Hanging by a Thread

by Ferris, Monica

  “Oh, yes, lots of sirens.”

  “So why didn’t he come running to see what was going on?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he was hard of hearing. Oh, wait a minute. It was pouring rain that evening, with lots of thunder and lightning. It’s possible the racket covered up what was going on. I remember that night, it had snowed once, so seemed weird to be having a thunderstorm instead of a blizzard. I remember that because I was worried about standing outside in the storm—but also because that storm gave Paul his alibi.”

  “It did? How?”

  “Well, if he’d gone from the gift shop to the bookstore and back, he’d’ve gotten soaked, even though it’s only two doors down. But he was bone dry, hair, clothes, and shoes. He’d brought a raincoat with him to work, because the forecast was for thunderstorms, but it was dry, too. He was looking good for that murder, so they really searched for wet clothes he might have changed out of, for a hair dryer, plastic garbage bags with head and arm holes, any evidence he’d been out in that rain, and didn’t find a thing. And no one saw him outside the gift shop. Despite the rain, there were people on the street, and some of them knew Paul by sight.”

  “So if it wasn’t Paul, and it wasn’t a robber ...” said Betsy.

  “Yes. And Foster was seen on Water Street right about the time it happened.”

  They stitched in silence for a while, then Betsy said, “Did you get called to the scene again when Paul was murdered?”

  “No. He and Angela lived in Navarre. The police force out there called in Malloy, of course, when they identified Paul, because of Angela; so some of what happened got back to us. I heard there was clear evidence of a fight, a broken mirror, overturned furniture, blood spatters. Paul was shot twice, once in the leg and again in the head. The same gun was used in both murders, and it was never found.” Jill put her stitching down to frown in thought for a few moments.

  “What?” asked Betsy.

  “What I think is, it’s a shame that no one saw Foster in Navarre the night Paul was killed, the way people here saw him on Water Street.”

  “Maybe they didn’t see him because he wasn’t there. Foster told me he was in his office, waiting for a meeting with Paul that never happened.”

  Jill said, “I don’t think I ever heard that.”

  “Foster says Paul called him and said he had evidence that would clear both of them of Angela’s murder. Paul said he had proof of who really murdered his wife.”

  “Who did he say it was?”

  “He told Foster he had to see the proof to believe it, that it was someone no one thought it could be.”

  Jill asked, “And you believe that story?”

  “I don’t know what to believe. Foster said Angela told him that Paul was a very strange person. It’s a weird alibi Foster has, too. But Foster says the police found evidence he was in his office after the cleaning lady left. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that Foster would agree to meet the man he cuckolded, a man he described as a crazy wife-beater.”

  “Did he tell anyone he was meeting Paul?”

  “That’s a good question, I’ll ask him that next time I see him. Jill, did you ever hear or see anything that would make you think Paul was insane?”

  “That’s a funny question.”

  “I know. But Foster said Angela was afraid of what he might do if she left him, that Paul was dangerous. He said Paul was always grinning, even when he was sad or angry.”

  Jill stopped stitching to close her eyes and think. “I remember that smile,” she said at last. “But I didn’t think it was crazy, I just thought he was a happy person. It wasn’t one of those grins that don’t reach the eyes, like you see sometimes. Paul’s eyes squinched up, too.” She considered a bit more. “He seemed like a happy, friendly person to me.”

  “That’s two very different pictures. How well did you know him?”

  “Not all that well.”

  “Who was Paul’s best friend?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who does know?”

  Jill smiled faintly. “Well, I’m sure the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension looked into his past pretty thoroughly, but I don’t know how you could access their records.”

  “Do you have a connection in the BCA who might look for me?”

  “Nope. Now you see, if you were a real police investigator, you could just call the BCA and ask to take a look at their files on the case.”

  “If I were really a police investigator, then Crewel World would be owned by someone who wouldn’t let you return unused needlepoint wool.”

  Jill said with every appearance of deadpan sincerity, “There’s a downside to everything, I guess.”

  The next day, Betsy phoned Alice Skoglund. “Hello, Betsy,” she said in her deep voice. “What may I do for you?”

