Murder Wears Mittens

by Sally Goldenbaum

  And then she moved on to Dolores Cardozo. “You were friends, I understand,” she said. “It’s a sad time.”

  Birdie felt Kayla stiffen but went on, her voice unthreatening, as if talking to a friend.

  “Sister Fiona mentioned that you had spent time with her, taking her meals. I envy you in a way. I’m just beginning to know her now, and from what I am learning, I think Dolores Cardozo and I could have been good friends.”

  Kayla relaxed slightly.

  “Did you enjoy taking her meals?”

  Kayla didn’t answer right away. When she did, it was in a tone that made Birdie think what Charlie Chambers had said might be true: Kayla Stewart didn’t lie. Not easily, at least.

  “I have two little kids,” she said, “so being with them is what is most important to me and what I like best. But doing the volunteer gig was something I told Sister Fiona I’d do. She made it easier, I guess, by assigning me to Dolores.” She paused, then said with a slight smile, “Dolores scared the bejesus out of me at first. But then, well, then I didn’t mind it so much. Dolores liked the food from the café.”

  “I don’t blame her.”

  “Right. It’s good food.” After a moment or two, Kayla said, “I’ll miss her. I will. She was a good lady. She was decent.”

  Decent. It made Birdie wonder if there had been people in Kayla’s life who hadn’t been decent. She let the comment settle between them for a while. Finally, she said, trying to keep her tone part friendly, part business, “I don’t know if you know this, but Dolores left a will. And even though we didn’t know each other, she made me executor of it. The will has shown us what her bankers already knew—Dolores wasn’t poor, no matter how many free meals she enjoyed at the Bountiful Bowl Cafe.” Birdie smiled, easing into the conversation.

  Kayla sat with her hands in her lap. She wiggled the toe of her boot into the dry ground, sending loose pebbles flying low in the air. Birdie watched and realized Kayla’s posturing wasn’t because she was anxious or nervous or excited, none of the emotions you would expect. It was simply that Kayla wasn’t interested in executors or wills. Nor surprised that Dolores Cardozo had money.

  “I don’t mean to bore you with details, dear,” Birdie said. “But you knew Dolores, and—”

  Kayla interrupted in a low voice, “I knew Dolores wasn’t poor. Not dreadfully poor, anyway.”

  Not like me, seemed to be insinuated in her words.

  Kayla continued. “She kept money in the house.”

  “The house?”

  “Her house. In her stove and cupboard, strange places.”

  “How did you know that? Did she tell you?”

  Kayla was very quiet. She shrugged but didn’t answer.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. The reason I needed to talk to you was because, as executor, I need to contact the beneficiaries in her will. That means—”

  “I know what that means,” Kayla said. Her tone was slightly defensive without being rude, and Birdie realized she had sounded condescending. Birdie was spoon-feeding an intelligent woman.

  “I apologize, Kayla,” she said. “I didn’t put that quite right. I just wanted you to know that you’re mentioned in the will. Monday we’re having a meeting at the Danvers Bank to distribute it. We’d like all the beneficiaries to be there.” She handed Kayla a card with Elliott Danvers’s name, the bank’s address, and her own cell number scribbled on the back, in case Kayla needed it. “Ben Endicott is an old hand at these things—he knows about the meeting and the will—and he said he’d be happy to give you a lift over and answer any questions you might have. I would recommend you take him up on it, although, of course, that is your decision.”

  Kayla seemed to be listening, as best Birdie could tell. She took the card and shoved it into her pocket, but when Birdie looked at her face, she saw that the connection between her and Kayla had been broken. Kayla was no longer listening. She was looking beyond her, and beyond the pine trees and white tents into the crowded area near the parking lot. Her face had paled slightly, her jaw clenched, and her eyes were filled with worry. Then just as quickly, Birdie saw a flash of anger in her eyes.

  “If you would let Ben know, it would—” Birdie began.

  But Kayla had gotten up from the bench. She checked her watch, then mumbled to Birdie that she had to go. Could she tell the others, and watch the kids for a few minutes? Ten minutes, that’s all she needed.

