Mike nodded. His brother-in-law liked to tell the story of seeing a woman in a bookstore with a Kindle in her hand, perusing books on shelves then ordering them on her device.
But they were wandering from the point again.
Betsy said, “I know for a fact that Hailey Brent did not buy red marigolds from Green Gaia, and that they are not for sale anywhere else. But if you go by her house, you will see one blooming in her backyard.”
“And?” Mike asked. Was there a point in here somewhere? But Betsy was looking very earnest. He reached for his notebook.
“Anyway, Marge found out about the new variety of marigold growing in Hailey’s garden and sneaked over for a look.” She raised a finger to indicate her next point was the important one. “Did you know there can be a great deal of money made from a new color of marigold? That you can actually patent it, so other suppliers have to pay money to carry it?”
“No, I didn’t know that.” Mike now knew where Betsy was going. “You’re saying Marge stole the red marigold plant.”
“No, she wouldn’t dare do that. Hailey paid close attention to the plants in her garden, and she would have noticed if the strange red marigold suddenly went missing. Marge stole the seeds. All she needed was one bloom, picked in the late fall, when the seed bulb was fully developed. I think Marge took those seeds and planted them to see if it was a true mutation, and finding it was, propagated them.”
“Propagated—?”
“Grew more of them. Did whatever gardeners do to strengthen and ensure the new color—it’s called line breeding when you do it with dogs, breeding sons and mothers, daughters and fathers, together. I guess you can do something similar with flowers. Marge is an experienced and talented gardener. She’d patented a new variety of aster and made enough money to expand and improve her garden center. Here was a chance to do it again—perhaps an even more lucrative chance.”
“Didn’t Hailey notice when she saw Marge putting out the new plants?”
“I think she didn’t realize right away that the new plants originated in her garden. There was only one red marigold growing in Hailey’s garden, after all. Perhaps a bird had carried the seed over the fence. But talking with an employee made her realize that Marge started growing red marigolds the season after Hailey saw one in her own garden.”
“So why not acknowledge it?” asked Mike reasonably. “Share the wealth. Marge could have given Hailey some of the money.”
“Because Marge needed it all. Pierce couldn’t simply abandon Joanne; she needed to be put into a good, well-run facility—a very expensive proposition that would eat up most, if not all, of the settlement given her as a result of that car accident. Joanne and Pierce were living comfortably on that settlement. Marge felt she needed to bring a great deal of money to her prospective marriage to Pierce to compensate for the funds potentially spent on Joanne’s care.”
Mike waited for more, but Betsy was done.
“Sounds kind of cold-blooded,” he noted.
“No, I think there’s plenty of heat between Pierce and Marge. But strip away the passion, and you’re right, there are elements of commerce in it. Marge felt she needed to contribute to the new arrangement, in order to remove an argument against implementing it.”
“So what can you offer as proof that this is what’s going on?”
“Come on, Mike, I’ve got the only explanation that fits all the little oddments and curvatures of this thing!”
“Your reasoning is all you’ve got? It’s an interesting story—it might even be true—but I need more than your active imagination.”
“But there are all sorts of little things.” Betsy spread her hands out, palms up. “And when you put them together, it shows me I’m right about what happened.”
“Like what?”
“Well, when Ruth Ladwig and I looked around Hailey’s dyeing setup—”
“Who’s Ruth Ladwin?”
“She’s a dyer, does demos over at the Science Museum. She and Hailey were friends.”
Mike went back in his notebook and found the name. “Yeah, okay. So you and Ruth Ladwin—”
“Ladwig. Ruth Ladwig. L-A-D-W-I-G.”
“Gotcha.” Mike corrected the spelling. His notes reminded him that he had talked to Ms. Ladwig but gotten nothing useful from her.
“She was a friend of Hailey’s. They talked methods, recipes, mordants, how to use bark and roots and flowers, and things like that.”
“Yes, I know.” Mike was starting to feel impatient. “Are you going to tell me she told you Hailey told her about Marge stealing the red marigolds?”
“I’m afraid not. But going through the dyeing setup in the basement, we found some pots still on the stove. We went down there with the permission of Hailey’s daughter, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And there was some dyed yarn hanging on a line over the sink.”
Mike tapped his pen on his desk and nodded. “I remember seeing the pots and the yarn.”
“Good. But there were still some things in the pots. One big one held indigo dye, and there was yarn in it—and this, too.” Betsy opened her big purse and pulled out what had probably once been a square made of knitted yarn. An uninteresting shade of brown with some spots of red-orange here and there on the loose part. It was about a third unraveled. She handed it to him.
“What is it?”
“Possibly a pot holder. More likely an experiment. It had been dyed that red-orange you can still see in spots, then dumped in the pot of indigo and overdyed blue—but blue and red-orange make brown. Except where the yarn crossed over itself. You can see the original color showing where I raveled it.”
“Unraveled it, you mean.”
“No, unravel means to knit it up again. Like from Shakespeare, ‘Sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of care.’”
Mike Malloy looked slantwise at her, one eyebrow lifted.
“Well, it does,” she murmured defensively.
