Authors: Monica Ferris
Twenty-four
R
IGHT
at ten, Annie called. She asked cautiously, “Have you seen Connor yet today?”
“Yes, and he told me all about last night. You both behaved beautifully!”
“I was scared, but Connor was a hero!” declared Annie. “Pow, right in the breadbasket!”
“Oh, Annie!” Betsy said, thinking Annie was being a little callous.
“Yeah, well, what can you do? He called me this morning.”
“Connor?”
“No, Cole. I told him the police explained to me how to apply for a restraining order against him, and that I’d be doing that today. He wanted me to post his bail, and I told him no way. He told me it would be just a loan, I should help him because he sold his car for the price of a bus ticket to Minneapolis, but right then I hung up on him.”
“This must be very difficult for you.”
Annie sighed, her cheerfulness ebbing. “Oh, it is, it is. But lots of things are hard to do, especially if they’re the right thing. My son has spent his whole life making that bed, now he has to lay down on it. I would like for you to tell Connor he’s a real peach, and I will tell anyone who thinks to get up against him that they’re making a big mistake. Pow, right in the breadbasket!” Annie’s words were brave, but there were tears in her voice.
Betsy laughed, but she felt like crying, too. “I will, Annie. I think you’re very brave and very tough, too. I want you to do something nice for yourself today, okay? And if you need anything, you let me know.”
“You did the best thing for me, already, when you told Connor to drive me home last night. Thank you very much.”
Godwin came in late—a new habit he’d developed since moving with Rafael into the gray clapboard condo right across the street. Being sixty seconds from work makes being on time harder for some people. But he got right to work.
Later that morning, he began marking down prices on some cross-stitch patterns going on sale. “I didn’t think the fireworks were quite as good as last year, did you?” he asked Betsy.
“Hmmm?” she said. She was pulling yarn for a needlepoint canvas a customer had ordered.
“Fireworks,” prompted Godwin. “Weren’t you at the display last night?”
“Sure. I thought they had too many of those loud ones.”
“And didn’t you think the display wasn’t quite as good as last year’s?”
Betsy had spent the late evening snuggled under Connor’s right arm. She would have been fine with sparklers tossed in the air. “I thought it was very nice,” she said.
Godwin had gone to the event with Rafael, who was still depressed over his failure as a merchant, which dimmed the colors of everything for both of them, even fireworks.
Still, that meant Godwin wasn’t going to have to choose to go into partnership with Rafael in a new enterprise, or stay with Betsy in her old one. In a little while he began to whistle.
“What is that tune?” asked Betsy. “You were whistling it the other day, too.”
“It’s the theme to
Sergeant Preston of the Yukon
.” Godwin deepened his voice and called dramatically, “On, King! On, you huskies!” And he made a noise with his mouth that sounded like a winter storm blowing across the arctic wastes. Godwin was, for reasons not even he could explain, a fan of old radio shows.
Betsy chuckled as she shook her head and continued pulling yarn.
An hour or so later, Betsy went to the basement of her building to locate a big poster she’d stored there, advertising DMC floss—she was going to hold a sale on the product.
She noticed the line strung up there, where she had hung the yarn Hailey had spun for Irene Potter. The yarn had been delivered to Irene, but the line still held up the knitted square that had been taken out of the pot of indigo. On the edge of the sink a small wooden bowl was half full of dried flowers.
The bowl had been full when Betsy first put it down in the basement. She had picked the red marigolds fresh from Hailey’s garden. She had meant to ask Philadelphia if it was all right, but had forgotten. She had wanted to talk to Ruth Ladwig about making a dye from them, but she’d gotten sidetracked into investigating the Pierce-Marge love affair. Now they had dried and shrunken into crispness, their bright red color dulled. Were dried flowers still good for making a dye?
She would call Ruth and see what she had to say.
Ruth told her that she would be at the Science Museum in Saint Paul tomorrow, doing demos on dyeing to anyone who came by.
And yes, dye baths could be made from dried flowers as well as fresh.