  And she was gone, disappearing into the crowd, her diminutive form lost among the muscled fishermen and families and townsfolk.

  “What’s going on?”

  Birdie turned to see Charlie standing a few feet away. He walked around the bench and sat down beside her, but his eyes were on the crowd that had swallowed Kayla.

  “Were you listening?”

  “I just caught the end of the conversation. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but it seemed best not to interrupt. Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know,” Birdie answered.

  “I talked to the kids over at the Garozzo stand. They’re all having a great time. Sam was there with Abby, too. They’re hanging on to balloons and have enough carbs stuffed in them to last through the end of the year. Those fritters are poison.”

  When Birdie didn’t answer, her eyes still combing the crowd, he said, “Is Kayla okay? Iz said you needed to talk to her. If she’s looking for her kids, she went in the wrong direction.”

  “No. She knows where they are. It was something else. She checked her watch like she’d promised to meet someone.”

  When she looked up, she saw the concern in Charlie’s face. “I don’t think the meeting was social,” she said, her hands curled over the edge of the bench, pushing herself up. “She’ll be back shortly.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Well, let’s go back to the kids.” He started to take Birdie’s arm, then stopped and looked down toward the bench legs. He bent over, picking something up from the ground. “Did you drop these, Birdie?”

  He held out an envelope, folded in half and smudged and wrinkled as if it had been scrunched inside a pocket. The letter was puffy, unsealed, and the flap, folded inside, created a gap in the sleeve.

  “This was stuck to the envelope.” Charlie held out a small piece of cardboard. “It looks like a Danvers Bank business card.”

  Birdie took the card. “Yes, that’s what it is. I just gave it to Kayla. She shoved it into her jeans pocket. It must have fallen out when she stood up.”

  And so, no doubt, had the envelope. Charlie unfolded it, smoothed it out, and rubbed off the debris. There was no stamp, no address.

  He turned it over and the gap in the envelope widened.

  “Well, that’s a surprise,” Birdie said.

  It wasn’t a letter inside the wrinkled envelope. Instead, the edges of a thin stack of fifty-dollar bills, neatly bound with a rubber band, appeared through the gap.

  * * *

  Birdie and Charlie walked slowly back to the group. In their absence it had grown to include the young Danvers girls and Abby Perry, toddling around on a pair of orange Nikes that Sam had bought her. Daisy Danvers and Gabby had taken it upon themselves to take over child-care duties, ushering them all off to a patch of grass to bat around balloons with sticky fingers and run in wild circles singing songs along with the high school band. Sarah Grace had seemingly fallen in love with little Abby, and sat with her in the center of the noise, carefully braiding pieces of grass into her hair.

  “Where’s Kayla?” Izzy asked. She looked around. Somehow the possibility of Kayla leaving her children hadn’t entirely been cleared from their minds.

  “She’ll be back in a minute,” Birdie said.

  But she appeared sooner than that, slightly out of breath and her eyes immediately darting around bodies and over heads, searching for her children. When she spotted them in the field, happy and safe, a mother’s look of relief washed over her face. Her mind switched gears almost immediately and she looked around the cluster of adults standing nearby, se
arching for Birdie. She saw Charlie first, then the small silver-haired woman standing beside him.

  They spotted her at the same time and Birdie began walking over to meet her, wanting to spare her any needless worry over the lost envelope.

  “Kayla, dear,” she said, “I wanted to be sure you got this. I think it fell out of your pocket when you left earlier. Charlie found it beneath the bench.”

  Kayla looked to Charlie, her brows lifting. “Hi,” she said, puzzled at his presence. He handed her the business card and folded envelope.

  “It’s a little dirty but nothing fell out of it as far as I could tell.”

  Kayla uttered a hushed sound. It was followed by a thank-you too profound to be explained away by a lost business card. This time she shoved the two pieces of paper into a pocket on the small denim purse strapped across her chest. She closed the zipper tight and managed a smile and another thank-you.

  Kayla glanced over at Sarah Grace and Christopher again, running her fingers through her short hair. “When I noticed it was missing, I ran back to the bench, but . . .” She let the rest of the sentence fall to the ground. “Well, anyway, you found it. Thanks. Both of you.”

