Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_01 (26 page)

“No. Home, I guess. She sort of waved that big pad at me and said, ‘Thanks for this, I've got some work to do now,' or something kind of like that.”

“She didn't say she was going straight home?”

“She said something I didn't quite catch. I said, ‘Are you going home now?' and she said—well, you know how you hear something all wrong? I heard her say, ‘I mean to putter around the mix,' which I know is wrong. I heard it wrong. I remember that I tried for an hour to figure out what she really said, because it kind of bothered me. Then when she was killed, I thought about it some more, because it might be important. But the police never came around asking, thank God. I'm thinking maybe I missed the last word, so it's the mixed something.”

Betsy thanked her and hung up.

“ ‘I mean to putter around the mix'?” echoed Godwin, when she repeated it to him. “What does that mean?”

“Irene Potter is next,” said Betsy. She had opened her mouth to say she had no idea what Margot meant, and instead that came out.

Godwin stared at her.

“Margot was my sister, Godwin,” she said. “I can understand her better than some secretary, even if she's not speaking to me.”

“You are
good!
So, are you going to go see Irene instead of going to the museum?”

Betsy hesitated. “Both,” she said. “The museum first, because it may be hard to get away from Irene.” She picked up the file folder. “Is there anything odd about this?” she said, spilling the silk onto the desk.

Godwin came for a look. “I don't know. I'd think they were the colors for the horse, except these two families are so different.”

“Would they be like samples?” asked Betsy. “I mean, there isn't enough here to do the entire horse, is there?”

“Probably not, although you get more loft from silk and so don't need as much of it as you'd need of cotton. These are more likely samples, to see which family came closer to the actual horse—Margot liked to match colors as closely as she could. But then why not a selection of yellows for the mane, or whites for the saddle? The ground was a light tan, I remember, but that wouldn't matter as much, since she wasn't matching a real wall or drapery.” He checked his watch. “If you're gonna visit the museum, arid flirt with Mr. Earlie, you'd better get a wiggle on.”

“Goddy!”

“I know, I'm incorrigible.”

 

Betsy got directions from Godwin and set off. She was halfway there before it occurred to her that she wasn't exactly dressed to kill. Oh, well, she thought, better he learns now that I'm not the clotheshorse Margot was.

The museum was perhaps a dozen blocks south and west of the Guthrie, in what had once been a neighborhood of wealthy families, and was still a long way from crumbling. Some of the fine old mansions had been converted to offices, but others held the line, stubbornly insisting that the 1880s would be right back.

The museum was built in the classical style, with lots of steps leading up to a row of massive pillars, flanking bronze doors. The new main entrance, around the comer, was a modem addition, and wheelchair-accessible.

The inside had been thoroughly renovated, too, though here and there was a room that still showed signs of having been built the same time as the beautiful old houses in the neighborhood.

The Fasset exhibit was in two rooms, one very small and the other not really large. Betsy was disappointed to discover that Kaffe Fasset was a man. She had never considered herself much of a feminist, but needlework is so traditionally female that while it was nice to see a woman's homely craft at last recognized as art, it would have been equally nice to have the artist be female.

On the other hand, Mr. Fasset was indeed an artist. There were gorgeous sweaters, some so enormous only an NBA star gone to fat could have worn them. Is that what makes these art? wondered Betsy. They are clothing no one can wear? Mr. Fasset favored rich earth tones of gray, mahogany, green, and gold.

The artist also did needlepoint; Betsy was intrigued by a red lobster on a checkerboard ground. His work was perfectly smooth, unmarred by errors, fancy stitches, or beadwork.

Signs everywhere warned patrons not to touch, but this was a weekday morning, and the exhibit had few visitors. Betsy took a quick peek and discovered that Mr. Fasset was not fastidious about the backs of his works. Betsy hadn't been either, when she was doing embroidery. Would it be worth her while to work really hard and gain artistic status so she might escape the criticism the Monday Bunch leveled against messy backs?

