“I’ll be fine,” Pamela said, because Penny had made plans with her friend Lorie Hopkins. “The lot attendants will tie it to the top of the car and you can help me bring it in the house when you get back from the mall. We’ll get out those old Christmas LPs that Grandma gave us and play them like we always do, and we’ll decorate it together.”
“You really don’t mind?” Penny’s gaze was particularly intense, as if determined to make sure Pamela hadn’t been nurturing a vision of mother-daughter togetherness in the Christmas-tree lot.
“Really!” Pamela said. “Lorie Hopkins is your best Arborville friend and I know you miss each other when you’re both away at college.”
The doorbell chimed as Penny was slipping into her violet jacket. She looped Pamela’s violet mohair scarf around her neck, greeted her friend, who popped over the threshold to say hi to Pamela, and they were gone.
* * *
Pamela prowled among the bristly trees, enjoying the fantasy that she was actually in a small forest, inhaling the nose-tickling spiciness of the dark-green foliage. She needed a dense tree with sturdy branches and plenty of them. Christmas-tree ornaments, especially vintage, were one of her weaknesses, and garage sales over the years had allowed her to build a collection that filled several boxes. She stepped back to get a better look at a likely candidate, a lush fir that appeared a bit over six feet tall.
It seemed symmetrical, and suitably bushy. A small tag wired to one of the branches read $50. The price was reasonable, and the proceeds did go to the high school. She stepped a bit farther back and surveyed the tree again.
Then she heard a pleasant male voice say, “Pamela?” and Richard Larkin’s head and shoulders appeared in the gap between the upper branches of the tree she’d been considering and its neighbor.
Pamela had been focused on the tree’s very tip, wondering if it looked substantial enough to receive the star that had topped Paterson Christmas trees ever since the first Christmas she and Michael spent together. But she had to raise her eyes a bit farther to meet Richard Larkin’s eyes. “Oh, hello,” she said, mustering her social smile.
“Hello.” He wasn’t smiling, but was studying her with the intent look he sometimes got. “I guess you’re looking for a tree,” he added. He was hatless, despite the cold, and the chilly breeze was ruffling his shaggy hair.
“It is that time of year,” she answered, feeling foolish the minute the words were out of her mouth. For some reason, she was suddenly aware of her heartbeat. If only Bettina would stop stressing how eligible Richard Larkin was, Pamela was sure chance meetings like this, or chatting when they happened to be in their driveways at the same time, wouldn’t seem so awkward. “I guess you’re buying a tree too,” she added.
“A wreath,” he said. “There’s no point in putting up a tree, with Laine and Sybil out in San Francisco—and I’ll be at my sister’s on Long Island for Christmas dinner. Our parents are coming up from Washington, D.C.”
“Oh.” Pamela nodded. “Definitely no point in a tree then.”
“No point. Exactly.”
The conversation was taking place through the gap between the upper branches of the two trees, Richard Larkin’s body from the chest down hidden by the more expansive lower foliage.
“There’s Le Corbusier too,” he said, a slight smile softening his strong features. Richard Larkin had adopted one of Catrina’s kittens when Pamela faced the challenge of the cat’s surprise pregnancy and the six offspring that resulted. “Kittens and Christmas trees can be chancy.”
Pamela laughed. “You’re right. I was lucky last year. Catrina was newly adopted and still on her best behavior.”
They regarded each other, the conversational thread exhausted. After a moment, he said, “I guess I’ll pick out my wreath then.” He turned and she watched him lope away, his blond head bobbing above the tips of the trees.
“Is it going to be this one, then?” Pamela turned to see a lanky young man in a down jacket and with a knitted cap hiding his forehead and ears. “An excellent choice,” he added. “The firs are our most popular trees.”
Pamela dipped a hand into her purse and came up with her wallet. “I’ll take it,” she said.
