Silence of the Lamb's Wool (A Yarn Retreat Mystery) Page 4

I knew the “that” she was referring to was the story on the back of the menu. It was written in fairy-tale fashion and told how Lucinda and Tag had been high school sweethearts, but their lives had gone in different directions. Then years later when she was divorced and he was a widower they had reconnected, gotten married and lived their dream of opening a restaurant. The trouble was the real story wasn’t quite so happily ever after. Both of them had changed during all those years apart. The biggest problem was Tag’s need to have everything just so. Lucinda wasn’t messy; she was just more relaxed.

  “There has to be some kind of solution,” she said, getting back to my problem, “but you can’t do it on an empty stomach.” She signaled to one of the waitresses and asked her to bring me today’s special. I didn’t even ask what it was because everything looked delicious.

  Lucinda was right. After eating the polenta circles sautéed in butter and covered with melted mozzarella and a drizzle of tomato basil sauce along with the chopped vegetable salad, things didn’t seem quite so terrible.

  “I don’t know why Kevin St. John waited until the last minute to tell me,” I said as I pushed my empty plate away. Before Lucinda could speak, I answered myself. “Of course—he was trying to trip me up, make me look bad so I’d give up the retreat business and let him take it over.”

  In all my rumblings about the sudden no-sheep-shearing policy, I’d forgotten about all the other news. I mentioned that Cora Delacorte had brought in her fiancé. When I described Burton Fiore, Lucinda knew who he was right away.

  “That explains it,” Lucinda said before describing the scene when he and Cora had eaten at the Blue Door a few nights earlier. “I thought he’d dropped something when I saw him on his knees,” she said. “And then when Cora shrieked and grabbed her chest, I was afraid she was having some kind of attack.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Tag probably knows more of the details about who he is than I do.” She waved her husband to the table.

  Tag didn’t like being pulled away from his restaurant duty and probably didn’t like that Lucinda was sitting with me even though the place was still mostly empty.

  Tag’s answer came out in a burst as he cruised by the table without stopping. “Lives in Monterey and works in real estate and has a daughter.”

  “I wonder how they met,” I said. By then Tag was back in the main room.

  “I can answer that. It’s really all your fault,” my friend teased. “They met right here a couple of months ago. They were at separate tables. He was dining alone, and she was with Madeleine. Burton ordered a piece of your banana cream pie. Then Cora ordered a piece, but Burton had gotten the last slice. He played the gallant gentleman and offered her his, but she refused and the next thing I knew he’d moved over to her table and they were sharing it. I don’t know what happened to Madeleine. I guess she must have felt like a third wheel and left.”

  I mentioned seeing the sisters and how formally dressed they were in their Chanel-like suits.

  “Chanel-like?” Lucinda said with a twinkle in her eyes. “How about those suits are the real thing. I agree it’s a bit overdressed for a trip to Vista Del Mar, but I think it’s their everyday wear.”

  Lucinda knew about anything with a designer label. Everything she owned had one. But she knew how to dress so that she looked good but not overdone. She’d recently cut her hair and was wearing it short now, which only showed off her dangle earrings and great makeup job. She had on a sunny yellow shift-style dress with a white shrug. The daisy pin was the perfect accessory. It was like she’d brought some sunshine inside.

  The banana cream pie story was swirling in my brain. I didn’t have a good feeling about Cora’s fiancé and wished it had been tomato soup that had brought them together instead of something I’d baked. I hated to think I’d played any part in their matchup.

  I left the Blue Door with no solution to the no-show sheep, but amidst kudos for my baking. A woman by the door was eating a piece of the apple pie I’d baked the night before and her companion was having the from-scratch vanilla pudding with the chocolate walnut shortbread cookies I’d made as well. When Tag mentioned I’d made all of it, they showered me with compliments. Hmm . . . and that was all without any certificate from a fancy French cooking school.

