A Line To Murder (A Puget Sound Mystery) (26 page)

“We are all so pleased to have you, the needlework group in particular. There are six regulars. They meet twice a month in the small parlor. Officially, that is, but some of the ladies are never without their yarn and needles. They’re quite prolific. They make really beautiful blankets, mainly for the preemie unit at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital. Once in a while one of the new mothers comes in to thank them and brings her baby. It’s been a wonderful activity for the women. Everyone likes to feel they’re a contributing part of society.”

“I think it’s great. You mentioned tatting. My grandmother used to tat. After she died, I found bits of lace she’d started. They’re beautiful.” I hesitated for a minute. “It’s funny, but none of this seems much like Isca, at least not the Isca I knew.”

Mrs. Cruise sipped her tea. “Well, we’re all many personalities, aren’t we? Friendships are wonderful things, but I find there are times when a friendship with one person defines the type of person I am with that particular individual. One needs a lot of different relationships in which to be free to be another kind of person.”

While I gave that some thought, she stood. “I smell the cookies. Mrs. Reims can have two. She’ll want more, poor dear. She loves her sweets but don’t let her. Why don’t we get you introduced, hmmm?”

I followed her down the hall, trying not to peek in the open doors from which came occasional moans and cries for help. Mrs. Cruise greeted everyone, from the aides to the elderly, by name. Nurses laughed with patients and, once, a large rabbit bounded down the corridor in front of us. The room she led me to had an electric fireplace that made it warm and cheerful. A painting of Anne Hathaway’s cottage hung over it. A flowery scent emanated from a potpourri pot. Windows framed the grounds and a glass door led to a patio. Two ladies in pants and sweaters sat on a love seat, their walkers next to them. Another sat in her wheelchair. One lady had a cane and two were apparently more ambulatory. Two of the ladies knitted; their needles flashed and made soft clicking sounds. Three crocheted and one worked on a small quilting frame. Their conversation ceased as we entered the room. Six gray-white heads looked up.

“What a beautiful room and how quickly you all work.” I put the cookies on a small table next to a yellow receiving blanket folded in a box and took the nearest chair. “This is beautiful,” I fingered the blanket made from soft, fine-ply yarn.

“Thank you, dear.” The woman in the wheelchair smiled as her crochet hook darted like a harried sandpiper in and out of light green yarn.

“Mercedes, this is Lucille Reims.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“And these two ladies,” Mrs. Cruise gestured toward the love seat, “Are Anne Millie and Barbara Wycowski. They’re sisters. Swannie Fisher, here,” she smiled at the lady with the cane “is my oldest resident. She’s one hundred and one.”

“I’m one of the few Whitworth College students from its Tacoma years who are still alive, don’t you know.” Swannie Fisher had a surprisingly firm voice.

“Whitworth. Isn’t it in Spokane?”

“It is now, but it started in Sumner then moved to Tacoma. I went there before the war. The big one, that i
s.”

I assumed she meant World War I. “My goodness! Do you have a bottle of wine for the last surviving graduate, like the war veterans have?”

“My idea exactly, but I can’t get the others to go along with me, not that there are many of them left. They say they signed the pledge. Alcohol and all that. Wouldn’t you think any pledge they signed would have expired by now? I don’t know what they think their saving themselves for.”

“Silly old fools
.” The third of the crocheters nodded in agreement. “I’m Hannah Leigh, by the way.”

I couldn’t help laughing.
What a hoot!

Rosa Elston, the lady at the quilting frame introduced herself. Only Swannie Fisher had idle hands.

“I’ll just leave you all to get acquainted.” Mrs. Cruise smiled from the door. “Mercedes brought you cookies.”

“I thought I smelled cinnamon coming out of your tin.” Mrs. Reims’ eyes lit up. “What kind?”

“Raisin oatmeal.”

“Well, I’m partial to shortbread, but let’s taste them.”

“If we start snacking now, our hands will be greasy. Why don’t we wait a bit?”

