A Murderous Yarn

by Monica Ferris

  “He was in charge of Saturday’s run,” Betsy said. She explained about the ongoing quarrel between him and Bill, concluding, “I don’t know how powerful a motive that is, but I do know Charlotte and I waited quite a long time for Adam to show up in St. Paul.”

  “Who could you ask, do you know?”

  “Not offhand, not anyone who wouldn’t go right to Adam and tell him I’m asking questions. He’s president of the Antique Car Club, and from the little I’ve seen, he seems to be very popular.” Betsy had gone to exactly one meeting of the Antique Car Club with Lars, just to see if it was something she wanted to get more deeply involved with. It had been interesting—but also obvious that this was one of those organizations that ate up all a member’s spare time, and Betsy didn’t feel she wanted to spend what little spare time she had on this organization. After all, she was not going to buy an antique car of her own. She told Lars on the way home that she would volunteer for this year’s run, because Lars was a part of it and she was Lars’s sponsor, but after that, he was on his own.

  “Are you afraid that if he did it and thinks you’re closing in on him, he might come after you?”

  “Oh, nothing like that,” Betsy said. “I don’t want to get people all stirred up about my thinking it might be Adam, when I really think he’s only a possibility. Being suspected of murder can ruin someone, even if it turns out he didn’t do it. If I knew more about antique car owners or the Antique Car Club, I might form a real opinion. Why do people collect them and how fanatical do they get about them? Adam would have to be totally invested in getting that Fuller to consider murdering Bill.”

  Jill said, “They’re probably like every other set of hobbyists. Some are casual, some are intent, some are fanatical. You talked with Adam, which kind is he?”

  Betsy remembered Ceil’s jeer at Adam’s remark that he might be willing to find a buyer for Joe Mickels’s McIntyre. “As if you’d let anyone else get their hands on it!” she’d said, or words to that effect.

  But Betsy was unwilling to say anything out loud, even to Jill.

  Godwin was in Shelly’s kitchen, doing the dishes, when the phone rang. “I’ll get it!” he caroled, wiping his hands on his apron. He lifted the receiver on the wall near the back door. “Hello?”

  “Goddy?” said a man’s voice in a near-whisper.

  “Who is this?” said Godwin, though he knew.

  “Don’t be stupid, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Why, hello, John,” drawled Godwin in as dry a voice as he could manage, though his heart was already singing.

  “I’m concerned that I haven’t heard from you.”

  “Well, you made it pretty clear—twice—that you didn’t want anything to do with me ever again.”

  “I was angry. You made me very angry. Sometimes, Goddy, when you act like you don’t care about me, I just can’t stand it.”

  “You suspected I didn’t care about you, so you stopped caring about me.”

  “I have never stopped caring about you. Ever. Even when I’m angry—even in a jealous rage. Goddy, sometimes you exasperate me beyond endurance. You know you do. You know you’re doing it when it happens.”

  “I wasn’t doing anything you could get mad about.”

  “Goddy, I saw you talking to—”

  Godwin hung up at that point with a satisfied little smile.

  11

  Wednesday morning Betsy’s alarm went off at 5:15. Sophie, who had been rescued from the street many years ago, retained a fear of abandonment. She became very much underfoot and vocal at this change in routine. Betsy reassured her, “Come on, I’ve been doing this for a week,” though it had been only three days a week, not enough to have sunk into Sophie’s unsophisticated brain.

  Betsy put on an old swimsuit, over which she put a good linen-blend dress in a shade of pale rose and matching sandals, her going-to-work outfit. She packed underwear, shampoo, soap, and a towel in a light zippered bag and, ignoring Sophie’s anxious inquiries about breakfast, went down to the back door and out. She was going exercising.

  Betsy had been meaning to take up horseback riding or maybe power walking, but with running her shop, trying to learn enough about roof repair to choose a roofer for her building, dealing with her tenants, volunteering with the Antique Car Run, and keeping up with household chores, she just hadn’t managed to add an exercise program.

