Moon Spinners

by Sally Goldenbaum

  “Speaking of mothers,” Cass said, “what happened to Julianne? Does she know about Sophia?”

  Gracie shrugged. “I left a message on her cell phone. At least I think it’s her cell phone. Who knows if she has it with her or if it works or if she checks it.”

  “She’ll come. I know she’d want to be here for you and for her brother,” Birdie said.

  Nell noticed the lack of conviction in Birdie’s voice. Julianne was hard to predict. She’d clearly wanted something from her brother last Friday. Probably money, Birdie had said. The elder Santoses’ will left everything to their son, Alphonso, with the directive that he provide for his younger sister from a designated fund, keeping her safe. It was a demeaning but necessary situation for the willful Julianne, but it didn’t stop her from asking for money, usually to spend on some low-life man who would inevitably take advantage of her. It was hard for Alphonso to say no because he felt guilty—or at least that was Birdie’s view of the situation. But when he married Sophia, she encouraged a firmer stand.

  “It might be better if Julianne doesn’t come,” Gracie said. “It will be one more thing for Alphonso to deal with. She’s probably worlds away after their argument Friday night.”

  Nell looked into the dining room and saw Alphonso at the bar, alone for that brief moment. He stood still, his blunt fingers wrapped around a drink glass, his brow creased, and the weight of the world showing on his face. Liz came up and offered him a plate of food, but he shook his head, and she soon walked away with the plate still in her hand.

  Instead, Alphonso gestured to the bartender to refill his glass, then turned and wandered onto the terrace, his face composed again and his hand held forward to a business associate who moved to shake it.

  “Did you see Joey?” Nell asked, looking over toward the young man still standing at the terrace doorway.

  Gracie followed the nod of Nell’s head. “That’s nice of him. Especially since Sophia . . .” A movement beyond the railing distracted her and her sentence fell away.

  “Oh, Lordy,” Cass moaned. They all followed her look to the edge of the terrace.

  A slender figure wearing a bright red tank top and a silky skirt that looked more like a slip moved along the flagstone pathway on the back side of the house. She held one hand aloft for balance, as if walking a tightrope.

  “Alphonso?” she called out, looking up to the terrace. “Are you there?”

  Nell had a sudden image of Zelda, moving dramatically toward her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, her slender body waving in the breeze, a martini glass held aloft in her hand. A strong breeze would have toppled either of them.

  Gracie started to call to her mother, then stopped abruptly, suddenly aware that people were standing on the terrace, watching. She took a deep breath and stood still as her mother came closer to the terrace steps.

  In three long strides Alphonso was at the top of the steps. Without looking at Gracie, he motioned with his hand for her to stay away.

  “Julianne,” he said calmly.

  Julianne stopped at the sound of her brother’s voice. She looked up. “I heard about Sophia, Alphonso. You’re sad, I know. She’s dead.” Her muffled words traveled up on the breeze, accompanied by the faint smell of whiskey. She stopped on the bottom step, gripping the handrail.

  “Let’s go into the house, Julianne. I’ll get you something to eat.” He took one step toward her.

  Nell looked at Gracie, wishing she could sweep her up and protect her from the scene her mother was about to make. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Joey moving across the terrace to Gracie’s side. He placed one hand on the small of her back, but Gracie stepped away from the support, standing alone, resilient from years of practice.

  Other guests had stopped talking and an eerie silence fell upon the terrace. Even the music seemed to have stopped for Julianne’s entrance.

  Alphonso held out his hand to his sister as one would to a child. “It’s okay, Julianne. Come up.”

  Nell watched the play of emotions on Julianne’s face, an awful mix of sadness and anger. She looked like a tragic heroine, beautiful and bereft, confused. Her beauty was a worn kind of beauty, Nell thought. Like a beautiful doll that has been played with too much or too roughly.

  Julianne held one hand up in front of her as if to stop her brother from moving toward her. Her head moved slowly from side to side.

  “Don’t be sad, my Alphonso,” she said. She spoke with effort, her voice louder than necessary and her eyebrows lifting crookedly into a sweep of scattered bangs. “That woman didn’t belong here in our parents’ house. Not ever. She was bad for you. For me. It’s better that she is dead, Alphonso.”

