A Finely Knit Murder (24 page)

“C
ome inside, Cass,” Nell said, one hand reaching out as if to protect her, to pull her back from a busy street.

But Cass had already climbed into the small, fast car—too far away to feel Nell’s touch. And before Nell could do anything, she backed out of the driveway and headed down Sandswept Lane, the BMW tires squealing,

Nell hurried back into the house, dialing Ben on the way. The call went directly to voice mail.

Izzy was standing by the counter with her car keys in her hand.

“I’m driving,” she said. “Birdie is staying here to wait for Sam and Ben and play with Abby.” She kissed the top of the baby’s head. “I know Cass’s anger better than anyone. We need to get to her.”

Nell pulled out her phone and dialed Ben again, then sent a text.

In minutes they were driving along the beach road, headed toward the lighthouse and the oceanside cottage that was being brought back to its pristine glory.

“It’s a good thing Red isn’t with us,” Izzy murmured. “She’d never let us stop at that house.”

“It’s a lot scarier now than when it frightened sweet Red,” Nell said.

A minute before they reached the cottage, Nell’s phone beeped. It was a text from Birdie.
Ben and Sam on way. Police called.
Bob Chadwick is awake.

Where is Danny?
Nell texted back. If they needed someone to keep Cass calm, Danny would be the one. Probably the only one.

He was the first out of the parking lot, driving like a madman,
Birdie replied.

They reached the cottage and slowed to a stop. Nell looked over at the main driveway. Cass had pulled right up to the cottage door, scraping Harry’s BMW against a bush.

On a side drive, hidden in a thicket of bushes, was Danny’s car.

Both cars were empty.

Nell and Izzy parked and walked up to the open door cautiously. Inside, the smell of fresh wood and paint greeted them. Through the screened door they saw a narrow hallway that led from the front door into a light-colored room that ran across the back of the house. Paint cans, plaster buckets, and new windows with stickers on them were visible.

But they couldn’t see Cass.

There was a figure in the shadowy hallway that they hadn’t noticed at first. He turned and looked toward them. It was Danny, with a finger pressed to his lips. With the other hand he motioned them closer.

They moved toward him and stopped at the end of the hallway, Danny’s broad shoulders shielding them from whatever was ahead of them.

And then they heard Cass’s voice. Angry and threatening. Her voice grew louder, almost as if she knew they were there.

“You took a life, Harry. A life!”

His angry answer equaled hers. “
She
took a life. My life. Stripped it away, without even letting me know there
was
a life. She took away my progeny!” He was screaming now. A frightening sound, as if he couldn’t control the volume—or the words. There was a shuffling of shoes. Then Harry went on talking.

“We had been good together. We came up here, went on a couple trips, fooled around. Then it broke up, just like her cousin Bob warned me it would. I didn’t see her around Boston, she
didn’t answer my calls, and Bob—he introduced us, you know—told me she was up here most of the time now. I thought, just maybe, we could put it back together again. I loved her. Maybe the first time I loved anyone. So I came up to just get the lay of the land, go slow. I called her a couple times, but she didn’t want to see me. I knew she’d be at that party, though. And somehow I thought if she saw me there, maybe it’d be a start anyway. And sure enough, she recognized me, even with the beard. And she didn’t turn away.”

No, Nell thought. She didn’t.
“Later,”
Blythe had said to Harry.

“I looked back and saw her point to the boathouse.” His voice rose and fell as if he was unsure of his own emotions. “She wanted to meet me there. It was going to work out after all.”

“So you went, you foolish man.”

“You’d gone home. I went down. I thought this was it, sure, we’d get together again. There she was, behind the boathouse, looking gorgeous. I was going to play it cool, but seeing her waiting there for me, it took my breath away. I blurted out that I loved her. I wanted to marry her.

“At first she was in shock. And then she began to laugh. ‘
Marry
me?’ she said. ‘Do you have any idea how
over
we are?’ Her words were filled with laughter. She was meeting me there to tell me never to contact her again or she’d call the police.

“And then . . . then she told me what she’d done.”

“‘That’s how
over
we are,’ she screamed at me.”

There was silence. Even those in the hallway felt the anguish Harry Winthrop had felt.
A pain so great.

They waited while the quiet grew, not knowing if Harry had a weapon. They tried to assess where Cass was in the room, if she was bound, how close she was to Harry—and what Harry’s next move might be. Above all, what was the safest way to get Cass out of that house?