Betsy studied a knitted shawl inspired by the arum lily, row upon row of perfect curved shapes, each marked with a narrow tongue, in a harmony of colors that made her sigh with envy and covetousness. No, she would never be this good. Better to learn to be more careful with the backside of her work.

She left the exhibit and went looking for the Asian art section. One wide hallway was lined with European sculpture from the last century, which Betsy only glanced at—until she saw a small white bust of a young woman wearing a veil held in place by a circlet of flowers. She slowed, stopped. She could see a hint of eyes, nose, and mouth behind the veil, and almost instinctively reached to touch it. But her eye was caught by a hand-lettered sign asking her not to. Smudges on the veil showed not everyone pulled their fingers back as she did. Not that one could move the veil, of course; the entire thing was of marble, a three-dimensional
trompe l‘oeil.
She looked for and found the brass tag naming the genius who had done this: Raffaelo Monti. When I am rich, she thought, and went on.

Her feet were tired before she found the Asian art section, up on the third floor. It was cramped between two areas being noisily renovated, and was disappointingly small. The centerpiece was a massive jade mountain carved into paths, brooks, bridges, trees, houses, animals, and people. But in the few surrounding glass cases there was no pottery horse of any color from any dynasty.

Betsy went down to the information desk on the main floor, which was manned by two middle-aged women whose manners were so open and informal that they had to be volunteers. One of them called Hudson Earlie's office, and permission given, a guard was summoned to bring Betsy up four flights to him.

She was shown into a small anteroom where a secretary said Mr. Earlie was on the phone. Hud stayed on the phone a long time—but Betsy didn't mind. Chat was better than “music on hold,” and Hud's secretary was personable, as well as young, trim, and pretty. Doubtless Hud had taken her out to dinner any number of times, though Betsy was careful not to ask.

Hud's inner office was quite grand, with tall windows on two walls and an Oriental carpet on the floor. He came out from behind his desk to take her hand in both of his, pleased she had come calling.

“Nice of you to come into town especially to see me,” he said.

“Actually, I came to see the Kaffe Fasset exhibit.”

He smacked himself on the forehead. “Oh hell, where is my head? I should have realized that you'd be interested in that and seen to it that you got a ticket.”

“It was only five dollars, Hud.”

“Yes, but you're not on Easy Street yet.”

“True, true.” She looked around. The shelves flanking the windows held small, exquisite examples from Hud's specialty, Asian Art, and the books were also on that topic, except one called
Art Crime.

“Do you get thieves or see a lot of fakes?” Betsy asked.

“Not a whole lot,” he said. “Asian art sometimes has the same problem as art from third-world countries: provenance. Because some of it is stolen or smuggled, provenance can't be given—you know what provenance is?”

She nodded. “The paper trail of owners tracing a piece of art back to the artist.”

“Or the place where it was dug up,” he agreed. “So what we get sometimes is an authentic piece of ancient art with a fake provenance. It's my job to authenticate pieces that we acquire, and I've learned to look beyond the paper to the piece itself.”

“Hud, where's the T‘ang horse?”

If she hoped to startle him with that question, she didn't succeed. “In storage. Most of our collection is in storage, because we're renovating the Asian art exhibits, giving separate galleries to India, Korea, Islamic countries, Himalayan kingdoms”—he was counting on his fingers—“Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. Plus new lighting and better alarms. It's going to be spectacular. I take it you went looking for the horse?”

“Yes. Margot was going to redo her needlepoint picture for a customer, who offered a thousand dollars for it—a sum the shop can use, badly. I've got an employee who thinks he can do the needlepoint, so maybe we can still get the money. I was curious to see what it looks like—I don't remember more than glancing at Margot's original.”

“You want me to show it to you?”

“Can you?”

Hud glanced toward his desk, where papers waited. Then he smiled at her like a schoolboy plotting to play hooky. “This will have to be quick, okay?”

“Thanks.”

