Knit Your Own Murder

by Monica Ferris

  She picked up a Sharpie. I am grateful you brought your nimble fingers into my life, she wrote. God bless you. Betsy Devonshire.

  Connor took the pen from her. You are at last in a place where there is nothing to try your patience, he wrote, which Betsy thought was an impertinence, though it made her smile. She noticed he did not sign it.

  They went back to their places. Betsy, unfamiliar with Baptist churches, looked around. Plain off-white walls, no stained glass, no contrasting color anywhere. Up front was a vestigial altar with a bouquet of white lilies and a large black Bible on it. To the right was the upright piano whose notes they’d heard upon coming in. The pianist was a middle-aged woman with dark curling hair and an impressive bosom. She wore a long-sleeved gray knit dress with a black-on-white polka-dot scarf. Now she was playing a gentle version of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” and as Betsy tried to remember the words to it, she rolled it into another hymn Betsy did not recognize.

  At ten thirty on the dot, the pastor, a rotund man with thinning dark hair and a pleasant face, came in from one side and took his place at the lectern on the left. He was wearing a charcoal black suit, white shirt, and dark maroon tie. A square of maroon silk handkerchief was peeking from his suit coat pocket.

  “Good morning,” he said. The piano player noticed his presence, stopped playing, and put her hands into her lap. “Good morning,” he said again.

  “Good morning,” replied the congregation solidly.

  “Welcome to a House of God, to a place of worship and praise. We have come here this morning to thank God that He led Maddy O’Leary to us, to praise God for her life, and to glorify God that she is now living in the perpetual sunlight of His eternal kingdom. Maddy was a faithful member of this church for nine years, a good Christian woman. But I suspect few of us really knew her. She kept herself to herself, and her charities, while many, were mostly anonymous. How many of you knew that our new piano was a gift from her?”

  There was a murmur of surprise.

  “Or that half the cost of our new roof came from her?”

  More murmuring, louder.

  “Maddy O’Leary was a God-fearing, intelligent, hardworking . . .” He paused for effect. “Difficult woman, who loved her fellow man, preferably at a distance.”

  There was surprised, agreeing laughter. “Amen,” called someone.

  “But she loved God and praised Him for sending His only begotten Son to us, to teach us how to live, to die for us, and to open the gates of heaven for us.” He was getting into his preaching voice now, and electricity began to trickle into the room. “Let us praise Him!”

  After a heartfelt invocation, he led them in singing “Face to Face with Christ, My Savior,” a hymn Betsy was not familiar with. Connor, she noticed, seemed to know it. Or maybe, since he was holding an open hymnal, he could read music. He was always surprising her with a display of some skill or other she hadn’t known he had.

  When the pastor called on the congregation to speak about Maddy, only one person rose: Chaz Reynolds. Betsy hadn’t realized he was there. He wore a dark brown suit with a dark brown shirt and black tie, and he went to the lectern with a deeply grave expression on his handsome face.

  Betsy sat up straighter as he took hold with both hands and looked out at the congregation. “I don’t think any of you know me,” he began, “so I’m grateful you gave me this opportunity to speak. I had to come. I’m not even a Baptist, I’m a Lutheran. But I couldn’t stay away!

  “I worked for Maddy O’Leary for seven years. She took me on as a kind of office boy, taught me step-by-step how to collect rents, how to do basic repairs to kitchens and bathrooms, how to interview prospective tenants, how to evict tenants. I learned to keep records, fill out tax forms, make reports, do all the things necessary to keep her business running smoothly. She shouted at me—a lot—and praised me—not to my face, but to others. She raised my pay at least every year, upgraded my benefits, set me up with an investment program, and matched whatever I put into it. She gave me responsibilities and dared me not to live up to them. She made me a better man, faster than I thought possible.” His voice was thickening and slowing. He stopped to swallow. “I loved her, though I never dared to tell her that. So I hope she can hear me tell her now.” He looked upward. “I love you, Miss Maddy, and I miss you every day.”

  He tore himself away and stumbled back to his pew in front. Bershada was there, and she put an arm around his shoulders.

