He led them back the way they had come and opened the door to reveal the deep expanse of snowy yard, studded with bare trees and sloping gently to the road, that assured the Wentworth mansion its privacy.
“You know,” Pierre said suddenly as the three of them clustered in the doorway, “Nadine was aware she owed that job to Millicent’s charity, and I think she resented it. I know I would. Perhaps she saw that she could more easily run away with the shop’s profits and whatever else she wanted if Millicent was out of the way first.”
Pamela had just raised a foot to step over the threshold. Now she felt herself stumble, jolted by Pierre’s words. She was saved having to speak by Bettina’s response.
“Nadine knew Millicent cared for her,” Bettina said. “She appreciated Millicent’s help.”
“But”—Pierre smiled slightly—“what you are now thinking Nadine has done doesn’t make her seem a nice person. N’est-ce pas?”
* * *
“We have a lot to talk about,” Pamela observed. She and Bettina were making their way along the slate walkway that curved away from the Wentworth mansion’s entrance. The dark slabs were slick and icy, and navigating them required concentration.
“And we forgot we were going to have lunch,” Bettina said.
“We forgot to buy the yarn for Maxie too.” Pamela struggled to stay upright as her heel encountered a slippery spot. “We have an hour before Pierre will be at the shop,” she added after she caught her balance. “We can grab a bite and get the yarn then.”
But when they reached the gravel road that connected the carriage house to the road, Bettina veered left as Pamela veered right.
“The road is this way,” Pamela called as Bettina picked up her pace on the gravel.
“I want to peek in on Charlotte,” Bettina called back. “I’m not sure she knows Knit and Nibble is meeting next Monday. She might just think we’re skipping a week because Tuesday is New Year’s Eve.”
Pamela reversed direction and the two friends crunched over the gravel, past the weathered façade of the carriage house with its four pairs of double doors and its peaked roof. They rounded its far corner and then turned left again. A small door and a small curtained window marked the portion of the carriage house designated as the groom’s quarters.
They stepped into a most domestic scene, illuminated by lamplight. A hooked rug cushioned the wide planks of the rustic floor, and old-fashioned prints decorated walls papered with a faded but still charming flower print. In a shadowy corner were rustic stairs. Charlotte sat on a charming love seat, snug in a dark fleecy top and dark leggings, her dark hair loose. Next to her was a soft mound of sky-blue yarn.
“The perfect project for a chilly day like this,” Bettina declared as she stepped across the rug. She bent over to take a closer look. “You’re ripping it out!” she exclaimed. “All your beautiful work—and such a complicated pattern!”
Pamela stepped closer too. Off to one side sat two completed pieces, sleeves maybe, that had so far been spared. But it looked like Charlotte had undone most of the sweater’s front (or back)—whatever she’d been working on the last time the group had gotten together to knit. As Pamela recalled, it had featured an elaborate interlocking pattern like a multi-strand braid.
Charlotte sighed and her lips curved into a sad smile. “Sometimes things just don’t come together the way you expect,” she said, “so you can’t go on the way you planned.”
“I hope you’ll do something else with that lovely yarn,” Bettina said, and delivered her message about the Monday night meeting of Knit and Nibble. “At Roland’s,” she added.
“I don’t know about you,” Bettina said as they followed the graveled driveway back to the side street where they had parked, “but I am starving.”
* * *
Among the charming storefronts that lined Timberley’s shopping street was Sara’s Soup Station. Sitting at a small table in the window that looked out on the bustling sidewalk, Pamela and Bettina gratefully applied themselves to steaming earthenware bowls filled with thick split pea soup. It was after two p.m., well past time for lunch.
The demands of Pamela’s stomach gradually became less insistent as she spooned the satisfying soup to her lips. With her stomach silenced, a nagging voice in her brain spoke up. She gave it her attention for a moment, noted that it had a good point, and then looked over at Bettina.
“You said Millicent had been inviting everybody she knew to help themselves to whatever they could find in the attic,” she observed.
