Sins and Needles

by Monica Ferris

  Each of the other Early Birders had her continuing story: Ingrid was moving rather gingerly as she recovered from a broken hip; April was yawning because she was taking night classes toward a library degree; Barbara was cross with the inefficient builders putting an addition on her house; and Mary was excited about a forthcoming trip to Thailand. Even Vicki had a life outside the pool. She and her husband maintained a big sailboat up on Lake Superior, and she often livened up the sessions with funny stories about her adventures in sailing—and the endless work it took to keep the craft seaworthy.

  But today Betsy let the conversation flow around her all but unheard. She was planning a day of detective work.

  She had talked to Stewart last night on the phone, and he had agreed to meet her for lunch. He knew she was an amateur sleuth—Jan had talked to him a time or two about her friend’s strange ability to prove the innocence of falsely suspected people. Now, offered a chance to help his favorite niece by helping her friend, he was very willing.

  But first, Betsy was going to meet Susan at the Hanraty mansion. Betsy had heard about the interesting visit paid there by Edyth’s family and the selection of memorabilia.

  But Susan had said something else when she’d come into the shop with a counted cross-stitch piece to be finished. “Nobody took what I expected except Katie. The strangest was Bernie. She picked this abstract painting nobody else even liked.”

  Betsy had remarked lightly that there was no accounting for taste. “Well,” Susan had said, “sometimes there is, and the accountant’s name is Stewart.” Betsy had heard about Stewart trying to change his aunt’s mind about her will by visiting her and doing odd jobs around her place. Which meant, of course, that he had several chances to look around. Everything was still there; the executrix—such quaint terms the law had!—hadn’t completed her inventory yet.

  This was going to be a very interesting tour, thought Betsy, doing the grapevine to her left: right foot over left, step left, right foot behind left, step left, and reverse to cross the other way. It made her feel graceful and accomplished.

  As she stepped, she thought about old houses, either properly restored or never altered, and how wonderful they were at giving modern people a glimpse of lost times. This house would tell her something about Edyth Hanraty—and perhaps offer a clue to the person who could not wait for this very elderly woman to die.

  Then, after lunch with Stewart, she had arranged to meet Lucille and Bobby Lee, ostensibly to get support in her quest to prove Jan innocent, but in reality to explore their personalities. Could one or both of them be the kind so eager to get rich they would resort to murder?

  After riding around on foam plastic noodles in the deep end for fifteen minutes, the group paddled down to the shallow end to stretch out, and class was over.

  Betsy showered, changed into pink clam-diggers and a pink gingham sleeveless top, and headed out for Orono. The air was already hot.

  It was eight forty when she pulled in the driveway of Edyth Hanraty’s mansion, ten minutes after the arranged time. There was no for-sale sign up yet, but the wrought-iron gate was open.

  The house had a solid look that took the preceding Victorians to task for frivolity. Betsy went all the way up under the porte cochere, a little surprised not to see Susan there or in back. She got out and started around to the front door, then saw a little hybrid Honda coming up the drive. Susan’s.

  Susan got out, a little breathless. “Sorry to be late. Mrs. Beekman from church called, and I just couldn’t seem to get off the phone.” She looked up at the big front porch. “Shall we go in?”

  They went up the front steps together. From a distance, the simple design had made the house look ordinary in size; now, up close, it could be seen for the mansion it really was.

  “When will your family members be able to pick up the items they’ve claimed?” asked Betsy.

  “After tomorrow, I think.” Susan unlocked the carved-oak door. “The attorney for the estate said she was having the items valued this week, and she called last night to ask if she could talk to me this afternoon, so I think that means she’s done it. Katie’s champing at the bit; she bought a chest to store her silver in—Aunt Edyth kept it in a special drawer lined with silver cloth in the pantry.”

  Betsy nodded understanding.

  “But some of the others won’t get their things right away; they have to arrange for a place to keep them—Jason’s one, there’s no room in his garage for the motorcycle. And God knows where Stewart is going to keep the boat he chose.” Susan opened the door, and they went into the hall. Betsy noted at once the Navajo blanket in its glass case. “Oh, how beautiful!”