  She did manage a couple of hours for a physical a few weeks ago, and her doctor said she would have more energy if she would stop writing IOUs to her body and find some kind of exercise she would actually do. So Betsy investigated and found an early-bird water aerobics program that met three mornings a week. Betsy chose it partly because of all forms of exercise this was the least distasteful, but mostly because she didn’t have to carve a couple of hours out of her working day, an impossible task. This flock of early birds met at 6:30 A.M. for an hour. Betsy would be back in her apartment by 8:30, showered, dressed, and on time for her pre-exercise routine: her and Sophie’s breakfast, e-mail, a bit of bookkeeping or bill paying, and down in the shop by 10:00.

  But first she had to get there. Oddly enough, at 5:45 in the morning, the rush hour into the Cities was swift enough to deserve the name. Betsy drove toward Minneapolis, but only as far as Golden Valley. She exited onto Highway 100, then took Golden Valley Drive to The Courage Center, a brick building in its own small valley, parked in the nearly empty lot, and went in. All three women behind the big reception counter were in wheelchairs. The Courage Center’s primary aim was to restore injured bodies to health and bring handicapped bodies to their full potential—hence its name, and the status of its employees—but it also offered pool exercise to all comers.

  In the women’s locker room four other women greeted Betsy with that muted cheer found before 6:30 A.M. All were at least middle-aged. More women came in until they were eight and they all, after perfunctory showers, trailed down a short hallway to a large room nearly full of an enormous swimming pool. Between pillars on the far wall large panes of glass were hung, with stained glass sections making a thinly traced and almost abstract map showing a confluence of rivers.

  The water was warm. The pool, instead of sloping from shallow to deep, had four large flat areas, each a foot or so deeper than the one before. The shallowest area was three and a half feet deep, and Betsy went there with three of the other women to start walking back and forth. Two men joined them. Disco music began to play. A cheerful and energetic young woman in a professional swimsuit came to stand in the water and direct the movements.

  “Good morning, Jodie,” said several of the more-awake women. This did not include Betsy, who could not even remember Jodie’s name, though it had been Jodie who had interviewed Betsy just last week while signing up for this program.

  “Let’s keep walking, knees high,” called Jodie, standing waist deep in the pool. She was taller than Betsy, on whom the water came nearly to her armpits.

  After a few minutes of this, Betsy’s brain sputtered to life. “Hi, Florence, hi, Ruth, hi, Barbara,” she said, pushing her way through the water past them, knees high and glutes tight. She had a lot of catching up to do.

  A few minutes later, they were sidestepping, bending sideways, and reaching with the lead arm, when Florence, at eighty the most senior person present, said as Betsy flowed past her, “Look, Betsy, we have a new person here today.” Florence nodded toward one of the deeper areas, and Betsy looked over. And stopped dead in the water.

  “Why, I know her, that’s Charlotte Birmingham!”

  “No, not Charlotte,” said Florence impatiently. “She’s been coming for a long time. I mean the man.”

  “But I don’t remember seeing Charlotte here before,” said Betsy.

  “She sometimes stops coming for a week or so. She travels, I think.”

  “Oh.” Of course. Charlotte had been getting ready for last week’s run. Betsy thought about going deeper to say hello, then decided against it. She was getting into this sidestep
ping business, feeling the push of water against her legs and reeeeaching, feeling the good stretch. In a while everyone would climb aboard a Styrofoam “noodle” and go paddling out into the deepest water. She’d say hello then.

  “Jumping jacks with elbow kisses, side to side!” called Jodie, and everyone continued moving sideways but now in jumping jack motions, bringing elbows together in front and out again. There was no way Betsy could have done this for this long on dry land, but with the lift and support of the water, it was fun and not too difficult.

  She looked again at the man, who was out beyond Charlotte, in the second-deepest area. He was taller than Charlotte, but not by a lot. He was trim and muscular, though he wasn’t young. His hair, a light brown, showed no trace of gray—Grecian Formula, concluded Betsy. He had a pleasant face, presently lit with laughter as he struggled with the unfamiliar movement. Charlotte, facing him and moving well, said something to him and his head went back as his laughter intensified.

