by Anne Canadeo
“So she’d planned this revenge scheme her whole life. Or ever since her sister died,” Maggie murmured.
“Looks like it. She came to LA after college and wrangled her way into the job at Jennifer Todd’s house, starting as a dog walker, drawing Jennifer and Nick into her confidence.”
“She did a good job playing the role of devoted assistant,” Maggie mused. “She has some acting talent herself.”
“Undoubtedly. When Jennifer and Nick teamed with Heath to make the movie, the three of them were sitting ducks for Alicia. She saw her chance to finally get revenge. To undermine the production they’d all invested in so heavily. And to physically harm them, any way she could. The combination was too tempting for her to resist.”
“I can see now how it all falls into place. I didn’t for the longest time,” Maggie admitted.
“Neither did we,” he said. “The case is closed and the guilty party is behind bars. We just dropped all charge against Todd and are about to release her.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Maggie said sincerely. She wondered if she would hear from Jen before she left town. She’d probably run straight to Boston, to be with Nick, she realized. “What a shock for her, to hear it was Alicia, who she truly trusted. Even loved. What a painful betrayal.”
Charles nodded. “Jennifer was shocked. It was a blow. Alicia had tricked us all. Operating in clear sight, flying right under our radar. She had a one-way ticket to Brazil in that pack, and was ready to fly out of Logan this afternoon. Fake ID and passport, the works. We would have never found her, if not for you and your friends. They took a big personal risk this morning . . . Not that I’m encouraging it,” he added quickly.
Maggie laughed. “Believe me, I know. But it’s good of you to say.”
He paused and gazed into her eyes. “I’m sorry we had words over this.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Maggie said quickly. “It wasn’t worth it. I shouldn’t be so stubborn. And touchy.”
“I was being a little stubborn myself. Too macho or something?” He made a face that was very endearing.
She reached across the table and took his hand. “Maybe. But I can deal with a little macho . . . or something . . . from time to time. Not a problem.”
“Show us again how you took Alicia down, Suzanne. Please?” Phoebe sat back in an armchair near the fireplace, ready for a show.
Lucy was just coming into the living room with a tray of appetizers: fresh feta cheese and cucumber and tomato chunks with red onion and dill. She’d also made her friends hummus and tzatsiki dip with crudités and pita slices. It was her turn to host their weekly meeting and for once she was ready on time and all her friends had arrived promptly, too.
Which was a good thing, because she and Maggie had cooked up a little surprise for them that did require careful timing.
“Come on, Phoebe. Nobody wants to see that again.” Suzanne shook her head, but Lucy could tell she was tempted to demonstrate their amateur “collar” of Ava—alias Alicia—again.
“I’d like to see it one more time, and I was there,” Lucy encouraged her.
Dana sat smiling and looked up from her knitting. Maggie took a bit of humus and feta salad on her plate. “I bet you could teach us all a class in self-defense, Suzanne,” she said. “That might be useful someday. If we don’t have any knitting needles handy.” Maggie added. Of course, that would be her weapon of choice.
Suzanne didn’t need too much coaxing. “Okay, one more time.” She came to her feet and stood in the middle of the room. “It was a simple, playground, bad-girl move. I need a volunteer.”
Phoebe jumped up and raised her hand. “I’ll be Alicia.”
“You need something on your back, for a pack. Use your knitting bag—perfect,” Suzanne said. Phoebe did use a backpack for her knitting and slipped the straps onto her shoulders.
Suzanne positioned Phoebe and faced her toward the door. “She was yelling at Lucy, about to spill her guts about the murders. So I just snuck up behind her, grabbed the pack, and whirled her around like this . . .”
Suzanne demonstrated her heroic move. But Phoebe was light, much lighter than Alicia, and was caught by surprise with little motivation to hold on to her knitting bag. Hardly the treasure trove Alicia had clung to so fiercely.
Almost as soon as Suzanne spun her, the straps of the pack slipped off Phoebe’s slim arms and she flew across the room, screaming with glee. “Whoa!”
