LITMIR.BIZ

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someone. I’m not smart enough for Princeton, but he must have thought I was smart enough to appreciate how smart he was. Or maybe he just liked the way I looked.” Mary laughed, but not as heartily as she’d laughed when contemplating the Halloween killer targeting Bo Peep and discovering he’d killed Brainard.

      She stopped suddenly and raised a finger in the air, as if sensing that her audience’s attention was flagging.

      “Secret enemies! The llama farm! Don’t let me forget,” she exclaimed before carrying on with her earlier theme. “But anyway, men?” Even twisted by scorn, her features were beautiful. “That’s all they want, isn’t it? Somebody to admire them? Brainy’s first choice was too smart for that.” She flopped back in the armchair as if worn out.

      “Llamas?” Nell inquired after a few moments.

      Mary leaned forward again. “I’m supposed to do a post on llama wool, or whatever they call it—fur?—for the owner of some llama farm in Kringlekamack? Please! I said. Hello? It’s ‘Mary had a little lamb,’ not ‘Mary had a little llama.’ ”

      * * *

      “Sad,” Bettina commented when they reached Nell’s side of the street. “Just like you said, Nell. It’s sad when couples can’t get along.” Bettina shook her head. “I wonder if she gets along with anyone. You consider her a friend, but . . .”

      “A neighbor,” Nell said with a raised eyebrow and a tilt to her head that suggested she was making a distinction. The three of them took a few steps in the direction of Bettina’s Toyota.

      Before leaving Mary’s, they had suggested that she be very careful when she left her house, especially at night. Perhaps there was another explanation for Dawn’s murder, one that didn’t involve the killer’s expectation of who would be wearing the Bo Peep costume, Pamela had told her. But perhaps there wasn’t. And it didn’t hurt to be careful.

      “Mary has a son,” Nell said as Pamela and Bettina began to climb into Bettina’s car. “He’s grown up now, but still . . .”

      “They still love their mothers.” Bettina paused and met Nell’s gaze.

      “And our little town certainly doesn’t need another murder,” Nell added.

      * * *

      Tuesday morning’s Register didn’t announce any arrests in what it was calling the “Arborville Halloween bonfire murder”—so presumably, Detective Clayborn and his associates were still at work interviewing patrons of Dawn Filbert’s salon. Pamela wasn’t sure whether the previous day’s conversation with Mary Lyon had laid to rest her fears that the bonfire murderer would strike again—or heightened them.

      Mary had enemies, yes, but how bent on murder could the recipient of the bad reviews be? Or even the woman’s chivalrous husband? On the other hand, Pamela had once received a very frightening email from an author who figured out that Pamela was the editor who had given a thumbs-down to his article on the ecology of replacing caskets with funeral shrouds.

      Then there was the llama farmer Mary had mentioned. People could be very protective of their animals. Pamela was protective of her cats. In fact—she jumped from her chair and took up a pad of the notepaper that, along with address labels, arrived in the mail without ever being requested. Cat food, she wrote as the first item in what was to be the shopping list for the Co-Op Grocery errand on that day’s agenda.

      She tipped her wedding-china cup to drain the last few swallows of coffee that was now lukewarm, rinsed the cup and the plate that had held her toast, and headed upstairs to get dressed and start her day. Catrina followed at the heels of her mistress’s furry slippers.

      Ten minutes later, wearing jeans and the same sweater she’d been wearing since Sunday, Pamela sat down at her desk, welcomed Catrina onto her lap, and pressed the buttons that would bring her computer to life. There was no message from her boss at Fiber Craft and she didn’t expect one until she returned the work that had arrived the previous day. But there was an email from Penny, with a photo of her in her Halloween costume of a black velvet cape, scary makeup, and a witch’s peaked hat. That message made her smile, not least at the fact that the note accompanying it contained no further reference to Dawn Filbert’s murder.

      She opened the attachment from her boss’s Monday email labeled “String Skirt” and settled down to evaluate “The String Skirt as Puberty Marker in Bronze Age Cultures.”

      Chapter 6

      A scarecrow lounged in a chair on Roland DeCamp’s porch. The scarecrow’s body was a pair of jeans and a plaid flannel shirt stuffed with straw, and a battered felt hat topped his jack-o’-lantern head. En route to the DeCamps’ house, Pamela and Bettina had driven by other houses displaying acknowledgments of the holiday just past. Some homeowners’ shrubs had been encased in webs produced by giant spiders that now sat atop the shrubs looking fearsome. At other houses, phalanxes of skeletons paraded across yards that had sprouted tombstones. Elsewhere, bedsheets rippling in the wind suggested ghostly shapes.

      Roland and his wife, though childless themselves, lived in a neighborhood inhabited by numerous families with school-age children. Many of them were relative newcomers to Arborville, and the houses built on the land that the old-timers still called the Farm appealed to them because they were large and modern and had dependable plumbing and lots of closets. Arborville’s old-timers, however, considered their own old-time houses historic and charming, and had yet to forgive the latest generation of Van Ripers, a Dutch family that dated back to before Arborville was Arborville, for selling their family’s farm to developers.

      Melanie DeCamp welcomed Pamela and Bettina at the door. She was Roland’s wife, blond and elegant, not a member of Knit and Nibble but delighted that her husband had followed his doctor’s advice and taken up knitting to offset the stress of his job as a corporate lawyer. Melanie motioned them in, and they saw that they were evidently the last to arrive.

      Nell had settled into the substantial armchair Melanie always reserved for her—the other seating possibilities in the DeCamps’ sleek living room, a low-slung turquoise sofa and matching chair, required legs as well-exercised as Melanie’s own to rise from them once one was seated. Holly Perkins and Karen Dowling sat side by side on the sofa. They were both young marrieds and the best of friends, though Holly’s dramatic good looks and outsize personality made her as unlike her shy blond friend as any two people could be.

      Holly and Karen greeted the newcomers and moved closer together to make room for Pamela and Bettina on the sofa. From her armchair, Nell spoke up with her own cheery hello and resumed extracting yarn, needles, and a partially finished stocking from her knitting bag. She had already embarked on her annual Christmas project—dozens of colorful stockings to be filled with treats and distributed to the children at the Haversack women’s shelter where she volunteered.

      As Pamela and Bettina settled themselves, Melanie cocked an ear toward the kitchen, as if responding to a summons that only she could hear. “You know he always wants to bake the Knit and Nibble goody himself,” she murmured, excused herself, and hurried toward the hall that led to the kitchen.

      “We’re all quite ourselves again after Saturday night?” Bettina surveyed the group, her eyes lingering on Holly. Pamela was glad Bettina’s question made it sound as if this was the first time they were meeting again since the adventure they all, except for Karen, had shared on Saturday night. There was no reason to alarm Holly—or timid little Karen—with suspicions about the bonfire murderer’s true target and thus the fact that the murderer might strike again.

      “A few good nights’ sleep did wonders,” Holly said with a smile that stopped just short of activating her dimple. “Desmond is quite himself as well.”

      But Karen wasn’t so upbeat. “I wasn’t even there,” she said with a delicate shudder, “and I’ve been having nightmares. When I saw the Register Sunday morning, I couldn’t believe I was reading about something that happened in my own little town—the town where Dave and I thought we could raise our dear baby Lily in

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