Hooking for Trouble

by Betty Hechtman

  Turn the page for a preview of

  Betty Hechtman’s first Yarn Retreat Mystery,

  YARN TO GO

  Available now from Berkley Prime Crime.

  I was in the middle of laying out the ingredients for my carrot muffins when the call came. It’s lucky I hadn’t started mixing them, because you can’t just run off and abandon muffin batter for an hour and expect it to be okay. I didn’t even understand who it was at first. All I heard was something about no refund on a credit card bill, the word retreat and that I “better do something about it.”

  “Who is this?” I said when the caller finally took a breath.

  “Casey, this is Tag Thornkill,” an exasperated voice responded. He could have left off the last name. I mean, it’s not like I know a bunch of Tags. Immediately my demeanor changed from irritated at the interruption to concerned. Tag is my current employer, or half of the pair, anyway. He and his wife, Lucinda, own the Blue Door restaurant, which is where I presently work. I’m the dessert chef. Tag doesn’t know it, but I also bake muffins for some coffee spots in town using the Blue Door’s kitchen. Lucinda had given her okay and saw no problem with the arrangement as long as I brought in my own ingredients.

  So every night when the restaurant closes and everyone has left, I come in and bake the restaurant’s desserts for the next day, along with batches of muffins for the next day’s coffee drinkers.

  Let me be clear from the start: I’m not one of those fancy cooking school graduates who does French pastry. I had never even thought of baking as being a career. It was just something I started doing when I was a kid. It might have been a reaction to having a mother who was a cardiologist and thought cookies only came in white boxes from the bakery.

  My first experience as a dessert chef happened at a friend’s bistro. He didn’t care that I didn’t have any formal training. The truth was in the cake. He loved what I baked and hired me. Unfortunately, he sold the bistro after six months and it became a hot dog stand that didn’t offer dessert.

  After that I tried law school, but by the end of the first semester, I knew it wasn’t for me. Nor was being a substitute teacher at a private school. Then I tested out a lot of other professions. In other words, I worked as a temp. I did things like handing out samples of chewing gum on street corners, spritzing perfume on anyone I could get to slow down at a department store, some office work and my favorite, working at a detective agency.

  My poor mother was beside herself. If I’d heard it once, I’d heard it a zillion times. “Casey, when I was your age, I was already a doctor and a mother. And you’re what . . . ?” Talk about knowing how to make me feel like more of a flop. My father wasn’t all that happy, either. He was a doctor, too—a pediatrician. When I broke up with Dr. Sammy Glickner, things really hit the fan. He was my parents’ dream come true: Jewish, not just a doctor, but a specialist in urology and nice. They said nice; I said bland. Well, not totally bland. He was very funny in a goofy sort of way.

  But I needed a fresh start. And who better to help me with it than my father’s sister, Joan Stone. Let’s just say we both had the black sheep thing going. Her main advantage was she actually had a profession—actress. She wasn’t an A-list star like Meryl Streep or Julia Roberts. Most of her parts were playing somebody’s aunt Trudy or the noisy neighbor down the street. Her one claim to fame was she’d been the Tidy Soft toilet paper lady long enough to build up a nice nest egg before she left L.A., moved up north and started a new career.

  But now back to the call.

  With a nice tone, I asked Tag to repeat what he’d said.

  “I was checking Lucinda’s credit card receipts. There is a charge for Yarn2Go. My dear wife explained that was your aunt’s business and the charge was for some kind of yarn trip.” He paused as if he expected me to say something, and when I didn’t, he continued. “I checked all of her later bills and there was no mention of a refund. What do you have to say about that?”

  The “oh no” was purely in my head. Barely three months after I’d left Chicago and relocated to my aunt Joan’s guesthouse in the northern California town of Cadbury by the Sea, my aunt had been killed in a hit-and-run accident. It was horrible. There were no witnesses, and the cops still had the case open, though it didn’t look like they were going to find the driver. I didn’t care that the cops, my parents and all of my aunt’s friends insisted it was just an unfortunate, random accident. I didn’t buy it.

