Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_02 (6 page)

Jill misinterpreted the look on Betsy's face and said, “You don't have to do it, too. I mean, for one thing you're busy, and for another you don't have Margot's connections, so you won't know who needs the tree.”

“That's not what's bothering me,” said Betsy. “I feel so bad about all the things that won't get done because she's gone.”

There was a little silence, then Godwin sighed noisily and asked, “What else did Sergeant Malloy say about the lace?”

“Not much. He said it might be part of a dress or a handkerchief. It's green, but that's because whatever was holding it down was made of copper or bronze, like a section of pipe. It's only about four inches' worth, going around a corner, like maybe the corner of a handkerchief or a collar point. Silk, he says. The expert, not Mike. But really, it's such a mess I don't know if even someone who makes lace could tell Mike anything useful.”

 

Malloy hesitated before opening the door. Betsy Devonshire was okay, he was pretty sure. He had a problem accepting women as equals, and his natural cop attitude toward civilians overlay that to make him appear a male chauvinist pig. Which he wasn't, not really. But here, too, and not all that long ago, Ms. Devonshire had shown herself willing to interfere in a police investigation. So he'd have to step carefully around her, because he really wanted to use her as a resource. After all, the woman had been pretty clever coming up with the murderer of her sister. But he didn't want her poking around again because that first time was undoubtedly just luck, and if she tried again, she'd probably only scare off or corrupt a witness. So he'd have to talk kind of careful to her.

Malloy steeled himself and opened the door.

Inside the shop, Betsy and Godwin had been staring at the person standing so dark and still on the other side of the door. His head was on a level with the Open sign so they couldn't see his face, but there was a sinister tension in the stillness of his pose. And one hand was hidden in the folds of his overcoat.

Then the door went
bing
and it was Sergeant Mike Malloy. They were both so relieved that their greetings were especially warm, which made them grin at one another.

Which puzzled Malloy, who started to frown suspiciously.

“We thought you were a robber,” explained Betsy, still smiling. “You were standing there like you were trying to get up the nerve to come in and demand all our money.”

Mike laughed and gestured dismissively. “Heck, this is too nice a town for something bad to happen to decent people twice in a row.”

“Jill was here a little while ago,” said Godwin, eager to get down to business, “and she said you might come to ask us to help you with some needlework sample.”

Malloy shrugged crookedly. “Well, what it is, I'm hoping you know someone who can tell me if I have an example of handmade lace here, and what kind it is.” What Malloy had hidden in the folds of his coat was the glass sandwich. It now had a double seal of tape and a tag with Evidence in big red letters.

Betsy looked at it without touching it and shrugged. But Godwin took it and held it up to the ceiling just as Jill had, then over toward the front window, then close to his right eye. Frustrated, he said, “I'm sorry, it doesn't look like anything to me.”

“Perhaps one of your customers could help me. Officer Cross said that everyone in the area who does needlework comes here.”

“From your mouth to His ear, amen,” said Betsy fervently and Malloy laughed again.

“Still,” persisted Malloy, “is there anyone who comes here who is knowledgeable about handmade lace?”

Betsy said, “There are a number of local women who make bobbin lace, do tatting, crochet, and make lace in other forms. The real question is, can they look at what you have there and make sense of it? I'm worried now that Godwin says it doesn't look like anything to him, but he's not a lace maker, so maybe someone else can help. If you like, I can ask customers to take a look at your sample—but wait, I guess you wouldn't want to leave that here.”

“I'm not allowed to leave it here.” Malloy lifted and dropped the Evidence tag.

“Oh, I see. So how about we arrange a meeting, and you can bring it, and we'll see if someone can help.”

“You'll never get everyone to agree on a time,” said Godwin.

“Including me,” said Malloy. “So how about I get a good picture of it, or maybe just a Xerox for a start. Then if it rings any chimes with someone, I can show the real thing to them.”

“Yes, of course. Would it be all right if I taped up the photocopy? Or should I keep it in a drawer and just show it to select customers?”

“I don't see why you can't post it. I'd appreciate hearing right away if someone thinks she can help. I'll drop the copy off later today.”