  “I want to ask you a question about Paul Schmitt.”

  A bit warily she asked, “What about Mr. Schmitt?”

  “He was a long-time member of your church, wasn’t he?”

  “Well ... yes, why?”

  “I was wondering if you knew someone who was a good friend of his.”

  Alice didn’t reply at once. Then she said, “I don’t think I know of any.”

  “Think hard, Alice. This is important.”

  Alice had the curious trait of falling into what seemed like a noisy, deep-breathing coma when thinking, and suddenly the sounds of that were carried through the receiver at Betsy’s ear. After a minute it stopped, and Alice said, “Well, he used to go hunting with Vern Miller and his sons, Jory and Alex. Paul and Jory are about the same age, and they were in the same Sunday-school class for several years. Paul and Alex were friends until Paul married Angela, but as far as I know, Vern and Jory stayed friends with Paul right up until Paul’s death. Jory works for his father in that garage he runs over on Third. They’ll probably be able to tell you who was Paul’s best friend—if he had one.”

  Betsy had been to that garage, a scabrous place converted from a livery stable. It didn’t sell gasoline, just did repairs on older vehicles, the kind without computer chips or built-in VCRs. Though she had heard he was very talented, Betsy would not allow Vern, who was built on the approximate lines of a shell for a large naval gun, and was about as intelligent, to touch her old Mercury Tracer. And of course her new Buick was outside his expertise.

  So he watched her walk into his little office with a frown of puzzlement.

  “Help you?” he offered in his deep, gruff voice. He was an old man, his face deeply creased, his white hair both overgrown and thinning. But his sloping shoulders were heavy, and his filthy overalls and black fingernails indicated he was still a working man.

  “Is Jory here?” she asked. “I’d like to talk to both of you for a few minutes, if you can spare them, about Paul Schmitt.”

  Without rising he threw his head back and roared, “Jory!” His office was built into a comer of the workshop with old boards and chicken wire, he could have called his son with far less effort than that.

  “What?!?” came the reply, equally loud, equally needlessly.

  “C’mere!” He sat back in his ancient, battered chair behind a dirty, cluttered desk and smiled at her. “He’ll be right in.”

  A minute later a man in his mid-thirties came in. He was slimmer than Vern, but not by much, and not much taller. Though he resembled his father, there was an Asian cast to his features, and Betsy suddenly recalled that Vern had brought a bride home from the Korean War. “What’s up?” he asked, glancing at Betsy suspiciously.

  “I dunno. This lady wants to ask me and you some questions.” He asked Betsy, “Are you doing another investigation?”

  Jory said, “Oh, she’s that lady!” He looked at her curiously, apparently having been told the story of the time Betsy had suspected Vern of murdering a vanished high-school sweetheart.

  Vern said, “Yeah. I bet she’s out to prove once and for all it was suicide, Paul killed his wife then hisself.”

 
Jory retorted, “Or maybe she can prove it was Foster Johns murdered both of ’em.” He smiled and leaned against the doorframe of the tiny office. “Sure, I’ll answer any questions you have.”

  “Thank you. I understand you and your brother Alex were good friends with Paul.”

  “Sure. And with Foster Johns, too, back then. We all kind of hung out together.”

  “I never liked Paul Schmitt,” growled Vern.

  “Ah, you did too! You used to take us hunting and fishing.”

  “Maybe I did. But Paul was a strange kid, mean as a snake even with all his jokes.”

  Jory chuckled. “Remember that time he got hold of a little propane torch and would heat up a quarter and drop it on the sidewalk? Ow, ow, ow!” Jory laughed and shook his fingers as if they were burned.

  Despite himself, Vern grinned, then drew up his sloping shoulders. “Yeah, but that time he scalded our cat, that wasn’t funny.”

  Jory frowned. “That was an accident, he told you that, I told you that.”

  “I didn’t think so. Neither did Alex.”

  “Aw, Alex! Who cares what he thinks?”

  Vern shrugged. “Not me.”

  Betsy asked Jory, “How long have you known Paul Schmitt?”

