Knit One, Die Two

by Peggy Ehrhart

  The front door opened and once again they heard Wilfred advising the kittens to be careful of his feet. Then he was lifting three frosty bottles of beer from a canvas bag. “To go with the soup,” he said. Pamela started to rise, but both waved her back into her chair.

  “She had that argument with Craig Belknap,” Pamela said suddenly.

  “We’ll let the police figure things out,” Bettina said. “They’ll talk to all the Players.”

  At the counter, Wilfred busied himself cutting the rest of the ham bits from the hock. Bettina found a few of Pamela’s homegrown tomatoes in the wooden bowl on the counter, and soon they were gathered around the dining room table eating and feeling a bit more cheerful.

  Pamela insisted that she would be okay in the house alone. If she accepted Wilfred and Bettina’s invitation to spend the night across the street, Catrina and the kittens would feel deserted, especially if their breakfast wasn’t forthcoming first thing in the morning. By the time Wilfred and Bettina left, no vehicles of any kind remained at the curb and all the lights were off next door.

  * * *

  An insistent meow distracted Pamela from an urgent quest: She had been invited to speak on new frontiers for old crafts at a conference sponsored by Fiber Craft, but no room numbers were posted outside the meeting rooms in the conference facility. She hurried from one room to another, desperately asking the assembled conference-goers what topic they were waiting to learn about. But in every room there was that curious meowing. What would cats be doing at a Fiber Craft conference?

  She rolled onto her back and opened her eyes. She was not roaming the halls of the Hilton Garden Inn. She was at home, in her bedroom. She’d slept later and more soundly than she’d expected after the drama of the previous night. Usually, this time of year the sun brightened her white eyelet curtains early enough that no alarm clock was needed. According to the glowing numerals on her bedside clock, it was already nine a.m., but the curtains hung in shadowy folds, suggesting that the sky behind them was gray.

  “Okay, okay,” she murmured, rising and pulling on her robe. Catrina stopped meowing as the bedroom door swung open, but she tipped her face up and gazed at Pamela. Her expression suggested that she was as worried about Pamela’s well-being as about her own empty stomach.

  Downstairs, kittens were tumbling around the kitchen, chasing and tackling one another with tiny squeaks meant to be ferocious, and batting the tightly wound ball of yarn she’d given them to play with when they’d first begun to venture from their communal bed. Pamela spooned cat food and kitten food into fresh bowls and set them in the corner of the kitchen where mother and children had learned to expect their meals. The sky did look gloomy, she noted as she stood at the counter settling a paper filter into its plastic cone and adding three scoops of coffee.

  After she got water started in the kettle, she hurried outside to collect the Register. She doubted that Caralee’s death would be front-page news, but she knew the Register’s reporters could be quite persistent in covering local stories, not to mention the people from the local TV channel. Their truck had probably shown up while she and Bettina and Wilfred were eating their bean soup.

  Pamela ate a slice of whole-grain toast, drank her coffee, and paged through the Register. As she folded the first section and set it aside, a headline on the front page of “Local” caught her eye. It read ARBORVILLE ACTRESS DIES IN FREAK ACCIDENT. Freak accident? Was that official?

  According to the article, a member of the Players came upon Caralee’s body after entering the storage room in search of chairs shortly before rehearsal was to start at seven p.m. Police were summoned, an ambulance was called—though Caralee was clearly dead—and the sheriff’s crime-scene unit responded as well.

  Could reporters have stayed around long enough and been persistent enough to get a statement confirming that the death was an accident? Detective Clayborn had been on the scene right away, but didn’t it take time and deliberation to decide whether an event that killed someone was an accident? Perhaps Bettina would have more to report.

  Most days Pamela’s work happened in her upstairs office, but she’d never been one to lounge about in pajamas and robe. Though she’d slept late and it was nearly ten a.m., the workday could still be salvaged, and work would take her mind off the thought of poor Caralee meeting a fate that had been so curiously foreshadowed. Teeth brushed, hair tidied, and dressed in her warm-weather uniform of jeans and a cotton blouse, she settled down at her desk. She was staring at her computer screen as a progress bar tracked the slow arrival of an email, undoubtedly from her boss and undoubtedly attachment-laden.