Bettina looked up from buttering a piece torn from one of the crusty rolls that accompanied the soup. “For months,” Bettina said. “Starting right after her mother’s funeral. She was longing to get all that junk cleared out so she could sell that huge house.” She twisted her lips the way she did when she was puzzled and added, “What made you think of that now?”
Pamela spoke slowly. “If the antique rifle that killed Millicent was tucked away up there, and if Nadine accepted the invitation to help herself, she could have found it.”
Bettina had gone back to buttering the piece of roll, but now she dropped the knife and it clunked against the wooden table. “No!” she squealed. “I just can’t believe that Nadine could have been so ungrateful.” She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “I mean, I can see why she might have done . . . what we think she did . . . after Millicent was gone. A person desperate about their future might do lots of things. But to think she’s the one who killed Millicent? When would she even have done it?”
Pamela smiled regretfully and shook her head. “She had the best opportunity of anyone.”
“How?” Bettina stared at Pamela, her eyes wide.
Pamela set her spoon down. “On the Monday morning that Millicent was killed, you visited her at her shop. You gave her the red scarf with green stripes and she gave you the vase. She got ready to go out and put the scarf on, but had to wait until Nadine got there before she could leave. Nadine came in while you were there and then you left.” Pamela leaned across the table. “Think about it. Nadine could have killed Millicent and then closed the shop long enough to dispose of the body in the Arborville nature preserve—barely ten minutes away.”
As Pamela spoke, Bettina’s mouth had sagged. “The shop has a back door,” she whispered. “People delivering things can pull up in the alley. A person could . . . take something away . . . through the back door too.”
Pamela nodded. She reached across to where one of Bettina’s hands rested on the table and squeezed it. “There are other suspects too,” she said comfortingly. “And we still don’t know whether anything’s missing from the shop—or the bank account.”
Bettina squeezed Pamela’s hand in return. Suddenly her face brightened. “The police might have crossed Pierre off their list of suspects, but we certainly haven’t. Why would he plant the seed that someone else—in other words, Nadine—might be guilty unless . . .”
“Good point!” Pamela said. “We have to keep our wits about us when we meet him at the shop. He might want to make sure we think Nadine did what we’re afraid she did.”
“I wonder if he’ll really come up with the password for the bank account,” Bettina said.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sara’s Soup Station was almost directly across from the craft shop. Pamela and Bettina were just reckoning up how much to leave for a tip when Pamela noticed the striking figure of Pierre strolling along Timberley’s shopping street. In his scrupulously tailored wool overcoat and dashingly deployed scarf, he could equally well have been taking the air on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. He reached the door of the craft shop, paused to look up and down the street, and then bent to unlock the door.
A few minutes later Pamela and Bettina joined him in the crowded shop. “What a great pleasure to see you,” Pierre crooned, as if he hadn’t just bid them farewell an hour ago. He seized Pamela’s hand and bowed, then seized Bettina’s hand and repeated the gesture. “I haven’t spent so much time
in the shop,” he added, glancing around, “but everything looks the same to me.”
Indeed, the towering driftwood construction Nadine had been hiding behind on Pamela and Bettina’s last visit still occupied the far corner of the shop. The shelves were still laden with glassware in glowing colors, metal creations, and pottery—some useful, some purely decorative. Paintings and prints were displayed on the walls, and lengths of intricately patterned fabric hung from a rack near the entrance. A table held tablecloths and bedspreads, hand-woven by the look of them, neatly folded and stacked.
“The jewelry would be easiest to carry off,” Bettina said, “and most valuable. Some of the craftspeople use gold and semiprecious stones in their work.” She stepped toward the counter, dodging around a tall stand displaying fanciful teapots.
“I can’t see that anything’s been taken,” she announced once she was behind the counter. Pamela had followed her friend through the shop. From the front of the counter she gazed down at the assortment of earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and brooches arranged on a shelf below the counter’s glass top. Some combined silver and turquoise or jade. Others used materials unusual for jewelry, like polished wood or rough-textured stone. A few pieces were gold, with obviously valuable gems—in shades of pink, clear aqua, and yellow—or pearls, or amber, or opals.