  “Since high school. He was a great guy, the funniest person I ever knew. He liked every kind of joke, and liked to play jokes on people.”

  “What can you tell me about his wife Angela?”

  “I can tell you he murdered her,” Vern cut in.

  “You don’t know that!” Jory said sharply. To Betsy he added, “He was nuts about her, totally nuts. He bought two cell phones and he was callin’ her up all the time, asking her what she was doin’. An’ he was always buying her things, a new dress, jewelry, flowers, fancy nightgowns. Then he’d call her three or four times to ask how she liked ’em, just so he could hear her thank him one more time. He’d say, ‘Gotta keep ’em happy.’ ” Jory’s smile faded. “He was real upset when she got shot. He looked so bad that when he was killed, the first thing I thought was that he killed himself. I said, ‘I bet he killed himself,’ didn’t I?” He looked at his father.

  Vern nodded, rugged face pulled into a heavy frown. “He took it hard, all right, but I don’t agree that somebody else killing his wife would make him kill his own self. He wasn’t the type. He was the type to kill her, and then kill hisself.”

  Jory shook his head, “It was proved he was beat up and shot by someone else.”

  Vern waved a thick, dirty hand dismissivly. “Yeah, but who proved it? Mike Malloy, who couldn’t prove corn flakes taste better with milk. Nah, I say he killed hisself and Malloy bungled it somehow. Maybe the gun fell behind the couch and Malloy couldn’t find it, or it’s even possible he had it and mislaid it, so he just said it was murder.”

  Betsy said, “Malloy isn’t as stupid as all that—”

  “Sure he is,” said Vern. “Dumber than a box of rocks.”

  Jory said, “So what? It couldn’t’ve been Paul, it had to be someone else; the same gun killed both of them. Paul wouldn’t murder Angela, he was crazy about her.”

  Vern shifted his weight in his chair, settling in for an argument. “Same gun, sure—but it could’ve been Paul’s gun. He had one, you know that.”

  “Then where is it?”

  “I told you, Malloy lost it. And crazy is the right word. You said it yourself, he called her every five minutes when she wasn’t at home, checking up on her. He liked her to stay at home, and he worked at home so he could be right there with her. He hated it when she took that job at the bookstore, so he took a job right down the street. They didn’t need the money she brought in; I think she wanted out of the house because he was smothering her. Ten, eleven years they was married, and was like they’d gotten married last week. It wasn’t love, it was more like he was obsessed. And he was getting worse, not better. He was always thinking she was having an affair, which it turned out she was, though where she found the time I don’t know. But I don’t blame her. So okay, he found out, and he shot her. I thought from the start he done it.”

  By the unheated tones of the argument, Betsy was sure this was an old, often-rehashed one.

  Jory said, “Nope, you’re wrong. Once Foster Johns admitted he and Angela were messing around, I knew it was Foster who killed her. Why the hell our police couldn’t prove something as open and shut as that, I don’t know.”

  Vern shook his head. “If Foster was in love with Angela, why in hell would he kill her?”

  “Lover’s quarrel. Or because she wanted to break it off. One or the other, plain as the nose on your face.”

  “The only thing plain—” began Vern.

  Betsy intervened. “All right, all right. I understand you two don’t agree. But suppose it wasn’t suicide, and it wasn’t Foster who killed Paul, either. Do you have any idea who else might have wanted him dead?”

  “Don’t you say it!” Vern said suddenly to his son, who had opened his mouth.

  Jory obediently didn’t say it. Instead he said, faux innocently, “What were you thinking I’d say, Dad?”

  “You know what I’m talking about, and I won’t have it said in my presence, I don’t care if you are my son.” His glare intensified. “Blood’s thicker than water, no matter what he’s done.”

  “Are you talking about Alex?” she asked.

  “I never said a word, and I won’t,” said Jory, his expression truculent. “Anyhow, it was Foster. I knew all along it was Foster.”

  “Please don’t say things like that when I’m in the same room with you,” said Vern. “One of these days you’ll say that and the roof will fall in on you, an’ it might take me along, too. You told me yourself right after Angela’s murder that you thought Paul did it, and you even predicted Paul would either be arrested or kill hisself in the next couple days. You said it happens all the time, men killing their women, then themselves.”

