Embroidered Truths

by Monica Ferris

  “Got a computer problem or a knitting question?” he asked jovially. Some while back, Betsy had helped Gary prove to his father the marijuana found in his bedroom wasn’t his. Subsequently, the father became closer to his son, and, in gratitude, the teen had volunteered to help Betsy solve any computer problems she had. Betsy knew Gary before the marijuana incident; he had learned to knit in grade school and haunted the sales bin in Betsy’s shop for yarn. Betsy enjoyed knowing Gary, he had the same deep understanding of knitting patterns he had of computers.

  Now Betsy said, “A computer problem. I need him to show me how to copy a hard drive onto another hard drive. I’m on my way out to buy the new hard drive. Could you have him call me?”

  Just before ten, she went down to open up and found Rennie just coming up to the door. Betsy let her in and told her that Nikki Marquez and Shelly would be in in an hour to help out.

  “Where are you going today, Betsy?” asked Rennie, as she watched Betsy put the start-up cash into the register.

  “First, to CompuWorld. After that, well, it depends on if I can buy a computer part that I can make work.”

  “Ah, spyware,” nodded Rennie wisely.

  Betsy smiled. “I wish I could use some spyware, but it’s too early in this business to even know whom to spy on. I’m hoping to hear from Charlie Nye today, because I want to see him. If he calls looking for me, give him my cell phone number and tell him I’ll be back in about an hour. And if Gary Woodward calls, ask him where he’ll be today, so I can get hold of him. Tell him it’s urgent.”

  Betsy wrote her cell phone number down on a card and put it beside the phone on the desk. “You can also call me if you run into any problems. I’ll stop back in here when I get back from Minnetonka.”

  Minnetonka was a lake, but also a town adjoining Wayzata that ran east along the I-394 corridor. Near its eastern end was a nice mall called Ridgedale. In the manner of such things, Ridgedale had inspired a couple of strip malls and a gathering of big box stores: Best Buy, PetSmart, Office Max—and, next to a Porsche dealer, CompuWorld.

  Betsy was deeply intimidated by computer stores. Big signs advertising features she sometimes didn’t know the use of made her feel defensive. She was sure the clerks could tell just looking at her, a blond, middle-aged woman—“Look, Harold, a three-fer!”—that she was ripe to be sold some defective product at an outrageous price.

  And it was true, she was woefully ignorant. She wished Gary had been at home when she called, she could have brought him along.

  She would have walked out of the place, except a fragment of common sense made itself heard. All she needed was a hard drive somewhat bigger than forty gigabytes; she knew that. And knowledge is power. Beside, look, right over there, on that bin, a sign saying SALE: Hard Drives, Priced as Marked. The bin was nearly full of silver boxes, about the size of a hardcover novel, except longer. They looked metal but were plastic, and were not in boxes or other wrapping. Betsy quickly found labels on their undersides that announced the number of bytes. The Internet site she’d found said hard drives generally sold for around one hundred dollars; none of these cost more than seventy. She found a sixty-gigabyte one for fifty-eight dollars. The case had no damage she could see, and it didn’t look at all shopworn. It should do nicely for the temporary use to which it would be put.

  She carried it proudly to the checkout and was careful to store the receipt in a zippered pocket of her purse. Maybe she could get at least some crumbs of her retainer money back from Attorney Lebowski when she turned in her receipts.

  Back at the shop, Rennie had been joined by Shelly, Emily, Martha, and Phil. With the addition of four customers, the place looked jammed. Sophie, reclining regally on her chair, was trying to conceal a fragment of a chocolate chip cookie with one fat paw.

  Rennie said Charlie hadn’t called but Gary had, and the teen was at home waiting for her to call him.

  “Thanks,” said Betsy, and, after subtly removing the portion of cookie from her cat’s custody, hurried upstairs.

  Gary didn’t live far away, and he was ringing her doorbell within minutes of her phoning him.

  He was a slender boy of sixteen, a little undersized, with a thick shock of dark hair shading gray eyes. He wore an unbuttoned plaid flannel shirt, too-big jeans, and unlaced sport shoes. Betsy bit back the smart-aleck remark about people who went out before they finished dressing, and showed him the way to the computer.

