Pamela steeled herself for whatever might come next, but his smile was genuine, if a little goofy, as if compensating for his good looks. And the expression in his clear eyes was admiring.
“I really did like the aardvarks,” he said. “Doing things with your hands—that’s what it’s all about.” He smoothed the soil around the base of the rangy plant he’d been working on and picked up a garden trowel. “My grandmother knit,” he said. “I wish I’d known her better.” Still on his knees, he moved a few feet to the right and scooped out a trowel-full of earth. Several plastic pots of salvia waited nearby. “You’ll be lucky,” he observed, nodding toward the penny in her hand. “I wish I’d seen it first. I’d have played the lottery today.”
“Oh—it’s just a silly superstition,” Pamela said. “But I always pick up pennies when I see them on the sidewalk. I never play the lottery though.”
“I do,” Joe said. “The same number, once a week—431985.”
They talked for a few more minutes, and Pamela made it the rest of the way home with no further encounters. She was grateful that Mr. Gilly, the super of the big apartment building at her corner, was nowhere in sight—he could be very chatty. And she skipped her usual detour to peek around the length of wooden fencing that hid the apartment building’s trash from the street. Other people’s trash could be treasure, and Pamela had been amazed to discover castoffs as nice as things from her favorite thrift store.
At home, she made a quick sandwich with cheese the Co-Op stocked from a farm in Vermont, put two pork chops out to thaw for dinner, and climbed the steps to her office. As she’d suspected, her boss at Fiber Craft had had a busy morning, and an email message with ten attachments lurked in her in-box. She clicked the message open and read: “Please look at these submissions and let me know by tomorrow which you think would be suitable for the next issue, or any future issue.”
Just as she was about to open the first attachment, the computer chimed to signal the arrival of a fresh email, and Bettina’s name appeared in boldface at the top of the email queue. Odd, she thought. She had seen Bettina only a few hours ago, and when Bettina wanted to get in touch she usually just crossed the street. What could she have on her mind?
She clicked on the boldface “Bettina” and up came a startling message: “Check AccessArborville. The ‘Killer Aardvark’ is the talk of the town.”
Chapter Four
AccessArborville was the town listserv. Pamela didn’t subscribe to the posts, but she had an account and visited the website when she wanted to communicate with her fellow townspeople. Not long ago, after a satisfying afternoon rearranging an out-of-control flower bed, she had offered free daylily tubers to anyone who wanted them.
Now she went into her “Favorites” file, and soon she was reading the most recent comment in the thread KILLER AARDVARK: “I am not sure how the high school will replace Randall Jefferson. He may have acted at times as if he was too good for Arborville, but he was a brilliant teacher who brought credit to the town. And he was a great American. That knitting club has a lot to answer for.”
Previous messages asked why Pamela Paterson hadn’t yet been arrested, how anyone could suggest the aardvark wasn’t placed on Jefferson’s chest by a member of the knitting club (and we all know what that would mean!), and even hypothesized that the knitting club was a front for a group that did not support patriotic values. One person was of the opinion that Pamela Paterson was being spared because she and Detective Clayborn were involved romantically.
Pamela heard a moan and a sigh that she recognized as coming from herself. She closed her eyes in search of comforting darkness, but the glare from the computer screen gave the darkness a reddish tinge. She hurriedly clicked on the X that would banish AccessArborville from her computer and sent a quick reply to Bettina: “It’s just the AccessArborville cohort, isn’t it? Not the whole town.” Then she retreated to the soothing world of Fiber Craft. The first attachment she opened contained an article about early Indonesian textiles, complete with photographs. The photographs showed weavings in vivid shades of red, blue, and gold, with parades of stylized lizards marching along their borders. She sank gratefully into her work.
In the winter, gathering darkness outside Pamela’s office windows told her dinnertime was near. But sunset on these long May days came too late to signal quitting time. After she’d read half the articles her boss had sent, she checked the clock and decided the rest could wait until the next morning. Penny would be home from work soon, and Pamela wanted to get a head start on a dinner that was to include strawberry shortcake.
