Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_02 (22 page)

“No,” she said. “I'm looking for the
Hopkins
.”

He laughed. “Not here, obviously. Not only because there's no room, they told us it's the scene of a crime. The police hauled it up onto the Big Island until they finish with it.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointed.

“You sure you aren't a volunteer? We sure can use someone to varnish the slats of the upper deck seats,” he said, and stuck out a hand. “I'm John Titterington. This is Pete Weir, and that fellow in love with the catalog is Virgil Behounek, and over on the deck are Jim Hewett and Leo Eiden.”

Betsy waved vaguely at the men, who nodded vaguely back and continued their labors. “Some other time,” she said to Mr. Titterington and retreated back down the stairs.

I should have known
, she told herself as she got back into her car and wallowed back up the lane. They wouldn't allow the public to go crawling over the boat.

And what did you think you'd find on the
Hopkins,
anyhow? You're just trying to act like a real private eye, which you're not. Go do what you can, which is ask nosy questions.

She drove back to the shop in a grump and picked up a salad with double croutons in the sandwich shop next door. The dressing she selected wasn't diet, either.

But a big special order came in that afternoon, and going through it with the customer and finding it all there, as ordered, brightened Betsy's spirits—and the big check the customer wrote helped, too.

Just before closing, the phone rang. It was Jeff Winters. “Grandmother's at home,” he said, “if you want to talk to her.”

So Betsy ate a hasty supper, called Jill (who wasn't home) to leave a message saying she'd be home by eight, then got back in her car and drove down Lake Street to what she called “the
other
Lake Street.” At its north end, Lake Street went around a corner and became West Lake Street.

The west end of West Lake Street made another sharp turn that led it down to the lakeshore. Betsy negotiated the curve carefully, wary of ice. She'd once been a good winter driver, but that was many years ago.

Martha Winters's attractive brick house was the second from the end on this segment. A streetlight gleamed on the snow clinging to an enormous blue spruce in the front yard. Martha's driveway was gritty with sand.

Bushes beside the little porch had been covered with cloth tied close with twine. Betsy, no gardner, wondered if they were roses. She went up the brick steps to the front door and rang the bell, feeling uncertain about the conversation she was about to have.

The door opened, and there was Martha, her face pale, its folds and wrinkles looking freshly carved. “Jeff said he'd asked you to come over and talk to me,” she said. “Oh, Betsy, I'm so worried! I do hope you can help me. Please, come in.”

Betsy stopped on the little tiled area just inside the door and took off her coat. She glanced past Martha at the virginal blue carpet and said, “Shall I take off my boots?”

“Yes, if you don't mind,” said Martha, and she hung Betsy's coat and scarf up in the little closet, then led the way into the living room. “Would you like some coffee? It'd just take a minute to make a pot.”

“No, thanks. But you have some, if you like.”

“No, I had three cups with my supper, which I ate in my own kitchen,
thank God,
and that's two more than I usually have in the evening. I won't sleep a wink tonight.”

Martha sat down on the very front edge of a pale, upholstered chair, so Betsy started for the couch. But her eye was caught by the framed handkerchiefs, and instead, she leaned forward for a look. Sure enough, there was a butterfly, plain in the design of each corner. The lace itself was two inches wide around the center handkerchief, very elegant and rich-looking. “These are amazing,” said Betsy. “Jill told me about them, but they are even more luscious than I thought. I pictured the butterflies as a subtle pattern, but they're as clear as drawings. How old is this work?”

“Years and years. I stopped making lace a long time ago—soon after Carl ran off. I had the store to mind and my son to raise, so I had to give up a lot of things.”

Betsy turned and spoke from her heart. “I can't imagine the hurt his disappearance must have given you. And now this.”

Martha looked up at her with wounded eyes. “Yes.”

Betsy sat down. “Was he a pig before he went away?”

“A ... pig?”

