Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_02 (16 page)

Betsy tried to keep her face muscles in neutral while wondering wildly if she was the right person to be hearing a confession. And what she ought to do if she was sitting in a murderer's kitchen.

Alice took a big breath and began, speaking slowly. “I was always the biggest child in any of my school classes. Even when I got into high school, I was taller than most of the boys. And clumsy and goofy looking. And I wasn't very good in my studies, either, so I didn't have that to comfort me. I'd see the posters go up advertising a dance and yearn and yearn to go, but no boy would ask me, and I was just miserable.

“Then, in my junior year, Trudie Koch said something halfway sympathetic to me, and I just poured out my grief to her. She said she was going to a party where you didn't need an invitation, and there would be plenty of boys to choose among, all of them glad to see me. She said I wasn't really ugly, I just didn't know how to use what I had to best advantage. She said she'd come over and help me dress pretty for it, show me about makeup.

“I knew it was wrong right from the start, but I wasn't making any progress at all with nice boys or with being nice myself and it seemed kind of exciting, to be naughty and flagrant and welcome at a party. I followed her instructions and bought a pair of high heels and some silk stockings. I talked my parents into going out to a movie, so we had the house to ourselves when Trudie came over. She put all sorts of rouge and powder on my face, piled black mascara on my eyelashes until it was hard to keep my eyes open. She put my hair up and she pinned my good dress in a way that showed I did have a figure after all. I didn't even recognize myself in the mirror.

“We went to a house in Shorewood that was kind of isolated, and I had the first beer of my entire life five minutes after I got there. I had another to keep it company, and pretty soon I was dancing with some boy I'd never seen before in my life. He took me out on the porch and I learned a great deal about—”

Alice stopped. Her face was a red so deep Betsy was alarmed for her blood pressure, and her hands were clasped very tightly on top of the loose-leaf binder. “About life, I guess,” concluded Alice lamely. “It seemed like great fun, and I became very popular for several hours. But it got later and later, and at last I began to be afraid that my parents would be waiting on the porch for me to get home. I finally persuaded one of the more sober young men to drive me back to town. I gave him an address a couple blocks from the real one, and I sneaked into our backyard and through my bedroom window. As it turned out, my parents were in bed. They had come home to a silent house and thought I'd turned in early. I was particularly attentive in church the next several Sundays, which drew the attention of a young man who was about to graduate from Luther Seminary.”

Alice looked into Betsy's eyes. “We had a very happy marriage. He never knew I was only technically a virgin. I recognized two of the young men at school later, but they didn't seem to have any idea that had been me; at least neither of them ever said anything to me about it. Trudie dropped out of school a month later, and I didn't see her for awhile. I married Martin a week after I graduated, and a week after that Trudie came calling. She'd lost her waitress job and was about to be evicted and could I help her? It was just five dollars. Just this once.” Alice grimaced. “It's never just once with something like that, of course. But she was careful not to drain my budget to the point where I had to tell Martin. And when she had a boyfriend with money, she'd leave me alone for months. But she'd always come back. Always. Until she disappeared. I used to pray for God to strike her dead, to open the earth so it could swallow her up, and when she vanished, I was happy for the first time in a long while. She was gone a year before I finally believed she would never come back.”

She reached out and took Betsy by the wrist. “But I didn't kill her. I prayed to God to take her out of my life, but I wouldn't dare do anything myself to get rid of her; it never occurred to me to pray for the strength to kill her.”

9

B
etsy went back to the shop. She thought she was maintaining a poker face over Alice's startling confession, but Godwin read something and asked, “What did you learn?”

“I can't say, for sure,” she replied.

“Why?” asked Shelly.

“Because I want to talk it over with Jill first.”

“Hey, I'm your friend, too, aren't I?” demanded Godwin. “You can tell me anything.”

“It's not because she's a friend, it's because she's law enforcement,” said Betsy, and retreated from their suddenly serious expressions. She was worried, too.

