Died in the Wool

by Peggy Ehrhart

  Chapter Fourteen

  Half an hour passed. Finally all forks reposed on empty or almost empty plates. “Dessert still to come,” Bettina sang out, as she and Maxie and Dave and Karen Dowling began clearing the table.

  “I can help,” Richard announced suddenly. He jumped up and seized his and Pamela’s plates. Pamela watched him lope across the patio, taller than any other man there and wearing the stiff new jeans. When he reemerged, he was carrying a serious-looking knife, its gleaming silver blade over a foot long. Bettina bustled after him. She pointed to a small table that had served to hold barbecue sauce, and the chicken and sausages awaiting their turn on the grill. He handed Bettina the knife, stooped over the cooler, and removed the lid. When he rose again, he was bearing the watermelon, wet from its sojourn in melting ice. Bettina, looking for all the world like a nurse assisting at a surgical procedure, handed over the knife and watched with fascination as he made the first incision.

  Pamela was watching too, admiring the precision with which Richard sliced the watermelon into two equal halves and then four equal quarters. But when Karen appeared with her bowl of chocolate chip cookies, she remembered the lemon bars. As she stepped back out onto the patio with them, Richard was offering child-sized slices of watermelon to Bettina’s grandsons.

  “You carved up that watermelon like an expert,” Pamela said when they were again seated at the long table with slices of watermelon before them. The cookies and lemon bars were making their way around.

  “Carving a watermelon is rather like carpentry,” he said. “Measure twice and cut once—the same rule applies.”

  “Do you do a lot of carpentry?” She’d pictured him spending his workdays at a desk in a Manhattan office with chic furnishings and a stunning view. She stole a glance at his hands. They were large and well shaped, but they didn’t look like a worker’s hands.

  “Sometimes it’s part of the work in Maine,” he said. “Helping people use recycled materials to fix up their houses.” He concentrated on his slice of watermelon until it was reduced to a pale pink crescent shading to white, with a green peel. The lemon bars arrived at their end of the table and Bettina made sure to point out to Richard that Pamela had made them. He barely had a chance to take a bite and offer the requisite compliment before Wilfred pulled up a chair between him and Bettina. “Pamela has outdone herself,” he said to nobody in particular, reaching for a lemon bar. “This is my third.” Then he leaned toward Richard and said, “I’ve made a lot of progress on my model of the Mittendorf House. Come on down to the basement and take a look.”

  Wilfred led him off, lemon bar in hand. They walked across the patio, Richard bending solicitously toward Wilfred’s white-thatched head. “So nice looking,” Bettina said. “You and he had quite the conversation.”

  Pamela stood up. “Why don’t I help you clear away?” They were the only people left at the table. The men, minus Wilfred and Richard, were standing around the cooler, fresh bottles of beer in hand. Penny and Richard’s daughters had retired to the lawn chairs under the big tree. Karen Dowling and Maxie were watching the two boys caper in the grass. The other women were in the kitchen. Pamela and Bettina joined them, washing dishes that would go home with their owners, packaging up leftovers, and filling the dishwasher with plates and silver. Pamela’s deviled-egg platter sat on the pine table, one deviled egg remaining.

  The sliding door opened and Karen and Dave Dowling peeked in. “We’re on our way,” he said.

  “Wonderful party,” Karen chimed in. “Thank you so much.”

  “And thank you for the cookies,” Bettina said. “They were certainly a success. Your bowl is empty.” She hugged Karen and handed over the plastic bowl with the snap-on lid. “I guess we’re at your house Tuesday night,” she added.

  “It might be chocolate chip cookies again,” Karen said, blushing slightly. “They’re the only dessert I know how to make.”

  A few at a time, the other guests bade their farewells, picked up their bowls, trays, or platters, and went on their way. Wilfred’s cousin John offered Nell and Harold a ride up the hill, collected his wife, and made a detour to the basement to tell Wilfred good-bye. Bettina’s son, daughter-in-law, and grandsons got special hugs from Bettina and called good-bye to Wilfred down the basement stairs. Penny stuck her head in to say she and Laine and Sybil were heading back across the street and to tell Richard to bring the tabouli bowl home.