“That's the word I use to describe my ex-husband. He was a tenured professor at Merrivale, that's in San Diego, and had been cutting a swath through the undergrad women for years. I had no idea until I got a phone call from the attorney he'd hired to fight the case the university was bringing against him. Apparently, he'd dropped one student a little too abruptly in going to another, and she went to the administration. And it turned out she wasn't his first. Other women heard about it and came forward to testify—one or two actually in his favor. There were nine—nine!—willing to talk; and God knows how many weren't. I should have known, but I didn't. I mean, I met him when I was a student in one of his classes, so I really should have been more suspicious. Only I made sure he was single before I let his advances advance.” Betsy looked over and saw Martha staring openmouthed at her.

“I'm sorry,” Betsy said. “I came here to talk to you, not carry in the trash of my own life.”

“I think perhaps you're making assumptions about Carl and me, that's what set off the confession,” said Martha.

Betsy felt herself blushing. “You're right, and I shouldn't do things like that. I told Jeff and now I'll remind you, I'm an amateur. I don't know how to conduct a proper interrogation. I just ask whatever occurs to me.
Was
Carl a pig?”

Martha smiled. “He was frisky, he had a terrible reputation for it, but it was all talk. He loved to ‘push the envelope,' as they call it nowadays, but he never went outside it, as far as I knew. Certainly he never ran off with anyone before.”

Betsy said, “If that skeleton belongs to Trudie, then Carl didn't run away with her, either. It's even possible, I suppose, that her murder and Carl's disappearance aren't connected. I wonder if perhaps Trudie thought he was serious, and he murdered her to shut her up.”

“I don't think Carl could commit murder,” said Martha. “He was a scalawag, everyone knew that and was used to it. But he wasn't cruel or mean. He had a great many friends in Excelsior, and so did I; yet two women made it their business to tell me he was having lunch every day down at the Blue Ribbon and making time with Trudie. Jessie Turnquist was one of them—this was before we became close. I told her what Mark Twain said, that it takes two people to cut you to the heart: an enemy to slander you and a friend to tell you what the enemy said. Besides, I said, Carl would try to make time with a gorilla if he thought it was a female gorilla, he can't help himself. So you see, if I knew, and wasn't turning into a fishwife over it, why would Carl have to murder her?”

“Did Carl know you knew?”

“Indeed yes. I brought it up over supper that same day I heard about it. I said the whole town was talking, which hurt my feelings and might be bad for business. And he said something like, ‘Aw, they know I don't mean anything.' But then he didn't come home the next night. It was late closing and I was tired, so I went to bed and didn't realize he hadn't come home till the next morning. I couldn't imagine where he'd got to. I went down to the store thinking someone had robbed the place and left him tied up in back, but he wasn't there. I called around and no one had seen him, so finally I called the police. It wasn't until that evening, when Trudie didn't show up for work, that people realized she was missing, too.”

“That was the evening of the day they towed the
Hopkins
out and sank her,” said Betsy.

“Yes. That's why I don't have any memory of them sinking her, because it wasn't a year later, it was the same day Carl disappeared. I was so upset about Carl, I didn't notice what was happening with the
Hopkins.
But looking back, I can see that by the time they realized Trudie had disappeared, too, the boat was already sunk. And everyone was
so sure
they'd run off together it didn't occur to anyone to think one or the other's body might be on the boat.”

“The big thing we have to worry about is your handkerchief. We have to figure out who got hold of one and left it on that boat. And why.”

“To make it look as if I did it, of course,” said Martha.

“No, that can't be right. The boat was taken out and sunk for what was supposed to be forever,” said Betsy. “If someone wanted to frame you, the thing to do would be leave the body up on shore somewhere and drop your handkerchief beside it. Why hide the body and the handkerchief?”

There was a thoughtful silence. “All right, perhaps they didn't want to implicate me,” said Martha at last. “Maybe whoever dropped it didn't murder Trudie, they were just there and dropped the handkerchief by accident. Certainly I did it often enough.”

Betsy frowned. “But if it was just dropped casually, then it would have floated away. It was found on the bottom of the boat, after the last of the rubble was taken out. The only reason some of it was found at all was because it was tucked away under the rubble.”

