Hanging by a Thread

by Monica Ferris

  There was a pause while computer keys rattled faintly. “Yes, he’s our second shift engine assembly line supervisor,” reported the man in personnel.

  “How long has he worked for you?” asked Betsy.

  “Hmmm, twelve years.”

  “Always second shift?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Betsy allowed her voice to soften. “Well, I’ve got a cousin who’s working first shift and he has an idea he’d like to try second, now he and his wife have a baby. This way, they don’t have to put him in day care. But I was wondering if people who work second shift stay with it. I mean, the hours are screwy, you’re trying to sleep when everyone else is up, and so on.”

  She looked over and saw Jill staring at her with raised eyebrows, and looked away again, lest she start laughing.

  The personnel manager said, “Well, I’ve never worked second shift, but Mr. Miller has been on it for seven years.”

  “Is he late a lot, or taking a lot of sick leave? I mean, Will is very reliable and all, but I’m wondering if that might change.”

  “I don’t think checking just one record is going to help you much, you know.”

  “You know, you’re right. I shouldn’t be asking you all this, anyhow. His wife asked me for advice and I don’t know what to tell her. He says the pay is better if he’ll move to second shift, and they could really use the money.”

  The manager sighed. “Tell me about it. And for what it’s worth, Miller takes all his vacation in one lump every December and he hasn’t been late or off sick since he started that shift.”

  “Say, that’s very encouraging.” Betsy resumed her brisk voice. “Thank you very much. Good-bye and have a nice day.” She hung up.

  Jill, leaning against the box shelves that divided the counted cross-stitch back of the shop from the knitting and needlepoint front, said, “Girl, I had no idea you were such a con artist.”

  “Well, what else could I do? You wouldn’t help me!”

  “I take it the news is bad.”

  “Not for him. He was at work the night Paul was murdered.”

  “Ah. Too bad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re back to Foster, then.”

  “Yeah.” Betsy opened the cash register and began to put the opening-up paper and silver into the drawer. “Alex did tell me he didn’t know what Paul was doing to him until after Paul had been dead a while. I was hoping he was lying.” She mulled that setback over while the soft airs of something classical played on the radio. Then she asked, “Do you know where Comfort Leckie lives?”

  “No, why?”

  “I want to ask her something.”

  Jill murmured, “Bulldog, bulldog, rah, rah, rah.”

  “What?”

  “Just glad you’re not quitting. I’m sure she’s in the phone book, why don’t you call her?”

  “All right, in a while.”

  Jill, smiling, said, “How about I buy you lunch in a couple of hours? You can tell me all about it.”

  Betsy laughed. “All right. But it’s my turn to buy.”

  “Comfort, it’s Betsy Devonshire.”

  “Hello, Betsy. What’s up?”

  “I was thinking about your story of seeing Paul’s ghost in the bookstore. Do you know about what time of the evening that was?”

  “Let me think. It was such a long time ago ...”

  Betsy waited patiently, and at last Comfort said, “Near as I can remember, it was after six-thirty. It was dark—real dark, not the dark you get when the weather is bad, but I don’t think it was as late as seven. It was windy, the wind turned my umbrella inside out. It was sleeting hard and had been for a while, there was slush on the streets and sidewalks. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  “Yes, that’s it. Thanks, Comfort.”

  “I take it you’ll explain that question one of these days.”

  “I sure hope so. Bye.”

  “May I special-order the linen?” Mrs. Hubert asked Godwin. She had just paid for several Marc Saastad iris patterns—she grew varieties of iris in her beautiful front yard, and the Saastad patterns were very accurate about varieties—and the expensive silks to stitch them. But Crewel World didn’t have the high-count linen in the shade of green she wanted.

  Godwin considered that. Special orders were a special pain for a small business. It cost twice as much per yard to order a small piece as it did to order five or more yards, plus there was the rapid-delivery cost, and of course the customer grudged the difference—and only too often found the fabric at another store before the special order arrived, or changed her mind altogether about the project.