  As I came down the short flight of stairs onto the street, the noonday sun bathed me with warmth. There was still a sharp edge of damp and cool to the air, but having the sun out changed everything. The tall trees that grew down the center strip between the lanes of traffic on Grand Street now cast shadows. The strong light brightened up the whole street and even the yellow Victorian house across the street that had been turned into a bed-and-breakfast seemed a brighter shade.

  Downtown Cadbury was a mixture of styles. Many of the storefronts were built in a Victorian style with bright-colored paint, bay windows and things like fish-scale patterns on the sides of the buildings. Others, like the post office, had a Spanish look, with white stucco walls and a red tiled roof. The unifying factor was that the buildings were all old. Some of them had plaques showing they were built in the late 1800s and gave their history.

  As I looked up and down the street at the cars parked on an angle, I noticed a Cadbury PD blue-and-white was one of them. Even from this angle I recognized my neighbor Dane Mangano as the officer standing at the front of the cruiser talking to a sullen-looking teen. The kid was all bad posture and an I-don’t-care attitude.

  Cadbury wasn’t exactly a crime capital and I knew Dane spent a lot of his time being proactive to keep things from happening. It was a small town with a bunch of bored kids, which was a recipe for trouble.

  I could tell by the upward movement of Dane’s chin he was giving the kid some kind of pep talk. He pulled out a card and wrote something on the back before handing it to the boy. The teen looked at it for a moment before shoving it into his pocket. He kept looking away and it was obvious he wanted to leave. Dane touched him on the shoulder in a supportive move and must have told the kid he could go, because the teen suddenly pulled away.

  Dane looked up as I headed down the street. His eyes lit with recognition and his angular face softened into a smile. All the jogging and martial arts he did served him well, and the midnight blue uniform fit him like a glove. In other words, he was definitely hot. “Are you a social worker or a cop?” I said, gesturing toward the receding figure of the teen. I knew that he had turned his garage into a workout studio and gave karate lessons to the local kids and let them hang out there.

  “You caught me,” he said. His eyes held my gaze a little too long and his smile turned into a teasing grin. “I’m always looking for a new recruit. I’d rather get them when there aren’t any handcuffs involved.”

  Dane had told me that he’d been a bad-boy teenager and gotten into plenty of trouble. He was trying to save the youth of Cadbury from going down the same road. Not only did he give them a place to hang out where they could use up all their excess energy in a positive way, he fed them as well. I should be grateful that he cooked for them, because he always left a dish of whatever pasta he’d made at my door. Just thinking of his spaghetti sauce with the tomato-garlicky taste made my mouth water.

  We made a little small talk, which was really mostly him flirting. There was no denying I was attracted to him. It wasn’t just his looks, either. Despite all the teasing, he had character. He took the whole concept of protecting and serving seriously.

  “You know,” he said, resting his hands on the assortment of tools on his belt, “we could try delivering our care packages in person. Even eat them together. My main course and your dessert.” He stepped a little closer and had entered my bubble of space. His eyes moved over my face. “I promise to show you a good time.”

  I felt a little breathless and took a step back. I think he was completely aware of the effect he had on me and it amused him, along with my usual answer.

 
“Maybe someday,” I said, with an over-the-top bat of my eyelashes. Flirting wasn’t my strong suit, so I tried to make it look like a joke, figuring it would come out that way anyway.

  “Promises, promises,” he said with a laugh. Just then his radio squawked something about a problem at the aquarium and he said he was responding. “Duty calls,” he said. “Somebody jumped in the tank with the sea otters.”

  He rushed to his car, flipped on his lights and siren, and backed out in one move before doing a U-turn and roaring away.

  The cars on the street responded to the flashing lights and siren, and froze. When the blue-and-white was out of sight, traffic resumed.

  I suppose I could have told Dane about my problem with the sheep shearing, but it seemed out of his realm of problem solving, so I’d kept it to myself. I continued down to the corner and turned on a side street that sloped down toward the water. Cadbury Yarn was located in a former house halfway down the block. It was really more of a bungalow, with a nice front porch complete with a wicker rocker and a rainbow wind sock.

