And Then You Dye

by Monica Ferris

  Betsy stooped and nursed her aching fingers. “Ow, ow, ow,” she moaned.

  “Betsy?” asked Marge.

  “Ow, ow, ow!” replied Betsy.

  Connor was by her side in an instant. “You’re not shot, are you?”

  “No, no, it’s my fingers. She hit the camera with that rake and it hurt my fingers. Damn, damn, dammit! Where’s the gun?” She looked around and saw it lying on the ground, a few yards away.

  “Nobody move,” said Jill, her revolver firmly in both hands. “Betsy, where’s your cell phone?”

  “In my shirt pocket.”

  “Take it out and dial 911. Say a shot has been fired and we’re holding a person in custody.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute!” cried Marge. “What’s going on? Holding a person in custody? I thought you were thieves!”

  Betsy ignored her and placed the call, giving her name and location, and repeating Jill’s message. “I’m sure they’ll be right here,” she said, on disconnecting.

  “I want to know what’s going on,” repeated Marge. “Why are you digging up my hydrangea?”

  “We’re not digging up the hydrangea, we’re digging up the gun you buried under it,” said Betsy. “The gun you used to shoot Hailey.”

  “What are you talking about? What gun?”

  “Pierce McMurphy’s gun. Over there on the ground. It’s got an aluminum frame. That’s why your hydrangea changed from pink to blue.”

  Marge stared at her. “Aluminum frame?” She looked at Jill, at the gun in her hands. “A gun has an aluminum frame? But that wouldn’t make a hydrangea change color!”

  Betsy said, “Sure it would. At the Fourth of July picnic Annie told us about a neighbor who changed her hydrangeas from pink to blue by burying a set of aluminum measuring cups by the roots.”

  “No, no, that’s an old wives’ tale. Not enough aluminum will leach out of an aluminum object to change the pH of the soil. You dug up my hydrangea because of an old wives’ tale?”

  It was Betsy’s turn to stare. “Then why did your beautiful pink hydrangea turn blue?”

  With an exasperated air of stating the obvious, Marge replied, “Because I mixed up a batch of Color Me Blue in water and poured it on the roots.”

  “Why did you want to change the color of your hydrangea?”

  “Because Como Flower Center in Saint Paul was going under—I knew that last fall—and I knew she had a truckload of potted hydrangeas on her hands. I thought, if she had a batch of them left over, I could get a good price on them. But I needed an angle. Lots of people know about my big pink hydrangea. I got this idea to change its color to blue. People would see it and want to know what happened, and maybe I could sell them a hydrangea they could work some magic on themselves.”

  She added in a tone of tired wonder, “And you thought it was an aluminum frame gun that did it.”

  “Yes. And we found the gun. Marge, look, we found Pierce McMurphy’s gun!”

  Marge half sat, half collapsed onto the ground, and covered her eyes with her hands. “Oh my God, done in by an old wives’ tale!” She began to weep.

  Connor said to Jill, “May I retrieve the gun?”

  “Handle it carefully, okay?” She had taken her finger off the trigger of her own gun and lowered it to her side with one hand.

  “I will.” Connor took the spade with him and scooped up the gun one-handed.

  “Marge, why didn’t you throw it in the lake?” asked Betsy.

  “I tried to. I bought a ticket on the Minnehaha, but there were always people around, so I brought it home again. I thought it was safe to bury it under my one plant that wasn’t for sale!”

  There was the sound of an approaching siren.

  “Marge, is this the gun that killed Hailey?” asked Jill, as Connor came back with the dirty gun balanced on the blade of the spade.

  Marge nodded. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Did you murder Hailey Brent?” The siren was rapidly coming closer. A second siren was heard, also approaching.

  “Yes.” She began to sob. “Oh, God, oh, God. Yes, yes.”

  Connor lifted his left arm just a little, experimentally, and winced.

  “Are you hurt, Connor?” asked Betsy.