  “Can you pay in advance?” asked Godwin.

  Now it was the customer’s turn to consider the problems with that. “How much?” she asked after a pause. Godwin had already calculated the add-on charges, and named a price that included a small profit.

  “I’ll write you a check—can you get it before the fifteenth of November? We’re leaving for Florida the twentieth.”

  “Certainly. I’ll call Norden Crafts today.” Godwin wrote up the order and phoned it in as soon as Mrs. Hubert left. He bantered a bit with salesman/owner Dave Stott and, so long as he had him on the line, placed another order for three more Kwanzaa patterns. Stott reported the linen was in stock, and said he might be able to get it in the mail yet today.

  The door went Bing! a few minutes later, and so did Godwin’s heart when he saw the incredibly handsome Rik Lightfoot come in.

  “Hi,” said Rik in his rich voice.

  “Hi,” said Godwin, batting his eyelashes furiously. “May I help you, I really, really hope?”

  Rik laughed. “Down, boy, I’m heterosexual. I thought I had enough Anchor 308 for that lab pattern, but it turns out I don’t.” He went to the wooden cabinet and ran a forefinger down the sets of shallow drawers until he found the deep golden brown he was looking for. He bought two skeins and said, “Where’s the lady who was behind the counter last time I came in?”

  “She’s at lunch. She’s heterosexual, too.”

  Rik laughed and Godwin thought he’d melt right into his penny loafers.

  “Is it true that the best bass fishing in the state is right here in Lake Minnetonka?” asked Rik.

  “I’ve heard that,” hazarded Godwin, who didn’t know one of the biggest bass fishing tournaments in the country was held on the lake every year.

  “Can people fish off the docks here?”

  “Sure,” said Godwin, who had no idea at all if that were true.

  “I want to see if a technique I learned in Montana works here. You see, you skip your jig sideways so it goes under the dock, where fish hang out in the shadow of the boards, just like they hide around sunken logs or under water lilies.” Rik made a sideways casting gesture and Godwin melted all over again at the display of shoulder and back.

  “You make it sound really interesting,” said Godwin fervently, leaning on the desk to get just a little closer to the man.

  “Well, Minnesota makes a lot of famous lures, and with all those lakes, I should think just about everyone here likes to fish.”

  “Oh, I agree with that,” nodded Godwin without mentioning he was an exception.

  “It must be nice, living right on the shore of such a great lake.”

  “I love to go out on the water,” said Godwin. “I get out there whenever I can in the summer.”

  “Of course, Mille Lacs is good, too,” continued Rik.

  “That’s what I hear,” said Godwin, whose only trip to that lake was to visit an Indian casino.

  “Nothing like a fresh walleye. The best I ever had I caught in a Canadian lake that didn’t even have a road to it, we had to fly in. Caught my limit in less than an hour. Used a spoon. Dropped it ...” Again Rik made a casting gesture, this time forward, toward the door. “I barely started to reel it in when all of a sudden, bam, he hit that line and took off with it. I thought I was gonna lose him, he ran right up along the shore, wou
nd himself around tree roots, practically buried himself in some big rocks. But I just set the reel and let him go, and pretty soon he came right back at me, and five minutes later he came alongside the boat, tame as a kitten, practically asking me to take him out of the water.”

  “How ... interesting,” said Godwin, a little desperately.

  “I tell you, after eating those fillets, I just about swore off fishing back in the States. But it’s the sport that draws me, I do a lot of catch and release now.”

  “I suppose that happens a lot,” said Godwin. “I mean to people who have eaten walleye fillets, er, caught with a spoon in Canada.”

  Rik, enlightened, laughed. “Yes, you’re right. Well, thanks for an interesting conversation—what’s your name?”

  “Godwin DuLac. Nice to meet you. Come back again when you need anything in the needle arts line.”

