And Then You Dye

by Monica Ferris

  “You can patent a plant?”

  “Sure. Then you license other greenhouses to grow them or sell the seeds. Marge’s first big expansion of Green Gaia was paid for by another patent of a new variety of aster.”

  “She’s selling a lot of the red marigolds this summer, then?”

  “Oh, not that big a number. We’re keeping almost all of them for seed, so we’re just selling a limited quantity to the public. That’s why Marge was so angry about Ms. Brent taking the blooms. There’s a lot of money involved. We can expand this operation again if it hits like Marge thinks it will. But we have to be able to fill the orders for seeds.”

  But marigolds, red or otherwise, weren’t for sale, or even blooming, when Hailey was shot. “When did this theft of blooms happen?”

  “Last year. We were charging ten dollars a plant. Even though we had a very limited quantity, I was surprised when we sold out.”

  “Novelty sells,” said Betsy, the voice of commercial experience.

  “You bet.”

  “So Hailey stole the red marigold blooms last year. Did she steal anything this year?”

  “I don’t think so. There weren’t many potted plants blooming back when she was killed.”

  “Did she ever steal whole plants?”

  “Just blooms, as far as I know. Like I said, she’d buy whole plants once in a while.”

  As the rain continued pattering down, Betsy began to feel chilled. She wished she’d brought the little umbrella she kept in the glove box in her car. Or worn her raincoat. “Did she buy any red marigold plants?”

  “No. Actually three people bought all of those we put out. One came back in the fall and said she was the envy of her neighbors. They really are a pretty shade of red. They get covered with flowers, and it takes a hard frost to kill them. I like the deep orange ones better myself, but the reds do make a nice show in borders.”

  “When will Marge know about the patent, whether or not it’s granted?”

  “By the end of summer, probably.”

  “How certain is it she’ll get it?”

  “She’s already writing up the announcement to send out.”

  “Do you have any red marigolds for sale right now?”

  “No, not for sale. But the seed beds are out back. Want to see them?”

  “Okay, thanks.” Betsy was already soaked through; a few more minutes couldn’t get her any wetter.

  The back half of the grounds was marked off by a sturdy Cyclone fence with a padlocked gate. Most of the land back there was a sea of warm red, the multipetaled flowers blooming profusely on closely packed plants each about seven inches tall. Except for the color, the plants looked like ordinary marigolds, compact and with feathery leaves. “Very pretty shade of red,” remarked Betsy.

  “We’re letting them all go to seed, of course,” said Katy. “One interesting feature of these new marigolds: They seed themselves better than the regular kind. If you grow a row of them, then next year you’ll get one or two volunteers.”

  “Interesting.” Betsy couldn’t think of any intelligent question to ask, so she thanked Katy and started back for her car.

  It was parked on the street, almost directly in front of Hailey’s house. Betsy knew that Philadelphia had reduced the asking price three times and still had no takers. So much for her desire to be unburdened of the house. Betsy stood behind her car for a few moments. She didn’t have any reason to go up there.

  On the other hand, she was about out of ideas. Jill, she remembered, once said that police detectives, stymied in an investigation, started going over things they had already covered, trying to see if there was something they had missed.

  What had she missed at Hailey’s house? She didn’t have the combination to the little Realtor’s box attached to the door, which held the house key, so she couldn’t go inside. Could she see something from outside? She went up on the porch and, shading the sides of her eyes against the window, tried to look inside. All she could see were pale and dark shapes barely identifiable as a couch and two chairs.

  Leaving wet footprints behind, she came off the porch and went around the side of the house. She started to go up to the side door when her eye was caught by a tiny splash of color from the backyard. She walked back to the overgrown remnants of Hailey’s flower garden. And there, almost hidden by weeds, was a bravely blooming red marigold.

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell you if my mother had red marigolds in her garden or not,” said Philadelphia on being asked. “I couldn’t even tell you for sure if she had red flowers. I don’t remember any during the estate sale, but I can’t tell a marigold from a petunia unless you give me three guesses.” Philadelphia was sounding hassled.

  Betsy apologized. “I’m sorry if I interrupted you at work.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m off nights right now and trying to get my clock reset and it’s not going too well. Plus, my last three knit pieces haven’t sold so I’m trying to find a new outlet for the Red Hat Ladies—though what I think is, the market’s saturated and I need to find a new theme altogether. My mind’s all clogged up. It’s like my muse died.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, well . . . How’s your sleuthing going?”

  “It’s stalled. I think I have most of the pieces, they just don’t add up to an accusation.”

  Philadelphia said, “I guess Mike Malloy’s in the same boat, right? He hasn’t arrested anyone.”

  “That’s true.”

  * * *

  “AND that’s the one bright spot so far as Marge is concerned,” Betsy said to Godwin before she went upstairs to change out of her wet clothes. “He may still think she did it, but he hasn’t got any proof.”

  “So what’s next?”

  Betsy sighed and thrust her fingers into her hair. “I don’t know.”

  “How about we invite Jill over to brainstorm? You know she’s just itching to get involved.”

  “Yes, and I know Lars is just itching to forbid it.”