  “What are those men up to?” Bettina said when she and Pamela were alone in the kitchen. They chatted for a few minutes about the barbecue, pausing when they heard feet coming up the basement stairs.

  “Rick gave me some good ideas about how to do the windows,” Wilfred said as he stepped into the kitchen, Richard following behind.

  “Nice job,” Richard said. “I’m impressed. You got a very convincing sandstone effect with that clay.”

  The deviled-egg platter with the one remaining deviled egg still sat on the pine table. Wilfred stopped a few feet away. “I see you eyeing that egg,” Bettina said.

  “It’s yours.” Pamela moved the platter a bit closer to the table’s edge.

  “Unless . . .” Wilfred looked up at Richard.

  “No, really.” Richard laughed and waved his hands as if to ward off the egg.

  “Well . . . waste not, want not,” Wilfred said, and popped the egg into his mouth.

  * * *

  “Tomorrow morning then,” Bettina said to Pamela. “In the library parking lot.” They stood at the end of the driveway, accompanied by Richard. Pamela carried her tray and her platter, and Richard carried the bright-red tabouli bowl.

  “It’s very nice of you to talk to Wilfred about the dollhouses,” Pamela said after Bettina had retreated toward her backyard and they had set out across the street.

  “I’m trying to fit in. Besides, he’s an interesting guy,” Richard said. “Reminds me of the father I always wished I had.”

  “You didn’t—?” Pamela wasn’t sure how to finish the question.

  “Oh, I had a dad, a decent dad, but he was always busy with work.” They’d reached the sidewalk in front of Pamela’s house. Richard looked toward his own house, then down at the sidewalk, then back at her. “Could I ask you something?” She tilted her head to meet his eyes. They had that desperate look they sometimes got.

  “Yes?” She wasn’t sure whether it was a good idea to seem too eager.

  “What’s a perennial border?”

  “Oh!” The word burst out accompanied by a laugh. He took a step back and his eyes shifted from desperate to hurt. “I didn’t mean to laugh,” she said. “Nobody would know unless they gardened, and even then, not necessarily. I thought you were going to ask me something . . .” Her voice trailed off. What had she thought he was going to ask her? “I’ll show you,” she said. “Come with me.”

  She led him onto his lawn and along the side of his hedge past his recycling containers and his side door. When they reached his backyard, she advanced toward the unruly swathe of vegetation stretching along the wooden fence that marked the boundary between his lot and the lot behind.

  “These are iris,” she said, pointing to a plant with long blade-shaped leaves and stiff stalks topped by the shriveled remains of flowers. “And these are peonies.” The few remaining blooms, blowsy globes faded to the barest tint of pink, drooped among the deep green foliage. Below, the ground was strewn with petals already turning brown. “And these are cone flowers, and salvia, and goldenrod”—she paced along the edge of the flower bed—“and black-eyed Susans, and yarrow.”

  She paused. “And this is a weed.” She pointed to a sturdy plant that was already taller than the peony bushes. “And there are more weeds down there.” She waved her hand. “And also that tall grass is crabgrass, and it will take over if you don’t pull it out.” To illustrate, she leaned over, gathered a handful of the tall, stiff blades, and pulled. Up came a satisfying clump, trailing roots and small knobs of dirt.

  “The point of a
perennial garden,” she said, “is that the plants come back year after year, and people plant them so the colors and sizes and shapes make a nice design. But you have to tend it, or it just gets wild—like this.” She paused, feeling a bit breathless, and looked back toward Richard, who was still standing where she’d left him when she began to pace. She was still holding the clump of crabgrass. He was studying her as if she herself was a botanical specimen.

  “So”—she shrugged, suddenly feeling self-conscious—“that’s pretty much it.”

  “I guess it is.” He stepped across the grass and reached out for the crabgrass. She put it into his hand. “I’ll do something with this,” he said. He continued studying her. “Maybe you’ll come and look at it again . . . when I get it fixed up. We could sit out here.” Now he glanced away, toward two Adirondack chairs sitting in the middle of the grass. “The Bonhams left their lawn furniture.”