And yes, Betsy could come by with some dried marigolds and Ruth would make a dye bath from them.
* * *
I
T
was a bit of a struggle, but Betsy found a part-timer able to come in the next day. Around ten, Betsy set off for Saint Paul. With her, safely placed in a plastic bag, were the dried red marigolds.
She took I-94 East through Minneapolis to the Kellogg exit in Saint Paul, turned right, and went down a hill past the Basilica, around a bend, and turned right on Eagle Street, then left onto Chestnut, which fed directly into a multilevel underground parking garage.
She collected her parking ticket at the entrance and found a spot not far from the elevator.
Following Ruth’s instructions, she took the elevator to the main floor of the museum, crossed the huge, light-filled lobby to the ticket counter, and got a pink cardboard bracelet Ruth had left for her.
She took the stairs down a floor, pausing to look over the landing into a cafeteria area far below, where some strange-fangled device suspended in the air played abstract marimba music one note at a time.
At the bottom of the stairs and around a corner was the entrance to a large room filled with displays, including miniature scenes hand carved in wood that were activated by cranks—a man in a bathtub scrubbing his back, for example, or a woman operating an old-fashioned typewriter. There also was a whale skeleton and an enormous grizzly bear standing on its hind legs. And sea-creature fossils. And there stood Ruth, in an apron, behind a low red counter set with cafe stools. Two pots, one small and one large, were already steaming on a gas stove set right near her.
“This place makes me wish I were a kid again!” said Betsy, looking at the outsize hanging loom across from them. “Hi, Ruth!”
“Hello, Betsy. Did you bring the flowers?”
“Yes, here they are. I picked all the blooms off the red marigold growing in Hailey’s garden, but there weren’t a lot. I hope there are enough.”
Ruth inspected the plastic bag, weighing it in her hand, pressing with her fingers to test its density. “I think there are. We’ll just make a small dye bath.” She opened the bag and plucked a bloom from it, then sifted the remaining dried flowers through her fingers into the smaller pot. She stirred them with a wooden dowel to get them to sink into the simmering water.
Then she took a closer look at what she held in her fingers.
“What are you looking for?” asked Betsy.
“I want to see if these were fully developed before you picked them.” She showed Betsy the bulge forming at the base of the flower. “See, here is where the seeds form.” She used her thumbnail to break it open, but there were no seeds inside. “No, this is a young flower. Which is to be expected: You find seeds in the late fall.”
She dropped the flower into the pot with the others and went into a cabinet, where she brought out two fabric squares about four inches in diameter. Slits had been cut along the bottom of each square, and slipknotted through the slits were short lengths of white yarn.
“Hey,” Betsy said, “those look like the squares Hailey brought to the dyeing demo in my shop!”
“That’s because they are the same. I gave her a box of them to use in her demos.”
“You were a good friend to her.”
Ruth shrugged and gave her gray and silver hair a shake. “I did it with the encouragement of the museum. Hailey wrote to the curator.” She turned, stirred the pot with the dowel, and checked her watch. “We’ll give it five minutes.”
“On balance,” said Betsy after a bit, “was Hailey a positive or a negative presence in the world?”
Ruth thought. “Positive, I’d say. Though I didn’t know the secrets of her heart. But what heart doesn’t have secrets, and who knows the secrets of any other person’s heart?” She smiled. “I guess I’m being more philosophical than usual today.”
Betsy avoided an examination of her own conscience by posing another question. “Do you know what Hailey thought of Marge Schultz?”
“I know they used to be friends, but something happened, I’m not sure what. Hailey used to say how smart Marge was, how hardworking and independent. Knowing how Hailey was about men, I’d say Marge started talking about a man she liked and Hailey objected to it. Is that possible? I mean, I don’t live in Excelsior, so I don’t know the people out there.”
“I’d say it’s possible. Of course, anything’s possible.” Betsy shrugged.
“Now it’s you getting philosophical,” said Ruth with a smile.
“Did Hailey know Joanne McMurphy outside of Tai Chi classes?”