The young man thrust an arm through the bristly foliage and clapped a gloved hand around its trunk. As Pamela backed out of the way, he plucked the tree from its neighbors and, with Pamela following, bore it along the well-trodden path that led to a canvas shelter near the entrance to the lot. She handed over fifty dollars to an older man and watched as the tree was detached from the crisscrossed staves that had enabled it to stand upright and fed into a sheath of plastic netting.
* * *
As Pamela turned onto Orchard Street, with the Christmas tree—tamed by its plastic netting—tied securely to the roof of her car, she caught sight of Richard Larkin farther down the block. He was striding along with a large balsam wreath, unadorned by ribbons or glittery ornaments, slung over one arm. A minute later, she drove past him, and she was climbing out of her car by the time he reached his house.
He waved and disappeared behind the tall hedge that separated her lot from his. But then he reappeared, back out on the sidewalk but without the wreath. “I could give you a hand with the tree,” he said, then added quickly, “not that I think you couldn’t manage it yourself. I don’t mean to imply . . . that is, you look very strong . . .” He stopped in confusion and shifted his gaze from her face to the tree.
“Penny was planning to help me,” Pamela said.
“Oh. Of course.” Richard edged back a few steps, onto the strip of faded grass that separated the sidewalk from the street. “So you won’t need—”
Me, she imagined he was going to say, but before he could finish the thought, he took another step back and lurched to the side as that step took him off the curb. He teetered briefly, then straightened up with a shrug and an embarrassed smile.
“But Penny’s at the mall right now,” Pamela heard herself say. “So, yes, I could use a hand.”
The tree was lashed to Pamela’s car with lengths of thick twine. Pamela untied the front one, and Richard untied the back one, rolled the twine into a neat circle, and handed it to Pamela. He grasped the tree, slid it off the car roof, and easily swung it upright. Despite the fact that his awkward retreat moments earlier had nearly toppled him into the street, he was actually quite graceful, Pamela found herself thinking, and certainly muscular. Suddenly the image of Richard Larkin at work in his yard the previous summer popped into her mind. He’d been wearing faded jeans and a T-shirt that left no question about his fitness.
“Where to then?” he asked, sounding more confident.
The question startled her and the image fled. “The house,” she said. “I’ll get the door.” Her purse was over her shoulder, but her keys had been in her hand. Then she untied the tree, and now she held two rounds of twine. Where were the keys? She looked around, puzzled.
“In your pocket, I think,” Richard said.
Of course. She dipped into her jacket pocket and there they were. She climbed the steps and unlocked the door, standing back as Catrina and Ginger fled and Richard steered the tree, base first, into the entry. The dress form had taken up residence in the laundry room the previous evening.
“Penny and I can take it from here,” Pamela said as he lowered the tree onto the entry carpet. “The stand is still in the attic with the ornaments and lights.” The room was already infused with the sharp, spicy scent of the tree.
“It smells like Christmas,” Richard said.
“Yes. Yes, it does,” Pamela agreed. Catrina and Ginger had ventured back to investigate this curious new phenomenon, prowling along its length and sniffing it warily. Both humans watched them. A few moments passed.
“Well, then.” Richard shifted his gaze from the animals to Pamela’s face. “I guess I’ll head home.”
Pamela nodded. “Thank you for helping with the tree. Penny will be glad that task is out of the way.”
&n
bsp; Richard reached for the doorknob. “I’ll see you Christmas Eve . . . at Bettina and Wilfred’s.”
“Christmas Eve.” Pamela nodded. And then he was gone.
Chapter Twelve
It wasn’t really time for lunch. But after a breakfast of only coffee and toast, the tree-buying adventure in the chilly air—almost like a walk in the woods really—had awakened Pamela’s appetite. There was just enough oxtail stew left for one serving, and while it heated on the stove, Pamela repaired to her office to check her email.
There were no emails bearing attachments from her boss at Fiber Craft, and in fact no emails from her boss at all. Her mind at ease, Pamela ate her oxtail stew. Then she went to the chest in the living room and opened the deep drawer where she stored her collection of wrapping paper and ribbon.
