Inherit the Wool

by Betty Hechtman

  Cover

  Inherit the Wool

  After reconnecting with some old college friends on social media, part-time dessert chef and muffin maker Casey Feldstein has gotten herself roped into hosting a knitting retreat for the group. Tangled up in worries over how they’ll judge her unconventional life and the rustic atmosphere at Vista Del Mar, she watches in dismay as the women arrive and their old personalities—and old grudges—come trickling to the surface. But Casey discovers these are the least of her problems when one of the women is found dead.

  With everyone a suspect—including an old crush of Casey’s who’s mysteriously been invited to join the retreat—Casey knows she’ll have to start stitching together clues to uncover the culprit. And as long-held secrets start emerging, she begins to suspect that each of the women may have had a motive for murder. Casey wants to avoid needling her old friends with accusations, but she knows she’ll have to ask some pointed questions if she’s going to unravel the clues and catch a killer . . .

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Betty Hechtman.

  Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs.

  ISBN: 978-1-946069-84-9

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Razzle Dazzle Scarf

  Kernel of Truth Muffins

  Acknowledgments

  Books by Betty Hechtman

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  I looked out the window at the sunless morning with a knot in my stomach, hoping this call would help. The ringing stopped and a familiar voice answered. After barely a greeting Frank Shaw got right to the meat of the matter.

  “Oh, no, Feldstein, what is it this time? Don’t tell me there is another dead body,” Frank said. Before I could get a word in, he continued. “I’m telling you those people in the town that sounds like a candy bar are going to start putting two and two together and notice there have been an awful lot of deaths since you came to town.”

  “No one is dead, at least no one that I know about,” I said, finally getting a chance to speak. Frank was my ex-boss from my time doing temp work. He was a PI, and working for him was my favorite job, though it only lasted a few weeks. Since moving to Cadbury by the Sea, California, I’d gotten involved in some murder investigations and Frank had been my go-to guy for advice.

  “If it’s not a murder, then what is it?” he asked with a touch of impatience. “I’m a busy man.” I could hear the squeak of his reclining office chair, which he tended to push to its limits, and it in turn complained. I could also hear the rustle of paper, which was no doubt wrapped around a submarine sandwich, as it was lunchtime in Chicago. Frank was closer to being the Pillsbury Doughboy than he was to James Bond, and I imagined him anxious to dig into his food.

  “It’s about the retreat I’m putting on this weekend,” I began. “It has to be perfect and I’m worried.”

  “I can see your point. You’ve had a few snafus. More people checking into that hotel and conference center than checking out after your retreat. The way you describe that place it sounds a little sinister with all the fog and ocean crashing against the shore.”

  “Vista Del Mar is rustic and atmospheric, not sinister. And as for what happened to some of the guests—and about not everybody leaving who came—it wasn’t my fault, and at least I did find out what happened. But that’s not going to happen this time. It can’t. This time I know everybody coming to the retreat. They’re friends from college.” I explained that we had all recently reconnected on Facebook and then someone suggested we should all get together, and someone else had seen my website advertising my yarn retreats and suggested I put on a retreat just for our group. It had all come together before I had a chance to think it through or come up with a reason not to do it.

  “I get it, Feldstein,” Frank said, interrupting. “What is it, a sorority?”

  “Me in a sorority?” I said with a laugh. “Actually, we were sort of a team,” I said. I could tell by the noise that Frank had sat upright.

  “You mean like a team for a sport?” Frank said, sounding surprised. “I never thought of you as the sports sort.”

  “It was in a gym class,” I said. “A requirement and we all hated it.” I started to fumble when I got to explaining what kind of team. “It was a rhythm-ball routine team.”

  “Rhythm-ball routine? What’s that?” There were more sounds of rustling papers and I was pretty sure Frank was working on the sandwich.

  “Sort of like dancing while tossing a ball around,” I said, remembering the fiasco. “And then we had to perform it for the rest of our class, only made worse by the fact that we shared the gym with a boys’ class. If we’d been going for comedy, we’d have gotten an A.”

  “And those boys were doing the same thing?” Frank asked.

  “We’re getting off the subject, but no, they did weight lifting. The school was doing a remodel of their gym so we had to share ours.” I could hear Frank chortling and I wanted to change the subject. “The point is they are all settled in their lives, and I’m sure they’re going to be all judgy of me.”

  “Wow, Feldstein, I always thought of you as being someone who didn’t care what people thought.”

  “Well, I don’t most of the time. But this time I do.”

  “I’m surprised you called me about this. Isn’t this the kind of thing you talk over with your girlfriends?”