  Before her words could completely settle on the shocked gathering standing in stony silence above her, Julianne Santos released her grip on the railing. With the grace of a ballet dancer, her body folded over on the wide granite steps.

  Chapter 7

  Nell walked into the Seaside Knitting Studio, weaving her way around customers leafing through patterns on a rack near the front door. She waved to Mae, Izzy’s store manager, and headed toward the back of the shop.

  It was the color that caught her eye and caused the detour—but not a color, really. The yarn was brilliant and white as snow. As if pulled by a magnet, Nell wandered into the small room defined by floor-to-ceiling cubicles of yarn. On the one wall with open space, Izzy had hung framed photographs of sheep—the Bluefaced Leicester, a California Red, even a Navajo-Churro—all reminders, she told her customers, of the amazing animals from which the raw fiber came. In the center of the room on a small round table was a giant wicker basket. And overflowing its edge was Izzy’s new shipment of handspun wool. Nell picked up a soft, luxurious skein of Cormo wool and held it up to the light, resisting the urge to press it against her cheeks. “Amazing,” she murmured. She fingered the spun fibers and wondered about the hands that created it. A true art.

  “Hello, dearie,” a voice behind her chirped. Nell turned and only then noticed Esther Gibson sitting in the room’s one rocking chair, her gnarled hands working a large multicolored glove. She looked at Nell over the top of rimless glasses and smiled, her fingers continuing to loop yarn over needle.

  Nell smiled, an effect the police dispatcher always had on her. “I didn’t see you there, Esther. You’re as quiet as a church mouse.”

  “Quiet can be good,” Esther said brightly. “That young crew at the station house thinks quiet breeds ill. If they aren’t chattering and telling their silly jokes, they’re playing pounding music on those tiny boxes.”

  Nell laughed. “Tommy Porter tells me you keep all the young police officers in line. They need you, Esther.”

  “Well, yes, they do. Not that sweet Tommy, though. He’ll be chief one day, if he sticks around long enough.” A short cane was hooked over the arm of the rocker, a concession to a bad back suffered from nearly thirty years of sitting in an unforgiving wooden chair as Sea Harbor’s police dispatcher. She lifted it now and leaned forward on the worn handle, her voice dropping to a hushed level. “Nellie, tell me dear, what is all this gossip about Sophia Santos? We’re getting calls, people going on and on as if they had good sense. Let the dead lie in peace, is what I say—God rest her soul.”

  “What kind of calls?”

  “Silly calls, the kind a dispatcher doesn’t have time to dally with. Everyone has a theory. Everyone wants a say. You’d think there was a reward out there, the way people are acting. But for what, I ask? My goodness. A lady called today to tell me that Sophia was drunk, and she could have killed someone. She said she was calling to report it. Why? I’m wondering to myself. So she’ll get a ticket, for heaven’s sake? So I said to the caller—nicely, of course, but quite firmly—I said, ‘She did kill someone, dearie. She killed herself, and that’s a very sad thing, and it doesn’t need your gossip to paint it another color, now, does it?’ ”

  Nell thought about the unsuspecting caller, sweetly put in her place. “Rumors can b
e nasty. But people don’t mean harm, I don’t think.”

  “Sometimes they do, dear.” Esther settled back into her chair and picked up her knitting. Her glasses slipped down her nose as she looked down and counted the stitches with the bent tip of her index finger. Then she looked up again. “But sometimes people just don’t think before they open their mouths, and they say or do things that add fuel to rumors, maybe not meaning to. They jump-start those rumors, you might say.” She paused for a moment, her thin brows pinching together across her nose, gathering her thoughts. “And sometimes others are hurt by those thoughtless rants.”

  Esther was trying to be delicate, Nell thought, not mentioning names. But it was clear that the news of Julianne’s outburst had already hit the airwaves—or at least the police station. And Esther wanted Gracie protected from her mother’s words.

