Sins and Needles

by Monica Ferris

  “I don’t know what to think. You look about to explode with an idea. What is it?”

  “I was thinking she may be in the exact position I was—looking guilty because of a will made by a not-nice person. I bet when the answer’s known, it won’t be about the will at all.”

  Eight

  JAN was in the kitchen fixing Ronnie’s bag lunch, putting an extra-thick slather of the honey mustard he loved on his ham sandwich. She gave him two trail mix bars so he could have a midmorning snack—sixteen-year-old boys are all appetite—and meanwhile watching The Morning Show, where a political figure she had never heard of was being interviewed. His tone was reasonable, and he was very articulate, but his opinions on health care had her pink with indignation. She reached to shut off the television just as the phone rang.

  “Hello!” she said more brusquely than she meant to. “I mean, hello?”

  “Mrs. Henderson?” asked a deep male voice she didn’t recognize.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Sergeant Mitchell Rice, Orono Police. I was wondering if I might talk with you some time today.”

  Her fingertips tingled with alarm. She said, “I don’t think I can. I have to work. We have a very crowded schedule today, and I’m head nurse at my husband’s clinic. There seem to be a lot of allergies showing up this time of year.” She realized she was nattering and bit her tongue to stop it.

  “It will only take a few minutes,” he persisted.

  “Can you hang on a minute?”

  “Certainly.”

  She put the receiver on the table and went to find her husband, who was lathering up to shave. “Hugs, there’s a policeman on the phone.”

  “What does he want?” Harvey—he hated that name, hence his acceptance of the marginally less offensive nickname—put down his razor and looked at her with steady, hazel green eyes.

  “To talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “He didn’t say, but his name is Sergeant Rice, and that’s the name of the man who talked to Mother about Aunt Edyth.”

  “Well, then of course you have to talk to him. Are you afraid of what he might ask?”

  “No, of what I might say. You know me, when I’m nervous I just can’t stop talking.”

  “And you’re afraid you might say…what?”

  “I don’t know.” She smiled suddenly, realizing that she couldn’t think what she might say that could harm her. “Never mind, I’m worried about nothing. And who knows? I may be able to say something useful.”

  “Want me to come along?”

  She recalled the full schedule waiting at the clinic and said, “No, and I don’t want him to come to the clinic and disrupt things. I’ll ask him to come here.”

  “All right. But if you’re at all nervous, maybe we should get our attorney to sit with you.”

  “Well…no, because then he’ll think I’m guilty.”

  “You sure?”

  She hesitated, then said firmly, “Yes.” After all, he was Lizzy Rice’s husband. And Mother had said he was nice.

  “All right. But make sure Ronnie isn’t here when he comes. He can be a terrible wise ass.”

  “Ronnie’s going fishing after his summer classes. He won’t be home till dark.”

  “Fine. Call me as soon as he’s finished with you.”

  She went back to the phone to negotiate a time for the sergeant to come over. He wanted to come over now; she wanted him to come over at four, near the end of the workday. They settled on one thirty.

  Jan went back to the bathroom to tell Hugs she’d work till noon and might or might not come back after the interview, depending on how tough he was. “Of course, I might call you from jail,” she joked.

  “That’s not funny,” he said, and his eyes were so worried she went to him for one of the hugs he was famous for, and got shaving cream in her hair.

  BETSY had barely more than unlocked the door when a customer came in. He was a burly man with dark hair and a thick neck cruelly restrained by a white shirt and dark red necktie. He looked around like someone who’d seen this sort of place before, but not with a stitcher’s real interest. Betsy pegged him as the husband or father of a stitcher.

  “Do you have zero or double-zero knitting needles?” he asked. “Steel ones?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. They’re right over here.” She led him to a spinner rack of knitting needles. He glanced at the rack and chose a flat packet of four Skacels. Then he pulled out a piece of paper and seemed to be comparing it with the needles in the plastic pack. Thanks to LASIK, Betsy had a good pair of eyes, so she drifted a little closer and looked around his elbow. What she glimpsed was a black-and-white picture of part of a needle with a short ruler beside it.

