Murder Wears Mittens

by Sally Goldenbaum

  “Is there any news?” Cass asked.

  “No arrests that I know of, if that’s what you’re wondering.” She took a drink of the hot coffee as if to steady herself, then continued. “I’m concerned about the direction the investigation will take. Sometimes police are restrained by . . .” She paused, groping for a word.

  The knitters knew exactly what she was saying. The police are sometimes restrained by facts. And it was true. Personality, emotions, being a mother or a father or even a nun—those things couldn’t be allowed to influence the facts in a murder investigation. And yet they did. They were important. At least to the women sitting in the room, yarn and knitting needles in bags nearby.

  “Surely the police will check out the development and construction firms that were haranguing poor Dolores to death, trying to wrest that property away from her,” Fiona said. “It was pure harassment.”

  Fiona paused, aware of her awkward choice of words.

  Nell said, “The police are aware of it. Ben mentioned the matter had been coming up in city planning meetings. Lots of heated discussions. I didn’t realize it bordered on harassment, though.” Nor did she believe it—the Delaney and the Santos families were the two biggest developers in the area and she couldn’t imagine either family resorting to murder to get a piece of land. Although, as Ben reminded her, everyone has to be a suspect at this stage.

  Fiona swallowed a forkful of the casserole and acknowledged Nell’s comment with a nod. But it wasn’t developers who brought her to Izzy’s back room.

  “It’s Kayla Stewart I’m concerned about.”

  Of course it was. They all knew that. The young mother was of greater concern than large, rich companies whose goal was to become larger and richer. They felt an intimate, albeit not entirely rational, connection to Kayla, too. And all because of a few pieces of forgotten clothing in a Laundromat dryer—and two sweet children with a friendly dog.

  Something had been bothering Nell since meeting Kayla in the food pantry. “Fiona, how well did Kayla know Dolores Cardozo? Laura Danvers had the impression you wanted them to get to know one another, is that right?”

  Fiona continued to eat, chewing and swallowing, her expression thoughtful. Finally, she looked up. “Dolores and I became friends. I’m not sure why or how but we got to know one another shortly after I moved back to town. She was a good woman who had experienced difficult times in her life. I thought it would be good for Kayla to meet her—I knew she would like Kayla. And although Kayla isn’t an easy person to get to know, she let Dolores into her life. They enjoyed talking to one another—I don’t know about what, but I think Dolores was kind of a mentor to her.”

  It was clear that was the end of the story for Fiona, although they all knew it wasn’t really the end.

  “Of course, now I worry about my own judgment, getting Kayla mixed up in a murder,” Fiona said. “But who could have known that this was going to happen?”

  “Finding Kayla’s bike near Dolores’s house is a worry, sure,” Izzy said. “But maybe everything else can be explained away easily, even the bike, once she regains her memory.”

  Fiona didn’t answer, and it was Birdie who filled in the silence. “There has to be a logical reason for the bike, for Kayla’s injuries. It will be cleared up.”

  And hopefully without Kayla being accused of murder was in all their minds.

  They waited, looking at the nun for affirmation that those were her thoughts, too.

  But what they saw there were deeper lines, more worry, settling in on Fiona’s face.

  “It’s back,” she said quietly.

  “What is?” Cass asked.

  “Kayla’s memory is back. And as much as I want what Birdie says to be true, it isn’t necessarily going to be much better for Kayla now. It could be a whole lot worse.”

  At first her words seemed to suck all the air out of the room.

  Finally, Birdie asked, “Kayla’s memory about her injury, her disappearance—all that is back? She told you that?”

  Fiona nodded. “She didn’t tell me at first, not a word about it. I drove her to the clinic for an appointment and she was quieter than usual, didn’t even talk about the kids. In fact, she didn’t say much of anything. She was all curled up inside her own head. But I knew something was wrong, and later, after we left the office, I forced the issue. Finally, begrudgingly, she admitted that she was remembering things from that night, like riding her bike to Dolores’s house.”

  “So it was her bike. She put it there—” Cass said, forced to give up her own explanation.

