Sins and Needles

by Monica Ferris

  “That’s awfully sweet of you, pet.” Stewart turned to his wife. “See how CeeCee believes in me?”

  “You would actually permit her to make that sacrifice, wouldn’t you?” said Terri in a terrible voice. She turned and walked away.

  “No, of course not!” called Stewart, but Terri kept going. “I wouldn’t take money from her. I only said it was sweet of her to believe in me!” When Terri still didn’t turn around, he muttered, “Unlike my own wife, God bless her.”

  “Uncle Stewart,” said Jan, “why do you want that boat so much?”

  He turned to her, mouth opening to reply, then shut it again. He heaved a huge sigh. “You’ll understand one day, Jan. I promise you, you’ll understand.”

  Thirteen

  ALTHOUGH the shouting appeared over, the tension remained, and everyone began looking for an excuse to leave—not hard to do, since the exploration of the property was over. Stewart tried to jolly them all into a more comfortable mood; they were having none of it.

  But when CeeCee whined, “Can we go home now?” Stewart took her out under a big cottonwood tree, stooped down, and began whispering in her ear. In about a minute, she began to giggle. He whispered some more, and she whispered something back, and the two came back to the door of the shed with identical smug smiles on their faces.

  “All right,” said Jan, “what’s the big deal here?”

  “No big deal,” said Stewart, his smile instantly replaced with a surprised and hurt look. “I was just sharing a joke with my beloved youngest daughter.”

  “Yeah,” said CeeCee, her smile refusing to go away.

  “By the way, Jan, may I speak to you in private?” Stewart asked.

  “What about?” she replied suspiciously.

  “Oh, it’s not urgent or anything. Maybe some time in the next few days?”

  “I guess so.”

  Stewart bowed. “Thank you.” He turned to Susan. “And you? May I speak to you?”

  “Certainly. How about right now?”

  “Now?” He looked disconcerted. “Well, uh, certainly, all right. Where shall we go?”

  “How about that same tree beneath which you talked with your beloved youngest daughter, CeeCee?”

  “All right.” Still looking disconcerted, he led his sister to the big cottonwood. There, out of earshot, he made some kind of pitch while the others watched. Susan became stiffer and stiffer until she folded her arms and began shaking her head. The more earnest Stewart grew, the more firmly she shook her head. Still, he never lost his temper. Nor did she. Finally, the two came back together, both breathing deeply and not even looking at one another.

  Now the gathering really did break up, to a chorus of good-byes and car-door slams.

  Jan, closing her mother’s car door, said through the open window, “What did he want?”

  “Three guesses.”

  “Money?”

  “Of course, money. What else could he possibly want?”

  “What for? To repair that wretched boat?”

  “Oh, no, the boat’s only the beginning. He also wants me to finance the opening of a tourist fishing-guide operation. He’s spent so many years fishing on Lake Minnetonka that he’s convinced he knows all the best spots and that he can rent boats and take fishermen out and simply coin money. It would only take several hundred thousand dollars of start-up money, and he’s sure he could pay me back out of the profits in a few years.”

  Jan stared at her mother. “Is he serious?”

  She shrugged and started her engine. “He sounded serious.”

  “You aren’t—” Jan recalled Susan’s folded arms, her head shaking back and forth, beneath the big tree. “No, of course you aren’t.”

  “And neither should you, when he approaches you.”

  THE next day, Jan came into Crewel World holding a white plastic bag. “Hi, Betsy,” she said. “I think I have a job for Sandy here.” Sandy Mattson was Betsy’s “fix it” stitcher; she could take raveled knitting or poorly done needlepoint and mend it invisibly. At a price, of course—but one many stitchers were willing to pay.

  Jan opened the bag and rolled it down to reveal the terrible remains of the pillow found in the old boat. “Gosh, it didn’t smell that bad when I packed it!” she said, as both she and Betsy stepped back, waving their hands in front of their noses. “Sorry, I’m sorry!” Jan, blushing, stepped forward to grab the bag, hold it up, and put a long twist in it.