Pamela and Bettina looked at each other and shrugged. “There’s always the bank account,” Pamela said.
Bettina shifted her eyes to where Pierre still stood near the shop’s entrance. “Do you have the password for the bank account?” she asked.
“I don’t have it but I know where to look for it.” Pierre smiled. “I knew my late wife’s habits very well.”
The three of them clustered around the desk in the little office off the hallway leading to the shop’s back door. A computer monitor, a keyboard, and a few piles of papers occupied the desk’s surface, along with a pottery coffee cup that still contained a few inches of coffee.
“Millicent never concerned herself with the shop’s finances,” Pierre said, “so she wouldn’t have memorized the password. But just in case she was in the shop and wanted to verify that a check had cleared, for example”—he reached for the keyboard and, with a flourish like a magician doing a trick, flipped it upside down—“et voilà!”
Taped to the black plastic of the keyboard’s underside was a tiny strip of paper inscribed “millicent craftshopbankaccount.”
“Not a very original user name or a very strong password,” Pamela observed.
Pierre took charge of bringing the computer to life. After a brief session of beeps and chirps, the screen displayed an assortment of icons. Pierre opened Google and keyed in the bank’s name. Once on the bank’s site, “millicent” and “craftshopbankaccount” got them to a page that revealed a balance of $21,765.30. No debits had been posted for over a week.
Bettina was exploring the contents of the desk drawers as Pierre worked. Now she held up a thick sheaf of bills. “Hundreds, fifties, and twenties,” she explained, leafing through them. “Nadine must have known about the cash. She’s the person who worked at this desk.”
“So,” Pamela said, “Nadine may have disappeared, but she hasn’t disappeared with anything from the shop.”
“That would appear so.” Pierre nodded.
“I think we should put the money right back in this desk drawer,” Bettina said, matching her action to her words and sliding the drawer closed. “If Nadine has really disappeared, the police will want to investigate and every detail should remain just as she left it.”
Pierre’s expression was serious as he logged out of the bank’s site and returned the computer to its resting state. Without the veneer of good nature that normally softened his sharp features, he looked quite wolfish.
Was he disappointed that Nadine no longer seemed a possible suspect in Millicent’s death? Or had he just been hoping to pocket the cash Bettina had found?
* * *
“We’re right by the yarn shop,” Bettina said as they stood on the sidewalk watching Pierre lock the craft shop’s door. “I might as well pop in and pick something out for Maxie since we’re so close.”
The stylish blond woman behind the yarn shop counter welcomed them back and listened with concern as they described their visit to Nadine’s apartment building. “But it’s too soon to go to the police,” she said. “I can tell you that from an experience one of the other Timberley merchants had last year. The police told him they wouldn’t have time to do anything else if they launched a missing-persons search every time an employee didn’t show up for work.” She laughed. “Not that the police have much else to do here in Timberley.” Then she became serious again. “That is very troubling about your friend though.”
Determined not to forget the purpose of their errand this time, Pamela and Bettina studied the rack of knitting-pattern books. Bettina selected one called Simple Styles for Little Folks and leafed through it, stopping at a page that showed two little boys wearing matching pullover sweaters.
“This pattern doesn’t look too hard, does it?” she asked, tilting the page in Pamela’s direction. “It’s just basic stockinette stitch and there aren’t any buttonholes to worry about.”
“And for the yarn?” The stylish blond woman stepped out from behind the counter and pulled a wooly skein of navy-blue yarn from a shelf piled high with similar skeins.
“It will have to be acrylic,” Bettina said. “They’re allergic to cats and so maybe wool will make them itch too.”
Soon the pattern book sat on the counter next to several skeins of acrylic yarn, also navy blue, and a pair of knitting needles.
“I’ll keep an eye on things at the craft shop,” the stylish blond woman said as she handed Bettina’s credit card back and began to slip the purchases into a bag. “If you want to leave your phone number, I’ll let you know if your friend comes back and opens the shop again.”
