Buttons and Bones

by Monica Ferris

  “Would you like something to drink?” asked Godwin.

  “I’d really like . . . Just some water, please.”

  He hurried off to the back room.

  “What happened?” asked Betsy. “You didn’t look ill when you came in.”

  “It’s that drawing,” said Molly. “It’s my father’s face.”

  “What?” Betsy turned and picked it up off the carpet where Molly had dropped it. “Your father? Are you sure?”

  Molly smiled a strange smile and nodded. “He had one of those very thin mustaches, they’re called ‘pencil mustaches’ because they look like they’re drawn on with an eyebrow pencil, but otherwise it looks just like him.”

  “Strewth!” exclaimed Godwin, coming back with a bottle of chilled water. “Your father? But I thought we had eyewitnesses to him getting on the train! Helga was crying in the snow and everything because he was going away to war!” He unscrewed the cap and handed the bottled water to her. He said to Betsy, “This changes everything, doesn’t it?”

  Betsy felt a wan smile pull at her mouth. “Again. Yes, it does.” She looked at the pencil drawing in her hand. “Peg said she made the man middle aged because she thought I’d said it might be Matthew Farmer.”

  Godwin stared at her then gave a dramatic shudder. “Oh, wow, that is just too strange, too, too strange!” He came to look around Betsy’s shoulder at the drawing. “That’s what Major Matthew Farmer looked like? So who was Helga seeing off on the train?”

  Twenty-one

  “So then that means . . .” said Jill a couple of hours later. She and the children were sitting in the dining nook in Betsy’s apartment. The puppy she had promised the children was ready for pickup, so she had “borrowed” them back from their grandparents for the afternoon. The initial squealing, hugging, chasing, and other means of getting acquainted were over, and everyone could draw a calming breath for at least a little while. Airey was eating Cheerios, O by O, from a little bowl; Emma Beth was drawing with crayons on a sheet of typing paper.

  On the floor under the table was a black dog about the size of an adult cocker spaniel, but without the big, pendulous ears and with a long, thick tail and enormous feet. It was busy eating the Cheerios that Airey had dropped, moving with the eager clumsiness that marked it as a puppy. Sophie had withdrawn to her basket in the living room from whence she could keep an appalled and wary eye on the intruder.

  “It’s possible,” said Betsy. “He’s the right age and size.”

  “But what about the gold tooth? Peter Ball didn’t have one.”

  Betsy thought back to the little old man in his living room full of beautiful doilies. He had a wide smile—and perfect, very white teeth. No one in his eighties could have natural teeth like that.

  “Dentures,” said Betsy. “He’s got dentures now.”

  “All right,” said Jill. “But how do we prove it?”

  “I don’t know. Go talk to him, I guess.”

  “What if he’s got a gun? He’s been making threats.”

  “Unspecific ones. Almost meek ones.”

  Betsy said, “I’m not so sure he’s meek. He’s clever, after all. And energetic—he must have driven up to the Cities to mail those threats, so they wouldn’t have a New Ulm postmark. I think maybe the threats were terse for fear we’d find something about the writing that would point to him.”

  “Oh. Yes, you’re right. Actually, I wonder now why he wrote at all. Didn’t he think we’d go to the police?”

  “That depends on what Cindy told him. If she said I was an amateur sleuth, then he’d think I work cases without the aid of the police.”

  Jill nodded. “I’ll bet he has no idea that Cass County and Hennepin County law enforcement know you’re working on the case. When he finds out, he may try to run.”

  “At age eighty-six? Where will he run to? What will he do when he gets there? What will he live on? He’ll have to abandon his house and any savings, and even his Social Security checks.”

  “Yes, poor fellow,” said Jill in a very dry voice.

  “So you think he won’t run.”

  “If he murdered Matthew Farmer, I hope he does run. I hope he winds up in a musty, dark cellar somewhere, with lots of spiders for company, and an old jar of green beans for sustenance. He’s had a good life: a wife, children, grandchildren, an honorable occupation, respect in his community, far and away more than he deserved for taking a man’s life. Not to mention the hell he put Matthew’s daughter through.”

