Lie of the Needle (A Deadly Notions Mystery)

by Cate Price

  I glanced at Joe, and he hid a smile. I didn’t want to tell her it was doctored Stove Top, to which I usually added some cranberries, celery, and chopped pecans.

  “No, um, actually Dad is making the traditional version this time with celery, carrots, onions, sage, and browned sausage.”

  “Want to see the menu?” Joe had a shy smile on his face.

  “Of course, Daddy, but I already know it’s going to be awesome.”

  “Martha’s making the desserts,” he said, “but the rest is on me.”

  He handed her a sheet of paper in a festive orange design that would be displayed on a stand in the study during cocktail hour.

  Joe and Daisy’s Thanksgiving Menu

  APPETIZERS

  Parmesan Cheese Straws

  Antipasto Platter

  Pâté de Campagne with Cornichons and Crackers

  STARTER

  Margarita Lime–Grilled Shrimp Cocktail

  DINNER

  Roast Turkey with Bourbon Maple Glaze

  Sausage, Chestnut, and Sage Dressing

  Butternut Squash–Cheddar Gratin with Rosemary Bread Crumbs

  Mashed Potatoes and Sweet Potatoes

  Roasted Balsamic Cipollini Onions

  Green Beans Amandine, Sweet Corn, and Brussels Sprouts

  Cranberry Sauce

  Turkey Gravy

  Buttermilk Biscuits

  DESSERT

  Pumpkin Cheesecake

  Fig Pecan Pie

  Chocolate Mousse

  “Yowza,” Sarah said. “How many people are coming to this shindig?”

  “Leftovers are the best.” Eleanor sipped her martini. “Don’t worry about it, kid.”

  * * *

  Martha arrived as promised the next day, around one o’clock. Joe had been up early that morning, preparing the dishes that could be made ahead of time. Martha rolled up her sleeves, and I offered to help, too, but Joe was one of those people who liked to have room to maneuver in the kitchen, and one extra body was enough.

  I took myself off to the dining room and unwrapped my Limoges dinner service. At each plate I set a mini pumpkin as a placeholder, with the guest’s name lettered on the side. Along the middle of the table I’d created a rustic arrangement of bittersweet branches wrapped around white pumpkins, sitting on a bed of pinecones and oak leaves with votive candles staggered in between.

  I was happily polishing the silverware and about to set out my best wineglasses when I heard the sound of raised voices coming from the kitchen. I tossed my towel onto the table and hurried toward the commotion.

  “Oh, I always stuff my turkey,” Martha was saying. “That’s the only way to do it.”

  Joe exhaled. “Well, I like to cook the dressing on the side in a casserole dish. Not just for safety reasons, but I think the turkey cooks more evenly that way.”

  Martha sniffed. “I’m telling you, it tastes so much better with the juices from the bird.”

  Joe shoved a pile of cut up onions, celery, parsley, and thyme into the body cavity with such vigor, it was a good job the poor fowl couldn’t feel a thing. He threw the neck, liver, and gizzards into a pan where butter was already sizzling. “This juice will add flavor. Trust me.”

  She peered over his shoulder. “I always cover my turkey with a wet buttered cheesecloth, too. Do you have a cheesecloth here, Joe? If not, I can always run home and get one. There’s no need to baste, and it cooks perfectly.”

  I winced. One of Joe’s favorite parts of the operation was basting the turkey. My husband, who was normally so even-keeled that nothing could rock him, was looking a little flushed.

  “Hey, Martha, how about a glass of champagne?” I suggested. “And I could use your help in the dining room, if you have a minute.”

  I’d never seen Joe open a bottle so fast.

  Martha and I finished setting up the dining room, and then I enticed her into a game of cards in the living room. Eleanor showed up an hour later, and together with Sarah and Peter, we switched to Pokeno, one of my favorite vintage games, sort of a cross between poker and bingo. While we played for stacks of pennies, the enticing aroma of roasting turkey wafted through the house. Jasper enthusiastically huffed the air, almost choking on his own drool and alternating between keeping an eye on the kitchen and fixing me with a pleading stare.

