Knitty Gritty Murder, page 15
Now she was standing in her entry with knitting bag in hand, watching through the open door as Bettina backed her Toyota out of the Frasers’ driveway. In a minute Pamela had joined her friend at the curb and they were on their way to the Farm, since that evening’s meeting of Knit and Nibble was to take place at Roland’s.
* * *
Melanie DeCamp opened the front door before they rang. She was accompanied by the DeCamps’ dachshund, Ramona, who was squirming with delight. The fact that Melanie held a leash that was tethered to Ramona’s collar suggested the reason for the animal’s excitement: a walk was in the offing.
Though the occasion was only a walk around the neighborhood, Melanie DeCamp was groomed with her usual fastidiousness, her blond hair pulled into a smooth twist and a long silky blouse in a flattering shade of cream lending elegance to her smooth black leggings.
“Please come in!” she welcomed them, stepping back and leading Ramona to a spot where she wasn’t underfoot. “You’re the first ones and Roland is still in the kitchen.” She smiled. “He’s very excited about the dessert he’s going to be serving.”
Bettina stepped over the threshold and Pamela followed her into the DeCamps’ living room. Bettina looked longingly at the comfortable armchair, but they knew that was always reserved for Nell. The room’s other seating possibilities were sleekly modern, a low-slung turquoise sofa and a matching low-slung chair.
“You’re going to have to help me up,” Bettina cautioned as she lowered herself onto the sofa.
Through the open door, they could hear Melanie greeting Holly and Karen and then Nell.
“I guess Holly isn’t bringing Claire tonight,” Bettina said as Pamela joined her on the sofa. “So we don’t have to think about whether the whole group should get a say about new members.”
But no sooner had she spoken than Holly stepped into the room saying, “Claire told me she wanted to come, but nobody was home when I stopped to pick her up.”
Noticing the look Pamela and Bettina gave each other, and interpreting it correctly, she raised a hand to her mouth and said, “I did a bad thing, didn’t I? I shouldn’t have just assumed I could add a new member on my own.” She glanced from one to the other.
“All the Knit and Nibblers should weigh in.” Nell had followed Karen, who had entered on the heels of Holly. “But no harm done. And it seems Claire isn’t that committed to joining anyway.”
She crossed the room to the comfortable armchair and Bettina spoke up, saying, “Go ahead, Nell. It’s yours.”
“Where’s Roland?” Holly nodded toward where Roland’s briefcase waited next to the low-slung turquoise chair that was usually his seat.
As if in answer, an electric mixer whirred into action in the kitchen.
Holly was looking very summery tonight, in shorts and a tie-dye T-shirt. The shirt echoed the orange streaks in her hair with bursts of orange against a dark background. She and Karen, who looked summery too in a cotton sundress that flattered her fair prettiness, took seats next to Pamela and Bettina on the sofa.
Once settled in the armchair, Nell had immediately reached into her knitting bag to pull out an in-progress elephant and the skein of yarn to which it was tethered. On the sofa, Pamela was studying once again the directions for the periwinkle blue sweater that would be her new project, and Bettina was pondering a length of knitting, taupe-colored, that had been set aside in mid-row. She contemplated first one side and then the other as if trying to decide which direction she had been going when she left off. Holly and Karen, with knitting bags on laps, were chatting.
Everyone, however, looked up when Roland strode into the room, preceded by Cuddles, the cat he had adopted from the litter of six that Catrina had produced nearly two years ago. Cuddles, the tiniest of the bunch, had grown into a splendid creature, glossy and black and devoted to Roland.
Roland pushed back his faultlessly starched shirt cuff to consult his impressive watch. “Ten minutes late,” he announced. “I apologize.”
With that, he lowered himself onto the turquoise chair, lifted his briefcase to his lap, and extracted a long swath of charcoal-gray knitting. Cuddles jumped up beside him.
“A new project?” Holly inquired as Pamela set aside the directions she had been studying and pulled from her knitting bag the ball of Australian yarn.
Pamela opened the magazine to the page with the photo of the sweater being modeled and offered it to Holly.
