Framed in Lace

by Monica Ferris

  “Martha said she lost two handkerchiefs with that wonderful lace trim. One she left at the Guthrie Theatre, where it ended up as a prop. The other she lost at the State Fair. Jessica had a fried-food stand at the State Fair—that’s where she and Carl got all greasy. Carl worked for Jessica there, selling battered hot dogs on a stick. Martha thought she lost that handkerchief in the pig barn, but when she came to the fair, surely she would either stop by the stand to see her husband, or if Carl wasn’t working they would both stop by the stand to say hello and perhaps buy something to eat and drink. And if Martha dropped that gorgeous handkerchief by the stand, someone might have picked it up and given it to Jessica, or Jessica herself found it. In either case, she kept it.”

  “Why?” asked Shelly. “Didn’t she know whose it was?”

  “Of course she knew,” said Betsy. “But she was having an affair with Carl and wasn’t very fond of Carl’s wife. She knew Martha was proud of those handkerchiefs, so it was a fun and spiteful thing to keep that handkerchief rather than give it back.”

  “Now, just wait one second,” said Godwin. “Trudie worked in a café, so she got all greasy, didn’t she? You took the word of a senile old woman who doesn’t know Sleep-Around-Sue from a respectable widow.”

  “No, she said Carl met his mistress at the State Fair and both of them got greasy. Jessica told me she and Carl had to constantly mop the floor at her stand to keep the grease under control. Dorothy isn’t senile in the ordinary sense of the word; she knows plenty. Everything else she told me was true. Her son was killed on Omaha Beach during the Normandy invasion, that same son got Alice Skoglund drunk at a private gathering and took liberties with her—”

  “No!” said Godwin, much edified, and Shelly’s eyes gleamed at this delicious tidbit.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that!” said Betsy, alarmed. “So if that little fact goes beyond this gathering, I will fire both of you.” And Jill looked at Shelly and Godwin with a glint in her eye that said firing might be the least of their troubles. Betsy continued, “In fact, we are going to be a whole lot nicer to Alice than we have been. She was very important to solving this case.”

  “Yes, ma’m,” said Godwin meekly, and Shelly nodded, allowing the gleam to fade.

  “Dorothy said Jessica’s husband flew in airplanes and died in one, also true. Dorothy doesn’t muddle her facts; she’s just so tired of inquiries into her clarity of mind that she turns the tables on her questioners, making a joke or a riddle of their questions. While she spoke elliptically to me, she knew what she was saying and spoke only the truth.

  “But,” said Betsy, “I didn’t know that until I talked to Jill. And even then, even if everything else she said was true, could it really be that Carl and Jessica were having an affair? It would explain a whole lot if it was. But how to prove it? And then I thought about something else Jill told me, and then I remembered that cross-stitch heart Jessica gave Martha, and I crossed my fingers in hopes I was right and went to talk to Martha.”

  “What did Jill tell you?” asked Shelly.

  “That using metallic floss will leave a mark on fabric that only shows up after a long time. It kind of develops, like a photograph, into a gray or black mark. And when we took Martha’s initials out of that fabric, there were black marks that spelled JT, for Jessica Turnquist. She had made that piece for Carl, not for Martha. The ‘love forever’ she stitched on that project was between her and Carl, not Carl and Martha. That’s when I knew Jessica murdered Trudie.”

  “Now wait a second,” said Godwin. “Odell saw a man running away from the boat. Jessica wouldn’t look like a man no matter how you dressed her.”

  “Why was Jessica mad at Trudie?” asked Shelly.

  “I‘d’ve murdered both of them,” said Jill.

  Shelly and Godwin started at this odd confession from a law enforcement officer, but Jill only stared back. Then the three looked at Betsy to go on.

  “Jessica told me she was surprised to learn how much Martha loved Carl. Carl bad-mouthed Martha to everyone, especially women he was flirting with. But I think Jessica was more surprised than average, because Carl told her he and his wife had a sham of a marriage. It’s a favorite line of philanderers, more so back then when divorces were rarer. Nearly as common as ‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’ And it’s what Carl told Jessica, along with ‘She says if I try to divorce her, she’ll hire a private detective, which means it’s possible your name will be dragged through the courts.’ The truth is, he didn’t want a divorce at all, because he was a businessman in a small town where his wife was highly thought of. If he dumped her for Jessica, they’d have to leave town and start over. Carl had a wife who, I think, he actually loved, and he had a healthy, intelligent son, and a successful business. I don’t think he was willing to give all that up. But he wanted the thrill of a beautiful mistress, too.

  “Jessica may have actually believed the lies Carl told her, or at least told herself she did. She thought Martha was a shrew who wouldn’t set her unhappy husband free. But as time went on, Jessica grew impatient; if she wanted children, if she wanted to show her love openly, something had to happen. So she began to press Carl, until at last he lost his temper and they had a fight. And to show her he was not going to be bullied, he stomped off and flirted more seriously than he ever had before with someone he knew wouldn’t blow him off.”

