Died in the Wool

by Peggy Ehrhart

  “We’re looking for somebody,” Bettina said. “Nightingale. Do you know her?”

  Shaking her head slowly, the woman said, “Not to talk to. She’s kind of weird, used to be a witch somebody told me. Not a bad person though, at least not anymore.”

  “She doesn’t answer her bell,” Pamela said.

  The woman continued shaking her head. “Now that you mention it, I haven’t seen her for days. Or heard her. We’re on the same floor and she’s got this guitar. Live and let live is what I say, but not after eleven p.m.”

  “Could we leave a note?” Pamela said. “In her mailbox maybe? Are the mailboxes in there?” She nodded toward the small foyer visible through the heavy glass of the door.

  “No way to get into the boxes unless you’re the mailman,” the woman said. “He has a key. But”—she reached into a nondescript handbag that dangled from one handle of the cart and came up with a set of keys—“you could slip a note under her door. I’ve got laundry to do, but I’ll let you in. You two look honest.”

  Bettina pushed the door open as the woman twisted the key in the lock. The woman aimed her cart toward the sidewalk and started off, but then turned.

  “You could ask in the park,” she said. “She takes sandwiches for the guys who hang out there, plays her guitar. Like I said, she’s not a bad person.”

  A steep flight of stairs confronted Pamela and Bettina once they stepped into the small, dark foyer. “No elevator, I guess,” Bettina said. “I wonder how that woman made it down with her laundry cart.”

  “I suppose people get used to it,” Pamela said. “All apartment buildings were walkups once.” She regarded the stairs. “Apartment 3B. Let’s start climbing.”

  Both were panting by the time they reached the third floor. A hallway with grimy and worn carpeting stretched from the front to the back of the building, with a small window at each end. Four doors opened off each side of the hallway. The door they were seeking was halfway down on the right.

  Pamela knocked. Bettina gave her a quizzical look.

  “Maybe she just doesn’t like to buzz people into the building unless she’s expecting someone,” Pamela said. “We might as well check if she’s in there before we push a note under the door.”

  “But that woman with the laundry said she hadn’t seen—or heard—her for days.”

  Pamela nodded and knocked again. She put her ear to the door. Now Bettina looked worried. “Do you hear anything?” she asked with a frown that carved a tiny wrinkle between her carefully shaped brows.

  “Not really,” Pamela said, biting her lip and looking toward the ceiling as if in search of an idea. “I wonder if there’s some way we could get into the apartment.” She reached for the doorknob and gave it a sharp twist.

  Bettina uttered a muted squeal, but the door remained closed.

  “Okay,” Pamela said. “Let’s write that note. Then we’ll visit Nightingale’s friends in the park. The people she brings sandwiches to.”

  “Florence!” Bettina said suddenly. “Florence Nightingale.”

  “That could be it,” Pamela said. “She fancies herself a ministering angel.”

  “Could she also be a killer then?” The wrinkle between Bettina’s brows deepened. She pulled her notepad and pen from her purse. Pamela dictated as Bettina wrote. “Dear Nightingale . . .” She paused. “Wait a minute—we can’t tell her the hat she made for her niece ended up at the St. Willibrod’s rummage sale.”

  Bettina looked up from her task. “We’ll say we’re friends of Nancy Billings, and she showed it to us because she knows we’re knitters.”

  “Yes, that’s it,” Pamela said. “Put that, and say we’d love to share the pattern with our knitting club, and then put our names and phone numbers.” Bettina finished the note, tore the sheet of paper from her notepad, folded it in half, and pushed it under the door. “We’ll wait a couple of days, and if we don’t hear from her we’ll come back. I’m not sure I’d respond if somebody I’d never heard of pushed a note under my door.”

  “What park do you think that woman meant?” Bettina asked as they made their way back down the stairs.

  “Probably the one we drove past when we crossed the river,” Pamela said. “The stretch of grass that turns into a pond every time the Haversack floods.”

  * * *

  The man was sunning himself on a bench with his eyes closed and a beer can in his hand. The river was low, the water a murky green. The park extended all the way to the riverbank, where scraggly grass gave way to a line of jagged rocks streaked with moss. On the opposite bank, the well-groomed grounds of Wendelstaff College sloped down to the water’s edge.

