Murder Wears Mittens

by Sally Goldenbaum

  Esther’s laugh came out in a rumble.

  Charlie looked tired, Nell thought. He was worried about something, too. Of course he was. Although she didn’t know exactly what his feelings were for Kayla Stewart, she knew there was a connection there that was strong enough to worry him.

  He met her glance, read the concern on her face, and, as he always did, immediately disavowed it with an “I’m fine” grin. “So what are you guys doing out here?” He looked around at the boxes.

  “What are we doing right this minute?” Birdie asked back. “Right this minute we are learning that Esther’s knitting project with the women in the jail was masterminded by Fiona.”

  “Fiona? That’s no surprise. That nun has her hands in everything,” Charlie said. “Even Cass’s love life.”

  Cass threw darts at him.

  “Fiona brought some kids in today for their vaccinations because the moms were working,” he said. “She’s sitting in the clinic playing Old Maid with them right now.” He helped himself to a poppy seed kolache and half sat on the deep window ledge. “Fiona may have stolen that knitting idea, though. I remember hearing about a program like that somewhere else in one of my travels. And Birdie’s right, it’s great therapy.”

  “Maybe Fiona started that program, too,” Esther said. “She worked with women with addiction problems someplace before she came back to Sea Harbor. You all knew that, right?” Esther said.

  Cass was quiet, slightly embarrassed that Esther knew more about her aunt than she did. She knew Fiona had been principal in several different places, wherever her order needed her to be. But knowledge of her aunt’s work was scanty, mostly confined to letters that arrived at the Halloran Lobster Company asking for donations for some cause or another. Cass’s dad had always supported his younger sister’s charities, so Cass did the same.

  Nell realized she didn’t know much about Fiona’s missions, either. Or maybe she did and had forgotten. Mary Halloran had mentioned once that her sister-in-law had come back to Sea Harbor after the place she was running ran out of money. But she hadn’t expanded on it. And Fiona herself seemed much grounded in the present rather than talking about the past.

  On the other hand, Esther was the kind of magical grandma figure who elicited talk and secrets from even hardened criminals. Perhaps it was the endless hours she spent at the jail, but whatever it was, it surprised no one that Fiona talked things over with her, and suggested the knitting program for the women’s jail.

  “Where was the program she was involved in?” Charlie asked. He licked a drop of filling from his finger.

  “Somewhere out west. One of those states beyond the Mississippi. South Dakota, maybe?” Esther said. Then she shook her tight gray curls, as if scolding herself. “No, no, no. It was where they have the potatoes.”

  “Like grow them?” Charlie asked. “Idaho?” His brows lifted into a wayward hank of hair.

  “That’s it,” Cass said. “Potatoes sounds familiar. Lots of corny jokes about potatoes.”

  “Idaho,” Charlie repeated. He was listening intently, as if Fiona’s coming home from Idaho, with or without potatoes, was somehow interesting. Important, maybe. “Idaho is quite a place,” he said, and then concentrated on his kolache. He checked his watch.

  “Are you leaving?” Cass asked.

  “I want to catch Fiona before she leaves. I need to ask her why potatoes make good detectives.” He grabbed a napkin and the last kolaches and headed toward the door.

  “Why?” Cass knew she shouldn’t ask, knew it before the word was out. She ignored Izzy’s warning scowl.

  “Because they keep their eyes peeled.” Charlie grinned and disappeared down the hall.

  * * *

  With Esther’s help, it took less than an hour to figure out where and how they’d display the knitted items, samples of each category displayed on tables, then hundreds more would be hanging on colorfully painted pegboards. The yarns alone would turn the Clothing Closet into an explosion of color. A winter of warmth was ahead.

  The thought warmed them all.

  Esther began packing up her knitting and making a move to leave. “No one will be coming in at this hour, I don’t expect, but if you’d kindly lock the door when you leave and drop the key at the Free Health Clinic next door, I’d be grateful.”

  “Night shift?” Birdie asked, helping Esther into a heavy cable knit cardigan she had knit during long hours in the dispatcher’s office.