She went into the shop's little back room, where a bathroom took up half the space and the other half was crammed with a coffee machine and boxes of stock and folding chairs. She hung up her coat and put her purse in a locked cabinet. She came out, but still wasn't ready to face her employees or a chance customer. She looked around for something to do in the back of the shop. It was nearly three o‘clock.

From the front she could hear Godwin and Shelly talking, their voices swift and urgent, but not loud.

Speculating,
thought Betsy,
about what I learned from Alice. Thank God they don't have a clue. Poor Alice!

Back here was a little area set apart from the front by two sets of box shelves, double sided, filled with fabric, yarns, books, and magazines. There was a small round table and two comfortable chairs on the left, where customer and employee or salesman and owner could sit and plan really big projects or a substantial increase in the credit limit.

There was a cordless phone on the table; Betsy picked it up and dialed Jill's home phone number. She got a recording, and left a message: “Jill, can you call or come over as soon as possible? I have something to tell you. It's kind of urgent.” She hung up and thought about calling Malloy, but what could she tell him? She was not going to reveal Alice's secret, and it would be useless to just tell him that Alice had once hated Trudie without telling him why. No, the person she needed to talk to was Jill.

She straightened the chairs and moved some catalogs back to where they belonged. Then she decided to tackle a spinner rack near the box shelves that held counted cross-stitch patterns and supplies. The items on the rack weren't moving well—perhaps because the rack looked so disorganized, like a collection of remnants. She took the items off the rack and laid them out in various ways on the table. Scissors all together? No. Arranged in sets of scissors, needles, thimbles, patterns? No. She finally decided to treat the rack like a Christmas tree, which meant the bigger the item, the nearer the bottom it should go. She swiftly put things back on the spinner, big scissors and floss organizers on the bottom, chatelaines and smaller scissors in the middle, and thimbles and scabbard needle holders on the top row of black metal arms. That at least looked better than the original arrangement.

She was near the end of her task when she heard the sound of the front door opening, and Godwin calling gaily, “Hiya, Myrt! How's ever‘ little thing?”

A woman's voice giggled and said, “Now who would have thought anyone would still remember that?”

“Remember what?” asked Shelly.

But Betsy remembered, too, and, smiling, came into the front part of her shop. “It's from
Fibber McGee and Molly
,” she said.

“Who are Fibber McGee and Molly?” asked Shelly.

“It was a radio show way back when,” said Godwin. “Betsy, this is Myrtle Jensen. She's president of the Excelsior Historical Society.”

“Hello, Mrs. Jensen,” said Betsy, coming forward. “How may I help you?”

The woman, short and very thin, wore a long wool skirt, low-heeled boots, and a plaid wool jacket. She moved briskly, but her face and hands were those of an elderly woman. She met Betsy halfway, hand extended. Betsy, leery of arthritic fingers, took it gently.

Myrtle had a small head, clear brown eyes, a tiny nose, and a wide, thin mouth. She made Betsy think of a chimpanzee. “What a pleasant store you have,” she said, looking around.

“Thank you.”

“I've come to talk to you about Alice Skoglund.”

Betsy felt her smile vanish, and suppressed a sigh. “What about her?”

“The police are sure the skeleton they found on that boat is Trudie Koch, and I'm sure they're right. She and Carl Winters disappeared the night before it was taken out behind the Big Island and sunk. It's embarrassing how that error about the year got into all the accounts of its sinking, and we're going to prepare an errata slip to go in the books. Thank God for photocopy machines. I'm old enough to remember the days of mimeographs and ditto—that smell would give me the biggest headache! Now you just put the original facedown on the glass and punch buttons.

“But that's not the subject here. I understand the police have decided Martha murdered poor Trudie, and while it's true Martha had what some might think a good reason to do that, I don't believe for one minute that she did. She was a respectable Christian wife and mother in 1948, and it would never have occurred to her to murder some silly young woman just because her husband was canoodling with her.”