  Betsy was a little startled at the vehemence in Jill’s voice. Normally a very cool head, here her words had hot, sharp teeth in them.

  “All right, you’re right. So what should we do? Go down and see if we can set him on the run?”

  “Arf!” said the puppy. Airey had run out of Cheerios.

  “Hush, Bjorn,” said Jill. “No, at this point, I think we need to have a conference with Mike Malloy and Investigator Mix.” Mix was the Cass County Sheriff’s Department investigator.

  Betsy went into the kitchen to get the box of Cheerios and pour just a little into the bowl in front of Airey. “Nice!” he said, and immediately dropped one on the floor for the pup.

  “Can you say thank you?” asked Jill.

  “Thank you,” said Emma Beth, selecting a black crayon to make a scribble she hoped would turn out looking like Bjorn.

  “Fan’ ’oo,” said Airey, putting a Cheerio into his mouth, chewing twice, and grinning messily at Betsy.

  “You’re welcome, darling,” said Betsy.

  ON the drive up to Cass County on Wednesday morning, Betsy asked Jill, “Why a Newfoundland? Aren’t they really, really big dogs?”

  “Yes, the males can go thirty inches high at the shoulder and as much as a hundred and fifty pounds. But they are gentle and they love children—and without any training at all, they will go into a river or lake and rescue a drowning person. Since both our home and our cabin are on a lake, we thought that was a splendid feature. Did you know the big dog in Peter Pan is a Newfie, not a Saint Bernard? The Victorians loved them because they guarded children and were endlessly patient with them.”

  “Are you going to have Bjorn trained as a guard dog?”

  “Oh, no, they aren’t really good at that. Their idea of protecting their families is to stand between them and whatever they perceive as a threat. They don’t growl or bite or even bark a whole lot and so long as they are permitted to go swimming in the summer, they are, overall, happy campers.”

  “Yeah, but he’ll eat you out of house and home. I mean, a hundred and fifty pounds? He’ll eat half a cow a week!”

  “No, they’re thrifty keepers once they reach full size. Because they’re lazy. One long walk a day is all they need. I want to see if he’ll go cross-country skiing this winter. In the summer, they sleep in the shade.”

  “All right, I give up, he sounds like a good match for you. Where did you get the name Bjorn for him?”

  “Bear is a very common name for the breed. And Bjorn is Norwegian for ‘Bear.’ ”

  Going to Walker, the county seat, added a little over an hour beyond the length of a trip to the cabin. Walker was an attractive little city on the shore of Minnesota’s biggest lake, Leech Lake. To judge by the false-front brick buildings, it was probably the same age as Excelsior. The County Court-house, which also held the jail and sheriff’s department offices, was a stately brick-and-white-marble edifice on top of a low hill on the edge of downtown.

  Investigator Mix was summoned by a sheriff’s deputy sitting on the other side of a slab of bulletproof glass. He came out and shook their hands and led them through a locked door back to his small office. There, he seated them in front of his cluttered desk, got them each a mug of bad coffee, and then phoned Mike Malloy back in Excelsior. Once connected, he put Malloy on his speakerphone and said, “Hi, Sergeant Mike Malloy, glad you could join us via phone. I want to state at the outset that our conversation is being recorded, okay?”

  “Sure,�
� said Mike.

  Since Investigator Mix’s statement was intended for Jill and Betsy, too, they each agreed. “Yes, that’s fine,” said Betsy.

  “Yessir,” said Jill.

  “I will also note for the record that it is eleven forty a.m. on Wednesday, August twenty-eight, that present in my office are Elizabeth Devonshire and Jill Cross Larson, both civilians of Excelsior, Minnesota. This is in regard to an active homicide investigation.” Mix went on to describe in brief terms the discovery of the skeleton and its positive identification as one Corporal Dieter Keitel, of the German Army, brought to Cass County as a prisoner of war in 1944. “Later information indicated that it might not, in fact, be Dieter Keitel’s skeleton but some other person’s.