  Here are the basic facts. It was six thirty on a Sunday morning. My aunt never got up before eight. No one could explain, at least to my satisfaction, why she would have been out walking by the water at that hour. It was barely even light. I simply didn’t buy the cops’ explanation that maybe she’d taken up an exercise program and not mentioned it to me.

  I mean, I was living in her guesthouse, which was just across the driveway from her house. True, we’d agreed to stay out of each other’s lives, but still . . .

  My aunt had left everything to me, and when I’d met with the lawyer, he’d brought up her retreat business. While Joan had still done occasional acting gigs, her real passion had become putting on these retreats that she called “vacations with a purpose.” Basically all I knew about them was that they had to do with making things with yarn and she used the hotel and conference center across the street to host them. Joan had tried to explain more to me, but she got totally frustrated when I kept mixing up crocheting and knitting. I knew that you needed two things for one of them and one for the other, but not which for which. Needles, hooks, not my thing. All my creative endeavors had to do with baking.

  I had told the lawyer I had no interest in continuing the business for obvious reasons. He’d looked through the papers I’d brought in and said they appeared to be for her taxes, so for all intents and purposes, the business was over.

  “So what are you going to do about it?” Tag repeated, pulling me back to the here and now. I said something about checking into it when I got home, but that wasn’t good enough. I could practically hear him pacing. Tag was one of those people who went around straightening pictures on the walls at other people’s houses. He couldn’t deal with things being out of order or unsettled. He said he wouldn’t be able to sleep until it was straightened out. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was ten o’clock. I really wanted to continue making the muffins, but I knew Tag would be frantic until he had an answer, and he was sort of my boss. So I decided to run home and check. I’d finish the muffins when I returned.

  Even though the restaurant was in downtown Cadbury and my place was on the edge of town, the route was direct, and a little over five minutes later I pulled my yellow Mini Cooper into the driveway. When I doused the headlights, the yard became invisible. I was still getting used to so much darkness at night. In Chicago, wherever you were, there was some light coming from somewhere. Here, on the edge of a small town that didn’t allow streetlights, it really was pitch-dark.

  There’s something else I haven’t mentioned. I had inherited my aunt’s house, but after we’d cleaned out the refrigerator and I’d returned the packet of papers I’d shown the lawyer, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to go back inside, let alone move into it. The space would have been wonderful. The guesthouse was basically one room. But in my mind the house still belonged to my aunt, and in some wishful corner of my heart, I thought she still might come back.

  I fumbled with the keys as I headed toward her back door. A noise in the yard startled me as I pulled out the small flashlight I always carried. It was like my own personal headlight. I aimed the light around the yard and caught a deer nibbling on the petunias in one of the flower boxes. The delicate-looking creature blinked at the light but didn’t seem concerned by my presence. Not really a big surprise. Deer wandered around the seaside town at will, helping themselves to gardens and flowers. They really loved the small cemetery and were always lounging between the gravestones.

/>   “No more stalling,” I said out loud. In one swift move, I put the key in the lock, turned it and pushed open the door. The air inside seemed warm and a little stale. Was it my imagination or was there still a trace of my aunt’s signature scent, Penhaligon’s Elisabethan Rose? I couldn’t help it; my eyes filled with tears at the thought of her. I flipped on the light quickly. Everything was just as it had been. She could have walked in and felt right at home. The bunch of lavender flowers she’d been drying was still hanging upside down. Her coffee mug was rinsed out and sitting on the counter.

  I felt a real tug when I saw the shopping bag that the hospital had given me with the clothes she’d been wearing that morning. It had been sitting there since November, untouched since I brought it in.