  “I can see the border from my kitchen window,” Pamela said, and then wished she hadn’t.

  * * *

  Back at home she changed out of the fancy blouse, noticing as she caught a glimpse of herself in her bedroom mirror, that her eyes seemed darker and somehow mysterious. Maybe it had something to do with the deep colors in the blouse. Downstairs, she looked out the kitchen window. Richard Larkin was on his knees pulling crabgrass out of the perennial border.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Well, he’s really up a creek without a paddle!” Because she was talking about Detective Clayborn, Bettina waited until she was a goodly distance from the police station to make that announcement. It was Monday morning and Pamela had been waiting for her in the parking lot shared by the police department and the library. “He doesn’t have any idea what to do next.” Bettina shook her head pityingly. “Of course, he didn’t tell me that, but I could see he wasn’t himself.”

  “They don’t have any other suspects?” Pamela said. “You said he didn’t get excited when you told him about Marcus Verteel.”

  “He couldn’t see how insulting each other in the pages of a journal devoted to eighteenth-century history could escalate into one guy clunking the other with a rock—or even how two guys writing a book on the same subject could be a problem. And besides, how would the aardvark come into it? This morning I suggested there might be a romantic angle, as in romance gone awry,” Bettina said. “But I didn’t tell him about the hat,” she added quickly. “He said no one they had interviewed after the murder said anything about Jefferson being involved with a woman.”

  Pamela reached into the canvas bag she carried and pulled up the orange and chartreuse hat. “This is our own scoop then.” She tucked the hat back in her bag and they strolled toward the library.

  “Did anything interesting happen after Richard walked you home last night?” Bettina asked.

  “I showed him what a perennial border is,” Pamela said.

  “He certainly liked your eggs.” Pamela scowled at her friend, who was suppressing a smile. “You looked nice in that outfit.”

  Pamela had reverted to her uniform of jeans and a casual blouse. Bettina was wearing light-blue pants that ended right below her knees, a matching sleeveless top, and wedge-heeled espadrilles with ties that wrapped around her ankles. They strolled past the azaleas, the pretty wooden bench, and the rock garden with the rock-sized gap in the border.

  The Arborville Public Library was quiet on a Monday morning. A few young mothers browsed the children’s section with toddlers in tow. In the chairs near the big windows that looked out onto the street, a gray-haired man paged through a newspaper. The young woman Pamela had spoken to on Saturday and recognized as one of Penny’s classmates from Arborville High was on duty again at the circulation counter.

  Pamela greeted the young woman with a whispered “Hello,” though she knew libraries weren’t the bastions of silence they had been when she was a child. “I was here Saturday,” she added, “looking for Nancy Billings. Is she in today?”

  The young woman gave her a curious look, then nodded toward a row of shelves where a mousy woman with faded auburn hair was reshelving books from a wheeled cart.

  “Her hair is kind of red, but it’s not wild or flyaway,” the young woman noted, somewhat unnecessarily.

  Pamela tugged the orange and chartreuse hat from her bag and shaped her lips into her social smile. The errand, she reminded herself, was to seem simply an effort to track down an interesting knitting pattern. The mousy woman—Nancy Billings—was studying the spine of a book as they approached. She stooped to slip it into place on a lower shelf and caught sight of Pamela and Bettina as she rose. Her eyes didn’t linger on their faces, however. They darted immediately to the hat. Pamela held it in both hands, the ears flopping over her knuckles and the tail dangling nearly to her knees.

  “Oh, no!” Nancy Billings held up her hands in mock alarm. “I plead guilty.” She smiled, a smile that revealed pretty teeth and lit up her plain face. She reached toward the hat. “I knew it wouldn’t stay gone,” she said.

  Pamela hadn’t expected this reaction, though she wasn’t sure what reaction she had expected. How to request a knitting pattern from someone who seemed determined to disown the creation? But Bettina came to the rescue.

  “We love the hat,” she said. Nancy’s face registered amazement, then curiosity. “So imaginative . . .” Bettina paused.

