Death By Cashmere

by Goldenbaum, Sally

  Though it was already after eight, Nell knew it took a while to wash down the kitchen and empty the trash. And often diners stayed on, gossiping and catching up on news. She and Izzy had spent many Tuesday evenings at Annabelle’s while planning the Seaside Knitting Studio, knitting and talking and filling the small shop with Izzy’s dreams, and the friendly owner never urged them to leave. She always had something to do, she said.

  Nell turned onto the small gravel road that led up to the restaurant. The parking lot lights were on, and the restaurant was still well lit. She spotted several cars parked in the lot—an old Corolla that Annabelle had let Stella use when she’d turned sixteen. Annabelle’s car was there, too, and a few late diners, their cars parked on the other side of the lot. Nell pulled up close to the kitchen door, debating whether to go in or stay put, waiting untilall the diners were gone. Just then, she spotted Stella Palazola walking out the kitchen door, dragging two sacks of scraps for Annabelle’s compost pile.

  Nell dropped her car keys and purse on the front seat and jumped out of the car, hurrying to catch up to the young waitress.

  “Stella,” she said, stopping the young waitress just as she reached the compost pile behind the restaurant.

  Stella spun around, dropping one of the sacks. “Miz Endicott, you scared me.”

  “I’m sorry, Stella.” Nell leaned over and gathered up the sack. “I need to talk to you. Please, just for a minute?”

  Stella looked back at the restaurant and Nell kept her eyes on Stella, hoping she wouldn’t flee again.

  Stella’s eyes darted back and forth—to Nell, the kitchen door, then over to the parking lot where the last diners were finally leaving, going out to their cars. In the distance, Nell could hear their footsteps, car doors slamming, distant chatter, and then the sound of cars leaving the parking lot.

  Nell held Stella with her eyes.

  “What?” Stella asked.

  Stella looked defeated, Nell thought, as if she had known Nell would come back. She had become Stella’s bad penny. “It’s about that cashmere sweater, Stella—”

  “I told you, I’m sorry I tried it on. I’ll never do it again. Does it matter so much? Who cares about a stupid old sweater?”

  “I do, Stella. I care very much. And I promise you that I will never do anything to get you in trouble. But you need to tell me about that sweater.”

  Stella took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.

  “I know this all seems silly to you.”

  Stella picked up a sack filled with coffee grounds and dumped it into the compost pile. She wiped her hands on her apron.

  “Miz Endicott—” she began.

  “You can trust me, Stella. I promise you. But I need to know the truth.”

  Stella nodded. She picked up her last bag and dumped it into the pile.

  And then she turned back to Nell, and she told her the truth.

  Chapter 33

  It was late when Nell finally returned home, her mind numb and her heart heavy. Stella had said what she knew she would say. The truth had been there, hovering at the corners of Nell’s mind for days now, but she wouldn’t allow the suspicions to become fact. She didn’t want them to be fact.

  Ben was waiting at home, worried. “Don’t do this to me, Nell,” he said.

  “Ben, you’re not the worrier. I am.”

  “You’re right, I’m not. So don’t turn me into one.” He was sitting at the island, drinking a cup of tea and he forced a lightness into his voice. Nell walked over to him and dropped her purse on the floor. She rubbed his neck.

  “Birdie, Cass, and Izzy came by.”

  “And they brought the envelope?”

  Ben nodded. He picked it up from the island. “They filled me in about the other documents. I’ve checked them over.”

  “And the third envelope?” Nell asked. But she knew before Ben answered what was in it. Izzy had been right. It contained a will. A deed. A fortune. Angus’s fortune.

  Nell told Ben about talking to Stella. And about the photos she had printed off from Sam’s shoot at the quarry. The photograph that held the key to Angus’s life—and Angie’s death.

  Nell reached for her purse, digging inside for the printouts she’d made.

