Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_02 (3 page)

“Yes, but it's not deep enough for that boat,” said Jill.

“Not to mention the sudden forty-foot drop going over Minnehaha Falls,” added Lars with a grin.

“Then how does he get that boat down to Florida?” asked Betsy.

“He doesn't,” said Jill. “He has an even bigger boat down there.”

“Is it called
The Waterhole Two
? And why
Waterhole
?”

Lars said, “Anyone with a boat will tell you that it is a hole in the water into which you pour money.”

Jill added, “And a water hole is a place where animals come to drink, which is why taverns are sometimes called water holes. Billy's a party animal, and you'd be surprised how many people he can haul in that boat.”

“You know something about just about every boat owner out here,” said Betsy. “Is that because you're a police officer, or do you have a boat, too?”

Lars laughed. “Neither; it's because she's from Excelsior, gossip capital of the state.”

“Have you lived here long, Jill?” asked Betsy.

“Third generation,” nodded Jill. “My grandfather used to run the ferris wheel at the Excelsior Amusement Park, and my mother put herself through nursing school by working at the Blue Ribbon Café at the Park.”

Betsy said, “That's right, I've heard that there used to be an amusement park in Excelsior. This is a sweet little town; it doesn't seem like the kind of town for that. I mean especially years ago, when amusement parks weren't the high-class operations they are today.”

“Oh, it was pretty high class,” said Jill with something in her voice Betsy couldn't read.

“Did your father work in it, too?”

“He was a highway patrolman. His uncle was a deputy sheriff, and my mother's brother was an investigator on the Saint Paul cops.”

“So you kind of went into the family business,” said Betsy with a smile.

“It does run in families,” agreed Jill. “What did your father do?”

“He worked in the engineering department of Poland and Harnischfeger in Milwaukee. They build cranes. I still catch myself looking for the P&H logo whenever I see a crane. It never occurred to me to follow in his footsteps, but when I was small I used to wish there were still cattle drives, because
his
dad was a cowboy in Utah, and I thought that was one of the great, romantic jobs. My dad used to tell some great stories about him.”

“Can you ride?”

“I used to be good at it. You?”

“Oh, I don't fall off half as much as I used to.” Jill looked out toward a boat drifting close to the perimeter she and Lars had established, but it stopped before crossing it. “You know what I've always wanted to do?” she asked.

“What?”

“Go on one of those cattle drives. They still have them in some places, and they allow paying guests to take part. You get your own horse to take care of and you help keep the steers in line.”

Betsy stared at her. “Really? Where does this happen, in Texas?”

“They run one in South Dakota, less than a day's drive from here. Lars won't go with me.”

“Gosh.” Betsy's eyes became distant. The lowing of cattle, the dust of the trail, the campfire at night, sleeping under the stars ...

“Want me to find out the details? We can go next year, maybe.”

Betsy tried to make her acceptance as casual as the offer. “I'd like that very much. Thanks.”

They fell silent for awhile. The sun warmed the air, the boat rocked, the motor burbled and gave off noxious fumes. Betsy began to feel a curious combination of sick and sleepy. She regretted the fried-egg sandwich she'd had for breakfast, then the seafood salad she'd had for supper last night. She was beginning to be concerned about the lo mein noodles she'd had for lunch yesterday when Lars said suddenly, “I think we're gonna see some action now. And look over there!” He pushed a lever that stirred up the motor and steered the boat toward the nearer barge.

Jill shouted through the bullhorn, “You in the blue boat, you're in danger! Move back, away from the barge!” The passengers, a man and two women, turned to look at Jill. One woman waved to show she wasn't concerned. “Move ... away ... from the ... barge!” repeated Jill. “Now!”

The man shouted something at whoever was steering, and the boat began to shift around. The woman stopped waving and instead made a rude gesture.

