Knit of the Living Dead - Peggy Ehrhart A Knit & Nibble Mystery

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“You both saw it too! And Nell!”

      “We saw it.” Pamela nodded. “But we didn’t find it. The kids did. And Nell said it was her neighbor. So the police made them all stay and sent us in here.”

      “Poor Nell! What a shock that must have been for her! Is she all right?”

      “We don’t know,” Bettina murmured sadly. “We haven’t seen her since . . . then.”

      They were all silent for a bit. After a while, Holly glanced at the clock above the circulation desk. It was nearly eleven. “When do you think we’ll get out of here?” she asked.

      Bettina shrugged. “Anybody at the bonfire might have seen something useful, so the police will want to talk to everybody. At least tomorrow’s Sunday and we can all sleep late.”

      At that moment. a police officer appeared at the top of the stairs that led to the library’s lower level. Pamela recognized her as Officer Sanchez, the young woman officer who was usually to be found monitoring the grammar school children crossing Arborville Avenue.

      Officer Sanchez approached the long table closest to the steps. “Please come with me,” she said, and gestured for everyone at that table to get up.

      Wilfred helped himself to one of the chairs that had been vacated and pulled it up to the end of the table where the Knit and Nibblers sat. “Might as well be comfortable,” he said with a sigh.

      Harold stood up again and resumed scanning the room. “He’s looking for Mary Lyon’s husband,” Pamela explained.

      “He might be downstairs,” Holly said. “The police filled that big room down there with people first. And he might not know what this is all about . . .”

      “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Harold said. “Brainard might not even have come tonight. I didn’t see him at the bonfire . . . of course I might not have recognized him in his costume—whatever it was.” He furled his cape around himself and sat back down. “I didn’t see Mary either. But with such a crowd, and in the dark . . .” He shrugged.

      An authoritative voice drew their attention to the stairs again. A police officer stood there, not Officer Sanchez but the officer Pamela had seen just that morning on Arborville Avenue arranging orange cones around a spot where the asphalt was being repaired.

      “Harold Bascomb?” the officer inquired. “Is there a Harold Bascomb here?”

      Chapter 3

      Pamela would have been happy to remain in bed until ten a.m., or even later. But, though she’d been a widow for the past seven years and her only daughter was away at college, she was not alone in her large house. The two beings with whom she shared it were at that moment crouched on her chest. Catrina, a lustrous black cat with amber eyes, was studying Pamela’s face intently, as if for signs of consciousness. Catrina’s daughter Ginger, whose name described her color, seemed similarly curious about Pamela’s state.

      “Yes, yes,” Pamela murmured. The cats leaped nimbly to the floor as she pushed herself into a sitting position. “I know it’s past your breakfast time.”

      Down in her cozy kitchen, wrapped in her fleecy robe and with furry slippers on her feet, Pamela scooped a six-ounce can of “fish medley” into a fresh bowl that the cats shared and broke it up into manageable morsels with a spoon. She set the bowl in the corner of the kitchen, where the cats were accustomed to receiving their meals.

      Once Catrina and Ginger were crouched over their bowl nibbling at the glistening mixture from opposite sides, Pamela set her kettle boiling for coffee and headed out to retrieve her newspaper. After the distressing events of the previous night, the familiar rituals with which she always started her day promised to soothe.

      It had been one a.m. before she was back at home again. When she and Bettina were finally summoned down to the children’s library, where the police interviews were being held, she’d had to repeat to Detective Clayborn the story she’d already told to one of the police officers who’d responded to Gus Warburton’s summons—how she heard the scream, stepped back among the trees, encountered the frightened teenagers, and followed Gus and the teenagers to the spot where the body lay across the path. Then when she and Bettina and Nell and their spouses left the library, the three women had been set upon by the County Register ’s ace reporter Marcy Brewer, no less perky for the lateness of the hour.

      Back inside, she extracted the Register from its flimsy plastic sleeve and laid it, still folded, on the small table that furnished her kitchen. The table, just large enough to accommodate two chairs, was covered with a vintage cloth featuring fruit in unlikely colors—blue oranges!—that she’d found at one of her favorite rummage sales.

      At the counter, she measured coffee beans into her coffee grinder, depressed the cover, and waited until the clatter of the beans smoothed into a whir. She slipped a paper filter into the plastic filter cone atop her carafe and transferred the ground beans into the filter. She was just about to reach for the kettle, which had begun to whistle, when the doorbell chimed.

      The cats preceded her to the entry, streaking ahead and pausing in the middle of the thrift-store Persian rug that covered the floor’s ancient parquet. They stared at the door, and so did Pamela, but only for a moment. Through the lace that curtained the door’s large oval window, Pamela could see a woman, none too thin and not very tall, with hair of vivid scarlet. She smiled and opened the door to Bettina.

      But Bettina, usually quick to smile, didn’t smile back. And the woman who dressed for her life in Arborville with the flair of a dedicated fashionista had crossed the street from her own house and climbed the steps to Pamela’s porch wearing a flowered flannel bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. Her face was free of makeup and her bright hair looked untouched by a comb.

      “Have you seen this?” she inquired, the rising pitch of her voice reminiscent of a distressed Catrina. Bettina held out a section of the Register.

      “I just brought mine in,” Pamela said. “I’m making coffee.” She stepped back and beckoned Bettina across the threshold.

      Bettina shook her head vigorously. “I have to get dressed. We have to talk to Nell.”

      Pamela felt a frown take shape on her forehead. She reached for the newspaper. What could the Register be reporting that was more startling than what they’d experienced firsthand the previous night? And surely Pamela and Bettina wouldn’t even appear in that day’s issue of the paper. Marcy would have filed her interview with them long after Sunday’s Register had gone to print.

      “It wasn’t Nell’s neighbor,” Bettina said. “That body wasn’t Mary Lyon’s.”

      “But the costume—” Pamela stopped. Bettina’s lips tightened and she shook her head again.

      “The dead woman was Dawn Filbert.” Bettina was still shaking her head, and the uncombed tendrils of her hair were bobbing. “She owns—owned—Hair Today, the hair salon on Arborville Avenue. We have to talk to Nell.”

      “But the costume,” Pamela repeated.

      “That’s why we have to talk to Nell,” Bettina said, in the tone of someone stating the obvious. “Maybe the killer was trying to kill Mary.”

      Pamela nodded. “Wandering around in the dark looking for the person in the Bo Peep costume. . .” She paused. “But the killer would need some reason to think the person in the Bo Peep costume was Mary.”

      “She had the blog,” Bettina said. “The Lyon and the Lamb: Adventures in Woolgathering. ‘Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep’ and all that . . .”

      “There’s a connection . . .” Pamela squinted and pursed her lips. “But would the killer make that connection?”

      “That’s why we’re talking to Nell.” Bettina pulled her robe around her. “I can’t go like this and neither can you. Get dressed. I’ll call Nell and tell her we’re coming and I’ll pick you

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