Silence of the Lamb's Wool (A Yarn Retreat Mystery)

by Betty Hechtman

  “Suicide?” I repeated.

  “It isn’t official until the medical examiner makes a ruling, but that’s what it looks like.” He explained that the paramedics had thought she’d been having some kind of seizure and rushed her to the hospital. “It was only later when Cadbury PD went to the scene to do an investigation that we found the note.” I mentioned being there when the paramedics arrived and not seeing any note.

  “It wasn’t written on paper. When we checked her cell phone it was set to a note-taking app. I don’t remember the exact wording of it, but it was something like she was doing something bad and couldn’t live with it anymore.” Dane shifted his weight and took another cookie. “After we read that, we looked at everything with a different eye.”

  “Right,” I said. “I saw a red paper cup and a small glass bottle.”

  “The bottle had a homemade label on it. Basically, it said ‘poison’ and ‘insecticide.’ The results aren’t in yet, but the ME thinks she dumped the insecticide in the coffee. Not that it matters, but you probably realized the cup came from the Coffee Shop,” he said.

  I nodded as if I had, but really until he’d mentioned it, I hadn’t put the paper cup together with the coffee place on the main drag.

  “Poison, suicide,” I repeated, trying to put the pieces together in my head.

  “The ME will probably make an official ruling on the cause of death tomorrow. Then that will be it. Case closed.”

  “You’re not even going to do any more investigating?” I said.

  “It’s Lieutenant Borgnine’s call, but I think he’ll just take it at face value. It’s common knowledge the shop wasn’t doing well. She seemed to feel guilty about something. Who knows what she was involved in.” A woman’s voice called out for Dane. “I ought to go in.”

  “Of course,” I said, backing away. “Thanks for the info. Even though it’s a shock. Suicide,” I muttered to myself.

  “There’s one other thing,” he said. “I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything, but we found a muffin on the ground.”

  “One of mine?” I said, feeling my brow furrow. “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “It was hard to miss the ‘Muffins by Casey’ on the bottom of the paper around it,” he said. In an effort to brand my baked goods, I’d gotten the paper liners printed up. “Don’t worry. She didn’t give herself the poison with it. There wasn’t even a bite out of it.”

  That information didn’t make me feel any better.

  9

  The red-polo-shirted managers’ group crossed my path as I headed toward the Lodge Wednesday morning. Their retreat seemed to be going on as planned. They probably didn’t even know what had happened to Nicole, but then it had nothing to do with them. Over their bright shirts they wore matching navy blue fleece jackets adorned with their company name. They were headed toward their meeting room, probably just having finished breakfast.

  This morning’s version of white sky didn’t have a hint of sun, but was just a thick layer of opaque clouds. There was nothing to reflect off a shiny surface and not a shadow to be found.

  I was early and it was chilly standing outside waiting for Lucinda and Tag, so I went inside to get a hot drink for the road. I really appreciated Tag using the restaurant van to pick up the group to take us to the ranch and I wondered if Tag would have a fit if I brought a coffee into his pristine vehicle.

  I was surprised—no, stunned—to see Will Welton, dressed in his usual work clothes of plaid flannel shirt over snowy white T-shirt and loose jeans, coming out of the café, holding a white paper cup. I put my arms around him and said, “I’m so sorry about Nicole.”

  He swallowed a few times and we moved off to the side. “Are you sure you ought to be working today?”

  “It’s worse if I stay home,” he said. Now that I looked at his face I saw that his even features looked drawn and his skin looked pale. He stared at the ground. “I had no idea . . .” He let the train of thought drift off before he composed himself and faced me. “I am so sorry for you. I know this leaves you in a lurch. If there is anything I can do.”

  I felt funny mentioning the retreat under the circumstances, but he had asked. “I’m sure you know I was pretty much completely depending on her to run the whole fleece-to-yarn part of the program. Do you think she had some kind of playbook? Something I could follow, since it looks like I’m going to be doing it now. And she was going to bring a number of spinning wheels?”

