“Have a seat,” said Alice. “How do you take your coffee?”
“With everything, I'm afraid.”
“You say that like you're ashamed of it. Why, don't you like coffee?”
“Not much, actually. I like fruit and vegetable juices, herbal teas, and cocoa, and when I have a cold, I like hot lemonade, but I'm not that fond of coffee. But everyone around here sure drinks a lot of it.”
“It's a Scandinavian thin
g
,” nodded Alice. “I'm British myself, half English and half Scot. But after all those years married to a Norwegian, I got converted. I have some herbal teas around here somewhere, I can heat a mug of water in the microwave for you.”
“No, don't bother. I'm fine, really. But you have your coffee.” Betsy glanced over her shoulder at the hook by the back door with the man's overcoat on it. “Was that coat your husband's?” she asked.
Alice stopped in the progress of the step and a half from the stove to the table and looked at the coat as if seeing it for the first time. “No, it's mine. Bought it at a rummage sale.” She sat down. “A big woman like me, with shoulders like I got, regular women's coats don't fit me. They bind under the arms and at the elbows something painful, and my wrists stick out and get chapped. I've been wearing men's coats almost all my life. Oh, once in awhile I'll find something, usually in a real ugly color or priced so it takes me all winter to pay it off. And when I do buy one, do you know I have the worst time buttoning it? It buttons the wrong wayâor at least what's become the wrong way for me, for coats. Everything else I wear that buttons, I can button right the first time. But I always go to buttoning my coats from the men's side.” She chuckled at herself, then took a drink of her coffee. “But you didn't come here to ask about why I wear men's coats.”
“I keep hearing about bobbin lace, but I wouldn't know it if it came up and bit me on the knee,” said Betsy. “Do you have any you can show me?”
Alice smiled. “Yes, I have some. You just wait, I'll go get some samples of my work. I'd invite you into the living room, but the light's better here.”
Alice was gone several minutes. Betsy took advantage of her absence to look into the living room. It was nearly as small as the kitchen, and as worn, and as clean. Faded chintz curtains hung at the two windows, and a big rag rug made a shades-of-green circle on the hardwood floor. An old television set stood on a metal frame in one corner, with an upholstered chair close to it. No cable box in sight. The chair and a loveseat were both covered with afghans, doubtless made by Alice, in shades of green. On the wall were framed photographs, of Alice with a strong-looking man in a clerical collar, the man alone in front of a stone church, Alice very young in a wedding dress, and a single, sad photo of a very frail looking little girl.
Betsy saw another door off the living room start to open and scooted back to the kitchen table.
Alice came into the kitchen with a big round cushion supporting a little stack of magazines and a loose-leaf binder.
When she put the cushion on the table, the magazines and binder slid off, revealing that it wasn't quite a cushion after all, more like a flat-bottomed doughnut. It was covered in a tan fabric that looked like twill. The opening in the center held a cylinder covered with the same tightly woven fabric, and around the cylinder was a strip of paper with a pattern of dots and squares drawn in ink. The uppermost part of the pattern was clogged with dozens of straight pins, and woven through the pins was thread, dozens of threads, each stretching from the pins to three-inch wooden pegs shaped something like the bishop in unelaborate chess sets.
“Bobbins!” said Betsy. “That's why it's called bobbin lace!”
“Yes,” said Alice.
“How many bobbins are there in bobbin lace?”
“It varies. This lace pattern calls for sixty-two. I've worked as many as a hundred and forty.”
“Wow. I had no idea.”
Coming out the other side of the cylinder and draped across the cushion was a strip of scalloped lace about an inch and a half wide, perhaps seven inches long.
“How does it work?” asked Betsy.
Alice said, “The idea is to move among the pins according to the pattern. You're only working with a few bobbins at a time.” She picked up four that had been lying side by side. “You would move this one over this, then these two like thisâ” She moved the bobbins deftly, like a three-card monte dealer, then scooped them up and pulled the threads attached to them to the left. She reached to the back of the pattern covered with pins, plucking one and putting it at the front, pushing the newest twist of threads into position behind it.
