The Drowning Spool (A Needlecraft Mystery)

by Ferris, Monica

  BETSY had always thought of her Buick as a big car, but with Lars in the passenger seat, it seemed to have shrunk to the size of a sports car. While not in the least obese, he was a very big man, and he came dressed for the outdoors in snow pants and a heavy jacket. He overflowed the passenger side of the front seat; she could feel his jacket brushing her arm. She wondered if he had a gun under it. Of course he did, he was a cop, they were always carrying. She was sure it was a big gun. Probably an AR-15—a man his size could carry one as a sidearm. Betsy had never felt so safe in her life.

  Looking down at the huge boots he wore, she wondered what size they could possibly be. Seventeen? Twenty? Extra-extra wide? He must have to special order them. In the summer he could rent them out as cabins to tourists.

  He also had the biggest thermos Betsy had ever seen. “Coffee,” he’d said when she’d noticed it in his gloved hands.

  Now his gloves were off, draped across one massive knee. His wedding band winked in the faint light cast by a light high up on a pole in the barnyard of Tommy’s landlord’s hobby farm.

  They were parked alongside the road, hidden from the house by a short row of overgrown lilac bushes. Tommy’s old car sagged in the driveway that crossed between the barnyard and the snow-covered front lawn. There was a garage, not attached to the house. Betsy was sure the landlord’s car was tucked safely away in there.

  An hour later she was getting cold. She wanted to start the car and run the heater, but there were lights on in the house, and out here in the country sounds carried. The sound of a car starting and then not moving away might draw a look out the window—and if Betsy could see the upstairs window, then someone looking out could see her car. She sighed and wiggled her bottom, hoping to stir up her blood.

  “Coffee?” suggested Lars.

  But Betsy thought about the lack of bathroom facilities and said, “Not right now, thank you.”

  A silence fell.

  Betsy asked, “Have you done many stakeouts?”

  “A few.”

  “How do you pass the time?”

  “Talk about fishing. Or cars. Or sports.” He sighed and looked out the window. “What do you and Connor talk about?”

  “Needlework. English music-hall songs. Being a tourist in Europe. We’re planning a trip to East Glacier Park this summer.”

  “Not much crossover there, huh?”

  Betsy smiled in the near-darkness. “Not much. I’m kind of sorry now I agreed with Jill to swap you for Connor—and I bet she’s feeling the same.”

  • • •

  “ARE those pecans in the chicken salad?” asked Rafael.

  “Yes. And cranberries instead of golden raisins. Isn’t this exciting?”

  “Not really, mi gorrion. But it is fun, more fun than I thought it was going to be. Do you think we will actually see something happening?”

  “Probably not. I’m getting cold. Start the car for a little while. Is it time to check in yet?”

  Rafael checked his watch. “Not yet.”

  • • •

  CONNOR and Jill were discussing needlework. “I’m not a big fan of counted,” Connor was saying. “I mean, the results are spectacular, but . . . well, all those damn x’s.”

  Jill nodded. “Of course you can use other stitches. Samplers are a great way to explore the possibilities.”

  “I saw a great quote on a sampler: ‘You love someone because they sing a song only you can hear.’”

  “Why don’t you ask Betsy to marry you?”

  “I have. I ask her about once a month. So far she says no.” Uncomfortable with her question, he changed the subject. “What do you think Lars and Betsy are talking about?”

  “Fishing,” said Jill. “Children. Problems with owning a Stanley Steamer. What do you think?”

  “Owning your own small business,” he said, with a chuckle. “Knitting. Ireland. Cats. Speaking of which, would you like a cat? He’s very lively, we’ve got his health problems straightened out, and he’s been fixed.”

  “No, thank you. We have an absolutely enormous dog who would come to give him a big, wet kiss and accidentally swallow him whole.”

  • • •

  “WHAT time is it?” asked Lars.

  Betsy pressed the button on her Indiglo watch. “Half past midnight. How much longer should we sit here?”

  “Hey, you’re the one in charge of this shindig. You tell me.”

  “Give me a cup of coffee. Then I’ll be good for another hour, anyway.”

