Silence of the Lamb's Wool (A Yarn Retreat Mystery) (8 page)

I looked at my watch and calculated the time difference in Chicago. It wasn’t that late, I thought, as I punched in the number.

I didn’t have to say who it was; Frank recognized my voice before I’d gotten all of “hello” out.

“Feldstein, it’s been a while. What’s up? You back in town or are you still in that town that sounds like a chocolate bar?” Frank had been my boss when I did the temp work at the detective agency in Chicago. It had been my favorite temp job and if I’d been offered a permanent position, I probably never would have ended up in Cadbury. But Frank’s fortunes came and went with the clients who came and went, and he couldn’t hire permanent help.

“I’m still in Cadbury,” I said. “I just wanted to run something by you.”

“Oh no, Feldstein. What happened this time?” Frank always sat in a recliner and kept trying to push its limit of recline, which made the chair protest. It was a loud-enough squeak to hear through the phone, but this time all I heard was silence.

“Where are you? I don’t hear your chair.” I heard Frank laugh.

“Good detective work, Feldstein. I’m not in the office. I’m doing a surveillance. Insurance case. A woman claimed she threw her back out picking up something at work. Her Facebook status said she was going for a dance lesson. I’m sitting outside the dance studio waiting to see if she’s going to strut her stuff.”

I apologized for bothering him while he was working, but he said it was pretty boring sitting in his car watching a bunch of people mangle the tango.

“You know how to tango?” I said, surprised. I always said Frank had more resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy than to James Bond.

“There’s lots you don’t know about me, Feldstein. Underneath my gruff exterior, I’m a romantic.” He made some grumbly noises. “Forget I said that last part. You were going to tell me something.”

“This woman I know died—” I said before Frank interrupted me.

“Not another death. Feldstein, it’s a small town with a low crime rate. You come to town and people start dying. I hope they don’t start connecting the dots.”

“I didn’t say she was murdered. I just said she died.” I told him what I knew and then ran by how Lieutenant Borgnine was investigating. “Don’t you think that makes it sound like there was something suspicious about her death?”

“Well, yeah,” Frank said in slightly sarcastic tone. “Young women don’t usually die sitting on a bench. What was she doing there anyway? Didn’t you say she was supposed to be meeting you?” He didn’t wait for me to answer, but went on. “Feldstein, I trust you know where to start.”

“Yeah, flirt with the cop down the street,” I said with a sigh. Frank had suggested that when I got involved with my first murder and was looking for information. Frank laughed.

“You can do it, Feldstein. A little hair twirling and eyelash batting and he’ll tell you everything.” Frank was teasing me. He knew I wasn’t good at that girly kind of flirting, but what he didn’t know was that I liked Dane.
Liked
was the wrong word. That was the kind of thing I said in elementary school about the boy who sat in front of me in seventh grade. There was a definite attraction thing going on between Dane and me, which I had been trying to ignore. I cringed, realizing the whole phone call had just been so he would tell me to do what I really wanted to do all along.

I thanked Frank for his advice, wished him luck with the lady dancer and hung up.

There was no time like the present to follow Frank’s advice. I couldn’t go to Dane’s empty-handed, so I went to the refrigerator and took out one of the logs of butter cookie dough. I had made up a double batch and had them wrapped and ready to slice and bake for my retreaters. There would still be plenty with one less log.

While the cookies baked, I tried to spruce up my appearance. The long-sleeved black T-shirt and snug but comfortable jeans were a little dull. I tried to emulate Nicole’s style and swirled an aqua cotton scarf around my neck. Even with the swirl, it looked forced to me and I took it off. Maybe a little more makeup, I thought, trying to do the Crystal thing with black eyeliner. It looked great on the yarn store owner, but I didn’t have her touch and on me it looked like a cross between some Addams Family character and a raccoon. I washed my face and started again. When I’d put on what served as makeup for me and checked myself in the mirror, I felt better. I looked like me. The timer for the cookies was going off as I made another attempt with something around my neck. This time I dropped a cherry red cowl over my head and it felt natural. I finished by taking the scrunchy out of my hair and shaking it loose.

A short time later I left with a plate of hot cookies.

