Knit, Purl, Die

by Anne Canadeo

  “How did the police find out?” Lucy was dumbfounded.

  “Phoebe had told Detective Reyes where Crystal lived. They went to her apartment and tried to find some ID, in order to locate her family. They found a passport and some other papers that showed she was living under an alias.”

  “But why?” Lucy was still dumbfounded. “Why come back here only to disguise herself?”

  “Lucy, don’t you get it? She came back to catch up with her stepmother, Gloria.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lucy sat back and thought about Dana’s revelation. Her brain was reeling. That had to be it. Why else would Christine Thurman return to Plum Harbor? She had no family or even friends here anymore.

  But somehow it wasn’t like those stories you hear about some child given up for adoption, who comes into town asking questions, searching for her birth mother. Gloria’s stepdaughter had never revealed herself. She had gone out of her way to disguise her identity.

  That didn’t make sense or bode well.

  “Wait, that’s not all …” Even Dana, who rarely lost touch with her cool, calm center, sounded rattled now. Lucy braced herself for another bombshell.

  “They’ve checked her cell phone records. There were about a million calls to Jamie.”

  “Jamie? She knew Jamie?” Lucy heard her voice rise in alarm. Tink, who had been sleeping in the shade under the table, jumped up and barked.

  “Apparently she knew him quite well,” Dana continued. “Even though neither of them let on while they were around us. The police are looking for him. He’s wanted for questioning. It doesn’t look good.” Dana sounded bleak. “Though I suppose there could be some plausible explanation …”

  “An ‘explanation’ for why they knew each other so well, but acted as if they were strangers when we were around?” Lucy asked her. “What reason could that be?”

  “I really can’t think of one,” Dana admitted. “Phoebe said that Crystal—Christine, I mean—had a boyfriend, but he was in another relationship. That could have been Jamie, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, he might be the guy Christine told Phoebe about. Christine Thurman must have wanted something from Gloria and Jamie was her connection,” Lucy speculated.

  “Money, maybe? What else could it have been? Lucy, do you think she had anything to do with Gloria’s death? … No, it’s too horrible to imagine,” Dana said quietly.

  “I know what you mean,” Lucy cut in quickly. “I don’t want to think it, either.”

  Neither of them spoke for a long moment.

  “What do the police think?” Lucy asked finally.

  “They aren’t saying anything right now. They’re waiting to question Jamie,” Dana reported. Lucy heard her let out a long slow breath. “I’ve just told Suzanne and I’m going to call Maggie next. Actually, I think I’ll go over there and tell her and Phoebe in person. Maggie isn’t going to take this well and Phoebe will feel even more upset now about her friend,” Dana predicted. Lucy was thinking the same. “Jack went out for a late golf game. He won’t be back until dark. I can stay with Maggie and Phoebe a while.”

  “I’m meeting Matt in the village later. I’ll get ready now and come by the shop.”

  Lucy hung up with Dana and hurried to clean herself up. She showered and dressed quickly, then left for town with her hair still wet and some makeup and jewelry stashed in her purse for further repairs.

  Jamie…. It was hard to believe. They had all trusted him so much. They’d flocked around him after Gloria’s death, like a bunch of fretful mother hens trying to soothe him. Protect him, even. He must have been laughing at them the entire time.

  She felt so betrayed and used. Maggie, who had been the closest to him and Gloria, would feel even worse. And what about poor Phoebe? Had Crystal/Christine befriended her, then used her just to keep track of what was going on at the knitting shop once she realized that Gloria’s friends had suspicions about the drowning?

  Maybe even to keep track of Jamie?

  Thousands of questions spun in Lucy’s head. She soon reached the village and parked in front of the Black Sheep, right behind Dana’s little black hybrid. She saw her friends Dana, Maggie, and Phoebe up on the porch. They all looked very grim. Grim and shocked, Lucy thought. As if they’d just witnessed some horrific accident out on Main Street.