  • • •

  “DISAPPOINTED yet?” asked Connor.

  “I never was appointed,” said Jill. “I don’t think anything is going to happen.”

  “So why did you agree to go on this stakeout?”

  “Because I’ve been wrong before. More often than Betsy, really. Is she this good about other things? I mean, she’s some kind of phenom at sleuthing. Is she making you happy? Wait a minute, that’s a rude question. I must be getting tired. You don’t have to answer that.”

  “Thank you, I won’t. But she does. How did you and Lars meet?”

  • • •

  RAFAEL yawned prodigiously. “How much longer do we sit here?”

  “I’m not sure. Let’s ask Betsy. What did I do with my cell?”

  “Hush, look!”

  “Where? Oh my God, someone’s coming out of the house!”

  “No, wait, it’s not Pres, it’s Sony.”

  Rafael leaned toward the window. “What in the world is she doing up and out? It’s half past two! And what is she carrying? It looks like some kind of weird purse! Is she going somewhere?”

  “Oh my God, she’s opening the trunk! It’s not a purse, it’s one of those little vacuum cleaners! Call Betsy! Call Betsy!”

  • • •

  GODWIN, hero of the hour, was sitting proudly at the head of the library table in Crewel World. Phil and Doris were there, and Bershada, Tommy, Noah, Rafael, Betsy, and Connor.

  But not Sony or Pres, of course. Sony was in jail, and Pres was trying to convince his father-in-law that none of this was his fault.

  “What did you do when you saw her open that trunk?” asked Bershada.

  “Honked my horn,” said Godwin. “Flashed my lights.”

  “What did she do?”

  “Came across the street yelling at us. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ I rolled the window down the least little bit and said, as nicely as I could, ‘Oh, my dear, you are so busted.’”

  He laughed delightedly. “And Rafael is on the phone, shouting at Betsy, ‘Eet ees not Mister Preston, eet is Sonja!’” Godwin was exaggerating Rafael’s Spanish accent—though it was true that Rafael, under great stress, lost some of his fluency in English.

  Rafael, smiling broadly, nodded. “Just so,” he said, “Just so.”

  “Then what did she do?” asked Doris in her husky voice.

  “She ran back in the house, leaving the little vacuum cleaner on the ground and the trunk open. I found my cell phone on the floor and dialed 911, but they weren’t interested, there wasn’t a crime taking place. So I called Connor and while Rafael talked to Betsy, I talked to Connor. And then a squad car came up behind us!” Godwin laughed some more.

  “Betsy called 911,” guessed Bershada.

  “No, Sony did! She reported us as prowlers! Too, too, too delicious! They actually made us get out of the car and searched us and everything! I finally persuaded one of them to take Rafael’s cell—Betsy was still on the line! She explained what was going on, and meanwhile Connor had called Mike, and he called Minnetonka PD.”

  Godwin’s great good humor diminished abruptly. “Well, Mike was not happy with these goings-on, but what could he do? We had caught her with her hand in the jelly bean jar, almost literally. So he got a search warrant and summoned a tow truck, and I imagine that a forensic search of that trunk is happening right this minute!”

  He sat back and raked in the plaudits for a couple of minutes, then waxed serious. “But I still
don’t understand what she was thinking, Betsy. Why did she commit murder?”

  “She was desperately in love with Pres, had been from the start. When she got pregnant, her father applied a lot of pressure on Pres to marry her. Mr. Halloway then tried to make an honest businessman of his son-in-law. But Pres was of the opinion that he had done the right thing by Sony and it was up to Tony to make it worth his while.

  “He was pleased that his offspring was male, because he was the kind of man who thought having a son was better than having a daughter. Plus, his father-in-law was proud and pleased to have a grandson, and Big Tony had probably made it clear to Pres that keeping the father-in-law happy was a good thing. But Pres didn’t want any more children. One reason, perhaps, was that he was a serial adulterer, and life was much less complicated without any ‘accidents’ to mark his passage. So he had a vasectomy—but he didn’t tell Sony, because she wanted another child.