  Inside a number of customers were milling around the main room, which had a wall of cubbies filled with yarn organized by color. There were displays of tools and books for all different kinds of yarn craft as well. I looked toward a room behind, which must have been a dining room when it was a house. A number of women were gathered around the long oval table working on their projects.

  The deal was if someone bought yarn there, they were welcome to hang out and work on their projects. And Gwen Selwyn or Crystal Smith, the mother-daughter owners, would help them if they had a problem. I knew all about it because they had nursed me through several projects.

  I was glad to see the place was busy, as I knew it was a struggle to make enough to keep them all going. Gwen was old-school Cadbury. She had short brown hair with streaks of gray she did nothing to hide. Her clothes were comfortable. Mostly she wore loose-fitting slacks in neutral colors paired with a cotton shirt. Since it was always chilly, she wore something on top that she’d made, like the chunky toast brown sweater she had on today.

  Crystal went the opposite way. Maybe her fashion sense came from being the former wife of a rock god. She wore skinny jeans with interesting tops, her earrings never matched and she wore heavy makeup that somehow never looked overdone. Her hair was black and so curly, the ringlets looked like tiny Slinkys.

  Crystal was free so I told her I was there to pick up the drop spindles and patterns for my retreaters. After a moment her mother joined us and I mentioned the yarn and related items for the gift shop.

  “Thanks for the reminder, but believe me we’ll remember to bring it over. And we’ll check it a day or so later and add as needed. These events are a real boost to our sales,” Gwen said as her daughter went into the back and brought out a shopping bag with the spindles.

  I told them the news about Kevin St. John’s ixnaying the sheep shearing. “What am I going to do? That’s the beginning of the whole event.”

  “You could just make spinning the yarn the main event. Just change the name to Spinning to Shawl,” Gwen suggested. “There’s still time, we could get in roving.” She went to a basket and took out a slender plastic bag filled with natural-colored fibers. When she removed the fiber, it came out as one long piece. She explained it was wool that had been washed, combed and carded.

  “But that takes all the fun out of it,” Crystal said. She suggested taking the group to the farm to watch the shearing and get the fleeces, but then realized I’d need to rent a bus and that it would cut way into my profit, which wasn’t that big to begin with.

  I began to second-guess my decision to put on such an ambitious retreat. “I should have stuck to something safe and easy.”

  One of the women had gotten up from the table and joined us. “I don’t know why you didn’t contact me if you needed someone to teach spinning,” the woman said. Gwen stepped in and introduced her as Wanda Krug. The woman added “spinning specialist” to her name.

  “It was a mistake to hire that Nicole Welton,” the short stout woman began in a matter-of-fact voice tinged with annoyance. “She might have some fancy degree in textiles, but let me tell you, when it comes to spinning, I can spin her into a corner—any day.”

  I was taken aback by Wanda’s attack. As if to punctuate her comments, Wanda pulled a drop spindle out of her floral-print tote bag and grabbed the length of roving on the counter. She moved so fast, I couldn’t see what she was doing, but after a moment she began to hit the cylinder part of the spindle against her leg and held the long strand of wool as it twisted upward. She wasn’t silent as she did it, either. She almost did a little dance and kept yelling “Woo-ha!” every time she gave the spindle a whirl.

  I was amazed at how fast she turned the long piece of roving into a length of yarn. At the end she seemed to come back to reality and realized what she’d done. She paid for the roving and then left in a huff.

  After she’d gone, Gwen told me Wanda really was an expert spinner and her confidence was earned even if she was a little hard to take. The older store owner went back to the table to help a woman who was holding up a piece of pearl gray knitting with a big hole in the middle, hysterical because she didn’t know what she’d done wrong.

  I hung around the counter with Crystal for a while and she assured me that Nicole Welton would be able to handle the spinning just fine and I said I’d let her know if I decided to skip right to spinning. “No matter where you start, the group is going to end up knitting,” she said, handing me an envelope with copies of the pattern for the shawlette.