  “She hit me a good one on the shoulder,” he replied. “Nothing broken, I don’t think, but it hurts.”

  “I guess being around me is dangerous to your health.”

  “Yes, but always very interesting, machree.”

  The siren grew very loud, and a flicker of red and blue lights began to bounce in the air.

  “Things are about to get complicated,” said Jill to them all. “Everyone just stay calm and very, very obedient.”

  Twenty-seven

  “THAT’S something you’re supposed to think about before you decide to carry a gun,” Jill had told Betsy over lunch a couple of days later. “It’s not just deciding to carry it, it’s deciding to be very reluctant to draw it. I could have been arrested on the spot; in fact, I still may face charges. If I do, I’ll have to hire an attorney. We could lose our house defending me in a trial and I could still go to prison.”

  Betsy was aghast. “But Marge was trying very hard to hurt us, even kill us with that rake! How can the police not see that? I can’t believe you might still be arrested! They know you wouldn’t be careless. You used to be one of them—Lars still is!”

  “All the more reason I’m supposed to be careful about pulling a weapon.”

  And another good reason, decided Betsy, not to apply for a concealed carry permit.

  The Monday Bunch worried at its next meeting, too; and about a week later, there were ecstatic expressions of happiness and relief when the news came that the police had decided not to file charges against Jill.

  “Of all the silly nonsense I’ve ever heard,” declared Bershada at the meeting, “the silliest was the notion that our Jill is a gun nut!”

  Jill smiled but said nothing.

  “I didn’t even know you carried a gun,” said Doris. “Since you stopped being a police officer, I thought you turned it in.”

  “I did,” Jill said. “But I bought a new one, smaller, easier to conceal.”

  Emily said, “That must be why I never saw a bulge on you. Where did you keep it? In your bra?”

  “No,” said Jill, with a laugh. “There are places, and ways, to conceal a weapon. But let’s not get into that, okay?”

  Phil said, “So, is it okay now to talk about what happened at the garden center when all this went down?”

  Connor had joined the Bunch at the table in Crewel World today. He looked at Jill, who looked at Betsy, who looked at him.

  “You first,” said Connor to Betsy.

  But Betsy was tired of the story—and eager to hear the results of the template contest Crewel World had been running. Sitting on the table, under the Fair Isle sweater she was painstakingly knitting, was a long white envelope addressed to the shop with a return address of one of the three contest judges. It had come by registered mail, and Betsy’s fingers fairly itched to open it. The envelope was nice and fat, so there was probably commentary on at least the winning patterns.

  But she wanted to announce the winners on the Crewel World web site on the date promised, which wasn’t until tomorrow. How could she open the envelope in front of the members of the Monday Bunch without telling them the results? Especially since some of them had entered the contest and so would know whether or not they won?

  “Excuse me,” she said, and took the envelope over to her desk to put it in a drawer that locked.

  Then she came back and sat down. “Where were we?” she asked.

  Bershada said in her driest voice, “You were going to tell us how you came to realize that the woman who asked you to p
rove Mike Malloy was wrong to suspect her of murder was, in fact, a murderer.”

  “It was a mistake,” said Betsy.

  Emily said, shocked, “You mean she isn’t a murderer?”

  “No, I mean it was a mistake that led me to the correct conclusion. Oh yes, Marge murdered Hailey, sure enough. And I figured it out, but I couldn’t prove it. Then I made a mistake—or rather, Alice, you made a mistake.”

  “Me? What did I do?” The big woman wrinkled her forehead in a frown.

  “You told me you knew someone who changed the color of a hydrangea from pink to blue by burying aluminum measuring cups under it. You believed that story—and so did I, when you told it to me. So when I remembered that Marge’s hydrangea was turning blue, and that Lars told me Pierce McMurphy’s stolen gun had an aluminum frame, I was sure Marge had buried the murder weapon under her hydrangea bush.”

  “But I thought she did bury it there,” said Emily, still confused.

