Naturally, I said yes. Irene was the tough, unflappable type if ever there was one, but on the phone she sounded distinctly flappable. I’d met her two months earlier, while investigating the murder of a mutual friend, Ray Landry. Not a believer in fairies, Irene was nevertheless the author of a booklet on them titled Fairy Lore and Horticulture in Smithwell.
She had thought Ray was bonkers to believe in fairies and, therefore, a foolish enough man to pick poison mushrooms and die eating them. And though the police soon proved her poison-mushroom theory wrong, I’d never tried to persuade her that Ray had been right about fairies. Doing so would have meant revealing the existence of Minette, the tiny fairy who lived first with Ray and now with me.
But I liked Irene. She was about seventy-five, two inches shorter than my five foot seven, and possessed what I could only call spindly legs and arms, but she was no weakling, physically or otherwise. She was a force of nature.
I polished off my sandwich and set the kettle on the stove, and the second the doorbell rang, I told Minette to hide. That she did—by diving straight into the pocket of my coat, which was slung over one of the table chairs.
“Keep your head down and not a peep from you,” I warned her, heading for the front door. “You’ll give Irene a heart attack.”
I took a last glance toward the kitchen and opened the door.
“Kate Brewer, how good to see you again.”
“It’s good to see you too, Irene.”
She breezed through my door and wheeled back to me as I shut the door. “I have a task for you, if you’re game. How about we make a pot of tea?”
“I already have the kettle on,” I said, leading her into my kitchen. “Have a seat at the table. I’ll get you a cup.”
“So this is your famous teacup collection?” she said, admiring the contents of my hutch. “I’ll admit to liking Wedgwood. And that purple-flowered one is nice.”
It wasn’t much of a collection. Just a few lovely teapots and twenty-five or so cups my husband, Michael, had bought for me over the course of our too-short marriage. But I’d mentioned my love of pretty cups and pots back in October, and though Irene by nature disapproved of even small collections as a waste of money, she had remembered our conversation.
“That’s my purple vinca pattern,” I said, taking down two purple teacups before Irene could grasp the Wedgwood ones from the top shelf of the hutch. One of them, which I’d lined with soft cotton balls, was Minette’s favorite. It was where she sat, watching me as I worked in the kitchen, and where she slept at night, her four-inch frame and butterfly-like wings curled into a ball.
“You keep your house nice and cool.” Irene plopped down on a chair, leaving on her brown waxed-canvas coat. “Good, good.”
As a self-described “old Mainer,” she was pleased by the penny-pinching temperature of my house. I didn’t like to waste money, either, but on bitterly cold nights I’d been known to crank up the heat or put a few extra logs on the fire.
“Birdie Thompson keeps her house so warm I could melt,” she went on. “But I’ll get to that in a moment. On second thought, never mind the tea. Have a seat, Kate.”
I switched off the kettle and sat.
“Have you ever heard of my Smithwell knitting group? We call ourselves the Merry Knitters. We’re all widows, so you see, merry widows became merry knitters. You and I both know there’s nothing merry about being a widow, but there you are. It’s not a clever name, but we knit for town charities, so it does the job.”
“You knit?” This I had to see. Irene Carrick knitting. It was such a genteel thing to do, and it required one to sit still for, well, at least an hour. That just wasn’t Irene.
“We all knit, and don’t look so surprised. Norma knits too. You remember Norma Howard?”
“Of course I do. I met her at your house the day we talked about Ray Landry. Norma’s a widow too?”
“Divorced, but that’s close enough for the rest of us. She paid a visit to the emergency room late last night.”
“Oh no! What happened?”
“An accident, so they say. I say baloney.” Irene dipped into her pocket, pulled out a red box, and slipped off the top, revealing a plastic blob of an ornament tied with a red ribbon. “This is what happened.”
“Is that meant to be a Christmas ornament?”
“Have you ever seen anything so ugly? It’s supposed to be a typewriter. It looks like a pickle.”
“Did Norma slip on it?”
Irene frowned. “Don’t make jokes. This ornament is mine. Norma received a plastic pig ornament, also in a red box and also tied with a red ribbon.”
I lifted the typewriter ornament from its box and examined it. It was a plastic toy rather than an ornament, and someone had drilled a hole through it to string it with ribbon. “You’ll have to explain, Irene.”
“I shall.” She leaned back and crossed her arms. “There are seven of us in the Merry Knitters, and we all exchange Secret Santa gifts about a week before Christmas. I think it’s a silly tradition, but tradition it is. However, we’ve already given and received our real Secret Santa gifts—four days ago. These ornaments, near as I can gather, arrived at all our homes yesterday morning, variously placed on our porches, in our mailboxes, or in our dooryards, though in my case it was in a brown bag taped to the gate across my driveway. You remember how insanely long my drive is. We all received one. Same thing—red box, plastic ornament, red ribbon.”
“You have no idea who left them?”
“Not a clue. However.” She dug into her pocket once more, and this time she produced a piece of paper that had been folded, it seemed, to fit the confines of the ornament box. “This same message came with each box. It was obviously printed on a computer.”
I unfolded the paper and read the message aloud. “‘Secret Santa says it’s time for you to pay.’ What on earth does that mean? You all got this?”
“All of us. Charming, isn’t it?”
“Unnerving is more like it.” I looked up. “How does this relate to Norma going to the emergency room?”