Penny would be choosing yarn and a pattern for the promised sweater and would find a generous check from Pamela under the tree on Christmas morning. But all during the year Pamela kept her eyes open for perfect gifts for her friends and relatives. Presents for her parents and siblings had been wrapped and mailed long ago. But upstairs on Pamela’s closet shelf there waited a book for Wilfred about the settlement of the Hudson Valley, a hand-woven tablecloth and napkin set from a craft show for Bettina, and a whole box full of miscellaneous treats for Penny.
Pamela sorted out the Christmas wrap from odds and ends bought for birthdays, wedding showers, or gifts for new babies. She preferred Christmas wrap that was recognizable as being for Christmas, not abstract patterns in wild colors, but Santas or wreaths or partridges in pear trees rendered in Christmassy colors like red and green. She carried a few rolls to the dining room table, along with a huge spool of red satin ribbon that had been a garage-sale find. Then she fetched the gifts for Wilfred and Bettina and Penny from her closet shelf and set to work, wrapping and taping paper around variously shaped objects and finishing off each job with a few twists of red satin ribbon and a bow.
When the packages were finished and sat in a cluster on the living room carpet, she retrieved from under the mail table the small cardboard box Penny’s Paterson grandparents had sent and the larger one from her own parents. She sliced the tape that sealed the small box. Michael Paterson’s parents remembered Pamela and Penny every Christmas with a gift and a check for Penny and a gift for Pamela. Indeed the box contained two smaller boxes, prettily wrapped, that Pamela suspected contained jewelry. The tags read “To Our Dear Penny” and “To Our Dear Pamela.” There was also an envelope with Penny’s name on it.
The larger box contained four boxes. Two wide, flat boxes were likely new pajamas, a set each for Penny and Pamela. Pamela’s mother understood the difficulty of predicting a young woman’s (Penny’s) taste in clothes, and she knew that Pamela knit her own sweaters and was otherwise not very concerned about fashion. But a person could always use a new pair of pajamas. A small box was probably jewelry for Penny, and a heavy box, with a tag that read “Pamela” felt like a book. An envelope addressed to each hinted at the likelihood that—if pajamas, jewelry, and books didn’t thrill—a post-Christmas shopping trip funded by the enclosed check could make up the deficiency.
Pamela added the gifts from the Patersons and her own parents to the group that she had wrapped, and surveyed what was becoming an impressive pile. Catrina and Ginger wandered in to investigate this new feature of their environment. Catrina batted experimentally at a particularly luxurious bow on one of the gifts from Pamela’s parents, while Ginger attempted to reach the top of the pile by hopping from one gift to another.
Pamela gathered up the cardboard boxes and the crumpled newspaper that had cushioned their contents and headed for the front door, en route to the recycling bins at the side of her house. But the front door opened before she touched the knob. She stepped back, the door opened farther, and in walked Penny, bearing a large shopping bag from the mall’s fanciest store.
“It looks like you had a successful outing,” Pamela said with a smile.
“It looks like you did too.” Penny nodded toward the Christmas tree, which stretched across the entry carpet, its dark green branches still contained by the netting sheath. “The mall was mobbed,” she added, “but it was fun to hear the Christmas music and see that huge tree they put up.” She set the bag at the foot of the stairs, slipped out of her jacket, and unwrapped the violet mohair scarf from her neck.
“I’m going to make a meatloaf for tonight,” Pamela said. “If you’re hungry now there’s cheese and apples.”
“Lorie and I had lunch at the food court. Besides”—Penny’s pretty mouth shaped a smile—“I have presents to wrap.”
“There’s Christmas wrapping on the dining room table,” Pamela said.
“Some of them are surprises.” Her smile became teasing.
“You can take the paper to your room.”
After Penny had retreated upstairs, shopping bag from the mall and wrapping paper in hand, Pamela settled back at the dining room table for another Christmas chore. A partial box of Christmas cards featuring an angel from an antique tapestry sat before her, along with stamps and a holiday-themed batch of address labels that had come unbidden in the mail. She’d written cards on and off all month, ever since the cards from early-bird friends started drifting in. But there were still names on her Christmas-card list that hadn’t been checked off.