“Ohhh!” Holly glanced from the photo to Pamela and back to the photo. “This will look amazing on you,” she said. “You’re so tall and thin and—”
Bettina burst out laughing. “She’s not going to be the one wearing it,” she said, and she explained how Pamela came to be knitting a sweater destined to be worn not by her but by her friend.
“That is awesome!” Holly exclaimed when she had finished. “That is just so nice.” She leaned across Pamela to inspect the project in Bettina’s lap. “And what’s yours? I didn’t get a chance to ask you about it last week.”
Bettina picked it up and displayed a piece of knitting about twelve inches wide, several rows of ribbing followed by a few rows worked in the stockinette stitch.
“Taupe?” Holly asked. “Would you call that color taupe?” With her taste for the colors that enhanced her vivid beauty, Holly could be forgiven for puzzlement when confronted by a shade that evoked a carpet color chosen in the hope that it wouldn’t show dirt.
Bettina nodded.
“And you’re making something quite small,” Holly observed.
Bettina nodded again, mournfully this time, and said, “It’s a sweater for my little grand . . . grandchild.”
When there was no response, Bettina went on. “You’re thinking it should be pink. Or blue. Or apricot, like Karen’s lovely project.” She tipped her head toward Karen, who was sitting at the far end of the sofa. “I do too, for my beautiful little Morgan, but . . .”
And Bettina was off. Pamela had heard the lament many times before. She understood Bettina’s grief, though she herself would have faced more stoically the pronouncement by Morgan’s parents, academics both, that they were raising “an ungendered child,” in her mother’s words. “Not a girl.”
Bettina’s Arborville grandchildren were little boys, delighted with their grandfather’s basement workshop projects, but Bettina was not to have the pleasure of mall visits with a granddaughter. And “girly” clothes and toys had been proscribed.
With Bettina, voluble in her distress, sitting right next to her, Pamela had no choice but to echo Holly’s comforting murmurs. Across the room, Nell was listening too. Her lips were curved into a small knowing smile but her eyes, in their nests of wrinkles, were melancholy. When Bettina at last was silent, Nell spoke up.
“When I was a girl, girls had to be girly,” she said. “Some of us—maybe even most of us—were fine with that. I loved my dolls, and playing house. But girls who don’t want to be girly shouldn’t feel they don’t have a choice.”
At that moment, the front door opened and Ramona stepped in, her toenails clicking against the wooden floor. She was followed by Melanie, and in the pleasant hubbub of greeting, as well as Holly cooing over Ramona, any thoughts of refuting Nell’s point or agreeing with it were forgotten.
Melanie unleashed Ramona, who trotted down the hallway toward the back of the house. Then Melanie made a circuit of the room, exclaiming over each knitter’s work in progress. She especially lingered in front of Holly, stooping to get a better look. Holly’s project since she finished a sweater for her husband at Christmas had been a hand-knit dress in a bright tangerine yarn.
Holly rummaged in her knitting bag for the pattern book to display a photo of the finished product. It resembled a miniskirted pinafore knit in a stitch that created the effect of horizontal ripples. The model’s back was bare to the waist except for six narrow knitted straps connecting the skirt to a band at the neck.
“That is fantastic,” Melanie enthused. “And the tangerine will be perfect with your skin and hair. If I was younger . . . and maybe in blue . . .” She bobbed to her feet.
For his part, Roland was just casting off. He dispatched the last few stitches, folded the piece of knitting—a sweater back or a front by the looks of it—and nestled it into his briefcase. After clicking the briefcase closed and replacing it beside his chair, he pushed back his shirt cuff to check his watch. With a nod and a brisk “Back on schedule,” he rose and headed for the kitchen with Cuddles scampering along at his heels.
Melanie perched on the edge of the chair that Roland had just vacated and joined the conversation, which centered on the town’s proposal to host a farmers’ market in the library parking lot on Sundays during the summer. The topic was uncontroversial, though Pamela wondered what objections Roland might have raised had he not been in the kitchen.
A cry of “Melanie!” from that direction was followed by “Never mind, I found it” and shortly afterward the aroma of brewing coffee announced that refreshments would soon be arriving.