  Esther nodded. “Home first to check on the hubby. Then off to the station.”

  “May it be a quiet night,” Birdie said.

  Esther nodded. “I’ve had my excitement for the year.”

  “Of course you have,” Birdie said.

  “Were you on duty the night Dolores died?” Izzy asked.

  Esther nodded.

  “Did you know her?”

  “I knew her well enough to know she was a good woman who didn’t deserve to die that way.”

  “She recognized the good you do, Esther,” Birdie said, smiling. “Not only the bequest, but her comments about the knitting project were lovely.”

  “Yes, they were. Somehow Dolores heard about the program—probably from our Fiona. And then low and behold she turned up at the station one day, walked all the way over from her house near the old quarry. Can you believe that? Just this skinny woman with a giant walking stick. And not sweating a bit as far as I could tell. We got on, the two of us. Maybe it was comparing my cane to her walking stick that did it. But she didn’t come for talk; she came because of the knitting program in the jail. She asked me lots of questions about it, where the money came from—”

  Esther laughed at her own words, and the others laughed along with her. They all knew where Esther got the money to buy the yarn and needles and the food and drink she’d bring along to the ladies in the jail. She got it from her own paycheck and from pleas to Sea Harbor’s policemen, and from any friends, including those in the room right then, who happened to ask her how it was going.

  Few could say no to Esther Gibson.

  “And now, low and behold, we have this big pot of money at our disposal. The boys at the station cheered when they heard the news, thinking incorrectly that they’d be off the hook to donate.” She looked at Izzy. “You can bet I’ll be buying up a storm in the shop, Izzy.”

  “We’ll be ready and waiting.” Izzy handed Esther her cane.

  The others went back to moving boxes while Nell walked Esther out to her car, ignoring the police dispatcher’s insistence that she could get there just fine by herself.

  Nell held the center’s heavy wooden door open while Esther and her cane made it through, then down the steps. As they approached the pickup truck that Esther and her husband shared, Nell paused before opening the door. “Esther, I’d like your opinion on something.”

  “Well, dear Nell, you know I have plenty of those.” She opened the door herself and threw her cane into the cab, then leaned one elbow against the open door.

  “It’s about that new reporter. Someone told me he’s been hanging around the station, so I’m assuming you know him.”

  “Richie. That’s who you mean. Mary Pisano’s cousin so far removed she sometimes forgets which relative bore him. A plucky lad. He’s everywhere, isn’t he?”

  “He seems to be.”

  “At first his charm got to me along with others at the station so we allowed him to hang around, drinking coffee in the break room, taking pictures now and then. He was funny, mostly polite and very talkative. But once that top layer wore off, we discovered the young man could be pretty full of himself. It’s probably not his fault. Who knows what kind of a childhood he had? So much begins there, in those early years.”

  “Do you think he was hanging around the station waiting for a crime to happen? Hoping maybe? Something to write about?”

  “Oh, no, dear. I don’t think that. I have come to suspect that Richie Pisano has agendas that don’t have much to do with journalism. If truth be know
n, I think Richie is more interested in being rich than being a journalist. Perhaps he was aptly named. But that might be me watching too many TV shows. No matter, we all soon tired of his comments, his poking around, the personal questions. He told me recently he was on a quest to research the wealthiest people in Sea Harbor. Who says that sort of thing?”

  Nell frowned. “I agree. That’s a bit odd. When did he say that?”

  Esther pulled herself up into the cab and sat back in the driver’s seat, catching her breath and thinking. “Well, that’s a good question. It was before Dolores died, I think. I remember because he mentioned Dolores that day, too. Wondering what we knew about her. We all wondered how he even knew her name since few people did.”

  She closed the door and started up the engine, her jaw set, upset all over again at Richie’s impertinent questions and comments. She leaned on the window frame, the flesh of one round arm hanging over the edge, and looked at Nell. “Some of my guys in blue said he reminded them of some television character, Superman’s friend or someone like that. He reminded me of one, too. Remember the old Leave It to Beaver show?”