  “You’re a dog,” I told him as I shuffled the cards. “Dog food is good for you. Not turkey.”

  “Oh, and I suppose fatty cheese and large quantities of chardonnay are good for you,” Eleanor said.

  Sarah snickered.

  I leaned down to pet him, and Jasper gave a little jump up and kissed me on the mouth.

  “Ew, Mom, how do you know he didn’t just lick his privates?”

  Eleanor roared as I wiped my lips.

  “His mouth is cleaner than yours, in more ways than one, young lady.”

  PJ was the next to arrive. “I brought a bone for the dog, too,” she said gruffly as she handed me a bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums, orange roses, sunflowers, and eucalyptus.

  I hugged her. “Thank you for the beautiful flowers, and the bone is a fantastic idea. It’ll keep him busy while we eat dinner and stop him from bothering the guests.”

  Jasper danced around so hard, he almost fell over backward. PJ laughed.

  “Go ahead,” I said, “you can give it to him now if you’d like. Be his best friend.”

  As the dinner hour drew closer, we moved to the study for drinks and appetizers. Martha opted for more champagne, Eleanor had her usual vodka martini—shaken, not stirred—and Peter opened a bottle of Washington State chardonnay for the rest of us.

  Sarah flicked her long blond hair over one shoulder and munched on a cheese straw. “How come you didn’t invite Patsy and Claire, Mom?”

  “They’re spending the holiday with Patsy’s sister and her family.”

  Joe popped his head into the study, holding a potato masher. “Anyone want to work out their aggressions on the mashed potatoes?”

  Martha jumped up and whipped it out of his hand before anyone else could even open their mouths. “I’ll do it. I’ll need butter, milk, sour cream, and plenty of pepper,” she ordered as she marched out of the room.

  Eleanor, Sarah, and Peter followed with alacrity. They’d been in the film business long enough to know when a pivotal scene was coming up, and they were eager to see how it would play out.

  PJ nodded toward the doorway. “So what’s the deal with Eleanor?”

  “What do you mean?” I spread a dab of pâté on a cracker.

  “Why didn’t she ever marry? She’s a successful businesswoman, she’s a lot of fun, and she still looks great for her age. I mean, she’s a little different and everything, but you know . . .”

  I exhaled. It wasn’t my place to reveal Eleanor’s secret pain. Her fiancé had been killed in combat right at the end of the Vietnam conflict, and somehow she’d never quite recovered, not even after all these years.

  How to explain to a twentysomething that life’s twists and turns sometimes took you on a path not of your own choosing? How the option of getting married might seem like such a given at that age, but it wasn’t always so easy.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to find the right one,” I said carefully. “Joe and I are very lucky, but it’s not always such a smooth path for everyone.”

  The rest of the guest list—Angus, Ruth, and Mary Willis—arrived within minutes of one another, and I scurried to take coats and fill drink orders. Angus, ever kind, had given both ladies a ride in this snowy weather. Soon the house was full of the sounds of laughter, chatter, and the clink of toasts being made all around.

  “Where’s the rest of the gang?” Angus asked.

  “In the kitchen,” I said. “Come on, let’s go check out our own version of Iron Chef.”r />
  “Stop her before it’s mashed potato soup,” Eleanor murmured to me as we entered the room. I gently took the bowl from Martha’s hands.

  Joe had brought the turkey out of the oven to rest, and we all oohed and aahed at the golden brown skin.

  “You can never have too much gravy,” Martha declared as she moved over to the drippings pan. She added some stock and began to stir up all the tasty bits into bubbling brown delight.

  I slipped my arms around Joe, and he looked down at me with a rueful smile. “Just surrender to the inevitable,” I whispered. “I love you.”

  Peter asked how he could help, and I directed him to open the bottles of Beaujolais nouveau and pinot noir in the dining room. Everyone else took a dish and carried it in, and soon the old table was groaning under the weight of the feast.

  The moment everyone was seated, Joe said a prayer. I silently gave my own prayer of thanks for the glorious sight of my family and friends gathered together in our home. I wished that Cyril could have been here, but wherever he was, I sent a fervent message out to whoever was listening up above to keep him safe and warm.