  As she waited, her mind returned to the dream from which Catrina’s meows had delivered her. She’d had the dream, and others like it, before—often when a challenge loomed. In the dream she always persisted, opening doors and asking questions, but in the way of dreams there was seldom a satisfying denouement. Cats meowed, the sun came through the curtains, or the landscapers started up next door, and she awoke.

  At the same moment that the email finally popped up in her inbox, the doorbell rang. Halfway down the stairs, she already knew it was Bettina. Through the lace that curtained the oval window in her front door, she could make out a splash of bright orange. She opened the door to discover that Bettina’s face reflected anything but the cheer that would have suited her fetching outfit. In fact Bettina had been crying.

  “Oh, Pamela!” she exclaimed, reaching out to be hugged, which Pamela obliged. “I just couldn’t help it,” she added, stepping back and wiping her eyes. “I sobbed all the way here in my car. Margo is heartbroken, and talking to her I just kept thinking, what if I lost one of my own children?”

  “Come in here.” Pamela led her to the kitchen, settled her at the table, and took the facing chair. “There’s some coffee left,” she said, popping up again.

  Bettina waved her hand. “I’ve had plenty,” she said. “I just want to talk.”

  “I guess . . .” Pamela hesitated. She didn’t want the words to come out wrong, but she was curious. “I guess . . . Caralee showed a different side of herself to her aunt? Of course, no one would be happy if a niece died, but to be so devastated . . . there must have been a special bond.”

  “There was,” Bettina said. “Caralee’s father was Margo’s brother, her favorite brother. He died when Caralee was in college. His marriage to Caralee’s mother wasn’t a happy one, and she wasn’t a happy mother, at least where Caralee was concerned. Parents don’t have favorites, they say, but everybody knows they do. Caralee’s mother left Arborville after her husband died, so Margo took over that role. Caralee would come back here on her college breaks and they stayed very close.”

  Pamela nodded sympathetically. “And Margo’s own children?” she asked.

  “A son, grown up and living in Europe. They’re close too, and he keeps in touch—he didn’t move there to escape from Mom or anything. And she has a married daughter in Timberley. But she loved Caralee and she’d gotten so used to having her in the house.”

  “You saw the Register?” Pamela asked. She’d left the paper on the table when she went upstairs to work and she patted it now.

  “I know what you’re wondering,” Bettina said. “Do they really think it was an accident?”

  “Well, do they?” Pamela leaned across the table.

  “No reason to think other wise—according to Clayborn.” Bettina shrugged. “I spent fifteen minutes with him before I went to Margo’s.”

  “Did you tell him last night wasn’t the first time furniture in the storage room had come crashing down on Caralee?”

  “I did.” Bettina’s grim expression was at odds with the cheery orange tint of her lipstick. “He said they interviewed everyone in the Players and no one had any reason to want Caralee dead. He also said that it would be very hard to prove in court that falling furniture had been used as a murder weapon.”

  “But what about Craig Belknap?” Pamela asked.

  “Clayborn
told me that I pay my taxes so I don’t have to trouble myself with work better left to the police. He seemed a little grouchy this morning.”

  “Probably hadn’t had enough coffee yet,” Pamela said. “Speaking of which, are you ready now? I could do with another cup.”

  There was just enough left in the carafe for a scant cup each. Pamela set her cut-glass sugar bowl on the table and, dispensing with formality, served Bettina her cream in its grocery-store carton.

  “The funeral is tomorrow,” Bettina said after a fortifying sip of coffee. “At St. Willibrod’s.”

  “What time?” Pamela asked.

  “Do you want to go?” Bettina looked mildly surprised.

  “Of course,” Pamela said. “She was in our group, if only briefly, and you’re Margo’s friend and you’re going.”

  “It’s at ten,” Bettina said. “I know you’ll want to walk, but I’ll be wearing my good shoes and I plan to drive.”

  “I’ll take a ride.” It was true that some shoes were more suited for walks around town than others, not that any of Pamela’s were very fancy.