  “Yes we did,” Birdie said, and suggested they join the others, now cheering the children on as they raced after balloons, trampling the grass into a path that circled Abby and her adoring caretaker, Sarah Grace.

  When the children began to fall in heaps, giggling and stretching out, finding animals in the clouds, Birdie suggested they all go over to the Artist’s Palate Bar and Grill—just in case Christopher and Sarah Grace hadn’t yet tasted the juiciest cheeseburgers in the state of Massachusetts. The children shrieked with joy, including Gabby and Daisy, who testified proudly to Christopher and Sarah Grace that the food really was the best in the state. Izzy added that the grill’s outdoor patio would allow Shep to join them at the table—which left no room for refusals, not even from Kayla Stewart, who seemed bewildered by the group of strangers who were scooping up her children as if they had known them their whole lives.

  Kayla watched Charlie Chambers gathering up her children and directing them to his car, and she felt a visceral crack inside her—a crack in her carefully constructed privacy. And she wasn’t at all sure what to do about it.

  Chapter 20

  “Do we know Kayla any better?” Izzy asked. She’d piled several baskets of yarn on the table, a stack of Xeroxed patterns next to them.

  Mae had taken a message the day before from the Sea Harbor Gazette, saying that they wanted to interview the knitters. “Knitters Society,” Mae had said, lifting her chin and nose in the air. They had promised it wouldn’t take long, so Mae had promised an hour, figuring it would be quiet since Seaside Knitting Studio was closed on Sundays.

  The knitters were fine with it. An excuse to spend an afternoon surrounded by yarn and each other was not something they’d protest. Add in Adele’s inimitable voice singing in the background and a glass of Birdie’s Pinot and they might even forget the kind of week that had absorbed them.

  “Kayla is definitely a private person,” Nell said, mulling over Izzy’s question.

  The hamburger outing had been great fun for the kids, and Kayla had come along, her mood seeming to lighten up at the sound of her children’s laughter.

  Merry Jackson—the singer in Pete’s band and owner of the Artist’s Palate Bar and Grill—loved children. She had made her patio deck safe and welcoming, complete with smaller tables, booster chairs, kids’ menus, and coloring pads. It was the perfect suggestion, especially for a crowd as big as theirs. The whole group had gone along with Birdie’s invitation, unwilling to pull the happy kids apart—the Danvers, Charlie, Gabby, and the usual crew. Merry welcomed them effusively, claiming it was her best early Saturday crowd ever and made a big fuss over everyone.

  “And how would that have happened?” Cass said. “With our noisy mob? She barely got a word in.”

  “I think she was relieved that it was a noisy mob,” Birdie said. She pulled a ball of brick red baby alpaca yarn from the basket, rubbed it lightly against her cheek, and then began casting on for a scarf, warm and soft. Her movements were pleasingly automatic, her thoughts somewhere else. “She is very private. I admire her for coming.”

  “She went along with it because of her children. She could see that the kids were having a great time,” Izzy said. “I might not know her any better after being with her yesterday, but I like her better. Those two cuties are the light of her life, and although it wasn’t easy for her to be with a crowd she didn’t know well, I thought she handled it fine.”

  “Charlie helped,” Nell said. She held up one nearly finished sock, a top-down design with a heel flap and gusset. She’d knit it up in a bright blue and green Leicester wool—soft as cotton candy with plenty of stretch. It would keep someone’s toes from turning blue come January.

  “I think Charlie helped, too,” Birdie said. “Kayla relaxed some when he was nearby.”

  “So what do you think, Cass?” Izzy asked.

  Cass tugged at a strand of chunky yarn, finally pulling it free from the ball. She held up the pattern—chunky, dark gray mittens. “These are going to be huge,” she said. “Perfect for some blustery fisherman. Or maybe Aunt Fiona.”

  They laughed. Fiona did have big hands, but they matched her heart nicely, and even Cass seemed to be appreciating her more these days.

  “So?” Izzy said. “You haven’t answered the question. I saw you talking to Kayla for a while before we left the grill.”