“All right,” said Betsy.

After Malloy left, Godwin said, “You know, there are times when he seems almost human.”

 

 

There's no statute of limitations on murder, and occasionally something will crop up to crack an old case. Even in solved murders, someone convicted many years ago may persuade a judge to order a new trial or a DNA test that proves him innocent, or something will be discovered during another investigation that forces the police to start over. So when it's a homicide case, the records are kept forever.

But nobody can keep records of every crime. So when Malloy wanted reports of a missing woman in the summer of 1949, the missing person reports were long gone. He went first to the public library and searched microfilm copies of old newspaper files. And found nothing, which he thought was a little strange.

Shrugging off his annoyance, he went to his first fall-back location, the Excelsior Historical Society, which consisted of three seniors, all women, who met on Tuesday mornings in the vault of City Hall.

City Hall was in the basement of the volunteer fire department, a cramped space with five employees. The mayor was at his regular day job, so the highest executive present was the city comptroller. He smiled and nodded when Malloy stated his business, and Malloy lifted the flap that marked the entrance and made his way to the back of the room, where a large, thick, fireproof door let into a space almost as big as the main room. Three walls were lined with metal shelves stuffed to overflowing with wire baskets, accordion folders, boxes, and files, the official records of the City of Excelsior. The fourth wall was obscured by metal file cabinets and an old wooden map cabinet. Near these stood a scarred wooden table, at which the Excelsior Historical Society sat in session, surrounded by plats, deeds, and old tax records.

“Good morning, ladies,” said Malloy. “What's on your schedule for today?”

“Good morning, Michael,” said the littlest woman, who was also the oldest. “We're trying to map the location of the fire lanes. The city hasn't kept up its claim to them where they touch the lakeshore, and there's been a lot of encroachment.
Some
of it inadvertent.”

This budding problem had made the news recently. When the Excelsior Fire Department was young, its pumper drew water from the lake, and so eight or ten narrow access lanes to the lake were marked off and maintained for its use. The installation of fireplugs in the ‘50s removed the need for the lanes. Some were turned into public access boat landings. But over the years the others blended into the lawns of the houses on either side of them. A quarrel was developing over what should be done about the lanes. Sold to the homeowner(s) who had encroached with garden or lawn? Divided equally between the properties on either side? Reclaimed by the city? Before anything could be settled, the city had to first discover just how much land was involved and where it was located.

“If I might pull you off your work for just a few minutes,” Malloy said, “I'd like to know if you can tell me if there was a report of a woman gone missing in 1949.”

“From just Excelsior?” asked the second oldest woman, whose name, Malloy suddenly remembered, was Myrtle Jensen.

“Excelsior and the area close by—unless you can search other areas easily,” said Malloy. “And also, can you find the month the
Hopkins
was sunk? I assume it was summer, but it could have been any time there was no ice.”

Myrtle pressed a crooked forefinger to her lips. “I can tell you that,” she said. “It was just before the Fourth of July. I remember because Jack brought up a bushel basket of sweet corn from Illinois—ours wasn't ripe yet. We boiled it up and had a Fourth of July picnic in the backyard and a neighbor came by for an ear and said he'd seen the
Hopkins
towed out to be sunk. That was the best sweet corn I ever ate, and ever after, I associated corn on the cob with the Fourth of July, even though it's never ready up here by then. We always have to buy it from people who bring it from down south. There used to be a man who would drive to Tennessee—remember him, Lola?—he'd fill his trunk and the backseat of his car and drive all day and night and park down by The Common and sell it. I remember my dad used to put about half of our garden in sweet corn, each row planted a week later than the one before, so it didn't all ripen at once. We used to have a real big backyard garden. I remember being sent out to work in it when I was a child, weeding and picking caterpillars off the leaves. My brother's son Jimmy worked in that garden, but Jimmy's boy Adam went to college and he uses mulch and organic bug spray.”

Malloy had patiently waited for her to run down, then reaffirmed the pertinent part of her remarks. “So it was July they sank the
Hopkins
.”

