Knit One, Die Two

by Peggy Ehrhart

  “I brought something,” she said hesitantly, unsnapping the top of the satchel. “I thought Caralee’s mother might want it, but she doesn’t. And Margo doesn’t want it either. She said she would mourn Caralee all over again every time she looked at it.” She lowered a hand into the satchel’s depths. “But one of you might want it because you’re in that knitting group and you were teaching her.” She tugged.

  Up came a fuzzy gray mass. Pamela stared at it, hoping her face didn’t give away her momentary puzzlement. But as Rue continued to tug, a pair of knitting needles came into view, threaded through loops that edged one of the object’s fuzzy gray borders.

  “Madame Defarge’s knitting!” Pamela and Bettina exclaimed in chorus. “Won’t you need it for the production?” Bettina added.

  “No, we most definitely won’t,” Rue said. “And this is—wouldn’t you say—sort of cursed.” She thrust it at Pamela, who extended a tentative hand and then found herself holding the piece of knitting, which was still tethered to Rue’s satchel by a strand of yarn that disappeared into the satchel’s depths.

  “And here’s the rest of the yarn.” Rue rummaged in the satchel and came up with a partial skein of the coarse gray yarn whose color had reminded Pamela of her basement floor. Pamela reached out her other hand.

  “Margo probably has a bag for that somewhere,” Bettina said, and headed for the kitchen.

  She was gone several minutes. Pamela listened, holding the skein of yarn in one hand and Caralee’s homely knitting project in the other and wondering what could have happened to Bettina, as Rue regaled her and the grandmotherly woman with a description of an article Anthony was writing for an online directors’ forum. At last Bettina reemerged from the kitchen, but instead of a bag she was carrying a tray of cups.

  “Pressed into service,” she said with a laugh. “Margo is finding you a bag.”

  Megan had been making trips back and forth to the kitchen, clearing away the platters, now mostly empty, and the plates that people had abandoned here and there when they’d had their fill of sandwiches. Now she followed Bettina, carrying a second tray of cups.

  “Coffee on its way,” announced a male voice, and Craig Belknap stepped through the kitchen door bearing a huge coffee urn, spigot and all, just like the ones Hyler’s used. It probably was one of the ones Hyler’s used, Pamela reflected, borrowed for the occasion. Apparently lured by the prospect of coffee, Anthony Wadsworth strolled in from the living room, trailed by the flock of Manhattanites. The well-toned woman in the sheath dress still clung to the arm of the handsome, lanky man. Craig set the urn in the middle of the table, seized the electric cord, glanced around to find an outlet, and stooped to plug it in. Megan scurried to the kitchen and returned with a bowl of sugar in little packets.

  Still carrying the knitting project and the skein of yarn, Pamela followed Craig when he returned to the kitchen. “Margo was looking for a bag for me to put this in,” she said, “but she seems to have gotten distracted.”

  “That’s Caralee’s.” He stared at it, and she stared at him. His looks had initially struck Pamela as nondescript, but now she reflected that nondescript looks could be an advantage for an actor. Besides, there seemed few emotions his face was incapable of expressing. As she watched, his expression changed from curiosity to recognition to sadness to anger. “I know who you are,” he said at last. “You’re in that knitting club.”

  “She wanted to learn to knit,” Pamela said with a shrug. “So she could be a convincing Madame Defarge.”

  “You were standing behind the hedge eavesdropping last Tuesday night.” His eyes were definitely not nondescript. They were a piercing shade of blue. And at the moment, the few days’ growth of auburn stubble that he sported lent his face a rakish charm.

  “I was on my way home,” Pamela said. “I was standing in my own front yard. And I wasn’t even standing. I only stopped for a minute because you were both talking so loud. It was hard to ignore.”

  “I wasn’t mad at her,” he said, giving Pamela the full effect of his amazing eyes.

