Buttons and Bones (12 page)

“Just a kid,” said Connor, looking thoughtful.

Godwin frowned a little, thinking. “You know, if he hadn’t died back then, he’d be eighty-seven today.”

Betsy said, “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. But something, somehow.” Godwin ate a potato chip. “Makes me wonder if it’s better to die young and leave a beautiful corpse or to live and wind up a wrinkled old man.”

“You’d better hurry and make up your mind,” said Betsy, and Connor laughed.

When they had finished their meal, Connor said to Betsy, “I’m glad we’re friends again. May I see you this evening?”

“Well, I’ve got a class tonight, then some bookkeeping to do ...”

“All right, I understand,” said Connor. He did not ask about the next night, but said good-bye and left.

“And you were looking so good to him,” said Godwin.

“What?” she said, exasperated. “I do have a class tonight.”

“You should have suggested he come over for a nightcap. No wonder the good ones always get away from you—you have no idea how to manage a love affair.”

 

 

 

JILL came in near closing time with the two children, all restored to sunny-bright moods. “Lars called the sheriff’s department investigator up in Walker to see what made them decide the skeleton was Dieter Keitel, and guess what?”

“What?” replied Betsy.

“They found the records kept by the old sheriff back in the 1940s, and he actually had put away an official description from the POW camp medical officer, and a copy of the wanted poster, with a photograph on it. He kept them because, we suppose, the case was never solved. Did you notice the gold tooth in the skull?”

“Yes.” Betsy nodded.

“Well, it’s mentioned in the poster. Something like, ‘a gold crown on a molar on the right side near the front, noticeable when he talks or smiles.’”

Betsy sat down abruptly. “Oh, my.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. ‘Noticeable when he talks or smiles’—that makes him a real person, not an anonymous skeleton. Now I feel as if I’ve seen him naked and I’m embarrassed. He was just a kid, Jill, all of twenty, dragged off first to war, then to the middle of another country, surrounded by people he was taught to think of as the enemy.”

“Yeah, people who waved at him as he was hauled around in a big truck, and who brought him treats and taught him crafts, and let him organize soccer tournaments.”

The fist that had been squeezing Betsy’s compassionate heart loosened. “Yes, of course you’re right. C. S. Lewis said that about the English during the war: they’d declare hanging was too good for their enemies, then give tea and biscuits to the first injured German pilot who turned up in their back garden.”

Godwin said, “But someone didn’t give this guy a cup of tea and a cookie. Instead he got a knock on the head.”

“That’s right,” said Jill. “And I want to ask you, Betsy, to use your sleuthing talent to help me find out what happened.”

“Now, wait a minute. First of all, there’s an official police investigation going on right now. They know the land, they know the people, and they have the proper tools. And second, it’s three hours to Longville. I’ve got a business to run right here in town. I can’t go running up to Cass County to look into this every time I get a clue.”

“Mama, Mama?” asked Emma Beth. “Are you going to buy floss?”

“Not today, sweetie.”

“Can I go look at the floss?”

“Floss!” agreed Airey.

“Here, I have a better idea,” said Betsy, who did not want a pair of unsupervised children pulling expensive and carefully sorted silk floss from spinner racks as if they were un-decorating a Christmas tree. She went into the deepest drawer in her checkout desk and came up with two pieces of bubble wrap. “Who wants to help me pop some bubbles?” she asked.

“Me, me!” shouted the children.

“You have to sit by yourselves at the table while you’re doing this job for me, okay? Honestly, I don’t know where all this stuff keeps coming from. I’m so glad I have you two to help me out.”

In about half a minute the two were seated at the library table in the middle of the room, making snapping noises, totally engrossed.

“It’s not just Cass County we want to look at,” said Jill to Betsy. “We need to find out what happened to Mrs. Farmer—and probably her husband, too. They could be anywhere.”

“And this will make it easier?”

“No, it means we use our computers.”

“ ‘We’? ‘Our’ computers?”

“I want us to work together. You can tell me where to look, and what to look for, and I can save you time by doing the work. Together we can figure this thing out.”

“I don’t know ...”

“Well, I’m going to try it on my own, regardless. But I’m sure I’ll do better with your help.”

Betsy smiled. “I believe you’ll be disappointed if the Cass County Sheriff’s Department gets there first.”

Jill shook her head. “No, I won’t. I don’t care who gets there first, so long as someone gets there. If they figure it out, that’s great with me. But I don’t want them to find it hard to solve and gradually let it slide, until we find ourselves with a cold trail.”

Betsy laughed. “Jill, this trail is already about as cold as it can be. Not so far from seventy years cold, in fact. All the adults who might have known something useful are dead.”

“Not all of them. Johanna, for one. I doubt she’s the only one.”

Betsy remembered the old men gathered at the bar in The Lone Wolf General Store, and nodded. “All right, not all of them. But it’ll be hard to find the time to go all the way back up there to talk with them.”

“I have a feeling I’m going to be working some extra hours pretty soon,” said Godwin, but not too unhappily. He loved being on the inside of Betsy’s cases, the first to know of clues discovered and conclusions formed. And Betsy, for her part, was careful to keep that bargain in mind.

“I can do the legwork, too, or most of it,” said Jill. “But where do we start?”

“With Helga, I suppose,” said Betsy after a moment’s thought. “Where did she go? Why did she go? Is she still alive?” She thought some more. “If I had to throw away everything I had here and run off . . . well, that would be hard. I could sell the business—to Godwin probably.”

“Hurrah!” said Godwin. “Not that I want you to do any such thing, but hurrah for thinking of me.”

Betsy ignored him and said to Jill, “So maybe Helga sold the cabin to a friend.”