No matter how much I tried to tell myself that I was just going down there to find out what Dane knew about Nicole’s death, I realized it was an excuse to go see him. Why fight nature. Even my mother had seen it.

I had the rest of the evening free. Since the Blue Door was closed on Wednesdays, I didn’t have to go in and bake. Wednesdays were muffinless in town, too.

I needed my flashlight to guide the way since there were no streetlights in Cadbury. It was even darker here on the edge of town with all the trees. I was glad to see the street wasn’t parked up, meaning there was no karate workshop going on in his garage.

As I got closer, I began to get nervous. When I didn’t take off like a scared rabbit, he’d get the hint. But was I opening Pandora’s box? I could smell the wood smoke from his fireplace and had an image of the cozy room inside.

And then I was at his front door. I could hear a low hum of voices, the TV, no doubt. I took a deep breath and punched the bell. It took a few moments before he opened the door and I put on my very best beaming smile.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. I should have gotten the message that there was something wrong when he sounded surprised and uncomfortable, but I was too caught up in what I was doing to notice.

I presented the cookies. “They’re nice and warm,” I said, trying to make it sound seductive. “You know how you’re always saying I should come over and stay sometime. Well, here I am.” He glanced toward the inside of the house, but instead of opening the door and inviting me in, he pulled it closed behind him as he came outside. He took the plate of cookies and snagged one. “Up to your usual standards,” he said when he’d eaten it. He saw me looking at the door.

“It’s kind of awkward,” he said. “I have company.”

From inside, I heard a woman’s voice calling out and asking what had happened to him.

Oops. No, super oops.
Of course he wasn’t sitting around waiting for me to pick up on his teasing. He had somebody. I started to back away, but he grabbed my hand.

He started to say something and then seemed to give up. “It’s complicated.” He let go of my hand and seemed upset. “Whatever you think it is, is right.”

I wanted to disappear. How embarrassing. But I wasn’t fourteen, so I pulled myself together, remembering my other mission, and tried to pretend it was the sole reason I was there.

“No problem,” I said, doing my best to sound indifferent. “I was hoping you might have some details about what happened to Nicole Welton.” I mentioned that Lieutenant Borgnine had stopped by to question my people, but wouldn’t tell us anything.

“I heard about that,” Dane said with a grin. “I saw him taking a couple of aspirin when he got back. He complained that you refused to give him a straight answer about anything and just kept asking questions.”

“I was only trying to find out what happened,” I said, and Dane chuckled.

“I think he might have met his match with you.” Dane made another glance toward his house and I got it: He was anxious to get back to his company.

“Sorry to keep you,” I said, forcing myself not to sound sarcastic. “I’ll take any and all details.” I pleaded my case. “She was the center of my retreat and I ought to know what happened.”

Dane must have felt guilty for the awkward circumstance because he was very forthcoming with information. The first detail was anything but what I was expecting. “We think it was suicide.”

“Suicide?” I repeated.

“It isn’t official until the medical examiner makes a ruling, but that’s what it looks like.” He explained that the paramedics had thought she’d been having some kind of seizure and rushed her to the hospital. “It was only later when Cadbury PD went to the scene to do an investigation that we found the note.” I mentioned being there when the paramedics arrived and not seeing any note.

“It wasn’t written on paper. When we checked her cell phone it was set to a note-taking app. I don’t remember the exact wording of it, but it was something like she was doing something bad and couldn’t live with it anymore.” Dane shifted his weight and took another cookie. “After we read that, we looked at everything with a different eye.”

“Right,” I said. “I saw a red paper cup and a small glass bottle.”

“The bottle had a homemade label on it. Basically, it said ‘poison’ and ‘insecticide.’ The results aren’t in yet, but the ME thinks she dumped the insecticide in the coffee. Not that it matters, but you probably realized the cup came from the Coffee Shop,” he said.

I nodded as if I had, but really until he’d mentioned it, I hadn’t put the paper cup together with the coffee place on the main drag.

“Poison, suicide,” I repeated, trying to put the pieces together in my head.

“The ME will probably make an official ruling on the cause of death tomorrow. Then that will be it. Case closed.”

