Hanging by a Thread

by Monica Ferris

  She woke up to find herself sleeping on her belly, crosswise on the bed, one arm reaching out. “Maybe I should have tried the curry instead of eating all that basil,” she muttered, straightening herself around, pulling the sheet and blanket back into place. She pushed the little button on her watch, whose face obediently lit up. Four o’clock. She had another hour and a half to sleep—today was early-bird water aerobics day. She rubbed her forehead and composed herself for sleep.

  No good. She got up, grumbling.

  The stupid dream had her wide awake.

  Sophie, wondering what she was doing awake at such an hour, came to ask if, so long as they were up, perhaps Betsy could give her loyal, loving cat a little snack? “Not a chance,” Betsy told the cat. “If I feed you now at”—she checked her watch—“four ten A.M., my God, then when I do get up at five-thirty because it’s Friday and I have early-bird water aerobics, you’ll have very conveniently forgotten all about this, and want your breakfast. Again. It may also cause you to decide this is customary, rising at four to feed the cat. But it isn’t, so I won’t. Now, go to your basket and take a nap. Shoo.”

  Having after countless lessons learned that Betsy could not be cajoled away from no when it came to food, the animal did as she was told; except she didn’t take a nap, but leaned on one elbow to stare at Betsy with her yellow eyes at half mast, thinking resentful, self-pitying thoughts.

  Betsy ignored her and sat down in an easy chair, turned on the standard lamp that stood behind it, and reached for her knitting, which lived in a big, bowl-shaped basket beside the chair. She had three projects under way and, considering the tired state of her mind, picked the easiest one, a thin blanket meant to be sent to Africa, part of a program her church was sponsoring. She was using an inexpensive acrylic yarn, not because she was cheap but because it could stand repeated washing, even in very hot water. There was no complexity to the stitchery, just knit and knit and knit—though she was changing colors every eight inches. But that was more to keep herself from being totally bored than to provide something a little less plain for the unfortunate individual who would sleep under it.

  It took a great many stitches to get a width sufficient for even a narrow blanket, and even the promise of a change from mint green to tangerine in another three inches didn’t help all that much. Betsy could knit much faster now than she could a year ago, but she was not yet up to a speed that would impress anyone but a beginner. The blanket was growing very slowly.

  But after a few minutes she stopped noticing how slowly the work was progressing and fell into a state that was almost like meditation. Giving her hands something to do stopped that little voice that recited a list of things she should be doing: cleaning the bathroom, dusting, updating the books, reviewing her investments—she had an appointment with Mr. Penberthy next week, and he could always tell when she had merely glanced at them. That little voice was silent now because she was doing something.

  On the other hand, what she was doing took about seven of her brain cells, which freed the rest to wander around and inspect the newest information she had logged into her head.

  Funny how everyone had thought Paul killed himself when they first heard about his death. Jory had said Paul looked sick with sorrow over his wife’s murder. Even if Paul had been obsessed rather than in love, it must have been terrible for him to have lost her.

  And that would be true even if he had murdered her. Because if he had murdered her, it was because he thought he had already lost her, to another man.

  So it would make sense for him to have committed suicide.

  That was the ugly pattern in so many cases, a man kills his estranged wife, and then himself. Betsy thrust the needles angrily for a few stitches. What a stupid thing, that “take her with me” syndrome! Where did they think they were going? Were they suddenly some kind of pagan, thinking that in the afterlife she would be a loving spouse again?

  But in Paul’s case the evidence was clear, it wasn’t murder-suicide. Paul may have murdered Angela, but someone else had killed him. Who? Someone he had planned to kill, who turned the tables and killed him? Then why not come forward? Fear of arrest? People didn’t go to jail for killing in self-defense.

  Suppose Paul had been planning to murder Foster, and make it look like suicide. Had it been Foster at the Schmitt house? Was Treeny Larson right when she said it took only a few minutes to pull out those blueprints and papers to make it look as if Foster had been working for hours? Had Malloy gone over the papers, or had someone who really understood them looked them over, to see if they were merely random papers?