“Mercedes is right, Lucille. Your insulin is still adjusting from dinner.” Swannie Fisher rooted in a sewing bag next to her chair. “Muriel told us you’ve never done any needlework. Crocheting is much easier than knitting, dear and I’ve just the pattern for you.”

She looked at my yarn, nodded and showed me how to tie it onto the hook and make a chain stitch.

After I’d started, she picked up the conversation. “Isca could crochet and knit. She said her grandmother taught her, but she hadn’t done much tatting, so we started her on something else. Isca was such a lovely girl. What a tragedy.”

“Call it what it was, Swannie. The girl was murdered.” Mrs. Wycowski scowled. “She had red hair. My father never approved of red hair. Thought it wasn’t decent.”

“Then it’s a good thing your father wasn’t Irish. Silly old bigot.”

“He most certainly wasn’t. He never had an unkind thing to say about the Irish, just about red hair. He was a hardworking, God-fearing man. Taught Sunday school for over twenty years. Read the Bible every day.”

“Boning for his finals, dear?” I almost missed Rosa Elston’s comment. For a moment I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. Then I bit my lips to keep from laughing.
Boning for his finals! Holy crap!
I looked at the sweetly smiling lady bent over her quilting frame and she winked. Happily, it looked like a whole room full of eccentrics. My lucky day.

Chapter 23

At Rosa Elston’s implied insult against her father, Barbara Wycowski sat bolt upright and pursed her lips. It was hard to watch my crochet hook and Mrs. Wycowski at the same time. Just when I thought she would deliver the
coup de grace
by way of a scathing remark, Mrs. Wycowski looked at Mrs. Elston over the tops of her glasses. “Don’t be so common, Rosa, dear. Boning indeed.”

Bu
mmer
.

“And you needn’t put on airs, Barbara, dear. Your father ran a neighborhood grocery store on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.”

“It was on Waller Road. You really need to pay better attention. I think the doctor should be told about your inability to concentrate and remember things. Perhaps he can prescribe something.”

“Look.” I held up a length of uneven stitches. “I’ve finished the chain.” I pursed my lips and eyed the stitches. Some were pulled so tight I didn’t think I would be able to get the hook back in. Others were large enough for a hook three sizes larger than the one I used.

“Don’t worry, Mercedes.” Swannie Fisher glanced at the pattern book for a minute and then smiled at me. “When it’s all done, you can have it blocked at the cleaners and that will do wonders to even everything out. Now, your pattern is a series of single and double crochets and they’re very much alike. It’s just a matter of how many times you wrap the yarn around the hook. Watch and I’ll show you.”

She inserted it in the chain’s third stitch from the end wrapped the yarn around the hook. With a couple of quick moves in and out of the stitch she’d made a shell.

I took the chain back and tried to make one of my own. “Don’t hold the yarn so tight. You’ll get hand cramps. Now finish this row just like I showed you.”

“Perhaps, while Mercedes is finishing the row, we could order some hot chocolate to have with those cookies.” Lucille Reins looked hopeful.

“Is that what you usually do?”

“Absolutely not. Really, Lucille.”

“Well, I think we should celebrate Mercedes’ first time with us.”

Rosa Elston snorted, and when I glanced at her, she wigg
led her eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

“What do you usually have?”

“Tea or decaf, sometimes warm milk, and crackers with cheese or spread.”

“I think warm milk is disgusting.” I blanked on her name.
Who is she? Oh, yes, Anne Millie.

“Unless it has a tot of something in it.”

“Oh, Anne.” Her sister shook her head and sighed.

I was so engrossed in my double crochets and the verbal sparring, I lost track of the activity in the corridor. It came back to me when a door closed and voices rose and fell. Suddenly, people were talking, their words punctuated with bursts of laughter.

“I think someone has arrived.”

Footsteps approached the parlor.

“Why, it must be …” Before Swannie Fisher finished her sentence, Mrs. Cruise sailed into the room. “Ladies, look who’s here.”

“Father.”

“Father Garr.”

“
Reverend.” A chorus of voices welcomed into the room a middle-aged man wearing a clerical collar.

