Authors: Monica Ferris
“Coffee, black, thanks.”
“Come with me.” Betsy led her to the back portion of the shop, to a small round table covered with a cloth embroidered with children holding balloons. Two small chairs with cushioned seats were pulled up to it. Betsy usually used it when consulting with a customer trying to select a pattern or to decide what colors or what kinds of floss to use for a pattern.
Betsy gestured at one of the chairs and put her reporter’s notebook in front of the other. “Have a seat,” she said. “I’ll get the coffee.”
She moved to a small room at the very back of the shop that held a coffee maker and a teakettle, and brought back to the table two pretty porcelain cups, one with coffee and the other with an herbal tea for herself. “Before we talk about Hailey Brent,” she asked Randi as she sat down, “did you find everything you were looking for for your project?”
“Yes, thanks. Godwin was a good help in picking things out.”
“Yes, he’s wonderful, isn’t he?”
“Yes.” Randi took a sip of her coffee, then wrapped a slender hand around the cup, as if to warm it. “What did you want to ask me?”
“How well did you know Hailey?”
“I thought I knew her very well. We were friends for about five or six years—I met her at an adult education class in creative writing. I wanted to write children’s books, and she was going to write a novel about a woman dyer. We started a two-person writers’ group that lasted five months, but neither of us finished our projects. It’s harder than it looks, writing. But we stayed in touch.”
“Why did you say you only thought you knew her well?”
“Well, she was always sure of herself, and very kind to me. And me, I dither, can’t make up my mind about anything, whether it’s what to cook for dinner or should we have kids or should I get a divorce. Walter and I started having problems, and I shared my problems with Hailey, and pretty soon I started thinking maybe we should divorce, and Hailey strongly agreed we should. I trusted her opinion. She even offered me a place to stay if I followed through with the divorce. She treated it as if it were obvious that I should divorce Walter, and I got all caught up in the details of it. We discussed why I should get the house and whether the money I inherited from my Aunt Lucy was a sign, and so on, as if filing for the divorce was almost the least part of it.
“Then suddenly she was murdered. I was never so shocked in my life. It was as if someone cut off the air or the sunshine—or maybe more like someone turned on the air or the lights. Because I talked, really talked, with Walter, and I found out he was sick and scared because he didn’t want a divorce. And that’s when I realized I didn’t, either. Neither of us did. So we’ve started going to couples counseling and I think things are getting better between us.
“That’s why I only thought I knew Hailey Brent. She wasn’t supporting me in my decision. She made the decision herself, and got me to agree with it.”
Betsy wondered if Randi wasn’t now reflecting her husband’s opinion or even the counselor’s, but she just cleared her throat and made another note.
It also occurred to her that unless Randi was lying, she had no motive to murder Hailey. On the other hand, Walter certainly did.
Nine
T
HE
timer dinged in Betsy’s galley kitchen as a reminder that it was time to make the salad. At the same moment the doorbell buzzed. It was exactly 7 p.m.
“I’ll get it,” said Connor.
“Thanks, love.” Betsy began pulling items out of the refrigerator and putting them beside the cutting board.
Jill and Lars Larson were always so prompt that Betsy sometimes wondered if they didn’t stand out on the sidewalk waiting for the second hand on their watches to sweep around to the minute.
Jill came up the stairs to Betsy’s apartment ahead of Lars. She was a tall woman, naturally ash blond, with a Gibson Girl face. She was wearing her usual lofty, serene expression, which hid a not-always-subtle sense of humor.
Lars was a very big man, equally fair but in a golden way, with broad shoulders and a little too much chin. He had an amiable air that sometimes fooled people into thinking he wasn’t as hard-nosed in his profession as a sergeant on Excelsior’s little police department should be.
They were both dressed casually in chinos and lightweight flannel shirts, Jill’s light blue and Lars’s deep green—it was cool for early June.
Connor was a medium-tall man with a weather-beaten face, kind blue seafaring eyes, and an Irish accent so faint hardly anyone could hear it. He took them into the living room and sat down with them to talk. He wore gray twill trousers and a densely patterned Fair Isle sweater he’d knit himself.
“How does Emma Beth like preschool?” Connor asked. Divorced and with two sons and a daughter, all grown, Connor liked talking about the Larsons’ children as if they were the grandchildren he was beginning to fear he’d never have.
“She’s doing very well,” said Jill. “Of course, she’s the brightest child in her class.”
“Of course,” agreed Connor.
“She asked a riddle the other day. Why can’t a bicycle stand up on its own?”
“Beats me,” said Connor.
“It’s two tired.” Jill laughed and said, “She actually understood the pun, isn’t that amazing?”
Connor laughed, too. “Amazing.”
“Dinner smells delicious,” Lars said. “I smell poultry. Are we having chicken?”
“No, some extra-small Cornish hens Betsy found somewhere.”
Lars rubbed his palms together. “Oh boy!” he said. “I like those because I can eat them bones and all.”
But first there was a spinach salad with red onions, mushrooms, avocado, and pieces of mandarin orange.