  The man must have sensed her near him; he turned abruptly and caught her peeping. But he only smiled and folded the paper. “I’ll take this, please,” he said, handing her the packet, and followed her to the checkout desk.

  She punched code numbers into her computer and, screwing up her courage, asked, “Are you from the Orono Police Department?”

  His eyebrows climbed his forehead in surprise. “What makes you ask that?”

  “A customer of mine is taking a knitting class and she told us that the police suspect her aunt was murdered in Orono. She described the murder weapon as a pin or nail and she touched herself here”—Betsy touched the nape of her neck—“as the place the weapon was used.”

  The man looked thoughtful. “Huh, your customer did that?” he asked.

  Betsy nodded. “Now you come in and somehow I don’t think you do needlework, and you have a sheet of paper with a printout or photocopy of a steel knitting needle on it and you buy a set of steel double-zero knitting needles.”

  “Maybe my wife sent me for the needles.”

  “She’d’ve written a note saying she wanted Skacel double zeroes, not sent you with a picture that could be any brand and any size from one to triple zero.”

  The man smiled suddenly. “I bet you’re Betsy Devonshire.”

  “You win. But how do you know?”

  “My wife comes in here a lot. Liz Rice? Plus, there’s a cop here in town who complains about this amateur crime-solver.”

  “Oh, my gosh! You’re Lizzy Rice’s husband? Well, isn’t that nice!” Betsy put out her hand. “How nice to meet you!”

  He took the hand in a warm, slightly-too-firm grip. “Nice to meetcha,” he said. “Was this customer Susan McConnell, by any chance?”

  “No, her daughter, Jan Henderson. Have you talked to her yet?”

  “No. So she’s a knitter, is she?”

  “Yes, among other things. Most people who stitch do more than one kind. But you know that; Lizzy knits, does counted cross-stitch, free embroidery, and needlepoint. She’s thinking about tatting or needle lace, but she’s waiting for a good class on it.”

  His eyes twinkled. “Yes, I know.” He paid for the needles, tucked the receipt into his wallet, and left.

  RICE pulled into the driveway of Jan Henderson’s home just as the minute hand arrived on the half hour. He’d just had lunch with Sergeant Malloy of Excelsior PD, whose opinion toward Ms. Devonshire seemed to have mellowed a bit over the past year. He had recommended that Rice pay attention to her conclusions but not even think about her methods. “She’s one of those one-of-a-kind people, y’know?”

  “Yeah, there’s one of them in every crowd.”

  “You said it,” Malloy had said fervently—then saw how he’d been suckered and laughed.

  Rice shut off his engine and climbed slowly out of his car. The Henderson house was nice-size, not new, a Cape Cod or saltbox, he couldn’t remember which label to apply; white clapboard with black shutters, two stories. Well maintained. Fireplace chimney up one side. Maybe three blocks from the lake. He paused to inhale the sweet, warm air. June in Minnesota made a lot of people forgive Minnesota’s version of March.

  As he walked up to the little porch that marked the front door, he saw a woman st
anding in a window, watching for him through lace curtains. He lifted a hand in greeting, and she twitched the curtain shut. A moment later, the front door opened.

  She was dressed in medical-clinic scrubs, baby blue with cartoon songbirds printed all over them. He recalled that her husband was a pediatrician. “Ms. Henderson, I am grateful you took time off work to see me,” he said.

  “No problem. Come on in.”

  He stepped into a living room cooled by air conditioning, made to seem even cooler by the use of pale green as the main decorating colors—the same color her mother used—interesting. There was even framed needlework on the walls, like at her mother’s house. On the couch sat an amazing purple needlepoint pillow. It had silver threads, fancy stitches, and big tassels.

  She saw him looking at it and said, “Your wife saw me at a local needlework shop having a fight with it and taught me how to do the interlocking wheat stitch.”