“Is that how they knew each other?” Ruth asked. “Hailey was uncomfortable about Joanne. She said she was getting crazier and crazier—but she generally added, ‘Poor thing,’ after saying so. She pointed Joanne out to me one time and said I shouldn’t say anything to her because she was very touchy. The way she said it made me think maybe she’d said something to Joanne that set her off. What’s her story, anyhow? Do you know?”
“She was in a car accident four years ago that damaged her brain. She has trouble controlling her emotions, especially anger.”
“Ouch! ‘Poor thing’ for real!”
“How about Pierce McMurphy?” asked Betsy.
“I don’t know him at all.”
“Did Hailey?”
“I doubt it. She never went out of her way to strike up an acquaintance with a member of the male sex.”
“Well, that’s true. Do you think Hailey was sincere about encouraging Randi Moreham to separate from her husband?”
“Very sincere. Vehement, even. She even tried that argument out on me. Once. Huh!” Another toss of her head made it clear what Ruth thought of Hailey’s attempt.
“Do you think Randi’s husband, Walter, knew about this?”
“I have no idea. Why, what have you found out?”
“Since Hailey’s death, Randi’s opinion of her husband has undergone a change, and they’re now in couples counseling to see if they can work out their problems.”
“Oh my. I bet your question is, did Walter figure out it was Hailey, not Randi, who wanted them divorced?”
“Yes, that’s a very big question. He says he didn’t know. But he would say that, wouldn’t he?”
“Even if only to keep people from thinking he’s an idiot, not able to tell that his wife was under the spell of someone else’s opinion.”
Betsy nodded. It did seem a little odd that Walter didn’t realize his wife’s turnaround from loving homemaker to wannabe divorcee wasn’t a natural progression for her. Of course, if he was working crazy hours at a demanding job, maybe the marital friction they experienced was understandable.
Ruth poked at the simmering flowers. “I think this is ready.”
She poured the mixture through a strainer into a glass bowl sitting on the counter beside the stove. Then she tapped the strainer on the edge of the counter to shake loose the last of the liquid, and dumped the wet marigolds into a waiting plastic bag.
She picked up the two squares with their hanging strands of yarn and said, “Ready? One square is wool, the other square is soy—I marked it with an S.”
“Ready,” Betsy said.
Ruth slid the two squares into the bowl and prodded them with the dowel to get them well into the dye bath, which was the color of tea.
Betsy went into her purse and got out the knitted square Ruth had lifted from the pot of indigo all those weeks ago. “Oh, I forgot to bring a pair of scissors!”
“I’ve got a pair that should work,” said Ruth. She went into the short, cabinet-lined hallway off her dyeing area. From a drawer she retrieved a small pair of scissors, and brought them to Betsy.
Betsy snipped at a corner of the square and began raveling it.
Ruth poked at the squares in the bowl. “Hmmm, we’re getting there,” she said. She put the dowel down and came to look at what Betsy was doing. “There, see what I mean?” she said and touched strands of the yarn as it came undone. “Wherever the yarn crossed, the original color can be seen.”
It was a strong red-orange.
And in another few minutes, when Ruth lifted the knitted square from the bath, the colors varied from yellow-orange to tan, to yellow, to cream, to—in the case of the tin-mordanted wool—a strong red-orange.
Betsy nodded and watched Ruth go to rinse off the squares. At last, she had a piece of the puzzle that seemed to illuminate things more than complicate them.
Twenty-five
T
HERE
was a time when Sergeant Mike Malloy would have groaned when the desk sergeant called to say Ms. Betsy Devonshire was here to see him. But he had slowly and reluctantly realized that while she may only be an amateur sleuth, she was a singularly talented one.
Still, she was an amateur, and capable of messing up a case by moving an important piece of evidence, or warning a suspect of her suspicions, or precipitating an arrest before the case was ready.
She was currently working on proving the innocence of his main suspect in the murder of Hailey Brent. She had a history of being right, which was one of the reasons he had grown willing to deal with her. It was possible she had something tangible to offer him today. Like another viable suspect.