  Foster Johns was happy because Betsy had broken Paul Schmitt’s alibi. Betsy wondered if it was possible to prove that Paul had replaced the nails with screws. Perhaps, if the nails had been significantly longer than the screws. There would be a tell-tale hole that went past the end of the screw. She would have to tell Jill about that.

  Rik Lightfoot was a bore about fishing, Godwin said. Betsy hadn’t been fishing since—wow, was it really twenty years? More like twenty-five, actually. Anyway, he was much, much too young for her. When she had last gone fishing, he wasn’t even a teenager yet. How strange it was, to be that much older than a grown man, and still feel the juices rise. She remembered something her mother said once, about looking in a mirror and wondering who that old woman was. “The heart stays young, Betsy,” she’d said. And so it did.

  Was Morrie surprised at the silver-haired man who looked back at him during the morning shave?

  How nice it would be, to hear that faint scraping sound of a man shaving again, and smell the sweet-sharp scent of aftershave newly applied! Funny the things one missed when there wasn’t a man in the house.

  Rats, she’d dropped a stitch. She’d only gone two stitches past it, so she unknitted two and picked it up.

  She thought about her dream, about the resistant wallet. Where had that come from? Of course, from telling Morrie the story of the practical joke her mother had played when a child. People must have been awfully dumb not to have seen that string. Just as she was, in her dream, not seeing the big rubber band that yanked the wallet out of her feeble fingers.

  She was getting sleepy again. She folded the needles beside each other and stuck them into the ball of yarn. Yawning, she stood and stretched a kink out of her shoulders.

  “A-row?” asked Sophie.

  “Back to bed, Sophie,” said Betsy. “Let’s hope I don’t go running after any more wallets in my dreams.”

  She massaged her scalp vigorously as she started back to her bedroom. Then she stopped.

  Could it be?

  “Ra-arow?” asked Sophie.

  Betsy needed to talk to someone who spoke English. But who, at four forty-five?

  “Jill!” Betsy said. Jill was still on nights at present, a thankless job in a sedate and orderly town like Excelsior; perhaps she might welcome an interruption. Jill carried a personal cell phone, which she could turn off while giving someone a ticket or taking part in an arrest. Betsy dialed the number and was pleased when she got a gruff, “Yeah?”

  “Jill, it’s me, Betsy. Have you got a minute?”

  “What on earth are you doing up at this hour?”

  “I think I know what happened to Paul. It all depends on where the gun is.”

  “What gun?”

  “The gun Paul used to shoot Angela, and which was used on him.”

  “I thought no one knew where it is.”

  “I think I do. But you’ll need to get a search warrant.”

  “I can’t ask for a search warrant; I’m not an investigator. Anyway I’m not assigned to the case.”

  “Who is?”

  “Mike for Angela’s murder, someone in Orono for Paul’s. What happened, what did you find out?”

  “I went out to dinner with Morrie last night and then I had this dream about a wallet.”

  “Betsy, why don’t you go back to bed and get some more sleep?” Jill could remember another time when Bets
y got all excited about a conclusion she’d reached based mostly on wishful thinking and exhaustion.

  “No, it’s almost time for me to get up anyway, I have water aerobics this morning.”

  “Then tell me what it is you think you’ve figured out.”

  And Betsy did.

  Jill, a patient listener, didn’t interrupt. When Betsy was done, Jill said, “What if the gun isn’t there?”

  “Well, then, it’s all snow on my boots. Gone with the first breath of hot air.” For some reason that tickled Betsy a bit and she giggled.

  “I don’t know if we can get a search warrant based on just that theory.”

  “Then let’s just go out there and ask if we can look.”

  “Not at this hour. No one with any brains is going to allow people to tramp all over their living room at five o’clock in the morning. Let me talk to Mike in the morning, and if he’s not game, I’ll call Orono PD.” Orono supplied law enforcement for its three suburbs, including Navarre.

