The Drowning Spool (A Needlecraft Mystery) (6 page)

She unfolded the bundle, which proved to be slightly malodorous as well as dirty and torn. Betsy took a step back. It was a bedsheet, a very old one to judge by its thinness and by several long tears, which were parallel splits. But the top edge showed a broad line of Hardanger stitching, complex and beautiful. Betsy stepped forward again, her eyes sparkling with interest.

“I hoped you’d be interested,” the woman said, reading accurately the expression on Betsy’s face. “This is that same kind of thing you wrote about on your web site, right? Hard anger. Or is it har danger?”

“Hardanger,” said Betsy, pronouncing it HAR-dahng-er. “It’s Norwegian embroidery. This is beautiful work.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” said the woman. “What I want to know is, can it be cut off this raggedy old sheet, cleaned up, and put on something else?”

“Certainly,” said Betsy. “In fact, I hope you will do that exact thing. You say you found it in your garbage bin?”

“Yes,” said the woman, nodding. “I don’t know how it came to be in there, it wasn’t one of my neighbors mistaking my can for their own, I asked them.” She stroked the embroidery with a work-thickened forefinger. “I never seen anything like this Har-dahng-er before.” She pronounced it carefully. “My grandmother used to do all kinds of embroidery, but nothing like this. This’s got little bitty holes cut in it.” She hesitated, then asked a little too casually, “Is it valuable?”

“Yes, but not many people collect it. It’s generally of more value to the family that inherits it. I’m surprised it ended up in the trash. This is certainly heirloom quality, and has probably been in someone’s family for a long time.”

“How long? Is it really old? Like an antique?”

Betsy leaned in for a closer look. She didn’t do Hardanger—she found its serious demand that every stitch be done perfectly intimidating. She thought it hard to believe the assessment by advanced stitchers that the craft was relaxing. But she’d seen a lot of it, and had sold a lot of copies of Janice Love’s book on advanced Hardanger,
Fundamentals Made Fancy
, so she knew complex work like this when she saw it. She recognized the pattern of one repeating segment as Spider in a Lacy Web, and another as the wonderfully complex and delicate Edelweiss. Geometric shapes made of satin stitch were set among the open work and were strong contrasts to the nubbly Dove’s Eyes. There were a lot of variants of Dove’s Eyes, and the edging was an incredibly complex broad strip of open work called Spider Web Flowers, in which the tiny cut-out squares were linked in rows and filled with tightly wrapped threads and Greek crosses. The whole thing made an intelligent repeating pattern that was simply ravishing.

“It’s impossible to tell just from the embroidery itself,” Betsy said. “On the other hand, the sheet is badly worn, so it’s likely old. Perhaps more than fifty years. I don’t see a single bit of damage to the Hardanger, but work of this sort is often amazingly sturdy. It’s sad that the last owner of this didn’t realize that it could be moved to trim a new bedsheet.”

“I was going to put it on a table runner.”

“That would also be a good use for it. Then visitors to your home could admire it.”

Betsy and the customer discussed how best to clean the Hardanger and safely cut away the ruined bedsheet. Then Betsy took one of her biggest plastic bags and began folding the sheet into it.

Meanwhile, the customer looked around at the displays in the shop. She said, “I used to knit my sister a sweater every Christmas, but I haven’t knit anything for such a long time.” She paused. Then, “So long as I’m here,” she murmured, and the wistful look in her eyes turned to yearning. She walked over to touch the skeins of spring pastel yarns heaped in baskets. She hesitated a long while over the ones on sale, then picked out three skeins of wool so pale a yellow it was almost cream, another skein in earthy brown, a simple sweater pattern, and two pairs of steel knitting needles. She paid by check, and with an abstracted, smiling good-bye, as if already knitting and purling in her mind, she left the shop.

T
HE
next morning, Jill was standing at the door of Crewel World, waiting for Betsy to unlock it. The coffee was just starting to perk, filling the space with its warm, dark fragrance. Betsy had turned on the Bose, tuned at a low volume to a light jazz station. She unlocked the door to let her friend in. Jill paused for a few moments just inside the door, listening with pleasure. She was of Scandinavian descent, not the least intimidated by below-zero temperatures—which it was outside. But still, she was clearly enjoying the comforting warmth of the shop.