  He fished in his pocket for a key and handed it to me. “To be honest, I don’t know what she had. But go to her studio and take whatever you need.” He looked away and seemed to be losing his composure. I thanked him and he walked away without looking back.

  As I stepped into the café, Jane was standing with the delivery guy, signing a clipboard. He started to take it back, then flipped a page and asked her to sign the one she’d missed.

  While she made my drink, I brought up Will and how surprised I was to see him. He’d told Jane that Nicole had killed herself. “The worst is, he’s blaming himself. They think she used some insecticide he had in the shed. Some stuff he’d mixed up from some old recipe. The main ingredient is cyanide,” Jane said, setting my drink on the counter.

  I took my coffee and went back into the main part of the Lodge. I hadn’t realized how early I was. None of my group was there yet.

  While I waited, my mind wandered to my experience with Dane—which bummed me out. I wondered who the woman was.

  But there was no time to dwell on that now. I looked out the window just as the Blue Door van pulled up. I looked at my coffee cup, glad that I’d let Jane put one of the plugs in the opening. There was less chance that I’d spill any in the van and make Tag go nuts.

  Tag already had the side door open when I came outside. I saw him eyeing my coffee cup and he pointed out the drink holders and requested I keep my cup there when we were moving. Lucinda got out of the front seat and joined us. She was wearing a Ralph Lauren jacket that resembled an Indian blanket. She stepped close to me. “Any news about anything?”

  Tag wanted to be included and stepped next to his wife. I looked around and saw we were alone. “I don’t want to talk about this in front of Olivia, Bree and Scott. There is no reason to burden them with the problems of the retreat or anything about Nicole. They didn’t even know her.” I surveyed the area again just to make sure before I told them what I had learned about Nicole’s death.

  “Suicide, huh,” Tag said. “I talked to her a bit now and then. I got the feeling she had begun to sour on Cadbury. Her husband is so popular with everybody but I don’t think she was. She was too big for the room, as the saying goes. You have to work at fitting in, in a small town like this. Maybe it got to her.”

  I mentioned the contents of the note. Tag’s interest perked up. “She was doing something bad? I wonder what?”

  I saw Olivia, Bree and Scott walking together toward the van so I quickly changed the subject and asked Tag how long he thought it would take to get to the sheep ranch. Lucinda laughed silently and winked at me. She knew what I’d done. For all Tag’s attention to detail, he sometimes missed the obvious, like me changing the subject. He was going on about his calculations as I greeted my group and we all got in the van.

  Tag was still giving times based on traffic, stoplights and road work as we clipped on our seat belts. He only stopped long enough to make sure I’d “sheltered my cup,” as he put it.

  As soon as we got on the highway, I heard a squeal come from the seat behind me. When I turned, I saw that Bree was holding up her phone triumphantly.

  “I got a signal,” she said, showing the face of the phone to all of us. Olivia and Scott took out their phones as well. I heard them muttering that the line at the pay phones had been unmanageable.

  As soon as we left the peninsula, as if by magic the weather changed and the scenery did as well. Suddenly the clo
uds got thinner and thinner until there was blue sky with sun streaming down and there were tall mountains on either side of us. It felt kind of like the movie version of The Wizard of Oz, when it went from black-and-white when Dorothy was in Kansas to Technicolor when she arrived in Oz. Soon, all that was left of the clouds were wispy fingers of fog that clung to the mountaintops. I watched as a hawk glided through the filmy white.

  Everything was green. Not the dark green moisture-holding green of the Monterey pines and Monterey cypress trees. This was bright green, spring green. The mountains’ sides were covered in grass and there were dots of black steers grazing. This was a different sort of rustic than where I lived. It was a more lush version of rural now that we were in the Carmel Valley. Organic lettuce farms, vineyards, horse farms and housing developments around verdant golf courses all whizzed by. We passed wine-tasting rooms and houses on big lots.

  “I’m thrilled about this outing,” Bree said, putting her phone down on the seat, “but the schedule you gave us yesterday listed the sheep shearing as Thursday afternoon at Vista Del Mar.”

