A Denial of Death (2 page)

Martha Waddell didn’t seem to notice the stifling heat or be in any hurry to get back inside. She matched her steps to Helen's. "Did you get a new car?"

"Just test-driving it."

"SUVs are good for the winter here," Martha said, "but that particular model gets dreadful mileage, you know. Check out the Subaru Forester. It gets at least twice the miles per gallon."

"Thank you." Helen might not particularly like the know-it-all assistant administrator—no one really did—but the woman's advice, solicited or not, was generally solid. "I'll look into it."

"Betty and Josie wouldn't tell me why, but they're anxious to talk to you."

Helen was afraid she knew why. They'd been teaching her to crochet a simple hat, and, contrary to all the evidence so far, they insisted on believing her next finished project might be something a person would voluntarily put on her head.

*  *  *

The activity room of the Wharton Nursing Home looked like something out of a period-piece movie or television show depicting the end of the nineteenth century, except that it was occupied by elderly men and women in T-shirts and shorts or capris instead of elegant young couples in formal attire. Where once uniformed servants unobtrusively roamed the room, now there were equally unobtrusive nurses in scrubs.

Helen looked for her friends, Betty Seese and Josie Todd. Betty was in her late seventies, tall and dressed in somber black most of the time, relieved only by snippets of brightly colored yarn clinging to her clothes. Her constant companion, Josie, was a few years older, a good deal shorter and thinner, and emphatically more brightly-hued, from the henna highlights in her hair to the yellow oversized T-shirt and lime green leggings.

The two women usually claimed a pair of wingback chairs at the far end of the room, near the massive fireplace, where they could keep their nearsighted but still observant eyes on all the other occupants of the room. Thursdays were different. For the two hours of the Charity Caps Day event, they mingled with the other volunteers, overseeing the creation of preemie caps and chemo caps for donation to the local hospital. One table was set up for sewing them out of fleece, but most of the work was done with yarn and needles or hooks.

Betty and Josie made the cap-making look easy, but no matter how beautiful the yarn was or how easy the pattern was supposed to be, Helen always ended up with a misshapen mess, caused by an assortment of added stitches, dropped stitches and uneven tension.

Josie had taken to unraveling and redoing Helen's crocheted projects, and Helen pretended not to notice. She'd tried knitting too, under Betty's patient tutelage, but that had led to even bigger disasters. In a misguided attempt to encourage her student, Betty had added Helen's first knit cap to the donation basket, as if there really might be a patient with a pointy head, possibly with a few squid-like tentacles that needed to stick out through the random openings of missed stitches. Helen had gone back to crochet, which seemed simpler, but was still proving elusive.

She finally caught sight of Josie standing next to the donation basket. Helen reluctantly handed over her latest attempt at making a cap. Josie didn't recoil in horror but ran her bony hand over the soft yarn and said, "What a lovely shade of purple. I'm sure someone is going to love it."

Which was true, Helen thought. The yarn was beautiful, and someone would love the cap. After Josie had unraveled it and re-made it from scratch.

Betty came over, took one look at the purple blob, and said, "I'm not so sure needlework is the right hobby for you."

Helen sighed. "I know, but I need to do something with my time." She was only forty-five, after all, and, despite the lupus flare-ups and her nieces' annoying but well-intentioned attempts to keep her from taking any risks whatsoever, she wasn't done with living.

"There has to be something you're really good at," Betty said.

"I'm good at planning political events, but I've done enough of that. I'd rather do something that feels more useful."

"You should become a private investigator," Josie said. "You solved Melissa's murder when the police went after the entirely wrong suspect."

Helen hadn't intended to solve the murder. Not really. She'd simply been miffed, because the police hadn't taken her seriously. Catching the killer had been a fluke, a once-in-a-lifetime experience she hoped never to have again. She was looking for a quietly interesting pastime, not an extreme sport.

Helen tapped her walking cane on the floor beside her. "I'm not really in any condition to chase down bad guys."

"No, but you could outsmart them," Betty said. "You may not be able to run or even to knit, but you can think. In the end, that's a lot more useful."