Everybody stared, dumbfounded, as Phoebe landed on the couch, like a surfer washing up onshore, across Maggie’s and Dana’s laps. Maggie grabbed hold of her flying assistant’s shoulders to slow her momentum, as a glass of wine tipped over and the basket of pita pieces fell.
The dogs quickly jumped up to gobble the bread and even lapped a few drops of wine.
Everyone gasped and ran to the couch..
“Phoebe . . . are you all right?” Dana pushed Phoebe’s hair back so they could see her face. Suzanne and Lucy hovered over them.
Phoebe slowly lifted her head. “I think so . . .” She squirmed out of Maggie’s hold and sat in the middle of her friends. “Thanks for catching me,” she murmured.
“Happy to help. You were really moving,” Maggie said sincerely.
Suzanne was upset. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to throw you across the room . . .”
“That’s okay. It was fun,” Phoebe insisted, in a bit of a daze.
Lucy shook her head and laughed as she quickly dabbed up the wine with some napkins. “Enough of our glory days in law enforcement. I would like to hear more about how Alicia managed all her heinous deeds. Since Charles has been sharing the inside story, Maggie.”
Lucy had not meant to embarrass her friend, but the meaningful note in her voice did make Maggie blush.
“He knows how to get on my good side. What can I say?” Maggie replied. “The DNA tests on the blood droplet on the bottle came back. Alicia’s blood is a perfect match. Along with a bit of iodine mixed on the stain, which came from the scab on her hand from the cut she got when the light fixture fell.” Maggie turned to Phoebe and caught her glance. “You were the only one who wondered why the person who poisoned Nick dumped the bottle in such an obvious place and didn’t try to hide it better, or destroy it. Now we know why. She wanted it to be found easily and had rigged the bottle to be linked with Jennifer.”
“How did she manage that?” Dana asked.
“Remember when she came to the shop Tuesday morning, after she and Jen had visited the night before? She said Jen needed more yarn for her project. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but had been pretty sure I’d given Jen the right amount for the pattern. I thought maybe she knit with a very tight stitch. Or was making the pattern for someone with a larger size. Anyway,” Maggie said, “Alicia kept that skein for herself, planning to use it to frame Jen. It didn’t matter where the tote actually was. She had her own yarn and rubbed it on the bottle before disposing of it. She wanted to make it look as if Jennifer had picked up the bottle and hid it in the tote. But Alicia’s plan was fouled up when Jen left the tote at the shop the night Nick was poisoned. No one saw Jen touch the tote, from the time Nick was poisoned to the time she got into the ambulance. In fact, all the video on the news confirmed Jen’s story. And the tote was here, under police protection from Thursday night until they found the bottle,” Maggie explained.
“But Alicia still thought she’d get away with it,” she added, “since the police suspected Jen and were building a case against her. But when the police finally compared the yarn in the tote with the fiber on the bottle, the fibers turned out to be from a different dye lot than Jen’s. One that matched a skein they found in Alicia’s belongings. And the police couldn’t find any trace at all of the bottle or the liquid in the knitting bag after they took Jen into custody and had it back. Though they examined every inch microscopically.”
“So, when everyone was panicking about Nick’s attack, Alicia took the bottle, hid it somewhere—in a pocket or
in her purse—and rubbed the gluey part with her own yarn before she dumped it,” Lucy said, trying to get the specifics straight.
“Yes . . . and dumped it in an obvious spot, in a trash can on the village green, right across from Jennifer’s hotel,” Dana added.
“Wow, is she diabolical or what?” Suzanne had gotten over nearly flinging Phoebe through Lucy’s bay window and was enjoying the appetizers. “What about the light fixture? How did she manage that one?”
“Oh, that was pretty simple. Remember when we walked into the shop, we had to speak to a girl who was taping down the extension cords all over the floor?” Maggie asked.
Suzanne nodded, her mouth full.
“Alicia pulled up the tape that was under the table, attached to that big fixture, then ran a thin wire from the base of the fixture to the spot where she was sitting. She said it wasn’t hard to do, with all the confusion of the crew putting the set together. No one even noticed her. She maneuvered Jen to sit there and go over the script. She thought Heath was going to be sitting there, too. But he was late for the meeting.”