  Pamela hesitated a few yards from the bench with the dozing man. It was getting on toward lunchtime, but no one else was in the park, suggesting that perhaps sandwiches hadn’t been forthcoming lately, and the park’s regulars had changed their routines. “He looks so comfortable. I hate to disturb him,” Pamela whispered to Bettina.

  “Then we won’t,” Bettina said. The man’s bench was one in a row that faced the river. Bettina made her way over the grass, Pamela following, and lowered herself onto a neighboring bench. Pamela joined her. “Pretty, isn’t it?” Bettina nodded toward the Wendelstaff campus.

  “It makes me think of Marcus Verteel,” Pamela said. “If we actually track Nightingale down and decide she didn’t have anything to do with killing Randall Jefferson, he’s the only suspect we’ve got left.”

  “Well, there is the ghost.” Bettina half laughed as she said it.

  “I don’t know how we’d follow up on that though.” They sat in silence, gazing across the water, until a man’s voice spoke.

  “Good morning, ladies.” The dozing man was awake.

  “Good morning, sir,” Bettina replied in her most sociable tones. “How are you today?”

  “Well, just fine I’d say.” His voice suggested the can of beer in his hand wasn’t his first of the day, but he seemed genial enough. “I ain’t seen you ladies down here before.” He looked to be in his fifties and was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.

  “We’re looking for somebody.” Bettina scooted along the bench till she reached the end and turned to face the man. “A red-haired woman who comes down here sometimes with a guitar.”

  His weathered face creased into a smile. “That would be Nightingale.” The smile vanished. “She ain’t in trouble?”

  “Oh, no!” Bettina shook her head. “She’s a friend of a friend. We were in the neighborhood and thought we’d stop by to say hello. We heard she’s a pretty good guitar player.”

  “She is that.” He smiled again. “But she ain’t been around . . .” He frowned and looked off toward the river. “Ain’t been around three, four days . . . no, make that five . . . or six. Seven maybe.”

  Bettina turned back toward Pamela and raised her eyebrows, then turned back toward the man. “Did she say anything about a trip? A plan to go somewhere?”

  One shoulder rose, and he pursed his lips. “Not to me.”

  Pamela slid down the bench until she was side by side with Bettina. She leaned around her friend to face the man. “And you haven’t seen her for a week?”

  The man raised his empty hand and counted off slowly, wiggling one finger at a time. “Monday . . . Tuesday . . . Wednesday . . .” He shook his head. “Not all week.” He raised the beer can and, seeming to realize it was empty, lowered it again. “Not all week,” he said again.

  “How about last Sunday,” Pamela said. “Not yesterday but the Sunday before.”

  He pursed his lips again. “Couldn’t say for sure. That was a long time ago.”

  “It was,” Pamela said, half to herself. She leaned back against the bench.

  “Well . . .” Bettina looked into Pamela’s eyes and smiled a hopeless smile.

  “You’re right,” Pamela said in a quiet voice. “This is as far as we’ll get.” They stood up. The man watched them.

  “If she comes back, I’ll tell her you we
re here,” he said.

  “She doesn’t know us,” Bettina said. “We’re friends of a friend.”

  The man jiggled the empty beer can. “You ain’t got any spare change, do you?”

  Pamela reached in her purse and came up with a ten-dollar bill. “Have a sandwich too, please,” she said as she slipped it into the man’s grimy hand.

  * * *

  As they walked across the grass toward where the park’s few parking spaces had been marked out on a patch of faded asphalt, Pamela suddenly chuckled. “Well,” she said, “you managed to work in the red hair.”

  “I did,” Bettina said with a contented smile. “Now we know it’s definitely her.”

  “But we don’t know where she is.”

  “No, we don’t know where she is.”

  “But we know she’s disappeared,” Pamela said. “That could be a clue in itself.”

  “You’re right!” Bettina picked up her pace. “Let’s talk about it over lunch.”

  * * *

  “A tuna melt and a vanilla milkshake,” Pamela said, handing the oversized menu back to the server.