“You’re not even going to do any more investigating?” I said.

“It’s Lieutenant Borgnine’s call, but I think he’ll just take it at face value. It’s common knowledge the shop wasn’t doing well. She seemed to feel guilty about something. Who knows what she was involved in.” A woman’s voice called out for Dane. “I ought to go in.”

“Of course,” I said, backing away. “Thanks for the info. Even though it’s a shock. Suicide,” I muttered to myself.

“There’s one other thing,” he said. “I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything, but we found a muffin on the ground.”

“One of mine?” I said, feeling my brow furrow. “Are you sure?”

He nodded. “It was hard to miss the ‘Muffins by Casey’ on the bottom of the paper around it,” he said. In an effort to brand my baked goods, I’d gotten the paper liners printed up. “Don’t worry. She didn’t give herself the poison with it. There wasn’t even a bite out of it.”

That information didn’t make me feel any better.

The red-polo-shirted managers’ group crossed my path as I headed toward the Lodge Wednesday morning. Their retreat seemed to be going on as planned. They probably didn’t even know what had happened to Nicole, but then it had nothing to do with them. Over their bright shirts they wore matching navy blue fleece jackets adorned with their company name. They were headed toward their meeting room, probably just having finished breakfast.

This morning’s version of white sky didn’t have a hint of sun, but was just a thick layer of opaque clouds. There was nothing to reflect off a shiny surface and not a shadow to be found.

I was early and it was chilly standing outside waiting for Lucinda and Tag, so I went inside to get a hot drink for the road. I really appreciated Tag using the restaurant van to pick up the group to take us to the ranch and I wondered if Tag would have a fit if I brought a coffee into his pristine vehicle.

I was surprised—no, stunned—to see Will Welton, dressed in his usual work clothes of plaid flannel shirt over snowy white T-shirt and loose jeans, coming out of the café, holding a white paper cup. I put my arms around him and said, “I’m so sorry about Nicole.”

He swallowed a few times and we moved off to the side. “Are you sure you ought to be working today?”

“It’s worse if I stay home,” he said. Now that I looked at his face I saw that his even features looked drawn and his skin looked pale. He stared at the ground. “I had no idea . . .” He let the train of thought drift off before he composed himself and faced me. “I am so sorry for you. I know this leaves you in a lurch. If there is anything I can do.”

I felt funny mentioning the retreat under the circumstances, but he had asked. “I’m sure you know I was pretty much completely depending on her to run the whole fleece-to-yarn part of the program. Do you think she had some kind of playbook? Something I could follow, since it looks like I’m going to be doing it now. And she was going to bring a number of spinning wheels?”

He fished in his pocket for a key and handed it to me. “To be honest, I don’t know what she had. But go to her studio and take whatever you need.” He looked away and seemed to be losing his composure. I thanked him and he walked away without looking back.

As I stepped into the café, Jane was standing with the delivery guy, signing a clipboard. He started to take it back, then flipped a page and asked her to sign the one she’d missed.

While she made my drink, I brought up Will and how surprised I was to see him. He’d told Jane that Nicole had killed herself. “The worst is, he’s blaming himself. They think she used some insecticide he had in the shed. Some stuff he’d mixed up from some old recipe. The main ingredient is cyanide,” Jane said, setting my drink on the counter.

I took my coffee and went back into the main part of the Lodge. I hadn’t realized how early I was. None of my group was there yet.

While I waited, my mind wandered to my experience with Dane—which bummed me out. I wondered who the woman was.

But there was no time to dwell on that now. I looked out the window just as the Blue Door van pulled up. I looked at my coffee cup, glad that I’d let Jane put one of the plugs in the opening. There was less chance that I’d spill any in the van and make Tag go nuts.

Tag already had the side door open when I came outside. I saw him eyeing my coffee cup and he pointed out the drink holders and requested I keep my cup there when we were moving. Lucinda got out of the front seat and joined us. She was wearing a Ralph Lauren jacket that resembled an Indian blanket. She stepped close to me. “Any news about anything?”