  “I’ll ring your bell at a quarter to.” Bettina stood up. “And I’ll let the other knitters know the details. Margo is hosting a reception at her house afterward. I told her I’d help—maybe it will be catering though. I’m not much good when it comes to food.” Bettina had a repertoire of seven meals, one for each day of the week.

  * * *

  After Bettina left, Pamela rinsed the cups at the sink and returned to her computer. The slow-to-arrive email had brought with it ten attachments, each a submission to Fiber Craft. The message itself asked Pamela to read the ten articles and advise for or against publication. While she’d been downstairs with Bettina, an email had arrived from Penny too. The note started out enthusing about a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with her art history class, but then the mood changed. “Mom,” Penny wrote, “I just got a message from one of my friends back in Arborville telling me to look at the Register’s website, and I looked. I hope you’re not going to get involved in this!”

  On the surface, pleasant little Arborville did not seem the kind of town where people got murdered, and Pamela certainly did not seem the kind of person to set to work sleuthing and make connections overlooked by the police. Yet both had happened, and more than once.

  “Of course not,” Pamela responded. “It was a tragic accident, just like the Register says.”

  It was tragic, and at the thought her throat grew tight. She swallowed hard. Margo had loved Caralee, prickly as she was, just the way most mothers loved their daughters. Penny wasn’t prickly in the least. Pamela had already lost a husband. She couldn’t bear to think how she’d feel if she was in Margo’s place.

  The report on the ten articles was due back the next day, a day whose morning and part of whose afternoon would be taken up with the funeral and reception. Pamela ate a quick lunch, fed Catrina and the kittens and freshened their water, and climbed the stairs to her office, happy for the distraction of work.

  She spent the next few hours immersed in the worlds of modern silkworm husbandry, wool carding, jacquard paisley, rigid heddle looms, and ancient Icelandic spindles. When she stopped to take a break, she was halfway downstairs before the events of the previous evening came back to her. And as she lowered her foot from the bottom step to the parquet of her entry floor, another recollection surfaced as well.

  A cardboard box for Richard Larkin waited under the mail table. It contained a few issues of the Register (now sadly out of date), a month’s worth of the Advocate (four in all), several catalogs, a small batch of letters (mostly junk mail), and an issue of Urban Architect. (Like the husband she still missed, Pamela’s neighbor was an architect.) Today he would be back. There was no rush to deliver the box though. He’d probably arrive tonight. A drive from Maine could take many hours.

  She warmed up a bowl of the bean soup from the previous night and considered eating it on the porch, since it didn’t look like she’d fit in a walk today. But the gray sky that had been responsible for her oversleeping that morning hadn’t lightened, and sitting outside didn’t seem that cheery a prospect. Instead, she sat at her kitchen table and watched a tussle between two of the kittens, a ginger female who was rapidly becoming the most assertive of the litter and a male brave enough to challenge his sister. Catrina had given birth to three males and three females, a large brood—and unplanned. The males were all black, which had surprised Pamela—since their father was a raffish ginger tom who prowled the neighborhood as confidently as if all he surveyed was his to command.

  Pamela’s afternoon was spent in front of the computer too, and at six p.m. she hit SEND and dispatched her evaluations of the ten articles back to her boss at Fiber Craft. She was too weary to cook, and another bowl of bean soup made a welcome, if repetitious meal. Her eyes were so tired from staring at the computer screen that instead of working on the in-progress sleeve, she dozed on the sofa half-listening to a PBS program about glaciers.

  * * *

  It was Friday morning. The frantic whistle of the kettle greeted Pamela as she stepped back inside after retrieving the Register and that week’s Advocate, which had lodged in the hedge between her yard and Richard Larkin’s. Her toast had popped up and was growing cold in the toaster. Catrina and the kittens had eaten what they wanted from their respective bowls and retreated en masse to their lair in the laundry room.