  “Lucy … you didn’t have to drop everything and run over here,” Maggie said.

  “I wanted to.” Lucy walked over and sat down. “I’m just as stunned as you are. I never once thought Crystal could be involved in Gloria’s death. Does that mean Jamie was hiding something, too?” she added quietly.

  “I think so—something big. A secret relationship with Gloria’s stepdaughter. It’s so hard to believe. They must have had some scheme going to trick Gloria out of her money, or her house or something,” Maggie said sadly.

  Lucy nodded slowly. The two of them wanted to get it, one way or another.

  “Jamie had us all fooled. And Gloria paid the biggest price,” Maggie added sadly.

  Phoebe looked as if she’d been crying again. “Crystal once told me that she grew up someplace in Florida, but I never thought about it. I mean, I never put it together with Jamie and Gloria. She once told me that she’d never had much of a family, only her mother. But her mother had died, about a year ago.”

  “I’d heard her mother moved down south somewhere, soon after George died,” Maggie said. “The mother must have had bad feelings about the way George Thurman’s estate was split, and passed that on to her daughter,” she added.

  “And George’s ex-wife already had plenty of anger toward her husband and Gloria for the way the marriage broke up,” Dana said. “Gloria basically stole George—and all his money—away from her. Then when he died, Gloria inherited that big house and a great deal of her husband’s holdings, their piece of the Avalon Group, too.”

  “His daughter must have inherited some share of Thurman’s wealth,” Lucy said. “But she’d been so young it must have been held in trust for her. Maybe by her mother?”

  “That was probably the case,” Dana agreed. “Or by some attorney George had put in charge. But you know, so many times when children inherit that way, the money gets used up by irresponsible—or even greedy—guardians.”

  “You mean, by the time she had control of it, there wasn’t much left?” Lucy asked. “So she felt cheated.”

  “That could have been.” Maggie’s forehead furrowed in thought. “Or there may have been a good amount there, but she still felt shortchanged. Her mother may have brainwashed her with her own bitterness. And Christine might have resented Gloria for destroying her family. You never know how young kids perceive things.”

  “Maybe her mother’s death brought all these toxic feelings to the surface and pushed her over the edge,” Dana speculated.

  That certainly sounded plausible to Lucy. She could just imagine the message George Thurman’s daughter may have heard, day in and day out while growing up—how much better off she and her mother could have been, how much brighter her future could be, if only her evil, greedy stepmother, Gloria, had never come into their lives.

  “So, at some point, she must have teamed up with Jamie and they put together a scheme to take back the fortune Christine thought should have gone to her when her father died,” Dana concluded.

  “George Thurman had that property down in Florida when she was little, so it wasn’t hard to check and see if Gloria still spent the winter there,” Maggie speculated. “Maybe they quietly stalked Gloria, figured out her habits, and Jamie found a way to introduce himself. Then started to romance her.”

  “She’d just broken off with Mike Novak,” Dana offered, “and she was vulnerable. Though they had no way of knowing that.”

  “Yes, that part was lucky. Jamie swept Gloria off her feet and somehow persuaded her to marry him.” Lucy wondered if that part of the plan had been difficult because of the age difference and since Gloria hadn’t seemed inclined to marry
for so many years.

  “I don’t think he had to persuade her much,” Maggie countered. “I think he just drew her in. He acted as if he needed her and she fell into a savior role, wanting to rescue him. Didn’t you say that a while ago about them, Dana?” Maggie recalled.

  “That dynamic was definitely going on between them, I think. I’m not sure Jamie had to fake it. I’m not sure he was even faking his attraction to Gloria. Not entirely,” she added.

  “Who knows? Maybe he did have real feelings for her, but got in too deep with Crystal’s scheme. When I saw Gloria in town, a few hours before she drowned,” Lucy recalled, “she told me that Jamie kept calling her, asking her to come to Boston for that party. Maybe he was having second thoughts about some plan he and Crystal had to kill her?”