  As we said amen, the lights suddenly flickered and went out. The only illumination came from the votives flickering among the white pumpkins.

  “Joe, did we blow a fuse?” I gasped.

  “It’s circuit breakers now,” he reminded me, “and no, I don’t think so.” He glanced toward the window. “Looks like the whole street is out. The weight of the snow and ice must have brought down some power lines.”

  “Don’t worry, everyone, I have more candles.” I pulled a bunch of candlesticks out of the drawer on the sideboard, and soon the room was filled with a magical glow.

  “Thank goodness the dinner was cooked first,” Joe said. “Let’s have a toast. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!”

  “I think we should toast the chef, too,” Martha said. “Outstanding job, Joe.”

  Amid the chorus of agreement and praise, I smiled at my husband and raised my glass in a loving salute.

  We began passing dishes around, and I didn’t have to ask anyone twice to dig in. Angus piled his food so high, it was touch-and-go if it would stay on the plate, and Eleanor’s meal wasn’t much smaller.

  “Did you ever have this butternut squash casserole before?” Angus asked her.

  “No, but I’ll try anything twice.”

  “Daddy, you might need to open some more champagne,” Sarah said as she took hold of her boyfriend’s hand. “Peter and I have an announcement to make. We’re getting married!”

  Tears sprung into my eyes, and in the hubbub that followed, I managed to hug both Sarah and Peter before I was enveloped in Martha’s arms and thumped on the back by Angus.

  “This is the perfect romantic atmosphere, with all these candles,” Sarah exclaimed. “We couldn’t have planned it better.”

  “Speaking of planning, did you set a date yet? Where are you going to have the wedding?”

  Jeez, there was so much to prepare. I’d need to nail Sarah down on a date soon. She wouldn’t realize that these things could take months, a year, to plan, let alone trying to book a church and a venue.

  “Mom! Just enjoy the moment, okay?” She smiled at me. “Don’t start making yourself crazy yet.”

  I nodded even as I was forming a guest list in my mind. Joe’s mom had passed away a few years back, but his dad would come, if we could drag him away from fishing off the Florida Keys. My parents, of course, would make the trip for a wedding, even though they weren’t good at traveling anymore. And our friends from Millbury . . .

  Sarah nudged me, and I chuckled. She knew me too well. “Okay, okay. I’ll worry about it later.”

  While we ate, we took turns at bringing Sarah and Peter up to date on recent events. Jasper sprawled across PJ’s feet under the table and never left her side for the whole meal, ever hopeful for tidbits that I strongly suspected she slid to him every now and then.

  “It’s amazing that such a quiet little village has so much drama and violence going on,” Peter said as he sipped his pinot noir.

  “Ain’t it just?” Angus took another buttermilk biscuit out of the basket and stuck it in his pool of gravy. If Eleanor had been counting on leftovers, she hadn’t counted on Angus’s mountain-man appetite.

  I told them about the neighbor in the Cassell development seeing a flash from the window of the vacant house, and said perhaps Roos was taking photos of someone across the street.

  “Or maybe there was a tryst going on inside, and he was doing erotic shots of Sally McIntire?” Eleanor suggested.

  But Sarah, who was an avid photographer, threw cold water on that theory. “At night he wouldn’t have used a flash, but a big aperture on low speed.”

  “Did you ever think that maybe he was signaling for help?” Joe said, his dark eyes solemn.

  We looked at each other, and I swallowed some more wine to ease the tightness in my throat. “Well, with all the busybodies in that development, it’s a shame that no one answered his plea.”

  “It’s so hard to believe that Althea Gunn is a murderer. She’s such a God-fearing woman,” Mary Willis said, making the sign of the cross.

  “Her evil ancestor made money off people’s misery,” I said. “That knowledge must have haunted a person like Althea, who was always so worried about appearances.”

  Eleanor snorted. “She was so busy telling other people how to live, she forgot to figure out the right way for herself.”