"Perhaps," Helen said. "But I can't see how I'd convince potential clients of that. They'd be looking for a tough person like James Garner in
The Rockford Files
or Kinsey Milhone in Sue Grafton's alphabet series. Not someone like me. I can't see much advertising potential in the slogan, 'I'm tougher than I look.'" 

Betty and Josie exchanged a glance, and then Betty did the talking. "Actually, you wouldn't need to advertise. We'd like to hire you."

"Why would you need a private investigator?" Helen came up with the answer while they were trying to decide which of them should explain. Betty and Josie were famous within the nursing home, and probably throughout all of Wharton, for knowing the best gossip, most of which was nothing more than wild conjecture based on their observations of the nursing home residents and their visitors. Their stories were generally considered to be better than anything on television or in the movie theaters, and their audience could never get enough of them. "Wait. I'm not going to spy on people and report back to you about their romantic escapades."

"We don't need you for that." Josie absently undid the knot at the top of the purple blob Helen had spent two weeks making. "We're good at ferreting out romances and feuds all by ourselves."

"We've got something bigger for you to investigate," Betty said. "We want you to look into a possible murder."

"We're hoping it's just a missing person case." Josie tugged at the end of the purple yarn and began wrapping the unraveled yarn around her fingers to make a ball. "Angie might still be alive."

"Have you talked to the police?"

"Of course we did. Hank Peterson was here visiting his uncle." Josie paused in her ball-making. "I can't remember. Have you met Hank?"

Helen nodded. Detective Hank Peterson had been in charge of investigating the murder of Helen's visiting nurse four months ago.

"Then you probably have a good idea of how he reacted when we told him we were worried about Angie," Josie said. "He kept patting Betty's hand and making condescending comments about interfering old biddies until she stabbed him with one of her needles."

"I just wish it hadn't been a big plastic one," Betty said. "Barely got his attention. One of my sharp brass needles for knitting lace would have made much more of an
impression
on him."

It helped a little to know that Helen wasn't the only person the detective had underestimated. She'd had the satisfaction of proving him wrong by catching her nurse's killer while he'd been off chasing the wrong suspect. Betty and Josie deserved the same vindication. That didn't mean Helen was the right person to help them, though.

"What about asking Geoff Loring to look into your friend's disappearance?" Helen had met the
Wharton Times
reporter at the courthouse a few months ago, when he'd thought a tell-all interview with the governor's ex-wife was his ticket to a career in investigative journalism. "He could ask around for you."

"He doesn't do hard news any more," Betty said. "He sticks to writing personal-interest stories now. He's pretty good at it, actually, better than he ever was at hard news."

"We did think about suggesting he interview Angie about her volunteer work, hoping he'd go see her, and then we'd know if she was missing or not," Josie said. "We decided it wouldn't be fair to send him into the lion's den unprepared. If Angie's really missing, then he could stumble into a dangerous story. Even if she's not missing, it could be scary. She'd be mean to him, and then he'd be too afraid to interview anyone ever again, and he'd be out of a job, and it would be our fault. None of that would be a problem for you. You're strong enough—mentally and emotionally, that is—to deal with anything Angie throws at you."

Helen was curious now. "Who is this Angie?"

"Angie Decker," Betty said. "She's been coming to our Charity Caps Days for at least a year. She makes preemie caps mostly, and they're exquisite. Perfectly even little stitches in the softest yarn you've ever touched."

"Pretty pastel colors, too," Josie said. "Newborns, especially preemies, can't handle bright colors, you know."

"I've heard that." Helen's younger niece, Laura, couldn't talk about much other than babies these days, while she was trying to get pregnant. "But why do you think she's been murdered?"

"She hadn't missed a single Charity Caps Day in at least a year," Betty said. "Then, three weeks ago, she didn't show up, and she didn't call or text or email or anything. Not then or the next week. We were hoping she'd be here today, but since she isn't, well, it's worrisome."

"Maybe she's just been busy," Helen said, thinking of her friends' propensity for fabricating wildly improbable stories out of the least little thing. "Or out of town."

"That's what Detective Peterson said," Betty said irritably. "We're not fools, and you know it. Something's wrong, and we're worried about Angie."

