Buttons and Bones

by Monica Ferris

  “He told me his wife taught him how a long time ago.”

  “Do you think that’s true?” asked Jill.

  “Oh, very likely. She was good at most of the needle arts: knitting, crochet, counted cross-stitch—she was a regular customer in here before she died, and taught a class about every other year. But he outshone her at crochet. He’s amazing—he can look at a piece for about a minute and copy it perfectly.”

  “Does he teach classes?” asked Betsy.

  “No, he says he wouldn’t be any good at that, because he lacks patience. That might be true. I’ve known other talented stitchers like that.”

  Betsy nodded and so did Jill. But maybe he didn’t want his hobby widely known. “Cindy, would you mind not telling him you told us he crochets?”

  “Certainly, if you want me not to.”

  “Thanks.”

  Then Betsy noticed the unusual way Cindy had arranged the shelves holding knitting yarn at the back of the shop. Instead of level shelves, the boards had been fastened to the wall diagonally, with more boards going the other way diagonally. This arrangement formed floor-to-ceiling diamond-shaped compartments into which the yarn was laid, each holding a color or weight of its own.

  Betsy went back for a closer look. “What a clever set of shelves!” she said. “I may copy that for my shop.”

  Jill approached the shelves, too, the better to see their contents. “Well, look at this, she has Windy Valley Qiviut yarn!”

  Made from the undercoat of musk ox, qiviut was softer and lighter than cashmere and eight times warmer than wool—and far, far more expensive. Each skein, containing 218 yards, weighed only an ounce. She turned to Betsy. “You aren’t about to place an order for this, are you?”

  Betsy came for a closer look at the stuff. It was the softest yarn she had ever handled, and almost weightless in her hand. Then she saw the price.

  “I’m afraid not, unless I get an order in advance.”

  Cindy said, “I special ordered it for a customer, and she got sick and I held it for her until I’d had it past the return date, then she up and died on me. I can make you a deal on it.”

  So Jill and Betsy each bought a skein.

  Seventeen

  THE next morning, Betsy, back in Excelsior, was in the process of opening up the shop when she found a note on the checkout desk, left by a part-timer yesterday. “Violet Putnam McDonald called. From Longville. Has information about Helga Farmer. Please call.” There was a phone number.

  Godwin unlocked the front door coming in as she was reading the note, and she waited while he relocked it—it was only nine forty, and the shop didn’t open until ten—before holding up the slip of paper and asking, “What do you know about this?”

  “What is it?” he asked, coming to take it from her hand. He read the message and said, “I don’t know anything about it. I was out on the driving range yesterday, and while your suggestion that I hit a couple hundred balls was an exaggeration, it was not a gross one.”

  “How’s your slice doing?”

  “Better than ever,” he said glumly. “The more I work on it, the slice-ier it gets.”

  Yet he didn’t sound as depressed as he had when the slice first appeared. “Still want to quit?” she asked.

  “Heavens, no!” It was interesting how, although he was impatient with his progress, Godwin was becoming more deeply involved with the game, rather than less. She was not familiar with golf, but she’d seen the same thing happen to novice stitchers, so this phenomenon was not a mystery to her.

  “Who is Violet?” he asked Betsy.

  “I have no idea. I don’t even know how she found out I am interested in Helga Farmer Ball.”

  “Oh, come on now,” teased Godwin. “You who are familiar with the big ol’ grapevine under whose shade we in Excelsior cower cannot understand how someone in the even smaller town of Longville might learn of your interest?”

  “Well, that’s true,” sighed Betsy, rembering the woman at the turtle races.

  “So, are you going to phone her?”

  “Of course.”

  But there was no answer—nor was there an answering machine, which surprised Betsy. In her experience, nearly everyone had an answering machine.

  The mail carrier came in soon after—a new man, who apparently was taking a different route, because usually the mail arrived in the late afternoon.