“All right, send her down,” he said into the phone, and closed the folder he’d been working on.
He watched as Betsy paused a moment in the open door to his small office, a short, plump woman with curly blond hair, wearing a lightweight, short-sleeved gray pantsuit and gold earrings, each set with a round jade stone, and carrying a big, dark gray leather purse that matched her low-heeled sandals. She looked intelligent and self-assured, even a little excited. Maybe she did have something useful to offer.
He rose with the old-fashioned manners his father had taught him and indicated the hard wooden chair set beside his old metal desk. “Good afternoon, Betsy,” he said. “Have a seat.”
She sat down, holding her purse in her lap with both hands. “I know who murdered Hailey Brent, Mike,” she announced.
Though he’d half expected something like this, he felt his pale eyebrows rise on his freckled face. “Who?” he asked bluntly.
“Marge Schultz.”
He stared at her for several seconds, his face disbelieving. “I thought you were out to prove she
didn’t
do it.”
“That’s what she asked me to do. And I tried to do it. But facts are facts.”
Mike smiled and sat back in his chair, prepared to listen. “All right, tell me the facts.”
Betsy said, “It started a few years ago—I don’t know precisely how many, but more than three, probably more than four. Hailey Brent had been growing herbs and flowers and making dyes from them since before that, for a long time. She was a spinner, too, spinning wool into yarn and coloring it, making soft, beautiful colors from her own dyes. I was one of her customers—her yarns were expensive but popular.”
“You knit things from the yarn she sold you?” Mike was trying gamely to follow this meandering story. Was knitting one of the clues?
“No, I bought the yarn for resale, in my shop. And she sold to other shops as well.” Betsy nodded sideways to show she’d slipped a little off target, then continued back on track. “She was a bright and talented dyer and had this attitude that, as an artist, she was above the rules of ordinary behavior.”
“Hell, I know all about that. How she’d go over to Green Gaia when no one was around and clip flowers off the plants to make her dyes. Marge knew she was doing it, but said that it didn’t happen often enough and that Hailey didn’t take enough to bother her bottom line—or at any rate it didn’t bother her enough to call the cops about it.”
“But it did bother her. It’s just that Hailey had a secret she was holding over Marge. In fact, I think her cutting blooms off Marge’s flowers was a way of twitting Marge about it.”
“You mean about Marge having an affair with Pierce McMurphy? Is that why you think Marge shot Hailey?” Mike would give a great deal to have solid evidence of that.
“No, I think it’s possible Hailey didn’t know about the affair. But it’s also possible Marge told Pierce she did. That was my first theory.”
Mike opened his mouth, then closed it again. “Why would she do that?” he asked.
“Because Marge wants Pierce to divorce Joanne and marry her, but he’s stalling. Joanne’s behavior has been getting worse lately, and Marge thinks she should be moved into a secure facility. And she told me Pierce agrees. If Joanne found out Pierce is being unfaithful to her with Marge, she might go over the edge and attack one or both of them. I was thinking Marge persuaded Pierce to fake that theft from his car and give her the gun so she could frighten Hailey into silence. Marge might have told Pierce it went wrong and she accidentally shot Hailey.”
Mike considered that. He, too, had wondered if the theft was faked. “But if the car burglary was a fake, why didn’t Pierce shoot Hailey himself? Why give the gun to Marge?”
“Because it gave Pierce the opportunity to establish an ironclad alibi—which he has got, remember.”
Mike wriggled in his chair. Ungentlemanly of Pierce. “Okay.”
Betsy nodded. “But from what I’ve seen of Pierce, he doesn’t seem the type to give a terrible job like murder to his mistress. And, anyway, if the problem was Joanne, the solution was to put her away, not kill Hailey. I think Marge stole the gun without Pierce’s knowing it was her.”
“Or,” said Mike, “the burglary was real and Marge—if Marge murdered Hailey—got a gun somewhere else.”
Betsy shook her head. “But where, Mike? I’m sure, since you’ve been looking hard at Marge, you’ve been checking to see if she bought a gun legally. Where would someone get a gun without leaving a record of its purchase?”