“Then you do thisâ” She stopped and bent forward, peering at the pins. “No, that's wrong, I think. In fact, I think I did the last twoâNo, that one isâAch, never mind!” She dropped the bobbins and pushed the cushion aside with an angry gesture, and a little wooden clatter. That immediately calmed her, and she ran her fingers across the bobbins again. “I miss that sound. When a lace maker is going fast, the bobbins chatter to her in a kind of rhythm. I used to recite nursery rhymes to the rhythm when my little Fifi was restless.” She sat down heavily.
“Who was Fifi?”
Alice put a big hand in front of her mouth, as if afraid to let the words out. “Our little girl,” she murmured through her fingers. “Phyllis Marie was her name, but I called her Fifi. She was born with a hole inside her heart. They called them blue babies back then, before they invented the surgery that could fix the hole. Because their little fingers and toes and lips were blue from lack of oxygen. She was a fighter, our Fifi. They said she wouldn't live past her first birthday, but she was four years, three months, and sixty-one days old when she died. She was our only child. I remember when they invented that surgery, it was just amazing. They had it on the
Today Show
, an actual operation. They showed the open chest, and how the doctor stopped the heart, cut it open, did a few quick stitches, then sewed the heart back up. It was fascinating, he held the stopped heart in his hand, and when he was done operating, he squeezed ever so gently, and it started beating again. That baby, they said, had been dead for the time it took them to operate, but now she was alive again, and would grow up like a normal child. It was like a miracle, that surgeryâand I was
so angry!
Because they didn't dare to do that back when my Fifi was still alive, and she died. No one knew then you could stop a living heart and then start it again. It was a sin how angry I got, I think I actually hated those mothers who got their babies back healthy, and all I got was a little tombstone with a lamb on it.”
Betsy could not think what to say. She was embarrassed at the naked emotions on display, and ashamed that she thought Fifi a silly name. She wanted to be big herself, and emotionally kinder, so she could gather the woman into strong arms and let her weep on a capacious bosom. She reached out and put a hand on Alice's shoulder. “I am so very sorry,” she said.
“Thank you,” said Alice, sniffing hard. “And I'm sorry, too, for letting go like that. I think this mess we're in is bringing up all kinds of old emotions. How about another cup ofâoh, that's right, you don't drink coffee.”
“Well, I do, once in a great while, but not after noon, because it keeps me up all night.”
Alice smiled as one who often sits up at night and said, “Now, what else did you want to ask?”
“You said you'd show me some examples of your work.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Alice opened the loose-leaf binder, which was about a third full of blank paper. “Mine isn't as fine as some.” Between the leaves were samples of lace. The first piece was as delicate as a daisy chain of snowflakes. It lay almost weightless across Betsy's fingers, about seven inches of lace perhaps half an inch wide, the pattern an abstract suggestion of a blossom, repeated over and over.
Betsy smiled at it; that mere human fingers could create something so delicate and perfect was amazing.
Before she could say anything, another piece was added to the first. This one was shorter and narrower, with a curve. It was also stiffer, the pattern more dense without being less delicate, done in ecru threads, with just a few threads of palest pink and a single thread of pure green.
“How can you say your work is not fine? This is lovely.” Betsy wished she could put it more strongly; the work was exquisite, delicate, like photographs of snowflakes.
Another piece was offered, this one much broader. It had lots of open spaces connected with braids or twists of thread. “This is what I think of when I think of lace,” said Betsy. She experimentally crunched it up a little, seeing it gathered along the edge of a collar or running as a frill down the front of a dress. A shame such things were not fashionable anymore.
“I suppose there are all kinds of lace and ways to tell one kind from another,” said Betsy.