  “That is possible. I never thought of it,” Dana admitted. “We still don’t know exactly how they did it. They must have gotten her into the pool somehow, without a struggle. Drugged her maybe? Which is why her blood work from the autopsy came back showing a high level of painkillers.”

  “So you don’t think Gloria took painkillers, like Jamie said?” Suzanne asked.

  “I think that was just a story, to cover his tracks,” Dana replied. “Including her dark moods.”

  “Moods we never saw,” Maggie added.

  “That all sounds pretty likely,” Lucy agreed.

  “Okay, Jamie and Crystal killed Gloria,” Phoebe cut in. “But who killed Crystal?”

  It was silent for a moment. The friends glanced around at one another, no one willing to guess aloud at what might seem the obvious conclusion.

  Finally Dana said, “It had be Jamie. They had gone to such great lengths to kill Gloria and then found out there was no money. What a shock that must have been. The little they could salvage would have been that line of credit he’d applied for against the home equity.”

  “Oh, right. It must have been approved and he didn’t tell anyone.” Lucy recalled Suzanne mentioning that she’d helped him with the application. He should have heard an answer by now from the bank. “So he must have decided to cut Crystal—I mean, Christine—out of the few crumbs left. She was the only one who knew what they had done. Well, who knows what really happened … but she was the one who ended up dead and dumped in the woods. He must have killed her before leaving town with whatever money he could get his hands on.”

  “The money he told us he would use to pay back the loan sharks,” Maggie recalled. “I’m sure now he never intended to do that. He just planned on skipping town and hoped they’d never find him.”

  “Now he has some really bad and angry people after him, as well as the police. Not a very smart crook, was he?” Lucy glanced around at her friends.

  “They both must have thought it would be easy,” Dana pointed out. “He’d marry Gloria, get his name on her will and on some of her assets, and then she’d meet with a little accident. But once they did away with Gloria, they opened a Pandora’s box.”

  “They did, didn’t they?” Maggie mused.

  “They’d never imagined that Gloria had so many secrets,” Lucy offered.

  “And what about her secrets? Especially Mike Novak,” Maggie asked. “Do you still think he visited that night?”

  “Yes, I do. Obviously before Jamie and Christine arrived.” Dana’s tone was very certain. “There was something in his body language when we confronted him about it. Something I saw in his eyes. I do think he went to visit her, but he didn’t want to tell the police, of course, once he heard that she had drowned. He may have even expected to hear from them, wondering if anyone saw his car, or put things together.”

  “Like we did?” Lucy asked.

  “Exactly. But he managed to fly under the radar and thought it was just as well. I guess, if he was there, it will come out now, when the police investigate again.”

  “Yes, it will,” Maggie agreed. “But now you’ve reminded me, what about that PI who came to Suzanne’s house last night? Do you think he was another one of Jamie’s tricks?”

  “Probably an actor,” Lucy guessed. “Jamie must have hired him to divert us and make us stop snooping into Gloria’s death.”

  “I’m going to ask Jack to check it out,” Dana said. “I think there was a licence number on the business card. He can find out pretty quickly if it’s phony.”

  “Yes, have him do that if it isn’t too much trouble,” Maggie said. “Though I think we already know what Jack will say…. It’s hard to believe we were all fooled so easily. And for so long.”

  “We weren’t fooled entirely,” Lucy pointed out. “We all felt unsatisfied by the story of Gloria’s accident. We all felt some twinge of suspicion.”

  “Yes, we did,” Dana agreed. “But who could have imagined such a complicated scheme?”

  “It’s as if we were looking at some huge project, like a big Aryan knit sweater, or even the group blanket we’ve been making. With your entire focus on one tiny section, it’s hard to get the big picture.”

  “That’s what Jamie was counting on,” Maggie agreed. “That must be why he stayed so close to the shop, keeping up his friendship with us. So that we wouldn’t become suspicious of Gloria’s death—or him.”