But as they turned toward the door, Betsy saw the one non-Asian note in the room, an umbrella stand made from an elephant's lower leg, standing by the door.

“Let me explain,” Hud said with upraised hands, when her questioning gaze came back to him. “I needed something to hold my walking sticks, and they were going to de-accession that. Somehow, it ending up in a Minnesota landfill seemed worse than keeping it, though of course we can't display it. So don't look at me like I killed the elephant myself; that happened a hundred and thirty-odd years ago.”

Betsy approached the object gingerly. She had heard about such things, but to actually see one was horrible—it even had the toenails—so she changed focus to the seven or eight walking sticks and the one umbrella it held. Most had brass heads, including the umbrella, which was tightly furled. “Is this your collection?” she asked.

“Part of it. I'm always taking one or another home and then coming in with a different one. I don't even know what's in there right now.”

The flat-faced owl was, and another shaped like a snail. “Which one's the sword cane?”

He pulled out an ebony cane with a standard curved handle. Apart from some copper-wire inlay, it was undecorated. Hud had to pull fairly hard to get the handle to separate, which he did with an overhead flourish, and suddenly there was a length of gleaming steel waving under Betsy's nose.

“Cute,” said Betsy, taking a step back. “I'm glad it was the sword or I'd be covered with whiskey.”

Hud laughed and put the cane back together, and they went out of his office. “I'll be back in a few minutes, Dana,” he said to his secretary as they swept by.

 

They took the freight elevator, a big, padded box so old-fashioned it had a human operator—a retarded man from a local group home, who loved this vehicle like Hud loved his Rolls. As it slowly clanked its way down, Hud said to Betsy, “How do you like our Guthrie Theatre?”

“Very impressive. How did you know I went?”

“You're a new face in a small town. Everyone's paying attention.”

“I didn't know you lived in Excelsior.”

“I don't, I live next door in Greenwood. But I eat breakfast every so often at the Waterfront Café.”

Betsy chuckled.

They went up a broad hall lined with huge eighteenth-century religious paintings to an unmarked wooden door that opened with a key.

The door let into a long narrow hall, at the end of which was another door, which opened into an enormous room full of stacked wooden crates, a big stone statue of Shiva, and glass cases containing golden Buddhas, Chinese watercolors, Japanese robes, and enigmatic stone heads. “Wow,” breathed Betsy, “it's like Christmas at Neiman Marcus.”

Hud laughed. “Here, this way.” He led her through a labyrinth formed by the rough wooden cases. At last he led her around an immense crate and pointed. “There it is.”

The blue horse was inside a glass case with a brown horse and two human figures. Hud said, “As you can see, it's part of a set. They are funerary figures from a tomb in China built early in the eighth century.”

He watched as Betsy slowly approached the case. The figures were on a stepped base, the male figure on the highest point in the center. But Betsy only glanced at him and focused in on the blue horse. This was so typical, thought Hud, that he was going to suggest at the next board meeting that they discontinue the postcard showing all the figures and make one of just the horse.

High but directly above the case was an air vent; it blew a chill draft down on them. He saw Betsy shiver and stuff her hands into the pockets of her blue cardigan as she moved around the case. Suddenly she stooped as if to see it from a child's angle. He could see only the top of her head, and was surprised at the amount of gray in her hair. Her face was young; she could get away with a dye job. Doubtless when she came into that money, her hairdresser would suggest it. What was it, three million? He would himself suggest some improvements to her wardrobe—that cardigan was positively shabby.

He waited, but she showed no signs of being finished. At last he cleared his throat, and when Betsy straightened he was looking pointedly at his watch.

“Sorry,” she said, and they retraced the labyrinth out of the storage room.

Back in his office, she asked, “May I ask why Margot came to see you the day she died?”

“She had some idea about a proposed fund-raising campaign. She felt it was too ambitious, that we wouldn't meet our goal. She wanted me to support her at the next meeting when she voted against it.”