“It can be done. Crooks do it all the time,” said Mike.
“But Marge isn’t a crook. She wouldn’t know who to talk to, where to go. No, I think Pierce’s gun was used to kill Hailey.”
“But how did Marge know about Pierce’s gun?”
Betsy smiled. “How do I know that Jill Larson has a concealed carry license and packs heat at all times?”
Mike smothered a laugh. “‘Packs heat’? Listen to you! Why’d she tell you, is she trying to persuade you to get a concealed carry license, too?”
Betsy nodded. “Not a chance, thank you very much. But we’re wandering from the topic again. I’m sure Marge and Pierce talked about their respective professions, and it’s likely Pierce told her about his gun when she worried about him carrying estimates and blueprints into bad neighborhoods. He may even have bragged about the gun, or offered to let her try to shoot it with him.”
Mike rubbed his lower face with one thin hand. “So if Hailey didn’t know about the affair, and the crime wasn’t to keep her from blabbing to Joanne, why did Marge Schultz murder Hailey Brent?”
“It was about the red marigolds.”
“Red marigolds,” Mike echoed. He had already found out that Marge was growing a new variety of marigolds, but so what?
“You see, Hailey is the one who first found them growing in her own garden. Or, more likely, one single plant with red blooms on it, a mutant. She might have mentioned it to Marge—she would go to the garden center for legitimate purposes sometimes; for instance, to see a plant in person after seeing it in a catalog. If she liked it, she’d order it from the catalog instead of buying it from Green Gaia, because the catalog price was lower. Like people sometimes come to Crewel World to look at a pattern or a new variety of floss or a pair of scissors—then order it online.” Betsy’s lips thinned. She didn’t mind that kind of thing once in a while, but some people made a practice of it.
Mike nodded. His brother-in-law liked to tell the story of seeing a woman in a bookstore with a Kindle in her hand, perusing books on shelves then ordering them on her device.
But they were wandering from the point again.
Betsy said, “I know for a fact that Hailey Brent did not buy red marigolds from Green Gaia, and that they are not for sale anywhere else. But if you go by her house, you will see one blooming in her backyard.”
“And?” Mike asked. Was there a point in here somewhere? But Betsy was looking very earnest. He reached for his notebook.
“Anyway, Marge found out about the new variety of marigold growing in Hailey’s garden and sneaked over for a look.” She raised a finger to indicate her next point was the important one. “Did you know there can be a great deal of money made from a new color of marigold? That you can actually patent it, so other suppliers have to pay money to carry it?”
“No, I didn’t know that.” Mike now knew where Betsy was going. “You’re saying Marge stole the red marigold plant.”
“No, she wouldn’t dare do that. Hailey paid close attention to the plants in her garden, and she would have noticed if the strange red marigold suddenly went missing. Marge stole the seeds. All she needed was one bloom, picked in the late fall, when the seed bulb was fully developed. I think Marge took those seeds and planted them to see if it was a true mutation, and finding it was, propagated them.”
“Propagated—?”
“Grew more of them. Did whatever gardeners do to strengthen and ensure the new color—it’s called line breeding when you do it with dogs, breeding sons and mothers, daughters and fathers, together. I guess you can do something similar with flowers. Marge is an experienced and talented gardener. She’d patented a new variety of aster and made enough money to expand and improve her garden center. Here was a chance to do it again—perhaps an even more lucrative chance.”
“Didn’t Hailey notice when she saw Marge putting out the new plants?”
“I think she didn’t realize right away that the new plants originated in her garden. There was only one red marigold growing in Hailey’s garden, after all. Perhaps a bird had carried the seed over the fence. But talking with an employee made her realize that Marge started growing red marigolds the season
after
Hailey saw one in her own garden.”
“So why not acknowledge it?” asked Mike reasonably. “Share the wealth. Marge could have given Hailey some of the money.”
