Knit Your Own Murder

by Monica Ferris

  “Over past the end of the porch,” said Betsy, gesturing. “In front of the garage.”

  “Oh, well, come on, there’s a door to the outside through the garage. I’ll let you out there. Less of a hike.”

  “Thanks,” said Betsy.

  A sudden silence fell as they came back into the living room. Heck smirked at his brothers and said, “Raining. Letting her out through the garage.”

  He hustled her across the room, out a dark gray door, into a hallway. Betsy got a glimpse of an office through an open door halfway along, then reached for a doorknob at the end of the corridor.

  “Wait!” ordered Heck. “It’s dark and there’s a step down.” He went around her to open the door.

  “Ow!” He went into a dark space beyond the door, and a second later a pair of overhead lights came on, and she saw him grasping his right hand. A tiny trickle of blood was just barely visible through his left fingers.

  “What happened?” Betsy asked.

  “That damn door bit me!” He was smiling, but it was a painful smile.

  He’d gone down a step, and Betsy saw a big concrete block a couple of inches below the threshold. Betsy looked at the door, which was standing open. It looked uninjured.

  Heck said, “Here, let me look at that doorknob.” He bent down to examine it. “Looks like there’s a screw loose,” he said. “And I don’t mean in me.”

  Betsy came for a look. There was a small, dark stain on the underside of the bright brass knob, on the area where it fastened to the flange that came through the door latch. It was partly covered by fresh blood, and the flat head of a screw was standing up a fraction of an inch through it.

  “I’d better fix that before it gets someone else,” said Heck.

  “It already has,” said Betsy. “And I think we’d better leave it alone. The police need to be called right away.”

  “They do? Why?”

  “Because that dark stain already on the screw is probably blood, and I think it was left there by the murderer.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  At breakfast the next morning, Connor asked, “So the police investigator wasn’t as excited about the bloody doorknob as you were?”

  “No, but he did take samples.”

  “What are they expecting to find?”

  “Probably that Harry Whiteside cut his hand on the knob.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I think if Harry cut his hand, he would have cleaned himself up, then wiped the knob, then fixed the loose screw. That house was immaculate, everything in order, no books stacked on tables or the floor, no dishes in the sink, nothing dirty or dusty. The kind of person who likes cleanliness and order is not going to leave a hazard like that doorknob unrepaired. It’s my opinion that the murderer cut his hand going out the door. I did persuade the investigator to look around the garage for more blood traces. I looked, too, and didn’t find any.

  “But you see, I don’t think they’ll get any usable evidence from the blood they did find at all. Heck Whiteside also cut his hand on that door, so the blood sample is mixed, and DNA testing won’t prove anything useful.” She looked down at her two soft-boiled eggs in the little blue dish. “Rats,” she mumbled.

  Downstairs, she found Godwin just starting to open up. He was unusually quiet, and she let him go unquestioned until at last, the opening up finished, she asked, “Something on your mind, Goddy?”

  “Well, yes. But, there is, um . . . but . . .”

  “Oh dear. What now?”

  “Well, I don’t know which one of them had this brainstorm, Raf or Pilar, but they talked about it on the way to the airport, and most of it was in Spanish, and it was late when we got back, and I sort of forgot about it until this morning. So I remembered and asked. And so now he’s told me what they think they’ve cooked up. And I don’t know if I like it. I mean, maybe it’s all right, but I never did think I’d be a parent one day.” He went to the library table and dropped into a chair with a sigh.

  She joined him there and said, “A parent? I don’t understand. You mean he got talked back into doing that? He will after all go ahead with the plan and marry Ms. Montserrat, and try to get custody of the child when they divorce?”

  “No, he’s not going to marry Ms. Mountain.”

  “Who, then? And what if it’s a girl?”

  “We talked about that, earlier, that he might have to breed a long string of girl babies before they got to a boy. But no, that’s not the plan at all.”