  “So she steals this guy’s truck,” Peter said, ticking off plot points on his fingers as if going through his latest script treatment, “knowing where the keys were kept in the construction trailer. She picks up the photographer on the road and drives him to the site. Did she somehow get him into the house, and then he signaled for help?”

  “Seems like a long shot,” Joe said. “Don’t think I would sit still long enough to be tied up and spray-foamed if I were him.”

  “Maybe she killed him somewhere else.” Eleanor took another helping of Brussels sprouts. “Then she went back and trashed the studio to make it look like a robbery.”

  “Good God, woman!” Martha said. “Do you have worms or something? That’s your third helping tonight!”

  “Why don’t you just f-f-fade away?”

  Sarah grinned at Eleanor. “The Who, right?”

  Eleanor nodded as she dished another mound of stuffing onto her plate.

  As I looked around the table, I realized we had a lot to be thankful for. Our freedom, our health, one another. “Enough of this sad talk,” I said. “Let’s have another toast to Peter and Sarah.”

  Mary shyly raised her glass. “Well, dears, I hope you’ll be as happy as me and my Fred. We were together almost forty years before he passed.”

  “Yeah, the old married couple is something of a rare treasure these days,” Angus said, “whether by divorce or, at our age, death.” He raised his glass. “Best of luck, kids.”

  Ruth sighed. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever have another chance at marriage. I would have been a good catch if I hadn’t made such a stupid mistake. I’d be a wealthy widow now. You wouldn’t believe how many people want nothing to do with me anymore because I can’t go out to expensive dinners or invite them to a fancy party.”

  Sarah raised an eyebrow at me, and we shared one of our rare moments of perfect understanding. “Hey, Mom, I just thought of something. I could take the last model photo for free if we can find another guy. I have all my camera stuff with me.”

  “Yeah, and I could spring for the costs of the printing.” PJ looked up from handing tidbits to Jasper.

  “Thank you both, that’s a wonderful offer, but let’s discuss it later, okay?” I glanced at Martha. The fizz had completely faded from her. I bit my lip, wondering again if I should say something about seeing Cyril in town and the crossword clues. Even thou
gh I was pretty sure he was still alive, if he was staying hidden, there must be a very good reason.

  No, I decided, I couldn’t tell Martha, who had never been able to keep a secret to save her own life.

  * * *

  After dinner, we said good-bye to Mary Willis, Ruth, PJ, and Angus, and Joe pressed big bags of leftovers into their hands. The rest of us assembled in the kitchen to help clean up.

  Eleanor scraped mashed potatoes into containers and grinned at Peter loading the dishwasher and Joe slicing up the rest of the turkey. “Ah, my fantasy. Two men. One to cook and one to clean.”

  “Joe, why don’t you leave the rest to me?” I said. “You’ve done more than enough for one day.”

  He didn’t need a second invitation, and he, Sarah, and Peter headed for the living room to watch the game.

  “How about a nightcap, girls?” Eleanor looked at me and Martha after we’d put the food away and the kitchen was sparkling clean again.

  Martha shook her head. “I’m exhausted. I’ve been on my feet since 5 a.m.”

  “I laid out towels for you on the guest bed, and there’s an extra comforter in the closet,” I said. “Make yourself at home. I won’t be far behind.” I hugged her. “Good night.”

  Eleanor and I repaired to the study, and I poured two glasses of port.

  “Congratulations again, Daisy,” she said. “That’s wonderful news about Sarah and Peter.”

  I grinned. I felt like I’d been doing a lot of that this evening. “It certainly is. I’m glad that Sarah finally gave this relationship a chance.” As I put some more logs on the fire, I thought about Ruth and Stanley, Martha and Cyril, me and Joe, Eleanor and her lost love. The couple who fought in that vacant house, and the anger and bitterness they must have felt. Jim and Sally McIntire, and the jealousy over her supposed affairs. Angus getting divorced from Betty after all those years. My daughter and Peter just starting out in their new life together. How hard relationships could be, but how rewarding if one was prepared to put in the effort.

  “How about you, Eleanor? Would you ever consider opening up to love again?”