Tag wanted to be included and stepped next to his wife. I looked around and saw we were alone. “I don’t want to talk about this in front of Olivia, Bree and Scott. There is no reason to burden them with the problems of the retreat or anything about Nicole. They didn’t even know her.” I surveyed the area again just to make sure before I told them what I had learned about Nicole’s death.

“Suicide, huh,” Tag said. “I talked to her a bit now and then. I got the feeling she had begun to sour on Cadbury. Her husband is so popular with everybody but I don’t think she was. She was too big for the room, as the saying goes. You have to work at fitting in, in a small town like this. Maybe it got to her.”

I mentioned the contents of the note. Tag’s interest perked up. “She was doing something bad? I wonder what?”

I saw Olivia, Bree and Scott walking together toward the van so I quickly changed the subject and asked Tag how long he thought it would take to get to the sheep ranch. Lucinda laughed silently and winked at me. She knew what I’d done. For all Tag’s attention to detail, he sometimes missed the obvious, like me changing the subject. He was going on about his calculations as I greeted my group and we all got in the van.

Tag was still giving times based on traffic, stoplights and road work as we clipped on our seat belts. He only stopped long enough to make sure I’d “sheltered my cup,” as he put it.

As soon as we got on the highway, I heard a squeal come from the seat behind me. When I turned, I saw that Bree was holding up her phone triumphantly.

“I got a signal,” she said, showing the face of the phone to all of us. Olivia and Scott took out their phones as well. I heard them muttering that the line at the pay phones had been unmanageable.

As soon as we left the peninsula, as if by magic the weather changed and the scenery did as well. Suddenly the clouds got thinner and thinner until there was blue sky with sun streaming down and there were tall mountains on either side of us. It felt kind of like the movie version of
The Wizard of Oz,
when it went from black-and-white when Dorothy was in Kansas to Technicolor when she arrived in Oz. Soon, all that was left of the clouds were wispy fingers of fog that clung to the mountaintops. I watched as a hawk glided through the filmy white.

Everything was green. Not the dark green moisture-holding green of the Monterey pines and Monterey cypress trees. This was bright green, spring green. The mountains’ sides were covered in grass and there were dots of black steers grazing. This was a different sort of rustic than where I lived. It was a more lush version of rural now that we were in the Carmel Valley. Organic lettuce farms, vineyards, horse farms and housing developments around verdant golf courses all whizzed by. We passed wine-tasting rooms and houses on big lots.

“I’m thrilled about this outing,” Bree said, putting her phone down on the seat, “but the schedule you gave us yesterday listed the sheep shearing as Thursday afternoon at Vista Del Mar.”

I’d forgotten I’d given them the folders with the information on the weekend when they’d arrived. “It seemed like a better idea to do it this way,” I said. “Such a lot of bother to bring the sheep to Vista Del Mar.”

“You listed it as the kickoff of the whole retreat. It sounded like a dramatic beginning,” Olivia said. “But I suppose this is much nicer for the sheep. They don’t have to leave home.”

I heard Tag saying something in the front seat and Lucinda seemed to be trying to shush him. “I don’t see why you just don’t tell them the truth,” Tag said. “It isn’t as if it’s your fault that Kevin St. John waited until the last minute to tell you he wouldn’t allow the sheep on the premises.”

“Is that true?” Scott said. The air was much warmer coming in through the open window and Scott took off his jacket. They knew that Kevin St. John wasn’t exactly supportive of my retreats, so they understood when I explained, or really just repeated, what Tag had said.

I was glad when the subject got dropped as Tag turned off the road into a long driveway back toward a red barn. White fencing surrounded the grassy corrals on either side of the road. At the end we pulled in, in front of the barn. A black-and-white border collie ran up to the van as we got out. It started to try and corral us until the rancher came out and called the dog back. Nicole had told me that Buck Morrell’s story was similar to Tag and Lucinda’s. In his later life, he and his wife were living a dream of having a boutique sheep ranch. Buck, which I suspected wasn’t his real name, greeted us all.

The rancher was dressed in jeans and a denim work shirt. I noticed he wore cowboy boots, the expensive custom-made kind.