  Suddenly she heard herself say, “Caralee said some awfully hurtful things to you. If somebody said things like that to me, I might want to hurt them back. ”

  He took a step forward, his expression suddenly threatening. “What?” he bellowed. Pamela glanced toward the dining room to see a few curious faces turned toward the kitchen. “So you think—what?—I killed her? You’re crazy.” He gestured around at the piles of dirty plates and the platters still holding a few forlorn sandwiches and wilted radish rosettes. “And I’m doing this—why?” His voice mellowed slightly. “Because I feel guilty? Or so people won’t figure out that I’m—” He paused and his mobile face assumed a look of comic malevolence. He lifted both arms and wiggled his fingers as if flourishing an impressive set of claws. “The mad killer of Orchard Street.” He laughed a ghoulish laugh, and then his face sagged. “In fact, I cared a lot for her,” he murmured sadly. “And I didn’t even go to the rehearsal Wednesday night, if you must know. I wasn’t anywhere near the church. Besides, the police think it was an accident.”

  “If you weren’t at the rehearsal Wednesday night, where were you?” Pamela asked, though she was touched by his evident grief.

  “They weren’t working on my scenes,” he said. He stooped toward a messy stack of miscellaneous bags on the counter and handed her one with the Co-Op logo on it, adding, “This should be big enough for the knitting.”

  Pamela took the bag and slid the lumpy knitting project and the partial skein of yarn into it. But she wasn’t ready to leave. She stepped toward the kitchen door and turned to block the entrance to the dining room. “Were you at home Wednesday night?” she asked in a voice that she tried to make conversational.

  “No, I wasn’t,” Craig said forthrightly. “And it’s none of your business where I was.”

  “Beth Dalton said you left Hyler’s before your shift ended.” Pamela hated to sound like a gossip, but if somebody had rearranged the furniture in the storage room so it would fall on Caralee that night, the rearrangement would have had to happen before she got there around six-forty-five.

  “That’s none of her business,” he said, “and now, if you don’t mind . . .” He turned toward the sink and the rest of his words were lost as he twisted the tap and water gushed from the faucet.

  * * *

  “Richard Larkin didn’t waste any time getting back to work,” Bettina said as they pulled up in front of Pamela’s house.

  “He’s home?” Pamela was startled to hear the eager edge to her voice. “I mean,” she said, trying to sound calmer, “when did you talk to him?”

  “I didn’t,” Bettina said, “but he was due back yesterday and I see his car’s not here now—so he must have been up and out and back to the office this morning without even one day of rest. Such a dedicated, hard-working man, a man any woman—”

  “Please just stop!” Pamela turned to face her friend. Bettina blinked a few times and looked suitably chastened. “He didn’t come back yesterday,” Pamela said in a small voice. “His car wasn’t there last night, even late, and it wasn’t there first thing this morning.”

  “Why come back on a Thursday?” Bettina said, twitching one black linen-clad shoulder in a shrug. “He probably just decided to stay away through the weekend. He’ll probably drive back on Sunday.”

  “Yes,” Pamela said, looking down at her hands, which for some reason were twisting nervously. “I was thinking that too. He probably will.”

  Bettina consulted her watch, a pretty gold bracelet with a delicate oval face. “We’ve got to run,” she said. “Maxie is delivering the Arborville grandchildren at two, and I can’t chase them around the yard in this suit.” Pamela reached for the door handle, but before she could slide out of the car, Bettina grabbed her hand. “I heard you talking to Craig Belknap in the kitchen and it sounded juicy. You have to tell me everything in the morning. I’ll be over at nine.”

  Chapter
Six

  Inside the house, a few kittens scattered as Pamela stepped into the kitchen. One of them, the bold ginger female, made her way to the communal kitten-food bowl, now empty, and turned to give Pamela a meaningful look.

  “I guess it is past lunchtime,” Pamela said. She put several scoops of something its label described as “hearty chicken” in a fresh bowl and set the used bowl to soak in the sink, filled with hot water and a squirt of dish soap. The aroma of “hearty chicken” was evidently quite alluring, even intermingled with the aroma of “lavender spring” dish soap. Soon all six kittens were clustered around the large bowl, the three ginger females and the three black males, their wispy tails momentarily still as they focused on their meal. Catrina sat off to the side, guarding her brood as attentively as if the venue wasn’t Pamela’s unimpeachably secure kitchen but the chilly streets of Arborville where she had lived out the first few months of her life.

