Authors: Monica Ferris
“But you don’t think it’s equally likely that Hailey emptied the garbage can herself.”
“No, because there was another pot with carrot tops floating in it. Hailey wouldn’t have taken the liner out without first draining the second pot. And she would have put a fresh liner in the can.”
Betsy, reading Mike’s doubting mind, said, “I told you these were minor things!”
Yeah, but minor things could add up. Still, he wished there was something more, something solid, something he could sink his investigative teeth into.
“I’m sorry. What you’re telling me is one way it
might have
happened. Your evidence is interesting, but too thin to convince a prosecutor or a jury. I need something more than this if I’m going to make an arrest.”
“Like what?”
“A concrete piece of evidence. A note from Hailey demanding money. Or, say, the gun.”
“If the killer had more than two active brain cells, any note has long since been destroyed, and that gun is at the bottom of Lake Minnetonka.”
“Find me an eyewitness then, someone who saw something.”
“I don’t have one. But come on, Mike, it all fits together the way I’m telling it! Go dig up the red marigold in Hailey’s backyard!”
“What would that prove this long after the fact of the mutant’s discovery? I admit, you’ve got a very pretty theory. I’m glad you brought it to me. I’m going to start looking at it from the angle you presented to me. Maybe I can come up with the proof you haven’t found. Meanwhile—” He lifted his thin shoulders in a shrug and rubbed at his faded-red hair. “I’m sorry.”
Betsy looked as if she was going to cry, then sucked it up. “All right,” she said, and, deflated, left Mike in his little office.
* * *
S
HE
spent the rest of the day furiously cleaning to work off her frustration. Connor came by at one point, but when he saw her standing grimly in her kitchen amid stacks of pots and pans—she was cleaning out her cabinets—with a scarf pulled crookedly over her hair and a smudge on her nose, he wisely retreated.
He came back in the early evening, bringing white cartons of Chinese food, to find peace restored. Betsy was happy to see him, and even happier that he’d brought a hot meal for each of them, since she’d been thinking, without enthusiasm, about a tuna fish sandwich.
“Now,” he said, dishing out the food in the dining nook, “what was that all about?”
She explained how she’d taken her well-thought-out theory to Sergeant Malloy, and how he’d decided it was not solid enough to warrant the immediate arrest of Marge Schultz.
“You haven’t shared this theory with anyone else, have you?” he asked. “Godwin, for example?”
“No, of course not. I don’t want Marge to be warned that we’re onto her.”
“Wise woman,” he said, nodding. “Very wise. But now what?”
“I. Don’t. Know.” Confessing as much made her sad, and the food she’d been enjoying turned to cement in her stomach.
But Connor began to talk about her previous successes, mixing in humorous anecdotes about the good times they’d had together, and in a while she felt better.
After dinner they did the dishes together, which took about four minutes, and then went into the living room. Connor got out his knitting—he was working now on a bright yellow glove—and Betsy followed his example. She was trying her hand at a Fair Isle sweater, but this evening, still shaken by her failure to convince Mike Malloy of Marge’s guilt, she couldn’t concentrate on the complex pattern. She put it aside and got out the plaited weave scarf. In a few minutes she had settled into the pattern and relaxed.
As her mind cleared, she began to run the case through her memory. All those weeks ago—not really that many, it just seemed like a lot!—Marge had come into her shop, scared because Mike had asked her if she had murdered Hailey. Would Betsy please do for her what she had done for others, and prove she hadn’t done it?
The audacity of that woman!
“Humph!” Betsy snorted. Connor glanced over and smiled.
Wearily, Betsy trod yet again the lengthy path of her investigation. But now, in sheer desperation, she wandered off the track, looking for a new insight. She remembered going through the upstairs of Hailey’s house, the tiny, old-fashioned bathroom, the long crocheted topper on the old dresser. She remembered Amy Stromberg’s pleasure at getting the Mark Parsons needlepoint canvas. She remembered the night Jill and Lars came over for Rock Cornish game hens and Scrabble. She remembered the mushroom omelet breakfast with Philadelphia at Antiquity Rose. She remembered the Fourth of July picnic, and Jill telling Marge she wanted a pink hydrangea and a blue hydrangea, one for each of her children.
Pink and blue. Aluminum to make blue.
She put her knitting down. “Connor,” she said, “I think I finally can give Mike Malloy his solid piece of evidence.”
Twenty-six
B
ETSY
called Mike Malloy. “I think I can tell you where to find your evidence,” she said. “But it depends on your answer to one question about Pierce McMurphy’s stolen gun.”
