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

by Betty Hechtman

  Wanda pushed ahead of me and started to speak, but I stopped her. Drill sergeant voice or not, she wasn’t in charge, I was. I stepped in front of her and put my hands on my hips, further blocking her. As the thought of being the one in charge went through my mind, I imagined my mother and everyone who’d ever known me hearing it. They would all be shocked. I was a little shocked that I was holding my own.

  As I told Will that we needed a lot of big pails, something that would act like a drying rack and a lot of hot water, I looked around the interior of the shed. The shelves behind him held industrial-size containers and there was a supply of smaller empty bottles similar to the one I’d seen near Nicole. I thought of something, but it was touchy how to bring it up. I could feel that Wanda was getting ready to move in, so I launched into it directly and asked Will if he’d known that Nicole was going to be at Vista Del Mar the morning of her death.

  He seemed to hesitate. “She seemed wrapped up in what she was doing and didn’t always tell me her plans. There’s no way I would have seen her. I was stuck under a sink in the dining hall from after they shut down for breakfast until I heard about her,” he said. It sounded like he was offering an alibi. I glanced back at the shelves.

  Will picked up on what I was looking at and swallowed hard. “After what happened, the ingredients for the insecticide and any I’ve made up are being kept in a locked cabinet.” I nodded and said it seemed like a good idea. It was a terrible thought, but it occurred to me it was like shutting the barn door after the chickens ran out.

  Will greeted Wanda, but his voice sounded strained and I guessed he knew how the short spinner felt about his late wife.

  He brushed his scruffy sand-colored hair behind his ears. “I’m sorry. I forgot all about it. I got the stuff together for Nicole last week.” Will said he’d bring the supplies to the meeting room.

  No matter how fast I walked on the way back, Wanda got to the small building that housed our meeting room first. She barred my way as I tried to go inside.

  “Didn’t Nicole tell you this is an outdoor project?” Wanda said.

  I thought back to what Nicole had said when we’d discussed what meeting rooms I should reserve. She’d just said the first encounter with the fleece would be messy. I remembered messy projects from my stint as a teacher and had chosen a room with a tile floor. Never again was I going to assume anything.

  Will and another man arrived carrying a stack of big white plastic pails. Wanda directed them to set them up in the open space in front of the small building. Like the rest of the grounds of Vista Del Mar, the small area had been left to grow wild and was covered with dry golden grass and a few green plants. I dropped my messenger bag carryall on the ground and helped arrange the pails in two rows. Will took out an unmarked plastic bottle and explained it was a special wool wash he’d mixed up for Nicole.

  Wanda stepped in and moved the pails so there was more space between them. I heard Wanda muttering under her breath that it was lucky for me that she’d taken over.

  Will heard her and his whole demeanor changed. His friendly features were contorted in anger. “I’d appreciate it if you’d stop trying to bury Nicole. She would have done just fine.”

  Wanda acknowledged his comment with a dismissive huff and went inside to get the fleeces. This was not the mood I’d envisioned for the retreat. I could practically hear my mother bringing up her offer of cooking school in Paris. For a moment the thought of bailing sounded appealing. We hadn’t even started and already I was wishing it was over and I could say good-bye to Wanda Krug.

  “Hey, Casey,” a woman’s voice said behind me. I turned and was surprised to see Crystal Smith. She seemed to be from another fashion planet than Wanda. Crystal’s favorite thing was to mix and not match things that came in pairs. Today she had on one hoop earring and one shaped like a heart, along with an assortment of studs going up her outer ear. I saw the tops of her socks and one was spring green and the other was hot pink with spring green stripes. I suppose you could say they at least blended. One way or another she pulled off the look and made it seem fun. It was hard to believe she and Wanda were about the same age.

  “I just dropped off another supply of yarn in the gift shop,” she said before commenting on how much yarn they’d sold there. “I can’t thank you enough for putting on these retreats. It really helps our business.”

  Crystal left it at that, but I knew what she meant. She and her two kids had moved back in with her mother when her rock god husband moved on to younger pastures. The yarn store was supporting all of them now, which had to be hard.

  “I came to offer my services,” she said. “I went through the wool process at last year’s Monterey Wool Festival.”

  I thanked her profusely, feeling like I’d just been thrown a life preserver. I mentioned my concern about dealing with Wanda.

  “She was hurt that you didn’t ask her to handle the retreat to start with. She comes across a little harsh, but you have to understand she’s always been upstaged by people. She has a younger sister who was the prom queen. Need I say more? I think she felt upstaged by Nicole, with her studio and her fancy degree. And then you hired her.” She stopped talking abruptly as Wanda returned. After what Crystal had just said, I wondered how Wanda would take the yarn store owner’s offer of help. To my surprise and relief, she seemed happy with it and noted that the retreaters were beginning to show up.

  I had realized early on that I would never be able to keep their names straight. Instead I’d given them my own monikers as they’d registered. The woman I called the Ginger had joined Olivia, Bree and Scott, who were gathered around one of the empty pails. The other names were all connected to some kind of identifying feature. There was the woman who wore T-shirts with cat pictures, another whose big dangle earrings caught my eye, and a pair of women who stuck together like glue and I’d started thinking of as the Siamese Twins. You get the picture.

