A Stitch in Crime (11 page)

“Aha, so you’re changing your opinion of him.”

“I still say he’s too fussy for my taste, but our campfire dinner the other night was fun, and he certainly came through during the whiteout. And those s’mores . . .” Her voice trailed off as she looked down the beach. “Okay, maybe that was not the best example under the circumstances, but he certainly came up with a lot of variations on the original idea.”

“You can argue all you want, but I think you’re softening.”

“He’s not my type,” Dinah countered. “I see myself with the brooding poet type. You know: intense, wears turtle-necks. Yeah, and isn’t into relationships, and is probably a jerk, too,” she added with a groan.

“I don’t think Commander is a jerk,” I replied. “He might be a little stiff and a little too enthusiastic, but definitely not a jerk.”

“Maybe not, but what do we really know about him? Just that he has a postal center in Tarzana and he’s very into parties. Doesn’t it seem a little odd to you that someone who’s so into entertaining is alone?”

I glanced in the direction we’d come from. “Even if he might have a dark past, that cocoa is starting to sound good. You’re right, it is cold and damp. We might as well go back.” We got up and started to walk toward the street. As we approached the fenced-off area, I made a visual sweep of the planted area. Something got my attention. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at a strange glow.

We moved closer for a better view, but it still appeared to be just a ghostly light.

“Maybe somebody threw one of those light sticks back there,” Dinah offered, walking on.

I stood my ground and peered into the darkness. Curiosity had gotten the better of me. I had to know what it was. Dinah saw that I had stopped at the fence and came back. I tried leaning over it to see if I could reach the glowing spot, but it was too far away. “I’m going in,” I said, stepping over the low chain. But going in was as far as I got. There seemed to be no way to reach the glow without tromping on some plants. Dinah picked up on my plight and offered to hold my legs so I could lean over the plants without falling in them.

She braced herself, digging her feet in the sand, and held onto my calves as I leaned and reached into the tangle of growth. I tried to avoid thinking what night creatures might be crawling around, just waiting for some tasty fingers to come their way. Instinctively I balled up my hand. I wished I had my son’s old Pinchy-Winchy claw toy to use, or at least gloves. I willed my hand open, and as I pushed through the wiry brush, I felt something soft and grabbed it. It came free easily and obviously wasn’t attached to the sand.

Dinah pulled me up straight and we both looked at what I was holding. We couldn’t make out the color in the darkness, but the shape was clear.

I was holding a small pouch purse, and the glow was coming from something shaped like a flower attached to the front.

That was about all we could make out in the dark.

“Why do I think this has something to do with Izabelle?” I asked as we trudged up the beach toward the street.

“WOW, GLOW-IN-THE-DARK YARN,” DINAH SAID as I turned off the light in my room. We were examining the pouch purse, which we now knew was lime green and the six-petaled flower was a satiny pink and the whole thing was crocheted. In the darkness the purse disappeared, but the pink flower gave off an eerie light. We had slipped back into Asilomar without crossing paths with anyone from our group. We wanted to keep the bag under wraps until we could check it out, and had avoided the cocoa party by slipping up the back stairs in Lodge.

I flipped the light back on. The purse was on my bed between us. “Okay, now that we’ve cleared up the strange light thing, you ought to see what’s inside,” Dinah said.

I knew Dinah was right, but I still hesitated. There was something unsettling about looking into someone’s purse. By the design, it was hard to think it was anybody’s but Izabelle’s—after all, she was supposed to be the queen of crochet embellishment, and who else would think of using glow-in-the-dark yarn to make flowers? But what was it doing in an off-limits area?

I swallowed and opened the purse, reaching inside. Along with sand sticking to the fibers, I felt something cold and metal that had snagged near the top. It turned out to be a key with an Asilomar tag.

“There’s an obvious way to be sure the purse belonged to Izabelle,” Dinah said. Of course she was right, and we went out into the hall. We made sure it was empty, then slipped toward the door to Izabelle’s room. I had the key in my hand but I hesitated again. In all honesty I didn’t want the key to fit. I wanted the purse to belong to some random person who had nothing to do with our group. If it was Izabelle’s, it brought up a lot of questions, like how someone in the middle of an allergy attack would decide to lob her purse into the bushes.