  Upstairs, after Pamela had changed her clothes and checked her email, she consulted the Internet to learn that kittens could be ready for adoption as young as eight weeks, generally at twelve weeks or older. They were now a little over a month old. Perusing the bulletin board in front of the Co-Op a few days earlier had made it clear that Arborville was not lacking in kittens, free to good homes. But she resolved to embark on her quest to place her kittens very soon. It would be easier to line up commitments for adoptions while they were still too adorable to resist.

  * * *

  Pamela opened her eyes, and in the morning brightness the last fragments of a dream slipped away. She could remember no details of the plot, but a phrase remained lodged in her brain. The police think it was an accident. That was what Craig Belknap had said about Caralee’s death. Why had her brain refused to let go of those words as the rest of the dream faded? It certainly wasn’t a sentence that a copy editor would pounce on, not like the tortured locutions people writing about the expressive possibilities of macramé or postmodern quilt designs sometimes seized upon.

  But—she rolled over onto her back and stared at the pale blankness of the ceiling—there was that word “think.” A person could think something that wasn’t true. She imagined the sentence being uttered with a dismissive laugh, not that Craig Belknap had uttered it that way. The police think it was an accident, meaning. . . it wasn’t. Certainly he hadn’t meant to announce his guilt—if he was guilty—but people sometimes gave away things they didn’t mean to give away. Maybe the sadness was just an act. After all, he was an actor.

  Bettina was coming at nine. There would be a lot to talk about.

  * * *

  Six hungry kittens prowled the kitchen, investigating corners, raising themselves on their hind legs and pawing the cupboard fronts as if they imagined they could scale forbidding walls to reach the heights from which they knew their food descended. Pamela stepped carefully among them, pausing as one of the ginger females identified her slippered foot as a perfect target for a practice lunge.

  As Pamela stooped to deliver a fresh bowl of kitten food, Catrina made her languorous way down the hall from the bed in the laundry room, where she’d been enjoying a brief respite from her energetic brood. Pamela served her breakfast and was rewarded with the soft sweep of Catrina’s sleek flank against her ankle.

  Those chores taken care of, Pamela headed out to retrieve the newspaper. On the front walk, she glanced toward Richard Larkin’s driveway, feeling a sudden pang at the absence of his car. But of course, why would it be there? Surely Bettina was right—he’d tacked a few extra days onto his volunteer stint and he’d be back Sunday night. Pamela would welcome him home, hand over the mail and newspapers she’d collected, and they’d resume their neighborly coexistence.

  Back inside, she ground twice as many coffee beans as usual, scooped them into the filter nestled in the plastic cone atop her carafe, and set four cups of water boiling on the stove. And since Bettina liked a sweet treat with her coffee, she decided to make cinnamon toast when her friend arrived. In preparation, she took the jar of cinnamon from her spice rack, set it on the counter next to the sugar bowl, and added a fresh supply of butter to her cut-glass butter dish.

  Most of the kittens had scattered after they finished their breakfast, but a few lingered in the kitchen. As the kettle began to hoot, they raised their tiny faces in surprise, then went back to a game that involved paw to paw combat.

  Pamela was still in her robe and pajamas when Bettina arrived, already dressed for the day in crisp lime-green pants and a green-and-white-striped shirt that set off her vivid red hair. “I know I’m early,” she said, as she stepped over the threshold, her green ballet flat narrowly missing a kitten, “but I’m dying to know what Craig Belknap had to say for himself yesterday. And before I forget, Wilfred is grilling ribs tonight. You’ll come, I hope.”

  “Ribs? Of course,” Pamela said. “And on the subject of food, coffee is just dripping, and I’m going to make cinnamon toast. Can I interest you in a slice?”

  “Two?” Bettina said, twisting her face into a comically hopeful expression. Silver earrings set with large green stones dangled from her ears and she’d accented her hazel eyes with a hint of green shadow. Her voice grew serious as she followed Pamela into the kitchen. “I can’t stop thinking about poor Margo,” she said. “I know she saw her brother in Caralee, and she lost him long ago, and her marriage wasn’t very happy. She doesn’t get too much comfort from her own daughter, so now she’s really—”

  The coffee had finished dripping and the dark, spicy aroma was so inviting that without completing the thought Bettina hurried to the cupboard where Pamela kept her wedding china and reached down two cups and saucers. Pamela moved the cut-glass sugar bowl from the counter to the table, set the cut-glass cream pitcher next to it, and filled the pitcher with heavy cream from the refrigerator.