  “What do you want done with that, besides to deodorize it?” asked Betsy.

  “Never mind. I’ll take it home and try to get the stink out.”

  “Well, no,” said Betsy. “I have some connections in that area. And methods of my own, for that matter. What is it, anyway?”

  “It’s a pillow with a knit cover. I think my aunt Edyth made it, so I was hoping to get it restored. Obviously, mice have been living in it, plus I think it once had mildew—it was found in a storage cabinet in an old boat. If you want to have a go at taking out the smell as well as restoring it—the knitting is badly raveled along two sides—I’ll be very grateful, and I’ll pay whatever it costs.”

  Betsy nodded. “All right. Let’s write it up. Are you in a hurry? I’d like to talk to you about something else. It’s important.”

  “You sound serious.”

  “I’m afraid it is serious.”

  “Then of course I can stay.”

  Betsy wrote up the work order and had Jan sign it, which she did with a little flourish. “Now, what’s the matter?” she asked, as she handed the pen back.

  “I had a long talk with Lucille. Do you know she really thinks she’s your sister?”

  Jan smiled. “No, that’s kind of a game we’re playing—”

  “No, she has what she thinks is a good reason to think she is actually your sister.”

  Jan stared at her. “You’re joking!”

  “I am not. She collected the evidence a few years ago in Houston, at a medical conference you both attended.”

  “We did?”

  “Certainly. You said something about it to me, about being accused of attending under two names? Or was it having a twin?”

  “Was that in Houston? Well, I suppose maybe it was. But what does—oh, you mean Lucille was the other person?”

  “That’s right. She had just found out she was adopted and was beginning her search for her biological parents when her laboratory sent her to the conference—it was in her home state, remember.”

  Jan said, “I don’t remember talking to her there.”

  “No, you never spoke to one another. But she stole your hairbrush from your room. The maid let her in—she thought she was you. The maid, that is.”

  “She stole my hairbrush? Why?”

  “So she could have a DNA test done on the hair caught in it. If you hadn’t brought a hairbrush, she was prepared to steal your toothbrush.”

  “She faked her way into my room in order to steal something?” Jan’s nostrils flared, and an angry frown was forming.

  “Yes. She was feeling pretty desperate.”

  “I guess so!”

  “She was probably in that same state of mind Molly was in last year.” Molly was a mutual friend who had recently discovered that her big sister wasn’t her big sister at all, but her mother. Molly had gone through stages of denial and anger for months before arriving at acceptance.

  Jan looked thoughtful. “All right, all right, I can see that. And finding out you’re adopted only after both parents have died would be worse. You can’t talk to them about it. So I guess some people would go a little crazy.” She thought some more. “So that’s why she was talking so much about DNA the other day when we went shopping! She wanted me to catch her hint! I thought we were talking medicine because I warned her I was in a funny mood and there were other things I didn’t want to talk about.”

  Betsy nodded. “She was setting you up to talk about your DNA and hers.”

  “But you can’t prove two people are siblings
with DNA. She knows that.”

  “Yes, she does. But do you remember why Lucille had a problem carrying babies to term?”

  “Yes, we talked about that, too. She has a balanced translocation on two genes.”

  “And I remember you mentioning at the sock class that you’d had pregnancies end without warning. Lucille was there, too, remember?”

  Jan grimaced. “Gosh, you’d’ve thought I’d’ve caught the hint!”

  Betsy smiled. “She was certainly hoping you would. She told me this particular translocation doesn’t cause much of a problem in the person it happens to, except that it makes the carrier more likely to have early-stage spontaneous abortions.”

  Jan’s eyes closed, then opened. “I was so focused on the pattern I was going to knit I just didn’t pay attention.”

