Till Death Do Us Purl (16 page)

“I remember.” Nora nodded. “Was that only a year ago? It seems like much longer.”

It did seem as if much more time had passed, Lucy agreed. It had been an ordeal for them all. A local shopkeeper and rival knitting store owner, Amanda Goran, was found dead in her store and Maggie was the prime suspect. There were no eyewitnesses and very little evidence.

Maggie had nearly shut down her shop, overwhelmed by the gossip and false accusations. But she’d toughed it out, with a little help from her friends, until the real culprit was discovered.

The situation was not unlike Rebecca’s, Lucy realized. Which made Maggie all the more sympathetic to Rebecca’s cause.

“Is there anything we can do to help you?” Maggie asked.

Nora sighed and shrugged. “You’ve all been a great help, just hearing me out. I’m glad I came tonight. I needed to talk. My brother left right after the service and Rebecca is in such a state. She’s so fragile right now. I can’t talk to her frankly about all this anyway.”

“We’re here for you, Nora. Anytime,” Maggie promised. “If only we could do more than just listen,” she added, gazing around at her friends.

“Finding out who really killed Jeremy . . . that’s the only thing that can really help us now. I’m afraid for my daughter, ladies,” she said very quietly.

She stood up, ready to go. Maggie stood, too. “I’ll walk you to the door,” she offered.

Everyone around the table
called out good night and good wishes. Nora’s disclosures had left them all with an uneasy feeling.

It was an amazing reversal, Lucy thought. A few weeks ago, Nora and Rebecca had come here, bringing such high spirits and happiness with their wedding plans. Now it had come to this. An unthinkable deception and a murder investigation.

Once Nora left, they cleared away their dinner dishes and took extra care cleaning the table. “I hate it when my projects smell of Chinese food; you can never quite get it out,” Dana noted.

“That’s a bad thing?” Phoebe asked. “Josh likes me to do that on purpose.”

Dana and Lucy just looked at each other.

Everyone took out her knitting. Maggie brought in a platter of sliced fruit. Phoebe stayed in the kitchen to fix a pot of tea.

“Poor Nora,” Maggie said finally.

“Poor Rebecca,” Suzanne added.

“Poor Jeremy,” Lucy said. “He went through all that trouble to fake his death, but somebody wanted him dead for sure.” Lucy turned to Dana. “It’s just as you predicted. Sounds like the police consider Rebecca their prime suspect.”

“Unfortunately. But when you look at the big picture, you can understand why. She stands to gain the most, as far as anyone knows right now. The first time he died, he left her with piles of money. Then he came back and told her to send it all to some mysterious bank account. And wouldn’t say why he was running away, where he was going, or how they would be reunited. The police have to consider all that. She’s the most obvious suspect, and, it seems, the only one who saw him alive.
”

“It sounds real bad for Rebecca when you tell it that way, Dana.” Suzanne seemed genuinely disturbed. “You sound as if you think the poor girl is guilty.”

“I didn’t say that. But let’s try to be a tiny bit objective. Just look at the facts. Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, he did fake his death and she didn’t know he was alive until he got in touch the other day. Now Rebecca is the only one who does know he’s alive and knows where he is. And maybe she’s gotten used to her new net worth of a few million dollars and doesn’t like the idea of running off to Thailand or Dubai and living life on the lam.”

“Dana, really. I’ve known Rebecca since she was a little girl. She’s just not capable of such a thing,” Maggie protested, sounding truly distressed.

Dana offered a small smile and shook her head. “We’d all like to think that we know what people are capable of. But the truth is, no matter how people act in public, we know so little about them. About what’s going on under the surface. Case in point: Jeremy,” she reminded them.

“I believe Rebecca,” Lucy said, jumping in. “I really do. It’s just unfortunate that Jeremy never told her what, or whom, he was running from.”

“All we know for sure is that Jeremy set fire to the lab to escape some threat by playing dead,” Suzanne reminded them. “Maybe he had gambling debts or some horrendous secret he was running from.”