  But they eventually did, Lucy realized. Though they had never really suspected Jamie, and hadn’t figured out the real plot behind Gloria’s murder. Yet, they’d instinctively sensed their dear friend had not died by accident. And they had tried hard to uncover the facts.

  That was some small consolation, wasn’t it?

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was Dana’s turn to host knitting night on Thursday. Jack was working late. Maggie told them to bring all of their squares to the meeting. Everyone had completed their assigned number and she wanted to lay out the blanket again for a preview of the final product.

  They were also going to vote on the color of the yarn they’d use to stitch together the squares and the color of the crocheted border, which Maggie pointed out, didn’t have to be the same color as the stitching.

  Dana was also going to fill them all in on everything Jack had heard at work during that last few days—the missing pieces of Gloria’s murder. Articles had also run in the Plum Harbor Times, which the group had been studying closely.

  The first one reported Christine’s murder and her double identity.

  The next reported that Jamie had been picked up in Texas on Sunday, trying to cross into Mexico. He’d been sent back up to Massachusetts and booked on suspicion of murder in his wife’s death.

  “He must have ditched or sold his car somewhere on the way. He wasn’t driving the BMW Gloria gave him. But they caught him anyway,” Dana told the group as she served glasses of chilled, organic white wine.

  She had prepared a healthy meal for them, appetizers of tabouleh salad and red pepper dip with vegetable sticks and pita chips. As her guests enjoyed the starters, she put finishing touches on the main course, slices of wild salmon, grilled in a soy mustard sauce atop a bed of sauteed spinach and shiitake mushrooms, with a side dish of seven-grain pilaf.

  It looked remarkably appetizing, Lucy thought, despite the abundance of health benefits.

  “Wow, that looks good,” Suzanne remarked. “I don’t even have to break my diet tonight.”

  “Guilt-free dining served here.” Dana smiled, beckoning them to the buffet she’d set out in the kitchen. They decided to sit at the big slate coffee table in the family room. Maggie had reserved the dining room table for laying out and viewing their blanket.

  “But getting back to the guilty parties, Jamie Barnett and Christine Thurman?” Maggie prodded her. “Did Jack hear any gossip about Jamie’s interrogation by the police yet?”

  Dana glanced at her and nodded. Lucy could tell by her expression she’d heard more than gossip, she’d heard the whole thing.

  “He didn’t cooperate at first. He had a lawyer who advised him not to say anything, especially since there’s not much physical evidence. Gloria’s body was cremated,” she
reminded them. “But something must have gotten to him. I don’t know, maybe he just felt guilty and remorseful, finally?” Dana asked the others. “He decided to plead guilty, at least to killing Christine Thurman, and he gave the police the full story—the plan Christine had cooked up and how Gloria finally died.” Dana had served some salmon and trimmings in her plate, but now put it aside.

  Lucy could tell it was upsetting for her to relate the story, but at this point, she had little choice. They were all waiting to hear it.

  “So … what did he say?” Suzanne prodded her. She was eating eagerly. The conversation had not quelled her appetite, at least not so far. “How did it happen?”

  “Jamie claims that even though he was part of the plan to kill Gloria, when the time came, he didn’t want to go through with it,” Dana told them. “He told the police he was trying to put Christine off, to delay the actual murder. He tried to persuade her that he could get more out of Gloria if she was alive, rather than dead.”

  “I don’t understand … he married her to kill her and inherit the money. Then he didn’t want to kill her after all?” Lucy asked.

  “That’s what he says. He said that he seduced her and married her for the money. As part of the plot, but as time went by … well, he says he had real feelings for her and didn’t want to go through with it. He claims he really loved her.” Dana paused. “But Christine had too much stored up against him by then and was annoyed that it was taking so long. He and Christine were lovers, too. So she was jealous about Jamie marrying her evil ex-stepmother … even though it had all been her idea.”

  “Wow, is that twisted. I can’t imagine how she put up with the arrangement in the first place,” Suzanne said, swallowing a mouthful.