  “Well, in fact, she did,” said Betsy. “But that isn’t the reason the flowers turned blue. Marge fed the plant a solution of aluminum sulfate to turn its blooms blue on purpose, as an advertising gimmick.”

  Alice said, in her deepest voice, “I will always believe that gun helped turn the flowers blue.”

  Phil made a faint scoffing noise, but Emily, blue eyes wide, nodded in agreement.

  Doris, without pausing in the little rhythmic motions of punchneedle, turned to Connor. “How’s your shoulder coming along?” she asked him.

  Connor bent over the tricky thumb of the glove he was knitting, nodded to her. “Only a little stiff now. No permanent damage.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  “We all are,” said Bershada, to general agreement.

  “Whatever possessed Marge?” asked Emily. “I don’t mean just to murder someone—I suppose anyone can get scared enough or mad enough to murder. But to think that Pierce McMurphy would put his wife in a home just so he could marry Marge . . .” She shook her head. “Marge must have been crazy. Pierce loved Joanne.”

  “Then why was he boinking Marge?” asked Phil reasonably. He was frowning over an upper corner of his counted cross-stitch piece of wild geese in a field, where the sky was six different shades of gray and cream.

  “Oh, men,” said Bershada. “Didn’t mean a thing to him.”

  Connor said, “Speaking as a representative of my sex, I object to that. Pierce was probably hungry for some give-and-take with a woman who wouldn’t go off like an unreliable firework if he took a misstep. Marge was comfortable, reliable, sexy, and intelligent. A very tasty side dish when the main dish has become complicated and difficult.”

  Bershada pushed her lips forward disapprovingly but didn’t argue.

  “Does she know?” asked Emily.

  “Does who know what?” asked Alice, her crochet needle coming to a pause as she tried to follow that question.

  “Does Joanne know that her husband was the cause of all this?”

  Emily’s question caused a minor uproar as the others tried to disagree, agree, or say it was more complicated than that, all at once.

  “But didn’t Pierce let Marge burgle his car?” asked Emily at last.

  “We don’t know that,” said Jill.

  “We don’t?” Bershada’s tone was dark.

  “I suppose it will all come out at the trial,” Phil pointed out.

  “What do you think, Betsy?” asked Doris, deferring to her as resident sleuth.

  “I don’t know,” confessed Betsy, lifting her shoulders high. “And I’m hoping Marge sticks to her confession and just pleads guilty in court.”

  “Amen,” said Connor.

  “It wouldn’t have worked out even if she’d gotten away with it,” said Doris.

  “What makes you say that?” asked Phil, looking at his wife in surprise.

  “Because marriages that begin with affairs rarely succeed. He’d be carrying guilt—and she’d be feeling guilty twice over. Plus she’d always be wondering if someone would figure it out. Betsy did, after all—and, pardon me, Betsy, if you could do it, so could someone else.”

  But Betsy only said, “That’s true.”

  Bershada said, “And when you marry a man who fooled around on his wife, you get a man who fools around on his wife.”

  “Well, yes,” said Connor, “but these circumstances were a little unusual, don’t you think?”

  Jill said, “I do think we have to cut Pierce some slack.”

  Bershada said, “Unlike the man an old girlfriend of mine got engaged to. He divorced his wife for her, and one week before the wedding, he left her for her maid of honor. They got engaged, and a month before their wedding, he left her and went back to his wife.”

  “Sounds like he had a problem with commitment,” said Emily, amused.

  “He had a problem, all right,” said Bershada.

  “I think he just wanted a ride on a merry-go-round,” said Phil.

  “Would you have taken him back?” Jill asked Bershada.

  “Yes, but I would have made sure he went to bed worried for a long time.”

  Connor said, “I read about a man who came home from work and heard talk and laughter coming from his kitchen. He walked in on his wife and his mistress sitting at the table drinking coffee together. They quickly shut up when he came in and sat there giving him the same look.”

  Doris asked, “What did he do?”

  “Packed a bag and left town.”

  And on that note, the Bunch began to break up.

