The Wedding Shawl (12 page)

“It’s a perfect party,” Nell said to Laura, walking up beside her.

The hostess was standing with Birdie near a teak table, sipping wine, people watching, and basking in the high, happy energy that filled her home. Behind them, the sound of the tide was musical, a perfect background for the evening.

Laura picked up a glass of wine from a passing server and handed it to Nell. “I’m so glad Izzy let me do this for her and Sam. I give parties for strangers all the time—all those people who bring business Elliott’s way. The president of this or that. Or the charity galas, which I love to do. But this—” She opened her arms wide, gesturing toward Pete and Willow, who were pulling Izzy and Sam up to dance, to Archie and Harriet Brandley, joining them in the next beat and quickly showing them up with some drastic twists and turns. And over near the bar, Chief Jerry Thompson, Gracie Santos, Jane and Ham Brewster, all laughing at a story that Harry Garozzo was embellishing with wild gestures. Laughter rose into the evening air like flames from the tiki candles that lined the yard. “This is just plain, happy fun with people I like so much. This is exactly what we all needed.”

“You’re absolutely right, Laura.”

“Tiffany Ciccolo’s death is awful. I don’t mean to belittle her at all—she was a sweet girl—but I hope that we can put this behind us soon.”

“Did you know her?” Birdie asked.

“I used to see her in the salon. And we were in the same high school class a thousand years ago. I didn’t know her much from school things, but we played basketball on a community-center team. But she was so shy that it almost doesn’t count.”

“You were in the same class?”

Laura nodded. “But it was a big class. I didn’t really know her.”

Ben came over and wrapped an arm around Nell’s shoulder. He pulled her close and swayed with her as Billy Joel crooned from the speakers. “My very own uptown gal,” he whispered into her hair.

Laura laughed. “You two. You should loan yourselves out to prewedding parties. Show people what it’ll be like in years to come.”

Ben’s deep chuckle joined Nell’s light one, but they held inside the words that ran through their heads. What it was like “in years to come” was an enormous bouillabaisse of things. One that needed continuous seasoning so it didn’t go flat. It was wading together through sometimes difficult times on your way to wherever. And rejoicing when you got there, then starting out again.
The journey
. It was all about the journey.

“Is Andy Risso here?” Nell asked, feeling in that instant that this might be the beginning of one of those difficult journeys. And she hoped the stream they’d be wading through would not be too deep—or too muddy.

Laura looked toward the dancing bodies near the bar, then beyond them to a quieter crowd. “I haven’t seen Andy. I left a message on his phone, but he didn’t call back. I was hoping he’d come… . I thought it’d be good for him, you know, because …”

Her husband, Elliott, caught her eye then, and Laura excused herself to say good-bye to some guests who had to leave early.

“Andy’s not coming.” The voice near Nell’s elbow was deep, gravelly, and familiar.

Jake Risso, Andy’s dad, moved closer, filling in Laura’s vacated spot. He set his beer down on the railing.

“I didn’t recognize you without your Gull Tavern T-shirt, Jake,” Nell said. “You’re looking good, all cleaned up like this.”

Jake’s laugh was tinged with years of breathing in tavern smoke—deep and rough. He looked down at his khaki slacks and knit shirt and shrugged. “Anything for our girl Izzy.”

“Is Andy minding the bar?” Ben said.

“Yeah. His choice. There were plenty of guys to do it. I thought he should come, you know, for Izzy and Sam. And I knew Pete and all would be here. I thought it’d be a good thing. Even that nice Laura Danvers. She called. She knows… .”

“Knows?”

“Oh, you know—how hard this is. All the cra—All the things it dredges up. I wish his mother were still alive. Marie’d know how to handle it better than a crusty old geezer like me.”

“You understand a lot, Jake. You’ve raised a fine young man.”

Jake rubbed his chin. He was younger than Nell by a few years, but losing his wife to illness when Andy was in college—that, and the hard work of running a bar—had taken a toll on the tavern owner. The lines in his face bore testimony to the more difficult years.
Fishing,
he told anyone who would listen; fishing was his salvation. Get him out in a boat by himself, with line and rod, some fresh bait, and a school of cod or striped bass nearby, and he was a happy man.

But tonight Jake Risso looked anything but happy.