“I remember that,” Suzanne cut in. “Jen was asking Alicia to text him. So she didn’t care who she killed first. She was painting with a wide brush.”
“Yes, she didn’t care who she hurt with that part of the plan. I saw her stand up and say she wanted a bottle of water,” Maggie recalled. “She had wound the wire around her foot and was pulling down the metal tripod with the lights as she walked away.”
“Like a magician on a stage,” Phoebe remarked.
“Exactly. When the fixture fell, like a big metal tree, and all the broken glass sprayed everywhere, no one noticed a stray wire in the mess,” Maggie added. “Though she admitted that she cut her hand on the wire, not a piece of glass, pulling it off the tripod stand, so no one would find it. Later, the gaffers thought the equipment, which they’d rented in Boston, was just old and had not been assembled correctly.”
“And there she was, getting so much sympathy for hurting herself, trying to clean the glass off Jen, and she was just covering up her own dirty work,” Lucy said.
“Exactly,” Maggie agreed.
“The fire in Heath’s trailer,” Suzanne reminded them. “That was a good one.”
“Alicia had access to all the trailers. She was constantly in and out, delivering laundry, scripts, food. She knew all the combinations to the door locks. Heath told everyone he was taking a sleeping pill to take a nap. He claimed that he hadn’t slept well the night before and had to shoot a scene that night at the house. Alicia snuck into his trailer and set a fire in a wastepaper basket with some of his own cigarette butts, which she’d found in his living room. She slipped open his bedroom door a crack and left it there, thinking he was in bed and wouldn’t wake up because of the pill. But she never looked to make sure he was there.”
“Ha!” Suzanne laughed out loud. “So she was surprised, too, to hear the sleeping pill story was just a cover for a tryst with Trina, in her trailer.”
Maggie nodded. “Yes, she was surprised. And annoyed that plot had failed. So she moved on to the poisonings—the digitalis from the lily of the valley arrangement in Jen’s trailer. She tossed it into the juicer and added it to the special health smoothies. She injected the poison into the plastic bottle with a syringe and sealed the hole with glue,” Maggie reminded them. Lucy did remember that Dana had told them that, too.
“And the daffodil bulbs were cooked up in Jen’s trailer, right?” Suzanne asked.
“That’s right. She left the pot unwashed at the back of a closet in the kitchen and some bulbs in a coffee can, in a closet as well. Again, she had no problem at all slipping the potion into Heath’s diet lemonade. He was carrying around a plastic bottle full of the stuff and drinking it all day. Anyone could have tampered with it.” Maggie shrugged.
“But all her heinous handiwork on the set was just the last act of a long, complicated plan,” Maggie added. “She’d been working on this scheme for months. While the movie was being planned, she was planning these murders and how to frame Jen. Creating the fake online stalker, leaving notes on Jen’s fan page, using Jen’s own computer. So that Jen would be accused later of trying to create a cover for herself.”
“Alicia . . . Ava, I mean, has amazing intelligence. Imagine if she’d channeled it toward something worthwhile, like medical research or inventing things,” Dana said wistfully. “What a waste.”
“I guess she’ll spend a long time in jail now,” Lucy said.
“Yes, most likely. She’ll have years to figure out how to channel that genius toward something constructive. Though I doubt that she will,” Maggie added.
“What about Jennifer? Has anyone heard from her since she went back to LA?”
They all knew that after Jennifer had been released from custody, she went to Boston to be with Nick. His condition had improved and they were able to return to California on Monday. That news had been reported on TV.
“I heard from her,” Maggie said. “She called from the airport, just to say good-bye.”
“Too bad she couldn’t come back and say good-bye in person, but I’m not surprised,” Suzanne said with a shrug. “I bet she’s not in any hurry to visit Plum Harbor again. It wasn’t exactly a happy experience.”