  “Sony suspected that Pres was unfaithful, but she used all her considerable willpower to suppress that knowledge. Pres was good to their son, he was an ardent lover, he had a fine job with a future, they had a nice home. She gave up a promising nursing career to stay home and keep everything running smoothly.

  “So see?” Betsy said, “there was someone who knew about drugs. And who kept her hospital ID in a scrapbook, so if she liked, she could pull it out and gain access to areas not open to the public. Such as the pharmacy.”

  “But why kill Teddi?” asked Phil. “She didn’t know the girl, did she?”

  “Sony intercepted a message from Teddi meant for Pres. Here was a reality she could not deny. Pres, who somehow was unable to give Sony another child, was giving one to another woman. It made a sham of her marriage, of her whole life. But she still loved Pres, and still wanted him as her husband—as her respectable, faithful, employed husband. What would her father do when he found out? Sony knew he already didn’t think much of Pres. No, no, this would not do, this would not do at all!”

  “So she killed her in cold blood,” said Godwin in a shocked voice.

  “Or perhaps in a hot, passionate rage!” Rafael pointed out.

  “I wonder if it might have been an accident,” said Betsy.

  “How can you ‘accidentally’ hold someone under water until they die?” demanded Tommy.

  “Let me tell you about a wicked Englishman named Smith,” said Betsy, and she did.

  Then she continued, “Now, here’s what I think might have happened. Sony continued to monitor Pres’s iPad or cell phone or whatever and found out that he’d made an appointment to meet Teddi late one evening. She goes over to Teddi’s house and finds Teddi taking a luxurious bath in a tub full of lavender-scented salts. There is a confrontation. Sony, intending just to duck Teddi, grabs her by the ankles and pulls. Teddi is instantly motionless, and Sony stands horrified at what she has done. She has killed someone. She can’t just leave her there; Pres is coming over, and if he finds the body, he will likely call 911 and may well end up charged with murder.

  “There is no open water anywhere, she can’t take Teddi’s body to a lake or river and dump it in so people will think she fell through the ice and drowned. The snow is deep, the ground is frozen, she can’t dig a grave. Then she remembers a place with a pool, a place with a secret entrance—a place her great-aunt showed her: Watered Silk’s therapy pool.

  “She takes the body out of the tub, and while the tub is emptying, she goes into Frey’s bedroom to get some clothing—and that shows you how blind I was!”

  “Blind how?” asked Bershada.

  “The clothes were wrong! Sony went into the wrong bedroom. She didn’t know which one was Teddi’s. Tommy did, Pres did, Noah did. They wouldn’t have made that simple mistake. But Sony had never been in Teddi’s house before. Anyway, Sony gets the clothing. She doesn’t bother to put it on Teddi’s body; after all, she’d only have to take it off again. And she’s in a hurry. She finds a handy sheet in the armoire and wraps Teddi’s body in it. She is a strong woman, she can carry the body and clothing down the stairs and out to the car. She hides them in the trunk and gets home ahead of her husband. She plies him with wine and, when he is deep, deep asleep, she slips out of the house and takes the body to Watered Silk. She thinks people will conclude that Teddi came to Watered Silk to go skinny-dipping and drowned.

  “But the autopsy made it clear that Teddi did not drown in the pool but in a bathtub full of lavender-scented bath salts. The police are called in and they are asking questions, like how did Teddi get into the pool?

  “And delightful Wilma Carter, her great-aunt, is a chatterbox, and starts to hint that she has told many people about the secret entrance. What if she admits that she told Sony?

  “So perhaps reluctantly, but with her usual efficiency, she pulls out her old hospital identification, which, I’ll wager, has a magnetic key that still opens a number of doors at St. Luke’s, where she used to work. Penney’s sells scrubs; she buys a set and slips into the pharmacy and takes a bottle of a powerful solution of atropine, the surgical kind that paralyzes the muscles and can suffocate a patient if their breathing is not mechanically supported. And she also takes a small-bore hypodermic.

  “Then she jiggles the cheap lock on the cabinet in Wilma’s room until it opens, takes out the box of Exelon, and uses the hypodermic to spill a lethal dose of atropine onto the patch inside its foil packet. She is nowhere around when the nurse comes in the next evening to put the patch between Wilma’s shoulder blades. Wilma suffocates very quietly that night, because she is unable to move or call for help.”