  Jill must have used all her powers of persuasion—more even than Betsy used in persuading herself to follow her morning routine and drive to Golden Valley for her exercise—because when Betsy came home, there was a phone message for her from Jill. And when she and Jill drove up to Paul Schmitt’s old house about nine, there were three official-looking dark cars and a squad car waiting.

  Mike Malloy was beside one dark car, looking uncomfortable and grumpy. He cast a skittish eye on Betsy, then went over to say something to the blue-jowled man in an open overcoat standing nearby. The blue-jowled man looked as if he’d been sent by central casting to play the role of a police detective. As Malloy looked at Betsy and laughed, the blue-jowled man rolled his eyes and lifted his arms a little in a tired shrug. Betsy felt a twinge of doubt and wished she was as sure she was right as she’d been a few hours ago. This immediately turned into a stab of anger. Of course she was right!

  Jill, still in uniform, walked over to the pair, motioning Betsy to follow. She introduced Betsy to Sergeant Fulk Graham, Orono PD, in a respectful voice, but merely nodded at Malloy.

  Then Betsy saw the real reason for this turnout: Morrie Steffans, looking nonchalant until he sneaked a wink at her. A senior investigator, he had the pull to convince these people to come around. Jill must have called him. Jill went next to talk to him, and her smile had a subtle element of triumph to it when she glanced toward Betsy.

  Please, please, let me be right, thought Betsy. For the first time she realized that being wrong would not only reflect badly on her, it could put a major kink in Jill’s career. But she took a steadying breath and went up to Jill.

  “Has anyone knocked yet?” she asked.

  “No, we were waiting for you,” said Mike brusquely.

  “Let’s get this show on the road, can we?” said the Orono detective.

  Betsy went up on the porch and rang the doorbell. She had phoned the house early this morning and caught Mrs. Searles in the confusion of trying to get her children out in time to catch their bus, and her husband off to work. Yes, she would be at home today, and yes, Betsy could come out and if Kaitlyn didn’t stop feeding her toast to Toby, there would be no toast for her in this house ever again.

  The kids had departed, as had the husband. The house was warm and smelled of bread rising and Lemon Pledge. Mrs. Searles had left the fireplace alone, as instructed. Morrie had a flashlight, but so did Betsy, and Mike, and Jill, and the Orono cop.

  It was Morrie, being slim and having long arms, who got to twist himself between the glass doors and shine a flashlight up the chimney. He grunted and came back out, soot marring the snowy white of his shirt sleeves.

  “There’s something up there, all right,” he said. “Looks like a cord of some sort. But no gun.”

  Mike frowned, but didn’t say anything. He’d been wrong about the gates and just the presence of the cord was a point in Betsy’s favor.

  “Isn’t there a ledge up there?” asked Jill. “You know, where the chimney narrows.”

  Morrie put the flashlight down on the hearth and twisted himself back into the firebox, one long arm reaching upward. There was a scrabbling, scraping sound as he fumbled for the ledge—and a surprised grunt when he found something.

  He came back out with a large and very dirty semi-automatic pistol in a filthy hand. “Heck of a hiding place,” he noted. “Might’ve gone off and hurt someone.”

  “Son of a bitch!” said Malloy.

  “The one place we didn’t think to look,” said Fulk, staring hard at Malloy.

  The slide was very resistant, but at last yielded and showed the gun to be empty.

  “He used the last bullet on himself, because he didn’t want it to go off and show people where it went,” said Betsy.

  “Who didn’t?” asked Mrs. Searles, staring at the weapon.

  “Paul Schmitt,” said Betsy.

  17

  “I will work here forever,” promised Godwin, right hand raised, “but only if you tell us everything.” He was sitting at the library table, his lunch of a chef’s salad—dressing on the side—forgotten in the excitement. Beside him was Shelly, a schoolteacher who worked part time during the school year—she was supposed to be at a teacher’s conference today but called in sick when Betsy phoned to ask her to work.