  “Is this the right kind of hard drive?” she asked anxiously, showing him the silver box. “I can’t see how to open it, so I just left it alone.”

  “You don’t open it,” he said, turning it over. “How many gigs on the drive that’s in it?” He gestured at Godwin’s laptop, a Toshiba Satellite.

  “Forty,” she said.

  “You bought a sixty, that’s good,” he noted, and sat down, shifting his backpack onto the floor beside him. “Where’s your USB cord?”

  “Um, I don’t think I have one,” she confessed.

  He nodded and opened his backpack and pulled out a cord with a metal rectangle near one end and a square sort of plug-in at either end. “Well, let’s see if we can do this.”

  He booted up Godwin’s computer, went searching in various places, attached the cord to the computer and then the hard drive, clicked on an icon, and clicked on various choices on the various boxes that came down with each click, and sat back.

  “Now what?” asked Betsy.

  “We wait. It’ll take maybe an hour.”

  “Well, then, how about lunch?”

  He brightened. “What’ve you got?”

  “Not much in the place, how about we go down to Sol’s?” Sol’s was the deli next door to Crewel World. “You can have any sandwich in the place, soup, too, if you like.”

  “All right.”

  “We could go to Licks for dessert.” Licks, over on Water Street, had many flavors of ice cream.

  “All right!”

  When they got back, the download was still going on, so Gary washed his hands and produced a knitting project from his backpack. He liked working with beads, and had once shown Betsy a pattern he had worked out on his own, suitable for any kind of cuff, whether a baby’s sock or the bottom of an extra-large sweater. He was currently working a series of red and blue beads onto the cuff of a white sock, a gift for his little sister.

  Seeing the white sock, Betsy was reminded of Godwin’s knitting of an endless series of white cotton socks. Perhaps they would allow Godwin to knit while he was in jail, a happy thought. Then, looking at the needles Gary was using with the eyes of a jailer—sharp, slender, easily-hidden objects—coupled with yards of strong yarn, she thought perhaps not. Still, she could ask.

  Meanwhile, she got her own project out. Bershada’s inquiry into an entrelac pattern had inspired Betsy to start that sweater. The pattern was from Spincraft, and knit from side to side. Betsy was using overdyed silk yarn in rich shades of wine, purple, blue, and gray. Like the purse Bershada was making, it was knit on circular needles. Betsy couldn’t wait to see how the pattern worked from the sleeves into the body—she wasn’t like Gary, she couldn’t look at a pattern and see how it would look for real.

  After about half an hour, Gary went to check on the download, and pronounced it finished. “What are you going to do with it?” he asked.

  “I’m going to trade it with someone for another hard drive. After I do that, will you show me how to access the new hard drive?”

  “Sure. Just let me know. Say, is this for a case you’re working on?”

  Betsy nodded. “Yes, it is. That’s why I can’t give you any details yet. When it’s all over, I’ll tell you how valuable you were to the solution.”

  His gray eyes shone. “Am I really important?”

  “Yes, very important. But I can’t tell you any more about it right now.”

  “Wow, thanks! Wait’ll I—no, I shouldn’t tell anyone, should I?”

  “Just tell them exactly what you did, you copied
a hard drive for me because I’m too lazy to take a class and learn how to do it myself. And that you don’t know why I wanted it copied.”

  He smiled, pleased at sharing a grown-up secret. “All right. You’ll call me again if you need me?”

  “When I need you. And when this is all over, I’ll tell you what I did.”

  After Gary went tripping down the stairs, she called Mike Malloy and found him in. “I’ve got that hard drive, if you still want to trade.”

  “All right, come on over.”

  The brick and stone one-story building wasn’t far away, but Betsy drove over, first because she was in a hurry and second because she was afraid she might drop the hard drive and have the copying to do all over again. She carried it in two hands up to the door of the police station.

  Mike was waiting in the airlock between the two sets of doors that made the entrance. “Here,” he said, handing her a clipboard after taking the hard drive.