“I didn’t mean to kill her,” Harry finally said. “I don’t kill
people. She laughed at me, said I was just another foolish man. She took something away from me that was mine, that was a part of me. Can you understand that?”

But Cass wouldn’t let go. She pushed and nudged—and scolded. “All those casualties—the whole town suffered at your hands. Especially Elizabeth Hartley. You tried to destroy her, too. What a cowardly thing to do. You stole her scarf and planted it. You didn’t care who you hurt.”

Cass sounded like a schoolteacher, reprimanding a wayward student. Nell restrained herself from telling her to be quiet, to remind her that the man she was scolding had killed someone—and tried to kill another.

But Cass was angry. Injustice did that to her.

“You’re selfish and hateful and destroyed a life. Nothing justifies that. Not your pain or your suffering. Nothing.”

“I didn’t plan to hurt the headmistress,” he said, so quietly that those in the hallway could barely hear. “I had no choice. Everyone would have kept looking if they couldn’t arrest someone.”

Nell remembered the look Harry had given Elizabeth when he biked by them in Canary Cove. As if an idea had come to him suddenly, out of the blue. The headmistress wasn’t going to be home. How easy to find her house, to find something of hers.

It was also clear Harry Winthrop didn’t plan. Perhaps Cass’s approach to him was correct. Harry was a child, foolish and selfish—and that was how she was treating him.

“And that nice Bob Chadwick?” Cass said, her voice rising again. “Did you lose it there, too?”

Harry seemed to have regained his anger. His voice was louder. “Nice? Sure. For the ten minutes it took him to introduce me to her. That was nice.

“If you and your friends had left him alone, it would have been okay. He’d have buried his cousin and gone back to Boston. But you swarmed around him, comforting him, talking about finding her
killer. He got religion. Started to feel bad, became determined to find out who was responsible. You made him realize Blythe meant something to him.

“So he started thinking about Blythe’s life and piecing it together. And he succeeded. He even found e-mails about how I wanted her to have our baby. He took Blythe to the clinic that day. Did you know that? At first he didn’t know who the father was and he didn’t care. It was when he cared that it fell apart—and that’s when he became dangerous. When he knew the father might have wanted a say. And he began to piece it together.”

The steely edge came back into his voice. “I thought I could reason with him. So when he wanted to talk I said I had to check out a boat that night. We could talk there. He loved sailboats—I thought I might make him see reason, out there on the water. Private, nothing but the sea around us. So I grabbed a key from the club board and took him out. I could make him see what Blythe had done to me, what she had destroyed in me. I wanted to make him see. But he was beyond seeing. We argued, and he tried to grab the controls. The boat rolled to port, then starboard. Then back. He screamed at me, just seconds before the boom swung across the cockpit and pitched him over the side.”

“And you left him there in the water?”

Harry was silent.

“And me?” Cass asked, her voice suddenly pleasant and ordinary, as if she were asking him for a ride home. “Do you want to kill me, too? And then who? Who’s next, Harry?”

Those in the hall froze.

Harry’s voice disappeared, replaced by a shuffle of boots, and then they heard an echoing, sickening click.

Cass’s shout was all that was needed to send Danny Brandley racing around the corner. He skidded on the hardwood floor at the exact moment Cass broke free of Harry Winthrop’s grasp and flew directly into Danny, with enough force to send him
flying back against the wall. His head hit the plaster with a resounding thud.

And then silence, and Danny Brandley’s long body slid in slow motion to the floor.

Before anyone could move, police sirens traveled up the hill and through the neighborhood, and in an instant the cottage was crowded with boots and uniformed men. Ben and Sam came in on their heels, pushing their way through to find Izzy and Nell.

They found them standing behind Cass, their faces pinched with worry.

On the other side of the room, on a police command, Harry Winthrop dropped the gun, which turned out to be a blunt plastering tool he had shoved into Cass’s side.

He hung his head while Tommy Porter read him his rights.

Before walking Harry out, Tommy told them—and Harry—that Bob Chadwick was going to make it. The guy was a true sailor. They were having him flown to a hospital in Boston, but he’d be as good as new in no time.

And ready to testify.

An ambulance was called for Danny. Cass crouched at his side, cradling his head in her lap. He was perfectly still, his face as pale as the plaster that had tarnished Elizabeth Hartley’s shawl.

