A Fatal Fleece: A Seaside Knitters Mystery

by Sally Goldenbaum

  Gabby’s mouth was already full of sandwich as they turned away, and her words came out muffled.

  “We found Moira’s grave, Nonna,” she said.

  Birdie and Nell stopped and turned around.

  “It’s up there.” She pointed to the top of the hill.

  “Do you have a rubbing of it?” Nell looked over at the stack.

  She shook her head. “I wanted it to be my very first rubbing. I wanted to do it for Finn. But there’s no stone.”

  Birdie frowned. “No stone?”

  Gabby’s hair flew around her face as she shook her head. “Nothing. Only some flowers that needed water, so Ella cleaned and filled the vase. It was a lonely grave. Not like some of the others here, because . . .” She pulled her brows together, thinking. Then decided that was the end of her sentence, and she lowered her head, giving her full attention to the prosciutto.

  A lonely grave. Certainly not what Finnegan would have wanted for the love of his life.

  They turned and walked on over to the stone house. Before they could knock, the door was opened by a short elderly man. He looked at them silently, scanning their faces with small, beady eyes. In the next instant, a smile spread across his lined face and he threw his arms around Birdie, grabbing her in a tight hug.

  For a moment, Nell wondered if Birdie could breathe, but before she could intervene, the man pulled away. He looked with pleasure from one woman to the other.

  Birdie took a quick breath to regain her equilibrium. Then she focused on the man and began to laugh. “Oh my goodness, Henry Staab. I didn’t know you were still with us.” She laughed harder, and the hunched-over, gnomelike man did the same. Tiny wisps of white hair, scattered willy-nilly across a nearly bald head, flew in the breeze of his bobbing head.

  “Birdie Favazza. My darlin’ Birdie.”

  Nell looked from one to the other. Finally Birdie wiped the laughter from her eyes and introduced Henry to Nell.

  “Ah, the Endicotts. I know of you, but don’t get into town much anymore. I kinda like it here with my friends.” He spread his short arms wide, encompassing the graves. “They listen. Good folks, the lot of them. Well, most, anyway.”

  He laughed again while Birdie explained to Nell that she and Henry had known each other a half-century ago.

  Henry looked at Nell. “I once proposed to this fine lady when she was out here visiting some grave site or another. Turned me down, she did.” The man’s laughter was loud and gravelly.

  Birdie laughed. “I’d forgotten all about you working out here.”

  “So it’s an accident, our meeting like this? Then what brings you here, if not my charming self?”

  “Moira Finnegan.”

  His smile faded.

  “We wanted to visit her grave,” Birdie said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “You know that Finn died, don’t you?”

  “Course I do. He was murdered,” Henry said. “Finn was a good man—used to bring me fish sometimes. Especially cod. He didn’t deserve to end his days on earth like that. Now, lots of these folks here were ready to come out and call it a day, and that’s as it should be. But no one has a right to send someone here. When it’s your time, that’s when you come.”

  “Like Moira,” Nell said.

  “Sure, like that, though it was too soon for her in my opinion. The old fisherman loved that lady like there was no tomorrow. Too bad she got that awful cancer.”

  “Do you remember when she died?”

  “Course I do.”

  “May we see where she’s buried?” Birdie asked. “With Finn gone, we thought it would be nice to pay our respects to her memory. It’d be nice if you’d go with us.”

  Henry looked up the hill, then back to Birdie and made a harrumphing sound, as if he suddenly had a million other things to do. But finally he pulled the door closed and shuffled his way up the hill.

  The women followed silently, their eyes focused on the old man’s bent back.

  At the top of the hill, beneath a tree, was the vase of flowers Ella had refilled. A small sign, enclosed in plastic and affixed to the ground with a stake, read MOIRA FINNEGAN, and below, the dates that spanned her short, fifty-year-old life.

  “That’s it? Where is her tombstone? A monument?”

  “Isn’t one.” Henry shoved his hands in the pockets of his baggy jeans. He took a step back and his back grew rigid. “Some folks don’t, you know.”

  “The flowers?” Nell asked.