  Betsy sighed over the invoices as she sorted through the envelopes, then paused over a single small envelope without a return address. The envelope was addressed to her at the shop in small block letters. Inside was a three by five card and on it, again in block letters, were two words: LAY OFF.

  Godwin saw her staring at it, and came to look over her shoulder. “Oh, my God, a threatening letter! What have you been up to?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Goddy, you know what I’ve been up to! This is probably some idiot’s idea of a joke.” She turned it over and back again. “Or maybe it’s the opening salvo of an advertising campaign.” But on closer examination, the brief message had been written, not printed on the card.

  She reached for the phone and dialed Jill’s number. “Has your mail come yet?” she asked. Jill’s hadn’t, so Betsy said, “When it does, call me. No, I can’t talk now, I’ve got two customers coming in.”

  They were the Murphy twins and they were brimming over with An Idea. A shop they had visited while on a trip to Canada offered a ten percent discount on any item bought on the customer’s birthday, and they had a birthday coming up and what did Betsy think of that idea?

  Betsy said she’d think about it, and the twins, who were in their fifties and still dressing alike, left, murmuring in one another’s ears, without buying anything.

  “So what do you think of that idea?” asked Godwin.

  “I think it’s a good one, but we’ll have to ask for proof—and I wonder how many customers would be willing to hand over a driver’s license so I can check their age?”

  “Oooooh, there’s an ugly thought! So let’s do it, with a warning that we’ll check IDs, because then not everyone will take advantage of it.”

  “All right, announce it in the next newsletter and on our web site. Thank the Murphy twins for the idea.”

  Around two, Jill called. “Well, I got my mail,” she said. “But why did you ask me to call you when it arrived?”

  “Did you receive anything unusual?” Betsy asked.

  “No,” Jill said. “Did you?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “What was it you got?”

  “An anonymous warning.” Betsy described it.

  “Funny, I don’t remember you giving your address to Robert Nowicki.”

  “I’m in the phone book: Crewel World, Betsy Devonshire, Proprietor. You think it’s from Nowicki?”

  “Well, I don’t think there’s been enough time for it to be from Peter Ball. And who else could possibly have sent such a warning? Not Molly Fabrae, she wants us to find out what happened. Can you read the postmark on it?”

  Betsy looked at the envelope. “Yes, it was sent from Minneapolis.”

  “Mr. Nowicki was in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago looking for a nursing home. Maybe he came back to resume his search.”

  “But hold on, we wanted to talk to him to find out what he could tell us about the sale of the cabin to his grandparents. That happened more than a year after Dieter Keitel walked away from the camp. What possible connection could his grandparents have to that?”

  “None—that we know of.”

  Betsy ran her fingers through her hair while she thought about that. “What, you’re thinking they might have known one another, the Nowickis and the Farmers?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Oh, Jill, this is ridiculous! All we’re getting from our investigation is more possibilities, not fewer!”

  “You want to quit?”

  Betsy looked at the card with the two words on it: LAY OFF. She was awfully tempted.

>   “No,” she said. “Not yet anyway.”

  Jill breathed a sigh of relief. “Me, neither,” she said.

  Betsy said, “Interesting that he sent it to me at the shop. I didn’t tell him about Crewel World. And it’s kind of a thin threat. ‘Lay off,’ I mean. Not even an ‘Or else.’ ”

  “I think the ‘or else’ is understood. I’m going to tell Lars about this, and I think you should tell Mike.” Mike, as in Sergeant Mike Malloy, one of the two detectives on Excelsior’s small police force, the one who knew Betsy and her peculiar habit of getting mixed up in crime.

  “All right.”

  Mike was, as usual, aggravated when he got on the phone with her. “What have you done now?” he growled.

  “I decided to help Jill Larson find out how that skeleton came to be in the root cellar of the cabin she and Lars bought up on Thunder Lake.”

  “Why in the name of all that’s holy couldn’t you leave it to the sheriff’s department up there? They’re competent.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry I’m adding to your law enforcement burden. But this could be an important clue for you—aren’t you involved in the investigation, too?”