  “Find a place to cross-country ski!” called Jodie, and the swimmers settled into stationary places where they could swing their arms and move their legs without bumping or splashing one another. The man looked around to see how it was done, and set a rapid pace, churning the water with arm movements, grinning. Charlotte turned to face him, her expression a mirror of his.

  Betsy was surprised, then surprised at her surprise. The man was enjoying himself, why shouldn’t Charlotte? Then she realized Charlotte’s face held the same warm, open look of amused affection she’d had last Saturday. Only then it had been directed at her husband.

  “So she was having a good time,” said Godwin when Betsy told him about it. “I’ve heard it’s possible for people to enjoy doing more than one thing. Who is he, anyone we know?”

  Betsy was going through her half-price-floss basket, pulling out items that were starting to look shopworn. She’d use them to make up more kits. “I don’t think so. I wonder if he’s another antique car buff. I talked to Charlotte in the locker room, but only briefly because we both had to get going. She said the man’s name is Marvin Pierce, a business associate of Bill’s who became friends with both of them, and now he’s rallied round the whole family, running errands and being a general help.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “I’m probably making something out of nothing, but she seemed so . . . cheerful with him. She wasn’t acting like a new widow and he wasn’t acting like a comfort to the bereaved. It was startling to see her laughing and having a good time.”

  “Well, you can’t cry twenty-four hours a day, can you? And she told you this guy’s been really helping out. So she laughed for an hour because he made her forget.” A thought struck. “You say she didn’t introduce you in the pool. You think that was on purpose?”

  “No. I went over to Charlotte and we exchanged hellos, and she said I was going to love this program, she’s been doing it for years. Then Barbara noodled over to ask me where my shop was, and when I finished telling her and looked around, Charlotte was over talking with Ruth and Leah.” Betsy frowned, trying to be sure there’d been nothing suspicious about her not getting introduced to Marvin. She would have introduced herself, but Marvin had gone to share a joke with Joe and she hadn’t wanted to intrude.

  “You can’t be thinking she did it,” said Godwin.

  “No, of course not, I know that’s impossible. But I’m thinking how she told me that she’d been going to a counselor and things had been improving between her and her husband. But she said he wouldn’t go with her, and I’ve heard that both have to go before you can turn a marriage around. So suppose things weren’t actually improving? And suppose she turned to an old friend for advice and comfort?”

  “You mean this Marvin fellow.”

  “Yes. And suppose that old friend and she decided the best form of help involved killing Bill? Maybe it was a plot the two of them cooked up, because then, you see, she would have a very good reason to get close to someone on that Saturday, and stick with that someone, who could give her an unbreakable alibi.”

  “Does this Marvin fellow drive an antique car?”

  “I don’t know. But he didn’t need to, really. All he had to do was sabotage the Maxwell’s engine and watch for Bill to pull over.”

  Godwin said admiringly, “How your mind works! That’s a wickedly clever plot—too bad for whoever did it that you’re even cleverer! But how can you prove it? I mean you can’t find out if the Maxwell was sabotaged, because it’s all burned up. And who did it?”

  “I don’t know, but he took an awful chance, burning the Maxwell. The police are very clever nowadays proving arson. Or is it the fire department that investigates suspicious fires? Whichever, they thought the fire was suspicious from the start.”

  “Not so clever, then.”

  “And you know, I may be wrong about all this. It’s just one of several possibilities.” Betsy remembered again that look of affection Charlotte had given her husband, the gentle caress she gave as she left him to his frantic car repairing on Saturday. It had seemed spontaneous, authentic. She said, “I haven’t had a chance to look into Adam Smith’s drive from Excelsior to St. Paul, for example.” She checked her watch. “Time to open up,” she said.

  Godwin went to turn the needlepoint sign so OPEN faced outward, and realized someone was waiting for the door to be unlocked.

