A Fatal Yarn

by Peggy Ehrhart

  Bettina had traded the bright yellow trench coat of the previous day for a puffy down coat the color of a pumpkin. Now she shrugged the coat off to reveal an olive-green frock that hugged her torso then flared at the waist into a knee-length skirt. Her olive-green suede booties completed the look, along with a chunky gold necklace and earrings to match. She’d accented her hazel eyes with a touch of olive-green shadow.

  “I am completely stuffed,” she said, patting her stomach. “Those seniors really put on a nice lunch—pot luck but it wasn’t just Jello salads. And the speaker was so interesting—a woman from the group that planted the butterfly garden at the edge of the nature preserve. She told all about the migration patterns of the Monarchs.”

  “I’m just finishing my lunch.” Pamela gestured toward the door that led to the kitchen. “Come on out here. A few more bites and then we’ll go.”

  Bettina tossed her coat on the chair by the mail table. Ginger, who had been lurking under the chair, darted out to sniff at one of the booties then sauntered toward the living room. Bettina followed Pamela into the kitchen and settled into her accustomed chair facing Pamela.

  “I’d offer you something,” Pamela said, “but you’ve just come from lunch.” She teased off another bite of the grilled-cheese sandwich.

  “What’s that?” Bettina asked, gazing past Pamela to the sheet of note paper with the daffodils and bunnies fastened to the refrigerator door. “That address?”

  Pamela responded without turning her head. “There’s a tag sale, starting Saturday. I saw a flyer on the bulletin board at the Co-Op. Your friend Marlene Pepper said it’s Cassie Griswold’s house and the house is to be sold because she has died.”

  Bettina nodded. “I knew she wasn’t doing well.” She directed her gaze to the remains of the sandwich on Pamela’s plate. “Her house is in the next block from Diefenbach’s,” she added. “Of course Cassie wasn’t murdered, but it is a little creepy—two deaths on the same street, so close together.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything,” Pamela said. “Coincidences like that happen all the time.”

  “Is that the Vermont cheddar?” Bettina asked, suddenly changing the subject. “From the Co-Op?”

  Pamela was chewing so she simply tipped her head.

  “I haven’t bought any for a while.” Bettina studied the remaining bite of sandwich. “Is it still as good as it used to be?”

  “Better, I’d say.” Pamela’s lips turned up in a teasing smile. She paused for a full minute, then she added, “Would you like a little piece?”

  “Yes!” Bettina exclaimed. “But tiny.”

  Pamela speared the last bite of her sandwich and transferred it to her mouth. Still chewing, she rose and fetched from the refrigerator the wedge of cheddar she’d brought home that morning. She extracted it from its plastic bag and placed it on her wooden cutting board.

  “Here you are,” she said as she placed the offering before Bettina. She added a napkin and a knife and sat back down.

  Bettina shaved off a small slice and began to nibble on it. “I should tell Clayborn what we figured out,” she said, pausing in her nibbling, “about the connection between the tree-sweaters and the red X’s. That somebody who’s trying to protect the trees by hiding the red X’s might have decided to go one step farther and kill Diefenbach. And might be planning to go after the rest of the Arborists too.”

  Pamela frowned. “I’m not sure we should give Detective Clayborn a further reason to think a knitter might be responsible. We want to prove that Roland didn’t do it—not link him even more firmly with the murder.”

  Bettina nodded and shaved off another slice of cheese, larger this time.

  Pamela went on. “If we could point to a specific knitter though, a specific knitter that isn’t Roland, it might be worth passing the information along to Detective Clayborn.”

  Bettina’s hand, bearing the slice of cheese, paused halfway to her mouth. “How will we do that?” she asked, raising her carefully shaped brows.

  “We’ll see what we can find out in Timberley,” Pamela said. “Shall I wrap the cheese up again?”

  * * *

  “I’m babysitting for the Arborville grandchildren Saturday morning.” In the entry, Bettina tugged her coat on. “Otherwise I’d come to that tag sale with you.”