Catrina greeted Pamela at the bottom of the stairs and led her eagerly into the kitchen, where Pamela spooned a few scoops of cat food into a bowl and set it in front of the excited cat. That chore taken care of, she put four small red potatoes on to boil and, in a separate pot, two eggs. Then she took her oldest, most favorite cookbook down from the shelf and turned its yellowed and food-stained pages to the recipe for homemade shortcake.
Shortcakes were basically biscuits, but with added sugar unless one liked all of one’s biscuits sweet. In her caramel-colored bowl with the white stripes, she mixed flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar, then she held a stick of butter over the mixture and cut narrow slices until she judged she’d done five tablespoons’ worth. She reached for a second knife and worked the two knives against each other in the flour until the butter bits had almost disappeared. The next step was to sprinkle milk over the now faintly yellowish flour mixture and work the mixture until it formed a clump.
The pastry cloth lay ready on the kitchen table, dusted with flour. She dusted flour on her hands too, and on the clump of dough, and rolled and patted and squeezed the dough until it became a smooth round.
She lifted the dough and dusted more flour under it, then returned it to its spot on the pastry cloth and patted it into a larger, thinner round. The recipe said to use a biscuit cutter to carve out the biscuit shapes, but Pamela had never owned a biscuit cutter despite her fondness for old-fashioned kitchen equipment. Instead she used a glass tumbler, placing it upside down on the dough and rotating it until the rim pushed through the dough and reached the pastry cloth. In this way she formed eight perfect rounds and set them one by one on a buttered cookie sheet. The recipe recommended splitting them while still warm and spreading them with butter before piling on the fruit. She’d time their baking so they came out of the oven right when she and Penny sat down to eat, and the biscuits would still be warm enough to melt butter by dessert time. They would eat two of them tonight and save two for the next night and the rest would go to Bettina.
A quick poke with a fork showed that the potatoes were done. Pamela drained them, and drained the eggs, and piled potatoes and eggs together in a shallow bowl to cool. She checked that the pork chops had thawed and sorted the ripest strawberries into a colander. Once they were rinsed and dripping into the sink, she picked up a small knife. She was just performing the delicate operation of stem-removal on the first strawberry when the front door opened and Penny called out, “Hi, Mom! I’m home.”
Penny sailed into the kitchen as energetic as if she hadn’t just put in a full day of work with a bus commute at each end. Even her yellow dress with the red roosters looked as fresh as it had looked ten hours earlier. “Oh, Mom,” she said. “Manhattan is just . . . the best—so many different kinds of people, and everybody is so busy and doing such interesting things. And the people who come into the store are all furnishing their lofts, and the things they buy are so elegant—” She paused for breath.
“And so expensive, and those people are so rich,” Pamela interjected, but with a smile so she didn’t sound like a spoilsport.
“Why did you ever leave, Mom?”
Penny had never asked her that before. Pamela looked at the strawberry she was holding, its stem still attached. She set the strawberry down and turned away from the counter. “We wanted to have you, and we wanted a house so you could have a room of your own and a ya
rd to play in,” she said.
“Aww . . . Mom.” Penny let her smooth forehead crease and puckered her mouth as if acknowledging a great sacrifice
“We loved living here,” Pamela said.
“You didn’t just do it for me?”
“Not just for you.”
“You could move back to the city. After I graduate. I’m not going to be one of those people who graduates and comes home to live with mom.”
“I’ll think about it,” Pamela said with a smile.
Penny started toward the door. In the doorway she paused and half turned. “You’re not going to try to solve this murder, are you?” she asked, her smooth forehead creasing again. “I was really worried the last time. And if Bettina tries to talk you into it, please just tell her no.”
“I don’t see what Bettina and I could do,” Pamela said. “I’m sure we don’t know anything that the police don’t know.”
“Okay,” Penny said. “Good.” And she headed around the corner and up the stairs.
“Come back down in half an hour,” Pamela called.