“I thought about putting in some little shrimps, too,” said Betsy, “but I just never got the chance to go back to the store for them.”
“This is great just as it is,” said Jill.
The Cornish hens came with wild rice stuffing and tender new asparagus. Dessert was cheesecake with brandied cherries.
“Ahhhh,” sighed Lars at last, leaning back in his chair and touching his hands lightly to the sides of his stomach. “That was really nice, Betsy, thank you.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
“How’s your latest project coming?” Jill asked Betsy.
“I need more practice stitching on perforated paper, so I’m working on Mill Hill’s Moonlit Kitties. It’s got a wonderful Van Gogh–like moon.”
Jill laughed. “No, I meant the Hailey Brent case. Any progress to report?”
“Not a whole lot.”
Connor began to clear the table while Betsy got out the Scrabble game, long a favorite of the two couples.
“I can tell you something, though it’s not particularly helpful,” said Lars. “It’s peripheral to the case you’re working on.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone involved in the case, not a suspect, has a concealed carry permit.”
“Who is it?” asked Betsy, eagerly.
“Pierce McMurphy, Joanne’s husband.”
“That’s not peripheral!” said Betsy.
“Depends,” said Connor, a stack of dessert plates in his hands. “What kind of gun does he carry? Do you know?”
“A forty-five semiauto—or he did. But it isn’t relevant; it was stolen two weeks before the murder.”
“Was it a forty-five caliber bullet that killed Hailey?” Betsy wanted to know. She thrust her hand into the little bag of tiles and pulled one out. “T,” she said, and handed the bag to Lars.
“Yes,” said Lars, nodding. He shoved a big hand into the bag. “Ha!” he said, showing the others the X he’d drawn. “Best you can do is tie me for the chance to go first.” Contrary to normal Scrabble rules, they played that the letter with the highest score went first.
“Was it stolen in a burglary?” asked Jill. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” She took the bag from him and drew a C.
“I didn’t think it was important,” said Lars. “Like I said, he’s not a suspect. And anyway, he didn’t have the gun at the time of the murder.”
“Hmm, a burglary,” said Betsy.
“Yes, but not a home break-in; the gun was stolen from the trunk of his car.”
“If he had a concealed carry permit,” said Connor as he came to sit down at the table, “what was the gun doing in the trunk of his car?” He reached for the bag of tiles.
“He was visiting a client who works in a building with a big ‘Allied Merchants Forbids Guns on These Premises’ sign on the door. So he locked it in his trunk. When he came out, his car had been broken into. They stole his brand new Garmin GPS, a cowhide attaché case with a three-hundred-dollar cashier’s check in it, and his forty-five Ruger aluminum-frame semiautomatic.”
“What a good memory you have!” said Jill, laughing.
Betsy watched Connor draw a Z. “But if he was visiting a client, why didn’t he take the attaché case in with him?”
“He didn’t need it for that client; he was making a delivery of some drawings too big to fit in the case.” Lars drew seven tiles from the bag and began to arrange them on the wooden holder.
They settled into the game. With his splendid British vocabulary, Connor always did well at Scrabble, though he sometimes had difficulty with American spelling, and anyway Jill kept him on his mettle. Lars liked to use strategy, blocking Betsy, Jill, and Connor whenever he got the chance. Betsy just was happy to find she had the tiles and the opportunity to form a good word. Such as adding C-O-M to Jill’s P-L-A-I-N, and turning the board to Connor.
He was smiling in anticipation and immediately started putting tiles down to link the D in E-N-D-I-N-G with the O of C-O-M-P-L-A-I-N, then going on, spelling D-Y-S-T-O-P-I-A. And the Y was on a triple letter score. He looked around the table, anticipating a challenge, but the other three only nodded. He added up his points and turned the board to Jill, saying, “I was looking for a place to put that Y.”
Connor won the game by thirty points, but Betsy came in second, surprising everyone, including herself.
Jill insisted on helping with the dishes, but once in the kitchen she had something else on her mind.
“Betsy, I don’t think you know any licensed private eyes—or do you?” she asked while waiting for the sink to fill with soapy water.
“No, I don’t know any. Why?”
“I’m sort of wondering if I shouldn’t go for a license myself.”
Betsy nearly dropped one of the glasses she was putting into the water. “Jill Cross Larson! What gave you that notion?”
“Watching you—well, more watching the people you help. They come to you desperately scared of being charged with murder, and are relieved and grateful when you prove them innocent. One reason I joined the police force was because I enjoy helping people: keeping the streets safe for honest folk, restoring lost children to their families, investigating traffic accidents. I can’t go back to that job, not with two small children to raise, but I could do sort of that same kind of work part-time, the kind of work you do, maybe.”
“What does Lars think?”
“He thinks we should get me pregnant again.”
* * *
G
ODWIN,
having loaded the dishwasher, wandered into the study to find Rafael laying out coins on the big antique mahogany desk. “‘The King was in his counting house, counting out his money,’” said Godwin.
“That sounds like a quote,” said Rafael absently.