  He watched Rik go with a little sigh, and when Betsy came back from lunch, he announced that he had saved her from a terrible fate: having to listen to fish talk. “I tell you, I thought that man was perfect, he is so handsome and he does needlework and he drives a Porsche, for heaven’s sake. But he not only fishes, he loves to talk about it. Do you know what he told me? He said he fishes with a spoon! Is that possible? Or did he see my eyes glazing over and start to spoof me?”

  “There’s a kind of fishing lure called a spoon,” said Betsy, laughing at his woebegone expression. “So I take it he is gay?”

  “Oh. Well, no, he said he. was heterosexual when he heard me panting at his approach. But if you are wise, Betsy, when he comes in again, run for the back room or he’ll start teaching you how to cast under a dock.”

  “All right,” lied Betsy, who used to love to fish. “Anything else interesting happen while I was gone?”

  “Well, I sold a set of Kwanzaa patterns, that’s the third set, so I told Dave to send us three more. And—I hope you aren’t angry about this, but I took a special order. I know you don’t like them, but it’s for Mrs. Hubert, and she bought all the silks as well as the patterns for three Saastad irises, plus she paid in advance.” He held out the order.

  “And she agreed to pay a premium for the fabric, so it’s all right,” said Betsy, looking at it. “But before it happens again, I want to try something Susan Greening Davis suggested, and call some other shops to see if we can’t order some of this less popular stuff together. If I can get three others to go in with me, the order will be big enough to get a price break.”

  “But you don’t have room for more fabric on your shelves,” warned Godwin. “And you’re already storing stock in the bathroom.”

  “I know. Goddy, do you think it would be a good idea to set up some storage shelves in the basement? I was thinking of moving all the household stuff out of there and putting the stock in that back room into the basement. I nearly broke my neck yesterday trying to reach that top shelf.”

  “I know. But if you start thinking you’ve got lots of storage room, next thing you know, you’ll have way too much money tied up in stock.”

  “Hmmm.” That was a good point. The temptation was to carry items no one else did. What fun it would be placing an order for some of the real exotica ! But the intelligent way to offer a wider range of products was to expand, to move the deli or the bookstore out and take over the space, so the stock could be out on shelves for her customers to see and be tempted by. On the other hand, she was barely making ends meet in the needlework shop right now, while Jack and Fort were paying their rent every single month. Could she afford to take a big hit while her expanded store got on its feet? Not really. Maybe she should work harder on getting the present Crewel World farther into the black before considering expansion.

  Of course, having made that decision, the next two customers each wanted uncommon patterns Betsy didn’t carry. The idea of expansion remained a flickering hope in the recesses of her heart.

  “Where are we going?” asked Betsy that evening, as Morrie handed her up into his big Wagoneer.

  “A place called Thanh Do.”

  “Vietnamese food.” Betsy nodded, pleased. She had changed into a royal blue dress he liked on her because, he said, it showed how blue her eyes were. She carried a delicate shawl a shade lighter than the dress in case of drafts, but wore her heavy winter coat for the journey because the forecast was for temperatures to drop below thirty.

  He got in on his side and said, “Not just Vietnamese, they do all kinds of Asian food. It’s becoming very popular, and I think you’ll like it.” A true Minnesotan, he just wore a sweater-vest under a wool sports coat.

  They drove up Highway 7 to just past Knollwood Mall in St. Louis Park, turned left on Texas and went to Minnetonka, left again and almost immediately turned into a parking lot beside a dry cleaners. The parking lot was narrow but deep and behind the dry cleaners was a two-window storefront with a modest green sign. “Thanh Do,” it read, the A formed by a pair of red chopsticks. A red hibiscus bloomed in one window.

  Morrie had made it sound fancier than this, but she didn’t say anything—he was very reliable about restaurants.

  They alighted and went in. A significant portion of the floor space was taken up by a life-size gray stone statue of Buddha as a slim young man surrounded by plants and bamboo. A table or altar with lit candles stood in front of the statue and a fat sitting Buddha was on it. The air was fragrant not only with the usual “Chinese restaurant” smells of hot sugar, garlic, ginger and meat, but also of herbs.

