A Finely Knit Murder

by Sally Goldenbaum

  “Apple picking?”

  “Yesterday. It helps me think.”

  “About?” Nell brought mugs and a coffeepot to the table in front of the fireplace.

  Cass followed her but didn’t answer. Her expression said whatever it was was still being processed.

  It was about Harry Winthrop, Nell suspected. But it might have little to do with her affection for him. Cass was perceptive, and Nell wondered exactly what it was she had perceived.

  Cass dropped a set of keys on the table. “My car wouldn’t start. Harry loaned me his BMW.”

  “Nice of him,” Nell said.

  “No, not really. He owed me. I plastered a hallway full of cracks. It’s payback, I suppose.”

  “You don’t look like you’re enjoying it,” Nell said. The it was undefined and Cass’s face showed that she knew Nell was throwing her a wide-open question.

  She looked at the car keys, then back to Nell. And then she changed the subject. “Did you see Josh Babson at the Gull last night?” She scratched at a spot on her jeans, flaking off plaster residue.

  Nell and Birdie hadn’t seen him, but Izzy had, and she had talked with him.

  “We talked about his painting that the Mansfields bought. Although he had painted the same spot where Blythe was murdered, it was painted before that. But I wondered about the Mansfields buying it, because they didn’t know that. Josh was convinced they bought it because they liked it and they loved the school. Barrett told him the last thing he saw in the painting was murder—which was exactly what I thought.”

  “Hmm. Well, I guess that’s one person’s perspective,” Cass said.

  “I think it means they didn’t see a murder there. If either of the Mansfields had been involved in Blythe’s murder, I don’t think they’d have bought a painting to remind them of it.”

  It was only an opinion, but it made sense to all of them.

  Birdie spoke up. “I think another thing Barrett Mansfield is saying is that the sooner we stop seeing murder on that beautiful campus, the better.”

  Nell looked at her. Something was clearly on Birdie’s mind. It resonated in the tone of her voice.

  “There are too many casualties of this unsolved murder,” she continued.

  Izzy and Cass turned toward Birdie. Her voice was stern now, advocating a serious cause.

  Birdie looked around at each of them. “It has to stop. For the sake of the town. For the sake of our friends whose lives have been turned on their heads. And especially . . .” Birdie’s breathing became audible and her face grew so severe that Nell hurried to her side with a glass of water.

  “Birdie, take a deep breath.”

  “Especially?” Izzy sat on Nell’s slipcovered couch, pulling her legs up beneath her.

  “Especially for the sake of the children.” Once the words were out, Birdie’s face relaxed. She took a drink of water and sat down next to Izzy. “Gabby and Daisy found the rest of Elizabeth’s scarf yesterday.”

  Izzy’s eyes widened. Nell put down her coffee mug.

  Cass forked her fingers through her hair. “Where?” she finally asked.

  “At the school. They were rehearsing for the fall festival and when their part was over, they wandered down to the boathouse, doing exploring or some such thing. The kids all play on those rocks.”

  Birdie reached into her knitting basket and pulled out a plastic bag. Inside was an exquisite, bright turquoise scarf. “I’m dropping it at the police station on my way home.”

  Birdie wanted them to see it first, something Ben would have raised the roof over. Nell held back an opinion. At least Birdie wasn’t letting them touch it.

  “Two things,” Birdie said. Her voice was matter-of-fact but heavy with authority, as if she were chairman of the board, making a decision for all. “First, having children—children—exposed to this murder in any way is awful. We need it solved and all traces of it gone from our lives. Now. And I think we can. I think we have so many things rattling around in our heads that we’re not seeing the forest for the trees. It’s all here. Right in front of us.”

  Nell walked over to the kitchen island, listening, and came back with napkins and coffee cake, sliced in thin pie-shaped pieces—one thing in her life, at least, that was neat and easily managed.