  The police dispatcher had watched the youngsters of Sea Harbor grow up for more years than anyone could count, and she considered it her personal responsibility to protect them and warn them of supposed or actual danger. Nell remembered how Esther had taken a teenage Izzy under her ample wing, even though Nell’s niece wasn’t a native and only spent summers in Sea Harbor during those years. Esther adopted them all. Loved them all. And they remained under her watchful eye, even when adulthood found them running businesses, with spouses and babies, and having houses of their own.

  “Gracie will be fine, Esther,” she reassured the older woman. “She’s strong beneath that Alice in Wonderland look.” And Nell believed her words to be true. Although Gracie’s willowy frame looked like a strong gust of wind would topple her, her life had prepared her well for storms.

  Though she was being discreet, Esther probably knew all the details of what had happened the night before, how Ben and Alphonso had lifted the inebriated Julianne from the steps and helped her into the house. Gracie had trailed behind, but returned shortly after. “It will embarrass her to see me,” she had said. But Nell suspected it was more than that. The ties between Gracie and her mother were so tenuous they couldn’t carry the stress of the day. And speaking ill of Sophia—the one woman who had tried to help Gracie through her teens—would not have settled comfortably in Gracie’s mind.

  Esther nodded without looking up, a smile lifting her lips. “And now I need to finish this glove, Nelly. I have the five-o’clock shift at the station, you know.”

  Nell’s return smile went unnoticed, and she placed the skein of Cormo wool back in the basket, leaving Esther to finish the ribbing on her bright plaid glove. A gift, no doubt, for one of Sea Harbor’s men in blue. Esther had lobbied for years for a more colorful uniform.

  Izzy and Birdie were busy piling skeins of a new wool blend on the wooden table when Nell walked down the three steps into the back room. “It looks like I am almost in time to not be useful,” she said apologetically, eyeing the rainbow of greens, yellows, blues, and gold of the sock yarns.

  “You don’t know how to be unuseful,” Birdie said, piling the skeins into baskets. Purl, the Seaside Knitting Studio’s resident feline, was curled up in the middle of one of the empty baskets, her green eyes following the movement of Birdie’s hands.

  “There wasn’t as much to do as I thought,” Izzy said. “And Birdie is a taskmaster—one quick lady.”

  Although Mae would close the knitting store soon, Izzy’s Sassy Sox class would keep the shop lively. The class was full to capacity, Izzy had said, and she had begged the Thursday-night knitters to help her with beginners. “Socks scare people,” she said. “Silly, but true.”

  Nell needed little encouragement. She loved knitting socks, and the methodical rhythm of knitting and purling was exactly what they all needed to replace the troubling thoughts of Sophia’s death and Gracie’s mother’s outburst. Ben was meeting Sam for a drink at the Gull and they’d all meet up later for dinner. Maybe drive over to the Franklin in Gloucester. The chef’s garlic grilled calamari and a spinach salad would top the evening off perfectly.

  Laura Danvers and two of her friends arrived for the class about the same time Cass and Willow snuck in the back door off the alley. Beatrice Scaglia and several women from Beatrice’s council committees were next.

  Nell spotted Mary Pisano taking a break from her chatty newspaper column to knit socks, although Nell suspected her motivation centered more on picking up news tips. Mary attacked her column for the family-owned newspaper with the zeal of a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, and a chatty group of women in a merry mood and safe environment could unearth enough grist for Mary’s mill for a summer’s worth of columns.

  “This is what we need to take our minds off the awful ending to our party Friday night,” Laura announced to those within earshot.

  Beatrice Scaglia sidled up close to Laura, her narrow heels clicking on the hardwood floor. As always, Beatrice was dressed for a New York board meeting, though she’d come from the Sea Harbor city hall three blocks away—a business environment where khaki pants or a cotton dress were considered dressy. “You were a very gallant hostess, Laura,” Beatrice said. “We were all proud of you.”

