Hooked on Murder: A Crochet Mystery

CHAPTER 10

'The knitters got meredith,' adele said in a panicky voice as the rest of us started to set up our crochetingsupplies on the event table.

'What are you talking about, dear?' CeeCee said, givingAdele a concerned look. She wasn't a fan of knitting, but she wasn't as rabid about it as Adele.

Adele held up a note written on yellow legal-size paper, and a plastic bag with three red-and-white squares with black borders. 'Rayaad gave me this when I came in.'

I looked a little closer, wondering why Rayaad had given it to Adele rather than to me. More likely Adele had seen it and just taken it.

'Meredith said she was dropping out of the group becauseEllen brought her in and it just doesn't feel right without her. That's what the note says, but I'm betting she went with the Encino twins and joined their knitting group.'

CeeCee looked at Adele, aghast. 'Oh, dear, that does leave us even more in the lurch.' CeeCee set a box on the table. She added Meredith's squares and then showed the contents to all of us. It was pretty sad.

I handed her a black-bordered kelly green square I'd done in single crochet, and Dinah gave her a similar one in yellow and black, but it made the amount look only a little less sad.

'Ladies, we're in trouble,' CeeCee said.

Adele noticed something white and puffy sticking out of CeeCee's tote bag and pulled it out. 'It's a blanket I made for a friend's grandbaby. I was going to show it to you.'

Adele shook her head. 'You shouldn't be working on baby blankets when we need squares.'

CeeCee sighed. 'Some of us can do both.' She presentedfive perfectly done three-color granny squares.

Adele, taking it as a challenge, whipped out another of her floppy-flowered squares, explaining that hers took more work and she had a full-time job--made worse by having to deal with story time. She stood with her hand on her hip. 'You don't have to deal with kids giving you a hard time every chance they get. Can you believe one of them thought this was a costume?' she said, pointing at her crimson peasantblouse and full skirt made of strips of different patterns. 'What kind of a costume would it be, anyway?'

Nobody answered, but I had a feeling we were all thinkingthe same thing: Clown.

'With their miniature-size couture clothes, all those kids know about are designers. They need to learn about style,' Adele grumbled.

Sheila was working on a royal blue square that began with a flower motif and then became square-shaped with rows of spaces and double-crochet columns. Her stitches had become so tight, she had to use her hook like a shovel to dig into each of them. Her shoulders looked hunched. 'Okay, I'm guilty. I should have been working on squares, but I made this.' She laid down the square and took somethingfrom her bag. As she unfolded it, all of us oohed and aahed. It wasn't just a magnificent scarf. It was a work of art. Sheila smiled shyly at our responses and explained how she had used more than one strand of yarn. The one constant throughout the piece was the variegated blue ribbonyarn, but she had mixed it with a different shade of green eyelash yarn in each section. The effect reminded me of an impressionist painting. To finish the piece, she had added fringe made of strands of tiny wooden beads.

'You made this?' Adele said, holding it up.

Sheila nodded.

'But how did you manage to keep the stitches so loose?' CeeCee asked, touching the scarf appreciatively.

'I'm not as nervous when I crochet at home, and I used this.' She held up a crochet hook that looked like a tiny baseball bat.

Dinah tried the scarf on, and it looked great. Sheila was certainly a surprise. She always seemed to be having troublejust making a square. Who knew she was so artistic with color?

Adele pulled some place mats out of her bag. 'As long as everybody is showing off what they made'--Adele laid them on the table--'I made a whole set.' They were a hot pink and electric purple combination, which made me wonder about Adele's home color scheme.

'Maybe we should try and get Meredith back. I know where those knitters meet,' Adele said. She looked a little disappointed that we hadn't been as excited about her place mats as we were about Sheila's scarf.

CeeCee shook her head. 'Dear, we have to let her go. If she wants to join the knitters, so be it. I never felt she was a committed crocheter anyway. She only came because of Ellen.'

Adele grumbled a few times and then, once again trying to hold on to the mantle of leader, suggested we all stop talking about the squares and start making some.

For a few minutes all was quiet except for the pop music over the loudspeaker and Rayaad announcing there were fresh peanut butter cookies in the cafe. But only for a few minutes.

'See how stealthy crocheting is,' Adele said to no one in particular. 'No annoying clacking needles to break the peace.'

'Did I tell you that the relative of the gym member who works at the police's West Valley Division said that Ellen had a big life insurance policy? Lawrence is going to get a bundle,' Sheila offered.

It was frustrating that she knew more than I did, consideringI had someone on the inside.

'Do you think Lawrence was having an affair before Ellen died?' I asked.

CeeCee blinked at me. 'You don't know, dear? I thought that since Ellen was your husband's partner, you probably knew all the dirt.'

'Ellen and I were just cordial.' That was really an overstatement.Most of the times when I'd been with Charlie and seen Ellen, she barely acknowledged me. 'And Charlie'srelationship with her was just business.'

'Let me tell you, Lawrence got around. It got worse afterhe became a TV producer. Ellen confided in me becauseof Bill.'

At the mention of her late husband, CeeCee's eyes welled up with tears. 'I know everybody thought Bill and I were the perfect couple. Ellen kept the image going. It wasn't easy for him, being Mr. CeeCee Collins all those years. He was a world-renowned dentist, but nobody ever thought about that. You know, that opera singer Maria Brava flew thousands of miles so he could clean her teeth. But even so, all everyone did was ask about me. So I couldn't really blame him for having a fling or two with some little nobody who wanted to hear about just him.'

'Men are skunks,' Dinah said. CeeCee looked a little miffed at losing the floor as Dinah continued. 'Jeremy wasn't a world-renowned dentist. More like a world-renowned jerk. After being married for twenty-five years, he had one of those midlife hissy fits. He walked out on me and the kids-- though by then they were mostly grown. He took off with the little nobody he'd been having an affair with, and started a whole new family.'

'I had no idea, dear,' CeeCee said with a sympathetic pat. 'Of course, Bill never left me.'

There was just enough emphasis on the left me for it to be one of CeeCee's sweet-toned barbs. Dinah gave her a dirty look but didn't say anything. She knew when it was best to just leave things alone.

All this talk of cheating husbands made me think of Charlie. As far as I knew, he had never strayed, and I realizedI didn't want to know now if he had. It was better to keep his memory intact.

Sheila stared down at her crocheting, her brown hair falling forward to hide her round face. She'd come to an impassewith the stitches. No way would her hook go in. Her only choice was to unravel them and start again. Unlike knitting,which was difficult to undo, crochet came apart with ease, making it much easier to correct a mistake. At last Sheila was just staring at a pile of curly blue yarn in her lap. I noticed a splotch of water hit the yarn, and when she looked up, she was crying. Not the theatrical tears like CeeCee turned on, which always seemed more for effect than genuine and which never mussed her makeup. Sheila's eyes were alreadyon the way to puffy and red, and so was her nose.

'Okay, here it is. The reason I had so much time to make the scarf is, I broke up with my boyfriend. Well, he broke up with me.'

Sheila, who had never talked much, suddenly started pouring out her heart. 'My boyfriend did this intervention thing. He tricked me into going to some doctor he knew who wanted to prescribe a bunch of drugs for my nerves.' She glanced at all of us. 'You know how it is. They rave on about some new pill being so wonderful, and then six months later, you find out that it causes warts. Besides, I want to conquer my nerves through natural means, like meditation or crochet. Anyway, when I told him I wouldn't do the meds, he said he couldn't stay with