Dinah nudged me and spoke in a low voice, urging me to stick the key in the lock. I took a deep breath and tried to put it in. It didn’t go. I felt a wave of relief and even laughed a little.

“So, I guess we were wrong,” I said, turning to go. Dinah took the key from my hand and turned it around. That way it fit perfectly, and with half a turn the door was unlocked and slipped open.

Neither of us made a move. If opening the purse felt strange, it was nothing compared to looking into her room. I was about to pull the door closed when something moved in the darkness and made a rustling sound. Both Dinah and I jumped as a shadow passed in front of the window. There was someone in the room. Instinctively I lunged forward, then slid on something as the shadow slipped out the window.

A moment later the room was flooded with light as Dinah flipped the switch. I skated across the floor on a flutter of papers, rushing toward the open window. But when I looked out, the small balcony was empty.

“What was that about?” Dinah said, her voice high-pitched with tension. My heart was still pounding as I took a deep breath.

“Somebody was in here.” I began to scoop up the papers, looking at them as I did. They had copy centered in the middle of the page. When Dinah saw one, she said they were galley pages.

“They must be from Izabelle’s book. The one she was making the big to-do about. Her fusion craft.” Dinah put on her creative writing teacher hat and explained the pages were typeset like the book. “It’s the last step before the book comes out.” Dinah pointed to a notation penciled in the margin. “She must have been proofreading them.”

As we piled them on the bed, Dinah held up a page in front of me. “Look at the title:
The Needle and the Hook.
”

“You think her big fusion craft was mixing knitting and crochet?” I asked.

“It looks that way.” Dinah riffled through the pages on the bed. “It also looks like most of the book is missing.”

We both looked toward the window. “Do you think the shadow was a woman, like maybe Adele? What if she found out the subject of Izabelle’s new craft and went bonkers?” I pictured Adele ranting about the fusion craft soiling the purity of crochet.

“I know she had a problem with crochet versus knitting, but do you think she’d go so far as to break into a room? And what would be the point of stealing the galleys? I’m sure the publisher has another copy. Finally, I think we know Adele well enough that if it had been her, we would have recognized her shape,” Dinah said.

By now our heartbeats had returned to normal, and all that was left was the rush from the adrenaline. I glanced around the room with a different perspective.

“I guess it’ll be my responsibility to pack up her things.”

Dinah gave me a sympathetic nod. “Yes, one more responsibility that goes along with the rhinestone clipboard.”

The room was laid out about the same as mine, except there was only one twin bed against the wall. Aside from the papers it seemed orderly. Izabelle’s personal items were in several unzipped pouches by the sink. A stack of plastic bins sat against the wall. Each of them had a label for a session of her workshop. When I lifted the lid of the top one, I saw pillowcases with thread crochet trim and a lot of flowers in different sizes and yarns, along with a copy of her book. I walked over to the closet and opened the door. A faint scent of her floral cologne clung to her neatly hung clothes and the suitcase stowed below. When I turned back to the room, Dinah was sitting on the bed with a laptop computer open next to her.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Checking my e-mail. You know how upset I’ve been about not bringing my laptop. This is even better. She has one of those cards that makes it so her computer can go online anywhere.” Dinah looked up and caught my expression of disapproval. “It’s all right. I’m just going to see what I have. And I want to check a quote for the memoir workshop. So technically I’m using it for the weekend. I’m sure Izabelle wouldn’t mind.” The reflection from the screen illuminated Dinah’s face after she’d pressed the power button.

“Hmm. It looks like Izabelle was in the middle of something and just let it go into hibernate mode.” Dinah turned the computer so I could see the screen. The body of an e-mail was in the center of the screen. It had no salutation and said
Don’t do anything before you talk to me. Call me or at least answer your phone
. It was signed
Tom, ITA Sponsor.
I sat down on the bed next to Dinah and put the computer on my lap, but I almost dropped it when my cell phone started to vibrate in my tote next to me. I hurried to get it before it started to ring. Dinah and I had kept our conversation to a whisper. Somehow, I didn’t want to make any noise.