  “Father Larry comes by to say hello once in a while. He was here to bury her, you know—sprinkled the water on the grave while Finn and I stood by. He said some prayers. Now he brings flowers. Probably does some praying, too.”

  “But Finnegan didn’t?”

  “Finn didn’t like graveyards. Too many strangers here, he told me once.”

  Birdie chuckled and the sound relaxed Henry’s stance, his shoulders slumping back into a curve.

  “It’s odd, though,” Birdie said gently.

  “Odd, schmod.” Henry started to walk away, toward the safety of his office.

  Birdie held back her words, and she and Nell quietly followed.

  By the time they reached the door, Henry’s expression had altered. He looked suddenly weary—and relieved. He turned around and looked at his old friend.

  “Okay, so now you know. With Finn gone, things all a-shambles like they are with this murder hanging over our heads, I s’pose it’s okay that you know.” He looked intently at the two women, his shoulders seeming to square back with his words.

  “She’s not up there, is she?” Birdie said gently.

  “Nope. She’s not here. I did it for the old man. It was what he wanted. Didn’t hurt no one, and sure as hell made the fisherman happy.”

  Chapter 32

  They dropped Ella and Gabby at the house with their treasures, and while Birdie got them settled inside, Nell called Cass on her cell. She could barely hold in her excitement.

  She had just gotten off the Lady Lobster, Cass said, but if Birdie could handle the fact that she hadn’t had time to shower, she’d meet them in ten minutes.

  “It’s a date,” Nell said, then turned the car toward Canary Cove. “Cass will meet us there with her keys in case we need them.”

  “When did she get keys?” Birdie asked as Nell drove around a mob of tourists spilling off a bus and into Harbor Road.

  “Ben talked to Jerry Thompson about getting her a set. Even though the estate isn’t settled, there didn’t seem to be any reason why she couldn’t go in and look around if she wanted to. They haven’t arrested her for anything, at least not yet.”

  “Not ever. Rubbish. Foolish thought.”

  Nell turned onto the road that led to Canary Cove and Finnegan’s land. “Have you had a chance to talk to Nick?” she asked. The teenager’s revelation that the intruder’s flashlight had only appeared on the first floor was puzzling. Even the drifter knew Finn lived upstairs. It wouldn’t have been difficult for Nick to find out.

  “No. But I’m going to.” Her voice was steady, but tinged with anger, something Birdie rarely succumbed to. “It’s time to stop the deception. I’m tired of it, Nell.”

  Nell nodded. Lies between friends could simmer until they became toxic. And Nick, in spite of everything, was a friend.

  Cass was waiting at the gate. She had parked her truck in the parking area near the garden. “I felt uncomfortable,” she said, “driving straight on in. Like it was mine or something.”

  “It is yours, sweetie,” Nell said. “But if walking is more comfortable, we’ll walk.”

  Nell parked next to Cass and she and Birdie piled out of the car. Arms linked, they walked down the drive toward Finnegan’s house.

  “It looks like we have company,” Birdie said.

  Parked in the gravel clearing ahead was an empty patrol car.

  They looked around, then down toward the dock, but there didn’t seem to be a soul in sight. They called out, but the only answer wa
s from some hungry gulls dipping into the water at the end of the dock.

  Cass shrugged and looked at the house. “This place looks like it could use a cleaning.”

  “Or perhaps a complete gutting.” Birdie glanced at the dangling sign on the window. TIMOTHY PULASKI, DDS. “It’s a mess. Poor Finn.”

  Cass walked up to the dental-office door and tried a key, then another. The handle turned and she pushed the door open, then looked back at Nell and Birdie. “Now, exactly why are we going in here?” she asked.

  “The police said there were some old dental records left behind,” Birdie said.

  “And the body they dug up didn’t have any teeth, remember?” Nell prompted, walking past Cass and into the dusty rooms. She stepped around a pile of mice droppings.

  “I remember that they said the dental records wouldn’t help them out for that very reason,” Cass said, looking eye to eye at a spider hanging down in front of her.

  “Right,” Nell said.

  “So why are we here?”