But Malloy, after answering her question and hearing her latest idea, said, “I’d need a search warrant, and I can tell you right now, I wouldn’t get it. There simply aren’t grounds for it. Marge Schultz may be a suspect, but so are Pierce McMurphy, Joanne McMurphy, and Walter Moreham. The real killer may be nobody we suspect at present. Your reasoning is creative, and maybe even right, but I can just see myself trying to give a judge gardening lessons—won’t happen, I’m sorry.”
Betsy hung up, rubbed the tip of her nose with a forefinger, and thought hard. “I think we’re going to have to go for it ourselves, Connor,” she said.
“
Machree
, do you understand the rules of evidence? There has to be an unbroken line between the piece of evidence and the courtroom. You might go looking for that gun, you might even find it, but when you take it to Mike tomorrow, it’s only your word that you found it where you say you found it. Plus, to get it you have to go trespassing, which weakens your case right from the start.”
“Hmmmm,” said Betsy, and called Jill.
* * *
T
HE
evening of the next day it was still daylight out, though it was after eight. Jill gave Betsy a quick lesson in using her video camera as they drove over to Green Gaia. Betsy had wanted Jill to use the camera but Jill wanted both hands free “just in case.” Betsy did not want to ask, “In case what?”
“What if she’s still there?” asked Connor from the driver’s seat.
“I’ll say I didn’t know it was so late—daylight saving time keeps it daylight till nine—and that I had hoped to pick up those hydrangea plants,” said Jill.
“And we’re just along for the ride,” offered Betsy.
“No, you’re coming over to help me plant them—that’s why there’s a spade in the backseat.”
“And then we’ll have ice cream,” said Connor, falsely bright. He wasn’t a very chipper lawbreaker; he’d had his fill of explaining things to the police the night of July Fourth, when he’d driven Annie home.
He found a parking spot not far from the entrance to the garden center and they all sat in the car for a few minutes, watching for pedestrians and vehicle traffic, and getting a few last-minute instructions on the video camera.
“I got it, I got it,” said Betsy at last. “Come on, we’ve got a hole to dig.”
They bailed out and walked quickly into the center, noting the closed sign on the shop door, and made their way to the greenhouse and the big hydrangea bush by it.
Betsy started the camera, panning around to show the entrance, the tables with their potted plants, the sign for Green Gaia Gardens in fancy script over the shop door. She then trained it on the hydrangea bush, careful to cut off the heads of her coconspirators.
“Dig,” Betsy murmured to Connor, and he pushed the pointed end of the spade into the earth near the shrub’s roots. Jill stood nearby, her head constantly moving, keeping watch.
He began on the side away from the street, going down about two feet, then gradually widening the hole and extending its reach around the plant. He worked very quietly, taking small bites of the earth, which had been kept loose, unlike the path beside it, which was tramped down hard. A perimeter about a yard across had been marked with stones painted white to keep customers and employees at bay; he stayed inside it.
Betsy kept the camera running. As Connor dug and dug, her palms grew sweaty, though the evening was cool. Connor did not look as if he was sweating, though he was breathing more deeply than usual.
No results, no results. Was she wrong? No, she couldn’t be wrong. Could he have missed it? He was being very careful, poking the blade into the soil several times before raising more of it.
What if they found nothing? Could they just replace the earth, make it look as if it had not been disturbed and quietly slip away?
Connor was more than halfway around when the blade of his implement struck something with an audible
tink
.
Jill, who had been looking toward the street, swung around, and they all exchanged an anticipatory look.
“Probably a stone,” murmured Jill.
Betsy closed in on the trench with the camera and held her breath as Connor pushed the spade under and lifted the object. It lay in dirt and was encrusted with dirt, but it was clearly a semiautomatic pistol.
“What are you
doing
?” came a very loud woman’s voice, high-pitched and obviously scared. “Stop it! Stop it!”
The trio whirled, but the woman was upon them, swinging a garden rake, its teeth sharp and heavy. Marge.
The end of the rake caught Connor on his shoulder and his spade flew up in the air, sending the gun flying amid a shower of earth. The impact made him shout and sent him reeling.
Marge was screaming and swinging in big arcs. “Thieves! Get out!” She was grunting with effort.
She smashed the camera out of Betsy’s hands. Betsy’s hands exploded in pain. She screamed.
Then a gun went off, its sound huge, and everyone froze.
