Gone with the Wool

“If you haven't read this series yet, I highly recommend giving it a go. The mystery will delight you, and afterwards you'll be itching to start a knitting or crochet project of your own!”

—
Cozy Mystery Book Reviews

“Good characters I hope to see more of.”

—
Kings River Life Magazine

“A cozy mystery that you won't want to put down. It combines cooking, knitting and murder in one great book!”

—
Fresh Fiction

“The California seaside is the backdrop to this captivating cozy that will have readers heading for the yarn store in droves.”

—
Debbie's Book Bag

“What a great start to a new series . . . A real page-turner.”

—MyShelf.com

“Will warm the reader like a favorite afghan.”

—Earlene Fowler, national bestselling author

“Get hooked on this new author! . . . Who can resist a sleuth named Pink, a slew of interesting minor characters and a fun fringe-of-Hollywood setting?”

—Monica Ferris,
USA Today
bestselling author

“Readers couldn't ask for a more rollicking read.”

—
Crochet Today!

“Fans . . . will enjoy unraveling the knots leading to the killer.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Classic cozy fare . . . Crocheting pattern and recipe are just the icing on the cake.”

—
Cozy Library

Crochet Mysteries

HOOKED ON MURDER

DEAD MEN DON'T CROCHET

BY HOOK OR BY CROOK

A STITCH IN CRIME

YOU BETTER KNOT DIE

BEHIND THE SEAMS

IF HOOKS COULD KILL

FOR BETTER OR WORSTED

KNOT GUILTY

SEAMS LIKE MURDER

Yarn Retreat Mysteries

YARN TO GO

SILENCE OF THE LAMB'S WOOL

WOUND UP IN MURDER

GONE WITH THE
WOOL

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

GONE WITH THE WOOL

A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2016 by Betty Hechtman.

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BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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.

eBook ISBN: 9780698406162

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / July 2016

Cover illustration by Patricia Castelao.

Cover design by Rita Frangie.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

I want to thank my editor Julie Mianecki for all her help in getting this book into shape. My agent Jessica Faust keeps steering me through the changing publishing world.

Thank you monarch butterflies for your amazing ability to come back to the same spot every October. What is most astonishing is the butterflies have never been there before. Somehow they inherit the ability to come back to the same location. In my book, their destination is Cadbury by the Sea, but in real life, it is Pacific Grove, California. The town does celebrate the return of the butterflies, but I'm pretty sure it is more subdued than the events and hoopla I came up with for this book.

When I saw the silver crown Amy Shelton crocheted, I decided it was possible to crochet anything—even a butterfly. I am very proud of the pattern for a monarch butterfly that I created for this book.

Thanks to my knit and crochet group Rene Biederman, Alice Chiredijan, Terry Cohen, Trish Culkin, Clara Feeney, Sonia Flaum, Lilly Gillis, Winnie Hineson, Linda Hopkins, Reva Mallon, Elayne Moschin and Paula Tesler for the friendship and yarn advice.

A special thank you to Linda Hopkins. She is so generous with her time, and her help with the patterns is invaluable. The support from Roberta and Dominic Martia is much appreciated. And of course, thanks to my family, Burl, Max and Samantha.

Why hadn't I realized this problem before? The bright red tote bag with
Yarn2Go
emblazoned on the front fell over as I tried to cram in the long knitting loom for my upcoming yarn retreat. My selection of round looms rolled across the floor before falling flat. The other long looms scattered at my feet. Julius, my black cat, watched from his spot on the leather love seat in the room I called my office as I gathered up the odd-looking pieces of equipment.

I might be able to get them into the bag for my meeting, but it would simply not work to hand out such ungainly and heavy bags to my retreaters as they registered.

Julius blinked his yellow eyes at me. “I know what you're thinking,” I said. “This is the fourth retreat I'm putting on, and I should have figured this out already.” The plan had been that after my meeting, I was going to pick up the boxes of looms and stuff the bags for the retreaters.

I looked around the small room, as if there might be an answer for me. There were reminders of my aunt's handiwork with yarn everywhere. My favorite was the crocheted lion who patrolled from the desk, though his face was too amusing to appear threatening. And then there was the sample of my handiwork that I was the most proud of. It had taken me a while, but I'd finished making the worry doll from the last retreat. I loved the doll and the concept. You were supposed to give her your worries, and she would take care of them. I'd given mine a face with an attitude, which made her appear up for the job.

“Worry doll, how about some help with this?” I pointed at the bag, which I had smartly propped up at my feet when I'd refilled it. It fell over on its side anyway.

“I'm talking to cats and dolls,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief as I grabbed the handles and lugged the bag out of the room.