  County Road, at the bottom of Orchard Street, had been a busy thoroughfare since Colonial times, before Arborville was Arborville, connecting the farms of northern New Jersey with markets for their produce. Now it connected populous towns that blended one into the other. Timberley was the next town north of Arborville. It was a bit larger and offered more elegant shopping and dining possibilities than were to be found in Arborville’s commercial district—including a yarn shop to which local knitters resorted when they were looking to spend more on the yarn for a sweater than a ready-made sweater, even from a fancy store at the mall, would cost. It was from the Timberley yarn shop that Pamela had bought Icelandic yarn from Icelandic sheep for the very sweater she was wearing.

  The east-west streets of Arborville all dead-ended into County Road. The land on the other side was the nature preserve, owned by the county.

  “You can’t see the butterfly garden from County Road,” Bettina said as they cruised past stands of trees, still bare except for a hint of delicate green where new leaves were beginning to unfurl. “You have to turn off at that little road that leads back into it. The butterfly garden doesn’t look like much at this time of year anyway, I’m sure.”

  “Forsythia’s coming out though,” Pamela commented. “It’s pretty along here. I’m glad the county’s keeping this stretch undeveloped.”

  “Those signs left over from last fall’s election don’t add much.” Bettina tipped her head toward the shoulder between the curb and the trees, where a row of cardboard posters much bedraggled after several months of rain and snow drooped from wooden stakes.

  “Mostly Diefenbach’s,” Pamela observed. “He certainly went in for the patriotic imagery.” The posters’ color scheme was red, white, and blue, with a large American flag valiantly waving behind the bold letters that spelled out “Bill Diefenbach—The Future Is Now!”

  “You’d think the election committee would come around and collect the signs after the election,” Bettina said. “It’s just like littering at this point.”

  Pamela nodded in agreement, and their conversation turned to spring yard cleanup. Already landscapers’ trucks had been appearing on Arborville’s streets, with crews of men swarming here and there with rakes and leaf-blowers.

  * * *

  The yarn shop was one storefront in a row of charming shops along a block in Timberley’s commercial district. A florist’s window offered tulips and daffodils, and a fanciful miniature tree fashioned from pussy willow boughs and decorated with elaborately painted Easter eggs. A bakery’s tempting fare included cakes decorated in soft pastels with flowers cleverly shaped from buttercream frosting. And a candy shop displayed a whole family of chocolate rabbits, as well as baskets of foil-wrapped eggs on beds of Easter grass, finely shredded cellophane in bright green.

  Once inside the yarn shop, yarn met their eyes no matter where they looked. Shelves on every wall reached nearly to the ceiling, piled with skeins of yarn in colors and textures ranging from a rustic ply in natural cream to a delicate filament in deepest black—and every shade of the rainbow as well.

  The stylish blonde woman behind the counter greeted Pamela and Bettina cordially. As they approached the counter, her eyes fastened particularly on Pamela.

  “The yarn in your sweater looks familiar,” she said with an approving smile. “Did you buy it here?”

  “I certainly did,” Pamela said with a smile of her own. She lifted the zip-lock bag with its colorful assortment of yarn samples from her purse and added, “I hope you’ll recognize some of your other yarns.” She unzipped the bag, pulled out a clump of the yarn samples, and set them on the glass of the counter.

 
“We’re looking for a person”—Bettina stepped for ward—“a person who might have bought some of this yarn from your shop. Maybe a regular customer? Someone you know?”

  The blonde woman’s smile didn’t disappear, but her expression froze for a moment as if she was processing this curious request.

  “I’m a reporter,” Bettina said, “for the Arborville Advocate.”

  Pamela wasn’t sure how Bettina was going to link the quest to track down the purchaser of the yarns in the zip-lock bag with the responsibility of the Advocate to keep the residents of Arborville informed, but fortunately the blonde woman seemed to accept Bettina’s self-identification as reason enough to lend her expertise to the task at hand.

  She fingered the clump of yarn on the counter, teased the strands—red, yellow, blue, pink, and two shades of green—apart, and looked up. “These are all just acrylic,” she said. “The yarn could have come from any hobby store, or even the dollar store. We don’t carry anything like this.” She picked up the bag and pulled out the entire contents, spreading a colorful carpet of yarn tails over the glass counter top.