  The one name I had straight was Ronny Fiore. She seemed to have toned down her clothes to almost casual, but she didn’t seem to be mixing with the others. Whatever reason she had for signing up for the retreat, it certainly wasn’t because she wanted to learn how to handle wool, or make new friends.

  Wanda took center stage and gave them an overview of the wool washing. In her typical style she announced the water needed to be the right temperature and ordered that they absolutely could not agitate the wool or it might felt. The wool needed to be washed twice and then rinsed twice and had to be dried before the next step. She ordered them to form small groups around each of the pails, since she made a point that there wasn’t enough for them each to have their own.

  Now I understood Wanda’s concern. Nicole had never given me any idea how long any of this was going to take. We only had until Sunday and they were supposed to be knitting their shawls by then.

  Wanda instructed Crystal and me to hand out a handful of fleece to each person.

  Will had rigged a hose from the restroom in the small building and was going around filling the buckets. As he finished filling each one with hot water, Wanda stuck a thermometer in it and then added a squirt of Will’s special soap. She turned to the group around the pail and snapped, “Put your fleece in now.” The women jumped as if a buzzer had gone off and dropped their wool into the water.

  “Why exactly are we washing the fleece?” the woman in the cat T-shirt said. She seemed to be taking notes. Wanda stopped what she was doing and in a most cordial tone explained it was to get the dirt and lanolin out of the wool and told everyone to move the fleece to the next wash.

  Crystal hung near me, waiting to jump in when needed, but Wanda seemed to have it under control. She already had Will filling buckets with rinse water. When he’d finished, she turned to us.

  “You two can help with this,” Wanda said and instructed us to help the groups move their fleece to the rinse water and on to a second one. It was a messy job
and I was grateful we were outside. I was surprised at the murky beige of the wash water.

  While Crystal and I worked next to each other fishing wet wool out of the pails, she turned to me. “I told you she’d be okay.”

  I shrugged in surprise. “I shouldn’t say this, but I think Wanda is more qualified than Nicole. I guess I was wowed by her studio and all those spinning wheels.” As long as I’d started to talk about Nicole, I brought up what had been sticking in my mind. “Did you ever hear anything about Nicole possibly blackmailing somebody?”

  Crystal’s head shot up and she put her finger to her lip. I hadn’t realized it, but with all the background noise, I’d spoken a little loudly. I whispered an “I’m sorry” and then repeated the question in a softer voice.

  “I heard she was asking a lot of questions.”

  “About what?” I asked

  “About the town and the people. You should talk to Maggie. I think Nicole went there a lot and everybody knows Maggie knows everything going on in town.”

  “Ms. Feldstein,” Kevin St. John said. I hadn’t noticed the whine of the golf cart and was startled by his appearance and the sharpness of his tone.

  “What?” I said.

  By now he’d stepped out of the golf cart and was standing so close to me I could smell the peppermint on his breath. “Who okayed doing your project outside? The yoga people are doing a morning meditation.” He pointed across the walkway to a similar building. The doors and windows were shut and I could see the glow of candles and a circle of faces with closed eyes.

  I took the blame and he insisted that we stop immediately. He waited while I approached Wanda. She wasn’t happy with the idea, but finally agreed that the wool could be left in the rinse water. Crystal and I moved through the group, quietly telling them we had to vacate the area. Crystal came up with an impromptu plan and told them all to go to the meeting room where the spinning wheels were set up and she’d do a demonstration of some specialty yarns they’d just gotten in at the store.

  Most of the group followed Crystal like she was the Pied Piper, but I noticed that Ronny Fiore went off on her own. I was about to join the crowd when I noticed that Kevin St. John was looking down and sounded perturbed. “Shoo,” he said, waving his hands. Julius was sitting by the side of the path, ignoring the manager’s commands. “Ms. Feldstein, will you please instruct this cat to stay out of the Vista Del Mar grounds.”

  I wanted to laugh. As if that was going to happen.

  18

  “Let’s finish up with the wool,” Wanda commanded when the group had reconvened in the washing area. By now the yoga group was finished with their meditation and had moved on to the beach to do their poses. Crystal’s demonstration had been a big hit. The group was inspired to try out the new yarns and had made a stop in the gift shop to buy up the supply she had brought over.

  Will had set up some drying racks he must have gotten from the Vista Del Mar laundry. Wanda hadn’t come to the yarn demo and now I understood why. She had a huge plastic bag and unloaded salad spinners for each group before pushing the receipt on me. She shook her head in disapproval as she mentioned that Nicole had overlooked this step in cleaning the wool.

  “I don’t think this is a mandatory step,” I said to Crystal, sounding a little defensive as Wanda had someone in each group take some fleece out of the rinse water and put it in the salad spinner, explaining it would extract the excess water. I wanted to believe what Will had said, that Nicole would have done just fine. “Now spin it, ladies,” Wanda said, turning her hand to demonstrate. Crystal agreed it wasn’t essential, but said it would certainly speed things up.

