Blackwork (27 page)

“How did Billie know about using dry ice?” asked Emily.

“There have been stories on the Internet, and it was the subject of a crime detection show. The problem is, it has a sharp odor when it’s in concentrated form, and I can imagine that people might struggle against the suffocation and wake up. All Ryan had to do was stand up and he’d be out of the fumes, since it fills a room from the bottom up. But Ryan on a binge, and probably as much passed out as asleep, might not wake up. That’s why she needed him drunk.

“She took a lot of chances setting this up. If Ryan had sobered up again after getting arrested for drunk driving, if Shelly and Harvey hadn’t gone out that night, she couldn’t have put this together. She must have felt it was fate working on her side when she drove by Shelly’s house with the dry ice on the seat beside her and saw their car was gone.

“But it was while arranging the dry ice that Billie saw the pattern Shelly was working on, and it snuck into her head to appear in a dream.”

“Like your galloping oranges,” said Godwin.

“It was probably very much something like that,” said Patricia. “Stress or fear or anger—any strong emotion—does funny things, makes you notice things in a powerful but sometimes unconscious way.” Doubtless Patricia, who had served time in prison for attempted murder, knew about things like that firsthand. But since her would-be victim was Betsy, and Betsy clearly held no grudge, the others felt it wasn’t their part to say anything about it, either.

Then Jill spoke up. “Lars told me that the first thing Mike said to Billie when he came to interrogate her was, ‘Why did you decide to use pellets instead of block dry ice?’ and right there she figured he knew everything about how it happened, and she confessed.”

“And all for love of Cara,” said Emily.

“Yes,” said Betsy. “She loves her daughter more than anything else in this life. Ryan’s stories about her, that she was a poacher who cheated her way through high school, made life very difficult for Cara and spoiled her ambition to go to the Naval Academy. Billie hated Ryan for that even more than Cara did.”

“I thought Joey Mitchell did it,” said Alice quietly.

“He was on my short list,” said Betsy with a nod. “His motive was powerful and he didn’t have an alibi that covered the whole time the murder might have occurred. But there’s a famous Sherlock Holmes story about a dog that didn’t bark. And here we had the same thing. Shelly’s dog Portia barks at strangers, and Joey has never been in Shelly’s house. Portia has a nice loud bark, but Shelly’s neighbors never heard a dog barking that Sunday night. Billie’s been in that house often; Portia knew her as a friend.”

Betsy hoped there was no one else whom Joey hated as much as he hated Ryan, because he had certainly come close to murdering the man who destroyed his career as a firefighter. But Betsy would not tell anyone about the strange confession Joey had made to her. There were enough lives already ruined by tale-bearing.

She hoped this striking lesson about its dangers would at least prune the Excelsior grapevine.

But she doubted it.

Witchwork

Designed by: Amy Law

Materials needed:

Cross-stitch this design centered on your fabric following the color key and chart. Each square on the chart equals one fabric thread, so stitch this design over one thread on your 18-ct linen.

Kit available for purchase from local needlework shops, or go to
www.kreinik.com
for information.