  “Yes, isn’t it?”

  “Is this one of the very valuable items you believe Stewart coached his daughters to pick?” asked Betsy.

  “Yes. Lexie—Alexandra—Stewart and Terri’s second-oldest daughter, is going to take that. Stewart and Terri will store it for her until she finishes college.”

  “Help me out here,” said Betsy. “How valuable is it?”

  “Well, I did what Stewart probably did. I Googled ‘Navajo blanket’ and found nothing exactly like this one, and only a few similar ones—and they seem to run between sixteen and twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Oh, my!” said Betsy, turning for another look at the blanket in its glass case.

  Susan went into the living room, flipped on the lights, and sank down on the timber and plum-cushion settee. She looked around and thumped a fist on the wooden arm. “Damn my conniving brother!”

  Betsy followed her. “But after all, why are you so upset?” she asked. “You and Jan agreed to the arrangement that they could pick whatever one item they wanted from the house.”

  “You don’t understand. I think Stewart will ask them to sell their choices so he can have the money to start up that new business he wants!” Susan stood and walked around the room, twisting one fist into the other hand. “That man has started enough businesses to have made six fortunes, but he’s ruined every one of them! He’s lazy, that’s his biggest flaw. He loves the idea of big money, and his schemes match his ambition—but when it comes to the daily struggle, he just can’t do it! He’s a great talker, he gets people all excited, and they invest in his schemes—then he loses their money. And then they let him get away with it because he sounds so plausible when he starts making excuses. What has me angry is that while he was right to get the girls a share in the estate, he’ll take the money they could have realized and will waste that, too!”

  “Do you really think he’d take the money from his children?” Betsy asked. “That’s a terrible accusation!”

  “You don’t know how terrible he is. All his life he’s believed that what he wants is the most important thing in the world—and everyone has catered to that belief. Even I did it, for years and years.”

  What an awful thing to do to someone, thought Betsy. How destructive and cruel. But she didn’t say so, because it wouldn’t help, not now. She did say, “Isn’t Katie an exception? She’s married and has her own home to worry about. She’s going to have a baby, and she’s got college expenses ahead. Surely she’s not going to allow herself to be talked into selling that silver flatware to satisfy another one of her dad’s pipe dreams.”

  Susan came back to lean on the settee. “You may be right there. After all, she’s seen enough of them collapse. Plus, she really seemed to want that service. You should have heard her raptures about it at the lawyer’s office—” Then her expression changed. “No, no, it was Katie’s little speech that gave Stewart the opening to ask that his girls be allowed to take one item from the house. And I can’t believe he came up with that on the spot. No, that was a setup. He came in there all primed to do that. Katie started the ball rolling, that’s all, so she must be in on it! He is so slick. He makes me sick!”

  “I don’t think I’m clear on just what happened,” said Betsy.

  “We all met at the attorney’s office—”

  “
What’s her name?” interrupted Betsy.

  “Marcia Weiner. She explained the will and said that its terms stipulated that Aunt Edyth’s estate was to be liquidated, with most of the money going to start a foundation to give scholarships to women studying business. The rest was to be divided equally between me and my daughter, Jan. Well, that started a discussion about the house and its valuable contents. I don’t think Ms. Weiner understood that Aunt Edyth was a very astute collector of art. Katie asked if family members might buy something at the estate sale and said she’d like to buy the silver. Well, she can’t afford it. It’s Art Nouveau and sterling, a service for twenty-four. Its value is tens of thousands of dollars. And Stewart jumped in and said we all knew the will wasn’t fair, and couldn’t his daughters each take just one thing from the house? And we agreed that would at least make it a little more fair. And somehow, I don’t remember how, it turned into every family member could take one thing. We agreed to meet here at the house so everyone could get a look at the things inside it and decide what he or she wanted. And right here in this room, Bernie surprised us all by saying she wanted that painting.” Susan pointed to the abstract over the fireplace.