  “Dental records tell you more than the placement of a person’s teeth.” Birdie walked over to a filing cabinet and pulled out a drawer. She reminded Cass of the ugly rumors that Moira and the dentist might have been overly friendly.

  “Which was crazy,” Cass said.

  “Absolutely, at least in the twisted way they were presented. But I think Moira was grateful to Dr. Pulaski. And here’s why. . . .”

  Cass listened while Nell laid out their hunches, complete with Father Northcutt’s comment about Moira’s health and what they’d discovered at St. Mary’s cemetery.

  Cass grinned. “It makes good sense . . . if you’re right.”

  “Voila,” Birdie said, and pulled out a yellowed folder with a typewritten label reading MOIRA FINNEGAN.

  They took it outside, spread it open on the hood of the police car, and with the help of sunlight highlighting Dr. Pulaski’s precise notes, learned why Moira Finnegan—and Finnegan himself—were grateful to Dr. Timothy Pulaski. And it didn’t have anything to do with romance.

  Father Northcutt suspected.

  And Finn, of course, knew.

  But probably no one else on earth.

  Moira Finnegan had no teeth.

  And Timothy Pulaski saved her from a lifetime of embarrassment by building her dentures, which he repaired and replaced as needed.

  Moira Finnegan, for her part, made sure he was well fed.

  Nell tucked the file in her purse.

  Birdie pointed across the drive to the spot where the rotting door leaned against a tree. “Come, Cass. Look at this.”

  Stepping over the debris, they walked single file around the bushes and scrub trees to the spot where Gabby had left her flowers and the newly dug earth formed a mound of dirt.

  Cass stared at the spot where a body had been.

  They walked around the loose earth gingerly, as if the body were still there, noticing the things no one would have paid attention to: the rosebushes planted in between the brush and lovingly pruned, the bushes cut back and the tiny birdhouse swinging from a low-hanging maple branch.

  It was a tended gravesite. A loving place.

  Moira Finnegan’s grave wasn’t lonely at all.

  “It’s an amazing love story,” Nell said a short while later. They stood in the driveway, looking around at the house, the bushes that hid Moira’s special spot.

  “All these years he kept everyone out to protect her.” Cass shook her head.

  They felt like cheering. A happy story. A glorious ending.

  “And he won’t be haunting me anymore,” Cass said. “She looked up at the sky. “We did it, Finn. We’re halfway there.…”

  They all felt giddy. Teenagers who had come upon a lovely secret.

  Birdie looked again at the Timothy Pulaski sign. “That dear old man. He was just as we thought: sweet and good at cavities.” Her eyes traveled from the office door to the next office. “Is there a key on that ring to the other office?”

  Cass shrugged. “We can see.”

  It took three tries, but finally Cass found one that turned. “This door had probably not been locked for years until the police put these new dead bolts on.”

  They walked in tentatively, invisible webs brushing their faces. Every surface—the old leather chair, a desk, a clothes tree—was covered with dust. It was a ghostly space, eerie in its coat of disuse.

  Nell knew where Birdie’s thoughts had drifted. If the flashlight intruder, Nick, hadn’t gone upstairs that day, he had been searching these two offices. A dental office and this space. What was he looking for?

  Birdie ran her fingers along the back of the gray chair, and a line of dark green leather peeked through.

  “I’m not a great housekeeper, but this is something else,” Cass said. She coughed and sent a flurry of dust flying across the room.

  “We’re leaving our mark.” Nell pointed to their footprints on the floor—Birdie’s sneakers, her sandals, Cass’ flip-flops were clean outlines on the dirty floor.

  Nell frowned. “But it looks like we’re not alone.”

  She pointed to another set of prints, bold and clear, circling the room, as if a ghost were there with them.

  Cass knelt down. “Weird,” she said. They looked down, their eyes tracing the prints from the door to a small file cabinet. The drawer was still open. Inside was nothing but a dusty outline of once-stored files.

  “It’s been cleaned out,” Cass said.

  “But recently. These are fresh tracks.”

  “The police?” Cass wondered.

  But it didn’t look like a police search. It was more focused, as if someone were looking for something specific.

  And found it.

