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

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Maybe there was a jealous boyfriend . . . or somebody who hated the way their hair turned out . . .”

      “I almost hope so.” Pamela reached for the door handle. “That would mean Dawn was the intended target and there won’t be any more murders.” She stepped out onto the asphalt of Bettina’s driveway, but then leaned back into the car. “I’m afraid there will be, though. That yarn around Dawn’s neck—I don’t think the plan was to leave it hanging loose. But then the killer got a good look at Dawn’s face and realized the woman in the Little Bo Peep costume wasn’t who he expected.”

      Bettina’s eyes got large and she raised her carefully manicured fingertips to her mouth. “Oh my,” she whispered. “And maybe he thought—hoped then—that he’d only knocked her out, and so he didn’t carry through with the strangling. I’ll point that out to Clayborn. And about the costume too.”

      “What time are you seeing Detective Clayborn?” Pamela asked, still leaning into the car.

      “Eleven.”

      “I’ll meet you at Hyler’s at twelve,” Pamela said.

      “You know I never say no to lunch at Hyler’s.” Bettina smiled and Pamela waved goodbye.

      * * *

      It was a bright fall day, made all the cheerier by the convivial parishioners lingering on the steps and sidewalk of the church next to Pamela’s house. They chatted and laughed and called to one another, as if unconcerned about the fact that Arborville’s town park had been the scene of a startling murder less than twenty-four hours before.

      Arborville was a charming small town, a town untouched by the social problems that afflict urban environments. But, curiously, Arborville had had its share of murders over the years. They weren’t committed by frightening people, but rather by ordinary people who one would never think could do such a thing—until they did. And even more curiously, Pamela and Bettina’s insights had frequently led them to solve murders that left the police baffled.

      * * *

      Pamela’s computer waited at the ready in her upstairs office, its keyboard warmed by the presence of a slumbering ginger cat. She’d checked her email first thing that morning, and now it took only a gentle click of the mouse to awaken the screen. She didn’t expect an email bringing work assignments on a Sunday—though her boss at Fiber Craft magazine seemed not to observe holidays or recognize weekends. But she suspected there would be an email from her daughter Penny. Penny’s college was in Massachusetts, but thanks to friends who emailed and texted, she often knew as much about the goings-on in Arborville as did her mother—or even more.

      Pamela transferred Ginger to her lap, clicked to open her email page, and clicked again to open the new message from Penny Paterson.

      “Mom,” the message read. “I slept late and now I am sending this to tell you I just found out what happened last night because lots of people on campus are from towns not that far from Arborville. I hope you and Bettina are not going to get involved in any way like you do sometimes if there’s something to do with knitting.”

      Pamela thought for a minute as she scratched Ginger between the ears. Then she responded. “You do not need to worry,” she wrote. “There’s no connection between that poor young woman Dawn Filbert and Knit and Nibble and I’m sure the police will have everything figured out in no time. Love, Mom.”

      Chapter 4

      In contrast to the previous morning, Pamela’s routine on Monday proceeded undisturbed. After feeding Catrina and Ginger, she started water boiling on the stove for her coffee. Then she fetched the Register from her front walk, slipped it from its plastic sleeve, and set it on the kitchen table. She returned the coffee she’d ground the previous day to her carafe’s filter cone and slipped a slice of whole-grain bread into her toaster. While she waited for the water to boil and the bread to toast, she unfolded the Register and scanned the front page.

      Thankfully, there was no follow-up to the story of the Arborville murder on that page. She set Part 1 aside to reveal the next section. Stories involving events in the county’s many small towns often started out as front-page news if they were dramatic enough but then migrated to the Local section. As she had suspected, the Register’s Marcy Brewer had been busy. Her byline appeared on a long article that mentioned Pamela and Bettina by name as “two of the first people to happen upon the gruesome murder scene.” But the article didn’t add anything to what Pamela already knew of the event or of the police response. Perhaps Bettina would have new information, however, after her meeting that morning with Detective Clayborn.

      The kettle’s whistle summoned Pamela to the counter, where she poured boiling water through the grounds waiting in the filter cone. Just as she finished, her toast popped up. From the cupboard where she kept her wedding china, she took out a cup, a saucer, and a plate. Pamela didn’t see the point in having nice things if one were to leave them behind, barely used, after one was gone. So she always drank her morning coffee and ate her morning toast from delicate porcelain garlanded with roses.

      Then, settled back at the table, she paged through the Register until nothing was left of the toast but a few crumbs and the carafe had been drained.

      * * *

      Pamela’s workday had begun even before she descended the stairs to her kitchen. She’d gone almost directly from bed to her office, where she’d watched as six emails arrived. A few were from friends, one offered coupons from the hobby shop, one informed her that her credit card statement was waiting to be downloaded—and one came bearing five attachments. That one had been from her boss at Fiber Craft.

      Now, fed and dressed and with her bed made, she revisited that email. “Please read and evaluate the attached submissions,” her boss had written, “and advise me by Thursday at the latest whether you think they are suitable for publication.”

      Pamela’s job as associate editor for Fiber Craft allowed her to work from home most days, a feature she’d appreciated when she was raising Penny and then especially after her architect husband was killed in a construction accident and she was left to raise her daughter alone. Her responsibilities included evaluating articles for publication and then copyediting the ones her editor chose, with occasional trips to the city for meetings.

      She opened the first of the attachments, each marked with a stylized paper clip, that stretched across the top of her boss’s email, and she was soon immersed in “The Feminist Collective Biennale: Subverting the Patriarchy One Stitch at a Time.” Two more articles later, it was time to meet Bettina at Hyler’s.

      With a light jacket added to her uniform of jeans and sweater, Pamela strolled up Orchard Street, past sturdy wood-frame houses that resembled her own. Though fall had been lovely so far, with the afternoon sun still warm despite its autumnal angle, the air had a golden tinge and leaves had begun to turn. Halfway up the block, one particular tree glowed a luminous scarlet.

      When Pamela and her husband had been shopping for a house all that long time ago, they’d been attracted by Arborville’s smallness and its charm. Most houses were two stories tall, with attics above and basements below and wide porches where people might have sat to drink lemonade in summers a hundred years ago, when the houses were new. The town’s commercial district, with the Co-Op Grocery anchoring it at one end, was only five blocks from Pamela’s house. There, quaint storefronts dating from the early 1900s, some with awnings and some without, offered most goods and services that any Arbor villian might need—including lunch at Hyler’s Luncheonette.

      At the upper corner of Orchard Street, Pamela detoured into the parking lot behind the stately brick apartment building that faced Arborville Avenue. A discreet wooden fence hid the building’s trash cans, as well as discards that wouldn’t fit in the cans. Pamela loved the treasures she discovered at tag sales and thrift stores—her wedding china was nearly her only treasure she’d acquired new. But even more exciting was a treasure that cost no money at all. Recently, a peek behind the wooden fence had yielded a framed sketch of a young woman in an eighteenth-century gown.

      Bettina

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