“The sheep are hanging out in the pen,” he said in a friendly manner. “Our shearer should be here any minute. Have a look around while you’re waiting.” He opened the door to the barn and led the way. I was expecting something full of straw and a little smelly. I was wrong on both accounts. It was more a museum than a barn. “This is the original,” he explained. He pointed at a new-looking structure done in the same red. “We built a new state-of-the-art version.”

Buck followed us as we fanned out. There were several old pieces of farm equipment that had been cleaned and polished to look like new. And some other stuff. A whole wall had been devoted to black-and-white photographs. As I began to look them over, the rancher joined me. “These are all from the old days. The ranch was much bigger and more of a working ranch than it is now.”

I stopped at a photograph of a man sitting on a horse. He was dressed in work clothes, but there was something about him. The only word I could think of was
dashing
. The photo was black-and-white, so I couldn’t tell the color of his hair, but I guessed it was dark brown with some waves. He was leaning forward on the horse as though he’d just come in from a hard day. A pair of leather work gloves hung from his jacket.

“That’s Edmund Delacorte,” the rancher said before explaining that the ranch had belonged to the Delacorte family. “Along with everything else, it seems,” he added, punctuating it with a laugh.

The name rang a bell. Hadn’t Cora Delacorte mentioned it the other day? “How does he fit in with the family?”

“He was Cora and Madeleine’s older brother,” the rancher said. “I gather he spent a lot of time out here. I think it was a hideaway for him.”

Before I could get more information, the shearer arrived, pulling on his coveralls. He went to a small temporary pen. While the rancher got the first candidate, I asked the shearer if the sheep minded.

His face had the look of someone who spent most of his time outside and wasn’t concerned with sunscreen. He stroked his chin. “I’d say it’s like giving a five-year-old a haircut. They don’t volunteer, but I think they feel better after.” We gathered around the small enclosure as the rancher led in one of the sheep with a rope halter. It looked like the standard Little Bo Peep variety, but the rancher said it was a breed called rambouillet. He did a short talk on there being two kinds of sheep, the meat sheep and the wool ones. The ones used for meat had shorter hair. He dealt only with wool sheep.

“This is Clover and she’s a ewe,” he said. When Bree heard the word
ewe
she got all excited and mentioned that the Ewes was the name of her knitting group.

“It’s a play on words,” she said, in case anyone hadn’t figured it out. She started snapping pictures on her phone, excited because she could send them right along to her boys. The shearer took the lead and got the animal in the middle of the pen, then he got the sheep on its side. He took out a pair of clippers that looked like the kind barbers used, only bigger. He positioned the sheep, then held it in place with his knee as he began to shear. I watched as all of her hair began to roll back on itself. The underside was shades lighter, but all of it looked soft and fluffy. It took only a few minutes for him to finish, coming away with the fleece in one large piece. He let the sheep up and it began to walk around the enclosure.

“You can pet her if you want,” the rancher said. Clover seemed to like the attention as I patted her head and looked into her eyes. Not exactly looked into. With their weird horizontal pupils it was hard to tell where she was looking, but when I stopped petting she leaned against the fence and pushed against my hip, wanting more. Buck mentioned that someone else had come out wanting the same number of fleeces recently. Clover was led back to the pasture and the next sheep brought in. Buck picked up the fleece and carried it out. Tag watched, taking in every detail, calling after the rancher when a piece of fleece fell free. I was glad to see my group seemed to be enjoying the outing. Olivia was taking pictures of Bree with the ewe so she could send it to her knitting group. Scott was interested in touching the fleece and was surprised at the slightly greasy feel that Buck explained was lanolin.

We watched them shear only two sheep. The rest had been done earlier and all the fleeces were loaded into the back of the van.

“That was great,” Bree said when we were all in the van on the way back. She was busy making use of the cell signal, sending more photos and text messages while talking about the outing. I was about to agree when Scott looked toward the back of the van at the sheep fleeces piled on sheets.

“So how exactly do we turn all that sheep’s hair into yarn?” he asked. I might have been able to wing it, if Tag hadn’t stepped in.

“I was wondering about that myself,” Tag said. “It would seem that there must be a number of steps, Casey. My understanding was that Nicole was the expert—”