  “That’s the first thing. Here’s the second—” Birdie’s voice mellowed slightly. “I know it isn’t quite kosher to run off with something that might factor into a police investigation. I’ll get it to them. But in truth, this scarf proves something. It was the actions of some frightened individual determined to put the blame for a murder on someone else. He’s trying to speed up the investigation, too. But in the wrong direction.”

  They all looked at the scarf, partially smeared with mud, one edge frayed and torn.

  “It’s a foolish attempt. Clearly we’re not working with a hardened criminal here. It’s amateurish.”

  “It may be amateurish, but he or she did kill someone,” Izzy reminded her.

  “Yes, of course.” Birdie’s white cap of hair moved slightly. “And being an amateur doesn’t mean this person isn’t dangerous. My point is if the person is this sloppy, there’s no reason he can’t be found. Immediately.”

  She paused for effect, and then continued. “The scarf was probably tossed into the ocean with hopes that the tide would miraculously land it near the scene. And somehow it did that. But the scarf is in decent condition. Muddy, but not something that’s been out there in choppy salt water for a week. And it has no further tears or rips. It’s dirty. And it’s soiled, but probably not from the ocean.” She smoothed out the large plastic bag on the coffee table, the scarf becoming visible through it. “See that?”

  They all leaned closer, looking at Elizabeth’s beautiful knit scarf and remembering the way it had transformed her from a schoolmarm to an elegant sensual woman.

  “What are we looking at?” Cass said. “I see mud.”

  “Look closer. Right there—” Birdie pointed with the tip of her finger to a spot near one corner. “I think sugar or baking soda or paint—something from sitting in a house or car, not floating in the ocean. Elizabeth wouldn’t have worn it with a stain that night—so it has happened since Blythe died.”

  They squinted at the scarf until they were all seeing an off-white smudge, garish against the silky turquoise yarn.

  “A workman at the school?” Izzy whispered. “Surely not Angelo.”

  Nell’s thoughts turned immediately to an artist with messy, paint-stained jeans.

  But the thought didn’t settle comfortably this time. Josh Babson was slowly but effectively becoming more to her than a brooding artist. She was beginning to like him.

  Birdie removed the plastic bag from the table and slid it into her purse, her face registering resolve. But more concerning to her friends were the deep worry lines that filled her face.

  Nell moved over to the couch. Birdie’s emotions were intensified because of Gabby, of course. The worry, the urgency. The thought that a murderer walked so close to where the girls played and painted and laughed. The worry wasn’t healthy. And it wouldn’t go away, not until they made it.

  They took out their knitting—a small Abby-sized sweater in a finely knit wool, long winter socks, and the poncho Gabby was making in class that required a little frogging and fixing. The sound of the needles, the rhythm of the stitches, knitting and purling and yarn overs helped them think.

  Angelo’s words returned again, as they had so many times. A hurt so great that someone would kill to dull the pain—or punish the person who inflicted it. Or struck out in anguish and took a life.

  The mental list of people was becoming ragged and worn, so often had they returned to it. They all had motive. They all had opportunity. But none of them seemed likely suspects any longer, no matter how they fared on paper.

  Nell, Izzy, Bir
die, and Cass were all unconvinced, and without a connection that knit Blythe with one of the people on the list so tightly that the stitches would refuse to come loose, the four women forced themselves to think outside the box, to make themselves invisible, like ghosts, tracing Blythe’s footsteps through her days and nights, listening to what she said, to whom she spoke.

  “We’re missing something,” Cass said. “We’ve boxed ourselves in and can’t see beyond it.”

  They all agreed. They needed to step back and look beyond the narrow prism they were looking through. They needed to dig into the shadows where they’d tucked aside things they’d seen, facts they’d recorded. Suspicions that caused them sadness.

  Nell moved back to the kitchen counter and put on another pot of coffee. She rinsed off a bunch of grapes and put them in a basket. And all the while she listened to the conversation humming in the distance.