  Pamela took over. “Though maybe a different color scheme would be more wearable for most people. I found it at St. Willibrod’s rummage sale, and the woman at the yarn crafts table said you’d donated it. We’re part of the Arborville knitting club. I was wondering if we could get the pattern for the hat.”

  “Oh, heavens!” Nancy showed her pretty teeth again. “I didn’t make it. I’m quite hopeless when it comes to crafts. It was a gift from my cousin, Nightingale, to my daughter. Sara’s in high school and would never wear such an odd thing, so . . . the rummage sale.”

  “Could we get the pattern from . . . Nightingale?” Bettina asked.

  Nancy shrugged. “I don’t see her that often. She’s a total free spirit, if you know what I mean. Nightingale isn’t her real name—she just calls herself that, now. She called herself something different before, back when she was a Wiccan. Her real name is Alison Denny.”

  Pamela took over. “Does she live in Arborville?”

  “No.” Nancy laughed. “Haversack. She’d never be able to afford Arborville. She doesn’t work, and I don’t know what she uses for money. And forget email or even the phone to track her down. Half the time she doesn’t turn the phone on, and the other half she hasn’t paid the bill.”

  “I know our club members would love to have the pattern for the hat,” Bettina said.

  “Well, like you say, maybe a different color scheme . . .” Nancy didn’t seem convinced. She reached out to finger the tail.

  “And for a younger recipient,” Bettina supplied.

  “I can give you her address if you’re so determined,” Nancy said. Bettina pulled a notepad and pen from her purse, and Nancy dictated a number and street. “Apartment 3B,” she added, “but she won’t respond if you write. No sense of responsibility whatsoever.”

  * * *

  “You didn’t ask Nancy if her cousin has red hair,” Bettina said as she led the way to her car.

  “Neither did you,” Pamela said. “I couldn’t figure out how to work it in, since as far as she knew we were just trying to track down the pattern for the hat. If her cousin could give us the pattern, why would it matter what color her hair was?”

  “It’s probably her though, don’t you think? The woman that nosy neighbor saw coming and going.” Bettina’s car was on the far side of the lot, near the kiddy playground that formed part of the town park. The playground was already busy, with nannies chatting on benches as children shrieked on the slides and giggled on the merry-go-round.

  “Yes,” Pamela said. “It’s probably her. So . . . off to Haversack?”

  “Off to Haversack.” Bettina unlocked th
e passenger side of her faithful Toyota and Pamela climbed in. As Bettina settled into place behind the steering wheel, she remarked, “I’m not sure I’ve ever met a free spirit.”

  * * *

  Haversack was the county seat and locus of the courthouse and the jail. The Haversack River separated it from its affluent suburban neighbors to the east. Nightingale’s apartment building proved to be a sturdy brick structure with a flat roof and a fire escape, like something one would see in a black and white photo from the turn of the last century. Its neighbors along the busy commercial street where it was located included a car wash and an auto body shop. A billboard on the corner announced the services of a personal injury lawyer with a 1-800 number.

  The narrow card next to the bell for apartment 3B was illegible, having long since succumbed to the elements. Pamela backed up to double-check the street address carved into the stone lintel over the doorway and, satisfied that she and Bettina were in the right place, gave the button a firm push. They waited, blinking in the bright sunlight reflecting off the sidewalk and the passing cars. After a few minutes, Pamela gave the bell another push. There was still no response. She and Bettina looked at each other. “Off somewhere being a free spirit,” Bettina murmured.

  As they stood there, the door opened partway and a woman started to push through, tugging a small upright cart laden with what looked like laundry.

  “You’ve got your hands full,” Bettina exclaimed, leaning an elbow against the door to open it farther.

  “Why, thank you,” the woman said. Her homely face and shapeless body were offset by her outfit, brightly-patterned leggings and a form-fitting tank top. She stepped out onto the concrete walk that ended at the building’s entrance, and the heavy glass door closed behind her. “I haven’t met you before,” she said with a smile that revealed a missing tooth. “Did you just move in?”