  He smiled. “I keep running into people who know my wife,” he said. “The common denominator seems to be Crewel World.”

  “It’s a wonderful shop,” said Jan. “Just about everyone who stitches in the area goes there. Won’t you sit down?”

  “Thank you.” He took an armless upholstered chair and got out his pen and tiny notebook. Jan sat on the couch. She picked up the pillow and held it on her lap with both forearms, as if it were a pet and could comfort her. Or a shield that would protect her.

  He began by gathering basic information, some of which he already had—but asking again helped establish whether people were being truthful or not. Her answers checked out, and she seemed only about as nervous as anyone would be in her situation. As she spoke of the murder victim, something in her tone made him go deeper into that subject.

  “Tell me about her,” he said.

  “I loved Aunt Edyth, even though she was cranky and peculiar.”

  He smiled. “If she was cranky and peculiar, why did you love her?”

  “She wasn’t like a lot of people today, all full of contradictions. There was something about her that was…all in one. She said what she thought, and, much as I disagreed with her on some things, she was consistent. All of a piece, the expression is. And never dishonest.”

  “You mean she never told a lie?” He let a little doubt show in his voice.

  “It wasn’t like that; I’m sure she told fibs, maybe even a whopper or two. It was more that she paid her debts in full and never broke her word. She was rigid, but in the really floppy world we live in today, that was kind of refreshing.”

  He nodded, making a note. “I agree, very refreshing. Was she religious?”

  “Yes, church every Sunday, rain or shine.” Jan thought a bit, then said, “Believe it or not, she was very kind—at least she was kind to me, always. She listened to me, even when I was just a kid, which is an enormous favor, you know. She was fair with her employees, who were loyal to her. She expected them to do their work, but she was good to them. And she had a great sense of humor. She was fearless and didn’t care what people thought of her. She used to ride a motorcycle back when that was considered not just dangerous but unladylike. And she rode that stinky old machine well into her sixties. Never had an accident, either.”

  “Interesting,” he said, amused at the thought of a skinny old woman tearing up the asphalt on a Harley.

  “Back when she was still driving, she always drove too fast, but I was never scared, because she was so good. She had a speedboat, too. It was her father’s, one of those old wooden ones, but it could go really fast. I never got to ride in it, never even saw it, but Mother told me about how she would take her and sometimes her brother all over the lake. And she would give Mother rides on her motorbike, too, until Grandmother put a stop to it. Said Aunt Edyth would break her neck on that old thing one of these days and didn’t want her to take someone else with her.” Jan smiled. “She didn’t take Mother anymore, but she continued to ride herself. She was not one of those helpless-female types at all.”

  “Do you know why she never married?”

  “Hah, she never even had a boyfriend. She had some kind of twitch about men, though I don’t think she was a lesbian.” Jan paused. “I tried talking to her about it from time to time, but she’d just say there was nothing anyone had ever shown her about the male sex that could hold her interest for more than three seconds. They were ‘untrustworthy scoundrels’ in her book and ‘not worth the powder it would take to blow the lot of ’em to hell.’ Those were her exact words.” Jan was smiling more broadly now. “And she wasn’t easily moved to profanity. So, see? Opinionated and not to be moved, in a world full of people scared to death of being called judgmental.”

  Rice made a brief note: Liked Edyth Hanraty. “And her will reflected that judgment,” he said.

  Jan hesitated. “Yes. I used to be really upset about that. She never made any secret of it, and I think every member of the family tried to talk her out of it, but she had made up her mind long ago. Then one day I thought, well, it’s her money, she can do whatever she likes with it. I mean, if it was my money and someone kept bothering me to leave it to an organization dedicated to—oh, I don’t know—taking away the right of women to vote, I’d stand as firm as Aunt Edyth in refusing to change my mind.”

  Rice pressed her a bit. “And, of course, if she had changed her will, you wouldn’t be inheriting as much money.”