  Betsy nodded. “When she started a search for her genetic parents, she found that she was born in Minnesota, but the trail stopped at the St. Paul hospital where her newborn self was dropped off, apparently by a sorrowful mother who could not care for her. She couldn’t get beyond that. Then, about a year ago, her company sent her to a medical conference in Houston.”

  “You know, I would have talked to her if she came up to me. Why didn’t she approach me?”

  “She was afraid to approach you without more knowledge. All she had was your looks and where you were from—and a big dose of wishful thinking.”

  “Still, I wish she had said something. It would’ve been fun to discover this together. I would have given her some of my hair, or a swab from my mouth.”

  “Would you? A perfect stranger walks up and says, ‘I think I’m your sister. May I borrow some of your saliva?”

  “Oh. Well, she may have been right. I mean, you hear all the time about people about to come into money besieged by formerly unknown relatives.”

  “Or estranged ones wanting to make up,” nodded Betsy, whose ex-husband had made a determined effort to win her back when he heard of her own inheritance. “But you see the real problem here. Given that you both were born in Minnesota and that you look very alike, the DNA results improve the odds tremendously that you are natural sisters. And if you are, that is going to complicate the inheritance situation enormously.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” said Jan. “No, if it’s true, it means our inheritance is cut by a third.”

  “She has a daughter, you know.”

  Jan’s eyes closed. “My God, you’re right. It cuts it in half. Oh, this is…amazing.”

  “Yes, but it gets worse. If she did know about the inheritance, she becomes a very likely suspect in Aunt Edyth’s murder. She was up here when it happened.”

  Jan went white. She grabbed a chair as if it were a life-line, pulled it out, and sat down. “Oh, my,” she said. “It seems I have a sister…who may be a murderer.” She looked at Betsy, her blue eyes huge and blank. “Does she know about the inheritance? Oh, of course she does. We talked about it at the sock lesson, and it’s been in the papers because it’s such a strange will. But she might not have known before she came up.” She touched her forehead with her fingertips. “But wait, if she is my sister…when? She’s five years older than I am; Mother would have been—” She calculated, eyes half closed. “Fifteen—no, sixteen. That’s old enough. But I asked Mother if anything had happened she never spoke of, and she said ‘No.’ She didn’t sound as if she was lying, but she must have been. I always wanted a sister, and now I have one—a big sister. How odd. This is disturbing. This is amazing. Lucille is my sister. And oh, I’m an aunt again, because she has two children, a son and a daughter. I can’t even remember their names. But what if Lucille knew, if she came up here because she knew about Aunt Edyth? Then maybe she did it. I don’t want that! My head is just spinning, and why can’t I stop talking?” A cup of tea appeared on the table in front of her, and she picked it up and took a hasty sip—then sucked air over her tongue, because the tea was too hot. But it stopped the nattering.

  Betsy sat down at the table beside her. “The next question is, what are you going to do?”

  “Oh, I think the first thing to do is tell Mother! She may be able to explain how it can’t be true. Or, if it is, why she lied.”

  “You’ll need to do another DNA test on her, you know; that will prove one way or the other if she is your mother’s daughter.”

  Jan said, “And if it proves she is, we’ll have to tell Sergeant Rice.”

  “No,” said Betsy, “we’ll have to tell him now. Because true or not, Lucille believes it and may have acted on that belief.”

  Fourteen

  JAN went straight from Crewel World to her mother’s house. She rang the doorbell rapidly three times, her usual signal of arrival, then walked in—Mother never locked her door when she was at home.

  Susan was in the living room, working on a counted cross-stitch piece, a square magnifying glass leaning out from her chest on two cords. She looked up and smiled. “Hello, dear,” she said.

  “Mother, I have something to tell you.” Despite her effort to speak calmly, Jan’s tone was almost frightened, and her mother immediately put her needle into a corner of her framed fabric and took the magnifying glass from around her neck.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Remember that woman from Texas I told you about? The one who looks like me?”

  “Yes, Lucille somebody. What about her?”

  “Lucille Jones. She has proof that she’s related to me.”