“Canoodling?” echoed Betsy, amused at the term and Myrtle's lengthy way of coming to the point.

“You know. Canoodling.” Myrtle rolled her brown eyes and tossed her head. Betsy nodded, and Myrtle continued, “When people hear some story from history, they tend to see just the people named in the story. They don't see all the other people who were around them, whispering in their ears, carrying tales, applying pressure, working on their own reasons for doing things. In this case, people are talking about Martha and Carl and Trudie as if they were the only people in town in 1948. And they don't pay attention to context, or make connections between stories. Like people don't realize the connection between Henry VIII and Christopher Columbus.”

“What was the connection?” asked Betsy.

“Henry's first wife was Katherine of Aragon, who was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who financed Columbus's first voyage. It's also like people calling that boat the
Hopkins.
For twenty-two years, from 1926 until 1948, it was the
Minnetonka III
, owned by the Blue Line Café, the same restaurant where Trudie worked. She was a waitress there, and a very immoral person. Of course, she was popular among a certain set of people, not nice people but drinkers and philanderers. She came by her lifestyle honestly. Her mother *was a tramp and her father ran off before she was born. She'd been an impulsive sort of person since before she got into high school. She had a boyfriend, a bad-tempered, jealous young man named Vern Miller, who went away to the army and came back years later married to a sweet little Japanese woman who turned out as American as any of us.”

She leaned forward and said, “I understand you went and talked to Alice. Instead of just listening to what she has to say, you should have asked her some hard questions.”

“Such as what?”

“Well, for example, why did she purely hate Trudie Koch?”

Myrtle nodded several times, wriggling her eyebrows, until Betsy said, “Hate is a strong word, Mrs. Jensen.”

“I'm saying what I mean. I remember while it was still during the war, I saw Alice on two separate occasions looking at Trudie, and if looks could kill, Trudie would have fallen down on the spot and never moved again.”

Betsy hoped her poker face worked better this time. “Have you any idea why?”

“Not one. They were in high school together, but I don't think they ever did anything together. They weren't friends, of course; Alice would never be friends with someone like Trudie. Trudie had a reputation that made all the nice girls steer clear of her. As my mother put it, Trudie was no better than she ought to be and a sight worse at times. I heard Trudie called on Alice several years later, but that may not be true because this was while Martin was being considered for pastor, so she had to be careful of her behavior.”

“Martin?”

“Her husband, the Reverend Martin Skoglund. He was hired as pastor of Saint Elwin's soon after, so like I say, it may not be true that Trudie visited Alice.”

“What do you know about Reverend Skoglund?”

“He was a wonderful pastor, quite wise, a good preacher. He had some old-fashioned ideas about morality, but that was expected of a pastor back then. He retired in 1987 and died five years ago, still very respected. And it was as if Alice had died, too; in a month she was forgotten by the people who'd acted like her friends and depended on her all those years. After all she and Pastor Martin had done for Saint Elwin's, it was a real shame. I always thought Alice should have gone to nursing school or become a teacher, but she set her cap at Martin, and he married her when she was barely nineteen. She was a big girl, and homely as a mud fence, but a good, good person, and they seemed very happy together, even though she was rather shy to be a pastor's wife. She never got proud, and she was a good cook, and a terrific housekeeper. It was so sad their one child died, she was a little bit of a thing, very frail, something wrong with her heart.”

“Yes, Alice told me she was a blue baby.”

“Yes, that's the term. I'd forgotten it. Alice turned out yards of embroidery and knit scarves and made beautiful lace. She gave most of it away or put it in the rummage sale. Half the Lutheran women in town wore her aprons or dried their dishes with her towels, the other half trimmed their dresses with her lace. And there was never a Saint Elwin's child going without mittens, not if Alice knew about it. So it doesn't seem fair, does it, that she should get cataracts and have to give up her needlework.”