  Betsy went over for a closer look. To her, it looked at first like one of those paintings that zoo elephants did, just colored streaks applied slapdash, mostly horizontal with a vertical here and there. Then, as she continued to gaze at it, it seemed to turn into a vague expression of a horse race, with the vertical streaks being jockeys.

  “I kind of like it,” said Betsy. Then she asked, “How old is Bernie?”

  “Sixteen,” Susan said dryly.

  “Maybe she has an artistic nature?”

  “No, not Bernie. But I remember something Stew said in the kitchen when we were concerned about how valuable the antique silver service Katie wanted was. He said, as if he was teasing, that maybe Bernie’s painting was the most valuable thing in the house.” She looked at Betsy. “He was wrong. It’s the second most valuable thing. There’s an eighteenth century four-poster bed upstairs that’s the most valuable, then this painting, then Katie’s silver.”

  “This painting is very valuable?” Betsy tried to keep the doubt out of her voice.

  “Yes, it’s an early example of Joan Mitchell’s work. I described it to someone at the Walker Art Museum, and she said it might be by Joan Mitchell, so I looked her up on the Internet. I found this exact painting, and it said ‘in a private collection.’ It didn’t give a value, but some of the prices of her other works about took my breath away.”

  “Who claimed the bed?” asked Betsy.

  “No one. Stew said he would have, except then we all would have called him a gold digger.”

  “What made you suspect this plot of Stewart’s, anyway?” asked Betsy.

  “What happened was, he slipped up and mentioned that two framed posters on a bedroom wall were worth several thousand dollars, and I asked him how he knew, and he admitted he’d looked up a few things.”

  “Would you have called him a gold digger?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  They walked through the house, Susan pointing out various items—the Hovby dining room set, the silver, the Remington horse, the autographed Hemingway first edition—and explaining who had chosen what.

  “What did Stewart pick?”

  Susan laughed harshly. “Nothing in the house. He picked Aunt Edyth’s old motorboat we found out in a shed. It’s a mess. It’s going to cost a lot of money to fix up. He wants to use it as an advertising gimmick in the fishing business he wants to start.” She told Betsy about Stewart approaching her for a loan to restore the boat and get his business up and running. “I told him no, of course. And I warned Jan that he’d be coming after her next.”

  “If he needs money to start a business, you would have thought he’d at least not pick something that was going to cost him money,” said Betsy.

  “That’s our golden-haired boy all over,” sighed Susan. “His boating business may be a really good idea—and if he did have the money, he could do worse than have that boat as part of the business. It used to be kind of famous out here on the lake.”

  “Why? Is it steam powered, like the Minnehaha?”

  “No, it’s not that old. It’s a runabout from the twenties, made of wood, with an inboard motor. And it’s big—more than thirty feet long. I’m sure there are people who’d get a thrill out of riding in it, some of them people who would remember seeing it on the lake when they were kids. But he couldn’t charge them enough to make up for what it’s going to cost to repair.”

  “Maybe it’s not going to cost as much as you think.”

  “Oh, it’s a real mess. Would you like to see it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Come on. It’s out back.”

  They went downstairs and out the back door from the kitchen. “Looks like that building used to be a stable,” said Betsy.

  “It was. Aunt Edyth and my mother had ponies when they were young.”

  The padlock wasn’t closed. Susan pulled it out of the hasp and opened the big doors to let the light in. The stuff that had formerly blocked the doors was piled up on either side, leaving a clear view of the boat.

  “Golly!” said Betsy. “It is big!” She went closer. “Is it a Chris-Craft?”

  “No, it was built by someone, or a company, named Gar Wood. The engine is a World War I aircraft engine.”

  “Are you serious? An aircraft engine? Where would you find a mechanic who could work on it?”

  “Exactly,” said Susan with a dry tone. “Where indeed?”

  Betsy smiled. “I bet it used to just tear up the water.”

  “It sure did,” said Susan, a smile flickering across her face. “Nothing on the lake could keep up with it.”

  “You’ve ridden in it?”