  Jan smiled ruefully. “That’s true. And having a lot of money is nice—if only because I can leave big hunks of it to my two sons.” Her smile thinned with stubbornness, and Rice reflected that here might be a chip off the old block, as determined to give money to her male heirs as her aunt had been determined to deny it to them.

  “May I ask you to show me something?” he asked.

  Her eyes widened the least bit. “What is it?”

  “Your collection of knitting needles.”

  “Why would you want to see them?” She seemed genuinely puzzled.

  “I want to compare them to something.”

  “All right.” She rose and left the room, but returned promptly with what looked like a roll of thick cloth in one hand. The roll was held closed with a narrow cloth band tied in a bow. He smiled; his wife had one of these, too. Needle cases, they were called.

  She pulled the bow loose and unrolled it, a double-thickness of light blue cloth with clear plastic pockets sewn onto one side of it. In the pockets were an assortment of knitting needles, the thickest at one end, dwindling by size to very thin at the other. The pockets shortened down the row so the tops of the needles always protruded. “Is this what you wanted to look at?”

  “Yes,” he said, and pulled the thin packet of Skacels from an inside pocket. “Do you have some of these?”

  She leaned forward to check the size printed on the packet. “Certainly.” She went to the second-smallest size and pulled out the little handful, frowning as soon as she touched them. “That’s funny.”

  “What?”

  “I thought I had six of these, but there are only five.” She counted them quickly. “That’s right, there are only five here. How odd.”

  “Are you using some of them?” he asked.

  “Yes, one pair. I buy the same brand as you have in your hand, Skacels, which come four in a packet. I had two sets of four, and two needles are currently in use, so that means there should be six here. I can’t imagine where the one missing might have gone.”

  “Suppose I told you it was a knitting needle like one of these that killed your aunt?”

  “It couldn’t be. Look at them—they’re eight inches long. It would have been noticed.”

  “Noticed?”

  “Sticking out…” She gestured. “Behind.” He could feel her revulsion in talking about this.

  “Maybe it wasn’t stuck in behind, but, say, in an ear. Or up her nose.”

  She looked at him, wanting to challenge him, but not sure if she should.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Please don’t play games
with me.” She looked about to burst into tears.

  He put on his most disingenuous smile. “Games?”

  She stood. “I think this conversation is over.”

  He leaned back, looking up at her. “All right, okay. I’m sorry. The reason I think the weapon was one of these knitting needles is because they look very much like a fragment that was recovered from your aunt’s body.”

  “You mean from her head.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was put into the back of my aunt’s head just above the first vertebra.”

  “How do you know that?” he asked, a trifle too sharply.

  She sat down. “Because my mother told me.”

  “Who told her that?” the detective asked.

  “The medical examiner.”

  Rice mentally cursed the ME and said, “He told her it was stuck in the back of her head?” He reached back to touch his head just below the crown.

  “He didn’t say just where, but I pithed more than a few frogs in college, so I know where the needle goes. You can’t stick it through the solid bone, and if it had gone into an eye or ear or nose, someone would have seen it. Mr. Huber found it when it scratched his finger, which means he didn’t see it, either.” She shrugged casually, but she was well aware of his intense interest. “I figure the murderer didn’t pull it out for some reason, but perhaps bent it back and forth until it broke, or ruined a pair of scissors cutting it off. In any case, it didn’t break off flush with her skin. He thought her night braid would hide it—and it did, until Mr. Huber scratched his finger on it. So I conclude it was pushed into Aunt Edyth’s brain stem. Which would call for some medical knowledge.” She looked away, but continued bravely, “And here, heir to a great deal of money in Aunt Edyth’s will, sits Jan Henderson, RN.”

  “Did you murder your aunt?”

  “Great-aunt. No, I did not.”

  “Have you any idea who did?”

  She sighed. “No.”

  “Might your mother have done this?”

  “No, of course not!”

  “How about your uncle, Stewart O’Neil?”

  “He’s not a doctor. And anyway, why would he? He gets zip from Aunt Edyth.”