* * *
Orchard Street after a snowfall was as picturesque as a Christmas card, Pamela’s house on this wintry afternoon particularly so. In her absence, a snowman had appeared in her yard. He was imposing in height, constructed of three snowballs in graduated sizes. He had twigs for arms, lumps of charcoal for eyes, and a carrot for a nose. Around his neck—the spot where the top snowball joined the middle snowball—he wore a plaid scarf.
“Hello?” she called as she pushed the front door open and stepped into the entry.
“In here, Mom,” came Penny’s voice from the kitchen.
The snowman wasn’t the only visitor. Aaron was seated at the kitchen table, across from Penny. He bobbed up from his chair at the kitchen table and greeted Pamela as she entered the kitchen, once again addressing her as “Mrs. Paterson.” Awfully polite, she said to herself. Almost too polite, like Pierre. And almost too good-looking. But she smiled in return.
Pamela’s wooden cutting board sat on the kitchen table between Aaron and Penny. It bore a loaf of poppy-seed cake—minus several slices.
“It’s the one you kept for us,” Penny said hurriedly as Pamela’s glance strayed to the cutting board. “But I won’t take one of the new ones back with me if you had other plans for this one.”
“It was for us to eat . . .” Pamela hoped it didn’t sound like she was emphasizing the “us”—meaning only Pamela and Penny—too much. “I like the snowman,” she added. “I’m glad I had carrots.”
“Penny said you baked this.” Aaron extended his hands toward the poppy-seed cake. “It’s a fantastic recipe. Would you share it or is it a family secret?”
“Not family,” Pamela said, flattered in spite of her misgivings about the flatterer, “but an old friend.”
“Aaron likes to cook.” Penny beamed at him across the table.
“Self-preservation,” Aaron said. “When you share a house with a bunch of people, somebody has to do it. And after I sampled what my housemates came up with . . .” He laughed.
“How many of you are there?” Pamela asked. “
Cooking for a crowd every night could be quite a challenge.”
“Four.” He nodded. “Two guys, two women. The place is huge—we each have our own room. They pay for all the food and they take turns doing the dishes. So far, it’s working fine.”
The young woman Pamela had seen wearing the red scarf must have been one of the housemates then. Penny had said Aaron lived in one of the houses behind Arborville’s public parking lot. The young woman had hurried off in that direction the day Pamela tried to follow her.
“I think I saw one of your housemates wearing the red scarf,” Pamela said. “There’s no reason somebody shouldn’t get some use from it,” she added. “It is a nice scarf.”
Aaron had been looking at Pamela during the conversation about cooking. Now he looked down. “After I found out what its connection was to your friend, I didn’t want to wear it anymore, especially not around Arborville. I hung it in the big closet where we all keep our outdoor gear. Sometimes people just grab what’s handy.”
Penny spoke up. “At first he thought it was litter, Mom.”
“Litter?” Pamela said. “Something as nice as that?”
“Well,” Aaron said, “not exactly litter. But it’s amazing what people will just dump—useful things that could be reused or recycled. And the nature preserve attracts a lot of dumpers. I was putting in some volunteer time for a project called The Earth Is My Home Too. Old shoes, pots and pans, furniture. It’s amazing what all we’ve carried out of there.”
Penny was watching Aaron as he spoke and Pamela was watching Penny—though Penny’s expression was so adoring that to watch her almost felt like an invasion of privacy. Pamela wondered if she had stared so adoringly at Michael Paterson in the early days of their courtship.
The slice of sky visible from the kitchen window was already growing dark. Pamela retreated discreetly upstairs after saying a quick good-bye to Aaron, and soon she heard voices in the entry as Penny walked him to the door. Pamela wasn’t sure what stage of physical expression the courtship had advanced to at this point, but a long silence before she heard the door open suggested that a farewell kiss had been a likely conclusion to the date.
Silent Knit, Deadly Knit Page 21