  Then in her head she heard Chelsey Mansfield threatening Blythe.

  Elizabeth Hartley shouting at her in the middle of Harbor Road.

  And dear Angelo, his face beet red, his anger and dislike almost palpable.

  But it was the party itself, the night Blythe was killed, that came back with the most clarity. Nell followed Blythe as closely as a shadow. Every step she took that Nell could remember. Every word she said.

  The thought brought a quick, uncomfortable thump in her chest. The critical moment had been there all along, but inconsequential, hidden in the banter and warm lights of the evening. Hidden among good friends and food and music.

  She repeated each word in her head, then turned her memory to the look on Blythe’s face as she had said them. Nell looked over at Izzy and Birdie, talking in hushed tones, as they picked their way, inch by inch, to a murderer. Did Izzy hear Blythe that night?

  Surely Cass did. And ignored it, thinking Blythe was talking to her.

  But she wasn’t.

  They needed more. An expression, a look, wasn’t enough. It needed a paved road in front of it so it wouldn’t slide off the cliff.

  Nell carried Bob’s brown envelope back with the grapes and set both on the table.

  Birdie took the envelope and emptied it as Nell explained where it came from.

  “There may be nothing of use here,” she said. “But Ben asked me to sort through the contents. Maybe seeing this side of Blythe’s life will help us look at her from a different angle, one that will help us figure out what she did. Mary Pisano said Bob used that word. And it meant more than casting a boyfriend aside.”

  “Something she did . . . ,” Izzy repeated, giving it a larger space in their thoughts.

  “Something she did that brought about her death.”

  “And when Bob comes back, he can answer any questions we have,” Birdie said.

  The phone rang—Nell’s landline—and they all looked up, somehow thinking Birdie’s words had reached Bob himself.

  And he was calling to say he’d be over in a few minutes to help them finish up the puzzle. They were that close.

  But it was Ben. He was calling from the hospital.

  Chapter 33

  T hey had found Bob Chadwick early that morning. The coast guard was doing a routine patrol out near Sunrise Island. Bob was washed up on the shore, still breathing, but unconscious. He’d been beached there for a while—it could have been a day or so—with a severe blow to his head. He must have fallen off a boat. It was a miracle he hadn’t drowned.

  “We’re going to stick around here for a while,” Ben said. “Danny and Sam are with me, and Father Northcutt is on his way to see if he can help. But there’s not much anyone can do. He’s in pretty bad shape.”

  “Danny?” Nell asked. Ben had been at the meeting with Sam.

  “The coast guard called Danny because he was the one who had reported Bob missing,” Ben said. “He came to the yacht club and got Sam and me.”

  Ben paused. Then said, “It’s odd. Bob had fallen off a boat—it’s the only way he could have ended up on the island. It probably happened Friday night, because that’s when he went missing. That was the same night the keys were messed up at the yacht club and one of the boats went out without being signed out.”

  “I thought they got the keys straightened out.”

  “They did. The missing set belonged to an owner who has been out of town for a few weeks. The police are checking, but they think that was the boat that was taken out Friday night. They’ll know for sure once they examine it, since it hadn’t been used for a few weeks. The security guard keeps track as best he can, though owners can come and go as they please—but they always do a morning check. And all slips were filled Saturday morning.”

  Ben talked for a few more minutes, then promised to call back soon and hung up.

  They sat in silence, absorbing the news and trying to make sense of it.

  “It wasn’t an accident, Ben said. Someone wanted Bob Chadwick dead.”

  The word why screamed unsaid in the room. And an avalanche of loose pieces of yarn seemed to float around as if to strangle it.

  “Why was he on a boat?” Cass said.

  “He likes to sail,” Ben had said the other day. But it certainly didn’t fit his schedule for Friday. At least as far as they knew.

  “Mary Pisano said Bob was disturbed about something, someone. Danny sensed that, too. He thought Bob was onto something regarding Blythe’s death,” Birdie said.