“Arnold and Marsha Nowicki,” said Jill. “They’re the next owners listed.”

“Do we know where they’re from? Or where they are now?”

“No, but we can find out, I suspect via the Internet.”

“What do you think the Nowickis can tell us? If they weren’t friends with the Farmers.”

“You know how people talk while they’re waiting to sign papers,” said Jill, remembering. “ ‘So, where are you going from here?’ the buyer may ask. ‘Oh, we bought a farm in Wisconsin, not far from the Dells.’ Like that.”

“Not bad,” Betsy said. “You may be right. And say, another place to look would be family. I wonder if Helga had any siblings. My sister and I weren’t terribly close, but when I needed a place to stay after I divorced Hal the Pig, I knew how to contact her. I would think Helga would know how to contact her sibling or siblings. We can do the same, but we’ll need to find out Helga’s maiden name. One way to do that would be to research her husband’s military record—I know that’s available on the Internet. I have a customer who is a genealogy nut and she did that to find out about her great-grandfather’s military service. If we can find out where he was stationed when they married, then I’ll bet we can get the record of their marriage. And that will give us her maiden name.”

Jill had picked up the notebook that shop employees used to record phone calls. She had turned to a blank page and was writing swiftly on it.

Betsy said, “Another thing the Nowickis can tell us is if both the Farmers attended the sale. One of the rumors going around up there is that he deserted the Army, then told her where he was so she could join him. If it turns out the two of them were there to sign the sale papers, that will destroy that rumor.”

“He’d have to be there anyway, wouldn’t he?” asked Jill. “Lars and I are both on the deed to the cabin, so we both had to sign our names. Major Farmer put Helga’s name on the deed with his, so I don’t think she could sell it alone.”

“If they both had to be there,” said Godwin, “that already spoils that rumor, doesn’t it?”

But Betsy said, “Power of attorney. If he was in the military, especially if he was going overseas, he might’ve given her a power of attorney so she could handle things while he was gone. I remember back when I was in the service how now and then there’d be a case of a sailor going on a seven-month cruise, and while he was gone, his wife would clean out their bank accounts, sell the house, and be long gone before he got back home.”

Jill’s eyebrows rose. “Nice of her.”

“Well . . . I know one case where he’d been asking for it the whole three years they were married. She sold everything, his guns, his truck, even his dog. That
was
mean, selling his dog.”

“Something else we’ll want to make sure of: the order of all this happening. It’s possible Dieter lived in the woods until it got too cold and then found this empty cabin to live in.”

Betsy struck her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Jill, you are a genius! Sure, think about it: Helga and the major sell the cabin and go off into the sunset, and Dieter finds this empty cabin to hang out in safe from the cold.”

Jill nodded. “Maybe it went like this: Major Farmer gets his orders and decides he doesn’t want to go into battle. He writes his wife to sell the cabin, which she does. Then he takes a thirty-day leave and turns up in time to sign the papers with her. That gave them a twenty-nine-day head start to disappear. Soon after, Dieter decides he just can’t take POW life anymore and walks away. He hides out in the woods for a few weeks, then there’s a hard frost and he needs some shelter. He finds the cabin, empty. So see, the Farmers could’ve been long gone before Dieter found the cabin.”

Godwin asked, “Then who murdered him?”

Betsy said, “Maybe some other tramp who had already taken possession?”

Jill said, “Maybe the Nowickis, coming to get the place ready for the winter. They came in and surprised a stranger, who attacked them, and they killed him in a fight. They, being new in the neighborhood, didn’t know about the German POW camp, and by the time they found out, they’d already hidden the body and laid the new linoleum down to hide the trapdoor.”

“You’d think they’d’ve figured it out from the big
PW
letters on his clothing.”

“If he’d been hiding out for weeks, he’d probably stolen clothing from clotheslines,” said Jill.

“Gosh, clotheslines,” said Godwin, who had a peculiar fondness for old, once-ordinary things.

“Mama, what’s a clothesline?” asked Emma Beth. She held up a limp piece of plastic. “I finished popping.”

“It’s a thin piece of rope strung up so you can hang wet clothes on it to dry.”

“Oh.” Emma Beth found this information peculiar but didn’t know quite where to go with it.

Betsy took the plastic from the child. “Wow, you did a super job! Thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” said Emma Beth. “Airey’s not finished yet.”

Jill said, “Well, we can’t wait any longer. Go get him. We need to get going.”

“Yes, Mama.” She walked off.

“I wonder if we can find out from the pattern when that linoleum was laid. Boy, is there a lot we don’t know, to have so many theories about what really might’ve happened,” said Betsy.

“Then I’d better get busy,” said Jill.

After she and the children left, Godwin said, “Interesting how she’s gotten so keen on sleuthing.”

“Yes. I wonder if Lars knows about it.”

 

 

 

ABOUT nine o’clock that evening, Betsy took a bottle of her favorite wine and two glasses and went knocking on Connor’s door. He was home.

Eleven

IT was getting on for bedtime. Jill was putting the last few stitches in some counted cross-stitch pattern she’d worked up with her usual speed and efficiency. Lars came to look over her shoulder at it.

“Nice,” he said.

“You sound like Airey.”

“Sorry. But it is nice.” He hesitated, then said, “Can I talk with you about something?”

She immediately put her needlework down. “Sure. What is it?”

“Are you serious about going sleuthing with Betsy?”

“Yes, I am. Why?”

“I’m wondering if you’re thinking of this as going back on the cops kind of sideways,” he said, using cop lingo.

“No, I don’t want to go back on the cops. At least I don’t think so. Not right now.”

“So what is this about?”