  Pamela had stayed outside longer than she’d intended. After collecting the newspapers, she’d remained standing on the sidewalk, staring at Richard Larkin’s empty driveway. He’d been expected back the previous evening—or perhaps night, she’d decided, as eight p.m. came and went, and then nine and ten. At ten-thirty, she’d roused herself from the dozing state she’d been lulled into by the nature channel, checked his driveway one more time, and gone to bed.

  A slight change of plans. That was the most likely explanation. Why come back on a Thursday? Why not stretch the trip over the weekend? There was no reason to worry about him, she decided. No real reason to even think about him.

  She spread butter on her cold toast and poured a cup of coffee. The Advocate would reveal nothing about Caralee’s death that she hadn’t already learned firsthand from Bettina, and she could check the garage sale listings later. But she unfolded the daily paper and quickly skimmed the “Local” section to discover that the Register apparently considered its initial coverage of Caralee’s death sufficient. There was no follow-up article.

  Breakfast complete, Pamela climbed the stairs to check her email and then crossed the hall to ponder the contents of her closet. Her few jackets were all wool, too warm for what was shaping up to be a summery mid-September day. She fingered her only dress, a pale green sheath. But she’d bought it long ago for a wedding, and in her mind it was linked with celebration rather than mourning. She pushed aside a few hangers that held jeans and pulled out a pair of navy cotton slacks. A crisp white shirt and navy pants would certainly be suitable, with low pumps.

  In the bathroom, she brushed her dark hair, which usually hung loose to her shoulders, and gathered it into a clip at her neck. She added a bit of lipstick and her silver button earrings, and she was just turning away from the mirror when the doorbell chimed.

  “I won’t say anything,” Bettina said, surveying the outfit. “The point is to pay our respects and I know it’s not a fashion show.” But Bettina herself looked smart in a black linen skirt suit accessorized with pearls. “Shall we be on our way?” she added. Pamela followed her down the steps. Wilfred’s ancient Mercedes waited at the curb. Wilfred, in one of the well-cut suits he’d worn in his working life, was at the wheel.

  Chapter Five

  The mourners that were scattered here and there in St. Willibrod’s pews made up a varied congregation. Saints gazed down from the richly colored stained-glass windows on Manhattanites—even people with tattoos! —and people whose unremarkable grooming choices identified them as Arborville through and t
hrough. A simple wooden coffin was positioned at the top of the aisle, adorned with a dramatic cluster of huge white chrysanthemums accented with glossy dark-green leaves.

  “Margo had to arrange everything,” Bettina whispered as they slipped into a pew. “It was like Caralee’s mother couldn’t even be bothered.”

  From the choir loft, low organ notes throbbed, shaping a melody that Pamela recognized though she couldn’t name. Echoing the somber mood, from the altar a dignified woman wearing a white robe trimmed with green spoke out: “In the midst of life we are in death, but there is life eternal for those who trust in the Lord. Today we commemorate the earthly life of our sister Caralee Lorimer.”

  Suddenly people were on their feet. Pamela consulted the program she’d been handed as she and Bettina entered the church. She rose and began to recite the “Our Father” as overlapping voices echoed around her. Next to her, Bettina dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.

  As the prayer ended, a young woman with Caralee’s dark straight hair, but chubby and considerably shorter, joined the minister in the altar area. Staring fixedly at a sheet of paper that fluttered in her trembling hands, she read the words, “Remember me when I am gone away,” in an uncertain voice. She looked up, seemed to catch the eye of someone in a pew near the front, smiled hesitantly, and returned to her task, speaking more confidently. As the poem drew to a close with the reflection that it would be better for the person being addressed to forget the loved one rather than remembering and being sad, Bettina leaned toward Pamela and whispered, “That’s her cousin, Margo’s daughter, Megan.”

  The young woman made her way back to her pew, and the minister took over again, announcing Psalm 46 and intoning “God is our refuge and strength, an ever present help in trouble.” The comforting words flowed over one another in a cadence that was itself comforting, and when the rhythmical language of the psalm ceased, the minister evoked in more prosaic terms Caralee’s youth in Arborville and her return to the arms of her community and her beloved aunt. “May she rest in peace,” the minister concluded, lifting her eyes toward the choir loft.