“It’s tough, this girl dying like that.”

“Tiffany,” Birdie said.

He nodded. “Tiffany. Andy’s having trouble with it. It was different than it used to be with them. But now, this. Two of them, can you believe it?”

“Two of them?”

“Two girls. Women. When Andy was in high school a girl he cared about died.”

“Andy?” Birdie said. The lines in her face deepened as she peeled back the pages of her memory.

“The Markham Quarry,” Jake said, as if that was all the explanation it needed. An infamous place because of one awful night. “She drowned in the Markham Quarry. Pushed, maybe? But she couldn’t swim a stroke.”

A collective intake of air followed Jake’s words. Then, slowly, released.

A loose strand of yarn woven into place.

“Harmony Farrow,” Birdie said. Her voice was hushed, not reaching beyond their group. And it held surprise, though when they looked back on it later, it shouldn’t have. Only recently they’d talked about Harmony. And a boyfriend. Talked about a family that had suffered. But they all were involved in other things, such as knitting a wedding shawl. And sad thoughts of long-ago deaths were easily pushed aside.

“Yeah, that was her name,” Jake said. “She was Andy’s first real girlfriend. He loved that girl in a god-awful way. And then she was gone. Dead, just like that. It was graduation night—a big party at the school. But Andy didn’t come home that night, and Marie and I were worried sick. When he finally dragged in the next morning, he looked like death warmed over. He’d been out all night looking for Harmony, he told us.” He paused and took a swig of his beer.

When he continued, his voice had picked up some momentum as the memories flooded back, and the words were now pushed out on a wave of emotion. “They were always hanging out at our house, studying or fooling around. Marie liked it. Her terrific trio; that’s what she used to call ’em. She’d bake cookies, make lasagna and her special fried chicken for them. They were together a lot, except when Andy was at band practice or the others playing basketball. Harmony and Andy were so smart. Top of their class, those two. They studied a lot, marched to their own drummer. They liked who they were for the most part; at least those two did.”

“Marie called them a trio?” Ben said.

Nell pulled her light sweater closer against the sudden chill in the air.

“Yeah. There were the lovebirds, Andy and Harmony. And Harmony’s friend. She was always around; Harmony’s shadow, we called her. The two girls; they were joined at the hip, Marie used to say. Joined at the hip. The beautiful Harmony and her quiet friend.”

Jake looked down at the flagstone patio floor. His words were muttered.

“Tiffany. Tiffany Ciccolo. And now she’s dead, too.”

Chapter 12

T
iffany and Harmony. Best friends.

Nell sat at a table on Coffee’s patio the next morning with a large latte in front of her, turning the words around in her head. She picked at her still-warm cinnamon roll. “It’s big enough for a family of four,” she’d told the young man behind the inside counter.

She had walked down to Coffee’s early to snag a table, knowing it would be packed. Summertime doubled Coffee’s devoted clientele, and on a breezy, sun-drenched Monday, everyone would be elbowing their way to the outside tables on the flagstone patio.

Nell checked her watch. Birdie would be there soon—as soon as Harold pumped up her bike tires and declared her safe to pedal down the hill. And hopefully before the cappuccino Nell had ordered for her had cooled off.

They had left the party the night before when the music went up a notch and Ben could no longer stifle his yawns. He and Birdie provided a united front and whisked Nell away from a spirited conversation with Mary Pisano, Izzy, and Sam.

“It’s time,” they said.

Chief Jerry Thompson followed them out, claiming his week was going to begin in a matter of hours and sleep was a necessity. It would be a long week for him, they all agreed, and the chief’s long face suggested not a pleasant one.

After Jerry had climbed into his car, Ben leaned in the open window and told him about the conversation they’d had with Jake.

Tiffany was Harmony Farrow’s best friend…. Did the chief know that?

Jerry had shrugged and admitted he hadn’t known that connection, though it would probably surface. He wasn’t chief back when the Farrow case was in the news.

“Heard about it some, but that’s about all,” he said. And then he agreed that it was certainly an irony—two young friends, both dying tragically. An irony. But he had intentionally stopped with that, unwilling to add weight or meaning to a coincidence.

A coincidence. Two best friends killed fifteen years apart.
The thought had lingered on the edge of Nell’s consciousness all night, until Ben finally turned out the bedside light and convinced her that there were more interesting things to think about right then.