“Sometimes,” she murmured, “on cold, starry nights in Minnesota, if you stand really still and listen really hard . . . you’ll freeze solid.”

Betsy was surprised into laughter. “Is it that bad out?” she asked.

“Of course not. It’s nearly the middle of February, the worst is over. Every morning the sun comes up earlier, and it goes down later in the evening. The sparrows are already squabbling and I expect snowdrops under our front window any second.”

Betsy laughed again, because the sparrows were still silent and snow still rose nearly up to Jill’s windowsills. “So, wassup, girl?” she said, mimicking the slangy vernacular of youth.

“I have some news for you. Well, more for Bershada and Ethan and his parents. Lars, among others, talked with Mike yesterday and Mike said something very interesting about the autopsy performed on that body in the pool.” Mike was Detective Sergeant Mike Malloy of the Excelsior Police Department.

As had happened before, Betsy felt as if her ears had grown large, hairy points, which she swiveled in Jill’s direction. “What did Lars tell you?”

“Two things. The first and most interesting is that when the medical examiner opened the victim’s body, she smelled lavender.”

Betsy blinked. “What?”

“Lavender. As in bath salts. As in, the victim was drowned in a bathtub, not a therapy pool. There were bath salts in her lungs.”

After a startled moment, Betsy smiled. The smile began at the tips of her toes and broadened as it flowed upward to her face. “Well then! What great news! So she wasn’t drowned in the therapy pool! And that means Ethan isn’t to blame!”

Jill nodded. “She must have been brought there after she was dead. Probably to make it look as if she drowned there, not at home in her tub.”

“Or in someone else’s tub,” amended Betsy. “But never mind, Ethan would hardly bring a dead body along with him to work. So he’s cleared.”

“Well, he’s cleared of killing her and of bringing her to Watered Silk. But not of letting someone else bring her in.”

That dashed icy water on Betsy’s glee. “Ah, I see. Yes. Well, that’s a puzzle yet to be solved. But we progress. What’s the other thing Mike said?”

Jill said soberly, “She was ten weeks pregnant.”

They looked at each other in shared heaviness of heart. Here was a double human tragedy. Betsy said softly, “Oh, how awful! Two lives lost—did she know, do you think?”

“I would think so. Ten weeks, that’s two and a half months. Unless she was totally oblivious, she would know.”

“Husband?” asked Betsy.

“She had never been married.”

“Was she seeing someone?”

“That hasn’t been established yet, or at least Mike didn’t say anything to Lars about it.” Lars was Sergeant Lars Larson, Jill’s husband and an officer on Excelsior’s small police department. Since Teddi, the drowned woman, was from Excelsior, Mike Malloy was now involved in the investigation.

“How was she identified? By her parents?”

“Her roommates had reported her missing and gave Mike a link to her Facebook account, and the photo on her Facebook page was a match. Her parents have been notified—they live out of state.”

“That pregnancy could be a motive, couldn’t it?”

“Sure. That’s probably where Mike is focused.”

“But now we know Ethan didn’t kill her, right? This will be such a relief to Bershada and his parents! Or do they know? Has anyone from the police spoken to him?”

“I don’t know. This changes the way this case has been handled up till now, but I don’t know who is telling who what.”

An hour later the phone rang, and Godwin picked up. “Crewel World, Godwin speaking, how may I help you?” He cocked his head, listening. “Certainly. Hold on.”

Godwin called Betsy to the phone. “It’s Thistle Livingstone.”

Betsy took the phone. “Hello, Thistle. What can I do for you?”

“Wilma Carter has asked me to ask you if you can get her a counted cross-stitch pattern called A Psychic Enters a Flower Garden.”

“Does Wilma do counted cross-stitch?”

“She told me she does. Or did.”

“Hmm,” said Betsy. Perhaps that was a skill she had retained. “I don’t think I know of that pattern. I don’t suppose she knows the designer or manufacturer?”

“She didn’t mention one.”

“Let me do a search. I’ll call you back, okay?”

“Thanks.”

Betsy was pretty sure the pattern wasn’t called A Psychic Enters a Flower Garden, but she did an online search anyway. She wasn’t surprised when it didn’t come up.

“Goddy,” she called at last, “did you ever hear of a cross- stitch pattern called something like A Psychic Enters a Flower Garden?”

Godwin came out from the back of the shop, where he’d been putting a new shipment of patterns into a display. His expression was thoughtful. “‘A Psychic’—are you sure?”