  I’d forgotten I’d given them the folders with the information on the weekend when they’d arrived. “It seemed like a better idea to do it this way,” I said. “Such a lot of bother to bring the sheep to Vista Del Mar.”

  “You listed it as the kickoff of the whole retreat. It sounded like a dramatic beginning,” Olivia said. “But I suppose this is much nicer for the sheep. They don’t have to leave home.”

  I heard Tag saying something in the front seat and Lucinda seemed to be trying to shush him. “I don’t see why you just don’t tell them the truth,” Tag said. “It isn’t as if it’s your fault that Kevin St. John waited until the last minute to tell you he wouldn’t allow the sheep on the premises.”

  “Is that true?” Scott said. The air was much warmer coming in through the open window and Scott took off his jacket. They knew that Kevin St. John wasn’t exactly supportive of my retreats, so they understood when I explained, or really just repeated, what Tag had said.

  I was glad when the subject got dropped as Tag turned off the road into a long driveway back toward a red barn. White fencing surrounded the grassy corrals on either side of the road. At the end we pulled in, in front of the barn. A black-and-white border collie ran up to the van as we got out. It started to try and corral us until the rancher came out and called the dog back. Nicole had told me that Buck Morrell’s story was similar to Tag and Lucinda’s. In his later life, he and his wife were living a dream of having a boutique sheep ranch. Buck, which I suspected wasn’t his real name, greeted us all.

  The rancher was dressed in jeans and a denim work shirt. I noticed he wore cowboy boots, the expensive custom-made kind.

  “The sheep are hanging out in the pen,” he said in a friendly manner. “Our shearer should be here any minute. Have a look around while you’re waiting.” He opened the door to the barn and led the way. I was expecting something full of straw and a little smelly. I was wrong on both accounts. It was more a museum than a barn. “This is the original,” he explained. He pointed at a new-looking structure done in the same red. “We built a new state-of-the-art version.”

  Buck followed us as we fanned out. There were several old pieces of farm equipment that had been cleaned and polished to look like new. And some other stuff. A whole wall had been devoted to black-and-white photographs. As I began to look them over, the rancher joined me. “These are all from the old days. The ranch was much bigger and more of a working ranch than it is now.”

  I stopped at a photograph of a man sitting on a horse. He was dressed in work clothes, but there was something about him. The only word I could think of was dashing. The photo was black-and-white, so I couldn’t tell the color of his hair, but I guessed it was dark brown with some waves. He was leaning forward on the horse as though he’d just come in from a hard day. A pair of leather work gloves hung from his jacket.

  “That’s Edmund Delacorte,” the rancher said before explaining that the ranch had belonged to the Delacorte family. “Along with everything else, it seems,” he added, punctuating it with a laugh.

  The name rang a bell. Hadn’t Cora Delacorte mentioned it the other day? “How does he fit in with the family?”

  “He was Cora and Madeleine’s older brother,” the rancher said. “I gather he spent a lot of time out here. I think it was a hideaway for him.”

  Before I could get more information, the shearer arrived, pulling on his coveralls. He went to a small temporary pen. While the rancher got the first candidate, I asked the shearer if the sheep minded.

  His face had the look of someone who spent most of his time outside and wasn’t concerned with sunscreen. He stroked his chin. “I’d say it’s like giving a five-year-old a haircut. They don’t volunteer, but I think they feel better after.” We gathered around the small enclosure as the rancher led in one of the sheep with a rope halter. It looked like the standard Little Bo Peep variety, but the rancher said it was a breed called rambouillet. He did a short talk on there being two kinds of sheep, the meat sheep and the wool ones. The ones used for meat had shorter hair. He dealt only with wool sheep.

  “This is Clover and she’s a ewe,” he said. When Bree heard the word ewe she got all excited and mentioned that the Ewes was the name of her knitting group.