  “Now, you two women are here to say that the skeleton is that of the owner of the cabin, Major Matthew Farmer, is that correct?”

  “Yessir,” said Jill.

  “What makes you say that?”

  Betsy got out the pencil sketch and handed it to Mix. “Jill was given a set of photographs of the skull of the skeleton. She brought them to me, and I asked an acquaintance to see if she could put a face on the skull using forensic techniques. She could, and here is the result. It has been identified positively by his daughter as the face of Major Farmer.” Betsy reached again into her large purse and brought out a photograph, which she handed across. “This is a photograph of Major Farmer loaned to me by his daughter. I think the resemblance is remarkable; the only thing Peg Sullivan missed was that skinny little mustache.” The photograph, a formal portrait that measured five by seven inches, depicted Major Farmer in his dress uniform, complete with hat, so it was impossible to tell if Peg had gotten the hair right.

  “I don’t know if you know that there are eyewitness accounts of Helga Farmer seeing her husband off on the train in November of 1944.”

  “Yes,” said Betsy, nodding, “I have spoken with Violet McDonald, who was at the train station that morning. She did not actually see Major Farmer board the train; if she had, I think she might have been surprised to see that he’d shrunk an inch or so and lost some weight.”

  “How is that?” asked Mix.

  “I think the person she put on that train was Dieter Keitel, who rode on Major Farmer’s ticket only as far as Chicago. He wore the major’s uniform and carried the major’s suitcase. The major lay dead in the root cellar, his body partly covered by the POW clothes and ID badge that had belonged to Dieter.”

  Mix sat back in his chair, which creaked loudly in protest. “I think I need more details than what you’ve given me so far.” He was looking at Jill, who said to Betsy, “You start.”

  “Helga von Dusen grew up in a family that spoke German at home, so it was her first language. Her parents were old-fashioned in many ways. As the baby of the family, she was told that she would never marry, but would have to stay at home to take care of them in their old age. They even pulled her out of high school, probably to remove the temptation of boys her own age. But they weren’t ready to retire just yet and they let her get a part-time job as a waitress. And there she met an Army major, in town to inspect the pulpwood factory making cardboard boxes for the military. They fell in love and, against her parents’ wishes, married.”

  Jill took up the tale. “The major was not a wealthy man; he was divorced and paying a good portion of his income in alimony and child support. So he bought a modest home for his new bride, an old log cabin, and soon afterward put her on the deed as co-owner. He was stationed at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin, working in supply, and would only get home on occasional weekends—his work at the Longville pulpwood plant soon ended. Because of that, and because he was an outsider, he was not well known in the area.”

  Betsy continued with the story. “Helga soon had the cabin in good order. She planted a garden and canned vegetables from it, storing them on plank shelves down in a root cellar under the cabin. She probably bought cordwood; she was a small woman, sturdy but not strong, and not able to cut down, cut apart, and split all the wood it would take to cook with and heat the cabin during the winter.

  “In 1944, a troop of almost five hundred German prisoners of war, most of them from the North African campaign, were brought to a revamped CCC camp in Remer. It was manned by a handful of soldiers with a ‘shavetail’ lieutenant in charge. A few local civilians were hired, and other locals came as volunteers, bringing food and supplies such as basketballs, soccer balls—which must have been rare and hard to find back in that era—boxing gloves, and so forth. Volunteers who could speak German were especially prized, and Helga was one of them. She taught needle crafts to the prisoners. When it became evident that she could type better than the Army clerk assigned to the task, she volunteered to assist him—and proved so valuable she was hired as the camp commandant’s secretary. Sometime during that period, she met a prisoner named Dieter Keitel. He was a lowly corporal and just nineteen years old. But Helga was eighteen, lonely, bored, and vulnerable.”

  Jill said, “There were very few escapes from the camp, and the men who tried walking away were rapidly caught. Except one, Corporal Keitel. That’s because he had a place to go, a place where he could hide in comfort. It’s a little hard to use the term ‘mistress’ with regard to Helga, because it suggests that the man is taking care of the woman, and in this case she was taking care of him. They were lovers, however, young and passionate, making foolish promises, I have no doubt. When visitors—or possibly even her husband—came to the cabin, he hid in the root cellar.”