  The pianist played a few bars, and the congregation broke into “Sweet, Sweet Spirit.”

  The pastor preached and offered more prayers, more hymns were sung, then he offered a blessing and said, “Because Ms. O’Leary is going from here to be cremated, and her ashes strewn in an undisclosed place, we ask that all who can please stay here for a luncheon prepared by the Ladies’ Society. There will be a fifteen-minute break, then we will reconvene in the church basement. The stairs are forward and to your right, or if you want a breath of fresh air, there is another entrance around the east side toward the back. I hope to see all of you there.”

  Four people—two obviously from a funeral home—came to wheel the casket out while one more hymn was sung, and Betsy was reduced to tears, as always, by “Amazing Grace.”

  Chaz and his mother left without talking to anyone. Chaz was so obviously in distress that no one remarked harshly on his departure.

  Many of the congregation chose to go outside into the open air, where, Schnurlregen be damned, it had stopped raining and sunlight was trying to break through the clouds. They stood around speaking in amazement of a fellow church member they only thought they knew.

  The pastor joined the group. “You know, I didn’t tell the whole story during the service,” he said. “Ms. O’Leary helped build my discretionary fund to new heights so when members came to me with a financial emergency I would be better able to help them.” He looked around the group. “Without naming any names, there are a number of you who needed your rent money or a mortgage payment made, or a month’s worth of groceries, or a tooth cap replaced, or a plumbing bill paid that I was able to handle, thanks to Maddy.”

  An indignant man said, “Pastor, why in, uh, the heck didn’t you say something about that a year or two ago? It would have been nice to know, y’know? So we could have thanked her while she was alive.”

  “Yes, it would have been nice and done her reputation a lot of good. But Ms. O’Leary gave me strict instructions not to say anything to anyone. I suspect it was because she didn’t want to start a stampede of mendicants in her direction.”

  “Kind of sad she thought so poorly of us,” remarked a woman.

  “Well, now, think about it, Marcy,” said another woman. “Suppose you knew there was a member of our church who was rich and very free and generous with her money. You recently had a big bump of a mortgage payment, didn’t you? It hurt you, making that payment; you asked me to help you pray over it. Would you at least have thought of approaching her? Especially if you knew she had helped others?”

  “No, of course not. Well, okay, maybe.” Marcy laughed. “So all right, I might’ve joined the line with my hand out.”

  Her friend drew up her shoulders and confessed, “Me, too.”

  The group began to join the others going around the side of the little church toward the basement entrance.

  “Is it true you don’t know where her ashes are being strewn?” Betsy asked the pastor.

  “She didn’t want to tell anyone.”

  “Such a secretive woman!” said a man disapprovingly. “There’s no reason for all that secrecy!”

  “Does anyone know?” asked Betsy.

  “I can give you the name of the funeral home,” the pastor said. “I think they might know. But I’m sure they have been instructed not to give out that information.”

  “Thank you, Pastor,” Betsy said. Shy, shy to the very end, she thought.r />
  The luncheon was very like every church dinner Betsy had ever attended. The menu was fried and baked chicken, cole slaw, potato salad, baked beans with strips of bacon on top, dinner rolls, two kinds of Jell-O salad, and sheets of carrot cake studded with chopped nuts and little pieces of carrot and topped with cream cheese icing. Lemonade, milk, and coffee to drink. The meal was served buffet style; middle-aged women with hairnets handed out plates, silverware, and thick, soft paper napkins, and they brought out more food as needed.

  The pastor offered a short blessing as the double line formed at the head of the long tables.

  “Wow,” said Betsy on the way home. “People sure are shocked at how they only thought they knew Maddy. Turns out her death is a serious loss to her church community. I wonder if that’s so in other places.”

  “Didn’t you say Bershada told you how Maddy would give her a check to cash so she could pass the money on anonymously to various charities? I suspect a lot of communities are going to be sad that Maddy is gone without ever knowing who she was.”

  As they drove up Highway 7, and nearly home, Connor asked, “Is there any reason you want to know where her ashes might be scattered?”