In a few minutes Roland entered bearing a pewter tray holding five cups of steaming coffee, as well as two empty cup and saucer sets. The cups and saucers were pale porcelain, elegant but simple in their design. He set the tray on the coffee table and waved Melanie back in her seat when she rose to help as he headed back the way he had come.
On his return, he set a second tray beside the first, taking care to align the trays so they were perfectly parallel. The second tray was also pewter, and it held a porcelain teapot and cream and sugar set that matched the cups and saucers, a pile of small napkins, and forks and spoons.
As he turned toward the hallway that led to the kitchen once again, Bettina struggled to rise from the low-slung sofa. “Roland, please,” she said. “Let me help carry things.”
“No, no, no!” he called over his shoulder. “Just a few more trips.”
It took four more trips in fact, Cuddles making the circuit each time as well, as Melanie served the coffee and tea. Finally Roland fetched a wooden chair from the dining room, pulled it up next to Melanie, who occupied his knitting chair, and tried unsuccessfully to hide his pleasure as people exclaimed over his creation.
To begin with, it was impressive to look at: a wedge of pie containing sliced fresh strawberries suspended in a shimmering jelly that was itself a deep red strawberry color. Each slice was topped with a cloud of whipped cream.
The jelly was Jell-O, Roland confessed, but with an admixture of cornstarch and extra sugar that made it linger in the mouth like a dense fruit syrup. The syrup was chilled, he explained, and then the raw strawberries folded in. The mixture was poured into a prebaked crust and chilled again, so the result was a refreshing summery pie, topped with the whipped cream that offered a contrast to the acidic note of the fresh strawberries.
From Bettina, on Pamela’s left, came moans of pleasure as she lifted forkfuls of pie topped with dabs of whipped cream to her mouth. Not until her plate was empty did she turn her attention to sugaring and creaming her coffee to her preferred sweetness and hue. Holly, however, put her reaction into words, pronouncing the pie just “too, too amazing.”
Bettina took a sip of coffee and lowered her cup to its saucer. “I can’t decide, Pamela, whether your cake or Roland’s pie is a better thing to do with fresh strawberries.”
“Fresh strawberry cake!” Holly swiveled toward Pamela. “That is awesome! What do you do?” A dimple-inducing smile underscored her enthusiasm.
Not wanting to rob Roland of his moment in the limelight, Pamela said, “It’s a little hard to describe, but I’ll email you the recipe first thing tomorrow.”
“Strawberries are at their peak now, that’s for sure.” Nell joined the conversation. “Did you know the Native Americans right here in northern New Jersey used to harvest the wild ones?”
“Wild strawberries?” Holly exclaimed. “Like that Swedish movie?”
“They’re around,” Nell said. “I come across them every once in a while in my yard. They’re little and sour, though. We get spoiled with our Co-Op strawberries.”
Heads nodded in agreement, and with the topic seemingly exhausted, people focused on their coffee.
But Nell spoke up again. “My rhubarb is ready, though, and there’s plenty if anyone wants to claim some now. Just let me know when you’re coming.”
Pamela did want to claim some, and she gave Nell a smile and a nod.
With a glance at his watch, Roland rose and began clearing away plates and silverware. Melanie replaced the dining room chair and excused herself. Soon fingers were busy once again looping and twisting yarn as needles clicked and crisscrossed, and Roland had resumed his usual seat with Cuddles at his side.
Pamela was finding concentration crucial to the launch of her new project. The seersucker stitch involved sequences of knitting one stitch, two, or three, before switching to purl or purling one stitch, two, or three before switching to knit. Wandering attention meant purls or knits popping up where they didn’t belong. It was a pleasure, though, to finger the delicate yarn and observe how the muted blue color enhanced the textured seersucker effect.
She looked up from her work, however, when she heard Bettina say, “What are you doing, Roland?”
He was evidently casting on for the next part of his project. That much seemed clear, because he was using the same charcoal-gray yarn that he had used for the section completed right before the break.
He glanced up with a frown, raised a finger, and intoned, “Twenty-one and counting.”