  Nell nodded.

  “He’s Eddie Haskell.”

  * * *

  When Nell walked back inside the center, she spotted Charlie down the wide hallway, just outside the free clinic waiting area. He was leaning against the wall cradling a mug of coffee. But he wasn’t drinking it. Instead he was staring out the window opposite him, his face a collage of emotions.

  Nell walked over to his side.

  Charlie seemed not to notice.

  “Charlie,” she said softly, trying not to startle him.

  But she had. Coffee sloshed over the side of the cup, rivulets joining the colorful artwork covering his jacket.

  “No one will even notice,” Nell said, pulling a tissue from her pocket and blotting it up. “In fact, it looks perfect on top of that little head some child drew. A lovely blob of tan hair.”

  Charlie smiled and set the mug on a table.

  “Ben told me he sent you over to see Kayla after the reading of the will,” she said. “She was quite emotional, he said. I hope she’s all right. I suspect that’s what’s on your mind?”

  “She’s on my mind, sure. And yeah, Uncle Ben told me about her reaction to the whole thing. She seemed anguished, he said. Anguished. It doesn’t compute. But in a way it does. She’s a smart woman. She knows she’s in the middle of a murder investigation—and she has two beautiful kids she thinks about constantly. I guess Uncle Ben thought maybe she could use a friend.”

  “He said she seemed burdened. I hope she was able to share it with you, somehow lessen that emotion. You’re good at that, Charlie.”

  He waved off the compliment but admitted that for some strange reason, she did seem to talk to him more openly. “Sometimes she tells me to get lost, but other times, she loosens up. It’s as if we’re kindred spirits in some odd way. So I went by, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to her. So I don’t know what she’s thinking.”

  “Was she working?”

  “No, she was home. I parked across the street and started to get out of the car, but then I saw movement through the door. She wasn’t alone.”

  “Fiona, maybe? I’m sure she was concerned about her, too.”

  “No. It was a man. They were standing on the other side of the screen door, in the front hallway.”

  “Who was it?”

  He shrugged. “It was shadowy and the guy had his back to me.” Charlie picked up his mug again, the coffee cold now, and drank it down in a single swallow. “I saw his car, though. It was parked right in front of her house.” He looked back out the window.

  Nell looked out, too. It’s what one did at the park. Lose your thoughts in what surrounded you. Long, late afternoon shadows falling across the lawn and parking lot. A flock of gulls flying in wide circles near the path to the beach, and closer to them leaves dancing across the parking lot.

  Peaceful. Untroubled. Not at all matching her nephew’s face. “Charlie, what is it?”

  He shrugged. “Something’s not right over there, Aunt Nell.”

  She agreed. Kayla Stewart was a mystery. And without anyone planning it, she had become their mystery. Charlie’s, Ben’s, Cass’s, all of theirs. Their responsibility, in some undefined way.

  “What kind of a car was it?” Nell asked. Something was niggling at the back of her mind. An uncomfortable itch.

  “One of those old Jeeps. It might be the same one I saw careening around the corner that first night I went over there. You know what I mean—canvas top, no door. I had one in high school.”

  Was it red?” Nell asked.

  She felt Charlie’s nod before she saw it.

  “Yeah. Blood red.”

  Chapter 25

  Birdie was the one who suggested that she and Nell take some of her housekeeper Ella’s muffins out to Joe Duncan and his wife, Marlene. When Danny Brandley heard they were headed to the Cardozo neighborhood, he asked to go along.

  “I knit,” he reminded them as he climbed into the back of Nell’s car. “That gives me some credentials to tag along with you two.”

  “Not to mention the lure of a murder scene,” Nell said.

  He’d never be turned away, of course. Danny was one of Nell and Birdie’s favorite people. Nor would they mention that his knitting expertise had been stalled on knit stitches for two years. The plethora of plain-looking scarves his generous father wore all winter were proof and added questionable doubt to his assurance that purling was just around the corner.

  “Now tell me why we’re going out to the Cardozo place?” Danny asked, settling in.