  “That’s odd,” she said. “I slipped the pictures in my purse. I’m not even sure why now. Habit, I guess. But they’re not here.” She rummaged through it again, but the large bag held her wallet and cosmetic case. Her cell phone and pens, a pad of paper and tissues. But the printed photos she had tucked into the bag were gone.

  She mentally retraced her trip to Annabelle’s. She’d left her purse sitting on the car seat with the windows wide open while she talked to Stella. Her purse and her keys. She frowned, remembering the voices and click of heels behind her as the last diners left the restaurant. She remembered the sound of footsteps that had come close to where she and Stella were standing, and then faded away. Car doors slammed; then the vehicles drove off until they couldn’t be heard anymore.

  “Someone took the photos from my purse,” Nell said. “And I think I know who.” She checked her watch. It was too late to call Annabelle, and she didn’t want to explain it all. But she suspected she knew at least one of the diners who had enjoyed Annabelle’s Tuesday-evening eggs a few hours before.

  Ben and Nell drank hot tea, talking quietly, and finally went up to bed.

  “It’s too late tonight to do anything,” Ben said. “And to what good end? No one is running away. Let people sleep. Tomorrow will come soon enough.”

  They would call the police in the morning and deliver the deeds and the wedding license and the photos. Angie’s hard work to make things right, all tied up neatly in a rubber band.

  The phone call from Birdie came early, just before the sun slipped up out of the ocean.

  Birdie had been unable to sleep, she said, so she got up and sat at the windows in Sonny Favazza’s den, a place she always found comfort. She could see the burst of color from the windows, but the telescope took her even closer. At first the light was small—a flash of light against the black sky. And then it grew larger.

  Birdie called 911, then dialed Nell and Ben.

  “We’re on our way,” Ben said, and Birdie assured him that the fire trucks were, too.

  Ben drove as fast as he could along the narrow Framingham Road, lit by a lingering moon that seemed reluctant to give way to dawn. Nell’s heart was wedged tightly in her throat, not wanting to see what she knew they would find at the end of the road.

  They arrived before the fire trucks and police, before Cass and Pete, who had gotten up early to prepare their traps and had seen the fire from their boat. Before Izzy, unable to sleep, who was on her way to the point.

  Margarethe Framingham stood at the edge of the drive, dressed incongruously in a suit and heels, as if she were going to a board meeting at the museum. She stood calmly, watching the enormous house that had been the love of her life light up the night. The crackling flames traveled from one room to the next, lighting up from the inside as if a party were about to begin. The old walls created a furnace, sucking in the air, fueling the dancing flames as they played with curtains, crackled exquisite chandeliers, and melted fine books into black lumps of coal.

  “Margarethe,” Nell called out to her. “Don’t.”

  But the woman put up her hands and took a step closer to the burning house. “Don’t come near me,” she called out. “If I can’t have this house, no one will.”

  “Why, Margarethe?”

  “I tried to talk to that girl, but she wouldn’t listen to me,” she said. “She wanted to take it all back and give it to an old man who didn’t care, didn’t need this, didn’t want it. This is mine,” she said, her voice turning steely. “I worked for it. I became someone because of it. I am important—and you want to take it away. You will never have it. Never. None of you ungrateful people.”

  In the background, faint and still at a distance, the sounds of cars, sirens, and fire trucks
racing over the granite ground toward Framingham Point marred the silent beauty of dawn.

  “Margarethe, the land didn’t belong to the Framinghams. Not ever. And now two people are dead.”

  “She didn’t have to die. I gave her choices. Life is all about choices. I was worth nothing and made the choice to marry into this family and control it. Angie made the wrong choice. I made the right one. She used her research skills on the wrong thing. Just to settle a silly score.”

  “I don’t think she would consider her father’s death a silly grievance, Margarethe.”

  “He drank himself to death. And being fired from our company was incidental. But no matter, Angie Archer should never have pursued this—she was not hired to dig into the Framinghams’ past. This town would be nothing without me.”

  Without me. The steely arrogance in Margarethe’s voice startled Nell. This was not the person she sat with on boards, the generous woman who spearheaded Sea Harbor causes. It was a power-hungry woman who came from nothing—and would never go back to that.