  “Then I really don’t understand.”

  “We’ll still get married. But then . . . things like in vitro and, and a surrogate.” Godwin drew up his shoulders, his face showing his distaste for the idea. “Because the way he and his family think, it has to be his biological son, not an adopted child. And so, of course, we will be the ones to raise it.”

  Betsy sat staring at him while the silence went on and on. He just stared at the collection of stitching tools in a bin in the center of the table.

  Finally, she said, “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Rafael’s halfway to being pleased with the idea; he thinks it’s clever. But somehow the idea of me being a daddy—well, it just never occurred to me. I knew a long time ago that I wouldn’t ever . . . you know, with a girl, so I just accepted that to be the way it was. And I put a brave, bad face on it, because after all, babies are loud and messy, and you’re up all night and ishy diapers and icky potty training and crying for no reason and expensive . . . so I told myself that was okay for some but not for me. Besides, I wasn’t ever going to be old enough to be a father. Fathers are old, and I’m always so . . . young.” He looked at her, his expression so pitiful and yearning that her heart turned over.

  “And now, the man you love is suggesting the two of you do this thing that will upset that applecart,” she said. “What did you say to Rafael when he told you?”

  “I hugged him so he wouldn’t see the look on my face and said I had to get to work early. I’ve been here for nearly an hour. I’m trying to think, and I can’t think. What can I say to him?”

  Betsy took several minutes to gather her thoughts. “First of all, you mustn’t lie to him. You have to talk to him, tell him you have deep reservations about this plan. You could begin by saying you don’t think you’d be any good at parenting—”

  “Well, I wouldn’t! I mean, look at me! I’m frivolous! I’m vain! I like pretty clothes and nice vacations and everything neat and clean, sweet and peaceful. Except at parties, I like loud parties and drinking too much and then sleeping till noon the next day. You can’t do that with a baby!”

  “It wouldn’t stay a baby forever, you know. They grow up quicker than you think. But then, of course, you’re faced with new problems: dating, and driving, and getting into a good college.”

  Godwin’s eyes widened. “Oh my God, you’re right! Suppose he drops out of school, takes drugs, and falls in love with absolutely the wrong person?”

  “Suppose she’s a girl, this child of yours?”

  He waved that off with one hand. “No, not likely. There’s something they can do, some processing of the sperm that makes it extremely likely it will be a boy.”

  “What if he’s gay?”

  Godwin stared at her, then bloomed all over. “Wouldn’t that be the biggest hoot in the world?” He laughed. “I don’t think dear Pilar thought about that!”

  Then he sobered. “So you think I should tell Rafael what I think.”

  “I think you must, because you are not to go into this unwillingly. Remember how your father reacted to learning you were gay? Think how this child will react to a father who dislikes him for a reason he cannot understand?”

  Godwin’s mouth fell open, then his face crumpled. He jumped to his feet and ran into the back room. Betsy heard the bathroom door slam. She went there b
ut heard noisy weeping and retreated. Neither of Godwin’s parents spoke to him, hadn’t seen or communicated with him in any manner since he was fourteen and they’d thrown him out into the street.

  She had cut him to the quick with that single careless remark.

  She felt tears of her own beginning, but the front door began to play “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” and Jill came into the shop with the children, Emma Beth, Airy, and Einar. The children ran to her for hugs and loud greetings—she was Emma’s godmother and informal aunt to them all.

  But Jill saw something in Betsy’s face and said, “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Godwin. He’s in a real pickle, and I don’t know what to tell him.”

  “Get the coloring books,” ordered Jill, and Betsy went into a bottom drawer of the checkout desk for the big plastic box of crayons and three coloring books.

  In another minute the children were settled at the library table telling stories about the pages they were coloring—or scribbling over, in Einar’s case—while Betsy drew Jill out of earshot and swiftly gave a condensed version of Godwin’s predicament.

  “Where is he now?”