  Nell watched the exchange, amused. Laura, married to a young bank president, was becoming a viable community leader, just like her mother before her. And Beatrice, with her eye still on the crown, as her husband, Sal, called the mayor’s job, would do anything to pave the way for next year’s mayoral election. Bucking a minor scandal the summer before, Beatrice had poured herself into so many generous causes that most people had forgotten it—or at least forgiven her. Her attempt to protect her good name by getting rid of evidence in a police investigation hadn’t hurt anyone, which made forgiveness easier. And somehow, in the mysterious way marriages work, the couple’s unlikely marriage had remained intact.

  “I did nothing, Beatrice,” Laura said, “but thank you. It was unfortunate, though, that the evening had to end in tragedy.”

  “Of course,” Beatrice said, slightly chagrined that she hadn’t been the one to address the tragedy first. She pulled out a chair at the table and sat down, tugging a skein of bright pink yarn from her bag. “I knew Sophia, you know,” she murmured with a certain pride.

  Nell noticed that Beatrice didn’t add what everyone around her knew to be true—that while she may have known Sophia Santos, Beatrice didn’t like her very much. Sophia was causing headaches for the City Council by locking up the beach access road that many Sea Harbor residents considered their own property. Beatrice Scaglia cared about keeping her constituency happy. Happy voters portended good election outcomes. And they expected her to get that access road reopened before the ocean warmed enough for the children to swim.

  Several people came in from the front of the store, carrying knitting bags and new packages of bamboo needles. There was an influx of vacation people, both men and women, young and old, with sunburned noses and eager faces. In minutes the room was humming with activity as people helped themselves to the bottles of soft drinks and the cookies Izzy had rushed down and gotten from Harry Garozzo at the last minute. Having a bakery and a deli so close had saved the day more often than the Seaside Knitters could count. And Harry was always generous, throwing in a few extra. Knitting kept his wife, Margaret, happy, and that was worth its weight in cookies.

  The room quieted when Izzy stood up on a small platform near the windows. As the voices faded away, she welcomed the crowd with the same magnetic smile that had captivated jurors in Izzy’s past life as a defense attorney.

  “The very best rule about knitting,” Izzy began, “is that there are no real rules. And when working up socks, we can apply that with a vengeance. Socks can be sweet or sexy—high fashion or cuddly feet warmers.” She pointed over to the window seat where Birdie and Purl were comfortably settled. “We’ll start with sassy— maybe even a tad sexy. Birdie Favazza will demonstrate what I mean.”

  Soft titters passed through the group as their oldest member stood up to her full five feet to demonstrate a sexy sock. Birdie waved to everyone and pulled a long stoc
king from her bag. “Why give flowers when you could be giving socks?” she asked, lifting her white brows and eyeing a very handsome young man sitting on the steps.

  Birdie had used a four-ply soft merino wool to knit up the Rowan pattern. The panels of lace stitches ran the full length of the knee-high sock and added a distinctive and lovely look. A silky black bow at the top screamed “sassy,” Birdie told them.

  “I love it,” Laura said. “Birdie, you’re a sassy socks genius.”

  “And an expert knitter,” Izzy added when the laughter died down. “So we won’t be trying anything quite that complicated to start with, though who knows what you’ll be knitting up in a month or so?”

  Izzy went on to explain the model sock they would knit for starters—three inches or so when finished. “But it will teach you everything you need to know, and next we’ll move on to the real thing.”

  In minutes the entire group was working on a tiny pair of socks, knitting and purling the ribbed edge, working down the very short leg of the sock.

  “Turning the heel,” Mary Pisano sang out. She stuck her pencil behind her ear and picked up her needles. “Do you have any idea how much I’ve yearned to turn a heel?”

  The group laughed and Izzy, Cass, Birdie, and Nell moved through the groups of people to help when a stitch was dropped, to admire balls of soft blended yarn, to encourage the reluctant few who were still slightly fearful of knitting anything that had a shape.

  It was after seven when dozens of tiny socks were folded into knitting baskets and their proud creators thanked Izzy profusely for beginning them on a new knitting journey.

  In record time, the last drink bottles were in the recycle bin, the bits of yarn swept up, and the baskets of needles and markers put away. Birdie poured them each a glass of wine and held her own up in the air. “To Izzy’s successful Sassy Sox class.”