  It was Irene. “Hello, hello, hello!” she caroled, striding into the shop with a broad, happy smile. Betsy and Godwin exchanged a surprised glance. Neither had ever seen her wholly joyous like this, without a hint of anxiety or arrogance. “Have you got a shopping basket?” she asked.

  Godwin grasped the situation faster than Betsy. “Big or small?” he asked, reaching for a two-gallon size currently holding yarn and nodding at the pint-size one Betsy was taking floss out of.

  “Oh, the big one,” said Irene, and Godwin happily spilled its yarn onto the library table, then handed it to her.

  Godwin said to Betsy, “Some people go to Disney World, Irene comes here.”

  Irene chortled in agreement and began to fill the basket. Never in her life had she been able to buy as much as she wanted of ribbon, floss, wool yarn, silk yarn, alpaca yarn, and fabric, in every desirable color, all at one time, with no thought of the cost. Irene filled the basket three times. Betsy, eyeing the heap, estimated there was over a thousand dollars’ worth, and Irene had not bought a single painted canvas—the most expensive single item a needleworker can buy.

  “Have you quit your job yet?” teased Godwin, helping Betsy start to write up the order.

  Irene said, “No, but I’m thinking about it. What do you think, Betsy?”

  Betsy said, “I think you shouldn’t, not yet. You’ll lose your benefits when you do, and I know from experience how expensive buying your own medical insurance is. Right now you need to talk to a financial advisor, which all by itself is going to cost you something.”

  “Oh,” said Irene, the light in her eyes dimming just a little.

  “I’m sorry to let more air out of your balloon,” said Betsy, “and much as I would like to encourage you to continue buying one or two of everything in my shop, I think you should be aware that you are going to have to share any money you received with the state and federal government.”

  “Maybe I should put some of this back,” said Irene, now definitely looking alarmed.

  But Godwin said, “Oh, come on, it’s not as bad as all that. How much did you take in last weekend?” asked Godwin.

  She turned to him. “Twenty-seven thousand.”

  Godwin whistled.

  “But I had to give fifteen percent of that to the gallery. On the other hand, I have orders for two more pieces, and Mark—Mr. Duggan—wants me to bring in three more by the end of the month. That’s why I was thinking of quitting, because I can’t think how I can do all that in so short a time. These pieces take a lot of planning, and they’re complicated to stitch. Also, a reporter from the Star Tribune interviewed me an
d they took pictures. After that appears in next week’s Variety section, there’s likely to be even more orders.”

  “Then for heaven’s sake, don’t worry about spending a single thousand here! What are you charging for these orders?”

  “Depends. The most expensive is five thousand. One of the orders is for a small piece, and I’m asking twenty-two hundred for it. It’s only six inches by six inches. Is that too much?”

  “On the contrary. Raise your prices.”

  “But I’m already charging so much—”

  “You can’t fill the orders you’re getting now. Raise your prices until you have only as many orders as you can fill. I bet you could charge twenty or thirty thousand apiece and still have enough work to keep you busy.” He glanced at Betsy. “And buy medical insurance. What you’ll have left over even after you pay those nasty taxes will keep you very comfortably.”

  Involuntarily, Irene’s hand reached out as if to touch Godwin on his hand, but stopped before she made contact. She turned to Betsy. “Could he possibly be right?”

  “He might be. He knows a lot about things like this. Maybe you also need to hire an agent.”

  “Oh my, oh my, oh my,” Irene murmured. The glow had come back. “An agent.”

  Godwin said, in a darker voice, “So long as you’re listening to me, hear this: Art is the strangest thing. What you’re doing may grow and grow, or it may vanish entirely overnight. It’s like, one year the museums can’t get enough big piles of penny candy, the next year it’s Lent.”

  “What I do isn’t silly like those piles of candy!” flared Irene. “What I do is real work!”

  “Oh, I agree,” said Godwin quickly. “It’s a form of Impressionism, which has been around for a long time and is a very respected art form. But the quote real unquote Impressionists use paint on canvas. It may be the critics will decide you’re just as real in this different medium. Or they may decide it’s a weird offshoot, a cute fad, but not really valid.”