  Fiona went on. “Things were still a little fuzzy, she said—like a dream that sometimes isn’t in the right order—but the gist of that night is there. She knew where she was going, and she knew she got there. But then she stopped, and told me she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  Izzy had brought out more coffee mugs. She warmed up Fiona’s and passed her the cream. Fiona cradled the mug in her hands. “So I said to her, ‘What do you mean, you don’t want to talk about it?’ I tried to be calm, but sometimes that’s difficult for me.” She threw Cass a silencing glance followed by a half smile. “Finally, she added a few details. Basically that she went inside the Cardozo home and found Dolores on the floor in the living room.”

  Fiona’s eyes focused on the table, the yarn, and then settled again on the dark coffee in her mug. Knit Happens was screened across the surface beneath a pile of yarn.

  No one spoke, letting Fiona’s words take hold. Izzy picked up the plates and put them on a side table. She replaced them with a wicker basket piled high with soft wool yarn. Birdie and Nell pulled bamboo needles and half-finished socks and scarves from their bags. It was the best remedy they knew for untangling thoughts and making order out of things. For arranging a barrage of questions that rose to the surface, the inconsequential ones sinking back down, the imminent ones lining up, all tangled with the image of a young mother face-to-face with a dead—or dying—woman.

  Finally, Nell said, “It must have been a nightmare for her.”

  “It was horrible. She looked like she was going to be sick, remembering it all. She didn’t want to tell me more, as if seeing Dolores that way had sucked her mind dry of everything. The only detail she would add—and that was because I pushed her—was that she heard a noise, stood up, thinking help was on its way, and then everything went black. And that was it.”

  “That was it?” Cass said. She began another row on her thick gray mittens.

  “That was it.”

  “Geesh, she walked in on a robbery in progress, someone whacked her unconscious. She has a lump, a cut. She sure didn’t do that to herself. How do the police explain that?”

  Fiona sat still as the images played out around the table and Cass’s words took hold, wanting to protect this woman from the scrutiny that lay ahead. Finally, she sat back in the chair. “When I called the hospital looking for her that night and finally found her, they told me to bring some clothes with me. They didn’t say why, but when I got there, I knew why. Her jeans and jacket had blood all over them. And not all of it was hers.”

  “Dolores’s,” Nell said softly.

  “And the police now have those clothes.”

  “Do the police know that her memory’s back?”

  “No. Kayla didn’t think it was any of their business. Okay, it’s a foolish statement—I know that and you know that. But she insisted that her trip out to Dolores’s house had nothing to do with murder, and that nothing she could say would help the police find who did it. Therefore, anything else was of no consequence to anyone but her. It was personal and private, she said.”

  “That’s naïve,” Izzy said. “It will end up hurting her if she waits—”

  “Yet the poor woman must be petrified,” Birdie said. Her fingers worked as effortlessly and fluidly as a musician’s, the yarn in her lap rising up to the needles and transformed magically into purl, knit, and slipped stiches, row after row, sliding from one needle
to the next.

  Fiona watched Birdie’s nimble fingers, the small bulbs of arthritis ignored as they moved the needles in a mesmerizing rhythm. Finally, she looked up and nodded. “Sure it will hurt her. But I’ve become a nag, I think. Sometimes critical without intending to be. Maybe someone else will have a more calming influence right now than I have, and help her see the damage she could be doing to herself and those kids.”

  Fiona left unsaid her message for sitting there in the middle of a Thursday night knitting session, but they could read it in her face. For all her independence and stubbornness, Fiona couldn’t handle this situation alone. She cared deeply about this family. And she needed help.

  “The Stewart family means a lot to you, Fiona, I can see that. And you mean a lot to us. You know we’ll do what we can to help,” Nell said.

  But all of the women sitting in front of the cozy fire knew that helping Kayla Stewart was going to require more than listening to someone who cared about her.