  Betsy said, “But Major Farmer got unexpected orders to the Pacific. He was to take a train to the Presidio in San Francisco, and a troop ship from Naval Air Station Alameda. He had only a few days to prepare, and decided to go home to tell his wife in person, and make sure she had everything she needed to get through the coming winter without him. This wasn’t a regularly scheduled visit and he did not telephone or send a telegram before coming up—the cabin did not have a telephone, so he would have had to leave word at Brigham’s store. He figured it would be a pleasant surprise. Well, it was a surprise, all right, but not a pleasant one. He walked in on his wife and her lover, and there was a terrible scene. Either immediately, or upon learning that Dieter was a POW, he attacked him. During the fight, someone, Helga or Dieter, picked up something heavy and clouted Matthew on the head—twice.”

  “Now,” said Jill, “the fat was truly in the fire. What were they to do? Matthew was dead. Who had he told he was going home? His commanding officer knew—and would send someone looking for him. I don’t know which of them got the idea, but it was a good one. They stripped Matthew of his uniform and Dieter tried it on. It wasn’t a good fit, but Helga could fix that with her sewing skills. They put his body down in the root cellar along with Dieter’s prison clothing—that’s why there were only plastic buttons in the cellar, not brass ones. And when the time came for Matthew to take the train, they drove in that big old Auburn automobile, and Dieter, well wrapped up against the snow in the major’s uniform, got on the train. He got off in Chicago and disappeared into the crowd. Helga’s frightened tears, which were witnessed by Violet Putnam McDonald, were very likely genuine. But she pulled herself together, drove home, and the next day ordered a roll of linoleum for the cabin floor. When the Army came looking for Major Farmer some weeks later, all they found were his worried wife and some reports of seeing her putting her husband on the train. He was marked down as a deserter, but was never found, nor did he turn himself in. In 1945, Helga sold the cabin to Marsha and Arnold Nowicki, and moved away.”

  “Six years later,” said Betsy, “the major was declared dead by a judge. Helga had meanwhile moved to New Ulm, where she put a substantial down payment on a modest house and got a job as a secretary. She took her secondhand car on a jaunt to Chicago, where it allegedly suffered a breakdown. It was a cold winter night when she walked into a restaurant seeking a phone to call a tow company. A waiter didn’t want her to wait in the place because she didn’t plan to purchase a meal.
The manager of the place, a Peter Ball, not only let her stay, he fed her. By the time the tow company arrived, he had her name and address. They began a correspondence. It warmed into a relationship and then a courtship. In the end, Peter moved to New Ulm to live with his bride in her modest house. They were very happy, raising a boy and three girls, and ending up with eight grandchildren. He wound up managing the Kaiserhof restaurant, and she became secretary to one of the deans at the New Ulm Christian College. They were very happy until, after forty-five years of marriage, she suffered a stroke at work and died.”

  The two women fell silent. Mix looked at them, one then the other. “So Dieter gets away and Helga is dead,” he said. “The case ends there?”

  “Oh,” said Betsy, “didn’t we tell you? Dieter is Peter. He had learned English from an Englishman, so he could pass as someone who came to America from England as a teen. It must have been difficult those first years, working menial jobs while he built an identity, scrubbing the last of his German accent away. Then, very carefully, and only after it was safe, they arranged to meet in Chicago. Living in New Ulm, with a wife who spoke fluent German, he could let the remnants of his German attitude and even the occasional German phrase show and explain that under the circumstances it was hard not to become a little bit German himself.”

  Jill whistled a phrase from an English music hall song, and Betsy nodded. “But he forgot to make himself more of an Englishman. When we first spoke with him, I pointed to a Bavarian hat he owned and asked, in the phrase of probably the best-known English music hall song, ‘Where did you get that hat?’ and he took it as a legitimate question. Didn’t crack a smile. It didn’t really bother me—I suppose there are living Englishmen who are unfamiliar with the song—until I started putting the pieces of the puzzle together and it became another small piece.”