“Because Marge needed it all. Pierce couldn’t simply abandon Joanne; she needed to be put into a good, well-run facility—a very expensive proposition that would eat up most, if not all, of the settlement given her as a result of that car accident. Joanne and Pierce were living comfortably on that settlement. Marge felt she needed to bring a great deal of money to her prospective marriage to Pierce to compensate for the funds potentially spent on Joanne’s care.”
Mike waited for more, but Betsy was done.
“Sounds kind of cold-blooded,” he noted.
“No, I think there’s plenty of heat between Pierce and Marge. But strip away the passion, and you’re right, there are elements of commerce in it. Marge felt she needed to contribute to the new arrangement, in order to remove an argument against implementing it.”
“So what can you offer as proof that this is what’s going on?”
“Come on, Mike, I’ve got the only explanation that fits all the little oddments and curvatures of this thing!”
“Your reasoning is all you’ve got? It’s an interesting story—it might even be true—but I need more than your active imagination.”
“But there are all sorts of little things.” Betsy spread her hands out, palms up. “And when you put them together, it shows me I’m right about what happened.”
“Like what?”
“Well, when Ruth Ladwig and I looked around Hailey’s dyeing setup—”
“Who’s Ruth Ladwin?”
“She’s a dyer, does demos over at the Science Museum. She and Hailey were friends.”
Mike went back in his notebook and found the name. “Yeah, okay. So you and Ruth Ladwin—”
“Ladwig. Ruth Ladwig. L-A-D-W-I-G.”
“Gotcha.” Mike corrected the spelling. His notes reminded him that he had talked to Ms. Ladwig but gotten nothing useful from her.
“She was a friend of Hailey’s. They talked methods, recipes, mordants, how to use bark and roots and flowers, and things like that.”
“Yes, I know.” Mike was starting to feel impatient. “Are you going to tell me she told you Hailey told her about Marge stealing the red marigolds?”
“I’m afraid not. But going through the dyeing setup in the basement, we found some pots still on the stove. We went down there with the permission of Hailey’s daughter, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And there was some dyed yarn hanging on a line over the sink.”
Mike tapped his pen on his desk and nodded. “I remember seeing the pots and the yarn.”
“Good. But there were still some things in the pots. One big one held indigo dye, and there was yarn in it—and this, too.” Betsy opened her big purse and pulled out what had probably once been a square made of knitted yarn. An uninteresting shade of brown with some spots of red-orange here and there on the loose part. It was about a third unraveled. She handed it to him.
“What is it?”
“Possibly a pot holder. More likely an experiment. It had been dyed that red-orange you can still see in spots, then dumped in the pot of indigo and overdyed blue—but blue and red-orange make brown. Except where the yarn crossed over itself. You can see the original color showing where I raveled it.”
“Unraveled it, you mean.”
“No, unravel means to knit it up again. Like from Shakespeare, ‘Sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of care.’”
Mike Malloy looked slantwise at her, one eyebrow lifted.
“Well, it does,” she murmured defensively.
“So she dyed it red-orange, and then put it in the pot of indigo to see what color she’d get,” said Mike, handing it back.
“No, her murderer put it in the pot of indigo.”
“Why?”
“Because . . .” Betsy dived into her purse again, and this time she pulled out a limp square of fabric with four thin strands of yarn in different soft colors hanging from the bottom of it. She handed it to Mike. “See, that one strand is the same red-orange color, or nearly, as the spots on the raveled square.”
Mike laid the red-orange strand across the red-orange spot. They pretty much matched. “So?” he asked.
“That little red-orange piece of yarn was dyed a few hours ago over at the Science Museum using red marigolds to make the dye bath. I think Hailey dyed the pot holder with red marigold blooms and her killer saw it floating in a dye bath with wet red marigold blooms standing in a strainer beside it. I think she thought that Hailey had decided to stop hinting that Marge was a thief and was plotting to prove the red marigold variety was her own. Marge put the pot holder into the indigo dye bath, dumped the blooms in the garbage can, and took the liner away with her. I think that’s why Ruth and I found the can empty, with no liner.”