  “He wouldn’t dare!”

  “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to.”

  “Why is he being like that?”

  “He’s afraid she’ll get into some dangerous situation.”

  “That can’t happen if we just sit and talk.”

  “He doesn’t want me to encourage her to even think about sleuthing.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Think of something else, I guess.”

  * * *

  BETSY peeked in again after lunch to find Jill and Godwin sitting companionably side by side at the library table. No other customers were present to distract them.

  “Come in, come in!” said Godwin cheerfully.

  Jill was working on a small painted needlepoint canvas from Jelly Bean Stock. It was about a foot square, depicting a magnificent tom turkey standing behind a wicker cornucopia overflowing with white and orange pumpkins, grapes, apples, gourds, and a thin sheaf of wheat that draped over the elaborate border. She was nearly finished with it, working the scroll in the border in silver braid.

  Godwin was knitting another in his endless series of white cotton socks, his fingers moving as if they had a life of their own.

  “Rafael is turning into a gourmet chef,” he said, continuing a conversation. “I’m going to have to do more exercise or by Christmas I’ll weigh two hundred pounds. Sit down for a minute, Betsy.”

  “All right. H’lo, Jill,” said Betsy. “How are the children?”

  “Just fine. Emma Beth wants me to buy her some floss of her very own—‘and a box to keep it in, like yours, Mommy.’” Jill imitated her daughter’s tone.

  “Aw, that’s sweet! And I think I have just the thing for her.”

  “Terrific. Meanwhile, Goddy and I wer
e talking about your investigation of Hailey Brent’s murder, but we discovered we’re missing one thing.”

  Betsy sighed. She might’ve known that’s what this was really about. “What’s that?”

  “You. If you haven’t got a ton of things you need to do, could you talk about it for a little while?”

  Betsy gave Godwin a look that should have knocked him off his chair, but he returned it with only his most limpid gaze. She said to Jill, “Does Lars know you’re over here?”

  “I didn’t know until an hour ago that I’d be headed this way myself. And no, I didn’t call him to tell him I was going to Crewel World. Why?”

  “Oh, Jill, Lars doesn’t want you getting mixed up in another one of my cases. I feel like we’re going behind his back doing this.”

  “Talk isn’t going to do anyone any harm. Besides, you and I—and Goddy—have talked about your cases before.”

  “Yes, but— Well . . . that’s true.”

  “And Godwin thinks you’re in a sticking place with this case. Talking about it may help, right?”

  “That’s true, too.”

  “So talk to us.”

  Betsy sighed and settled back. “Where do we start?” she asked.

  “How’s business?” asked Jill, surprising Betsy with that entirely off-topic query.

  “Slow. Slower than it’s ever been. But it’s slow everywhere.” Betsy’s gesture might have included every small shop in the state. “We’re hanging on; things will get better.”

  “Do you think being worried about the shop is affecting your investigation?” So Jill wasn’t as off topic as Betsy thought.

  “I don’t think so. I’ve been worried about business before, and it hasn’t hampered my sleuthing.” Though right now both things were as bad or worse than they had ever been.

  Godwin said, “Why don’t you just review the case from the beginning? Maybe we can see something you’re missing. Or maybe you’ll see something—I’ve done that, talked about a problem with someone and suddenly the solution is right there in front of me, without the other person saying a word.”

  Betsy didn’t want to admit she’d been discussing the case with Connor without enlightenment happening, so she just nodded and set off on a too-familiar trail.

  “Back on the seventeenth of May, Hailey Brent was found in the basement of her home, dead of a bullet wound to her head.”

  “Was she shot in the front, back, or side of her head?” asked Jill.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is that important?” asked Godwin.

  “It could be,” said Jill. “Was she facing her murderer, or did he sneak up on her from behind? Maybe she knew him and wasn’t afraid of him, or maybe he was chasing her and trapped her in the basement.”

  “She wasn’t being chased, she was in the middle of dyeing some yarn,” said Betsy. “There were pots of dye on the stove—she had what looked like a kitchen down there: stove, refrigerator, sink, cabinets. But she only did dyeing down there.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Godwin, irreverently.

  Jill made a hushing gesture at Godwin. “Go on,” she said to Betsy. “Did you see anything that struck you as unusual?”

  “No—well, nothing important. Just little things. Like there was a knitted square in a pot of indigo dye that otherwise had a skein of yarn. The square had already been dyed some other color, probably red or orange, so it came out brown.”

  “What was strange about that?”

  “Well, there wasn’t anything else in the dye kitchen that shade, and no other fiber, either dyed or waiting to be dyed, was knitted. It’s probably nothing, but it was a little unusual. Did you know indigo in the pot is green? When you lift the dyed material out into the air, it turns blue.”

  “I’d read that somewhere,” said Godwin. “What’s even more interesting to me is that indigo dye has been known for thousands of years, but the formula for making it is complicated and not obvious, so how some really long-ago people without university chem labs figured it out is a real mystery.”

  Jill said, “But that’s not the one we’re out to solve, is it?”

  “I guess not.” He said it cheerfully, then gestured at Betsy. “Go on, go on, what else struck you as strange?”