  “We’re taking Ella’s blueberry muffins to a neighbor. The muffins are still warm. And they’re magical.”

  “In what way?” Danny eyed the Tupperware container sitting beside him. He quietly pried open a corner of the container.

  “In every way, you’ll see. Now close the muffin lid, please.”

  Danny laughed. In his mind, Birdie was the one who was magical. “Are you a witch?” he asked. “I could use a witch in one of my mysteries.”

  “A witch, hmm.” Birdie pondered the thought and told him she would let him know.

  “I haven’t seen that old quarry since I was a kid,” Danny said, watching the small Sea Harbor neighborhoods fall away. The road grew narrow and winding, lined now with copses of hemlock and maple trees, clumps of shadbush and catbrier squeezed in between. Every now and then a small house was visible behind unkempt foliage.

  They drove in comfortable silence, around the bends in the road and up and down hills. A light breeze and warm, plentiful sunshine filled the car. “Ah, peace,” Birdie said. “Nature has its way of feeding our spirits, clearing our minds.”

  From the backseat, Danny felt it, too. He nodded, his thoughts moving like his stories sometimes did, unplanned, unpredictable, revealing. Or not. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and thought of Cass crawling out of bed that morning. She’d gotten up early to watch the sunrise. He had heard her get up and watched from the bed as she stood at the windows, watching the light come up over the water—pinks and purples, light blue and gold. Soon after, she had brought him coffee in bed. And then she took it away instead and crawled in beside him.

  Later she’d laid her head on his chest, thick black hair rubbing against his skin, and she had talked about Sarah Grace and Christopher Stewart. About their mother, who tightly guarded secrets, her life tangled up, but who had two children whose whole lives—their psyches, their thoughts, their dreams and values, their livelihood—depended on her, on what she did and what she said and how she said it—and on who she was. And she had no one to help her on that journey.

  He’d held her and listened, letting her talk it out, knowing Cass wasn’t talking about Kayla Stewart, her responsibilities, and her two sweet kids. She was talking about Cass Halloran.

  “Danny?” Birdie said, once the easy silence had run its course. “Are you still back there?�
�

  “It depends.” Danny stretched his feet out as best he could and brought himself out of his thoughts. “What’s up?”

  “I’m thinking about our friend Charlie Chambers.”

  “That sounds ominous. Cass and I had a few beers with Charlie last night.”

  “I know you did. That’s why I’m wondering about him with you, and not with Joe Schmoe.”

  In the privacy of the backseat, Danny grinned again. Maybe Birdie really was a witch. “So we’re wondering together.”

  “Yes. All three of us. Has Charlie mentioned that reporter to you?”

  “The guy with the red hair, you mean. The one that seems to be a friend of Kayla Stewart’s, or at least has been hanging around her house. That one?”

  “Have you met him?” Nell asked.

  “Funny you should ask—yeah, I have. He was also at the Gull last night. Hanging out with some guys. He’d had a few.”

  “What was your impression?” Nell asked.

  “Same as Charlie’s and Cass’s. He’s pretty full of himself. At first, we were kind of invisible to him. For a while he was too busy talking to notice us. So we just sat at the bar and eavesdropped.”

  “He seems to be climbing the journalism ladder, or at least hoping to,” Birdie said.

  “Maybe. But he’ll never get there. I was a journalist for more years than I want to remember, and our friend Richie isn’t very good. Cass showed me a couple articles of his. If he’s on a ladder, it’s the bottom rung. He’s writing about people we know and love, like Gabby and Daisy and Lambswool Farm, and that’s why people think he’s good. But a real journalist? Nah, no way.”

  Danny was right, and they knew it. Sometimes trying to be kind clouded the truth. “So he didn’t talk about his job last night?” she asked.

  “Only to say how good he was. And then some garbage about how being a journalist gave you entry into all sorts of things. ‘Opportunities,’ he said, and when he mentioned the word, Cass almost choked on a fried clam. I was afraid I’d be doing the Heimlich on her.”