  Fiona seemed to have gotten her second wind and sat up straighter in the chair. “I do want you to know this. It’s the absolute truth or I wouldn’t be asking you to get involved in this mess. Kayla Stewart is capable of many things, but murder is not one of them.” She had switched to her Sister Fiona voice, the one that no grade school student would ever try to counter. “She absolutely, positively did not kill Dolores Cardozo.”

  “Fiona, do you know Kayla that well?” Izzy’s voice lacked judgment, a simple question that any responsible lawyer would ask. “I mean well enough to be sure of her and what she could or could not do? It was clear on Sunday that those kids—even Shep the dog—think you’re pretty great. So there’s definitely a connection here. How do you know that Kayla is innocent? How do you know her—and her family—that well?”

  Izzy asked the question well—and bluntly. They listened carefully, but Fiona’s explanation was vague enough to be irrelevant.

  “You’re thinking that kids aren’t supposed to like scary principals, I get that.” Fiona shrugged. “Those two kids are different. Kayla and the kids didn’t know a soul when they moved to Sea Harbor last year. The kids were new to the school. That’s tough, any way you look at it. So I tried to make them feel at home, just like we do with new families. Like anyone would do. Father Northcutt did, too.”

  Izzy warmed up Fiona’s coffee. She wasn’t lying to them but she had skirted what they were really asking. She was holding something back that might help them get to know Kayla Stewart. But for some reason she wasn’t going to let them in.

  Birdie had been quiet, her expression thoughtful. After Fiona was finished, she rested her knitting in her lap and pushed her glasses to the top of her head and returned to the pressing issue at hand. She chose her words carefully, posing the question that was missing from Kayla’s story but loomed heavy in the room. Not a question about what happened next, nor about where the bike was parked or why the door wasn’t locked, but something, perhaps, more critical to Kayla’s story.

  “Here’s the great unknown. Why did Kayla leave her children home alone and go out to Dolores Cardozo’s house that day? Why was she there? Was she angry with her? Did she need to settle a score? What was so important that it took her away from her children?”

  Fiona’s shoulders drooped, a slight sign of defeat. Then she shook her head and said simply, “I don’t know why she went. She liked Dolores, just like I told her she would. They were good for each other.”

  “You didn’t ask her why she went?” Cass asked, seeming to have stopped listening after the first sentence. Her words came out too quickly.

  “Of course I asked her, Cass.” There was a weary edge to Fiona’s voice, but she softened it when she spoke again. “I asked and asked and asked, and I told her bluntly that I wasn’t the only one who would want to know. A woman was murdered, for heaven’s sake. But it was as if she had gone stone deaf. Nothing I said after that seemed to register at all. She refused to talk to me the rest of the ride home. When we pulled into her neighborhood, the kids were just getting off the bus.

  “‘They had a half day today,’ she murmured to the windshield, as if that was the explanation I was waiting for. Then, before I had brought the car to a complete stop, she opened the door and jumped out without a good-bye. I idled there, watching while she ran over, threw her arms around those two little angels, hugged them close as if a slight sea breeze would take them away from her, and she walked them on home.”

  Fiona shook her head, took a breath, and then went on, finishing what she had to say. “‘Tomorrow,’ I called after her as loud as I could. But who knows if she heard me?”

  For a moment, no one spoke. Then Birdie asked quietly, “And what are you thinking will happen tomorrow?”

  Fiona focused on the brilliant array of merino and alpaca yarn piled high in the middle of the table—soon to be knit into soft, comforting mittens, socks, hats, and scarves. Something to protect against the cold.

  Finally, she spoke, a heaviness carrying her words.

  “Who knows what I meant. That Kayla will answer my question tomorrow? That the police will come knocking on her door tomorrow? That somehow, whoever did this sinful deed will show up tomorrow at the police station, confess his crime, and we will all go back to our ordinary lives?”

  She looked up, her eyes sad. “Who knows what will happen tomorrow?”

  Chapter 13

  Fiona left a cold empty feeling in her wake. A dozen questions spun around aimlessly, without anyone to answer them. And a sadness that none of the knitters were quite sure how to deal with—or even to figure out the source—floated softly on the air.