  Pamela studied the assortment and began to cull the tails that were obviously acrylic. At the same time, the blonde woman picked out a few that were clearly finer quality. She held up a three-inch-long piece of mohair yarn in a rich umber shade.

  “We’ve carried yarn like this,” she said, “but I don’t recall this color.”

  She held up another, a rugged ply in pale gray.

  “This is that Icelandic yarn like you bought,” she explained, glancing toward Pamela. “Also undyed. The sheep can be cream-colored, brown, or gray.”

  “Do you recall someone buying that yarn?” Bettina asked, her eyes widening slightly.

  The woman shrugged and tightened her lips into a puzzled knot. “We sell a lot of it. I couldn’t really point to any one particular knitter.” She resumed fingering the yarn tails spread out before her. She picked up a another strand, mustard-yellow and thicker than the others. “A woman from Arborville bought ten skeins of this around Christmastime. I remember it because mustard isn’t a color that everyone can wear, and it’s quite an expensive brand.”

  The blonde woman herself clearly understood what flattered. She had set off her pale hair and eyes with a sweater the delicate pink of cherry blossoms.

  “Arborville?” Bettina’s voice rose in pitch and her eyes got wider.

  “I don’t know her name,” the blonde woman said as if anticipating Bettina’s next question. “I haven’t seen her since then, but for a while she came into the shop quite often. She always paid cash, so there wouldn’t be a credit card record or anything like that.” She focused her gaze on Pamela. “Maybe if you told me what you’re actually trying to do, I could be more helpful.”

  “There’s a group,” Pamela said. “They display knitting in public places—unexpected things, like sweaters for trees. They’ve put sweaters on a whole bunch of trees in Arborville.” She gestured toward the yarn tails strewn along the counter. “They leave bits of yarn hanging sometimes . . .”

  “And you’re trying to identify these knitters?” The woman’s expression suggested she was pleased with her deduction.

  “Why, yes,” Pamela said, suddenly inspired to add, “Bettina is doing an article on them for the Advocate.”

  “I know about the group,” the woman said. “The Yarnvaders, but I believe the members prefer to remain anonymous.” Was there a teasing edge to her voice? As if she herself was one of them? Pamela wasn’t sure. The blonde woman went on. “So I couldn’t tell you, could I? Even if I knew who they were.”

  “No.” Pamela started to gather up the yarn tails and tuck them back into the zip-lock bag. “You couldn’t tell us.”

  * * *

  Back in the car, Pamela and Bettina looked at each other and sighed. “Well,” Bettina said, “we did our best. And we found out something. I wonder who this Arborville knitter is.”

  “Have you noticed anyone in town wearing a hand-knit mustard sweater?” Pamela asked, her tone suggesting the question was quite futile.

  “Not really.” Bettina turned the key in the ignition and the Toyota grumbled briefly and came to life. “Home then?”

  “We’re not through.” Pamela’s voice was lively again. “There are other yarn shops. We just won’t tell them that we’re trying to identify members of the secret knitting group.”

  “Okay.” Bettina’s customary cheer reasserted itself and she smiled. “Where to first?”

  But visits to yarn shops in Meadowside and Newfield and beyond yielded nothing useful.

  It was getting dark by the time Pamela and Bettina returned to Arborville. Back in her own house, Pamela fed the cats, checked her email, and started the pot roast that was to be her dinner.

  Chapter 6

  The next morning Pamela was hard at work in her office, untangling the convoluted syntax with which the author of “Confederate Motifs in Civil-War Era Quilt Design” had set forth her discoveries. She was puzzling over a sentence that ran on for nearly three-quarters of a page when a notice popped up at the bottom of her screen to tell her that she had a new email. Often she tried to ignore such notices, forging on with her editing and catching up on email only when she took breaks. But this email was from Bettina, and since Bettina lived right across the street, an email message from her signaled that something interesting or untoward had happened.

  The message itself was brief, only two words: “Check AccessArborville.”