  “No, I’m not. And neither is Lars. It’s a Cass County problem. And maybe Stevens County, too, now, since that’s where Morris is. Don’t handle that card any more than you have to; I’ll come by later and take a look at it.”

  “All right. Thanks, Mike.”

  Just as she hung up the phone, the door sounded its twin notes, and Betsy turned to greet another customer.

  She was a trim senior woman with white and gray hair, cut to fall just over her ears. “Are you Betsy Devonshire?”

  “Yes, she is, and I’m Godwin DuLac,” replied Godwin. “How may we help you?”

  “I’m Violet Putnam McDonald, and I understand you are interested in hearing about Helga von Dusen Farmer.”

  “Why, I was trying to return your phone call a little while ago,” said Betsy.

  “I got impatient when you didn’t call yesterday and started for here first thing this morning. Wilma Griffin works for the sheriff’s department, you know, and she said the sheriff told her you have a reputation for solving crimes, so after I talked with Investigator Mix, I decided you ought to know, too.”

  “Know what?”

  “What I know about Helga. You see, I used to know her.”

  “You mean, when you were a child?”

  “No, I am actually several years older than she is.”

  “Was,” corrected Betsy. “I’m afraid she’s dead.”

  “Oh, dear, dead?”

  “Yes, she died fifteen years ago, of a stroke.”

  “Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that. She was a very sweet girl.”

  “How well did you know her?”

  “We weren’t good friends or anything like that. We spoke when we met about what we’d been doing, we exchanged recipes—she had a recipe for pickled green beans that was very good. Things were rationed during the war, of course, so we were always looking for recipes that didn’t call for fat or butter.”

  Godwin said suddenly, “Mock apple pie.”

  She looked at him in surprise, then smiled. “That’s right, made with Ritz Crackers and lemon juice. Not quite as good as the real thing, of course, but surprisingly not too bad, if you closed your eyes and dreamed a little. But how do you know about such things?”

  “I’m a fan of old-time radio shows, and a lot of the recordings include the commercials.” His voice took on a radio announcer’s timbre. “‘The Johnson’s Wax Program, starring Fibber McGee and Molly!’ ”

  Violet beamed at him. “Ovaltine sponsored Little Orphan Annie, and Jell-O sponsored Jack Benny. But who was sponsored by Ritz Crackers?”

  “Nobody I know of,” replied Godwin, “but when you get interested in an era, you start picking up other things about it. I don’t remember where I read about the mock apple pie.”

  “We’re wandering from the topic,” said Betsy. “If I bring you a cup of tea, Mrs. McDonald, will you answer some questions I have?”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  In a couple of minutes the women were seated at the library table with a pretty porcelain cup of Earl Grey in front of each of them. “What do you want to know first?” asked Violet.

  “Did Helga work at the POW camp in Remer or in Longville?”

  “There wasn’t a POW camp in Longville.”

  “Are you sure? Someone described it to me.”

  “That’s why I decided to contact you. There is a lot of incorrect information about those camps. Many people mistake the forest sites where the prisoners worked cutting down trees for where they slept at night.”

  “But she said the ruins had all gone to raspberry bushes and the bears were feasting there to fatten up for winter.”

  “There is an old logging site that was thick with raspberry bushes for years after the loggers left, but it’s gone back to forest now. It was right next to our farm, I can remember hearing the prisoners talking and even singing while they worked.”

  “Where was the camp where they slept, then?”

  “There were three camps, Remer, Bena, and Deer River. Helga worked at the Remer camp.”

  “Is there a book about these three camps?” asked Betsy. She wasn’t willing to say out loud that she didn’t know whom to believe.

  “I’m sure there must be. I’m speaking from memory, adult memory. The woman you spoke to was a small child during the period the POWs were up there. I’m sure a lot of what she told you is repeated from stories she’s heard or even overheard.”