“So she dyed it red-orange, and then put it in the pot of indigo to see what color she’d get,” said Mike, handing it back.
“No, her murderer put it in the pot of indigo.”
“Why?”
“Because . . .” Betsy dived into her purse again, and this time she pulled out a limp square of fabric with four thin strands of yarn in different soft colors hanging from the bottom of it. She handed it to Mike. “See, that one strand is the same red-orange color, or nearly, as the spots on the raveled square.”
Mike laid the red-orange strand across the red-orange spot. They pretty much matched. “So?” he asked.
“That little red-orange piece of yarn was dyed a few hours ago over at the Science Museum using red marigolds to make the dye bath. I think Hailey dyed the pot holder with red marigold blooms and her killer saw it floating in a dye bath with wet red marigold blooms standing in a strainer beside it. I think she thought that Hailey had decided to stop hinting that Marge was a thief and was plotting to prove the red marigold variety was her own. Marge put the pot holder into the indigo dye bath, dumped the blooms in the garbage can, and took the liner away with her. I think that’s why Ruth and I found the can empty, with no liner.”
“But you don’t think it’s equally likely that Hailey emptied the garbage can herself.”
“No, because there was another pot with carrot tops floating in it. Hailey wouldn’t have taken the liner out without first draining the second pot. And she would have put a fresh liner in the can.”
Betsy, reading Mike’s doubting mind, said, “I told you these were minor things!”
Yeah, but minor things could add up. Still, he wished there was something more, something solid, something he could sink his investigative teeth into.
“I’m sorry. What you’re telling me is one way it might have happened
. Your evidence is interesting, but too thin to convince a prosecutor or a jury. I need something more than this if I’m going to make an arrest.”
“Like what?”
“A concrete piece of evidence. A note from Hailey demanding money. Or, say, the gun.”
“If the killer had more than two active brain cells, any note has long since been destroyed, and that gun is at the bottom of Lake Minnetonka.”
“Find me an eyewitness then, someone who saw something.”
“I don’t have one. But come on, Mike, it all fits together the way I’m telling it! Go dig up the red marigold in Hailey’s backyard!”
“What would that prove this long after the fact of the mutant’s discovery? I admit, you’ve got a very pretty theory. I’m glad you brought it to me. I’m going to start looking at it from the angle you presented to me. Maybe I can come up with the proof you haven’t found. Meanwhile—” He lifted his thin shoulders in a shrug and rubbed at his faded-red hair. “I’m sorry.”
Betsy looked as if she was going to cry, then sucked it up. “All right,” she said, and, deflated, left Mike in his little office.
* * *
SHE spent the rest of the day furiously cleaning to work off her frustration. Connor came by at one point, but when he saw her standing grimly in her kitchen amid stacks of pots and pans—she was cleaning out her cabinets—with a scarf pulled crookedly over her hair and a smudge on her nose, he wisely retreated.
He came back in the early evening, bringing white cartons of Chinese food, to find peace restored. Betsy was happy to see him, and even happier that he’d brought a hot meal for each of them, since she’d been thinking, without enthusiasm, about a tuna fish sandwich.
“Now,” he said, dishing out the food in the dining nook, “what was that all about?”
She explained how she’d taken her well-thought-out theory to Sergeant Malloy, and how he’d decided it was not solid enough to warrant the immediate arrest of Marge Schultz.
“You haven’t shared this theory with anyone else, have you?” he asked. “Godwin, for example?”
“No, of course not. I don’t want Marge to be warned that we’re onto her.”
“Wise woman,” he said, nodding. “Very wise. But now what?”
“I. Don’t. Know.” Confessing as much made her sad, and the food she’d been enjoying turned to cement in her stomach.
But Connor began to talk about her previous successes, mixing in humorous anecdotes about the good times they’d had together, and in a while she felt better.
After dinner they did the dishes together, which took about four minutes, and then went into the living room. Connor got out his knitting—he was working now on a bright yellow glove—and Betsy followed his example. She was trying her hand at a Fair Isle sweater, but this evening, still shaken by her failure to convince Mike Malloy of Marge’s guilt, she couldn’t concentrate on the complex pattern. She put it aside and got out the plaited weave scarf. In a few minutes she had settled into the pattern and relaxed.
As her mind cleared, she began to run the case through her memory. All those weeks ago—not really that many, it just seemed like a lot!—Marge had come into her shop, scared because Mike had asked her if she had murdered Hailey. Would Betsy please do for her what she had done for others, and prove she hadn’t done it?
The audacity of that woman!
“Humph!” Betsy snorted. Connor glanced over and smiled.
Wearily, Betsy trod yet again the lengthy path of her investigation. But now, in sheer desperation, she wandered off the track, looking for a new insight. She remembered going through the upstairs of Hailey’s house, the tiny, old-fashioned bathroom, the long crocheted topper on the old dresser. She remembered Amy Stromberg’s pleasure at getting the Mark Parsons needlepoint canvas. She remembered the night Jill and Lars came over for Rock Cornish game hens and Scrabble. She remembered the mushroom omelet breakfast with Philadelphia at Antiquity Rose. She remembered the Fourth of July picnic, and Jill telling Marge she wanted a pink hydrangea and a blue hydrangea, one for each of her children.