Even if the two women did tend to exaggerate events, they always had some evidence for their stories. "Just the facts, ladies. Is there anything other than her absence that's suspicious?"

Josie nodded. "Her husband. He's been bringing us a couple preemie caps every week, claiming she made them but had other commitments that kept her from coming herself."

"He sounds like a nice man."

"He's a
beautiful
hunk of a man," Josie said. "But the pretty ones are always guilty of something."

"You don't understand." Betty picked up the donation basket that held the tiny finished caps intended for preemies instead of adults and rummaged through it until she found the two examples she wanted, one in hot pink and the other in lime green. "He brought these today."

Helen didn't see what the women found so odd. "So?"

"So there's no way Angie made these," Betty said.

Josie explained, "For one thing, they're bright colors, not her usual pastels. And for another, the knitting tension is uneven. It looks like a beginner's work." She glanced down at the remains of the purple cap Helen had spent two weeks creating and that had, in a matter of minutes, been almost completely unraveled. "Sorry. No offense intended. Everyone has to start somewhere. But Angie wasn't a beginner."

Helen tried to see what the women were saying about the craftswomanship, but the cap looked perfectly fine to her. "Are you sure she didn't make these? Perhaps she just had a bad day or something?"

Betty shook her head. "Even on a bad day, Angie's work would never look like this. It's hard to explain, but to a serious knitter, a person's stitching is as unique as a fingerprint. I could pick Angie's work out of a line-up if I had to. And this isn't it."

"Who made it, then?"

"I can't tell you that," Betty said. "All I know is it's not one of the regulars here."

"I still can't believe Ralph would hurt Angie," Josie said. "He's too pretty for his own good, but he always seemed like a good guy. Way too nice for Angie. I sometimes think she makes the preemie caps as penance for all the mean things she does. Sort of like one stitch for every nasty thought she has, and a whole row for every time she yells at someone. Except she wouldn't have enough time in her day to do that much knitting."

"She is a prissy, bossy little thing," Betty said. "And she's downright mean to poor Ralph."

"They had their twentieth anniversary recently," Josie said. "Poor Ralph. I hope she wasn't miserable to him the whole time. I'd like to think they were madly in love once. Maybe she's only turned mean in the last few years, and he sees her through the lens of the memories of good times."

"Until he killed her," Betty said, obviously relishing the thought. "If he finally saw her for what she really is, it must have come as a shock. That's probably why he did it."

"You think he snapped and killed her?" Helen was mildly disappointed by their theory. It was such a cliché, the basic plot of countless novels and movies. It might have been reasonably fresh when Hitchcock did
Rear Window
, but it wasn't up to the two women's usual standards of gossip. "I suppose he buried her in the back yard and told everyone she'd gone to visit family?"

"Something like that," Betty said. "We can't imagine why else he'd be trying to hide the fact that she's gone. Detective Peterson said there hasn't been a missing persons report filed, so there's nothing the police can do. He just laughed when we said we'd be willing to file the missing persons report if Ralph won't do it. He told us to mind our own business and go back to making doilies."

"As if," Josie said with disdain. "I've crocheted just about everything it's possible to crochet, from caps to parking-meter cozies, but I've never, ever, ever so much as thought about making a doily."

"Not that there's anything wrong with doilies." Betty nodded toward a woman hunched over a lacy, fine-thread creation who was taking advantage of the light from the huge front windows. "Donna over there makes the most beautiful tatted doilies you could ever imagine. Sells them on Etsy for a pittance, but it pays for her supplies, and she's just glad to find someone who appreciates her work."

"We'd do the investigation into Angie's disappearance ourselves," Josie said, "but it would take too long to get permission to leave the nursing home. You don't have that problem."

"Will you do it for us?" Betty said.

"I'm really not qualified to investigate a missing person," Helen said, although she was intrigued by the idea. She understood how helpless the two women felt, completely dependent on others to get the answers they wanted, and unable to convince anyone to take them seriously. If Helen turned them down, she'd be acting as dismissively as Detective Peterson. They were probably just imagining a problem, but it would be easy enough to set their fears at rest. A brief visit to Angie's house should confirm she was alive and well and simply too busy to do her usual charity work.