“It’s an old nursery rhyme. ‘The maid was in the courtyard, hanging up the clothes, when along came a blackbird and
snipped
”—Godwin snapped his fingers—“off her nose!’”
Rafael chuckled. “The things you know!”
“I know, it’s a beastly bore. Are you thinking of selling some of these?”
“Yes. I have taken to heart what you said about my working in retail to gain understanding of how it is done, so I have rented a table at the MOON coin show. I will buy and sell coins there. Will you come with me?”
Godwin smiled, surprised and pleased at Rafael. “I’ll check my schedule. I should be able to take that day as my day off.” He went to his room, a spacious one, with a grand view of the lake, and booted up his computer.
He did a quick check and found he could take the date off. After telling Rafael the good news, he made a note on his calendar. He had gone with Rafael to these coin meets before, but never as a vendor. He was pleased that Rafael was taking seriously his advice to get retail experience. It would be interesting to see how well his partner did when on the other side of the table.
* * *
T
HE
mailman brought two big, cardboard-stiffened envelopes into Crewel World the next morning. Opening them revealed two entries in the template contest. Ten more had come in the past week, and Betsy got those out of a desk drawer to look them over.
Several contestants had elected to treat the narrow rectangles as a color wheel, running from bright red at one end to cool blue at the other, outlining the rectangles in black. Others had filled the spaces with various stitches or patterns. One person had decided the rectangles’ black outline looked like the bars on a sagging cage and stitched a Chinese-style tiger pacing behind them, glaring out at the viewer, tail lashing and teeth on display.
“Ooooooh,” said Betsy. “I like this one!”
Godwin looked at the others. “I like the one she calls Rose Trellis,” he said.
“Here’s a nice one.” It was done in a broken bargello stitch, each jump from rectangle to rectangle acknowledged by a corresponding jump in the pattern. “Wow, that took some concentration,” Betsy said. She turned it over and saw the tag had Rafael’s name on it. “Hey, I didn’t know he gave us an entry!”
“He gave it to me yesterday and I just put it in the drawer with the others. I don’t think he wants any special consideration.”
“He doesn’t need to ask for special consideration; this is really good.”
“I agree, but I’m prejudiced. Now, we had said we were going to display the entries, but there’s a limited amount of wall space, and if what we’ve got already is any indication, there are going to be a
lot
of entries.”
“I’ve got the solution all thought out. I bought two bags of toy clothespins at the dollar store and a ball of twine at Menard’s. The ceiling’s nice and high in here, and we can string the entries up so everyone can see them. Oh, but first we have to retag them with numbers so our judges won’t know who did them. Let’s not forget to put a corresponding number on the name tags we take off.”
Sorting quickly through the rest of the mail, Betsy found a first-class letter addressed to her in careful printing, with the word PERSONAL printed in red letters in the lower left corner and a Forever stamp in the upper right-hand corner.
Betsy opened it to find a single sheet of lined paper covered on both sides with more printing, this a lot more carelessly done, though obviously by the same hand.
Dear Ms. Devonshire
, it began.
I did not want to send you an e-mail message because anyone might see it. My mother, who is Marge Schultz, told me she is being harassed by a police detective named Michael Malloy. He wants to prove she murdered a woman named Hailey Brent. I never even heard of Hailey Brent, and I am sure my mother never murdered anyone. She is a good person, and hardworking, intelligent, and honest.
Mother says you are trying to help her. I hope with all my heart you are successful.
Mother is the hardest worker I have ever known. She worked two jobs putting my father through medical school. My father was a good man, but he got cancer one year after he finished being an intern. He fought it for three years before he finally died. My mother was the rock that got us through.
I am so proud of how she has made Green Gaia a success. She always loved to garden. When we lived with Grandmama, we had a big backyard garden for mostly vegetables but flowers, too. She worked for a landscape company and then a garden center, which she bought from the owner when he retired.
I have told my mother that she should find a boyfriend and maybe get married. She always says she can’t because she is already married to Green Gaia. I think Green Gaia is the most important thing in the world to her, more important even than me or her granddaughter.
She proudly walked me down the aisle herself when I got married. I hoped we would stay in Excelsior so she could be a loving grandmother to my daughter, but my husband got this amazing job offer in Southern California and that’s where we live to this day. We only get to Minnesota every third Christmas, because we spend one with his parents in Las Vegas, then one just us, then one with Mother. But we stay in touch by e-mail at least once a month. We plan to come to Excelsior this Christmas. I hope our plans come true.
I can’t think what else to tell you about how good and wonderful Mother is. I thank you over and over for coming to her
aid.
Sincerely, Louise French
Betsy, deeply touched, read the letter again. She, too, hoped this coming Christmas would see the family happily celebrating in Excelsior.
* * *
L
ATER,
Betsy was high on a ladder stringing twine—Godwin was afraid of heights, especially when seen from a stepladder—when the door sang out its two-note alarm.
“Oh, hi, Irene!” called Betsy, causing Irene to jump and look around as she entered the store.
“Hi, Irene,” said Godwin, coming from the back of the shop.