. And I heard her tell Billy what a good friend he’d been—and she knew he’d help her out if she needed it.”

  “Why did she need help? What kind of help?” Cass pulled forward, not wanting to miss the punch line, and Purl jumped to the floor in a graceful leap. The fanciful child’s cap Cass had been knitting fell from her lap to the floor, the silky strands of yarn waving in the breeze like a peacock’s fan.

  “I can’t really say.”

  “Why?” Izzy and Nell chorused.

  “Because I don’t know. They must have discussed whatever it was while I was still out of earshot. But they both looked upset—Ellen more worried, and Billy sad.” Birdie finished a band of cherry on the hat, then pulled out a lemony yarn, wrapped it around her needle, and worked it into the next row. “They could have been talking about Aidan.”

  “Why Aidan?”

  “Because when I first spotted them, they were standing at the trail head—the spot where that lovely little wooden figure of Aidan’s sits, right beside his house. And they were both staring at the house as if Aidan himself was about to walk out the door.”

  “So Ellen was worried about Rebecca—or something.” Nell’s words came out slowly, inviting them all to make sense out of them.

  “Something like murder?” Izzy pulled out the first assumption playing on each of their minds and laid it out in front of them.

  “I can’t get my arms around that,” Birdie said. “Rebecca is emotional and spontaneous, but murder?”

  “She certainly didn’t like Aidan. She told us that herself.”

  “Why did they split up?” Cass asked, carrying a trayful of wineglasses to the table. “It happened abruptly, right? Aidan brought her to a Friday supper one week last month—they seemed reasonably happy.”

  “Though Rebecca was quiet that night, I remember. And Aidan, too.”

  “And then the next week Aidan came alone.”

  “And he brushed off questions about it,” Izzy said. “I remember, because I asked him about her. But breakups happen, I guess. Especially with the Rebeccas of this world. Besides, I thought they were an odd couple to start with.”

  Nell retrieved Birdie’s chilled bottle of wine from the refrigerator and walked back into the room. “It didn’t seem like a traumatic breakup—you’re right. Aidan seemed fine. And Rebecca was out and about, flirtatious as ever. She didn’t act like her life had changed much.”

  Nell was thoughtful for a minute, thinking of the few Friday nights that Aidan had brought Rebecca to dinner. She had the feeling from the beginning it was a relationship Rebecca had manipulated. And Aidan, for lack of other interests at the time, had gone along with it. Rebecca was beautiful. Witty.

  She pulled out the cork and poured the pinot into the glasses on the coffee table. Izzy had put out a platter of crisp pita pieces and a round of Brie, some napkins, and small knives. A bowl of freshly picked strawberries made Nell smile with a touch of pride. Izzy had learned
about balancing color and taste, sweet and tangy, from her many meals in her aunt’s kitchen.

  As the others reached for the wine and spread buttery Brie over the pita chips, Nell walked over to the open window and looked out over a fleet of white billowing sails as the boats scurried back into the harbor beneath the gray sky. The wind was strong and the blue sky they’d enjoyed in the morning was gone, the sky heavy with gray clouds burdened with the weight of rain.

  She breathed in the earthy, slightly iron scent, mixed with the salty breeze. It wasn’t far away. A summer storm.

  A sudden flash of lightning lit up the darkening sky, and seconds later, thunder rolled across the water like an oncoming freight train. They needed the rain. And the timing was good, Nell thought. The rain would come tonight, and tomorrow Billy Sobel would have a clean, rain-washed day for the opening of his James exhibit. At least there were bright spots in the midst of the murkiness of murder.

  And perhaps the rain would wash away some of the unanswered questions, too, and allow them to make sense of the puzzle pieces that were scattered right there in front of their eyes. Willow’s inheritance. Aidan’s relationships. Aidan and Billy Sobel . . . D. J. Delaney. And who? Who else could have wanted to end Aidan Peabody’s life?

  When the bell above the front door chimed, Nell glanced at her watch, then looked over at the archway that led into the front of the store. The others looked, too, knowing Mae had turned off the computer and gone home for the day shortly after they’d arrived. She had waved at them from the doorway, her car keys in hand. “Don’t forget to lock up on your way out,” she’d reminded them.

  Willow Adams appeared in the archway.

  But it wasn’t the same Willow Adams they had seen just hours before.

  Instead of long thick hair held in place with great difficulty, Willow bore a cropped, dark head of hair, wavy and full and short. It moved of its own volition, with thick curls and waves defining it irregularly. Raindrops glistened off the surface of a bright yellow slicker too big for her body, which covered her almost down to her ankles.