Pamela resolved not to mention Wilfred’s experience at the Co-Op or the “Killer Aardvark” theme that had overtaken the town listserv. Penny would be at work in the city every day for the rest of the week, and hopefully she and her Arborville friends had more interesting things to do than pay attention to the gossip of people with no lives of their own.
After Pamela got the oven started and picked up the strawberry she’d set down, her thoughts returned to the conversation she’d just had with Penny about leaving the city. She’d never imagined that Penny would move back home after college, but then she’d never thought much at all about a time that had always seemed so distant. Yet Penny’s freshman year had flown by. Only three years remained. She didn’t know what she’d do then. The house was huge for one person, but selling it would be like parting with a piece of herself, all the memories of being newly married and falling in love with a house in need of rescue. She and her husband had lavished their time and talents on it, and even though he was gone, the work he’d done remained. She felt welcomed by him every time she walked in the door.
Pamela went back to work on the strawberries. She carved out the stems, sliced the plump berries into quarters, and piled them in a favorite oval dish, white china with a scalloped edge and faded gold along the rim. Soon her fingers were red with strawberry juice, and the sweet but faintly spicy strawberry smell had overtaken the smell of boiled potatoes. When all the strawberries were destemmed and sliced, she sprinkled a teaspoon of sugar over them. It didn’t seem that long ago—though it was years and years—that Penny would come in while she was preparing fruit and ask hopefully, “Will sugar be added?”
Now the oven was ready, and it was time to start the shortcakes. And since she was thinking about dessert, she filled the cut-glass cream pitcher with the heavy cream she kept on hand for Bettina’s coffee. The rest of the meal went together quickly. The pork chops were set sizzling in the frying pan. The potatoes were stripped of their delicate red skins and sliced into a bowl. The hard-boiled eggs were tapped on the counter until the shells were fractured all around and the glistening white ovals slipped easily into her hand. Then they too were sliced and added to the potatoes. The salad was finished off with chopped celery and a dressing of mayonnaise, a bit of cider vinegar, powdered mustard, and salt and pepper.
A plate of sliced tomatoes would have been the perfect addition to the meal, but Pamela’s own tomato crop had just gone into the ground the previous week, and she’d used up the batch she’d bought at the Co-Op when she did last week’s shopping.
Penny reappeared in the doorway just as Pamela was setting the cookie sheet with its nicely risen and slightly browned shortcakes on a trivet to cool. She was picturing how satisfyingly the butter would melt on the sliced shortcakes and how pretty the strawberries would look piled up and garnished with heavy cream.
“Can you set the table while I tend these pork chops?” Pamela asked, standing at the stove and poking at the pork chops with a long fork.
“Mom?” Penny asked, her voice rising above the jangle of silverware as she collected knives, forks, and spoons from the silverware drawer. “Did you know everyone in town is talking about the ‘Killer Aardvark’”?
Pamela gave one of the chops a particularly savage poke. Maybe she should move back to the city. You could be anonymous there.
* * *
It was Tuesday morning. Penny was out the door, Pamela’s coffee cup was empty, and all that remained of the toast were a few crumbs scattered on the vintage 1940s tablecloth with its border of purple flowers and orange fruit. Catrina had been fed and had padded off for a nap after nibbling delicately at a few tablespoons of food. The Register lay loosely folded, ready to join a week’s worth of Registers in the recycling basket. Mercifully, the Arborfest murder had migrated to an inner page, much of today’s front page taken up by a story about the latest (unpopular) doings of the governor. The coverage of the murder had added nothing significant to the previous day’s report, except that the ME had put the murder sometime after six p.m. and before six a.m., and the murder weapon had been identified as a rock from the library rock garden—the yam-shaped rock, Pamela was sure. As far as suspects went, the police were pursuing various lines of inquiry.
Well, Pamela had said to herself as she read the article, Bettina and I had already figured out that he was killed after dark and after the library closed, but before people started showing up the next morning to put the finishing touches on their booths. And if it’s the yam-shaped rock, I already knew all about it because I found it.