  “Trudie Koch,” said Shelly.

  “That’s right,” said Betsy. “Everyone noticed it; Martha scolded him about it. And Jessica was furious. She went into a tool drawer and got out a hammer—”

  “How did you deduce this?” asked Godwin, amazed.

  “That’s from her confession,” said Jill. “We both were there when Mike took it down.”

  “Go on, go on,” Shelly urged Betsy.

  “She went down to the Blue Ribbon Café close to the end of Trudie’s shift and found that Trudie was already gone. The man at the counter said she was meeting someone at the City Docks at midnight. Jessica casually finished her coffee and left, arriving at the docks—which were just across the street—in time to see Trudie waiting alone. Trudie turned as Jessica came up and Jessica swung the hammer. She says she doesn’t remember much of the next several minutes, which I understand is normal. Then she went out to the end of the dock and threw the hammer as far out as she could. On her way back, past the body, she dropped the handkerchief. Did I mention she brought the handkerchief with her? She told Sergeant Malloy this murder was an angry impulse, but that can’t be true. She came prepared to frame Martha.

  “Then Carl arrived for his rendezvous with Trudie. Jessica was waiting, and she told him what she’d done, pointing to the handkerchief and saying Martha was sure to be arrested for the murder and then, at last, Carl could divorce her and they could be married.

  “Cold, cold, cold,” murmured Godwin.

  “She must have been crazy,” said Shelly.

  “Not within the meaning of the law,” said Jill.

  “And Carl just about went nuts. It made his previous rage seem like nothing. What on earth did she think she was doing? Martha was his wife; he loved her with all his heart; he wasn’t about to see her framed for murder! Then he calmed down just a little bit and got as scared as he’d been furious; he could see that any attempt to tell the truth would involve him in a very unpleasant way. He told Jessica to go home, that he’d take care of everything. So she did. And Carl picked up the handkerchief and Trudie’s body and hid them both on board the Hopkins. As he was getting off the boat, he saw a boy watching him. How much had the kid seen? If he’d seen Carl carrying the body out there, Carl was in big, big trouble. He ran after the boy, but he vanished into the night.”

  “That was Odell, wasn’t it?” said Shelly.

  “That’s right. So Carl fled. He ended up in Omaha and worked mostly at menial jobs, scared for years he’d be located. All this while, he thought the cops were looking for him. Then, at last, he sees a newspaper article, a reprint of a humorou
s story about a town gossip and a skeleton. All those years in hiding, and no one had been looking for him. And now his wife—same last name, so she never remarried!—is about to be charged with murdering Trudie Koch. So of course he comes home. Maybe he can still redeem himself, pick up the remaining scraps of his former life. He checks into a local motel and he calls his wife to see if things are as reported.

  “But she won’t talk to him, won’t let him tell her what he knows. She hangs up on him. She got over Carl Winters many years ago. But then, as she does whenever she has some news to share, she calls her very best friend, Jessica Turnquist. Martha says she doesn’t know what Carl had to tell her, and Jessica says she can’t imagine what it might be, either.

  “But Jessica does know, of course. After all—the changes she’s made in herself, her good reputation, her close friendship with Martha, her comfortable life in this town—are all about to be destroyed because of a few minutes of jealous rage cooled to ashes these fifty years.

  “She hurries to that storage place and digs into the box of her late husband’s military gear and takes out the gun. She drives out into the country and fires it twice to make sure it works, then she goes and knocks on Carl’s door. He is surprised to see her but lets her in.”

  Jill said, “I wonder what they talked about? She didn’t say.”

  Betsy said, “Maybe she tried to rekindle his old affection for her. Or did she try to scare him into promising to leave town again? But in the end she shot him. She waits until he stops breathing and then presses his still-warm fingers around the gun, lets it drop from his hand, and leaves. She thinks the police will conclude it’s suicide.”

  Jill said, “But she doesn’t know from forensics. Such as, when you shoot yourself, you leave powder residue on the wound and on your hand. Carl’s body had no powder burns; he was shot from farther than the length of his arm.”

  “And that’s why Jessica stopped begging you to prove Martha didn’t murder Trudie,” said Godwin. “Oh, my God, what a witch!”

  Jill said, “The choice was to tell the truth and go to prison or keep silent and let Martha go to prison. Not a hard choice for her.”

  “What made you decide to look under Martha’s initials on that heart?” asked Shelly.

