I set down the crochet book William had borrowed from Adele where I thought it had been. A piece of green paper had fallen down with the book. I recognized it as the sheet I’d seen when I’d been there with Adele. I had only gotten a glimpse of it then and remembered she’d said it was notes she’d made when she was figuring out the pattern of the afghan for me. This time I looked at her scribbles. There were all kinds of notes, and in the middle she’d drawn a rectangle and divided it into rows of boxes. The first couple of squares had Xs that probably were meant to stand for the flowers in them. Then she’d changed to just writing in numbers in a couple of the boxes. She’d just drawn one flower with a question mark in each of the rest of the squares. Across the top, in big letters, she’d written a note about the tassel situation stating that there should be one tassel on each corner or just one tassel on one corner, but not one tassel on one corner and two tassels on the next one and then none. I studied the sheet and showed it to Dinah and said William must have been really hard up for a bookmark to have kept the paper.
“Or maybe he was planning to have Anthony make the afghan in the next book,” Dinah joked.
“He’d have a hard time using this for a pattern unless he understood Adele’s secret code,” I said. As I said it my eye went to a book on the floor.
“Ciphers and Codes?” Ryder said, noticing what I’d focused on. I stared at it for a long moment and then suddenly I had a thought.
We all gazed at the paper as I pointed out the afghan drawing. “What if the flowers really were some kind of code?” I said. Before anyone could answer, I pulled out my BlackBerry and scrolled through the contacts until I found Madison’s number.
I called and asked her how she’d come up with the pattern of flowers for the afghan she’d given her brother as a wedding present.
“Not that afghan again,” she said with annoyance in her voice. “I don’t know who told you it was a wedding present. Bradley paid me to make it for him. He wanted it to be some kind of numerology thing. He gave me several long numbers and said they represented important dates for him and Emily and her kids and he wanted them incorporated in the coverlet. They had to be in the right order,” she said. As she said it, I thought of Adele’s note about the tassels and something clicked in my mind.
“And so that’s why you put a tassel on one corner and two tassels on the next. You were showing where the numbers started, weren’t you?” I said.
“Right. It made it weird looking, but Bradley didn’t seem to care,” she said. She said she’d given him the paper with the numbers when she gave him the blanket and forgotten all about it. She faltered and I said I knew she’d made another crocheted blanket for her brother. She admitted that Emily had contacted her with some confused message that Bradley wanted another afghan like it. She’d made up something quickly, but the only thing it had in common with the first one was that the background was green and it had some flowers incorporated in it.
When I repeated what Madison had said, Dinah got a skeptical expression. “Important dates? I don’t think so. I bet all that fuss Bradley made about getting the afghan had nothing to do with sentiment.”
“Exactly,” I said. “More likely it had to do with where he stashed all the money.”
“Numbers, stashed money, huh?” Ryder said. “Like maybe he had one of those Swiss accounts. There was this show on the Crooks and Spies channel called Dude, Where’s the Money? It was all about those accounts that don’t use names, just numbers.”
Ryder’s words hung in the air for a moment, and then everything really made sense. “Of course, that has to be it. Talk about hiding something in plain sight. What a way to keep track of the account number so no one would know. That’s why Bradley wanted the afghan before his faked suicide. And why he took the risk of breaking into my house twice. Now it makes sense why he kept upping his offer to Emily to get it to him. And now I understand why whoever killed Bradley took the afghan with them.”
“Right,” Dinah said. “They had to understand what the flowers meant.”
Ryder held the sheet of paper. “Do you think the clown figured it out?”
I suddenly had a strong urge to look in the garage.
Dinah and Ryder followed me. When I turned on the light, I saw it. The mountain bike was leaning against the wall, and when I took out my print of the photo, it was a perfect match to the size of the tire and the tread.
“Oh my God, William is the killer,” I said. And something else popped forward in my mind. The image of William buying the wool-lined boots for his trip. “He’s not going to Miami, he’s going someplace cold, like maybe to Switzerland.
“We have to stop him,” I said, rushing toward the front door. We got outside, hopped into Ryder’s mother’s Mercedes and he put the car in gear. By now it had gotten dark and all the holiday displays in all the front yards were illuminated. Ryder started to back out but stopped with a start. He hadn’t seen that the street was clogged with cars because they had all turned out their headlights so they could see the lights of Candy Cane Lane.
He finally was able to pull out, but now we were part of the procession of slow-moving cars. I tried Barry’s cell and got his voice mail. I began leaving a message, but it was so convoluted that it didn’t make sense even to me. I took a deep breath and called Detective Heather. I got her voice mail, too. I cut to the chase with her message and just gave her the facts that I thought William was the killer and that he was on his way to the airport, and I bet he had the afghan. I had no idea if she would believe me.
“Adele is going to have to keep him from leaving,” I said as I called her cell.
I heard Dinah snort from the backseat. I admitted it was going to be a challenge.
I got Adele in the car. She cut me off before I’d even finished hello. “Pink, just tell Mrs. Shedd I’m dropping William off at American Airlines and then I’ll come back to the bookstore and straighten everything out about the books. I cut her off and told her I had to tell her something very important and that she should just listen and say nothing.
“Pink, if it’s some of your detec—”
“Hush,” I yelled at her. “I said just listen. You’re not going to be happy with what I’m going to ask you to do. I need you to keep William from getting on the plane.” She made a sputtering sound, but I quieted her again. I told her he wasn’t going to Miami. I took a deep breath and told her that he had killed Bradley and I could prove it. I heard her gasp and then tell me I was nuts.
I told her to check his ticket and she’d see that he wasn’t really going to Miami.
“You’re ridiculous and I’m not going to do anything,” Adele said. I made one more attempt to get through to her.
“I know you don’t want to believe me because he’s your boyfriend and what I told you is a total shock. I hate that it’s true, but it is. I always thought you were too good for him, anyway.” She didn’t say anything else, and when we hung up, I figured the last thing she’d said still stood. She was in total denial and was going to let him leave.
By now Ryder had gotten out of the clog of cars and hit the gas as we headed for the freeway. The freeway wasn’t moving, but Ryder said not to worry, he knew all the short-cuts.
I tried Barry again, thinking we were never going to make it in time. Ryder did know every back road. We went up steep streets and along the paved part of Mulholland before getting onto Sepulveda as it paralleled the freeway. I was leaning forward, willing the SUV to go faster. Ryder was a typical young adult male driver. He wove through traffic like he was braiding a ribbon. I finally closed my eyes and hoped for the best.