  I saw that Lucinda was holding her dripping fleece, waiting her turn with the salad spinner, and I went to join her.

  I could tell my friend the truth. “I feel like an idiot,” I said in a low voice. “I trusted Nicole and now I wonder how qualified she was.”

  “This may sound callous, but it doesn’t really matter anymore.” She looked at Wanda checking the salad spinners to make sure they’d gotten all the fibers out before they were passed on to the next person. “I don’t think any of the retreaters even know that Wanda is a stand-in, or care. She’s a little rough around the edges, but I think she knows her stuff.”

  When Lucinda got her turn with the salad spinner, I went over to the drying racks and assisted Crystal as she helped arrange the wet fleece. I looked at the amount each of them was hanging out to dry.

  “I realize I’ve never done this before, but it doesn’t seem like they each cleaned enough fleece to make the yarn for a shawl.”

  Crystal’s expression darkened. “I didn’t even think of that,” she said, looking as Lucinda hung out her fleece. “No, this can’t be enough for a shawl.”

  Wanda was busy supervising and it took me a long time to get her away from the group. I brought up the fleece situation and she looked perturbed. “Do you think I don’t know that?” she said. “I have it under control.” She ended the conversation by walking away.

  The truth was, I needed Wanda too much to take a chance on her getting annoyed at me and taking off, so I let it go. But I had my fingers crossed that she really did have things under control.

  With the wool hung out, the first workshop ended and the group began to disperse. Except for Lucinda and my early birds.

  I realized I’d dropped my messenger bag in the grass when we’d first been setting up. I picked it up as the lunch bell began to ring. The white sky had become filmier and bits of blue were showing through with some sun here and there. I hoped it would help the fleece to dry quickly.

  “That was fun,” Bree said. “I can’t wait to tell the Ewes about it.” She turned to me. “Are you having lunch with us?” she asked.

  I nodded and said I thought it was a nice time to bond with the group. I invited Crystal to join us. I wanted to make sure Wanda got lunch, but she insisted on going home. “I don’t think it would be a good idea if I was too familiar with the group,” she said. “It would undermine their view of me as an authority, like letting them see behind the curtain of the great Oz.”

  Wanda grabbed my arm and pulled me farther away from the group. “After seeing how unprepared you were this morning, I thought I’d better be proactive. How many carders do you have?”

  It took a moment for the word to register. “Are those the things that look like dog brushes?” I asked. Wanda nodded. I didn’t want to tell her the truth, that I didn’t have any. Instead I asked her how many she needed. I was, after all, the person in charge. So much for my plan to have lunch with the group. I sent Lucinda and the rest of them on to the dining hall.

  I passed the yoga group on their way to lunch and apologized again for our noise. Their reaction surprised me. Instead of fussing the way Kevin St. John had, their leader said it was good for them to have challenges to their concentration and I had actually done them a favor.

  I went looking for Will and found him back in his workshop. He knew what carders were and assured me that Nicole had a bin of them she’d planned to bring when they were needed. He told me where to find them in his wife’s shop. Problem solved. I just had to pick them up.

  I stopped at my place and found Julius asleep on my pillow. I’d planned all along to bring over some cookies for the afternoon break. I wanted to bake them before my trip downtown. By the time I’d preheated the oven, I had sliced up the rolls of butter cookies and filled several baking sheets. They baked in no time and were sitting on cooling racks as I got ready to go.

  When I’d come across the street, I’d glanced down toward Dane’s. The red Ford F150 wasn’t there and I figured he was on duty. But I noticed a silver car parked in front of his house. It had been parked there for days, or just about the whole time his company had been there. It didn’t take real detective skills to figure out it probably belonged to his girlfriend.

  There had been no car
e packages of his delicious pasta since his company had come, but why not keep my end of the bargain and leave him some cookies? And if I happened to look in the window while I was leaving them, so be it.

  I was really curious about Dane’s company. Who was she? What was his type? Whoever she was, she wasn’t into cars. The car had a nice dent in the front fender and definitely looked like it had seen better days.

  I walked up the driveway and headed to the back door of the off-white stucco house. We always left our food offerings at the kitchen door. The top part of his door was glass and as I stood up from leaving the care package, I surveyed the kitchen. I don’t know what I expected. Did I think she was going to be hanging curtains and dusting with a feather duster? There was someone in the room. She was sitting at the table with her back to me and it looked like she was wearing his robe. All I could see was that she had wiry dark hair that hung below her shoulders and that her head seemed to be resting in her hands. Wasn’t that universal body language for being upset about something? Maybe there was trouble in paradise. For a moment I considered knocking on the door so she would turn and I could get a good look at her, but I stopped myself. What was I going to say? “I’m here to check you out”?

  I ended up just leaving the cookies.

  I was glad to see the sunshine as I headed to my Mini Cooper. Wanda hadn’t said anything, but I was worried about the fleece drying, even with the help of the salad spinners. Having some sun for a while would help.

  I parked near the Coffee Shop and remembered Crystal’s suggestion that Maggie was like information central for the town and might know something more about what Nicole had been up to. Getting the carders wouldn’t take long. I certainly could stop for a coffee and maybe ask a few questions.