“That might be true,” Lucy agreed. “But I think it had to do with his work, his research. It keeps going back to that, don’t you think?”

“I agree with Lucy,” Maggie said firmly. “I think it’s about this mysterious glue formula. Maybe he was trying to steal the
invention and run away with it. It sounds like it was all his own work. Maybe he believed he had a right to keep it and didn’t care about saving the family company.”

“Employees doing creative work or research usually have to sign a disclaimer form, saying that everything they create or discover is the intellectual property of the company,” Lucy pointed out. “Do you think his father made him sign something like that?”

“His father sounds pretty hard-nosed and there was a lot of tension between them. Maybe they argued about the formula, whether it belonged to Jeremy or the company?” Maggie suggested.

“His father might have argued about this with Lewis Atkins, too,” Dana said.

“But from what you overheard at the service, Maggie, his sister said Jeremy’s research was on record. All they had to do was put the pieces together again,” Lucy recalled.

“Unless Jeremy kept a lot in his head and never documented the complete formula,” Maggie pointed out. “Remember those little scraps of paper Nora mentioned? It sounds like his formula was so sensitive and unique that one tiny missing ingredient would render it useless.”

“No one’s ever said if the formula was protected by a patent. But if it was so radical and valuable, it must be, right?” Lucy said. “I wonder if there’s some way to look that up.”

“There must be. Let me ask Jack about it,” Dana said. “He’s my go-to guy for legal research.”

Phoebe had left the table to make more
tea but now returned with both the teapot and a platter of fortune cookies that had come with the takeout. “Hey, we forgot the most important part of the meal. I’m going to spin it and everybody take one.”

“Do you have to spin it?” Maggie watched the plate go round, bouncing on the tabletop. “That’s one of my favorite platters.”

“That’s part of the fun, Mag. It’s like a wheel of fortune or something,” Phoebe explained.

Finally the plate stopped. “Okay, everyone take a cookie,” Phoebe instructed. “Let’s open them at the same time.”

Lucy felt a little silly, as did the rest of her friends, she noticed, but they all went along with Phoebe’s instructions. The little exercise lightened the mood a bit.

They all tore open the cellophane wrappers at once, creating a small but irritating racket. Then they crunched open the cookies and read their fortunes.

“‘Your hard work will be recognized and suitably rewarded,’” Suzanne read. “Great. Maybe I’ll sell a house this week. I’d settle for a rental,” she added.

“‘The greatest wisdom is kindness,’” Maggie read. “That’s not really a fortune. But it is true,” she conceded.

“‘Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing,’” Dana read. She laughed out loud. “Well, one has just revealed himself. If you consider Jeremy in the wolf category.”

Lucy’s was short and to the point. “‘Trust your intuition.’ Okay, I can go with that.”

“Wait, mine’s the best,” Phoebe announced. She cleared her throat, then read it aloud. “‘If love is the glue that holds the world together, guilt must be the staples.’”

Dana laughed. “That is a good one. I might use that
in my practice sometime.”

“It does ring true, doesn’t it?” Lucy said.

“It’s sort of uncanny if you ask me, with all this talk tonight about Jeremy’s glue formula. A message from the fortune cookie gods that we’re on the right track?” Maggie said playfully.

“So what are we saying here?” Phoebe asked. “Someone was after the glue formula and killed Jeremy in order to get it? Is that too obvious?”

“Not at all. I think that’s a strong possibility. Even more likely than Rebecca wanting to hang on to the money she inherited,” Dana conceded. “I’m sure the police must be following that line of reasoning, too.”

“Too bad Rebecca can’t tell us more about his work,” Lucy mused. “That might help us figure out who was after him.”

“There was one woman in his life who did understand,” Maggie reminded them. “Who worked with him side by side in his lab. Until very recently.”

“In his lab . . . and in his bed, if you believe what you hear at funerals,” Dana quipped.