  Cass gave it some thought. “She’s smart,” she said. “And thoughtful, even though she keeps you at arm’s length. She’s secretive and a little wary, sure, but mostly I saw the same thing you did, Iz. She loves those kids more than life. And what I really went away with yesterday was bike or no bike, I don’t think she could kill anyone, much less Dolores Cardozo—a woman, according to Fiona, who liked Kayla. Never, not in a million years. Not someone who loves her kids that way. She’d never do anything to take her away from them.”

  Nell was touched by Cass’s answer. Although she never talked about having children, she seemed to understand what a mother’s love for her children was all about. She glanced over at a large canvas print of Izzy and Sam’s Abigail Kathleen and nodded a silent thanks to the toddler. She was teaching Cass well.

  The feeling was instinctive, and they all felt it, nodding along with Cass as they worked their needles. No mother would do something that would take her away from her children—maybe forever. It was unthinkable.

  But once the emotion subsided and they went back to knits and purls and working the cuff on a pair of winter socks, a glaring fact remained: Kayla had left her children one night. Alone in a house with only the dog, Shep, to bark away intruders.

  And for reasons she refused to explain.

  * * *

  With her fingers working magic, Izzy had nearly finished the rib of her squishy hat when Nell wondered what time it was.

  “Time, yikes,” Izzy said. “I almost forgot.”

  “So who is this person who’s coming over to make us famous?” Cass asked, frustration on her face. She had ripped out her cast-on row three times and now, nearly finished with the cuff, was worried it was time to do it again. A break was in order.

  “Maybe Betsy Figlio,” Izzy said. “Mae didn’t say. In fact, she didn’t say anything, except that she’d agreed to it for us. I think she was probably inundated with customers when they called.”

  “I don’t think Betsy does much writing except for editorials,” Nell said. “She’s a good editor. Smart. Mary had insisted that Pisano uncles or cousins or whoever now owns the papers stop giving all the top editorial jobs to other Pisanos. It was getting incestuous, she said. Betsy has brought fresh life to the paper.”

  Birdie, having known most of the Pisanos in question chuckled and started to agree, when the jingle of a bell announced someone coming in the front shop door.

  Izzy was up and heading that way
but stopped before she got to the steps.

  “Hey, guys. Is that Adele I hear? That’s cool. I like her, too.”

  His red hair flew in different directions as he flew down the stairs. He held out one hand to Izzy. “You must be Isabel Perry? I’m Richard Pisano from the Gazette. Friends call me Richie.”

  “Well sure you are,” Izzy said, grinning and taking his hand. “And you can call me Izzy. Come on in. Welcome to the Seaside Knitting Studio.”

  But Richie Pisano was already in, bounding over to the table like a kangaroo.

  In minutes he had introduced himself to Cass, all the while admiring the thick library table, the baskets of yarn, the cat who was curled up near Birdie’s knitting bag, and the three pleasant women staring at him, surprised at the familiar face, so like the one they’d seen for years on television reruns. And looking exactly as Mary Pisano had described him.

  “I feel like I know you,” Cass said, holding back a grin.

  “Okay, sure.” He grinned back. “From Superman? Happy Days? What?”

  “Happy days? Oh, sure. That Richie. That works,” Cass said and they all laughed.

  “Good to see you two again,” Richie said, turning his smile on Nell and Birdie.

  Richie pulled out a chair opposite Birdie and set his iPad and a Coke he’d brought in with him on the table. He sat comfortably, at ease, as if he’d known them all of his life. The fading light from the alley window washed over his face, turning his freckles into late summer tan. He stretched out his legs, his hands clasped behind his head.

  “It’s really great to be here. Sorry if I was a pest, calling all the time. I think the lady who answers the phone was getting a little tired of me. But it works to be a pest. She finally said yes. Who is she, your agent or something?”

  He paused for a breath and they laughed

  “Anyway, you gals have a reputation in town so I was like a dog with a bone, wanting to be sure I didn’t pass up a good thing.” He smiled again, something that seemed to come easily to Richie Pisano. “The Seaside Knitters Society. That’s what my editor calls you guys.”