Uh-oh,
thought Betsy, and was surprised when Lars didn't go after them but only moved back himself. Then she heard a serious change in the sound of the cranes' big engines, and her attention came back to the space between the cranes. The water roiled, as if about to boil. Smoothly, as if in time-lapse film, enormous black mushrooms bloomed onto the surface. They were floats, balloons, in three clusters of three. The cranes' engines were straining now, and big drops of water drooled off the cables. Betsy realized belatedly the cables were moving.

Then, gently as dawn, a long, sleek object appeared under and then just on the surface. As it rose, water sluiced away, and Betsy could see the lines of curved boards appear, gleaming in the sun. More of the object appeared, and still more, until it was a boat about seventy feet long, canted to one side, held in place by wrappings of cable. It didn't look much like the restored streetcar boat; there were no railings, no cabin, no upper deck, just this long, narrow wooden boat.

Air horns saluted the arrival of the
Hopkins
, and only when they stopped could Betsy hear the people cheering.

Waterfalls of various sizes cascaded off the boat, and the crane operators did something so that it mostly righted itself. Three men in black diver's wet suits appeared at the edge of the far barge and dived in. They swam to the boat and helped one another aboard. They began a quick, running inspection. One picked up a large rock and threw it over the side. Then he threw a hunk of what looked like concrete, and then another rock.

“They weighed the boat down with rubble before they sank it,” said Jill to Betsy. “The divers threw a lot of it overboard before it was raised, but I guess there's more still in there.”

Betsy could see the divers to their waists as they moved along the boat and she deduced the presence of a deck, because otherwise they'd be out of sight. As soon as she realized that, the rubble-tossing diver went out of sight. Betsy was deducing a ladder when he straightened—he'd only bent over. He shouted and gestured to the other two divers. They came running, and more rubble was tossed. Then one leaned against the side of the boat to shout, “Police! Police!”

Lars glanced at Jill, who nodded, and Lars ran his boat alongside the big boat.

“Got something here you should look at!” the diver shouted.

“You stay here,” Jill said to both Lars and Betsy. She raised her arms and was lifted over the side of the raised boat, which Betsy could now see had once been painted white. But there was lots of slime on the boards, and Jill had to scrabble for a foothold. Her light blue shirt and dark trousers were smeared by the time she vanished over the gunwales.

She reappeared less than a minute later. “Lars, there's a human skeleton under the floorboards of this thing. Looks to be adult size. Call it in.” She went away again.

“Be damned,” said Lars, and he reached for the radio microphone on the shoulder flap of his jacket.

Betsy rose to her feet, not sure if she did or did not want Jill to pick up the skull so she could see it. Wow, a skeleton! Had a diver from years ago been exploring the wreck and gotten trapped? Or was it a murder victim, the knife still stuck between the ribs? The boat had been filled with rubble, so the murderer must also have been a diver. Betsy had a sudden image of a man in a wet suit hauling a motionless victim down, down into the depths of the lake, finding the boat, moving hundreds of pounds of rubble—no, that was silly.

What it probably was, was a diver who found a hatch he could open and went in exploring. Then something in there ripped his air hose, and he panicked and couldn't find the hatch to get out again. Poor fellow.

She sat down, the image shifting to what the skeleton might look like now. Sprawled and shining white, the ruins of his wet suit crumpled around him. Were there clues to his identity? A wedding ring perhaps, one with initials engraved inside it? Or an ID bracelet? She could imagine the metal, at first dimmed by algae, which would slowly yield to rubbing, and the letters would appear. And an old mystery of a disappearance would be solved at last. How exceedingly interesting!

2

D
etective Mike Malloy watched the medical examiner cover the bones laid out on a metal table. Malloy had been present during the examination—it could hardly be called an autopsy—and had taken notes. Now he consulted his notes and read the important parts back to make sure he hadn't missed or misunderstood anything.

“You say the skeleton is about ninety-five percent complete,” he began. “That it is a white female older than eighteen but younger than thirty-five at her time of death.” He stopped to glance at the medical examiner.