Irene pushed back a shock of her thick white hair. “She was lucky. It could have been serious. And even so, she only has the use of one wrist for the next ten weeks. She’s sixty-nine, and it takes longer to heal at that age. At any of our ages, frankly. We’re going to take turns checking in on her and helping out.”
“What exactly happened?”
“I haven’t said, have I? She fell and broke her wrist. Now, I know what you’re thinking. People fall, nothing unusual in that. But Norma isn’t a faller, and she fell in her kitchen because someone placed ball bearings in front of her refrigerator. Ball bearings, Kate. Where did they come from? And if for some peculiar reason Norma happened to have bearings around the house, why would she drop them in her own kitchen? She got up in the night, went to her refrigerator—like she does when she can’t sleep—and fell.”
“That is strange. Did you talk to the police?”
“Detective Rancourt wasn’t remotely interested. He said it was an accident. ‘It was an accident, ma’am, unless you know something I don’t.’ Kate, it was all I could do not to say, ‘I know a lot you don’t know, Detective.’”
That didn’t sound like Martin Rancourt to me. I’d come to know him as an astute detective. Surely he considered ball bearings strewn across a senior citizen’s kitchen floor a bit weird. “Did you show him the note you all got?”
“Yes, and he was mildly curious about that, but not motivated to do anything more than ask where the ball bearings might have come from.”
“Where did they come from?”
Irene tossed her hands in the air. “You tell me! They weren’t Norma’s or mine, that’s for sure. They looked like bicycle bearings. New ones, too. They weren’t oily or grungy.”
“Does Norma have grandchildren or great-grandchildren?”
“Both. They live in southern Maine and New Hampshire, and yes, they visit her, but none of them leak ball bea
rings. Besides, the last time she saw them was a full two days before she fell.”
“And all the knitters received an ornament?”
“Yesterday, as I said. We all telephoned each other, wondering if we’d missed a second round of Secret Santa. Norma found hers on her porch when she went to get the morning paper. This was before she fell, of course.”
“Could it be a prank?”
Irene scowled, appalled that I would ask such a naive question. “Let’s say it was a prank. I still want to know who’s behind it. Norma broke her wrist, and there’s no guarantee she’ll get her full motion back. Here we are, December twenty-second—Christmas is her favorite season—and she’s on pain meds. She won’t be able to participate in the Christmas Charity Fair tomorrow, and I can’t tell you how she looks forward to that every year.”
“I was just grasping for straws. I hate to think someone deliberately tried to make her fall.”
“But it looks like that.”
“It does.”
“Capital! We’re two peas in a pod, we are. Suspicious minds. I smell a rat among the knitters.”
“How long have you known one another?”
“We’ve been the Merry Knitters for six years, and I know those women better than I know anyone in Smithwell. And they know me.”
“And you really think one of them did this?”
“It can only be one of them. Seven knitters and seven nasty ornaments delivered to our homes.”
“What about an outsider?”
“No, it was positively one of us,” Irene said. “Joan Simm’s ornament was left hanging in a shrub at the end of her drive. She’s the only one of us who has a camera tucked up under her eaves—you know those security cameras you can buy online?”
“I’ve seen them, yes.”
“No one, and I mean no one, outside the group knows that camera exists.”
“The shrub hid the perpetrator from the camera’s view?”
“You bet it did. And who but us knitters would know that? Joan complained about it at one of our meetings. She called it the camera’s ‘blind spot.’ But she kept the camera secret from everyone else.”
“But what do the ornaments have to do with Norma’s accident?”
“We’re going to find out.” Irene examined the outside of her teacup, then set it down. “Lovely pattern. Next time I’ll have to put some tea in it. All right, then, let’s go. I’ll drive you and drop you back here when you’re done.”
“Where are we going?”
“To Birdie Thompson’s house. It’s our final meeting before the charity fair, and they’re all there waiting for you. I told them I’d bring you. Come and meet your five suspects.”
“Me?”
“Don’t be humble, Kate. You helped solve Ray’s murder, and if the paper is correct, you were helpful in another murder case just last month. Well, if the police won’t help us, you will. That’s what I said.”
“Okay. I guess.”
Irene slapped the tabletop and stood. “Come along. Birdie Thompson will be eighty next week and she tends to fall asleep in the afternoon. It’s not surprising, considering she could grow hothouse tomatoes in her living room. The woman spends a small fortune on heating oil.”
FROM THE AUTHOR
If you enjoyed Dead and Buried, would you consider leaving a review on Amazon? Nothing fancy, just a sentence or two. Your help is appreciated more than I can say. Every review makes a huge difference in helping readers find the Smithwell Fairies Cozy Mystery Series and in allowing me to continue to write the series. I couldn’t do it without your help. Thank you so much!
MORE BOOKS BY KARIN KAUFMAN
JUNIPER GROVE MYSTERY SERIES
Death of a Dead Man
Death of a Scavenger
At Death’s Door
Death of a Santa
Scared to Death
Cheating Death
Death Trap
Death Knell
Garden of Death
Death of a Professor
CHILDREN’S BOOKS (FOR CHILDREN AND ADULTS)
The Adventures of Geraldine Woolkins
ANNA DENNING MYSTERY SERIES
The Witch Tree
Sparrow House
The Sacrifice
The Club
Bitter Roots
Dead and Buried Page 14