  A waiter with blond hair and delicate metal earrings took them to a black Naugahyde booth in back. He left them with big ivory-colored menus that noted that all meals were cooked from scratch with fresh ingredients, so customers were asked to be patient.

  “What do you recommend?” asked Betsy.

  “Well, do you like seafood?”

  “Yes, but only on the coasts, where it’s fresh. Why?”

  “Never mind.”

  Betsy looked and found the item he was hinting about, a teriyaki dish for two called Pacific Blue, containing shrimp, scallops, squid, salmon, and yellow-fin tuna on a bed of steamed vegetables and wood mushrooms. A pair of asterisks warned it was spicy. She was tempted, but the herb-scented air made her decide on single-asterisk Vietnamese basil chicken. Morrie chose a triple-asterisk curry dish and asked them to bump it up to four stars. She ordered a Chinese beer, Morrie a Beck’s Dark.

  “So how’s the sleuthing coming along?” Morrie asked while they waited for their food.

  “Paul murdered Angela, and I think I’ve figured out how.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You know he worked in that gift shop called Heritage II, on the comer of Second and Water?”

  Morrie nodded.

  “Well, Heritage and the pet shop next door and the bookstore next to that are all in one building, with a single basement.”

  Morrie’s eyebrows rose. “You don’t mean Sergeant Malloy doesn’t know that.”

  “No, he knows it, he even checked on it right away. But there are board walls dividing the basement space according to the shop space overhead, and while there used to be gates between them, they were nailed shut years before the murder took place.”

  “Ah,” nodded Morrie. “But you think ... ?”

  “Well, first of all, I thought it was odd he didn’t come out to see what the commotion was about when the window of the bookstore was broken. After all, he took that job to keep an eye on Angela, so he’d be sensitive to anything happening outside and nearby. Even a thunderstorm doesn’t make a racket every minute, and he should have at least heard the sirens. I think he didn’t come out because he had to stay dry, so his alibi would work.

  “You think he came through the basement spaces?”

  “Yes. It’s true, people will tell you, that these gates were nailed shut many years ago. However, if you go look at them, they are screwed shut.”

  “Screwed, nailed, what’s the difference?”

  “I think Paul concluded some while before the
murder that Angela and Foster were in love, and that’s why he decided to murder her. Then he waited for several things to come together. One was the storm. Rain or snow, it didn’t matter, but it had to be wet out. I think he pulled the nails on those gates so he could get through to the bookstore, so he’d be bone dry when Mike Malloy went to talk to him after Angela was shot. It’s possible he put the screws in, just in case someone tugged on the gates, but when conditions were right, he unscrewed them. It was Angela’s night to close up, she was alone in the store. Foster had come by to wave at her. Paul went down through the basements, up into the bookstore, and shot Angela. On his way back, Paul screwed the bookstore gate shut—no sound of hammering, by the way—then went down late that night or the next day and screwed the gate between the pet shop and the gift shop closed. He used rusty screws he brought from home—have a witness who saw the jars of screws in his workshop. His cousin, who now lives in his house, described how he kept a very neat shop, with new and rusty old screws and nails and such kept in separate jars.”

  The waiter brought their beer and frosty glasses and Morrie poured his professionally, down the inside of the glass, so it wouldn’t form a big head. “I take it you’ve looked at the gates?”

  “I looked in the pet store basement and in the bookstore basement. They are screws, not nails; they have that slot in the head. They’re on the pet store side of the gate to the bookstore.”

  Morrie looked interested. “And are there, by chance, nail holes beside the screws?”

  “No.”

  He winced with regret at scoring a point and looked away.

  “But,” said Betsy, “I had a shelf fall down in my shop the other day, and Jill told me to use wood screws a size bigger and put them in the nail holes when I put it back up. Paul Schmitt was a good amateur carpenter, he would surely think of that. And, since he used old screws, they weren’t shiny new when Mike went to take a look at the gate. This isn’t proof he murdered his wife, but you see how his alibi isn’t worth spit anymore.”