  “Yes, I have, lots of times. Aunt Edyth was still driving it on the lake in the early sixties. But look at it now—the finish is destroyed, the seat covers are shot, and after all these years of sitting, no doubt it leaks like a sieve.” She walked up to it, reached as if to touch it, then turned with an angry gesture. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Susan stalked to her car, said a brief good-bye, and left. Betsy stood awhile, thinking, then looked at her watch and made a little exclamation. She hurried to her own car, drove out through the pillars and turned left, heading up Highway 15.

  Weaving between the bays of Lake Minnetonka, she followed Highway 15 until, near Wayzata, it connected with Highway 12. At this point Twelve still thought it was I-394, but a couple of miles west it went around a sharp bend and became a two-lane highway, and soon after that ran along the south side of Long Lake, where Billy’s Lighthouse Restaurant was. Billy’s was well-known—it appeared to be just a shaggy roadside place, as much bar as restaurant.

  Betsy had barely found a parking place when she saw Stewart crossing the lot, heading for the front door. He had made a reservation for an indoor seat—there was a large deck out back, facing the lake and its surround of trees, but the weather was too hot and sticky to dine al fresco. The indoor dining area was faced with tall windows that gave the same view, unleavened by mosquitos and humidity.

  They both ordered the walleye, the most popular fish in Minnesota—lutefisk might be more famous, but it certainly wasn’t the best tasting. Billy’s walleye was fresh and came with a white wine and grape sauce that was fabulous.

  Betsy found Stewart a charming luncheon companion. He told stories about Lake Minnetonka she had never heard before and described catching fish in a way that made her decide she really needed to try for a “lunker” herself some day soon.

  “You know,” he said, “you have the quiet, sensible attitude of a good angler, and I really look forward to showing you some of the places that have rarely failed me.”

  “Thank you,” said Betsy.

  “In fact, I wish you were more of an angler, because I’m working on a business deal that could earn you a lot of money, if you wanted in—but you h
ave to understand the lure of the lake—” He stopped short and began to laugh. “My best pun in a long while!” he said. “Maybe I should name my company Lure of the Lake!”

  “What company?” asked Betsy.

  “It’s an idea I’ve been working on, ironing out the kinks and all. You know, if you really understood the powerful attraction that fishing holds for Minnesota residents and tourists, you’d know how valuable a business catering to that might be.”

  “If you’re about to begin a pitch for an investment, I’m going to ask you to contact my investment advisor, Marty Kaplan. I do nothing without his recommendation.”

  “May I call you about contacting him as my plans mature?”

  “Certainly. But can’t you persuade your daughters to invest in this plan?”

  “They haven’t got the kind of money it would take.” He looked surprised that she would suggest such a thing.

  “They may now. Didn’t they each pick items of considerable value from Edyth Hanraty’s house?”

  His eyes went frosty. “Who told you that?”

  “Susan. More, she said you at least suggested to each of them what to pick with an eye toward getting them to invest in your new company.”

  “Well, damn her!” He scowled and took a breath to continue. “All right, since you got the distorted picture from her, let me tell you what I really did. I did everything in my power to convince Aunt Edyth to leave a share to each of them—and then when she wouldn’t budge, I asked her to leave each of them something from the house, as a memoriam. She didn’t seem to think that was such an awful idea, and so I went on the Internet to do some research. I picked the most valuable items I could find the value of and told Lexie, Bernie, and CeeCee about them. I said that I would try to get permission for each of them to pick something, and if I succeeded they weren’t to get all sentimental but to pick from the list I gave them. That way, they’d have something more like a share in what should have been their inheritance. So Susan is right, I coached the girls—all but Katie. She knew she wanted the silverware and wouldn’t think of picking anything else. But then I found out what it was worth, and thought, attagirl! Now even Susan will agree the will was unfair, so why she’s all mad about this now, I don’t know. She and Jan were okay with them picking something. I just wish this could’ve been done by the old woman herself. I’m so angry she was murdered! What a stupid waste! I hope that police investigator finds out who did this.”