  Betsy thought. “This is probably even less important, but the wastebasket was empty, it didn’t even have a liner—and there was a box of liners right beside it.”

  Jill said, “And that was strange because—?”

  “Well, the flowers or whatever Hailey was using in one pot had been strained out and thrown away, but a second pot still had carrot tops in it. Not strained out. It was as if she strained out one pot of dye, threw the material away, big plastic can liner and all, while leaving the second pot with its material sitting right on the stove. It just seemed—inefficient. And from the orderly way everything else in that kitchen was set up, I don’t think Hailey was inefficient.”

  “What do you think it means?” asked Godwin.

  “I have no idea,” said Betsy. She flung her hands into the air. “I have no idea.”

  Seventeen

  “ALL right, then, never mind, let’s keep going,” said Jill. “What happened next?”

  “Philadelphia Halverson, Hailey’s daughter, and Ruth Ladwig, Hailey’s friend, went through the house with me. Philadelphia—isn’t that a great name? But she wants to be called Del. Anyway, Del grew up in the house. So did Hailey, actually. Hailey moved back in as an adult after she divorced her husband, and she took care of both her parents and her children. The house is to be sold, and the proceeds divided between Del and her brother, JR.”

  “Is the brother—” began Godwin.

  “No, he’s out of it, not desperate for money, so no motive, solid alibi.” Betsy put a hand flat on the table, then turned it over. “On the other hand, he refused to talk to me.”

  “What about Philadelphia? Does she have an alibi?”

  “Not really. She’s a nurse; she was working the night shift at HCMC. She says she was home alone, asleep. And she agrees with Hailey’s sentiment, that artists—and she’s an artist, she sells knitted figures in art galleries—are allowed special liberties with regard to the law.”

  “Hmmm,” said Godwin.

  “On the other hand, she has no motive I can discover.”

  “What about Hailey’s ex-husband?” asked Jill.

  “He lives on the West Coast, married to his third wife, with two young children. It wasn’t a happy divorce, but he seems to have moved on. He hasn’t been back here for years, and he didn’t come to Hailey’s funeral. It seems Hailey didn’t like him or any other man; she acted like she didn’t like Del’s husband, and she tried to convince her friend Randi Moreham that her husband was a rat and she should divorce him. Which gave Randi’s husband, Walter, who didn’t want a divorce, a motive to murder Hailey.”

  “Does he have an alibi?”

  “Yes, but it’s not a very good one. He was at work, he says, but locked away alone in a conference room working on an urgent project—he’s a commercial artist for an advertising company. No one was allowed to interrupt him. The room had a door into a back corridor he could go out of without being seen. His only proof that he didn’t leave is a finished project. Plus he says he didn’t know Hailey was the source of his wife’s discontent until after she was killed.”

  “Is he a rat?” asked Godwin.

  “I’ve only talked with him once, but I don’t think so. And now that Hailey’s out of the picture, apparently Randi doesn’t want a divorce, either. They’re in counseling, working things out.”

  “It would be a shame,” said Jill, “if it turns out he is a rat after all, just not the kind Randi was thinking he was.”

  After a thoughtful silence, Godwin asked, “All right, who else
besides Walter are you looking at?”

  “Well, there’s Joanne McMurphy. I can’t find what the connection was between Joanne and Hailey, though at least they knew each other.”

  Godwin turned to Jill. “She came in here the other day to yell at Betsy for sticking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted. I was here, and so was Irene Potter. She frightened poor Irene half to death. Very scary person, very.”

  Betsy said, “If I could find evidence of a quarrel between those two, I’d put her first on my list of suspects. Goddy was not exaggerating about her being scary.”

  “Anyone else?”

  Betsy started to tell them about the love affair between Pierce McMurphy and Marge Schultz, but thought better of it. Jill was entirely trustworthy, but Godwin . . . well, he was Godwin, and with all the goodwill in the world, he still might let something slip. And Joanne was a dangerous person to anger.

  “You know what’s missing?” said Betsy. “I don’t really know any of these people, not them or their friends and relations. I don’t have a deep sense of what they’re like, or any way to find out.”

  “We know what Joanne is like,” said Godwin with a dramatic shudder.

  “We know what she’s like when she’s lost her temper, which I’ve heard she does frequently. But what’s she like when she’s calm? And does she have a job? What do you suppose she does?”

  “Works for the IRS,” suggested Godwin promptly. “Or a collection agency.”

  Ignoring him, Jill said to Betsy, “You’ve talked with Philadelphia—Del—about her mother, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, but she spoke of a woman with an artistic soul who secretly liked Del’s husband, not a woman who was a thief and a man-hater.” Betsy consulted her notes. “Actually, I think I got a, a different, maybe more accurate, feel for Hailey from Ruth Ladwig.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That Hailey always thought she was right about everything. That she had strong opinions about politics and religion. That she was intelligent and talented and had a sharp sense of humor. That she loved to listen to gossip and then go tell the person being gossiped about what was said. Ruth forgot that one time and had to bribe Hailey with the cost of her lunch not to repeat something Ruth told her.”