“Drop the rake!” said Jill.
Betsy looked over and saw Jill standing bent-kneed, both of her hands wrapped around a snub-nosed revolver.
“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” cried Marge, and she threw the rake down.
There was a pause of several seconds. Then Marge said, “Wait, wait a minute! You’re Jill Larson! What are you doing here?”
Betsy stooped and nursed her aching fingers. “Ow, ow, ow,” she moaned.
“Betsy?” asked Marge.
“Ow, ow,
ow
!” replied Betsy.
Connor was by her side in an instant. “You’re not shot, are you?”
“No, no, it’s my fingers. She hit the camera with that rake and it hurt my fingers. Damn, damn, dammit! Where’s the gun?” She looked around and saw it lying on the ground, a few yards away.
“Nobody move,” said Jill, her revolver firmly in both hands. “Betsy, where’s your cell phone?”
“In my shirt pocket.”
“Take it out and dial 911. Say a shot has been fired and we’re holding a person in custody.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” cried Marge. “What’s going on? Holding a person in custody? I thought you were thieves!”
Betsy ignored her and placed the call, giving her name and location, and repeating Jill’s message. “I’m sure they’ll be right here,” she said, on disconnecting.
“I want to know what’s going on,” repeated Marge. “Why are you digging up my hydrangea?”
“We’re not digging up the hydrangea, we’re digging up the gun you buried under it,” said Betsy. “The gun you used to shoot Hailey.”
“What are you talking about? What gun?”
“Pierce McMurphy’s gun. Over there on the ground. It’s got an aluminum frame. That’s why your hydrangea changed from pink to blue.”
Marge stared at her. “Aluminum frame?” She looked at Jill, at the gun in her hands. “A gun has an aluminum frame? But that wouldn’t make a hydrangea change color!”
Betsy said, “Sure it would. At the Fourth of July picnic Annie told us about a neighbor who changed her hydrangeas from pink to blue by burying a set of aluminum measuring cups by the roots.”
“No, no, that’s an old wives’ tale. Not enough aluminum will leach out of an aluminum object to change the pH of the soil. You dug up my hydrangea because of an old wives’ tale?”
It was Betsy’s turn to stare. “Then why did your beautiful pink hydrangea turn blue?”
With an exasperated air of stating the obvious, Marge replied, “Because I mixed up a batch of Color Me Blue in water and poured it on the roots.”
“Why did you want to change the color of your hydrangea?”
“Because Como Flower Center in Saint Paul was going under—I knew that last fall—and I knew she had a truckload of potted hydrangeas on her hands. I thought, if she had a batch of them left over, I could get a good price on them. But I needed an angle. Lots of people know about my big pink hydrangea. I got this idea to change its color to blue. People would see it and want to know what happened, and maybe I could sell them a hydrangea they could work some magic on themselves.”
She added in a tone of tired wonder, “And you thought it was an aluminum frame gun that did it.”
“Yes. And we found the gun. Marge, look, we found Pierce McMurphy’s gun!”
Marge half sat, half collapsed onto the ground, and covered her eyes with her hands. “Oh my God, done in by an old wives’ tale!” She began to weep.
Connor said to Jill, “May I retrieve the gun?”
“Handle it carefully, okay?” She had taken her finger off the trigger of her own gun and lowered it to her side with one hand.
“I will.” Connor took the spade with him and scooped up the gun one-handed.
“Marge, why didn’t you throw it in the lake?” asked Betsy.
“I tried to. I bought a ticket on the
Minnehaha
, but there were always people around, so I brought it home again. I thought it was safe to bury it under my one plant that wasn’t for sale!”
There was the sound of an approaching siren.
“Marge, is this the gun that killed Hailey?” asked Jill, as Connor came back with the dirty gun balanced on the blade of the spade.
Marge nodded. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Did you murder Hailey Brent?” The siren was rapidly coming closer. A second siren was heard, also approaching.
“Yes.” She began to sob. “Oh, God, oh, God. Yes, yes.”
Connor lifted his left arm just a little, experimentally, and winced.
“Are you hurt, Connor?” asked Betsy.
“She hit me a good one on the shoulder,” he replied. “Nothing broken, I don’t think, but it hurts.”
“I guess being around me is dangerous to your health.”
“Yes, but always very interesting,
machree
.”
The siren grew very loud, and a flicker of red and blue lights began to bounce in the air.
“Things are about to get complicated,” said Jill to them all. “Everyone just stay calm and very, very obedient.”