I answered the phone with a whispered hello.

“Hey, babe,” Barry said. “Just calling to see how it’s going. I figured by now you’d be in your room . . . alone. Right, you are alone?”

There was dead air. I couldn’t lie when asked a direct question, but I also didn’t want to answer. Saying nothing seemed the safest bet. Unless you’re talking to a top-flight homicide detective who knows how to squeeze information out of the most reluctant suspects. In my case it was easy. He knew me well enough to recognize that the dead air meant something was up, probably something he wouldn’t be happy about. “Okay, Molly, let’s just save us both a lot of time and cut to the chase. Where are you, and what are you doing?”

“I was going to call you. There’s been a little incident.” I paused; what I was going to say next was going to get the reaction. “One of the presenters died.”

“What?” Barry said. I could practically hear his blood pressure go up.

“The doctor and the police think it was from some kind of allergic reaction.” I heard his breath come out in a gush.

“Then it wasn’t homicide. Good.”

I told him the doctor thought Izabelle had suddenly developed a life-threatening allergy.

“That sounds reasonable.” He began his standard speech. “The police will investigate. Stay out of it. Leave it to the professionals la la la la.” He didn’t actually say la la la la. That was the part where I wasn’t listening anymore. Eventually he figured out something else was up, and he knew me well enough to ask me directly. Like I said, when someone asks me a specific question, I always tell the truth. Barry asked where I was. I thought he took the information that I was in Izabelle’s room rather well. But since he didn’t ask about the purse, I didn’t tell. I let him think I was being overzealous about my responsibility to handle things.

“I understand you think it’s your task to pack up her things. But you have all weekend, and you might want to wait until you talk to her next of kin.”

Barry seemed pleased when I said I would definitely take what he said into consideration. Then he signed off after telling me how much he missed me.

“He just wants to protect you,” Dinah said when I flipped my phone shut. It was pointless to try and keep our conversation private. Besides, Dinah knew all my business anyway.

“The trouble is,” I said, putting my phone away, “he makes it so I can’t discuss things with him. I can just imagine what he’d say if I told him someone was in the room when we got here and went out the window. And he’d get crazy if I told him we thought that what we’d just read on Izabelle’s computer made it sound like she was planning to do something that would cause trouble.”

“We do?” Dinah said.

“Sure, look at it. It sounds like some person is telling her not to do something rashly.” Dinah read it again and nodded in agreement.

“I wonder what ITA is?” she said.

I looked at it again, too. “I bet the
A
stands for anonymous. Like Alcoholics Anonymous. They always give people sponsors.”

“And the
I
probably stands for independent or international,” Dinah said. “All we have to do is figure out the
T
.”

For a few minutes Dinah and I thought of words beginning with T that might go with Anonymous and Independent or International. We got teetotalers, tap dancers, taskmasters, tastemakers, tattletales, techies and taxi drivers before we gave up.

“Let’s check Izabelle’s favorite Web sites. Maybe that will give us a clue,” Dinah said, clicking on a button on the computer.

A list came up. A number of the Web sites had to do with crochet, but one popped out at me. I told Dinah to click on it. When the opening page loaded and I read it over, I nodded toward the screen.

“You realize what this means,” I said as we looked at the home page of
peanutallergies.com
. “She knew she was allergic to peanuts. It wasn’t a sudden allergic reaction.”

“Then why would she eat a s’more laced with peanut butter?” Dinah said. I flipped through some more screens that described first aid maneuvers. I pointed at the screen.

We both looked at the slender cylinder with the designation EpiPen. Underneath was a diagram of how to use it. Apparently you stabbed it in your thigh if you had a reaction to something and it would keep you going until you could get further help. The lime green pouch bag was still hanging on my wrist. I reeled it in and turned it upside down. A cell phone fell out along with a match of what we were looking at on the screen.