“Sorry,” Bettina whispered, ducking her head in self-effacement.
The next section of Roland’s project apparently required a large circular needle and two skeins of yarn deployed at once. He murmured more numbers, checked the count of cast-on stitches by fingering them two at a time, then started the cast-on process again, but with the second skein of yarn.
Pamela returned to the row she had been in the middle of and checked back over what she’d done, to verify that the next step in the sequence was to be three purls. Bettina, however, continued to watch Roland.
After a bit, Pamela heard her repeat her original query. “Casting on,” Roland replied. Without looking up, Pamela could picture his expression: a look he probably lobbed across a conference table when forced to explain a legal argument that he considered self-evident.
“Why the circular needle and two skeins of yarn?” Bettina inquired.
Pamela did look up then—conveniently, she had reached the end of a row. Holly and Karen, and even Nell, had gotten interested. “What’s it going to be?” Holly asked.
“Sleeves, of course.” Pamela had been correct about his expression, and now it intensified. But faced with a gallery of puzzled knitters, he explained.
“It’s a technique for making sure the sleeves turn out exactly the same length. Both sleeves are in progress at once and you knit a row on each one and then another row on each one and so on. You just keep switching from one skein of yarn to the other.”
Once the explanation launched, he warmed to the subject, seemingly as proud of his expertise as if he had been called to elucidate a difficult point of law.
“My neighbor told me about it,” Roland went on. “We got to comparing notes about our hobbies and it turns out he’s a knitter too. Ed Holt, just over in the next block.”
Pamela felt the sofa tremble, then Bettina seized her arm. “Ed Holt?” Bettina nearly shrieked it. Roland drew back in alarm and laid a soothing hand on Cuddles’s head.
“Is Ed Holt related to Deb Holt?” Pamela asked the question, trying to sound matter-of-fact. “She’s that local caterer. Bettina and I are great fans of her food.”
“I believe he is,” Roland said. “Related by marriage, that is. He’s her husband.”
“Such a coincidence,” Pamela murmured. Next to her Bettina had turned rather pink, and her expression suggested she was barely containing her eagerness to discuss this interesting new development. Deb had been so adamant about not knitting, but if her husband knit . . .
Roland had begun knitting now, deploying one skein of yarn while the other rested next to it in his lap. A strand of yarn from each skein led to the circular needle on which the sleeves would gradually take shape.
Pamela studied the narrow strip of knitting hanging from her needle and consulted her directions before launching another row. Soon she was caught up in the rhythmic dance of needles, fingers, and yarn, enjoying the conversation that ebbed and flowed around her without feeling a need to contribute. Roland’s voice chimed in occasionally, and even little Karen’s, but mainly Holly, Bettina, and Nell were comparing notes on the pleasures and perils (mosquitos!) of outdoor entertaining in the summer, though they were all largely in favor.
Uncharacteristically, Bettina was the first to pack up her work. As she tucked away the skein of taupe yarn and the needles with project attached, she whispered, “I can’t wait to talk. Hurry and finish that row.”
Across the room, Roland hurriedly checked his watch. “Not quite nine,” he commented. “Only ten to.”
But the others apparently felt they had done enough for one night, and soon Roland was on his feet, nodding at the compliments and thanks echoing around him.
“Really,” Bettina assured him as she and Pamela stepped onto the DeCamps’ porch, “it was one of the best strawberry recipes that I’ve ever tasted.”
They made their way down the walk that bisected the DeCamps’ artfully landscaped yard, followed by Holly, Karen, and Nell. The evening was clear, summery with the fragrance of flowery yards and cool with the moisture exhaled by the sweeping lawns that characterized the Farm. When they all reached the curb, Holly and Karen veered off toward Holly’s orange VW Beetle, but Nell lingered behind, though Holly was giving her a ride up the hill to her house in the Palisades.
“Do come for some rhubarb soon,” she told Pamela. “I have so much more than I can use—though I do freeze a lot. Not everyone knows what to do with it, but I suspect you have lots of good ideas.”
Pamela assured her that she’d be stopping by and squeezed her hand in thanks.