  Her mother frowned. “What kind of proof?”

  “You know how both you and I had problems carrying babies to term? So did she. And the reason for her problem was a translocation on two of her genes. She found the same translocation on the same genes in me, and that makes her think we may be sisters or cousins or something.”

  Her mother turned her head a little sideways. “And just how did she discover this same genetic translocation in you?”

  “It’s kind of an involved story.” Jan sat down on the couch and explained about the medical conference, the stolen hairbrush, and the genetic test performed on the hairs found in it. “One thing the test could have done was shown we could not be siblings, and it didn’t do that.”

  Her mother’s eyes had been growing wider and wider during Jan’s story. “So if she’s telling the truth—which you don’t know—she’s a confessed thief!”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, a hairbrush—that’s not important! She was afraid to talk to me directly, because she didn’t know what kind of person I am and because she didn’t have any evidence that we were related. But she was desperate to connect with her genetic relatives. And she was afraid that if she just walked up and asked me to help her find out, I’d think she was some kind of nut.” Susan raised a hand, wanting to interrupt, but Jan said, “Just listen one more minute, please. She’s adopted, and now that she’s found out I have the same genetic flaw she does, on the same two genes, she suspects we’re related. There’s a high probability that we are. Mother, am I adopted?”

  “No, of course not! Why on earth—”

  “If I’m not adopted, then is she right? Are you her mother?”

  “No, I am not!” So fierce was Susan’s denial that she looked close to tears.

  “She is absolutely sure she’s related to me—and to you, because of this translocation thing. So where did she come from?” Jan felt her face squinch up as she fought tears of her own. “She just wants to know—and she’s got me wondering. I do have the translocated gene—”

  “Lucille says you have the translocated gene.”

  “You think she’s lying?”

  “All I know is, she is not my daughter. You say she looks like you, and she says she likes a lot of the same things you do. Well, good for her. I have no doubt there are a great many blondes in Minnesota and Texas who like to stitch and ride in boats and take business trips, and not one of them is related to you, or me, or anyone else in the family.” She gestured in a spiral upward. “For all you know, she may
be lying about liking those things, just as she may be lying about that translocated gene business. Has she shown you any documentation about it?”

  “No, she hasn’t.”

  Susan made a dismissive sound and added, “I think you should talk to your brother the lawyer. Ask him what we need to do to protect ourselves. Because I foresee a lawsuit that can tie things up for years if we don’t cut this off right now.”

  Jan was hurt at this assertive dismissal of her trust in Lucille, as if she were a naïve child. Jan had worked with the public for many years and considered herself a shrewd judge of character. And Lucille had seemed perfectly sincere and honest. “Well, suppose she’s not lying?”

  “Fine. Then she’s got the proof. Ask her to show it to you.”

  “And if she does? Then what? Her next step will be to ask that you be tested. Would you be willing to have a DNA test?”

  “Certainly, and thank God there is such a thing to disprove her claim once and for all.”

  STEWART was in the kitchen preparing lunch. Lexie, Bernie and CeeCee were weeding the gardens—vegetable and flower. Minnesota’s growing season was short, but there were already lettuces, radishes, and green onions for the salad he would make. The cucumber he was slicing was store bought; the garden wouldn’t offer cucumbers until July.

  The phone interrupted him, and he grabbed the receiver, laying it on his shoulder and holding it in place with his chin while he cut up leftover chicken to add to the salad. “Speak to me,” he said in a cheerful tone.

  “Stew, it’s Susan.”

  He closed his eyes briefly, took a breath and said in a good imitation of that same tone, “Hello, Sis! What’s up?”

  “Jan just left me. She came by to talk about that new friend of hers, Lucille Jones.”

  “I don’t think she’s told me about Ms. Jones.”

  “Well, brace yourself, because we’re probably going to hear a whole lot about her. She’s from Texas, and she’s up here trying to prove she’s related to us. In fact, she wants Jan to think she’s my daughter.”