And whether he heard Cass or not, she didn’t know for sure. But it didn’t stop her from leaning her head low and whispering into his ear, over and over, that she had never stopped loving him, not for one single minute. She needed to straighten herself out. To be the kind of woman who could handle love in a way deserving of someone like Danny Brandley.

Harry Winthrop was a foolish diversion—almost a deadly one. A sad man whom she could make smile while she sorted through her own life. A selfish diversion.

But her life needed no more diversions.

It only needed Danny.

*   *   *

Cass wouldn’t leave the hospital, but she promised to keep Nell, Izzy, and Birdie updated on Danny’s progress—provided, that is, that they vowed not to tease him forever for his heroic attempt to rescue her. He had a concussion, a broken shoulder, and a broken pair of glasses.

But Danny Brandley was going to be fine, and no one on earth was quite as happy about that fact as Cass Halloran.

N
o one had known quite what to call the evening, not even the faculty and staff. A fall festival conjured up thoughts of pumpkins and bobbing for apples—and Sea Harbor Community Day School’s evening event was not that.

But it was a festival of sorts. It was fall. And it was going to be a beautiful night.

“Celebrating Autumn” was the name used for the event on the colorful posters Josh Babson had painted and spread all over town. The description fit the spirit of the evening.

But every single person who gathered on the lawn that autumn evening knew that the real celebration was one of life—a season of life. The life of Sea Harbor, life of friends and neighbors and artists, of the people who owned the shops and restaurants and bistros.

Laura Danvers had agreed to help pull it all together in a scant three weeks after Harry Winthrop’s arrest—and a town’s collective sigh of relief.

“It’s glorious,” Birdie said, leading her parade of friends down the first row of white chairs. The seats—row after row—were broken in the middle by a path and faced a terrace that was now a stage.

The pathway through the middle of the seats was marked by gold and burnt orange and yellow mums. And there were pumpkins, too, scattered in between the tiny stage lights. Teresa Pisano,
her hair pulled back into a ponytail, walked up and down the aisle, straightening flowerpots and helping people to their seats.

Her cousin Mary, sitting in the second row, leaned forward. “Teresa volunteered to help tonight. And she apologized to Elizabeth as best she could. But I suggested she work full-time at the bed-and-breakfast for a while. And maybe I can get her some counseling.”

They looked over at Teresa. Her smile had a sadness to it, but there was hope there. With Mary’s help, Teresa would be fine.

It was a perfect evening.

“Gabby couldn’t sleep all night,” Birdie said, settling down next to Izzy and Sam. Nell and Ben were on her other side. “You’d think this was Broadway.”

“Better than Broadway,” Nell said. She wrapped her lacy shawl around her shoulders, a sea silk shawl Izzy had knit her long ago.

She looked over and smiled at Elizabeth Hartley, standing at the edge of the terrace. She was watching the crowds gather, a peaceful look on her face. She wore a shawl, too, finely knit of silky yarn in the colors of the sea. It floated over her shoulders, as if not touching her skin. Chelsey Mansfield had put in long nights, but finished the shawl in time. And Elizabeth wore it with gratitude.

A lone bench, made of iron and teak, sat at the side of the stage. Elizabeth walked past it now, up to the microphone.

She tapped the microphone and brought the crowd on the lawn to attention. There was standing room only, with people lined up behind the last row, just happy to be there.

At first Elizabeth’s voice was faint, even with the microphone in front of her. But when Chief Jerry Thompson stood and started clapping, the need for words disappeared. In minutes the applause rippled through the crowd, and then became a roar as what seemed like the entire town of Sea Harbor embraced the headmistress.

When the applause finally died down, Elizabeth uttered her thanks, her face flushed. Then she collected herself and welcomed the town to their school. “I want us to touch each one of you,” she
said. “Through programs and caring and opportunity, no matter where your children go to school.” The programs would be expanded, she said, the scholarships increased greatly.

She pointed over to the bench at the side and explained why it was there.

Blythe Westerland. Her generous gift to the school would benefit everyone in Sea Harbor through the school. The board would make sure of that. “Her name will be engraved on the plaque and it will be set alongside the flagpole, a spot that was once important to her. It will be a reminder of the good she did here through her gift.”

They would be tearing down the boathouse, Elizabeth told everyone. A small studio would sit in its place—“A place to make beautiful art,” she said, and looked over at Josh Babson, sitting with Ham and Jane and the rest of the Canary Cove contingent. He nodded slightly.