“That's right,” nodded Dr. Pascuzzi, a darkly handsome man.

Malloy consulted his notes again. He was a redhead with a thickly freckled face, light blue eyes, and a thin mouth. His suit was conservative, his shoes freshly but not highly polished, and he tended to think before he said anything. His career goal was to be sheriff of some rural Minnesota county, one with a really good bass lake in it; so his criminal investigations, like everything else about him, tended to be by-the-book and not splashy. He didn't like this case because it was odd and was already drawing inquiries from the media. Investigators who got known for notorious cases didn't get asked to run for out-state sheriff.

“I noticed the skull was badly damaged when I saw it on the boat, the
Hopkins
,” Malloy continued. “But I thought it might've got that way banging against things under the water.” He raised a pale, inquiring eyebrow at the ME.

“No, I'm sure the injuries to the face and skull happened shortly before or very soon after death. The same for the broken radius.” He saw a lack of comprehension in the police investigator and said, “The smaller of the two bones in the forearm.”

“Oh, yeah.” Malloy searched through his notes and found the place.

“Like the other injuries,” said Dr. Pascuzzi, “it happened right about the time of death.”

“How can you tell that?”

“Because it happened to living bone, but there is no evidence of healing. My opinion is that it was a defense wound.”

“Sure, I get it.” People under attack would raise a hand or arm and it would get injured; Malloy had seen examples of that. Weird that there might be such specific evidence of something so momentary in a crime this old.

But finding it meant this was a homicide, all right; there was no other way to explain the injuries. And then, of course, there was the hiding of the body on the boat.

He continued to recite, “You say she was about five feet, two inches tall, not skin and bones or a fatso.” What Dr. Pascuzzi had said was that she had been neither emaciated nor obese, but Malloy liked his English plain. He went on, “You said that when a woman has a baby, it leaves marks on her skeleton, but you don't find those marks on this one. I suppose if she was pregnant at the time of death, we could tell that?”

“Not necessarily. If she were in the first trimester, there would be no way to know.”

Malloy nodded and added a little note. “You said her front teeth were broken?”

“Yes, and probably also at the time of death. I also noticed some problems with decay that might indicate she wasn't fond of the dentist. Or, perhaps, was too poor to afford proper dental care.”

“So a lower-class woman who maybe had been beat up some.”

“Well ...” Pascuzzi rocked his hand to indicate doubt. “Women who are abused regularly show other signs of it, healed broken ribs or fingers. I saw no signs of that. I do think her nose might have been broken, probably while she was in her early teens, but that's all.”

Still, this last severe battering to the face indicated rage or deep-seated hatred. A husband, maybe. Or a boyfriend. In either case, Malloy thought, what we probably have is an old-fashioned domestic that got out of hand. The
Hopkins
was sunk in 1949; it was possible the perp was still around. And that would for sure be a lead story on the evening news, with a camera shot of the cops rolling up to the nursing home to take him away.

Dr. Pascuzzi asked, “Want more?”

“Is there more?”

“By the look of the wear on the shoulders, elbows, and wrists she did a lot of hard labor. On the other hand, there aren't the changes to ankle and knee joints that mean prolonged squatting or kneeling. Not a char lady then, hauling water-filled buckets and kneeling to scrub floors. She might have been a farmer's wife who helped out in the dairy barn. Or a waitress, staggering under heavy trays of food. When was the boat she was found on sunk?”

“About fifty years ago.”

“Not long after World War II, then. So perhaps she worked in a factory or drove a truck during the war. There are some small signs of malnutrition, not uncommon on the skeletons of people who grew up during the Depression. Apart from the nose, I find no sign of injuries or any illness that would leave its mark on bone.”

Malloy grunted. That, plus the lack of dental work, was going to make positive identification difficult.

“Enough?” asked Pascuzzi again.

“For now. You'll send me a copy of your report when?”

“Couple of days. I may be able to come closer in my estimate of her age, weight, and height.”