Chapter 3 Whispers Over Earl Grey #2
but that’s not a reason to push a man off a ladder.”
“Nobody has said he was pushed,” Eleanor pointed out.
“Nobody has said he wasn’t, either.” Gareth swallowed and wiped his fingers on his apron. “And if Penny’s right about the button, and the book, and the chill, then someone was in that shop with him. Someone who left in a hurry. Someone who didn’t want to be seen.”
Florence’s needle slipped. She caught it before it fell, but the stitch dropped, a small ladder of unravelled wool running down through three rows of careful work. She stared at it for a long moment, and then she set the knitting aside with a gesture that was almost violent in its suddenness.
“I’m afraid I’m feeling rather unwell,” she announced, rising from her chair. “The heat, perhaps. I think I ought to go home.”
She was not looking at anyone. Her coat rustled as she gathered it around her, and the amber beads clicked together with a sound like small stones shifting in a current. I stood as well, my host’s instinct overriding my curiosity.
“Of course, Florence. I hope you feel better soon.”
She nodded once, a sharp, jerky motion, and then she was gone, the bell above the door chiming her exit into the soft grey afternoon. The shop felt larger without her in it, and quieter, though the other women were still talking in their hushed, speculative voices.
Eleanor caught my eye. She did not speak, but the look she gave me was long and steady, and I understood it perfectly.
She had seen what I had seen. The tremor in Florence’s hands.
The darting glance around the room. The way her voice had climbed when the button was mentioned, as though the word itself had pricked her.
The knitting circle wound down slowly after that, the conversation turning to smaller, safer things, the ordinary currency of village life.
Who was planting what in their garden. Whether the autumn fair would need more volunteers.
I moved through the goodbyes and the thank-yous with half my attention, the other half still fixed on the empty chair by the window and the half-finished square of moss-green wool lying abandoned on its seat.
When the last of the women had gone and the door had swung shut for the final time, Gareth lingered by the counter, stacking the empty tart tray and brushing crumbs into a neat pile with the side of his hand.
“That was odd, wasn’t it?” he said, his voice uncharacteristically subdued. “Florence, I mean. She’s never left early before. Not once.”
“No,” I agreed. “She hasn’t.”
Eleanor was winding her leftover wool into a tight, precise ball, her fingers moving with the same unhurried competence they brought to everything.
“Florence Albright has owned that antique shop for years,” she said, not looking up.
“She and Silas had a professional rivalry that was well known in the village. They bid against each other at estate sales. They argued over the provenance of certain items. It was never friendly.”
“You think she might have been in the bookshop yesterday?” Gareth asked.
“I think,” Eleanor said, tucking the ball of wool into her bag and fastening the clasp, “that Florence knows something she is not telling. And I think Penny knows it too.”
She looked at me then, and her expression was calm but not remote. There was an invitation in it, a door held open.
“I noticed her hands,” I said. “When she first arrived, they were steady. Perfectly steady. But the moment the button was mentioned, she started to shake. And she couldn’t look at anyone. She looked at the window, and the door, and her knitting, but not at any of us.”
“Guilt,” Gareth said, with the confidence of a man who had never felt it. “Definitely guilt.”
“Or fear,” Eleanor said. “They often look the same.”
I walked to the window and looked out at the lane, where the afternoon light had begun its slow fade toward evening.
The street was quiet, the shops closed or closing, the stone walls holding the last of the day’s warmth.
Somewhere out there, Florence Albright was walking home in her burgundy coat, and somewhere out there, the truth of what had happened in the Lavender Lane Bookshop was waiting to be found.
“I think I need to learn more about Florence,” I said, still facing the window. “About her shop, her finances, her history with Silas. There’s something there. I don’t know what it is yet, but I felt it this afternoon. She was afraid of that button.”
Eleanor rose from her chair and came to stand beside me. “I can help with the research. I still have access to certain records, and I know a great deal about the village’s history that has never been written down.”
Gareth dusted the last of the flour from his hands and joined us at the window. “And I can listen. People tell me things, Penny. They always have. If there’s gossip about Florence Albright floating around Meadowbrook, I’ll catch it.”
I turned to face them, these two friends who had asked no questions and offered no objections, who had simply stepped forward when the moment required it.
The warmth that rose in me then was not the abstract comfort of community but something sharper and more particular, the recognition that I was not alone in this.
“Thank you,” I said. “Both of you.”
Eleanor smiled her knowing smile. “We’re a village, Penny. This is what villages do.”
They left together a few minutes later, Gareth carrying his empty tray and Eleanor with her knitting bag over her arm, and I stood in the doorway of The Yarn & Needle and watched them go.
The street was emptying now, the lamps beginning to glow in the windows of the cottages further down the lane, and the air smelled of damp earth and the first hint of evening.
I stayed there until the cold began to seep through my cardigan, and then I went back inside and locked the door.
Florence’s knitting was still on the chair by the window.
I picked it up and turned it over in my hands.
The dropped stitch had unravelled further, a small ladder of empty space running down through the neat rows of moss-green wool, and I thought of the button on the floor of the bookshop, small and ornate and unexplained, and of the way Florence’s hands had trembled when she heard it described.
I set the knitting on the counter and reached for my own, the deep blue scarf that was still only a few inches long.
The needles felt solid and familiar in my hands, and I began to knit, the rhythm of it settling my thoughts into something like order.
I did not know what had happened in that bookshop, not yet.
But I knew, with a certainty that grew stronger with every stitch, that Florence Albright was part of the answer.