Patterns in the Sand Read Online Free Page A

in the heart of the artists’ development, and became another rock in the community by the sea.
     
     
Good friends, all of them.
     
     
“I’ve wrapped up key lime pie for each of you,” Nell said, following Aidan across the deck. “Ben and I don’t want it around.”
     
     
“Meaning Nell doesn’t want me to eat it,” Ben said. He reached over and patted Nell’s arm as she walked by. “She likes me lean and rock-solid.”
     
     
Nell’s soft laugh trailed behind her as she headed through the French doors to the open kitchen. She liked Ben healthy, was what she liked. And a heart attack scare a few years earlier had changed their eating and living patterns, though a little bit of key lime pie on a moonlit Friday night could be easily walked off along the beach in the morning.
     
     
A muffled ring broke into strains of soft jazz coming from the speakers. Nell glanced at the clock above the stove, then down at a lumpy knit bag near the kitchen counter. Her heart skipped a beat. A sliver of worry cut into the evening’s peace. Silly, she scolded herself.
     
     
Just because she and Ben would turn out the lights and head upstairs as soon as the last car rolled down their driveway didn’t mean other people’s night ended. Cass and Izzy’s evening might be just starting—Brendan Slattery, too—and it was Izzy’s phone, after all. It was probably friends inviting her to meet them at the Gull. Or maybe the Edge over near Pelican Pier, where the thirties crowd often gathered to bring their busy week to a relaxing end.
     
     
“Probably Sam,” Izzy said, coming up behind Nell and bending low to dig through her purse for her phone. She looked up at Nell while her finger tips rummaged through the cavernous bag. “He’s coming back into town for a few weeks and usually calls when he gets in so I don’t worry if there are lights on above the shop.”
     
     
Of course, Nell thought. Sam Perry, who had come to Sea Harbor the summer before and never left, at least not completely. Between tours for his book of photographs and simply doing his job as a photojournalist, Sam always managed to find his way back to the tiny apartment above Izzy’s knitting studio, where he was welcomed by Purl—and Izzy, too. He was the ideal tenant, she said. He was never there long enough to mess it up or have crazy parties, and he always paid his rent on time. Good reasons to welcome him back—but not the whole picture, Nell suspected, especially when she saw the light in Izzy’s eyes at mention of Sam’s return.
     
     
Izzy stepped out of the kitchen light and spoke into the sliver of her cell phone, her voice low.
     
     
But Nell caught the cadence, caught the fear in her niece’s voice. It sliced through the evening air like an ice skate on a frozen Pelican Pond.
     
     
“What did you say?” Izzy’s voice rose on the single question. And then it flattened into a tone that matched the next word out of her mouth.
     
     
“Dead?” she repeated after the caller.
     
     
And then, “No.”
     
     
Izzy’s tone was declarative and louder than before. “You’re absolutely, positively wrong.”
     
     
She snapped the phone shut.
     
     
“People don’t die in my knitting shop,” she said firmly to Nell. “They simply don’t.”
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 3

 
T he call had come from Esther Gibson, a dispatcher at the Sea Harbor police station.
     
     
For her sixty-fifth birthday five years earlier, Esther had treated herself to knitting lessons at the Seaside Studio, and she was now one of the most prolific knitters in town. Esther had single-handedly filled the children’s wing of the Beverly hospital with knit bears and bunnies, knit up sweet little hats for the hospital nursery, and donated hand-knit blankets to the homeless shelter and the four-cell Sea Harbor jail. “Those men deserve some trace of human kindness, too,” she scolded the chief of police when he expressed reluctance to support her latest project.
     
     
And in the process,