  “Does Margo believe Caralee’s death was an accident?” she asked after her first sip of coffee.

  “She knows Caralee argued with Craig a lot,” Bettina said. “But she doesn’t know what about. Caralee wasn’t the type to confide . . . in anyone.”

  “I could sense that,” Pamela said. “She was a bit . . . reserved. I guess that’s why she liked the acting—she could emote, but as another person.”

  “So what did Craig Belknap have to say for himself?” Bettina added a final dollop of cream to her cup, stirred the contents to an even shade of rich tan, and took a sip.

  “He said, ‘The police think it was an accident.’ ”

  “Well?” Bettina looked puzzled. “They do.”

  “But,” Pamela said, “that doesn’t mean it was an accident. It only means the police think it was.” Pamela had often lectured her daughter, Penny, on the importance of critical thinking. Now she hoped Bettina didn’t feel she was being lectured.

  Bettina nodded. “He could have said that almost as a kind of self-congratulation—meaning, I got away with it.”

  “Caralee thought somebody was rearranging that furniture on purpose,” Pamela said. “We know that. And according to Beth Dalton, Craig went dashing out of Hyler’s before his shift ended on Wednesday—and after an argument with Caralee.”

  Bettina nodded again. “So he rushes to the storage room, determined to get it right this time, and when Caralee arrives everything is in place, ready to topple over, and he’s long gone.”

  “And he won’t say where he was after he left Hyler’s Wednesday evening.” Pamela stood up and reached for the sugar bowl. “If we’re going to have cinnamon toast, I should get busy,” she said, and stepped over to the counter.

  There she set out three slices of whole-grain bread on a small cookie sheet and spread them with plenty of butter. In a small bowl she mixed two tablespoons of sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon. She sprinkled the fragrant mixture over the buttered bread and slid the cookie sheet into the oven on the very top shelf, the one right under the broiler.

  “I wonder if he was in love with her,” Bettina said as Pamela twisted the oven knob all the w
ay to the broiler position. With a whoosh the broiler came on.

  “I have to pay attention to this,” Pamela said, “or we’ll have burnt cinnamon toast.” She reached for an oven mitt on the hook near the spice rack and slipped it over her hand.

  “He got her that job,” Bettina commented. “Maybe he thought she should show her appreciation by falling in love with him.”

  “In that argument I overheard on my front lawn, he said he couldn’t help how he felt,” Pamela said. “That could be a classic lover’s plea.” She stooped to look through the glass window in the oven door. The tantalizing smell of melting sugar, infused with cinnamon, was beginning to fill the kitchen. “Then,” Pamela went on, “he begged her not to be so mean and said he was just asking her to listen. She told him not to ever mention whatever it was again, said goodnight, and told him he was pathetic. Then she stalked off.”

  “Wow!” Bettina shuddered and drew in her breath. Her earrings quivered. “That could be crushing.”

  “I liked him though. There just was something about him,” Pamela said. “And he seemed so genuinely sad about her death.” She opened the oven door and peeked inside, releasing a drift of warm, sugary air. “They’re getting very close,” she murmured as she straightened up. “But, back to the topic at hand, what we have to do is find out who has a key to that storage room and whether it’s generally locked or unlocked. If nobody can get in there until right before the rehearsals start, when other cast members are already milling around in the auditorium, Craig Belknap wouldn’t have been able to set up the collapsing pile of furniture no matter how early he left Hyler’s.” She bent down to peer through the window in the oven door again. “Let’s go over to the church and see what we can find out.”

  “The church custodian might know something,” Bettina said. “Wilfred chats with him sometimes—they both like old cars. His name is Ben and he was out there working when I crossed the street. But first things first!” She joined Pamela near the stove and bent toward the window in the oven door. “I’m sure they’re ready.”