  Betsy grimaced. “In the bathroom, crying his eyes out. It’s my fault. I brought up his parents, who didn’t want him once they learned he was gay. If he is burdened with a child he doesn’t want . . .”

  Jill nodded. “That wasn’t a very clever thing to say.”

  “I agree, I should have thought harder before I spoke. But on the other hand, he needs to really think this through before agreeing to help Rafael raise a child. He thinks children are pretty awful.”

  “Does he? Does he really?”

  “Well, he said so, in so many words, just a few minutes ago.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Jill. “Watch the children for me.” She walked into the back room.

  Betsy went out front and found Einar, already bored with his coloring book, beginning to scrawl on the table.

  “Here now, sweetie,” said Betsy, taking the crayon from his hand. “I have a different job for you.”

  Einar puckered up as if to cry and reached for his crayon, but Betsy lifted it higher. “Would you like to pop bubbles?”

  “Bubbles!” shouted the child.

  “No, not really bubbles,” said Betsy. “This is something different.” She went to her desk and opened a middle drawer. Under a clipboard was a length of bubble wrap.

  “Yay!” cheered Airy—his real name was Erik, but Emma Beth had called him Airy when they were both very young, and the nickname stuck.

  “Awww, baby stuff!” scoffed Emma Beth and went back to coloring a crowned frog in her book. She was very good, even adding shading to the frog’s foreleg.

  “No, it isn’t!” shouted Airy. “Me, me, give me some bubbles to pop!”

  So Betsy cut the piece into two unequal pieces and gave the bigger to Airy, who immediately began to pop his between thumb and forefinger. Einar watched him for a few seconds, then began popping his own piece. It took him under a minute to master the technique, and then, successful, he growled a low, dirty laugh, “Hurrr, hurrr, hurrr.”

  Betsy stared at him, amazed. She’d never heard such a sound from a little child before. It was practically a baritone.

  “Isn’t he just the cutest thing?” said Emma Beth without looking up from her book, obviously quoting some adult.

  Remarkable,” said Betsy.

  Snap, crackle, pop, went Airy’s plastic wrap. He was an expert at popping the wrap.

  Pop . . . pop . . . pop, pop . . . pop, went Einar’s. “Hurrr, hurrr, hurrr.”

  Betsy retreated to the other side of the box shelves that divided the shop in half. There she found Jill and Godwin seated at the little round table, talking in low voices.

  “Oh!” Betsy said. “Excuse me!”

  “It’s all right,” said Godwin, offering her a watery smile. “We’re just talking. I think . . . I think I’m starting to understand what I’m going to do.”

  Betsy looked at Jill, who smiled and nodded. “It’s going to be all right. Goddy is a good man; he’s just a little frightened at all this happening so fast. It was thoughtless of Rafael to make an agreement with Pilar without consulting him first. But it will go much slower now; these things take time, lots of time. And he’ll have all the time he needs to think about it, talk about it, make sure he knows what he wants, and what Rafael wants, and that they’re on the same page.”

  “Oh, Jill, you’re so wise, so sensible, I just love you to death!” said Godwin.

  There came the angry wail of a small child, and Jill got up to go see what atrocity had occurred in the front of the store. Her mere appearance stopped the wail in its tracks.

  “Wow,” said Godwin, looking through the opening at her. He said to Betsy, “Do you think she’ll give Rafael and me lessons?”

  * * *

  That crisis over, Betsy told him about her adventure with the Whiteside brothers last night. She sighed a bit over the unfairness of discovering the tiny sample of blood only after it had been hopelessly mixed with Heck’s. “I’m as sure as I can be that the first drop of blood was left by the murderer, but now there’s no way to prove that.”

  “Somebody, probably you, will think of something else that will break this case wide open,” Godwin predicted.