Five submissions to Fiber Craft lurked upstairs, waiting to be evaluated. Bettina would undoubtedly talk to Detective Clayborn today, or at least try, and would undoubtedly drop by to make her report. When she showed up, Pamela would take a break and make another pot of coffee, but for now duty called and she headed for the stairs.
She’d barely reached the landing when the doorbell rang. Reversing direction, she knew even before she reached the bottom of the stairs that it was Bettina—or at least a visitor who had dressed that morning in an ensemble colorful enough to do justice to a sunny May day. Through the lace that curtained the oval window in the front door, a bright but indistinct shape was visible, glowing against the green yard and the street beyond.
It was Bettina, and she began speaking even before she stepped over the threshold. “Clayborn didn’t want to talk,” she said breathlessly, “but I wore him down. Nothing much interesting in today’s Register, as you probably noticed, but more goodies emerged after his interview with the Register reporter yesterday. Lots more goodies.” She paused and let Pamela close the door behind her. “And speaking of goodies, how about a blueberry muffin?” She flourished a bag. “I didn’t have to venture into the Co-Op—I had them at home. Do you still have butter out from your toast?”
In the kitchen, Bettina opened the bag and set blueberry muffins on the plates Pamela hastily supplied. She’d obviously slept much better than the previous night, and was her usual fastidiously groomed self, eye shadow keyed to the aqua waves that zigzagged here and there on her dress, where they intersected with splotches of bright orange and fuchsia. The fuchsia was reflected in her carefully applied lipstick.
“So—” She addressed Pamela’s back. Pamela was standing at the counter pouring coffee beans into her grinder.
“Hold on,” Pamela said. “I just have to do this.” The grinder spun, beans clattered for a few seconds in the chamber, and then the sound smoothed out to a whir. The dark and pungent smell of coffee filled the little kitchen.
Bettina seized the kettle from the stove and measured in four cups of water. Once it was back in place with a burner alight under it, she reached two cups and saucers from the cupboard where Pamela kept her wedding china. Pamela slipped a coffee filter into the plastic cone atop her carafe and poured in the ground beans. Then she busied herself setting out cream and sugar, knives an
d spoons, butter, and napkins while Bettina talked.
“What do you want to hear about first?” she said. “The suspect who hasn’t been arrested? The murder weapon? That’s in the paper, but I know more. The blood? The fingerprints and DNA?”
“How about the murder weapon?” Pamela said, though she already knew. It was tantalizing to hear that there was a suspect, but she’d save the best for last.
“A rock from the library rock garden,” Bettina said, “but the Register had that. What it didn’t have was how the cops found out about the rock.” Pamela paused in the act of pouring heavy cream into the cut-glass pitcher that matched her sugar bowl. “A confidential informant,” Bettina said, whispering and looking from side to side in a parody of a television snitch.
“Oh, that silly . . . man!” Pamela laughed. “I’m the confidential informant. I was sitting near the rock garden waiting because I knew he’d want to talk to me, and I recognized one of the rocks I’d donated for the rock garden project. I looked closer and saw that it had blood—or something dark—on it and that the soil around it had been disturbed like it was picked up and put back. I pointed it out to him.” She returned to her task.
“I’ll keep that in mind if he resists me again,” Bettina said with a satisfied smile. “His confidential informant isn’t as confidential as he thinks.”
The whistling kettle summoned Bettina to the stove, and soon the coffee aroma in the little kitchen intensified as boiling water dripped through the ground beans.
When they were seated at the table, steaming cups of coffee in front of them, Pamela said, “So the dark spot was really blood.” She sampled her coffee.
“Really blood.” Bettina scooped a spoonful of sugar into her cup. “And definitely his blood. That’s been confirmed.” She added cream to her cup and stirred the resulting mixture, now a pale brown. “And did you know”—she looked up—“fingerprints can actually be retrieved from rocks, and DNA too?”
Died in the Wool Page 4