Death of a Crafty Knitter (17 page)

The group fell silent.

Someone began to snicker.

Another woman, who'd seemed more interested in her knitting than anything else until that point, spoke up. "She was kind of horrible. I was going to drop out of the knitting club, actually, but I worried she'd put one of her voodoo curses on me."

"Me too," Barbara said in her strident, self-assured voice. "I was afraid to cross her."

With Barbara's admission, the energy of the whole room changed, like we'd all been held inside a bottle of champagne, and the cork popped off with a few magical words
. Voula Varga wasn't that nice.

Everyone started sharing their true feelings. Voula had been a creepy, scary lady, and a bully, but nobody had dared to think about it too much, let alone talk about it, for fear of getting hit with bad mojo.

We passed the whiskey bottle around the circle, then raised our glasses.

Barbara stood and proclaimed, her voice as clear as a church bell on Christmas morning, "Ding dong, the witch is dead!"

The last guests
left at two o'clock in the morning, at which point a confused-looking Jessica roused herself from the guest bedroom, made herself a plate from the leftover food, then quaffed another dose of cold medicine before returning to the guest bed.

As I lay awake in my own bed, mulling over the revelations of the evening, I considered taking a dose of the cold medicine myself, just to shut off my brain. What troubled me most was that I hadn't gotten anywhere with my investigation into Voula's connection to Bernard Goldstein.

The Misty Falls Crafty Knitters had been more than willing to talk about their distaste for the woman whose wake we were at, but nobody would spill the beans about Goldstein or the potential investment. Something was going on, right under my nose, but I couldn't see it.

I rolled onto my side to check the time on my alarm clock for the millionth time. 3:17 a.m. There was a chance my father was still up—he gets insomnia sometimes, just like me—so I reached for my phone.

My bedroom was dark, and I didn't see His Regal Grayness sitting where I expected to find my phone. Naturally, he assumed that my clumsy gesture, in which I barely grazed the side of his body, was an attempt to grab him for something horrible, like a late-night car ride to the vet, or a bubble-bath party. He let out a mournful meow and made a daring leap for his life, in the direction of my dresser. Unfortunately, he was barely full-grown, and still had the dangerous optimism of a kitten. He overshot his landing by about three toes, and scratched his way down the front of the drawers, taking a few dresser-top items with him.

Once the breaking sounds stopped, I turned on the light to survey the damage. A ceramic good-luck cat I'd bought as a souvenir during my travels in China was in smithereens on the floor, along with the tiny cactus my father had given me as a housewarming present. The cactus would be fine once I swept up the sandy dirt and put it back into the pot, which was made of hammered copper.

I got a dustpan and started cleaning. Jeffrey circled around, looking equal parts curious and guilty.

"Don't feel too bad," I told him. "You're a naughty boy sometimes, but I know this was an accident. I groped you in the dark unexpectedly, and you ran off so fast, you weren't paying attention to where you were going."

I finished sweeping up, patted the dirt back around the thumb-sized miniature cactus, then bent down to kiss Jeffrey goodnight. He shied away and ran out of the bedroom.

I got back into bed and softly called to him, reassuring him that I knew it was just an accident.
Just an accident.
Sleepiness came, and I started to drift.

With my dreams came a nightmare: headlights glaring in my eyes from an oncoming vehicle.

I sat up in bed with a start, my heart pounding and my whole body drenched in sweat.

"The accident," I croaked to myself in the dark.

My subconscious had put it together, thanks to a clue from Jeffrey. He'd knocked my collectibles over because he'd been upset by something; on the day I found Voula's body, I was pushed off the road by a vehicle running wild. What were the chances that same vehicle had continued on a path of chaotic destruction? And what were the chances it was involved in the auto collision that had delayed the police in arriving at the murder scene?

There would be records of everyone in the accident, and eyewitnesses, too. I placed my hand on my chest, over my heart. I'd calmed down from the nightmare, but now my heart was racing because of something new: the identity of Voula's killer was just a phone call or two away.

It was 5:30 a.m.—early. I jumped out of bed and rushed to get dressed.

As luck would have it, Jessica was already up and making coffee, still sick but rested from twelve hours of sleep. I caught her up on my new theory.

She twisted her long red hair into a French braid while we talked.

"Sounds like I missed a wild party," she said.

"But I cracked the case."

"Did you? Your two suspects are Barbara's ex-husband, who was hiding money that Voula found, plus whoever was driving like a maniac on the first of January. Holy snickerdoodles! Stormy, what if it was him behind the wheel? That would pretty much clinch it, right?"

I wiggled in my chair excitedly. "Can you imagine? I'd be two for two on solving murders."

She kept braiding her hair, reaching the base of her neck for the easy part, fingers flying.

"Promise you'll be careful," she said.

"I'm not going to make a citizen's arrest. I'll pass the information on to the police, or… actually, I'll let my father do that."

"You'll let him take all the credit?"

"Um…"

My phone buzzed on the table with an incoming text, right on cue. It was my father, responding to my dozens of early-morning text messages explaining my theory about the vehicle accident and our possible suspects.

He'd replied—not with words, but with the cartoon image of a bear coming out of a cave, and a mug of coffee. I showed Jessica.

"His texting skills are improving," she said. "That actually makes sense."