  “He was meeting someone,” Nell said. She knew they were close. The pieces were scattered, but there. Had Bob Chadwick followed the same trail? A person hurt so badly by something his cousin did that he killed her?

  In a short few days, Bob had met nearly all their friends. Casual hellos. He’d gone out with Pete and the others. The person he went to meet Friday night was not a new friend who wanted to have a friendly beer. They were sure of that.

  Their thoughts pulled painfully together. They were filled with people and conversations and facts and dates, and narrow lines moving from one to the other, examining the connection. Throwing it aside. Hanging on to it.

  Nell stared at the pile of papers. They needed to do something, to keep their minds working, to keep connecting the dots until the picture emerged clear and flawless.

  “Let’s see what these tell us,” she said.

  They took turns laying the bills and papers out in neat rows. Many were financial statements, mortgage reports, renovation bills for the condo in Sea Harbor. It looked as though Blythe was using her Boston townhome more as an office for the last few months.

  More interesting to the women were the receipts and checks and credit card statements—a day-to-day record of where Blythe bought groceries and took her dry cleaning and shopped for clothes. In addition, there was a spiral-bound desktop calendar that surprised them. Nell picked up the calendar and leafed through it.

  Izzy looked over. “I’m surprised Blythe wasn’t more high tech. I haven’t used one of those for years.”

  The cardboard cover of the calendar was decorated with flowers and birds.

  “Who knows?” Nell said. “She was one of the only people on the board whose phone didn’t ring during meetings.” She glanced back at the large wall calendar she and Ben both scribbled things on. “There’s a certain security in paper.”

  Izzy laughed. “You’d be lost without that calendar, Aunt Nell.”

  “Let’s hope Blythe felt the same way,” she said, slipping on her glasses, her eyes smiling over the top of them. She went back to reading.

  “There’s not much here for the last month. Board meetings. Those are in big letters and that’s fitting. She took them very seriously.”

  Nell turned back to the summer months. There were plenty of Sea Harbor events. Yacht club parties, meetings with architects, dinners. Tennis lessons both in Boston and Sea Harbor. And scribbled here and there were dates with names of recognizable men.
>
  “They were ever-changing,” Nell said. “She certainly had an array of men at her beck and call.”

  “They were probably using Blythe as much as she was using them,” Birdie said. “I don’t think most of them are probably important to us.”

  Birdie continued flipping through a stack of bills, some paid, some still needing to be paid. She stopped at one, frowned, then checked several others. She looked at the calendar. “Nell, check the calendar for August.”

  Nell went forward a couple of pages. In one week there were several tennis matches, but they were all crossed out. There was also a line through a dinner event. A charity event at the Boston Mandarin Oriental Hotel was canceled.

  Nell looked up. “She seemed to have put her socializing on hold for a week or so in August.”

  “Maybe she was sick?” Cass said.

  “Maybe.” Nell looked at the beginning of the crossed-off week. There was an appointment at a clinic. This one was not crossed off. And another a week later.

  Nell read out loud: “Massachusetts Women’s Health Clinic. Arrange with Bob.” Each item had a phone number, one presumably for the clinic and another for her cousin’s cell phone.

  Birdie pulled out several checks and set them aside. “These are made out to the same clinic.” She frowned. “That’s odd,” she said.

  “What?”

  “These checks are for more than a throat culture or cold. Wouldn’t you think Blythe would have insurance to cover medical expenses? It looks like none was applied.”

  Nell shuffled through until she found the receipt. It looked as though Blythe had paid the clinic the day she went in. Nell lined up all the papers next to one another and looked carefully at the dates of the checks, the dates of the appointments. And a computerized receipt that indicated treatment. And a checkup a week later.

  They all realized it at the same time, surprise showing on each face. Of course. It made sense now.

  Nell looked up. “Her insurance probably wouldn’t have covered the procedure,” she said slowly, pointing to the medical abbreviation on the receipt.