  Curiosity, plus the promise of a respite from the brain-numbing task she’d been engaged in, led Pamela to save her Word document, minimize it, bring up the Google page, and key “Access Arborville” into the search box. When the town listserv came up, a glance at the post headings that filled the screen made it clear Arborville was abuzz with the topic of Bill Diefenbach’s murder.

  Skimming even a few posts made Pamela feel slightly queasy. How could a pleasant town like Arborville contain people with such vitriol in their veins? And people who posted on AccessArborville couldn’t even do so anonymously. If they could, heaven only knew what they would spew forth.

  It was widely believed, by Diefenbach’s supporters, that MacDonald’s supporters were rejoicing at the news of Diefenbach’s death—even if, the Diefenbach supporters admitted, the actual deed had been done by Roland DeCamp, who was not a MacDonald supporter.

  Moreover, MacDonald’s supporters were derided as tree-hugging know-nothings, pot-smoking hippies (probably introducing Arborville’s youth to drugs at this very moment), and shiftless layabouts who expected the town to provide them with land on which to grow the food that made up their effete vegetarian diets—as well as the marijuana that addled their brains. If they ate red meat like real men they’d understand the benefits of Diefenbach’s wish to sell off the Arborville community garden land to a developer for a mixed-use structure with sixty apartments and street-level commercial space.

  A timid rebuttal by a MacDonald supporter was greeted with the taunt “Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O.” That poster went on to remind readers of the listserv that during his tenure as mayor (which went on for way too long), MacDonald had been deaf to the complaints of Arborville residents who objected to the fact that someone in Arborville was raising chickens in his back yard.

  “Diefenbach swore he’d put an end to that,” another poster contributed.

  “Live and let live,” a MacDonald supporter countered. “After all, most of Arborville used to be farmland.”

  “Not anymore—and good riddance, tree-hugger!” was the response. “The future is now!”

  A number of posters chimed in to echo that theme, as well as to ask MacDonald supporters how they would like to be awakened by a crowing rooster at six a.m. every day, even on weekends, and earlier in the summer.

  “They crow at the break of dawn,” one Diefenbach supporter explained helpfully.

  Pamela sighed and closed her eyes. After ten minutes of exposure to the que
stionable thought processes of the people who spent their time communicating via AccessArborville, a return to the article on Civil-War era quilts would be a relief. She opened her eyes again to click on the X that would eradicate AccessArborville from her computer screen, then she responded to Bettina’s email: “At least they’re so caught up in insulting each other that they’re leaving poor Roland alone.” Soon she was back at work untangling the endless sentence.

  Bettina popped in briefly at lunchtime to chat about AccessArborville and remind Pamela that she wouldn’t be able to go to the tag sale at Cassie Griswold’s house the next day because she had to babysit the Arborville grandchildren. “Stop in for coffee and crumb cake first,” Pamela suggested. “The sale doesn’t start till ten.”

  The offer of crumb cake supplied the pretext for a walk uptown, and the knowledge that Saturday would be devoted not to household chores but to the manifold delights of a tag-sale browse made Pamela resolve that after the walk she would dedicate herself to housecleaning and laundry.

  Accordingly, at six p.m. she was bustling about her house, enjoying the mingled aromas of Pine-Sol and lemon oil, and tending to the final touches that made a house-cleaning session complete. In the dining room she settled the chairs, displaced for vacuuming, back into place around the table. In the living room she fluffed and rearranged the row of needlepoint pillows that decorated the sofa, making sure the needlepoint cat wasn’t standing on its head.

  Catrina and Ginger had warily returned after being driven upstairs by the vacuum cleaner, and Pamela knew they were waiting in the corner of the kitchen where their dinner regularly appeared. She was hurriedly straightening out the stacks of magazines on the coffee table so she could tend to them when she was distracted by the doorbell’s chime.

  It was nearly dark outside, so she switched on the porch light before reaching for the doorknob. Through the lace that curtained the oval window she could see that her caller was clearly not Bettina. The person illuminated by the porch light was tall, very tall—but familiar.