  “And I’ll have the same,” Bettina added, holding out her menu as well.

  They were in a booth at Hyler’s Luncheonette on Arborville Avenue, facing each other across a worn wooden table and sitting on benches upholstered in burgundy Naugahyde. The booth was in a remote corner, near the swinging doors that led to the kitchen, and they’d chosen it in hopes of avoiding conversations with their fellow townspeople. Certainly the dramatic arrest and then release of Brad Striker had reawakened interest in the “Killer Aardvark” murder case—if, indeed, interest had ever slept.

  “Disappearing could mean Nightingale did it,” Pamela said. “Our friend in the park didn’t have too clear a sense of time, but it sounded like she hadn’t been to the park at least since the Sunday of Arborfest, and maybe not even that day.”

  Bettina nodded. “So they quarrel Saturday night in the parking lot. She clunks him with the rock and hides him in the booth. And on Sunday while everybody’s at the parade, she puts the aardvark on his chest.” Bettina nodded again, but Pamela frowned.

  “Why bother with the aardvark? Why not just take off as soon as she realizes she’s killed him?”

  “She’s going to need money for a getaway,” Bettina said. “She goes up to his house and grabs a few portable goodies that can be sold—or pawned. I’m sure Haversack has pawnshops.”

  “How would she get in his house?” Pamela said.

  “Maybe she has a key—given their special relationship, whatever it was.” Bettina looked up. “Ah,” she said, “the milkshakes.”

  The milkshakes arrived in frosty glasses, tall and slim, etched with trails left by ice-cream drips and crowned with a froth of creamy bubbles. Pamela peeled a straw, slipped it through the bubbles, and took a long sip of the cool, sweet liquid with its slight hint of vanilla.

  “Why bother with the aardvark?” she said again, gazing at Bettina, who was engrossed in sampling her own milkshake.

  “Um. That is delicious!” Bettina held onto her straw, lifted her head, and gazed back. “Maybe she hates organized sports, being a free spirit and all. She kills him because of the unrequited-love angle, but then gets the idea to implicate Brad Striker. And she knows about Jefferson’s disapproval of the sports program, of course, because—after all—she knows him quite well.”

  “Why did she take two aardvarks?” Pamela took another sip of her milkshake then slid it off to the side to wait until her tuna melt arrived.

  Bettina shrugged. “Confuse people? Keep them guessing?”

  Pamela shuddered. “Or keep them wondering who’s going to die next?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  At that moment, the sandwiches arrived, on cream-colored oval plates with slender pickle spears tucked alongside. Gobbets of tuna salad and golden streaks of melted cheddar were barely contained by bread that had been grilled to buttery and toasty perfection. Forks were required, and for a few minutes neither Pamela nor Bettina spoke.

  After half of her sandwich had been dispatched, Pamela ate a pickle spear. “I keep returning to the Florence Nightingale idea,” she said, wiping her fingers on a napkin.

  “Um?” Bettina continued chewing but set her fork down.

  “Taking sandwiches to the men in the park. She seems like a charitable person, not a murderer. Maybe there was something charitable about her relationship with Randall Jefferson.”

  Bettina swallowed. “He didn’t need money. Or sandwiches.”

  “Maybe he was lonely,” Pamela said. “Unable to make friends because he was so focused on his books.” She picked up her fork and aimed it at the second half of the sandwich.

  “But then why would she disappear?” Bettina’s voice rose in pitch, and she added, “And why wouldn’t she go to the funeral?”

  Pamela set her fork down suddenly, and it clinked against the heavy plate. “Maybe she’s dead too!” she exclaimed. “Someone was after them both.”

  Bettina’s eyes grew wide. “The second aardvark!”

  Pamela nodded. “The second aardvark.”

  * * *

  The distance between Hyler’s Luncheonette and Orchard Street was only a few blocks, but Bettina’s car awaited them in the parking lot behind the hardware store. Pamela didn’t speak until they turned off Arborville Avenue and were nearing Bettina’s house. Then she said, “I don’t think we should tell Nancy Billings that her cousin has disappeared.”

  “No,” Bettina said. “We shouldn’t. At least not yet.”