  “Margarethe, we can make this right,” she said, not believing her words, just as she knew Margarethe would not believe them, but trying desperately to hold her attention.

  Ben slowly moved around the circle drive while Nell talked.

  “Gideon was a fool, you know,” Margarethe said, her voice rising to an unfamiliar level. “He saw us that night as he was stealing the lobsters, foolish, horrible person. No one could ever blackmail Margarethe Framingham.”

  “You kept Izzy’s sweater, Margarethe.”

  The light of the fire illuminated an odd smile on Margarethe’s face. “It slipped off her shoulders. It was the most exquisite yarn, an unusual perfect weave . . .” Her voice trailed off as if she were picturing the saffron-colored cashmere, feeling it with her fingertips. “I kept it safe in my closet. One should care for beautiful things, Nell.”

  “Angie talked to Angus about this land,” Nell said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ben circle the statue in the center of the drive, moving closer to the tall figure at the foot of the steps.

  Margarethe looked off into the distance. “Angus told me Angie was giving him proof. But she was dead. He didn’t know what she was talking about half the time, fool man. All he wanted was to clutter up the harbor front telling tales. But when he was lucid—”

  Nell wrapped her arms around her body, warding off the chill of dawn. “Then he knew, didn’t he? Knew that this land belonged to his beloved Anja. And when she died, it belonged to him. And that somehow Angie had put things in place for him.”

  “Belonged?” Margarethe stepped closer to the house. “What do you know about belonging? I was nothing, nothing! And now I am something. And no one will ever, ever take that away.” She turned and looked around the circle, spotted Ben not fifty feet away. She put up her hands in front of her, stopping him, her tall figure a silhouette against the burning backdrop.

  And as the fire trucks screeched and whirred, their lights spinning around and casting eerie shadows against the trees, Margarethe smiled back at Nell, nodded politely to Ben, turned as if on a stage, and walked back into her house.

  Chapter 34

  The Sea Harbor Gazette said it all: Sea Harbor’s old man of the sea— a millionaire benefactor.

  And farther down, a headline read: Fall from Grace. And the sad, awful story of Margarethe Framingham was detailed in chronological exactness. Nell noticed that Margarethe’s accomplishments were listed as well, but they paled in the light of her motivation and awful, murderous compulsion to maintain a name and a fortune. That couldn’t be explained away so easily.

  When Izzy and Nell visited Josie a day later and carried the boxes of her things into the back bedroom, Josie pulled out one of Angie’s graduate school papers and showed it to them. Angie had gotten an A on it, Josie said proudly. She’d chosen Sea Harbor for her paper that semester and discovered unusual land transfers that didn’t fall on the grid. So she had come back home after graduation to pick up the trail. It had been a lottery win for Angie, Nell realized now—she’d found a way to extract justice from Sylvester Framingham Sr. for her father’s death—and she’d help a very nice man in the process.

  Tony Framingham returned to Sea Harbor the next day, as soon as the news reached him. He’d been in Boston, visiting friends.

  A blessing, Nell thought when she took a look at the bedraggledfigure standing in her doorway that afternoon. No good would have come from seeing his mother die.

  Ben and Nell were both home when the unexpected visitor arrived, and they sat with him on the deck, a glass of untouched ice tea in front of him.

  “You were the last to see her,” he said. “I just want to know . . . I don’t know what I want to know.”

  “The fire chief said she didn’t suffer, Tony. She was knocked unconscious when the ceiling caved in. She didn’t feel any pain.”

  “Maybe not at that moment,” Tony said. He sat on the bench, his head low and his elbows braced on his legs.

  “Did you know what was going on, Tony?” Ben asked.

  Tony looked beaten, a handsome man, crushed beneath a sordid history and grief for his mother—and for her deeds. “I knew she wasn’t right lately. I got strange phone calls from her saying that people were out to destroy the Framingham name. Things that didn’t make sense. That’s why I came home.

