Page 8 of Christmas Mittens Murder

It was eerily quiet as Hayley walked past the rows and rows of white headstones, many of them faded, with the family names from the earlier settlers, dating back to when the town was first founded in 1796. Bar Harbor was initially incorporated as the Town of Eden, after Sir Richard Eden, an English statesman, in a document signed by Samuel Adams.

The winter chill in the air was almost debilitating. Hayley, who had hurried outside without putting on a coat, was about to turn around and retreat inside when she spotted what looked like a shoe.

A woman’s shoe.

A tan dress pump with a low heel.

Was it a discarded shoe, or was someone still wearing it? She could not tell because a gravestone was blocking her view.

Hayley cautiously approached, crunching through the snow, until she was able to see over the gravestone and what was behind it.

Hayley gasped and stumbled back, almost losing her balance.

The shoe, which had somehow fallen off, was just a few feet from the dead body of Esther Willey, laid out flat on her back with a sharp chrome steel knitting needle stuck in the middle of her Santa’s reindeer sweater and Betty Dyer’s missing Christmas mitten stuffed in her mouth.

Island Food & Spirits

by

Hayley Powell

When I was in high school, Home Economics was a required class, and I did everything I could to avoid it. Which worked until the start of my senior year, when I could not put it off any longer.

My mother, knowing how important this class was, and that if I failed I might not graduate with my class, informed me that if I did not pass this class, then I would not be joining my best friends, Liddy and Mona, for our upcoming Christmas break ski trip to Squaw Mountain that Liddy’s mother had so graciously agreed to take us on.

This, I must say, was indeed a motivating factor for me as I marched into the Home Economics class on its first day.

I sat down with my freshly sharpened pencil, a new notebook, and most important, a positive attitude, which my mother told me I would need to have or else.

Our teacher, Mrs. Blake, who started off by telling us to call her Mrs. B, stood in front of the class and explained that she would be showing us how to enjoy running a household smoothly and efficiently and that she would also teach us the basics of sewing, knitting and cooking.

I just sat back in my seat and groaned. This was the 1990s, not the 1950s. Who in the world wants to knit nowadays? In hindsight, however, that might not have been a bad thing for me to learn considering what’s been going on recently this holiday season in Bar Harbor.

First up was sewing. We all chose a pattern from a well-worn smelly old box that looked like it was also a relic from the 1950s.

Most of the students chose to make skirts and dresses, but both of those projects looked extremely complicated to me, so luckily I came upon a pattern for a simple pair of sweatpants. I mean, sweatpants, come on, how hard could that be to make? I quickly snatched it out of the pile and thought, “Jeez. Easy A.”

For the next few weeks in class, everyone worked like busy little bees. I made a show of focusing on my sewing project whenever Mrs. B passed by with her arched eyebrow checking on everyone’s progress, but in reality I spent most of the time just fooling around, chattering away to everyone about basically everything but sewing.

When my mother asked me how the class was going, I would give her a thumbs-up and say things like “Great!” or “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be!”

But eventually the hens came home to roost. Mrs. B held me after class and told me that she had noticed that I had not been working on my sewing project and wanted to remind me that I had only two days left before it was due.

I was shocked.

It had been two weeks already?

I quickly dashed back to my table and pulled out my material, staring glumly at it, realizing I had frittered away all this time and still had no clue how to follow a pattern or sew the sweats. All I could see was my mother’s irate face. In a panic, I just grabbed a pair of scissors and started cutting.

I wish I could say I surprised myself and that my sewing project was the work of art that I imagined it to be. But alas, no, an easy A was not in the cards. I could tell from the look on Mrs. B’s face when she inspected my project that she was not impressed. And the D Minus she gave me for a grade pretty much confirmed it. She told me in a very haughty tone that the only reason I did not fail completely was because I had at least made some kind of effort to complete the task.

I could suddenly see my Christmas ski trip in serious jeopardy and knew I had to try much harder on the next project, which was knitting a scarf or a pair of mittens. Of course I picked a scarf because it seemed to be the easier of the two to get done.

Well, it didn’t take long, just one class to be exact, to learn I was hopeless with a pair of knitting needles. I felt overwhelmed and soon lost focus, and before I knew it, another two weeks had passed by, and I found myself handing in a half-finished scarf. I gulped when I saw Mrs. B’s face. She looked even less impressed with my scarf than she did with my sweatpants.

Needless to say, I got an F.

It would take a miracle for me to even have a snowball’s chance in hell of going on that fun-filled weeklong ski trip.

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