She liked to take her time and include a little bit of news, so for the next hour she added notes to the greetings already contained in the angel cards, notes to her college roommate, Michael Paterson’s aunt Joan, a high-school friend who had never left the town where she and Pamela grew up, and an old professor who had kept in touch over the years. When the cards were finished, she set them on the mail table.
The tree stand and ornaments had to be fetched from the attic, but that could be Penny’s chore. Somehow it had gotten to be five o’clock and there was meatloaf to be made. In the kitchen, cat and kitten were prowling expectantly around the bowl they shared. Pamela served them several spoonfuls of chicken-fish combo from a fresh can and emptied and refilled their water bowl as they took delicate nibbles from their dinner, which looked rather like a paler sort of meatloaf.
Pamela wasn’t certain how glad she was that her brain had made that connection, but she unwrapped the pound of ground beef that had been thawing on the counter and placed it in her favorite mixing bowl, the caramel-colored one with three white stripes circling it near the rim. She set to work chopping an onion and added it, with an egg and bread crumbs, to the ground meat. Next came salt and pepper and a dollop of catsup and a sprinkling of dried herbs. Soon the resulting mixture, kneaded by hand and pressed into a loaf pan, had been set in the oven to bake. Next to it sat two potatoes, their tops patterned with holes from the tines of a fork lest they explode while baking.
The meatloaf and baked potatoes would be served with a salad of cucumber slices and mini-tomatoes. Making do with grocery-store tomatoes in months when growing her own was impossible, Pamela had found that the smaller ones had a concentrated flavor that the larger ones, promising as they often looked, lacked. Dessert would be cookies from the vintage cookie tin.
The larder had gotten quite bare, but it would be replenished on the following day. Penny would come to the Co-Op too, so there would be twice as many hands to handle the canvas grocery bags.
Pamela was in the dining room arranging placemats, napkins, and silverware on the table when she heard Penny’s feet on the stairs. Through the arch that separated the dining room from the living room she watched as Penny entered and added her own offerings to the growing pile of festively wrapped packages, two large boxes and two small.
“Can you bring down the Christmas-tree stand and the boxes full of ornaments?” Pamela called. “They’re all together in the back corner, to the left when you go up, and the boxes all say ‘Christmas.’”
“Sure,” Penny said, and she was off and up the stairs again.
After dinner, to the accompaniment of Christmas carols,
Pamela and Penny spent a pleasant evening choosing their favorite ornaments from Pamela’s collection and adding them, with lights and garlands, to the tree, which perfumed the entire downstairs with its sharp, piney scent. They finished off their work by topping the tree with the decades-old star and arranging the carefully wrapped boxes beneath. Then Penny retreated to her room and Pamela settled on the sofa to watch a British mystery and put the finishing touches on the ruby-red tunic.
* * *
Pamela leafed through the Sunday Register wondering whether any new tidbit in the Millicent Farthingale case had provided an opportunity to fill a few column inches. Penny had not come down yet and Pamela sipped her coffee in silence as she pored over news of national and state doings in the paper’s first section and then moved on to the Local section. Very dramatic local events—like murders—often started out in Part 1 but then migrated to Local after the initial drama had subsided.
But there was no mention anywhere of Millicent’s murder. Apparently the police had satisfied themselves that Pierre was not guilty, though at present he resided at the top of Pamela and Bettina’s list of suspects. Presumably they’d interviewed Coot too—Pierre must have told them about her arrival from Texas (coincidentally?) just a few days before Millicent’s death and her claim to a share of Millicent’s inheritance. But perhaps they had asked themselves, as Pamela and Bettina had, why, if Coot thought DNA would prove her claim, she would have had to kill Millicent.
Penny arrived then, her dark curls still tousled from sleep and her expression still dreamy. “Did they do anything to the Christmas tree?” she asked before even pouring coffee, as Catrina and Ginger strolled across the floor.
Silent Knit, Deadly Knit Page 12