Pink and blue. Aluminum to make blue.
She put her knitting down. “Connor,” she said, “I think I finally can give Mike Malloy his solid piece of evidence.”
Twenty-six
BETSY called Mike Malloy. “I think I can tell you where to find your evidence,” she said. “But it depends on your answer to one question about Pierce McMurphy’s stolen gun.”
But Malloy, after answering her question and hearing her latest idea, said, “I’d need a search warrant, and I can tell you right now, I wouldn’t get it. There simply aren’t grounds for it. Marge Schultz may be a suspect, but so are Pierce McMurphy, Joanne McMurphy, and Walter Moreham. The real killer may be nobody we suspect at present. Your reasoning is creative, and maybe even right, but I can just see myself trying to give a judge gardening lessons—won’t happen, I’m sorry.”
Betsy hung up, rubbed the tip of her nose with a forefinger, and thought hard. “I think we’re going to have to go for it ourselves, Connor,” she said.
“Machree, do you understand the rules of evidence? There has to be an unbroken line between the piece of evidence and the courtroom. You might go looking for that gun, you might even find it, but when you take it to Mike tomorrow, it’s only your word that you found it where you say you found it. Plus, to get it you have to go trespassing, which weakens your case right from the start.”
“Hmmmm,” said Betsy, and called Jill.
* * *
THE evening of the next day it was still daylight out, though it was after eight. Jill gave Betsy a quick lesson in using her video camera as they drove over to Green Gaia. Betsy had wanted Jill to use the camera but Jill wanted both hands free “just in case.” Betsy did not want to ask, “In case what?”
“What if she’s still there?” asked Connor from the driver’s seat.
“I’ll say I didn’t know it was so late—daylight saving time keeps it daylight till nine—and that I had hoped to pick up those hydrangea plants,” said Jill.
“And we’re just along for the ride,” offered Betsy.
“No, you’re coming over to help me plant them—that’s why there’s a spade in the backseat.”
“And then we’ll have ice cream,” said Connor, falsely bright. He wasn’t a very chipper lawbreaker; he’d had his fill of explaining things to the police the night of July Fourth, when he’d driven Annie home.
He found a parking spot not far from the entrance to the garden center and they all sat in the car for a few minutes, watching for pedestrians and vehicle traffic, and getting a few last-minute instructions on the video camera.
“I got it, I got it,” said Betsy at last. “Come on, we’ve got a hole to dig.”
They bailed out and walked quickly into the center, noting the closed sign on the shop door, and made their way to the greenhouse and the big hydrangea bush by it.
Betsy started the camera, panning around to show the entrance, the tables with their potted plants, the sign for Green Gaia Gardens in fancy script over the shop door. She then trained it on the hydrangea bush, careful to cut off the heads of her coconspirators.
“Dig,” Betsy murmured to Connor, and he pushed the pointed end of the spade into the earth near the shrub’s roots. Jill stood nearby, her head constantly moving, keeping watch.
He began on the side away from the street, going down about two feet, then gradually widening the hole and extending its reach around the plant. He worked very quietly, taking small bites of the earth, which had been kept loose, unlike the path beside it, which was tramped down hard. A perimeter about a yard across had been marked with stones painted white to keep customers and employees at bay; he stayed inside it.
Betsy kept the camera running. As Connor dug and dug, her palms grew sweaty, th
ough the evening was cool. Connor did not look as if he was sweating, though he was breathing more deeply than usual.
No results, no results. Was she wrong? No, she couldn’t be wrong. Could he have missed it? He was being very careful, poking the blade into the soil several times before raising more of it.
What if they found nothing? Could they just replace the earth, make it look as if it had not been disturbed and quietly slip away?
Connor was more than halfway around when the blade of his implement struck something with an audible tink.
Jill, who had been looking toward the street, swung around, and they all exchanged an anticipatory look.
“Probably a stone,” murmured Jill.
Betsy closed in on the trench with the camera and held her breath as Connor pushed the spade under and lifted the object. It lay in dirt and was encrusted with dirt, but it was clearly a semiautomatic pistol.
“What are you doing?” came a very loud woman’s voice, high-pitched and obviously scared. “Stop it! Stop it!”
The trio whirled, but the woman was upon them, swinging a garden rake, its teeth sharp and heavy. Marge.
The end of the rake caught Connor on his shoulder and his spade flew up in the air, sending the gun flying amid a shower of earth. The impact made him shout and sent him reeling.
Marge was screaming and swinging in big arcs. “Thieves! Get out!” She was grunting with effort.
She smashed the camera out of Betsy’s hands. Betsy’s hands exploded in pain. She screamed.
Then a gun went off, its sound huge, and everyone froze.
“Drop the rake!” said Jill.
Betsy looked over and saw Jill standing bent-kneed, both of her hands wrapped around a snub-nosed revolver.
“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” cried Marge, and she threw the rake down.
There was a pause of several seconds. Then Marge said, “Wait, wait a minute! You’re Jill Larson! What are you doing here?”
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