  “I wonder who rented this space,” Nell said. She walked over to a desk pushed up against the back wall in front of the window. Pushing aside a decaying curtain, she looked out at the dock, toward a few boats coming into the harbor.

  The wooden desk was covered in gray like the rest of the room, a pencil jar to one side, an old desk mat. She opened the drawer and found yellow pads, more pencils. “There aren’t any business cards,” she said.

  “What’s that?” Birdie pointed to an object on the floor beside the desk.

  Nell picked it up and blew away the dust. It was a leather picture frame, green and gold. She held it close to the window, her finger tracing the broken glass.

  She gasped. “Oh, my lord,” she whispered.

  Birdie and Cass were at her side in an instant. Nell handed Birdie the frame.

  The photo was yellowed from sunlight and distorted by the broken glass, but there was no mistaking who smiled out from the frame. Birdie Favazza, dressed in a soft blue dress, standing beside a handsome man who wore a flower in his lapel. His arm was wrapped around the woman at his side.

  It was Birdie’s turn to gasp. She stared at the photograph. Then she looked around the office more carefully, stripping it of the dust and dirt, focusing, remembering. She looked at the photo again. “It was our wedding day.”

  She rubbed the glass with a corner of her shirt, wiping it clean.

  “Hello, Joseph,” she said, a soft smile filling her face.

  Her eyes settled on the open filing cabinet and the footprints on the floor. “These two buildings, this one and the one across the drive, were identical. I’d simply imagined Joseph a few yards to the west. I suppose because as the years passed, it was the more respectable of the two. But this one . . . This one must have been his office. Of course—that’s why he knew Dr. Pulaski. Oh, my . . .”

  Her eyes returned to the picture frame, then over to the empty cabinet drawer.

  “Nicholas, Nicholas,” she murmured to herself. “What have you been up to?”

  Daylight was fading when they walked back down Finn’s drive to Canary Cove Road, feeling a lightness that came with rediscovering the past. Finn’s Moira. And Joseph Marietti. More than they had bargained for.

  “Have we been here an hour? A week?
A day?” Birdie said. “When one is unburying the dead, time escapes. Does it not?”

  Nell smiled. A day of revelations—and couched in the middle of them, one thing was becoming clear: Nicholas Marietti’s habit of harboring secrets was about to end.

  They stopped at the end of the drive just as Tommy Porter appeared around the bend, his jacket tossed over one shoulder, his eyes tired.

  Instinctively, Nell pushed the edge of the dental file farther down in her purse. She wanted to talk to Ben about the transfer of Moira’s casket before handing it over to the police. There were a few promises that needed to be made before the story of Finnegan’s grave was told to the police.

  “Tommy, you look like something the cat dragged in,” Birdie said. Perspiration dotted his forehead and spotted the front of his uniform shirt.

  “Feel that way, too. What’re you guys doing here?”

  “I’m just checking to see if these keys work,” Cass said.

  Tommy looked at the key chain. “So . . . so, what’ll you do with this place, Cass?”

  “It’s not really mine yet.”

  “Sure, it is. It’s all paperwork now, but it will be yours free and clear soon.” He paused, then looked at Cass again. “I know this is a bad time for you, Cass. It isn’t fair. None of us think you’d do anything like what happened to old man Finnegan. No way. It’s just the process. We gotta find the guy who did this. Then everyone can breathe clean air again and be about their business.”

  “You’re a good guy, Tommy,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Are you here on official business?” Nell asked.

  “Sort of.” He looked at Cass again. “I s’pose you heard I let Beverly Walden take Finn’s boat.”

  “I heard that.”

  “Stupid thing to do. I know. But she was his daughter—or I thought she was, anyway—and I figured it’d all be hers. I found her back here, looking around. She wanted the boat in the worst way. She looked at me, her eyes all big and sad.”

  Birdie smiled. “Tommy, I’m surprised at you, falling for such wiles.”

  Tommy shrugged, a blush spreading above the collar of his uniform. He stuck a finger into the collar of his shirt, tugging at it. “I . . . I felt sorry for her, I guess.” And then his voice changed, his words edged with anger. “But no more feeling sorry for her, for sure. No more of that.”