Julius followed me to the kitchen, making a last play for a serving of stink fish. I started to ignore it, but such a little effort made him so happy, and eventually I gave in. The can of smelly cat food was wrapped in plastic and then in three layers of plastic bags, yet somehow the strong smell still got through. I held my nose before giving him a dainty portion and then starting the involved job of rewrapping and resealing it. He was busily chewing as I went out the back door.

Julius and I had only been companions for a short time, and he was the first pet I had ever had—though I was beginning to think he viewed me as the pet. He had definitely chosen me, and he seemed to be doing a good job of training me to give him the care he desired. I'd wanted him to stay inside initially, but he'd had no intention of being strictly an indoor cat and had pushed open a window to show me how
to leave it open just enough so that he could come and go as he pleased.

Outside, the sky was a flat white. That was the average weather here on the tip of the Monterey Peninsula. White sky, cool weather, no matter the month. It just happened to be October, though you couldn't tell by looking around. There were no trees with golden leaves—mostly there were Monterey pines and Monterey cypress, which never lost their foliage and stayed a dark green year-round. The cypress tree on the small strip of land in front of my house had a typical horizontal shape from the constant wind. Somehow it made me think of someone running away with their hair flowing behind them. It seemed funny, since I had run here to Cadbury by the Sea, California.

My name is Casey Feldstein, and to make a long story short, I'd relocated to my aunt's guest house in Cadbury when I was faced with moving back in with my high-achieving parents (both doctors) because I was once again out of a job. Sadly, my aunt had been killed in a hit-and-run several months after I moved in. She'd left me everything—a house, a yarn retreat business and, as it was turning out, a life.

I might have moved almost two thousand miles away from Chicago, but that didn't mean I had severed my ties with my parents or, I was sorry to admit, my need for their approval. It still stung when my mother ended our conversations with her usual, “When I was your age I was a wife, a doctor and a mother, and you're what?”

So, maybe I was thirty-five and it was true that I'd had a rather spotty career history that, until recently, seemed to be headed nowhere. Of all the things I had done, my two favorites were the temp work at the detective agency, where
I was either an assistant detective or a detective's assistant, depending on who you talked to, and my position as a dessert chef at a small bistro. I would have never left either of those jobs—they left me.

Though my mother had a hard time acknowledging it, these days I did have an answer for her usual comment. I had taken over my aunt's yarn retreat business, even though I hadn't known a knitting needle from a crochet hook when I'd started. And I'd turned my baking skills into a regular job as the dessert chef at the Blue Door restaurant, plus I baked muffins for the assorted coffee spots in Cadbury.

I started to walk past the converted garage that had been my home when I'd first moved here and then made a last-minute decision to go inside and check the supply of tote bags, as if the new ones I'd had made up might somehow be bigger than the one I was carrying.

The flat light that made it through the cloud cover was coming in the windows and illuminating the interior. The stack of bags sat on the counter that served as a divider between the tiny kitchen area and living space. I folded one out and measured it against my stuffed one. No surprise, they were the same size. As I flattened the bag and put it back, I noticed the worn manila envelope that had been sitting there for months. I still hadn't figured out what to do about its contents.

I hadn't told anyone about the information the envelope contained, not even my best friend Lucinda Thornkill, who owned the Blue Door with her husband, Tag, so there was no one to go to for advice.

There was no reason to deal with it now, except to procrastinate from dealing with the bag issue. I guess there was
one
person I could go to for advice. It was two hours later in Chicago, and even though it was Saturday, my ex-boss at the detective agency was probably leaning back in his office chair considering his lunch options, which meant it was a good time to call.

I punched in the number, and he answered on the third ring.

“Hi, Frank,” I said. Before I could say more, he interrupted.

“Oh no, Feldstein. Don't tell me there's another body in that town of yours with the name that sounds like a candy bar.” It was true that when I had called him in the past, it was to get advice about a death—well, a murder in town, to be exact.

“No, no, Frank. No dead bodies this time. All the citizens of Cadbury by the Sea are alive—as far as I know. I wanted to ask your advice on something else.”

“Okay, Feldstein. I get it. You've got boy trouble again. Shoot.”

I laughed. I'd never called him about boy trouble, as he called it, nor would I ever do so. “It's something else,” I began. “Do you remember I told you I had some information that would shake up the town? Well, now I have even more. I know who it is—”

“Who what is, Feldstein? You're going to have to bring me up to speed if you want my advice. You do know I have a life here that has nothing to do with that town you're living in, right?”