  “I did not ”

  “Dammit, yes, you did!”

  “Well, all right, maybe I did, but just at first. Then we found out what really happened, only the cops couldn’t prove it, and we end up living in a town where a murderer walks the streets!” Jory threw a disgusted look at his father, a half-shamed look at Betsy; and walked out.

  5

  The Monday Bunch was again in session. The weather had warmed enough to rain, but gale-force winds made it rattle against the front window of Crewel World like hail. “Raincoats and umbrellas for the trick-or-treaters this year,” noted Martha.

  “If they go out trick-or-treating at all,” said Bershada. “My grandkids haven’t since they were toddlers, and then it was just going around inside the apartment building they lived in.”

  It was Halloween. In honor of the holiday, Betsy had made a five-gallon urn of hot spiced cider for her customers, and all five members present had a steaming cup in front of them. Despite the holiday— or perhaps because of it—every one of them was working on a Christmas project. But the talk was of Halloweens past, when children in homemade costumes went door-to-door soliciting candy. “I remember one year when my brother, who always dressed as a tramp, came home with a pillowcase nearly full of candy,” said Comfort. “Mother made him take most of it to the children’s hospital in St. Paul, and he still had enough left to give himself three or four stomachaches.” She was knitting a child’s sweater dappled with snowmen, a gift for a great-grandchild.

  “My father used to say that when he was a boy, they pulled awful pranks, soaping windows and tipping over outhouses,” said Martha, who was working on Holiday House, a complex work in two pieces. One, lying finished on the table, was the front of a two-story house done in Hardanger and other fancy white-on-white stitches. The second had an elaborately-decorated Christmas tree down low and a lit candle up high; when the first piece was laid over it, the tree appeared in the living room window and the candle in an upstairs bedroom. She was working on the tree, using silks, metallics, and tiny beads. “Once, they dismantled a neighb
or’s Model A and reassembled it in the hayloft of his barn.”

  Alice said, “My brothers never thought up anything more imaginative than stealing the mayor’s front gate.”

  Godwin, fashionable in a blue-and-maroon argyle sweater that set off his golden hair beautifully, said, “I always loved dressing up on Halloween.” He was knitting a red-and-green scarf without looking, his fingers moving swiftly and economically. A tiny smile formed. “Never as a tramp, however.”

  Emily, her dark eyes focused on the Cold Hands, Warm Heart sampler she was cross-stitching, said, “Oh, I wish there were fancy dress balls nowadays, the really elaborate kind, where people come as Harlequin and Marie Antoinette and go dancing in a gigantic ballroom all lit with candles.” She paused to complete a stitch. “But I’ve never even heard of someone holding one, much less been invited.”

  “You just don’t move in the right circles, my dear,” said Godwin. The ladies laughed. Godwin loved to hint at scandalous gay parties, but they were almost sure he’d never been to one in his life.

  As on last Monday, Betsy yearned to sit down with them, but today she was stuck at her desk designing a new seasonal display. As soon as the store closed this evening, the cross-stitched black cats and jack-o’-lanterns would be cleared away to make room for a framed counted cross-stitch cornucopia, and a stand-up pillow shaped like a turkey. But there would be only a very few other acknowledgments of Thanksgiving-not with the retailers’ most important holiday on the horizon: Christmas.

  Her window and the major components of her seasonal display were due to go up tonight. Already she was behind other retailers, whose Christmas lights had begun to twinkle right after school started.

  She glanced at the soft fabric sack under the table, three steps but many hours away. It held her Christmas stocking and a Ziploc bag of floss. If she was to get it to her finisher, she would have to work on it every night after the shop closed—and starting this weekend, the shop would be open all day Saturday and Sunday. That meant she couldn’t go to Orchestra Hall Saturday night. She took a sip of hot spiced cider and sighed. She enjoyed stitching, and she enjoyed owning a needlework shop, but there never seemed to be enough time left over for anything else.