  “What’s this?”

  “A receipt, of course.”

  “Oh. Of course.” Betsy signed it and was given a copy along with a silver plastic box identical to the one she’d handed over. Except for the strip of white adhesive tape that marked it as Copy Two of John Nye’s hard drive.

  “Did you find anything useful on this?” she asked.

  “Nah, most of it is password protected and the rest is encrypted.” He showed her an evil smile, turned, and went back inside.

  Yeah, thought Betsy, getting back into her car, but I’ve got a secret weapon that can, I just betcha, break this thing wide open.

  On her way home, her cell phone rang. “Yes?” she said, after pulling over and fumbling it open. She could talk and drive, but she couldn’t get the doggone thing open while driving.

  “Hello?” she said, hoping it was Charlie Nye.

  “Betsy, it’s Shelly. Can you come right away?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here.”

  At the shop Betsy found Rennie and Shelly behind the desk, looking flustered. Nikki was standing by the entrance to the back, and there was an air about her as of being on guard. Betsy glanced through the double set of box shelves and saw Phil sitting at the little round table with a customer Betsy recognized, though she couldn’t remember her name. They were not conversing. Phil was looking very firm, the woman was looking half-defiant, half-ashamed. Betsy sighed.

  “Is she our shoplifter?” she murmured, walking up to the desk.

  “Yeah.” Shelly sighed. “I walked into the back and caught her putting a kit into her slacks. I told her to put it back and asked her to sit down while I called you, but she couldn’t sit down, she had two more kits down her trouser legs and another one down the back of her slacks. And her coat pockets are full of floss.” Shelly smiled. “She said she had no idea how that stuff got into her clothing.”

  Rennie spoke up. “Yeah, but she’s either got two pairs of slacks on or some kind of lining like a giant pocket down both trouser legs, because they look loose but those kits didn’t fall out the bottoms.”

  A pro, then. Betsy went for a look. The woman was middle-aged, with thin lips, tired eyes, short hair dyed dark brown. She wore baggy trousers, sneakers, a loose-fitting coat over a baggy sweater.

  Betsy came back to the desk to ask, “Did she admit she’s been having a problem with charts and kits hopping into her clothing before?” Crewel World had been suffering from theft all year.

  “She said no, of course not, but I don’t believe her.”

  “I hope she’s the one who’s been doing all of it, all by herself,” said Betsy. She considered her options. If it had been just a pocketful of floss, or even a kit, they might have had her pay for the stuff, told her she was banned from the shop, and let her go. But if this was the chronic thief . . . Like most small businesses, the profit margin at Crewel World was thin and a determined thief could put a shop into the red in a hurry.

  “What did she take?”

  Shelly brought out the biggest Crewel World bag, heavy with merchandise. The Rowandean crewel kit alone retailed at more than a hundred dollars, the Nan Heldenbrand Morrissette kimono kit was sixty-five, and the two Marilyn Leavitt Inblum kits were seventy and eighty dollars—plus the shoplifter had filled one pocket with Caron’s Waterlilies floss at six-eighty a skein, and the other with Betsy’s new stock of beautiful, hand-dyed Olde Willow Stitchery Threads’ Quaker flosses. “What we took off her totals over three hundred dollars,” said Shelly. “That’s felony-level theft.”

  Betsy turned and asked Nikki, “Did Mr. Nye call?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Betsy started to weigh the various possibilities against the various consequences. She wanted to have this woman arrested as a lesson to her and any others who might be thinking of stealing. She wanted to hurry upstairs to start looking at the hard drive and find the clue that would free Godwin. It would take time to get this woman arrested; they’d gotten everything back and none of it was damaged. And if they called the police, that was just more time Godwin would have to spend with those odd people in Quad Eleven. She turned and looked at the sad woman at the table, then at the heap of expensive goods on the desk. Anger won. “Call the police,” she said.

  “Betsy!” exclaimed Rennie.

  “I don’t care, I’m sick and tired of this. If she’s the one who’s been stealing all along, we’ve lost nearly a thousand dollars thanks to her, and I am not going to stand for that kind of thing. So call the police!” Betsy said that last bit nice and loud and was rewarded with a burst of weeping from the sad woman.