“Didn't I say that? Yes, early July, before the Fourth, because on the Fourth we heard it had been done, so a day or two before. It was hot that day, just blazing sun. Jack set up a cauldron outside, and was miserable tending the fire. Good corn, though.”

The littlest woman said, “I've got a missing person story. Trudie Koch ran off with Carl Winters, or so everyone said. Maybe he murdered her instead and ran away.” Her eyes sparkled at the thought.

Malloy looked at her. “Who was Trudie Koch?”

“Waitress down at the Blue Ribbon Café. No better than she ought to be, remember, Myrt? Had a steady boyfriend, what was his name? Vern something. Mean fellow, gave her a black eye once in a while, not that she didn't provoke him something awful. She dated a lot of men, and was very easy, or so everyone said. We were surprised that she ran off with Carl, or rather, that Carl ran off with her. He had a perfectly nice wife and a good job.” She looked at Myrtle. “Remember?”

Myrtle was looking thoughtful. “But that didn't happen the year they sank the
Hopkins
, did it? Those two ran off in 1948.”

“I thought it happened the same summer. Are you sure they ran off in 1948?”

“Yes, because that was the year Martha had to drop out as organist and they asked me to take her place. With her husband gone, she had to run the dry cleaning store all by herself and she didn't have time for choir. I got in and stayed in. I got my gold pin for twenty years' service in 1968, see?” She touched one of two tiny round badges pinned to her dress. Malloy took a look and saw the badge said Saint Elwin's Choir and Twenty Years around its edge. A tiny gold chain led from the pin to a tiny rectangle with the year 1948 on it.

The other badge was slightly more elaborate and said Saint Elwin's Choir and Forty Years around its edge. The chained tag also read 1948.

“I stepped down as organist after I got this pin,” she said, touching the second one. “My ears weren't what they used to be.”

“Sorry,” said Malloy, but carelessly. “Say, maybe the
Hopkins
was sunk in 1948?”

“Oh, no,” said the youngest woman. She stood and went to a low shelf behind the table. She selected a slim, blue paperbound book and brought it to Malloy. “It says in here that the boat was sunk in 1949, and this book was written by the man in charge of raising both the
Minnehaha
and the
Hopkins
. He even took a picture of the
Hopkins
at the bottom of the lake.”

Malloy paged through the book, which was locally published and had good black and white photographs in it. Sure enough, there was an old photo of a streetcar steamboat loaded with passengers, and another of an open hatch, this one taken under water. The accompanying paragraph said the
Hopkins
was sunk near her sisters off the Big Island in 1949.

“Anyone know where I can reach the author of this book?” he asked.

“He's with the Minnesota Transportation Museum's steamboat branch; their office is right down by the lake, in that little row of stores,” said Myrtle.

“May I keep this?” he asked, displaying the book.

“For $7.95, you may,” said Myrtle, producing a cash box, and the best Malloy could do was get a receipt and hope the department would reimburse him.

4

T
he Minnesota Transportation Museum Ticket Office and Souvenir Store was a little storefront, in a row of them behind Pizza Hut. There was a parking lot in front, and Malloy stood a minute looking at the lake across the street. A gentle slope ran down to the docks—narrow wooden walks into the water, supported on thick wooden piles—now empty in anticipation of winter. Malloy sometimes thought he would like to live in some state where winter didn't take up so much of the year. They had bass lakes as far south as Missouri, didn't they? But in Missouri, they didn't go ice fishing, did they? And Malloy loved ice fishing almost as much as fishing from his bass boat.

He turned, saw the sign, and went up and into the MTM store.

Like most souvenir stores, MTM had lots of T-shirts and sweatshirts. There were also caps, some of them the old-fashioned, high-crowned, mattress-ticking variety that yesteryear's engineers wore. There were bright-colored prints of the lake in its heyday, with streetcar boats taking on passengers in the foreground. Each boat was named after a town on the lake. There were also prints of streetcars, some in small-town settings back when Hopkins and Minnetonka were not merely suburbs of Minneapolis—though even then the main purpose of the streetcars was to take workers to the big city.