“She is a big movie star. We tend to forget that,” Dana added. “She was very sweet to us when we spent time with her, but I doubt we’ll hear from her.”
“To the contrary, Dana. She really did want to come see us again. She even wished she could come to another meeting,” Maggie insisted. “In fact, she’s coming here tonight, on Skype. Lucy is going to set up the computer right now,” she added, glancing at her watch.
“Really?” Phoebe, who had been very quiet since flying across the room, suddenly sat up. “She’s going to knit with us again?”
“She’ll be here in one minute,” Lucy promised, picking up her laptop. It was on the lamp table, safely out of the way of her flying guests. Lucy flipped it open and brought up the Skype program and Jen’s contact information.
Jen was already at her computer, waiting for them, and her lovely, smiling face soon filled the screen. “Hi, everyone!” She waved to them.
The knitters all waved back. “Hi, Jen!”
Not much was visible, aside from Jen’s face and shoulders. But in the background Lucy could see a hint of Jennifer’s house, a spacious living room with a simple but luxurious-looking decor.
“Thanks for coming to the meeting. This is so cool,” Phoebe said sincerely.
“It is, isn’t it?” Jennifer laughed. “Maybe I can be a regular and tune in from LA or wherever,” she added. “Nick is really improving. We have a live-in nurse and of course Theo is here. He’s got an idea for a movie based on everything we’ve just been through. They’re already taking meetings by the pool,” Jen added, glancing over her shoulder.
“I’m not surprised,” Lucy said. “What about the movie, will you continue to work on it?”
She wondered if she should have asked that, but she was curious.
“Yes, we will. We’re going to finish it. They’ve decided they can finish without . . . Heath.” She sighed, her gaze lowered for a moment. “We’ll have to see how that works out. Nick and I are trying to work things out, too. With the movie . . . and our marriage,” she confided.
Lucy was happy to hear that, too. It would take time, but Jennifer sounded as if she was getting her life back on track, after these awful and tragic events had swept through like a tsunami. Lucy hoped Jen and Nick would have the privacy they needed to mend their relationship and their lives.
“I just want to thank you all for . . . for what you did. The way you helped me,” Jennifer added. “I still can’t believe what happened. It was a nightmare. Or like playing a character in a very dark drama. Except that I didn’t know the ending and could never walk off the set. Nobody believed me. Except all of you.”
Lucy knew that there were moments when at least one or two of
her friends had their doubts. But by and large, it was true. They had believed her and had helped to track down the real murderer.
“We knew you were innocent. It just wasn’t right. We had to find the person who did,” Suzanne replied. “I hope you don’t think badly of Plum Harbor forever.”
“On the contrary, when I think of Plum Harbor, I know I have friends there. Real friends.” Jennifer’s smile beamed warmly. Lucy knew for sure she wasn’t acting.
“That you do,” Maggie promised her. “Friends who knit together stick together.”
“I agree,” Jen said wholeheartedly. “So . . . let the knitting begin. What are we working on tonight?” she asked brightly.
“I have a lacy summer shawl pattern to show everyone. But first we’re going to show off our tank tops. Did you finish yours?” Maggie asked.
“I haven’t blocked it yet. But I have it right here.”
Jennifer turned away from the camera for a moment and soon held up the tank. She had chosen a shade of sea-blue yarn that matched her eyes, Lucy thought. “I was wondering if I should add some embellishment to the neckline, to perk it up a bit? Maybe just an edging in a contrasting color.”
“That’s a great idea,” Maggie encouraged her.
“Look what I did to mine,” Phoebe said proudly. She held up her finished project. Which was about six inches shorter than the pattern called for, Lucy noticed, with ribbing on the bottom about three inches long. “I made a crop top, instead of a long tank. It’s a little hipper looking, I thought.” She shrugged.
“It definitely is and you can wear it, too, kiddo,” Suzanne said. “With my hips and top . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
Everyone laughed, including Jennifer. It was good to see her so lighthearted, Lucy realized, after all she’d been through. It was great fun to know that the Black Sheep knitting circle could boast a real celebrity member now, too.