“What I don't understand is how it got there to begin with. I know where all my handkerchiefs are.”

Betsy asked, “How many did you have to start with?”

“One,” said Martha, and she smiled at her jest. “I started making lace when I was fourteen; my grandmother showed me how. Her mother was from England and showed her how. My mother loved to knit and crochet, she made both knitted and crocheted lace.”

“You can
knit
lace?”

“Oh, yes, on tiny, tiny needles. I used to know how, but once I learned the techniques, I loved bobbin lace best. My grandmother left me her bobbins. I still have them. I've thought now and again about selling them, but I'd rather wait and see if there's someone who would really appreciate them, so I could make a gift of them.”

“That would be a very special gift.”

“Yes, it's a pity I couldn't have more children; I'd have loved to teach a daughter how to make lace.” Martha sighed, but faintly; that was an old and no longer important sorrow. “But to answer your question, I made bobbin lace edgings for nineteen handkerchiefs. Each one's a little different, but they all have that butterfly. My grandmother helped me design it. Her signature on her lace was a bee.”

“Who else do you know who makes lace?”

Martha thought. “Alice Skoglund used to do very nice work. But she says it gives her a headache to do it nowadays and so she quit.”

“Did you see the design Alice made from the tangled mess taken from the
Hopkins
?”

Martha nodded. “It's mine all right.”

“You say you know where all your handkerchiefs are? I heard you lost two of them.”

“Well, I'm reasonably sure a pig ate one and the other went into show business.” She snorted genteelly and Betsy smiled, as much in admiration as appreciation of the joke. That Martha could jest in the face of danger showed she was a brave woman.

“Suppose a lace maker, one who makes bobbin lace, had gotten a really good look at one of your handkerchiefs, one you'd dropped, say. Suppose she got a chance to really study it before she gave it back to you. Could she then copy that design in some lace she made herself?”

Martha thought that over. “Maybe. She'd have to be looking at it with that in mind.”

“Now,” said Betsy. “Think hard. Try to remember back all those years ago. Did Alice Skoglund ever return a handkerchief to you?”

“Oh, yes,” nodded Martha. “Several times. She was the Reverend Skoglund's wife, you see. And I left a hanky in church at least once a year. Sometimes the person who found it brought it right back to me. But not everyone knew about my butterfly, so they turned it in to lost and found. I distinctly remember one Sunday Alice gave it back to me saying she'd heard about my butterfly lace and so thought this was mine. We talked about lace for a few minutes. That's when I learned she was a lace maker.”

“So she would have had it a whole week to study, if she wanted to make a copy,” said Betsy.

“Well, yes. Oh, surely you don't think Alice had anything to do with this!”

But Betsy was thinking of the woman who even in her seventies had arms and shoulders like a man.

13

S
unday afternoon Betsy went to see Alice Skoglund again, carefully choosing a time so Alice wouldn't feel obliged to feed her. “I came to talk to you about making lace,” she said. “Someone told me you can't make lace anymore because you had an operation to remove cataracts and can't see well enough.”

Alice grimaced angrily. “Like most gossip, that's almost sort of true. I did have early-onset cataracts. I had surgery when I was only forty-five. And it did make lace-making difficult. Not impossible, only very hard. I bought a great big magnifying glass, and ordered a lamp that sat on a stand through a catalog. But in three weeks of trying, I made four inches of lace. And it wasn't a difficult pattern or particularly fine thread, nothing like the one-twenty I used to be fond of. I can still make lace, but it's heavy gauge stuff, and I have to keep stopping and checking the pattern, and I can't see the pattern forming like I used to. When I finally realized I wasn't getting any joy out of it, I quit. I do some knitting and crocheting, but they aren't the pleasure lace-making was for me, and they aren't as easy as they once were, either. The only thing I can do real easy anymore are those darn afghan squares. I can do those practically without looking. So I make afghans and put them into fund-raisers and rummage sales and gift packages made up for people who have lost their homes to fire. That way I feel like I'm still making a contribution.”