“I usually do,” Maggie replied. “It would be fun to ask Erica Ferris a few questions. She could really shed some light.”

Suzanne was paging through a knitting magazine and suddenly looked up at Maggie. “Why would she talk to us? She doesn’t even know us.”

“That’s true, but . . . leave it to me. I’ll figure something out,” Maggie promised.

Lucy looked over at her, wondering what she had up her hand-knit sleeve. But she had long ago learned to never
underestimate the owner of the Black Sheep Knitting Shop.

Dana gave Maggie a look, too. “Do you really want to get involved in this, Maggie? The police are on the job, in force. I don’t think they really need our help.”

“I’m not so sure about that. And I’m not doing it to help the police. I’m doing it to help Nora and Rebecca. You urged her to find a lawyer. So you obviously agree that they need some advocates?” Maggie asked.

Dana gave her a look. But didn’t answer.

“I want to help them, too, if I can,” Lucy said.

“Me, too,” Suzanne agreed.

“Me, three,” Phoebe echoed.

“I’m just concerned. Let’s not get carried away and get ourselves in trouble again. Agreed?” Dana looked around at the circle of friends.

They all nodded solemnly. But Lucy thought she caught Maggie winking at her.

M
aggie arrived at the shop
the next morning and stood for a few moments on the front porch, thinking about cold-weather pansies. Shouldn’t they be in the nursery soon? She was eager to brighten up the storefront with some flowers.

The new window display was attractive, she decided. The amigurumi birds were cute and the knitting tote looked bountiful. She wasn’t sure if it had attracted any new customers, though.

But staring at it suddenly gave her an idea of how she might lure Jeremy’s former flame and lab partner over for a chat. A long shot, but worth a try, she decided.

As usual, she’d arrived well before nine, and left the front door sign flipped to the closed position,
SORRY WE MISSED YOU! WE’RE RESTING OUR NEEDLES RIGHT NOW
.

She liked time alone in the morning to survey her cozy kingdom. She put on a pot of coffee and looked over the displays, making sure the stock was arranged to its best advantage. She turned to the counter next. A respectable pile
of forms filled the basket by the register. Several people had thrown their names in to win the knitting tote in the window. She’d planned to keep it out there a while longer before announcing the winner.

But there would be two raffle baskets now. Fair or not, she already knew who the winner of the one in the window would be.

With the shop arranged to her standards, Maggie sat down with her coffee cup and the phone receiver, preparing for her performance.

She was glad Phoebe was not working this morning. It was best to do things like this alone, without answering a million questions. An audience would have made her too self-conscious.

She had already looked up At-Las Technologies online the night before and jotted down the phone number. She’d also Googled Erica Ferris, but didn’t find out much more than she already knew. Erica did have a PhD after her name and had published many scientific articles. Most had to do with something called polymers. Maggie had Googled Jeremy, too, and found even more credits for articles on his pages.

Maggie dialed the number and was soon connected to Erica. “Dr. Ferris?” she asked boldly. “This is Maggie Messina. I’m calling from the Black Sheep
Knitting Shop.”

“Are you selling something? I’m not interested . . . How do you people get office phone numbers anyway? Isn’t there some sort of law—”

“Please don’t hang up. I’m not a salesperson. This is important.” Maggie spoke quickly, hoping to catch her attention. “You’ve won a prize. A Black Sheep ‘You Can Knit! Starter Kit’—a complete set of needles, a bag, how-to books, and enough high-quality yarn to complete two beginner patterns. And three free knitting lessons,” she said quickly.

The scientist did not answer for a long moment. Now she really has hung up, Maggie thought.

“There must be some mistake. I never entered any contest at a knitting shop. You must have the wrong number.”

“I don’t. I’m sure of it,” Maggie insisted. “Maybe someone entered your name without your knowing. Don’t you know anyone who knits?”

She was going out on a limb here. But everyone knows someone who knits . . . don’t they?

“My sister-in-law, Janet. This must be her idea of a joke.”