  Bettina pulled into her driveway and parked, and Pamela climbed out of the car. Looking across the street, she could see that her mail had arrived. The ends of a few envelopes protruded from under the hinged cover of her mailbox. And apparently reluctant to jam the day’s batch of catalogs into a mailbox designed for an earlier era, the mail carrier had tossed them onto the porch. Next to the untidy stack of catalogs was a package the size of a shoebox.

  Back on her own side of the street, Pamela climbed the steps to her porch. Slinging her canvas bag and purse over her shoulder, she gathered the envelopes and stooped to collect the rest of the mail, reaching out to corral the catalogs first. But the package distracted her from that task. It, in fact, was a shoebox, with no additional wrapping and no address.

  Later it occurred to her that, given the current state of things in Arborville, a warier person would, at that moment, have retreated indoors and called the police. But, despite having come upon a dead body in her knitting group’s Arborfest booth only a week earlier, Pamela wasn’t a wary person. She woke up every morning expecting the day to unfold predictably, just the way a knitting project moved predictably toward completion, with only an occasional dropped stitch that could easily be picked up again. Besides, the shoebox bore the logo of an upscale brand that she recognized from advertisements for the department store that anchored the local mall.

  So, not being a wary person, and not imagining that someone with a taste for such an elegant brand of shoes could have evil in mind, she scooped the shoebox up. She carried it and the envelopes to the kitchen table, shedding her purse and the canvas bag containing the hat on her way through the entry.

  Could the box even contain shoes? A teasing gift from Bettina, delivered by Wilfred while they were out, intended to further perk up her wardrobe? She lifted the lid to discover that the contents—whatever they were—had been swathed in tissue paper. She lifted a flap of the paper, caught her breath, and stepped back from the table.

  The experience wasn’t quite as dramatic as the moment when she pulled the canvas panel loose at Arborfest and discovered the body of Randall Jefferson. But just like then, the surface under her feet no longer felt solid, the familiar glazed tiles of her kitchen floor swaying as she fought to keep her balance. She sank into the chair nearest her, still holding the shoebox lid as if it had been grafted to her fingers.

  Lying in the box, cushioned on a bed of crumpled tiss
ue paper, was a miniature version of Randall Jefferson, complete with natty jacket and bow tie. But unlike Randall Jefferson in real life, or even in death, the figure bristled with pins, ordinary sewing pins except for an especially large pin, like an old-fashioned hat pin, in its forehead.

  * * *

  Bettina was there in a flash, Wilfred following close behind, the apron he wore when he did his cooking projects tied over his bib overalls. “Not a threat,” Bettina declared in a common-sense tone that soothed Pamela immensely. “At least not directed at you. Otherwise, it would be you.” She reached into the box and raised the figure aloft. Wilfred actually laughed.

  “No ill of the dead and all,” he observed, “but I can think of more than one person who’d have been happy to stick him full of pins while he was still alive.”

  “It was sitting on the porch with all my other mail,” Pamela said. “But it wasn’t really mail. It was just in this shoebox, without an address or anything.” She displayed the lid of the box, which bore no markings except the swirling curlicues of the upscale brand’s logo.

  “No aardvark.” Bettina steered a finger among the pins to point at the figure’s chest. “So I don’t think it’s somebody still fixated on the ‘Killer Aardvark’ theme.”

  “Why put it on my porch though?”

  Bettina shrugged. “It’s a clue? Somebody knows we’ve been poking around and wants to help us? First the killer makes this . . . doll... of Jefferson and sticks it full of pins, and then the killer goes after Jefferson in person.”

  Pamela’s face had brightened as Bettina spoke, but now she frowned. “Having the doll isn’t helpful if we don’t know who made it.”

  “Maybe we do know.” Bettina set the doll on the kitchen table and began pulling the tissue out of the box. Wilfred grabbed each piece, smoothed it out, and examined both sides.

  “Nothing,” all three said in unison after a small pile of uncrumpled tissue had accumulated next to the doll.

  “How about the box?” Pamela said. She peered inside, then turned it in her hands to examine the sides and bottom.

  Bettina reached for the lid. “Nothing inside the lid either,” she reported, setting it atop the box. They all looked at each other.