  “I always suspected my grandfather stole the land and the quarries—I talked to my dad about it once and he admitted as much. His old man was a shyster, but he had friends in all the right places. When both the Alatalos died—father and daughter— there was no one to stop him. He was able to come up with a document, have it signed and sealed. Angus was probably overcome with grief at the time, and he may not have even known about the will that stated the Alatalos’ fortune, the land, and the quarries belonged to him. It was easy.

  “My dad handled the fraud by being distant. Mother knew, and coveted the secret to keep her standing, her power—the only things in life that really mattered to her. I handled it by getting away from here, not taking a cent from my family, finding my own way.”

  “You knew Angie was up to something, though.”

  Tony nodded. “She told me as much. Angie always disliked the whole family, ever since her father lost his job. She had a right to, frankly. But I always kind of liked her, believe it or not. Angie saw things in black and white though, and I was definitely a part of the bad guys, even when we were teenagers. When I came back to help my mother, I tried to talk with Angie, tried to get her to back off, to bribe her, if I had to. But she wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Did you know that your mother . . .” Nell paused.

  “Killed Angie? I don’t know if I knew or not, Nell. I guess I thought if everyone let the police report stand, moved on, it would all go away—and I wouldn’t have to know.

  “I was rude to all of you, I know. I thought if I played tough, you’d all back off, forget about it, buy into the town’s thinking that the guy who did it was long gone. And then maybe I could convince myself that they were right, some stranger killed Angie.”

  Tony’s face was so raw with sadness that Nell had to keep herself from looking away. He sat in silence for a moment, breathing in and out as if to stabilize his shaken world. When he finally looked up at Nell and Ben, his voice was shaky and his eyes filled with remorse.

  “She was my mother,” he said at last. “And I loved her.”

  Birdie dressed Angus up in summery Brooks Brothers slacks and a silky shirt for the Fourth of July ceremony. She slipped a rose into the pocket of his shirt.

  “This is your day, Angus. Now, behave yourself.”

  “Miss Birdie, I just love it when you talk dirty.” Angus smiled. He had lost weight, but his mind was clear and though the doctors couldn’t explain it, he had maintained a reasonable clarity since his release from the hospital.

  “I think he always thought he was alone,” Birdie said. “Ever since he lost Anja, he wandered, always
on the edge but never really being a part of anything. When he was in the hospital, Sea Harbor showed him he still has a family.”

  The doctors listened politely and nodded appropriately. But, as Birdie told anyone who would listen, they couldn’t seem to come up with a better explanation, now, could they?

  Nell waved at Angus as he walked onto the stage. It was set up in the middle of the park near Ocean’s Edge. When the skies turned dark, fireworks would go off over the ocean and little children would run around the grass with sparklers in their hands. Already blankets covered the grass, the smell of hotdogs and hamburgers filled the air, and a small band played John Philip Sousa marches to the delight of romping children. As the drums rolled, the mayor stepped up to the podium and blew ceremoniously into the microphone. A shrill ring brought the crowd to attention.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “a happy Fourth of July to you!”

  The crowd squealed and several helium balloons floated up in the air above the mayor’s head.

  They all sat in the first row, just in front of the stage—Nell and Ben, Cass, Pete, Sam and Birdie. The Brandleys were just behind them, Archie outfitted in a red, white, and blue striped shirt with a silly little beanie that had stars and stripes on the top. Ham and Jane slipped in just before Angus came to the microphone.

  And Izzy sat on the end, next to Sam, with the cashmere sweater that wouldn’t die wrapped around her shoulders. Shortly after the night Margarethe died, a package arrived at the Seaside Knitting Studio, mailed the day of the fire.

  Purl had found the package first, just inside the back door, and pawed and pulled until the string fell free. She seemed insistent Izzy open the package then and there.

  When Izzy opened the cardboard flaps, she gasped.

  “She must have planned that day,” Izzy told Nell. “She knew we were putting the pieces together. Angus was recovering. It was just a matter of time.”