  “It’s a play on words,” she said, in case anyone hadn’t figured it out. She started snapping pictures on her phone, excited because she could send them right along to her boys. The shearer took the lead and got the animal in the middle of the pen, then he got the sheep on its side. He took out a pair of clippers that looked like the kind barbers used, only bigger. He positioned the sheep, then held it in place with his knee as he began to shear. I watched as all of her hair began to roll back on itself. The underside was shades lighter, but all of it looked soft and fluffy. It took only a few minutes for him to finish, coming away with the fleece in one large piece. He let the sheep up and it began to walk around the enclosure.

  “You can pet her if you want,” the rancher said. Clover seemed to like the attention as I patted her head and looked into her eyes. Not exactly looked into. With their weird horizontal pupils it was hard to tell where she was looking, but when I stopped petting she leaned against the fence and pushed against my hip, wanting more. Buck mentioned that someone else had come out wanting the same number of fleeces recently. Clover was led back to the pasture and the next sheep brought in. Buck picked up the fleece and carried it out. Tag watched, taking in every detail, calling after the rancher when a piece of fleece fell free. I was glad to see my group seemed to be enjoying the outing. Olivia was taking pictures of Bree with the ewe so she could send it to her knitting group. Scott was interested in touching the fleece and was surprised at the slightly greasy feel that Buck explained was lanolin.

  We watched them shear only two sheep. The rest had been done earlier and all the fleeces were loaded into the back of the van.

  “That was great,” Bree said when we were all in the van on the way back. She was busy making use of the cell signal, sending more photos and text messages while talking about the outing. I was about to agree when Scott looked toward the back of the van at the sheep fleeces piled on sheets.

  “So how exactly do we turn all that sheep’s hair into yarn?” he asked. I might have been able to wing it, if Tag hadn’t stepped in.

  “I was wondering about that myself,” Tag said. “It would seem that there must be a number of steps, Casey. My understanding was that Nicole was the expert—”

  “So the Delacorte sisters had a brother,” I said, interrupting. I could see where this was going and managed to cut Tag off before he made it clear to the early birds about my predicament with all that wool.

  Lucinda knew what I was doing and joined in. “Tag knows all about the history of Cadbury and its inhabitants. He can tell you all about the Delacorte brother. Can’t you, dear?�
�� she said, patting her husband’s hand affectionately.

  “I did spend quite a bit of time at the Cadbury Historical Society when we first moved here,” Tag said. “I think that if you’re going to live somewhere you ought to know about it. You probably don’t know this, Casey, but Edmund Delacorte is the one responsible for Vista Del Mar.” Tag seemed to have forgotten about his comment about the wool and became totally involved with talking about Edmund Delacorte. It was almost fascinating, except Tag tended to go into too much detail. It was interesting to hear that Vista Del Mar had started out as a camp and gone through several incarnations as a resort by the time Cora and Madeleine’s brother had bought it. I don’t know if the others were listening, but I didn’t care as long as Tag didn’t start asking me what I was going to do without Nicole and her expertise.

  By the time we left all the blue skies and bright green of the Carmel Valley and entered a bank of fog drifting onto the Monterey Peninsula, I knew that Edmund had loved the outdoors and had wanted Vista Del Mar to stay a rustic spot for families to enjoy nature and for retreat groups to have a place to get away from it all. He didn’t want it to be exclusive, like the posh resorts in Pebble Beach. There was talk of him running for office and it sounded like everyone viewed him as some kind of god.

  Tag seemed to be running out of steam and I worried that we still had a ways to go. “So what happened to Edmund?” I asked, both out of curiosity and in an effort to keep him away from talking about the retreat.

  “He died. He was in his prime, just forty-seven. I can tell you the exact kind of infection if you give me a day or so,” Tag said. I told him it was okay and he went back to talking about Edmund’s philosophy on the outdoors. The fog had grown thicker and it was hard to believe we’d been in such bright sunlight just a few minutes earlier.

  We turned onto the street that bordered Vista Del Mar, and I started to relax as Tag’s monologue continued. In a few minutes, the early birds would get out without knowing how worried I was.