  But it was Jill who lifted her spirits when she said, “They can test mixed DNA samples. They do it all the time; they just separate them. That’s how I knew my second child would be a boy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean a baby’s DNA gets into the mother from the womb through the umbilical cord. She’s sending oxygen and food to the baby, and the baby is sending fragments of itself to the mother. A blood test will pick up those fragments, and a technician can separate the DNA in them from the mother’s DNA.”

  Betsy said, in a very quiet voice, “Really?”

  “Google it. DNA technology is galloping headlong down the road, past what you’re wishing it might do. They’ve been doing it for years.”

  Betsy went to her computer and asked her search engine to tell her if it was possible to separate mixed DNA samples. Indeed, yes, said several sites, though sometimes in language that gave new meaning to the term “scientific explanation”: The terminology used in some of the scientific abstracts she read—“loci,” “contributor genotypes,” “biostatical software”—was enough to give her a headache.

  Jill, reading over Betsy’s shoulder, said, “See? In a case like Wayzata’s, only two samples are in the mix, none of it fragmentary or degraded. That means it’ll be relatively simple to separate them. And since one of them is Heck Whiteside, who is currently present and can give a fresh sample, it’ll be even easier, using one they pull from him for comparison.”

  Betsy began to smile. “God bless the scientists who keep getting better and better at using DNA,” she said. “Do you think it would be interfering if I called Detective Larabee and told him about these advances in DNA testing?”

  “Oh yes, I think it would. He’s better educated about DNA than you and I are. I would be very surprised if he isn’t well aware of the separation technique.”

  “Then he’ll be able to test that second sample of DNA against all the suspects in Harry’s murder.”

  “I’m absolutely sure he’ll do that,” said Jill.

  * * *

  Jill had been gone for about forty-five minutes, having left with one hand holding a fistful of beautiful Silk and Ivory floss in a small plastic bag, when the door began to play “Yes We Have No Bananas” and Joe Mickels came in. He was looking triumphant, and he said to Betsy, “You’re fired!”

  Godwin scolded, “Who do you think you are, Donald Trump?”

  Mickels frowned at Godwin, then laughed, a sound rarely heard. Certainly neither Betsy nor Godwin had heard it before.

  “Whatever i
s the matter with you, Joe?” Betsy asked.

  “They arrested the man who shot me!” said Joe.

  “Not Chaz, surely!” exclaimed Betsy.

  “No, o’ course not! I never thought it was him. It’s Herman Glass. He used to be a tenant of mine. He’s a student at Rasmussen College, and to finance his education he was selling drugs out of his apartment. When I found out about it, he asked me to give him a break, so I didn’t call the cops on him, I just evicted him. He called me names anyway. Then he decided selling drugs wasn’t his forte, so he started pulling stickups. When he walked into one of my stores and saw me there, he took advantage of the opportunity and shot me.”

  “The dastard!” said Godwin.

  Joe turned and looked at him. “What did you say?”

  “Dastard.”

  “What is that, a ladylike version of bastard?”

  “No, it’s a word of its own, dates way, way back, medieval. It means a contemptible, sneaky coward.”

  “Dastard,” repeated Joe, trying it out on his tongue.

  “Dastard,” agreed Godwin. He had a curious fondness for old-fashioned words—and old-fashioned music, and cartoons, and radio shows, too.

  Joe turned back to Betsy. “But that’s not what I’m here about. They found the man I had dinner with the night Whiteside was killed, so I’ve got an alibi for his murder, so I don’t need your help anymore.”

  “What about for Maddy?”

  He shrugged. “They’d have to prove I had access to pure nicotine, and they can’t, because I don’t. QED, I’m in the clear.”

  Betsy nodded. “Very well, I won’t spend any more time trying to prove you didn’t kill Maddy O’Leary.”

  He turned serious, even morose. “I take it you will bill me for your expenses?”

  “I don’t charge for my investigative services. I thought we were clear on that.”

  He brightened. “Yes, you did say that, didn’t you? I’m glad to have that confirmed. Good day to you.”

  He turned and stumped out.