  “I would, but one of them owns the restaurant I make desserts for. She’s kind of my boss and I don’t want it to sound like I’m upset with my life. She could take it wrong. And the other one is one of my retreat helpers.”

  “And you don’t want to blow your image. I get it.” Frank cleared his throat. “Thanks to being a PI for a long time I’ve
become a student of human nature. You think those friends of yours from college have such perfect lives. I doubt it. I bet they have dark secrets and messed-up pasts that you know nothing about. What’s the big problem with your life anyway?”

  “I’m in my mid-thirties. I’m not married. If I hadn’t inherited my aunt’s house along with her yarn retreat business, I wouldn’t be able to get by. Even so, it only works by cobbling together the income from making desserts for the Blue Door and baking muffins for the coffee spots in town, along with the yarn retreats.” I stopped myself. “Oh, no, I sound so whiny.”

  “My thoughts exactly, Feldstein. Get yourself together. I’m telling you, you’ll find out that bunch isn’t so perfect after all. Now, some of us have to get back to work. I have to go to the Drake for high tea and see who shows up with who.” He seemed about to hang up when he said, “Did your group have a name?”

  “Sort of. We called ourselves the Baller-rinas,” I said quickly. I heard him let out a real laugh.

  “If you and the girls decide to recreate that thing with the balls, send photos, or better yet, a video. I got to see that.”

  I held in a chuckle at the idea of him doing a surveillance at the posh hotel’s very formal high tea. Frank was pretty rough around the edges and I couldn’t quite see him nibbling on finger sandwiches and sipping tea. “Casey Feldstein signing off,” I said, giving a mock salute before clicking off the cordless

  The call had made me feel only slightly better. Frank was probably right. My former teammates only seemed to be living perfect lives. Still, I regretted agreeing to put on the retreat reunion, as we were calling it. If only I hadn’t been so all over the place, I might be more settled now. I went over my past in my mind. I’d discovered after a semester of law school that it wasn’t for me. I’d tried teaching and had worked as a permanent substitute at a private elementary school. But after a couple of years I was ready to move on. I’d been the dessert chef at a small bistro that unfortunately went out of business, though it had definitely helped me hone my skills at making sweets. The temp jobs had at least offered variety. I’d spritzed perfume on shoppers in a department store, handed out samples of chewing gum on downtown Chicago street corners. There had been stints at offices, but the only one I’d really liked was the time I spent working for Frank. It had only lasted a short time due to his lack of finances, but he’d said I had a real knack for getting information from people.

  I had ended up in Cadbury by the Sea thanks to my aunt. I was faced with moving back in with my parents, both doctors, when she’d made the offer of her guest house. The idea of a fresh start in a town where nobody knew me was impossible to pass up. She’d also been the one to help me line up the baking jobs. Sadly, she’d died—well, had been killed—shortly after I moved in. The only consolation I had was that I had found the murderer and brought them to justice.

  I’d always had a special relationship with Aunt Joan since we were both black sheep in the family. I suppose that was why she left her house and Yarn2Go to me. She’d been a master of yarn craft and I was a complete novice, but since I was pretty good at being a jack-of-all-trades, I didn’t let that stop me.

  Actually, putting on the retreats had turned out to be the perfect sort of career for me. I was not the kind of person who could do the same thing day after day, week after week. Each retreat was different and had a beginning with the planning, a middle when it actually went on, and an end when everybody left. The projects were different and the people different. I liked that it was always a new challenge. Even my dessert making and muffin baking were not routine. I had some standbys, but I was also always trying something new.

  Even so, I wondered how long I would really stay in Cadbury.

  I looked around the living room of the house that was now mine. At first, I’d left things as my aunt’d had them, but now that I’d begun to feel like it was really my place, I’d decided to redo everything, starting with the living room. It was in total disarray. The furniture was pulled into the middle of the room and the walls were half painted. I’d decided on a soft moss green with white trim. I was just considering whether to tackle finishing the wall, when I heard a knock at my kitchen door.

  The sound woke Julius, who was napping on the couch in the center of the room. He stood, stretched and jumped down, running ahead of me to see who it was. The black cat had chosen me to be his human. I hadn’t realized that was the way it worked, but then I’d never had a pet and knew nothing about cats. I foolishly thought I’d been the one to do the choosing when he’d shown up at my door and I’d let him in. I knew he had a past but not what it was, other than he must have belonged to somebody, and I was pretty sure they’d abandoned him. That was never going to happen to him again. He’d wormed his way into my heart, and wherever I went, he’d be coming, too.