  “I’m sorry,” a female voice said. I turned in time to see Lucinda come through the door. A quick glance at her face made it clear she’d overheard Tag talking to me on the phone about the yarn retreat charge. Her frilly pink nightgown showed through the opening in her Burberry trench coat. Only Lucinda would have thought to add a silk scarf and lipstick. “I tried to reason with him, but you know Tag. It’s exasperating how exacting he is.” Though the pair were in their fifties, they’d only been married a short time. They’d reconnected at their thirty-fifth high school reunion. Tag had been her high school crush. But years later she was divorced, he was widowed and they picked up as if no time had passed. Almost, anyway. Lucinda’s favorite saying was “be careful what you wish for.” Two seventeen-years-olds was one thing, but two people who have had years and years to develop habits and their own definitions of the way things should be—was something else entirely.

  “If it was up to me, I wouldn’t care,” Lucinda said, closing the door and standing in the middle of the room with me. “I was so upset about Joan, I forgot all about it.”

  “It’s got to be some kind of mistake.” I hung my head. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have been such a baby. I should have come in here a long time ago.”

  Lucinda put her arm around my shoulder. “We’ll deal with it together.”

  From the first time I’d met Lucinda, I’d liked her. Like my aunt Joan, she had a sense of fun, and our age difference didn’t seem to matter. We were all on the same page, though visually we made an odd pair. Lucinda was smaller and lively looking with neatly styled black hair that softened her square-shaped face. She always looked put together, even in a trench coat over her nightie. I was a little rougher around the edges. Jeans, a long sleeve T-shirt and a fleece jacket was my usual attire. I had shoulder-length hair that resisted any style. It wasn’t straight and it wasn’t curly but went its own way. I tried to remember to put on some makeup, but it wasn’t my top priority. Besides, all that sea air gave me a lot of color.

  And when Joan had Lucinda taste my pound cake, she had gotten the idea of having me bake the desserts for the restaurant. I hadn’t known Tag then or I would have been more flattered that he approved the idea.

  Having Lucinda with me now made it easier to go through the house. We passed by Joan’s bedroom quickly. The door was shut, but I knew everything was still as she had left it that fateful morning. Her toothbrush was still in the bathroom, and tufts of her black hair were still caught in the comb. I turned on the lights in the living room. Examples of my aunt’s handicraft were everywhere. A colorful afghan was folded over the end of the couch. Purple irises graced a needlepoint pillow, and a soft fog gray shawl hung across a wing chair in front of the fireplace. It must have fallen off her shoulders the last time she sat there.

  “All the papers are in her office,” I said. We walked down the short hall. In an effort to make it seem like I was comfortable being in there, I pulled open a closet door. Yarn of every color tumbled out and bounced off my head.

  “What the . . . ?” I said, picking up a ball of cotton candy pink yarn that had hit my foot and rolled off.

  “It’s your aunt’s stash.” Lucinda noticed my confusion. “That’s what it’s called—stash. Joan told me everybody who gets into yarn has a stash. I’d probably have one, too, at least a little one, except for Tag. He’s a sweet guy in a lot of ways, but he’s nuts when it comes to details. He saw I had one extra skein of yarn and made such a fuss, I said I wouldn’t buy any more until I used that one.”

  “Skeins?” I said.

  “Sorry, that’s what they call these,” she said, picking up a ball of yarn. “It’s really a silly term. It’s not like there is a universal size of a skein.” To demonstrate, she pointed out a large peanut-shaped one of forest green yarn and a small fuzzy baby blue one in the mess on the floor. “Both of these would be called skeins. Go figure.”

  She helped me stuff everything back in the closet and shut the door before it could fall back out again.

  Joan had taken the smallest of the three bedrooms and made it into an office. An adorable lion was guarding the desk. Lucinda explained it was crocheted. There was a basket of half-made things in the corner. “Those are WIPs,” Lucinda said.

  “Huh?” I said, picking up a forest green tube that looked like it might be on its way to becoming a sock.

  “Works in progress,” Lucinda said. “Don’t get the idea I’m some kind of expert. Your aunt told me all of this.”