"It does, right? Actually, it makes so much sense, I wonder if he sent the wrong images by accident."

Jessica tied her hair with an elastic, then snickered into her mug of coffee.

As for her question about letting my father take all the credit for solving the case, I wasn't sure. I'd never seen him as dispirited as the day he'd blown up about his painful hip rehabilitation, and I never wanted to see him looking that sad again.

I'd heard so many jokes about guys retiring and driving their wives nuts, but the jokes weren't so funny now that it was happening to Finnegan Day. What had he been thinking, taking the retirement offer? As soon as I asked myself the question, I already knew the answer. He'd retired so the department would have the budget for two new rookies. Now we had Peggy Wiggles and Kyle Dempsey. He'd done it for the town, without thinking of himself.

I would push all the credit over to him, to help him kick off his private investigation business—the one he still hadn't told me about.

First things first, though. We had to track down everyone involved in the accident, then check their alibis for the morning. The body had still been warm when I found it, so I didn't need a fancy crime scene investigation report to give me a window for time of death.

Who was the killer? I jumped to my feet as I drained the last of my coffee. I couldn't wait another second to find out.

Chapter 17

The sun was
still an hour from rising as I drove to my father's in the dark. I saw very few vehicles, as it was still too early for most people to drive to work. The cars I did see were likely heading toward one of the town's factories.

Misty Falls is a former mining town that was just too beautiful to disappear after the mines closed down. We now have a strong tourism economy in the summer, plus some manufacturing year round. Back in the fifties, smart investors bought up land and employed the out-of-work miners as workers at one of three factories: chopsticks, potato chips, and furniture. These days, both the furniture and chopsticks are resold under various private labels. You'll never know if the chopsticks you're using to stab your sweet and sour chicken balls came from Misty Falls, but you can spot our potato chips by their brand name, Aunt Jo's Crispy Spuds.

It's a little-known fact that the potato chips were originally packaged as Uncle Joe's Crispy Spuds. That only lasted a few months, because a local man named Joseph Bacon, of no relationship to the factory owners or the actor Kevin Bacon, felt the artwork of the cartoon Uncle Joe on the packaging infringed on his life rights. The issue never went to court, because the cartoonist admitted to basing the image of the grinning, baldheaded, chip-eating man on Joseph Bacon, who ran the cafeteria counter at the town's only department store. Plus, anyone who had two eyes in their head could see the resemblance.

Rather than simply redrawing the cartoon with some hair, the marketing department at the factory ran some focus research testing—a newfangled practice at the time—and discovered that mothers who made the family's purchasing decisions preferred to buy potato chips from a cartoon
woman
, because they trusted a woman to provide a nourishing, vegetable-based snack for their children.

The marketing department offered every woman in town named Josephine or Joanna a fifty-dollar check in exchange for a personal release statement, just in case. Five hundred dollars later, Uncle Joe became Aunt Jo. It would have only been four hundred and fifty dollars, but an enterprising local couple changed the name of their just-born baby girl from Mary to Jody-Mary.

That's how my aunt Jody-Mary got her name, according to family legend.

These days, a new potato chip brand would probably launch with a fake old-fashioned label worthy of framing, plus a whole backstory about organic, fair-trade farmers who sing their baby potatoes to sleep. Personally, I'm a fan of Aunt Jo, with her curls freshly set from the hairdresser, and her good pearls worn proudly around her neck.

As I pulled up in front of my father's house, the DJ on the radio was talking about the unusual wind direction that was wafting the factory's potato chip smell into town. I rolled down my window to sniff the air, which did smell of deep-fried potatoes. I couldn't tell if the scent was real or my imagination, and puzzled over this, using my fingers to close one nostril and then the other.

My father came out of his house, using his cane to steady himself, and slowly climbed into the passenger side. He huffed and said, "It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good."

"You smell those potato chips too, Dad?"

"Only when I breathe."

I put the car into drive, but didn't step on the gas. "Where are we going, anyway?"

"I reckon the junkyard will be open to those who know which gates don't lock." He pointed in the direction of the town's only auto wrecker. "I checked the newspapers, both yesterday's and today's, but the only mention of the accident was brief and didn't include any names. Apparently there was some big murder in town that took up all the pages."

"You don't say. Any new details?"

He scoffed as he put on his seatbelt. "Only superstitious voodoo nonsense, but I did find one line about the accident, saying both vehicles were write-offs."

I started driving. The sky had turned navy blue, with a fringe of fuchsia between the snow-dusted mountain peaks.

I would have asked why we were driving to the auto wreckers instead of waiting until places were open for phone calls, but I suspected he was testing me. This was part of my interview, before he asked me to be his private investigating partner, assuming he was still moving ahead with that.

The answer came as we approached the chain-link fence surrounding the wrecker yard.

I turned to my father and said, with a sly smile, "You think I'll recognize the vehicle that nearly ran me down."

A grin spread across his face, making him look years younger. He was proud, and so was I.

"It's worth a shot," he said casually.

"A long shot." I'd been so surprised and shaken up by the incident that I hadn't been able to describe anything about the vehicle to the police, but there was a slim chance seeing it again might trigger my memory. Then again, it could be like the potato chip smell, where the mere suggestion played tricks on my head.