  Phil looked at Betsy and nodded once, firmly.

  “Did you also see her take anything?” Betsy asked Nikki.

  “No, ma’am.” Nikki’s eyes were wide; she’d never seen Betsy on the warpath before.

  It took a few minutes for Lars to arrive. Betsy was fairly jittering with impatience before his squad car drove up. “Now what?” he said, coming in large and aggressive. Still mad about me lying to him about Godwin’s whereabouts the night John was killed, she thought.

  “Shoplifter,” she said briefly. “I wasn’t here. You can talk to Shelly, she caught her in the act. I’ll be upstairs if you want me to sign the complaint.” She started to walk away, but then turned and went back to intercept him on his way to the desk and Shelly. She put a hand on his forearm and, looking up into his frosty blue eyes, said, “I’m sorry I misled you last Friday.”

  “You ought to be,” he said, but already the frost was melting.

  “Well, I just knew he didn’t do it, so I thought I’d save Mike the trouble of thinking he did.”

  “And now you know you were wrong.”

  “No, I wasn’t. You’ll see. Goddy’s no murderer.”

  “Aw, you and Jill and all you women, you always think the sweet little ones can’t do any wrong.”

  “We’re right about you, aren’t we?”

  Lars blinked, grinned, and said, “Got you fooled, don’t I?”

  Betsy turned and this time went all the way through to the back door and out.

  She imagined it was a full thirty seconds before a massive frown formed on Lars’s broad, low forehead. Work? Upstairs? But she worked here.

  Only most of the time, my friend.

  When she got upstairs, she realized she still didn’t have a USB cord and so couldn’t even begin to access John’s hard drive. She called Gary.

  “I hate to bother you again so soon, are you busy?” she asked.

  “Playing computer games is all,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I have a new hard drive, or rather a different one, another copy of someone else’s hard drive. I’ve been told it’s protected by a password and that some of it is encrypted. Any ideas?”

  “Is this more of that special deal you’re working on?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Great! Can I come over right now?” He sounded eager.

  She was pleased to be able to say with
equal eagerness, “I’d love it if you could come over right now.”

  He rang the doorbell a few minutes later, and within minutes of that was happily hooking up her computer to the hard drive. She stood behind him, hoping to learn something esoteric about computers—then her phone rang and she hurried away to answer it.

  “Hello, Ms. Devonshire, this is Charlie Nye. I understand you’ve been wanting to talk to me.”

  “Yes, I have. I’ve got good news for you. I have a copy of your brother’s hard drive, and we are at this minute trying to find a way past his passwords.”

  “Would you be willing to let me look, too?”

  “Certainly. Can you come over right now?”

  Sixteen

  BETSY went back into the guest bedroom. Her computer monitor was showing the Microsoft Word screen under the smaller screen on which files were listed, and, partly covering that, another screen asking for a password. There was a faint grinding sound, as of a disk turning, coming from her computer, and suddenly the password icon went away. Gary gave a grunt of satisfaction as a file opened.

  He clicked and typed a command and clicked again. “I took off the password protection,” he said. “You’ll be able to open any of these by just clicking on them.”

  He opened a few to show her, then one he opened filled the screen with gibberish: rows of dots, random numbers and letters, swatches of white space. “Encrypted,” Gary explained. He took out his password-finder disk and put it in. Seconds later, the screen changed, but only to more gibberish, which immediately faded to another screen of gibberish. This continued for a couple of minutes, and then the fade was to English.

  She touched Gary on the top of his dark hair. “You are so brilliant!” she said, and he grinned. She bent forward to look at the now-decipherable screen. “What have we here?” she said.

  It appeared to be a financial statement of some kind, but one belonging to Christopher Bright, who banked at First Wisconsin of Menomonee, a town down I-94 from the Twin Cities. He was further identified with what was probably his Social Security number, and a birthdate that made him about twenty-seven. He had a substantial balance of close to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, split among a savings account, a money market, and an investment fund called QuikGro.