“Ladies, I can’t tell you how I’ve missed you.” He bent down and kissed Rosa Elston’s cheek and turned to take Barbara Wycowski’s outstretched hand. “Barbara. How have you been? How’s your arthritis?”

“I declare, Vicar. It’s so nice to have you back. How were the missions you visited?”

Before he could answer, she turned to me. “Mercedes, this is Vicar Garr. Vicar, this is Mercedes, a very dear friend of Isca’s. She’s come to join our group.”

And there he is—Isca’s vicar.
Instead of feeling glad I’d found him at last, I felt flat.
What’s wrong with this picture?

“Mercedes.”

He had a slight British accent and sounded like someone from
Masterpiece Theatre
. As he leaned forward to shake my hand, he used his left and I saw why. His right hand was in a black sling that matched his suit. I quickly changed to my left also. I didn’t wonder if he was the right person. Isca visited Hathaway House on Thursday night. She called me Friday evening. In that twenty-four-hour period, she’d made the connection. How many men could there be in the Pacific Northwest calling himself that? I thought back to my Sunday school days. A vicar was a cleric in the Anglican Church and acted as the priest in place of the rector. A rector was a member of the clergy in charge of a parish in the Episcopal Church. Were these the same denominations and if so, who had seniority? Very confusing and totally irrelevant. “Irreverent.” That’s what I had said to Isca the last time I saw her. A phone-sex-calling cleric was irreverent.

For a moment, the room spun. What was it psychologists called it when a person experienced feelings of separation from reality with a slowdown of time? Oh, yes. Depersonalization.

The vicar was short and slight. Mrs. Cruise’s beaming face loomed over his head. I bent over my crocheting. The heel on his right shoe was built up. When he straightened, his pants were long enough to hide it. His light brown hair receded from his thin face. In spite of his jocularity, he looked fragile. By Gothic standards, the lights should have flickered, and a sudden burst of wind should have shaken the parlor windows, scattering loose pieces of paper. Instead, the rabbit I’d seen earlier hopped into the room and around the man’s ankles.

I remembered the last words Isca said—the message she’d left on my answering machine. “I think I know who the vicar is.” Her background in voice-over work had made her something of a voice expert. If the man in front of me had been calling her and then she met him here, one sentence would have been all it would have taken for her to recognize his voice. I tried to remember what else she’d said. He’d been calling her for a few weeks. She came on bi-monthly visits to the ladies in the early evenings. Weren’t pastoral visits done during the day, getting people ready because death did its drive-by late at night? She must have met him for the first time the Thursday before her murder.

I closed my eyes for a moment, took a deep breath and a hand rested on my arm.

“Are you all right, Mercedes?” The vicar sounded like James Mason. “Your color’s gone off.”

“I’m fine, just overtired. I work at a brokerage house, you see, and we’re still having to deal with tax season.”

I yanked my hand away from his so abruptly it threw him off balance. With horror, the vicar’s left hand fell on my knee and seemed to linger overly long as he attempted to right himself. I made a bustle of rearranging the crocheting yarn and moved closer to a desk light. The sisters, Anne Millie and Barbara Wycowski gave me identical frowns, making their displeasure at my actions clear. Truth be told, I didn’t blame them. There was nothing wrong with the vicar’s appearance or demeanor. They probably felt bad about his birth defect and thought I was callous. I might have felt the same way if I hadn’t had Isca’s words running through my brain.

Over the ladies’ chattering, metal-on-metal sounded. Presently, a middle-aged orderly wheeled a food cart loaded with beverages into the parlor. I opened the tin of cookies and handed them around. The orderly offered beverages and Mrs. Cruise said something about having business to discuss with the Vicar. “We’ll leave you ladies, for now. Reverend Garr has promised he will come back tomorrow for a longer visit.” She took his arm and they turned toward the door. Behind their backs, Mrs. Reims snatched three cookies and put them in her pocket. Then she took a fourth and bit into it with a smile.
Oh jeez, now I’ll have to tattle on her.