By Hook or by Crook

I did as Barry suggested; I told everyone I was stumped by Mary Beth Wells’s secret and who killed her and I was giving up. Only Dinah asked me if I was sure. Nobody even mentioned the crochet piece the next time the group got together. For once all we did was work with yarn and make small talk.

When I got home that evening, my mother was at the kitchen table drinking her hot water, lemon juice and honey. Her hair looked newly done and her nails manicured.

“Sit, sit,” she said after I’d taken care of the dogs.

I listened and the house was quiet.

“No one’s here,” she said. “We’ve practiced as much as we can. We’re as good as we’re going to get. Now we need to rest our voices and our feet so we’ll be fresh for the audition.”

I sat down on the bench across from her. She was nursing her drink and explained my father had gone out.

“I know our visit has been a little disruptive to your house, and I wanted to thank you,” my mother said.

I said the usual baloney about it not being any trouble, and she shocked me by telling me what a good daughter I was. I never knew she noticed.

“So fill me in about these murders you’ve been involved with,” she said, setting her cup down.

“You really want to know?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t want to know,” she answered matter-of-factly. Apparently she had never noticed that we hadn’t had a lot of mother-daughter moments. I told her I’d been in the middle of a couple of murder investigations and solved both cases.

My mother’s face brightened into a laugh. “Who’d ever figure you’d end up as an amateur detective?”

I shrugged.

“Did you ever get sent a dead fish before?”

“No. This was a first.” I kept waiting for her to turn the conversation around to herself, but she seemed genuinely curious and asked for the details of what had led up to the special delivery. “Are you sure you really want to know?” I asked again. She rolled her eyes and nodded in response. I went into my work room and got the package with the crochet piece and the notes. I had stopped carrying it with me. What was the point? When I laid everything out on the table, she leaned closer for a better view.

“Oh, I remember this thing. That’s the Casino Building.” She examined the first panel and then glanced over the rest of them. “What about the others? What are they supposed to be?”

I started going over the filet crochet designs one by one. I pointed out the odd house with the cone-shaped roof and the three panels around it, all with cats. “I found this house a short distance from the Casino and there were cats everywhere.” I indicated what I’d first thought to be the Arc de Triomphe. “This fireplace is inside that house and now I’m pretty sure the mantelpiece has a secret compartment with something hidden in it.”

My mother’s fascination was obvious as I continued on. I explained I thought the motif of the figure with the bow and arrow was meant to signify Sagittarius and referred to a baby’s birth sign. “And I know this vase appears to be filled with drooping tulips, but they are supposed to be Irises and are a clue to the baby’s mother’s name.”

I turned the piece around so the wishing well in the adjacent panel was recognizable. “See the S hanging from the roof. If you add that onto well you get Wells, which is the last name of the person who made this.”

My mother found the MB and nodded with enthusiasm. “I get it. This was like her signature. Very clever of you to figure that all out,” she said. Had my mother just given me a compliment? I told her the rest of it—how the baby turned out to be somebody in the crochet group.

“And I thought your only problems had to do with dating,” my mother said when I had finished.

My mother fingered the stitches on the piece. “This is really crochet? I thought crochet was just used to make those multicolored squares and shawls.”

She picked up the diary entry and read it over:

The island is decorated for Christmas. All the colorful lights brighten up the short cold days, but it doesn’t help me feel any less sad. I hate to have to say good-bye even for a short time. I know things will work out and we will be back together again for keeps. Tomorrow I go back as if nothing has changed. I know I am doing the right thing.

“This is about heartbreak and hope,” she said. I must have given her an odd look. “Molly, it’s like when somebody gives me lyrics to a song. I read over the whole thing to see what it’s about before I worry about each line. Then when I go back it’s easier to get the meaning. The person writing this is sad about having to say good- bye to someone.” My mother flipped the page and read the line on the back. “Oh, she’s saying she’s going to miss the baby.”

“What?” I said, and my mother pointed to the line on the back: Catalina, I’m going to miss you.

Dinah and I had taken that line to mean the island. “You said that’s what the baby’s name was, didn’t you? But she has hope they’ll be reunited,” my mother said and then appeared confused. “If it’s her baby, why is she having to say good-bye anyway?” Before I could tell her that Mary Beth wasn’t the mother, my mother looked at the crochet piece again.

“What about these other panels?” Her hand brushed the square with the plain ring and then the divided circle before moving on to the double-sized panel with the aqua rectangle. Her finger traced the open area in the middle.

I raised my hands, palms upward, in the universal I-don’t-know sign.

My mother continued to study the panels and then scrunched her face in disapproval. “Why would somebody put a switch in with all this other stuff?”

Just as I got out a “huh?” my mother held the panel up next to the light switch in the kitchen. It took a moment of my eye going back and forth, but then I saw that the panel image and the light switch were an exact match. How could I have missed it? “Mother, you’re a genius,” I said, kissing her cheek.

“I have my moments,” she said with a pleased smile. “As long as we’re playing detective—I think your father is having an affair with Belle Gladner.” When she got through laying out the facts, they were so ridiculous, I had a hard time not laughing. Her evidence: My father had gone shopping for a shirt without her and mentioned running into their former neighbor at the drugstore and noticing that her skin looked very good. My mother was back to thinking the world revolved around her.

DINAH MET ME AT CAITLIN’S CUPCAKES IN THE morning. “Think about it,” I said, discussing the crochet panel. “Switch. Like maybe switch Iris and Mary Beth and—”

“Ali’s mother is really Mary Beth,” Dinah said, finishing my thought. We were sitting at the counter that ran along the window.

“I think that’s Mary Beth’s secret,” I said.

“But there’s no way to prove it,” Dinah said. I looked out the window and down the street. I saw Ali and Iris heading toward the bookstore.

“Maybe there isn’t a way to prove it, but there is a way to prove Iris isn’t her mother.” I got off my stool. “I have a plan.”

“I guess that means you’re back on the case,” Dinah said, rushing after me.

It took some fast action, but when we got to the cafe at the bookstore I got Bob to make up a tray of iced tea samples. Then I got our head cashier, Rayaad, to carry the tray around the bookstore.

Ali and Iris were in the nature section, and I slipped behind a bookcase. As Rayaad headed in their direction, she glanced over her shoulder at me. I gave her the nod. I watched from my hiding place as our cashier stopped next to them and offered the samples. Other people came out of nowhere and took some of the small cups, but Ali and Iris shook their head. Rayaad looked back at me and I waved her back at them. She offered again, and persisted. They finally each took a cup and then walked away.

Dinah was right behind me as we shadowed them from the other side of the row of bookcases. We kept catching glimpses of them whenever we passed an aisle. They were drinking. Finally, they appeared to drain the contents and be looking around for someplace to discard the cups.

Before I could get Rayaad to swing by and pick them up, Iris found a trash can. Oh no. There went my plan.