  Of course the bag with the spindles and the patterns wasn’t the only package I left with. Even though my aunt had left me a closetful of different kinds of yarn, I couldn’t seem to get out of Cadbury Yarn without buying something. I’d become particularly fond of making washcloths. They were small and required only a few skills—like the knit stitch, yarn overs, increasing and decreasing—and I was left with something useful. I picked up a skein of pink organic cotton, thinking I’d make one and send it to my mother to show off my skills.

  Who was I kidding? I could hear her saying, “So now you’re a towel maker?”

  5

  The sun was still shining as I went back to the main street. There were an assortment of Cadburians and tourists out enjoying the bright afternoon. I looked down toward the aquarium and wondered if Dane had had to dive into the otter pool to retrieve the overzealous visitor.

  Nicole Welton’s shop was just down the street. Instead of calling her, it seemed better to go there in person and bring up the no-sheep situation. Maybe, after Wanda’s disparaging remarks, I wanted some reassurance that Nicole really could handle the retreat. And a visit to Nicole’s was always a feast for the eyes.

  I dropped my packages in my car and walked up the street to the old Cadbury by the Sea Bank. It was an imposing structure situated on the corner, with two white columns flanking the door.

  One of the arched windows still had CADBURY BY THE SEA NATIONAL BANK painted in gold across it, though time had smoothed away bits of the letters. My understanding was that the building had stayed empty and abandoned since the Cadbury Bank had closed years ago.

  A machine-embroidered banner with ANTIQUES emblazoned on it hung over another of the arched windows and made it clear it wasn’t a bank anymore.

  Bells attached to a leather strap went into a ringing frenzy as I opened the front door and walked in. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the lower light inside, though with large arched windows on two of the walls, it was still quite bright. The temperature dropped, too. The high ceiling and abundance of marble kept the place cool. The bells served their purpose and Nicole looked up from the back of the open space and waved.

  I thought it was clever how she’d turned the bank into an antiques store and textile studio. The old tellers’ cages were hung with samples of old and new textil
es, and they were a feast of color and texture. There were quilts, afghans and knitted blankets, along with some of Nicole’s hand-woven creations. An antique dressmaker’s dummy seemed to be standing guard, swathed in a light green shawl that sparkled with tiny crystal beads.

  “I can’t believe what you’ve done to this place,” I said, looking at the open area opposite the old tellers’ cages. Beautifully refinished antique furniture had been arranged into settings complete with plants and more quilts and blankets to add color. I admired a deep blue lap blanket that hung on the arm of an oak rocker. I couldn’t help but touch the intricate design of the thread doily sitting on a wooden washstand. I thought the clear vase holding a bunch of crocheted red roses was the perfect touch for the round mahogany table.

  The store seemed to have everything . . . except customers. It was really out of place in Cadbury, too arty and sophisticated, and instead belonged in San Francisco, Santa Fe or even down the road in Carmel. It hadn’t helped matters when Nicole had decided to call it The Bank. Just like my muffin names, Cadburians liked things to be called just what they were.

  Nicole was working at one of the looms and took a moment before she left her work and gestured for me to join her. She was dressed casually in soft-with-age jeans and a long white shirt with a darker T-shirt underneath. She had a beautiful aqua woven scarf arranged around her neck, held in place with a silver pin. There was a nonchalance to her whole outfit, as though she’d merely added one piece after the other without much thought instead of agonizing in front of a mirror trying to figure out if something looked good, like some of us—well, I—did.

  “You should have seen the place when we got it,” she said as I passed a U-shaped island of glass cases in the center of the large space. “There was dust a mile high and boxes of old papers from the bank. They must have just shut the doors and not looked back. The only good thing is they left me lots of papers to use as kindling in the fireplace.” I noticed a stack of blue ledgers next to the stone fireplace on the side wall. “The only thing they seemed to have taken were all the desks. Too bad, they would probably be a hot item now.”