  When the last of them had left and Connor had gone back upstairs, Betsy unlocked the drawer and took out the fat white envelope. She tore it open at one end and extracted the contents.

  Taking three pages, the judges had written a sentence or two about each entry. They had come up with a one-to-fifty numerical scoring system that they used three times for each entry—Best Execution in red, Cleverest Use of Space in blue, Just Plain Wow in orange.

  A separate note from the judges said they had enjoyed judging the entries, and that choosing the winners had been very difficult—“It took three fistfights and two arm-wrestling matches to pick Best Execution.”

  Betsy got out her list matching the numbers that had been assigned to each entry to the actual names of the contestants.

  The judges noted that Rafael’s entry was very clever and made good use of space, but that an error in counting had given the central rectangle an extra row up and down.

  Annie’s entry was given middling grades for cleverness and use of space, and a low-middle grade for execution. The comments noted that the execution seemed to improve from left to right, “the mark of an ardent beginner.”

  Helen Foster’s Tiger in a Cage won Cleverest Use of Space, Alix Jordan’s Climbing Roses won Best Execution, and Susan Okkonen won Just Plain Wow. Susan was just one point lower than Alix in Best Execution—which was a good thing, as the prize was the same for each of the three categories, and what would Susan have done with two OttLites?

  * * *

  MIKE Malloy sat at his desk, going over the files and notes he would turn over to the prosecutor. He shook his head. Betsy isn’t even Irish. Where does she get the dumb luck, he asked himself, of solving the case by way of a misunderstanding?

  Well, half the case. Mike was morally sure Pierce McMurphy had staged that car burglary in order to give Marge Schultz the gun. But Pierce was sticking to his theft story, and Marge said she often talked to Pierce about his deliveries and so knew where he’d be the day she followed him and broke into his car. She was taking the whole rap herself, even down to insisting that she and Pierce were just good friends. She claimed that the sole reason she killed Hailey was so she wouldn’t have to share any of the credit—and money—she was going to get from the mutant marigold.r />
  Now, instead, current plans were for Marge’s two daughters to go ahead with the patent process and split the proceeds with Philadelphia and her brother, JR. Mike felt that decision, coming out of the horrible mess created by Marge, wasn’t the worst possible.

  * * *

  BETSY was silent in bed that night. Sophie, aware that her mistress was not sleeping, lay close by her side, now and again reminding Betsy, with a gentle touch of her paw, that she wanted some more stroking.

  Connor was deep asleep on Betsy’s other side.

  Had there been a miscarriage of justice here? Marge was claiming sole responsibility for the murder of Hailey—but was Pierce in some way responsible, too?

  Betsy tickled Sophie’s right ear. The cat purred softly.

  Was Marge so besotted with love for Pierce that she was willing to go alone to prison for the rest of her life in order to protect him from the consequences of their shared crime?

  That didn’t seem to be an accurate description of Marge—or Pierce, for that matter. Betsy remembered how he’d insisted his wife apologize for scaring Betsy.

  Or was that to forestall an assault charge against her?

  Betsy recalled the look of love on his face when Joanne, entirely unwilling, nevertheless asked Betsy’s pardon. And her basking in that look with a smile of her own. No, there was more than fear of an assault charge causing that loving exchange.

  So how, loving his wife as he did, could Pierce collaborate with his mistress to murder a third party?

  She could understand the mistress part. Most men, despite all the sexist jokes and macho posing, yearned to have a warm, loyal, and reliable relationship with a woman. Joanne could no longer provide all of that; sometimes, none of it. It must have seemed to Pierce that Marge could.

  But loyalty went both ways, and Pierce was loyal to Joanne. Betsy closed her eyes and tried to recall as accurately as she could the conversation between Pierce and Marge on the other side of that tall wooden fence.

  “We have to stay away from each other for now,” Pierce had said, or something like that. Did that sound as if he knew, or suspected, that Marge was a murderer? Or was he merely anxious not to give Mike Malloy a reason to think she might be?