  A young mom with two small kids was a suspect in a murder case. Someone they thought was innocent, although they barely knew her. And the only reason for their belief was in their hearts.

  They sat in silence for a while, needles clicking, and the balls of yarn moving slowly as one row was finished and the next begun. All around the room, thoughts rose into the fire-warmed air, collided with one another, and fell to the ground, spreading out like a puddle in the shape of Kayla Stewart kneeling over the body of Dolores Cardozo. In a color as vivid as the crimson merino yarn hanging from Birdie’s needles.

  A jarring ruckus at the front door interrupted their thoughts and caused Izzy’s knitting to fall, the beginning of a gusset in her Latvian mitten slipping from the needles before the soft wool hit the floor.

  She was up and across the room in an instant, her heart pounding but her voice calm as she called over her shoulder, “Fiona must have forgotten something. No worries.”

  But when she unlocked the double bolts on the shop door and pulled it open, it wasn’t a nun who lunged at her, nor an intruder or a stranger or even her husband, Sam, who sometimes had a theatrical way of greeting his wife.

  It was a dog. Big, hairy, and . . . familiar.

  As was the person behind the dog, holding its leash.

  “Charlie, what are you . . .?” Izzy stepped back and stared at her brother. Then in the next second, she yelped as the dog jumped up, his paws on her chest as it licked a drip of forgotten cheese sauce off her T-shirt.

  “Watch your manners, dog,” Charlie commanded with a lopsided grin. He tugged lightly on the leash.

  Izzy stepped back, sliding the dog’s paws to the floor and looking at him carefully. She frowned, then leaned over, looking directly into soft brown eyes. “I think we’ve met,” she said. “Are you Shep?”

  A tail thumped heavily on the hardwood floor.

  Nell, Birdie, and Cass had joined the commotion, grateful for the interruption and a scene that was far more enjoyable than the thoughts and emotions they had left behind in the back room of the yarn shop.

  “I think you’re right, Iz,” Cass said. She walked up beside the dog for a closer look, checking for a brown freckle near his nose that she had noticed the first time they’d met. She patted his head, whispered his name, and the tail now swept the hardwood floor with vigor and confirmation.
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  “What are you doing with this dog, Charlie?” Cass asked. Her fingers stayed entwined with dog fur.

  “I didn’t steal him, if that’s what you’re asking.” Charlie looked down at the dog. “You and I are buds, right dog?”

  “He has a name. It’s Shep.”

  “Aha, Sam was right.” Charlie scratched Shep’s head.

  “My Sam?” Izzy asked.

  “Yep. Sam said if anyone knew who this dog was, one of you guys would. And it looks like he batted a thousand. You all seem to know him. So I’m presuming, as Sam also said, that you’d know his owner.”

  Izzy’s voice was suddenly frantic. “Sam. Where is Sam? He should be with Abby.”

  “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, Iz. He’s with Abby. I was, too. The three of us—along with Abby’s happy dog, Red—I swear that old dog smiles. We went for pizza, then ice cream at Scoopers, and then we walked over to our Lady of Safe Seas school playground to swing a while. We set Red loose to lumber around while Abby played with Sam and me. She’s crazy about me, you know.” He grinned at his sister.

  By now Shep had checked everyone out and was comfortably settled at Charlie’s feet, his head moving back and forth along with the conversation.

  “The dog, Charlie,” Izzy said, pointing to Shep. “How did you get this dog?”

  “It was Red who found him. Red may be the oldest golden in Sea Harbor but he was trying to run around the playground like a pup, spotted Shep here, and brought him over to us at the jungle gym. We couldn’t find any tags, so here we are, seeking identification from the most amazing ladies in my life who know everything.”

  Nell chuckled. “Charlie, we’re so glad you’re back home.”

  Charlie got serious for a moment and gave Nell a hug, his voice soft. “Me, too, Aunt Nell.”

  Nell hugged him back. “And now you’ve found a wonderful dog who needs to get back to his owner so two little kids will sleep tonight.” Nell rubbed the top of Shep’s head.