  “I’m willing to ask anybody anything. There’s got to be a key question in all this that will point me toward an answer. Who hated Harry strongly enough to physically attack him? Who was willing to play that sneaky, deadly trick on Maddy? Could it possibly be the same person? I don’t really want to know where Maddy’s ashes are going to end up. But I do want to know who she picked to do the scattering.”

  “I should think that information would be in her will,” said Connor.

  “No, wills sometimes are not even read until well after the funeral. They are mostly about the distribution of the decedent’s property. Funeral arrangements generally have to be made before that. A ‘living will’ could have those instructions, I think. Or some kind of similar document.” She frowned. “I should find out, because I need to ask someone to handle my instructions.”

  “What do you want that someone to do?” he asked.

  “At present, you are that someone,” she said. “And I want an Episcopalian church funeral, preceded by a wake at a funeral home. I keep meaning to find out if there’s a space available next to the grave of my sister and her husband here in Excelsior, because if there is, I want to be put there. If not, cremate me and pour my ashes into Minnehaha Creek while a CD plays Bill Staines singing”—and she began to croon—“River, take me along, in your sunshine, sing me a song, ever moving, and winding and free; you rollin’ old river, you changin’ old river, let’s you and me, river, run down to the sea.’ Because the creek runs into the Mississippi, and it runs into the Gulf of Mexico.”

  She sat back with a sigh of contentment, thinking about little pebbles of bone carrying her spirit into the place all life began, the ocean.

  * * *

  Having delved all she could into Maddy’s life, Betsy decided to switch direction and try to find out something about Harry Whiteside. She knew very little about him. She’d read the newspaper accounts, but in her experience, newspapers didn’t always have complete or accurate information. She’d heard the gossip about the three-way struggle to buy the big property on Water Street. But a lot of gossip could be described as exaggerated and unsympathetic speculation, and in any case, it made two-dimensional caricatures of its subjects. The word triangulate appeared at the front of her mind. She needed another source, so maybe she could triangulate and from three flawed angles find information she could trust. So where else to look?

  She turned to Whiteside’s obituary in the Star Tribune. That at least would be a compassionate summary of his life.

  There, as elsewhere, she learned that he was sixty-seven, the father of three children, all boys, all grown and married, with children of their own—and that he had two ex-wives. The children were all by his first wife. He had an MBA from the College (now University) of St. Thomas. He was the founder and CEO of Whiteside Design, Incorporated, the fourth-largest designer and builder of commercial property in the state.

  He was to be interred in Lakeview Cemetery—where the elite were buried—on a date yet to be announced. Memorials were to be sent to the University of Minnesota.

  The tone of the obituary was staid and respectful, without flowery or sorrowful prose. She wondered who had written it.

  Now she felt prepared to talk to someone who knew Harry Whiteside personally. One of his children or ex-wives would be best to start. Bershada, who helped his second wife move out, could probably help her connect with the ex-wife. But Bershada was in Arkansas for the marriage of her youngest daughter and had apparently shut off her cell phone. Nor was she reading her e-mail. Both decisions were understandable; Bershada had talked several times about the “Bridezilla” her daughter Leeza had become, and about her overbearing and even bizarre behavior as the wedding date approached. Doubtless Bershada had her hands full with her large and sometimes volatile family’s issues.

  Then she remembered Phil’s remark that Harry’s downfall would be bankruptcy, not murder. What did Phil know about Harry?

  She called him. Pleased to be consulted, he said, “I got a friend, he’s a contractor. He says ol’ Harry’s a manipulator. He can be—excuse me, he used to be—your best friend when he was looking to hire you for a job he had pending. Saw you in a restaurant, he’d pay your tab. Out on the town, he’d buy you a drink—hell, two drinks. A real hail-fellow-well-met. See? Then you signed the contract and all of a sudden he was mad at everything you did. It wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t fast enough, you weren’t working hard enough, he was losing money and it was your fault. He’d grind you down till you agreed to give him a discount. Once the job was done, he’d grudge that maybe you did all right, and in a few weeks he was fine with you, happy with the work you did, and if your paths crossed again, he’d shake your hand and offer to introduce you to someone he thought may be useful to you.”