  As I held the tube of yarn, four silver needles slipped out and hit the floor with a pinging sound. I picked them up, examining the sharp double points. “These look like they could do some real damage.” I tried to put them back the way they’d been but finally just stuck them into the yarn and put it on top of the stuff in the basket. “I have to stop getting sidetracked.”

  The padded envelope with the papers I’d taken to the attorney was on the desk where I’d left it. I was about to dump out the papers when I noticed a box covered in red bandanna print fabric. I lifted the top and looked inside, surprised to find that it was a file box. I’d started to push through the hanging dividers when I heard something hit the bottom with a clunk. “I wonder what this is,” I said, fishing out a small black flash drive. Lucinda pointed to the computer on my aunt’s desk and suggested I put it in and see what was on it.

  We both watched the screen and I kept clicking on things until I got the flash drive to open and then opened a file. “What’s that?” I said, looking at what had come up on the screen. It said RIB across the top, then Test. Lucinda shrugged and said it didn’t mean anything to her. “We’re not getting anywhere.” I turned off the computer and pulled out the flash drive, dropping it back in the box.

  I had a sinking feeling when I saw the tabs on the hanging dividers. They all said something about retreats. I pushed through them until I came to one that said Upcoming. Inside there were several files all marked Petit Retreat. I opened the last one and there were several printed sheets with a bunch of questions.

  “That’s the information sheet I filled out when your aunt talked me into signing up.” Lucinda leaned over my shoulder and looked at the page. “That’s what she called it.” Lucinda pointed to the heading that read Petit Retreat. “She said of all the retreats she put on, this was the most special. I told her I barely knew how to knit, but she said I would have a great time. Frankly, the idea of spending some time away from Tag and the restaurant sounded appealing. I love him, but our styles are just different. If he would just relax a little.”

  The more we looked through the papers, the more upset I felt. There were seven other people besides Lucinda who had sent in the money for the retreat. From the pile of receipts it was obvious my aunt had already paid all the expenses. “What am I going to do?”

  “You can try to cancel the weekend, but you’ll have to give everyone a refund. Not me, of course. I’ll deal with Tag.”

  “With what money? Nothing personal, but I’m not exactly getting rich from baking. The house is paid off—maybe I could get a loan.” I sagged. “But that would take a while.” I looked at the date. “The retreat is in two weeks.”
r />   “You could go to Vista Del Mar,” she said, referring to the hotel and conference center where the retreat was being held. “And Cadbury by the Sea Yarn and Supplies, and see if they would return the money.”

  “What am I going to say? ‘Sorry, folks, for the last-minute notice but I didn’t follow through with things, which my mother will be happy to tell you is my habit.’” I rocked my head with dismay. I barely knew Kevin St. John, who ran Vista Del Mar, or the mother and daughter who owned the yarn store. How could I ask them to refund the money? “There has to be another option.”

  “Well, you could go ahead with the retreat. Everything is paid for and arranged. All you would have to do is take your aunt’s place.”

  “I have no idea what these retreats are. I know zero about yarn things except for what you’ve just told me. I don’t think knowing that skein is really a meaningless term is enough. Joan was a master at arranging things, taking care of problems. I’m afraid my expertise is in making them—problems, that is.”

  Lucinda extracted one of the invoices from the file and waved the yellow sheet in front of me. “Joan hired a master teacher. Her name is Kris Garland, and your aunt raved about her. You don’t have to know anything. You would just have to greet everybody and hang around for the weekend. I’d be there to help you. And Vista Del Mar is right across the street from here.” She pointed to the wall of trees outside the window. When I still hesitated, Lucinda brought up the obvious. “You don’t really have a choice, do you?”

  I took the fabric box to the guesthouse, promising to think about putting on the retreat, before walking Lucinda back to her car. I held the flashlight as she pulled out her keys.

  A red Ford 150 pickup truck slowed as it neared us and stopped next to Lucinda’s white Lexus. I knew the color and make even in the dark because I knew who it belonged to. The driver’s window opened and a man stuck his head out. I shined my flashlight in his face and he squinted in response.