  “Yes, she said as much. How did Helga come to work at the camp in Remer?”

  “She started as a volunteer, teaching the prisoners to knit and crochet. Believe it or not, the men were grateful to her. The three camps used to have competitions in the crafts— painting, wood carving, needlework—and the Remer camp always walked away with the needlework contest. They also had soccer and boxing competitions, I remember seeing photographs of the teams in our newspaper. Anyway, she had taken a class in typing in school, and when the company clerk proved to be as bad a speller as he was a typist, she volunteered to do that part of his job. Inside of three months, they hired her, and got someone else to teach the boys to knit.”

  Betsy asked, “Do you remember when Dieter Keitel ran off from the camp?”

  “Corporal Keitel is the one they never caught. Yes, I remember there was an awful fuss, just like with the other four. Posters were put up with his picture on it and the sheriff formed a posse that roamed the forest for weeks. The others were found, but not Corporal Keitel. He could speak good English, they said, so they were afraid that if he could get out of the area, he might be able to blend in somewhere. And that’s what everyone decided must have happened, that he got to the Twin Cities, or more likely Milwaukee—that city had a large German community—and was taken in by a family. Only now they find these bones and that ID tag, so it seems he never got very far after all.”

  “How do you think he came to wind up in that root cellar?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. If he turned up on their doorstep, the Farmers would have turned him in, and if he put up a fight and was killed, they would have reported it. After all, he was the enemy and Major Farmer was a soldier. His death would hardly be considered murder.”

  “What did they do, the prisoners?” asked Godwin, who had chosen to re-sort a bin of patterns so he could eavesdrop. “Sit around cooking up escape plans?”

  “No, they worked. The Geneva Convention said they could be put to work, so they were. Cutting down trees mostly. But planting them, too, in the summer. And painting public buildings. When the war was over, they were shipped to other camps in Europe. There was some kind of scandal about the French camps, they held them too long or in bad conditions, I forget which. Maybe both. And of course, any that got sent to Russia simply disappeared. Some wanted to stay here, one or two even got engaged to local girls. But they had to go ho
me and apply to immigrate.”

  “Were they treated all right?” asked Betsy.

  “Oh, yes, warm clothing—marked with big black P and W on the back and legs, of course—and some of them wore pieces of American military uniforms, surplus I guess. Or at least they looked like American Army uniforms with the brass buttons and other insignia taken off. And good food, though after the death camps were found, they wouldn’t give them cigarettes anymore and I think they got more potatoes and less meat. Those photographs out of Germany! Some parents wouldn’t let their children near the papers if they had those photos in them. But before that happened, they were treated very kindly. People used to wave to them going by in their trucks to the camps where they did the logging. And volunteers came and brought special treats or taught classes. Some of the locals who could speak German were asked to translate—the guards weren’t top-drawer, of course; the best of them were overseas getting shot at, poor fellows. Now I think of it, Helga could speak German; she came from a family, the von Dusens, who spoke German at home. My husband was a farmer with a wife and two little children, so he was exempt from the draft, thank God. But he listened to the radio news every night and followed the progress of the invasion after D-Day on the maps in the newspapers.”

  “Do you remember Helga’s husband?” asked Betsy.

  “Major Farmer, the deserter? I don’t believe I ever met him, not to talk to. He was stationed somewhere in Wisconsin and came up on the occasional weekend, but of course they were much more interested in staying at home than going out.” Violet blushed very lightly.

  “Do you remember if Major Farmer’s desertion happened around the same time as Corporal Dieter disappeared from the camp?”

  Violet thought a long time about that. “No. No, it didn’t. Corporal Keitel ran off when it was still summer, and there had been snow on the ground for months when the Army came up here looking for the major.” She thought some more. “It was probably the same year, though it might have been early the next, but the two events didn’t happen one right after the other. I remember seeing Helga standing in the snow outside the train station, crying because she’d just seen her husband off to combat duty.”