  Shelly had planned to miss just the morning sessions, but when Betsy came in all cock-a-hoop with news of a resolution, she decided the heck with it.

  Jill was also present, tired but smiling, as were Alice and Martha. Betsy had called Alice on her way back from Navarre, asking her to come in for a “vindication.” Alice had phoned Martha, who drove them both over.

  And Foster Johns, sitting very still in a chair at the other end of the table from Betsy—but his stillness was that of a bottle of beer shaken hard and its open top covered with a thumb.

  “It was Paul who murdered Angela,” began Betsy. “He went through the basement from the gift shop to the bookstore.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Martha. “I don’t understand about Paul going through the basement. If it was that simple, how did Mike miss it?”

  “The gift shop, the pet store, and the bookstore are all in one building,” said Betsy.

  “Yes, I know, it’s the Tonka Building,” said Martha. “That comer store started life as a Ford dealership, back in the late forties, early fifties.”

  “Anyway,” said Betsy, “there’s one basement under all three stores. Then some owner decided each store should have its own storage area, and put up board walls. But they cut gates through them, probably in case of fire, or so that if someone later joined two stores together, he could use all the space without having to come upstairs to get from one part to the next. But after that, someone nailed the gates shut, possibly to prevent theft.”

  “But if the gates were nailed shut, how did Paul get from the gift shop to the bookstore?” asked Shelly.

  “Paul pulled the nails,” said Betsy.

  “And no one noticed?” asked Martha.

  “No, because on his way back to his shop after he shot Angela, he put screws in the same holes, using rusty screws from his collection in his home woodworking shop so they’d look like they’d been in place for years. I noticed there were screws holding the gates shut even though everyone kept saying the gates were nailed shut. That didn’t prove he killed her, but it broke his alibi.”

  “That’s better than Mike could do,” said Godwin.

  “That’s right,” said Alice.

  Betsy continued, “And when Mike Malloy searched the bookstore for clues, he missed another one, the shell casing that flew out of the pistol when Paul fired it. Paul needed that casing found to complete his frame-up of Foster Johns.”

  “Why?” asked Martha.

  “Because when he shot Angela, the bullet went out the window and disappeared. The police can compare slugs, and Paul wanted it understood that the same gun that killed Angela was used in another murder. But shell casings are almost as goo
d, and Mike didn’t find the casing that flew out of Paul’s gun when he shot Angela.”

  “But they did find a casing,” objected Shelly. “In fact, they found two of them.”

  “No, at first Mike couldn’t find any. Then after Paul was shot, and shell casings were found, he went back and looked again. This time he found one. The second one was found when the bookstore replaced some shelving. But only one bullet was fired in the shop.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Alice.

  “Remember when Comfort said she saw Paul’s ghost? That wasn’t a ghost, that was Paul, planting a shell casing. Mike hadn’t found the first one and Paul needed it found so he could frame Foster for the murder.”

  “Foster was framed?” exclaimed Martha. “You mean, he didn’t murder Paul, either?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Hah!” exclaimed Alice, smacking the surface of the table with a large hand.

  “It was just what everyone thought it was when they heard Paul was dead,” said Betsy. “A murder-suicide. Paul shot Angela and then himself. But he decided to play one last vicious practical joke by framing someone else for both deaths.”

  “Oh, are you sure?” asked Martha in a terrible voice.

  “Yes,” said both Betsy and Jill together.

  “Oh, but ... Oh, that’s terrible, because ...” She bit her underlip and fell silent.

  Betsy continued, “I think Paul first intended the police to think Angela was killed in a robbery, but when he shot her, the bullet went out through the front window, drawing immediate attention, so he fled down the stairs, pausing only long enough to drive a wood screw into the nail hole on the pet store side, so when Mike went down there, the gate was fastened shut. If Paul had taken time to break the lock on the back door, the notion of a robbery gone wrong might still have been a logical theory. But the back door is all the way at the back, and the stairs to the basement are behind the checkout counter, right where he was standing, and people were running toward the store.