Josh would design the studio, she said, and teach student classes there now and then, but most of his time would be back in a studio on Canary Cove. Josh Babson had found his home.

When she had exhausted her thank-yous—although she said it would take a lifetime to really do that—she looked over to the side where the choir director was waiting. “I think it’s time for the real evening to begin. The reason you have all come. Let the show begin.”

And it did, with a bang.

Daisy Danvers came out and spoke loudly and clearly into the microphone. She smiled out at the audience, waved at her parents and sisters, and asked for a rousing welcome to their opening act. True to their word, she and Gabby had talked the director into having the Fractured Fish open the show. And open it they did, accompanying a cast of munchkins, a ballerina lullaby league, and a lollipop guild that welcomed the audience, filling the terraced stage with fluffs of color and joyful dancing—all while Merry and Pete and Andy played in the background.

Cass and Danny, sitting next to Ben, had trouble holding back laughs, though even that slight motion caused Danny to wince, his hand instinctively touching his shoulder sling.

Esther Gibson’s guitar-playing granddaughter was next, accompanying Anna Mansfield, who was dressed entirely in green and singing with every bit of Kermit’s pathos. She held the audience spellbound as she sang “It’s Not Easy being Green.” Behind her, Nell felt the soft rustle of tissue as the singer’s proud mother wiped away a tear.

Gabby and Daisy led a group in a medley of songs—happy songs—about rainbows and sunshine.

But it was the finale that brought it all together. The terrace stage was empty, darkened. Quiet. The audience shifted in their seats, talking softly, waiting. Shuffling. Wondering if it was over.

But it wasn’t.

And then the finale began.

The Fractured Fish appeared on the darkened stage. And with nothing but small spotlights aimed at their sheet music, they began playing so softly that the audience wasn’t sure what they were hearing. A soft, rhythmic strumming.

Next, a spotlight fixed high in a tree turned on.

But it didn’t shine on the stage musicians. Instead its beam moved back to the very last row of white chairs, behind the standing room only crowd who shifted now to the side.

Angelo Garozzo appeared first, a fedora on his round head, a bow tie beneath his chin.

He began slowly, moving up the aisle, his finger shaking in the air and pointing to those in the crowd. To the right. The left. His fingers moving to the tempo of a familiar Pharrell Williams soul song.

Slowly the familiar strains filled the air as the lawn came alive with the Sea Harbor Community Day School’s very own rendition of the “Happy” video shown round the world.

“‘Because I’m happy. . . ,’” Angelo sang, his voice so rich and full no microphones were needed to pick it up. His head moved
from side to side, and then his shoulders and his whole body began to bounce as he sang on.

Daisy and Gabby followed right behind him, their bodies shaking and moving, their hands stretched high in the air, clapping along to the rhythm.

“‘Because I’m happy,’” Daisy and Gabby repeated, belting out the refrain, their hands in the air, hips moving and legs spinning.

“‘Clap along . . .’” Angelo sang, his head thrown back and his eyes closed, the words filling the air all the way to the moon.

And the crowd did.

The entire school paraded up the aisle, in groups and pairs and alone: a joyful parade of students and teachers and lunch ladies. Maintenance men and nurses, counselors and administrators. Hands high. The rhythm of their clapping moving their bodies.

The “Happy” refrain repeated over and over, clap by clap.

They waved their hands in the air and followed Angelo toward the stage, their refrain so full and rich it began to pull the audience from their seats, first a few in the back, and then the entire yard filled with people who moved back and forth, arms reaching into the air, hands clapping in perfect time.

“‘Because I’m happy . . .’”

Elizabeth Hartley appeared in the line, her narrow shoulders moving, her head high, her hands free and moving above her head.

The refrain grew louder and louder as happy tears were wiped away and the parade moved onto the stage, with Angelo, Daisy, and Gabby in the front, clapping and moving and grinning at the audience, who they had pulled to their feet.

“‘Because I’m happy . . .’”

Finally, they bowed as one, the wild cheering of the audience forcing another and another and another bow.

And then they spilled out into the audience for hugs and apple cider and to continue their celebration.

Birdie and Nell found Cass and Izzy sitting on a flagstone step, their arms looped together. They sat down beside them.

“Group hug,” Izzy said, and they complied, humming the catchy tune as their bodies leaned into one another.

They sang the refrain softly, the words almost tangible now in the evening air, their arms around one another, their words as one.

“‘I’ll be just fine . . .’”

And even without clapping, they knew it to be true.