  “Oh, stop!” cried Godwin. “That’s too awful!”

  “Okay, I’ll stop. That’s the end of the story anyway, really.”

  “It’s Pres’s fault,” pronounced Bershada. “He drove her to it.”

  “No, it’s her fault,” said Noah. “She refused to face the facts about her husband.”

  “I’m just glad it’s over,” said Tommy.

  Betsy stood. “My throat’s gone all dry. Excuse me, I’m going to get a bottle of water from the back.”

  But Connor was faster.

  “Sit back down, machree, I’ll get it.” He walked swiftly away from the table, toward the far back of the shop.

  No one said anything for a minute.

  Then Jill spoke up. “I wonder what will become of their little boy,” she wondered.

  Connor came back to the table, twisting the top off a bottle. “What a sad question! Of course his father, who loves him, will take good care of him.”

  “Will he?” said Betsy. “I should think Little Tony would put a big crimp in his lifestyle.”

  “He is going to be so fired from his job,” said Tommy. “He won’t be able to afford a lifestyle, much less a kid.”

  “Maybe the grandfather would want him,” suggested Godwin.

  “Of course!” said Jill. “Big Tony would gladly step in—won’t he?”

  “I don’t know that,” said Betsy. “He hates Little Tony’s father. And his daughter has proved herself a half-crazy murderer. If he takes Little Tony in, I should think at least some of the time he’d be looking for signs of trouble in that child.”

  A sad silence fell.

  “All that selfishness,” murmured Connor. “What a pity, what a pity.” He put the opened bottle of water down in front of Betsy with a flourish. “But you, machree, carry no blame in this matter. You have dealt a blow for justice and saved several innocent men from the loss of their reputations and, in one case, the possible loss of his freedom. To quote Proverbs, ‘Give her credit for what her hands have made, and let her works praise her.’”

  A murmur of agreement went around the table, and Betsy quickly took up the bottle to drink from it in order to hide her pleasure at the praise.

  Dolphin Pattern

  Photocopy the pattern. (Any copy shop can make your photocopy larger or smaller to fit the size you want.) Tape it to a window at eye level, and tape a piece of white weaver’s cloth (or any t
hin, tightly woven fabric) over it at least three inches larger in all directions. Trace the pattern onto the cloth with a soft pencil. Punch needle work is a mirror image of the pattern—if you want the result to be the same as the pattern, turn the photocopy over before tracing.

  This pattern can repeat to give a continuous band of dolphins and waves. Move the weaver’s cloth left or right until the pattern on the photocopy butts up against the pattern on the cloth, and trace again. Stretch the cloth into a really good hoop that will hold the fabric tight.

  You will want a skein of white and two skeins of blue floss—DMC 825 and DMC 813, for example. (Any two similarly related colors of gray, green, or aqua will work. The number of skeins needed depends on the size you make the pattern.) Use the lighter color on the belly of the dolphin. Fill the space around the wave and dolphin in white.

  Optional instructions—if crafters have a punch needle, they already know this:

  Cut about a yard’s length from one of the skeins, and pull three threads from it.

  Turn the needle so the beveled edge faces up. Push the threader through the needle toward the handle until it extends beyond the end of the handle. Pull a couple of inches of the three threads through the looped portion of the threader, then draw the threader back down the punch needle and out the beveled end. Pass the threader, with the thread still attached, through the eye of the punch needle. Slip the threader from the thread. Pull the thread back until only about a quarter inch is coming out the end.

  Hold the punch needle’s handle like a pen and keep the beveled portion of the needle turned toward the direction you are going. Work on the outline of your pattern first. Punch through the fabric and pull it back up so it barely clears the surface. Make your stitches small and make the lines close together.

  The nap of the pattern forms on the underside of your fabric. Check it now and again to see how you are doing. When you near the end of your floss, lift the needle so that the end is on your working side. Refill the needle and continue. When you release the fabric from the hoop, it will close around the stitches, keeping them in place.