I was hoping that I wouldn't have to start from scratch, but I could see his point. What was going on in Cadbury was hardly of earthshaking importance to him. I began by telling him about the Delacorte family, who were the local royalty. The family had owned a cannery and a fleet of fishing boats and still owned lots of property around town. Vista Del Mar,
the hotel and conference center across the street from my house, where I held the yarn retreats, had belonged solely to Edmund Delacorte.

When Edmund had died, it had been very specific in his will that Vista Del Mar was to go to his children. His only son had died in an accident a year or so after Edmund's death, and since it seemed there were no other children, the hotel and conference center had gone back into the family estate. All that was left of the Delacortes now were Edmund's two sisters, Cora and Madeleine. I explained all of this to Frank.

“It only
seemed
there were no other children,” I said. I debated with myself whether I should go into the whole story of how I'd come to the conclusion that Edmund had a love child. Frank only had limited patience, and I was afraid it would run out if I went through telling him I'd found an envelope of photos that was marked
Our Baby
in a dresser that had belonged to Edmund. The baby was clearly a girl, and as far as everyone knew, he had only had a son. I didn't know if Frank remembered that he had helped me figure out that Edmund had made money drops to the mother through them both accessing a safety-deposit box, but I didn't bring it up and got right to the point. “I found out that Edmund had a love child, but I didn't know her identity, not until I found some evidence that made it clear who the baby is. Well, she's not a baby anymore. All I have to do is tell her who she is, and then she can get a DNA test. I have samples of both Edmund's and the baby's mother's DNA.”

“Details, Feldstein. What kind of samples?”

I didn't have to look through the rest of the contents in the large manila envelope to know there was a sample of Edmund's hair with the roots I'd gotten from an old hairbrush. It was amazing—you could be dead for years, but hair stuck
in an old hairbrush survived. The mother had licked an envelope, and I had that. I listed the details off to Frank with a certain amount of pride in my detective skills.

“Okay,” he said. “Now what evidence led you to the baby's identity?”

“A teddy bear in the photos,” I said, imagining his expression as I said it. He didn't disappoint. I heard him choking on whatever he was drinking as we talked.

“A teddy bear,” he repeated in an incredulous tone. “I got to hear this one. How did a teddy bear give the kid's identity away?”

Frank didn't know anything about needle craft. Actually, I hadn't known much either, until recently. I struggled, trying to find a way to explain it so he would understand. “There was a one-of-a-kind handmade teddy bear in the pictures next to the baby girl. The style is distinctive, like a fingerprint. I know who made it, and I'm sure the woman will recognize it.”

“Now it's coming back to me,” Frank said. “I think I asked you before what was in it for you?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Then I recommend you sit on it. Those Delacorte sisters aren't going to be happy with someone trying to claim part of their estate. From the way you describe that town, I don't know that anybody would be happy with you for sharing your information.”

“I bet Edmund's daughter would like to know who she is, and I happen to know that an inheritance would certainly help her out.”

“Don't be so sure, Feldstein. My advice is to keep quiet awhile longer. Once the cat is out of the bag, you can't put it back.” There was silence on my end, and after a moment
Frank said, “Is there something else?” His mention of a bag had brought me right back to my problem, but I was pretty sure he wouldn't be any help there.

“That's it,” I said finally.

“Then I've got to go. The delivery guy is here with my sub sandwich.” I heard a click, and he was gone.

There was one thing he was definitely right about: the whole cat in the bag thing. I left the envelope where it was. There was always tomorrow.

The red tote bag banged against my leg as I walked, and I had to stop more than once to pick up a loom that tumbled out and force it back in as I went to my yellow Mini Cooper, which was parked in the driveway.

My house was the edge of Cadbury. The look was wilder here, with more trees, no sidewalks and of course Vista Del Mar across the street. I glanced toward the hotel and conference center as I pulled onto the street. Something large and cumbersome was being pulled down the driveway. It was impossible to see what it was, as it was covered in blue tarps. This was the beginning of the biggest week of the year here in Cadbury, and I had a feeling it was connected.

Cadbury by the Sea's real claim to fame was not the moody scenery, but the tens of thousands of striking orange and black butterflies that arrived in October to overwinter in a stand of trees behind a pink motel. There was even a statue of a monarch butterfly near the lighthouse. Tomorrow was the kickoff of Butterfly Week in Cadbury. There were going to be events each day, ending with a parade and the coronation of the Butterfly Queen.

I might live on the edge of Cadbury, but it was still a small town, and it only took five minutes or so to get downtown.
There was an authentic feeling to the place. No “ye olde” anythings—if anything was old here, it was because it had been around for a long time. The buildings were a mixture of Victorians that were built when that was the current style and some more streamlined mid-century-style structures that looked plain in comparison.