Alice began to speak of binche and torchon, of picots and ground. Betsy nodded gamely, but without real comprehension.
When Alice ran down, Betsy handed the lace back, saying, “Why don't you make this anymore? How can you just give it up?”
“I can't see as well as I used to,” said Alice. “It was hard, stopping. But I can't do the pricking of the patterns like I used to, and so I keep making mistakes. Even making lace from old patterns already pricked, I have to do it very slowly and carefully, and pretty soon I have a headache. When there's only pain and no joy in making lace, it's time to quit. So I do afghans. One day there won't be anyone without an afghan or a pair of mittens in the whole county, and I'll stop making them, too.”
“So long as people keep having children, you'll never run out of little hands needing mittens. And, of course, there are adults like me, who move to the frozen north and can't learn how to knit mittens.”
Alice, who had been putting the lace samples back into the binder, glanced over at Betsy. “Are you hinting for a pair?”
Betsy laughed. “Actually, I bought a pair at the Mall of America, went out to my car and started driving out of the rampâand went right back and bought a pair of leather gloves for drivingâmittens are so slippery on the steering wheel! But perhaps at the next Monday Bunch meeting you could show me what I'm doing wrong trying to knit my own. I just can't get that thumb to work.”
“I don't think I'll be coming to any more meetings.”
“Why not? Martha will be thereâ” Actually Betsy had no idea if Martha would be there; she had some kind of notion that people arrested for murder didn't get out on bail. “At least, I think she will. I don't understand why you think you shouldn't come.”
“I can't face those people anymore. When they hear that Martha has been arrested because of something I did, figuring out that lace pattern, they will likely think badly about me. This is a
filthy
thing that's happened to us! I wish those people had never taken it into their heads to raise that boat!”
“No, no,” said Betsy. “You can't wish a murderer to get away with his crime.”
“Hmph,” snorted Alice. “I imagine wherever he is, Carl Winters has more serious trouble than mere human justice.”
“You are one of those who thinks Carl did it?”
“We all thought he eloped with Trudie, which almost stretched my imagination to the breaking point when I heard about it. So it's not any harder to think he murdered the creature. He was a man like most men, with his off-color jokes and flirting.” She pulled herself up short, closed her eyes as if in prayer, and said, “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I'm so upset.” She took a deep breath and a drink of coffee, and said, “You know, I'd have bet the church he was true to his wife, because under it all he really seemed to love her. She nearly died having their boy, got an infection that took away her ability to have any more children, and Carl was there for her the whole time she was sick, practically slept at the hospital for weeks. So when he disappeared and Trudie Koch did, too, I thought maybe it was a coincidence. Gossip had it they'd been seen together, laughing and flirting, but gossip is wrong at least as often as it's right. Besides, Carl was like thatâand Trudie was notorious. No reputation at all.”
“But now you think he murdered her?”
“What other explanation is there for his running away? And, I think the police are wrong, I think he came back and committed suicide.”
“What else can you tell me about Carl? As a person, I mean.”
Alice frowned. “Well, he was a member of our church, but one of those who mainly occupies a pew on Sundaysârefused to serve as usher or on the board of trustees or sing in the choir, even though his wife played the organ. A hard worker at his store, very friendly with everyone who came in, good at remembering names. Took his boy to ball games and fishing, taught him to swim and shoot skeet. But some men didn't like the way he talked to their wives, and neither did some of the wives.” Alice frowned some more, but that was all she had to say.
“What can you tell me about Trudie?” asked Betsy. “Did you go to school with her?”
There was a moment of silence, then Alice said, “All the talk going on right now about those old times, someone is bound to say something and stir this old mess up, sure as I'm sitting here. Maybe no one knows, but in a small town, people pay more attention than they ought to their neighbors, and I don't want you to hear it from someone else. I think it's time to set the record right, so I'll tell you something I haven't told a mortal soul before. I used to cry myself to sleep for shame about it.”