  I saw Crystal Smith through the glass at the top half of the door. There was no mistaking her. I could see the purple and orange shirt showing through her open jacket. Her short black hair naturally fell into corkscrew curls that reminded me of tiny Slinkys. She went heavy on the makeup, particularly around her eyes, but she could carry it off. I’d tried to emulate it and ended up looking like a tired raccoon. Before I’d even opened the door, I knew that her earrings wouldn’t match, nor her socks. Both deliberate, I might add. She was the queen of mix instead of match.

  “Hi,” she said as I opened the door for her. She was pulling a plastic tote full of yarn and supplies. With the slightly wild look, it was hard to believe she was the mother of two teenage kids. She was a single parent now that her rock god ex, in a totally clichéd move, had replaced her with someone younger. I still couldn’t get over the pretentiousness of his name, Rixx Smith.

  Crystal and the kids were living with her mother, who owned the local yarn shop. Crystal had learned all the different yarn crafts when she was a kid and they seemed like second nature to her now. I’d hired her to do the workshops for the retreats and in the process she’d become a friend.

  “I brought all the yarn and needles. Where do you want to stuff the tote bags?” she asked, indicating the bin.

  “The usual spot,” I said as I joined her outside. I led the way across to the converted garage that my aunt had turned into a guest house. The flat white sky and chill in the air gave no hint to the time of year. The weather in Cadbury was almost always the same, mostly cloudy skies with a temperature that required a light jacket. I had to remind myself that it was a Thursday in March. I flipped on the lights as we went inside and automatically looked around at what was basically one large room with a high counter that set off a small kitchen area. It had become retreat central for me. I kept all the supplies in there and used the open space to make up the tote bags I gave out to my retreaters. I had left six of the blood-red bags with Yarn2Go emblazoned on them out on the counter. I heard Crystal let out a sigh when she let go of the bin and flopped in a chair.

  I knew what the sigh was about. It was the other reason she was here. I was grateful that Frank seemed to have forgotten about the hornet’s nest I’d stirred up in the small town. Though, it was still largely a secret hornet’s nest. The Delacorte sisters were the local royalty, rich, with tons of property all over town, including Vista Del Mar, the hotel and conference center where I put on the retreats. It seemed they were the end of the family line as neither had married or had any children, and their brother and his wife and child had died years before. There were rumors that their brother, Edmund, might’ve had a love child, but it had never gone beyond whispers. So even though the will he’d left stipulated that Vista Del Mar was to go to his children, the two sisters had gotten ownership of it.

  I’d discovered that Crystal’s mother, Gwen Selwyn, was the love child of the deceased Delacorte brother. It was hard to tell the story and keep it all straight. I’d held on to the information for a while, not sure of what to do with it. Frank, by the way, had told me to mind my own business and keep out of it. But you can’t unknow something once you kno
w it and I’d finally told Gwen Selwyn her true identity. The news wasn’t welcome to her and she’d chosen to ignore it. She didn’t like the Delacortes and it totally demolished who she thought her father was. She didn’t want the change it might bring to her life, either. She owned Cadbury Yarn, and though it was a struggle now that Crystal and her two kids were living with her, Gwen was okay with things the way they were. But then she began to weaken because she thought of Crystal’s kids and felt they should get their due. It was only recently that she had finally told Crystal the whole story. I’d been present when she did it.

  With some reluctance they’d contacted a lawyer and looked into their options. That was when they hit the brick wall.

  Crystal rocked her head back and forth. “I wish this had never started,” she said, looking at me. “It was better when I didn’t know. You can’t regret not getting something you don’t know is supposed to be yours.”

  I knew she was referring to Vista Del Mar. “What was it the lawyer said?” I asked.

  “He said we had waited too long to come forward and the Delacorte sisters would surely fight it. He seemed to think we might win in the end, but it would be a long and costly battle. They have deep pockets. We don’t. End of story.” She sighed again. “The only good thing is that we never told my kids and nobody in town knows.”

  “Have you ever considered talking directly to Cora and Madeleine. They might be more agreeable than you think.”

  Crystal looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Really? Their illegitimate niece and her family show up and want a cut of the family fortune. My mother would never do it anyway.”

  “Well, when you put it that way, I can see your point.” I took the opportunity to change the subject. This wasn’t the first time we’d gone over the hopelessness of the situation, and every time we did, I felt worse about being the hornet nest’s stirrer. I pointed to the bin of yarn. “I think your idea for the retreat is perfect.”