But when the sun came up, the thought was back, as if it had just taken a little rest and picked up some energy on the way. Now it presented itself as an annoying buzz that interfered with mundane pleasures—like enjoying Coffee’s rich cinnamon roll.

Two young girls dead. Coincidence?

“It must be a coincidence. What else could it be?” Birdie asked now, pulling out a chair opposite Nell and sitting down. She set her bike helmet and backpack on the flagstone floor at her feet.

Nell managed a half smile. “There should be a law against you mining my thoughts the way you do.”

Birdie reached across the table and patted Nell’s hand. “Nonsense. That’s what old friends do.”

“Do you think it’s a coincidence, Birdie?”

“Coincidence … or synchronicity. Is that what you’re asking?”

“Yes. I’m not sure I believe in coincidences anymore.”

“And that’s because they don’t exist,” a clear voice beside Nell declared.

They looked up into the suntanned face of Mary Pisano. She stood beside the table, trim and fit in plaid Bermuda shorts and a crisp white blouse, probably from the preteen department, which was where she bought most of her clothes. “Everything in life is connected,” she said, more forcefully. “A web. At least that’s how I see it.”

“Mary, I didn’t know you were so new age,” Birdie said.

Mary laughed. “I don’t like labels, but I do think we sometimes fail to see the synchronicity in events because we’re just too busy all the time; we move too fast without stopping to think—or maybe, for some reason, we don’t want to see the connection in the events that make up our lives.” She put down her coffee cup.

“Here’s a perfect example,” Mary went on. “When I saw you two over here, I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that I was sitting just a few feet away. You’d be talking about what I was thinking about. So, I said to myself, we’ll just do it together.” Mary reached back and pulled over a chair from her own table—her unofficial reserved seat. Everyone knew the table beneath the leafy maple tree to be hers, a place she occupied nearly every morning in decent weather. Her computer on her lap, she sat there and composed her “About Town” column for the
Sea Harbor Gazette,
the contents of which were sometimes gleaned from the conversations spinning around her on the crowded patio.

“Here,” Nell said, pushing the plate with her giant cinnamon roll to the center of the table. “Pick away.”

Mary seemed to have an agenda, but Nell wasn’t sure exactly what it was. They’d find out in good time, she supposed. Mary didn’t hold back.

But sometimes it took some chitchat to get her where she wanted to be.

Birdie pulled off a piece of the flaky roll and set it on a napkin. “How’s your bed-and-breakfast doing?” she asked. A rhetorical question at best, since everyone in town knew the answer. Ravenswood-by-the-Sea was booked solid. Thriving. Birdie herself lived in the coveted Ravenswood neighborhood, just across the street from the old Pisano estate, which Mary had transformed into a lavish B and B. Though its doors had been open less than a year, its reputation was already bringing return guests from Boston and New York.
The most comfortable beds on the Atlantic Coast,
a recent travel magazine had written alongside photographs of the magnificent home.
With breakfasts that Emeril Lagasse would die for. Exquisite lawns, woods for hiking.

“It’s fine. My grandfather would approve of what I’ve done with his home. And even my obstinate relatives are coming around. And it will shine when we put all the Chamberses up for Izzy’s wedding.”

Nell smiled. “Not to mention Izzy’s glorious reception.”

“Absolutely. It’s going to be beyond belief. And that’s one of the reasons we need to clear up this awful mess.”

“Awful mess?” Birdie said.

“That’s what’s pressing on us this morning. Right? This awful business surrounding Tiffany Ciccolo’s death. That sweet young woman. This is truly horrible.”

Birdie and Nell sat back and sipped their coffee, listening, nodding. They knew Mary wasn’t finished—she would go on for a while, and it wouldn’t do any good to interrupt.

“It’s summer, for heaven’s sake. I told Jerry Thompson that he’d better have something for me today, some news to put people’s minds at rest. I want to know that they’ve caught the thief and put him away somewhere far from here; that’s what the town needs. The thought of robbers roaming Harbor Road is distasteful. And frightening.

“There, I’ve said my piece.” Mary took off her sunglasses and picked up a large mug of coffee. Her fingers wrapped around it, and her blue eyes peered over the rim, waiting for their response.