“I’m sure that’s not the name of the pattern, but it’s tickling my memory somehow.”

“Try Psyche,” said Godwin. “Isn’t there a pattern about Psyche and Cupid’s garden?”

“Ah, you’ve got it! And so, I think, do we.” She called up the shop’s inventory, and sure enough there was the pattern, already in the shop. Psyche Entering Cupid’s Garden was a big, elaborate pattern, 188 stitches wide by 300 stitches tall, done in 92 shades of DMC floss, designed by Abracraftdabra. It was a close copy of a painting by Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse, and depicted a woman in a pink, sort-of-ancient-Greek gown, pushing open a wooden door in a cut-stone wall into a garden with a temple in the background. The detail was exquisite. It was not something Betsy would even attempt to do herself.

“Want me to kit it up?” Godwin asked.

“I don’t think so.” Surely Wilma couldn’t stitch this. Maybe it was something she had done before she became ill, and she was just remembering it.

“Who’s it for?”

“Wilma Carter. She apparently used to do fine needlework. I know people with Alzheimer’s sometimes retain old skills, but whether she is one of them, I don’t know. I feel bad about her botching the class on punch needle, so I’d like to do this favor for her. But let’s not pull the floss for it until I make sure it’s something she can do.” The chart was only twelve dollars—twenty in large-print format—but ninety-two skeins of DMC floss would bring the price up to something like a hundred and fifty dollars.

Betsy put the large-print version into the attaché case she took to the stitching class. She wanted to talk with Wilma.

Then she called Bershada and invited her to meet for lunch at Sol’s Deli, right next door.

They sat together over thick sandwiches of three kinds of lunch meat and two kinds of cheese. Betsy asked, “Have you heard the autopsy results?”

“Have they got results? What do they say?”

“The woman, whose name is Teddi Wahlberger, didn’t drown in the therapy pool, but in a bathtub full of lavender-scented bubbles.”

Bershada put down her sandwich hastily, as if fearful of dropping it in her surprise and confusion. “What?” she said.

“She drowned in a tub of scented bath salts. The medical examiner smelled lavender during the autopsy and found traces of bath salts in her lungs. Teddi wasn’t drowned in the Watered Silk pool but somewhere else, and then brought to the pool.”

“But . . . why?”

“That’s not known yet. My theory is that she drowned—or was drowned—in a bathtub, and someone wanted it to look like she drowned somewhere else.”

Bershada shook her head as if to clear it, the frown still in place. “Why would someone want it to look like she drowned at Watered Silk?”

“I don’t think Watered Silk was chosen on purpose. A lake or river would have been fine. But there isn’t any open water this time of year, so she was brought to the therapy pool.”

Bershada’s brain kicked into gear. “That means it had to be someone who knew about that pool. I mean, it’s not like they advertise on television and radio that they have a pool.”

Betsy nodded. “And it must have been someone who knew Ethan would let them in.”

“No! Girl, Ethan did not know anything about a drowned woman in that pool! He was as surprised as he could be over it! He never saw that woman before, he never let her or a friend of his or a stranger into the complex that night, he swears to it!”

Betsy studied her friend’s adamant face. “Okay, I believe that’s exactly what he told you.”

“Betsy, what he told me is the
truth
!”

“Did he let
anyone
through the front door that night?”

Bershada started to say no, but thought better of it. “I don’t think so. Maybe. Why?”

“Maybe the person responsible works at Watered Silk. Or lives there. No, wait a minute, employees and residents have their own keys.” Betsy rubbed the underside of her nose vigorously. “I wonder if they’ve reviewed the camera tapes that record activity by the doors. Probably, probably. But why didn’t they find something to help them with this? After all, that woman didn’t come up out of a drain or down a chimney; she came through a door in somebody’s arms.”

“Or in a laundry cart,” said Bershada.

“Laundry cart?”

“You’ve seen them, they’re big things, made of white canvas, with little bitty wheels at their four corners. Of course Watered Silk has them, right? A body would fit into one of them, if it was folded up good. And you could cover it up with laundry.”

An image swam up before Betsy’s eyes. She’d seen those very carts in hospitals and hotels.

“Sure!” she said. “Of course! Someone could wheel that thing in one of the back doors and no one would think a thing of it! Bershada, you’re a genius!”