  “What awful behavior!” said Betsy. “Do you think maybe he was bipolar? How did he stay in business behaving like that?”

  “According to what I heard, when he was being nice, his deals were more than fair, and in the end he paid the amended amount in full and on time—which is not always the case with these big-time builders. Any contractor who could develop a tin ear to Harry’s rants could make a living off him. But if enough people got tired of his methods, his business could suffer.”

  “This is wonderful information—thank you!”

  “Hey, remember, this is all what they call hearsay. On the other hand, it’s not just from my friend but a couple of his friends, too—during a late-night poker game when we were all half in the bag. Or is it still hearsay when it’s from three drunk people?”

  Betsy chuckled. “I think so. Still, this is very useful. You don’t happen to know anything about his wives and children, do you?”

  “‘Wives’? What was he, a polygamist?”

  “No, they were in succession; he married his second wife after divorcing his first one.” She stopped short. “You know, I actually don’t know if that’s true. Maybe she died?”

  “Sorry, I don’t know, either.”

  “Well, do you know anything about his children? All I have is that there are three boys, all grown and married.”

  “’Fraid not. I guess that’s what comes of him living on the other side of the lake. Like I told you, he owned a big architectural design company, and he had property all over the state. So this would be just another notch cut in the handle of his pistol.”

  Betsy said, “I wonder what will happen to it. I mean, who will come into possession?”

  “If he left a will, you can find out.”

  “I can?”

  “Sure, once it’s filed, you can read it. Wills are public information.”

  “That’s good to know. Where would I go to find it?”

&n
bsp; “Now that I don’t know. Call City Hall in Wayzata.”

  “Thanks, I will. You’ve been a great resource on this, and I’m grateful.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  But the will hadn’t been filed yet. So Betsy decided to run a Google search on Harry’s sons. She went back to the obituary and found their names: Hamilton, Howard, and Hector. Whiteside surely wasn’t a common surname. Or was it? Out of curiosity, she did another search and discovered about one person in twenty-five thousand is surnamed Whiteside. With that in mind, she searched the three sons by their first and last names and found links to three men named Hamilton Whiteside, two named Hector Whiteside, and five named Howard Whiteside. Five were businessmen, one was a builder, one was a hog farmer, one was an architect, and one was a college professor, but only four were of the right age to be Harry Whiteside’s sons. One was a very old man and another perhaps of an age to be Harry’s younger brother. None lived in Minnesota—was that a clue?

  One of the Hamiltons and both the Hectors had contact information, and Betsy sent a brief e-mail to them, asking each if he was Harry Whiteside’s son.

  Now all she could do in that direction was wait, so she turned her attention back to Maddy O’Leary. Maddy was a longtime resident of Excelsior. Her life, like that of almost everyone in town, had been thoroughly sieved. Maddy, she knew, had begun her adult life as a legal secretary in a Minneapolis law firm specializing in real estate. She took classes and became a paralegal and a few years later caused a minor scandal when she married a senior partner in the firm—who died after three months. Betsy held that thought out in front of her mind for a short while. What did her husband die of? She didn’t know, but it couldn’t have been something violent, or that fact would be prominent. Maddy wasn’t left pregnant and never remarried.

  Though her brief marriage left her well-off, she stayed with the law firm for a few years more, then began to buy distressed and/or repossessed properties, hiring people to rehab them, then selling some, keeping and renting others. Over time she moved from single-occupancy homes to duplexes and fourplexes and then to apartment buildings. As her holdings became more numerous and complex, she quit the law firm to focus on them. Gossip had it that nowadays some renters moved out when she took over a building because she was a harsh landlord, but she was never the subject of a successful tenant’s lawsuit. When she sold a rental property, it was usually at a profit because of the upgrades she’d done. But a not inconsiderable part was because her tenants tended to be orderly. Betsy, who had twice suffered with difficult tenants, had often promised herself that she would ask Maddy her secret. Was it because she intensely interviewed prospective renters in order to screen out potential problems? If so, what did she ask them? How would she make that kind of interview legal? Or was her manner of supervising her properties such that she overawed her tenants? Betsy had never learned the art of overawing.