  “Martha had shown the needlework to me. She said it was that gift that started their friendship. Carl’s and Martha’s initials were in the middle of the heart, his in gold. And they weren’t quite centered. And the heart was two different shades of pink, meaning it had been redone at least once. At first I thought Jessica was like me, willing to redo only so many times before deciding it was the thought that counts, not the perfection of the gift. And she was in a hurry. But after what Dorothy said, it occurred to me that maybe, originally, the heart had Carl’s and Jessica’s initials, both in gold. JT is a lot narrower than MW.”

  “Why didn’t she just throw it away?” asked Godwin.

  “I don’t know,” said Betsy. “Maybe she was afraid someone would find it. And besides, she was trying to think of some way to really distance herself from what had happened, and really make sure no one suspected she and Carl had ever had an affair. There was Martha, so unhappy and vulnerable, and she got this idea to make friends. Turning the needlework into a gift might have seemed like a good idea.”

  Shelly said, “Maybe she had this evil notion of seeing something that was about her and Carl’s love on display. Not in her own house, that would be dumb. So why not in Martha’s house? I can see that tickling some sick person’s fancy—”

  “Ugh!” said Godwin. “You are making me not like Jessica at all!”

  “Anyway,” said Betsy, “she picked out her initials and cleared an area of heart around it. But she was out of both the gold and the pink she’d used originally. She had a pink that seemed to match perfectly and she had some green, so she used those. The newer pink, unfortunately, faded more quickly than the old, which kind of called attention to Martha’s initials. And when Martha and I frogged her initials, we found some gray marks on the evenweave, just like Jill said there would be.”

  “Good job!” cheered Shelly, as if to a bright student. “Sorry, force of habit.”

  “So now I had real evidence of a motive,” said Betsy. “I called Sergeant Malloy from Martha’s house, and he came right over, bless him. I explained what I thought had happened and how it seemed to be the only version of events that didn’t leave little bits sticking out. I told him that I’d talked to Jessica earlier and asked her about a military-issue gun, so that she might be trying to destroy evidence at that very moment. He drove over to her house, and she opened the door, and he smelled leather burning. By the time he got what was left of an old holster out of the fire, she was crying and telling him some nonsense about how the historical society wouldn’t want an empty holster, and then that my questions had frightened her, and she kept changing her story until she finally told the truth.”

  “By which time she had been Mirandized twice,” said Jill.

  “Jessica Turnquist, hot mama and murderer,” murmured Godwin, shaking his head. “It seems so unlikely. I mean, she’s so old.”

  “Someday you’ll be old,” said Betsy.

  “Never!” promised Godwin, hand on heart.

  “She did beautiful crochet work,” said Shelly.

  Then silence fell, a long silence, in which many memories formed themselves into new shapes.

  “I’m glad I was able to help Martha,” said Betsy at last. “I’m sorry it had to be Jessica.”

  “She was always nice to me,” said Shelly.

  “I guess this confirms everyone’s belief that you are a natural-born sleuth,” said Jill.

  “Yes, well, sleuthing doesn’t put money in the cash register. Shelly, why don’t you get started dusting. Goddy, bring out that shipment of wool and refill the baskets.” Everyone stood, but nobody moved. They were all trying to think of a valedictory statement.

  Jill said, “Betsy, Malloy said to thank you for your assistance, and to look for a summons in the mail.”

  Shelly said, “I guess Martha can fire that expensive lawyer and put what’s left of the money toward the mortgage on her store. I’m going to bring some clothing to be dry cleaned, increase her earnings a little bit.”

  They looked at Godwin, who shrugged and said, “And since it looks like Dorothy gets the tree, I’d better make a pair of ruby red slippers to put on it.”

  Turn the page for your free

  Lacy Butterfly cross-stitch pattern.

  A Lacy Butterfly Designed by Denise Williams After a bobbin-lace pattern by Virginia Berringer

  This pattern is worked in a combination of straight or backstitches and cross-stitches to look like bobbin lace. Use two strands of white cotton floss on 16-count, dark blue, evenweave fabric.

  First, stitch around the border of the fabric to prevent fraying.

  Then, find the center of the pattern and mark it. Find the center of the fabric. (If you are making a bookmark, count up seventeen rows from the bottom of the fabric to find the last row of stitching. Mark this row, count the rows across to find the middle, and begin stitching in that place.)

  Cross-stitch the head and body first, then the cross-stitch portions of the wings. Do the straight stitches (backstitching) on the wings and antennas last.

  © Design by Denise Williams

  Needlecraft Mysteries by Monica Ferris

  CREWEL WORLD

  FRAMED IN LACE

  A STITCH IN TIME

  UNRAVELED SLEEVE

  A MURDEROUS YARN

  HANGING BY A THREAD

  CUTWORK

  CREWEL YULE

  EMBROIDERED TRUTHS

  SINS AND NEEDLES

  Anthologies

  PATTERNS OF MURDER

 

 

 
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