When Judy came back and after she had fed her charges, Betsy said, “You had something to tell me about Belle Hammermill’s death.”
Judy’s face turned solemn. “I don’t know if it’s important, but Frank said I should let you decide.”
“What is it?”
“I came up here this morning around ten to give my gliders their midmorning snack, and I came out just in time to hear that awful scream as the woman fell. I couldn’t believe it, and I looked up to see where she had fallen from. The strands of ivy on the ninth floor were waving, so I assumed that’s where she started from.”
“Did you see anyone else up there?” asked Betsy.
“No. At least, I don’t think so. But there was some kind of movement. I . . . can’t describe it, exactly. It was as if someone wearing something dark and sparkly was crawling on her hands and knees.”
Betsy could only stare at Judy, her mind working that one over.
“I know, isn’t that the oddest thing? But that’s what I thought it was. Or—you know how people will put a T-shirt on a Lab? Maybe that’s what it was. I mean, I got my sugar gliders into the hotel, maybe someone else brought a dog. And then put a sparkly shirt on it and sent it trotting down the gallery. Only I think before it got to the corner it went into a room.”
“Did you see a door open and close?”
“No, but I wasn’t at an angle where I could see the doors. All I can tell you is that there was a twinkle, it moved, and then it was gone. I’m not sure when it went away, because I couldn’t see very well, there are those flower boxes, and the banisters. So it was glimpses of fragments, y’know? But it seemed to go away before it got to the end of the gallery.”
“Might it have just gone back along the wall? I got a lesson earlier today in how things vanish if they step back from the railing.”
Judy thought about that. “All right, that might be what happened.”
“Which means whatever it was could have gone down to the corner and around it.”
“Yes.”
Betsy thought for a bit. “Could it have been someone in a wheelchair?” That made more sense, the wheels turning, seen through the balusters.
It was Judy’s turn to try to picture this. “Well . . . yes, I suppose so. Hmmm . . . yes, that makes sense to me. Though wait a second, you’d think I’d see more of the chair, wouldn’t you? And the person in it. But I didn’t.”
Betsy thought some more. “Please don’t be insulted, but how sure are you that you really saw something?”
“Oh, I really saw something. We have a lot of animals at home, and I’m quick to spot movement, especially sneaky movement.” Judy frowned in thought. “It wasn’t something small, like a ball or a cat, but large, like a big dog or a child. It wasn’t tall—like a person walking—it was low, and dark, and somehow there was a twinkle or sparkle, and it was moving fast.”
“Which way?”
“To the left.” Judy raised a forefinger to a little above eye level and moved it a few inches. “That’s all. I’m sorry, I guess that isn’t very helpful.”
That was true, but it was something peculiar, and on the scene, so who knew? She said, “I don’t know what is or isn’t helpful. And even if it isn’t, I got to meet these beautiful sugar gliders.”
“Would you consider acquiring one as a pet?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Good girl.”
Betsy went back out into the sitting room. “Oh, Goddy, they are just the prettiest little things!”
“Good, me next!” announced Godwin, and he slipped past her into the bedroom.
Jill and Betsy were invited to find places on the sofa, and they did. “May I get you something to drink? We have Seven-Up, Coke, and mineral water.”
“Coke, please,” said Jill.
“Water, thank you,” said Betsy.
Jill asked Betsy, “What did she tell you?”
Betsy told her about the “sparkly” sighting.
Jill thought that over while Frank brought them their drinks. “What do you think?” she said at last.
“I have no idea,” said Betsy. “Frank, what did you think when she told you?”
“That she saw something real. I’m the one with the weird imagination.” He sat in an upholstered chair and put one red-canvased ankle on his knee. “But what it might have been, I don’t know. Who goes crawling around on the floor carrying sparklers?”
“Beats me,” said Jill.
“Still,” said Frank, “we decided that since you are taking an interest in what might have happened, you should hear about this. What do you think? Is it a real clue?”
“I’m not sure,” said Betsy. “Maybe not, since what she saw was probably not a person.”
“But what else could it be?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
The talk turned to the world of needlework design, which lasted until Godwin came out. “I want one,” he announced.
“No, you don’t,” said Betsy.
“Yes, I do, I really do. But I won’t get one because in about three weeks I’d start looking for shortcuts in feeding, and they’d get sick and I’d feel guilty. Still, those three weeks would be really sweet. Do you know she takes them on airplanes and everything? Just sticks them in her pockets and down the front of her shirt and no one knows a thing.”
“So much for airline security,” noted Jill.
The door to the bedroom opened and Judy came out. She looked a little surprised to find three guests instead of two.
Frank said, “Sergeant Larson, do you have anything to ask Judy?”
“Just one thing,” Jill replied. “I haven’t got Betsy’s wild-card talent for investigations, and I haven’t had department training as an investigator. But I did wonder”—she turned to Judy—“How fast was this sparkly thing moving?”
“About as fast as a yellow Lab can trot,” Judy replied. “Or so it seemed to me.”
“Thank you.”
Godwin said, “Jill, go take a look at those sugar gliders, you’ll just fall in love.”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Jill. “I have a weakness for soft, furry things, but I have someone to love and take care of already.” She put her empty glass on the end table and said, “It’s getting late, we should let these people rest up for tomorrow.”
Betsy stood and said, “Thank you so much for calling us about this. What Judy told me is certainly intriguing.”
As the trio went back up the gallery toward their room, Betsy told Godwin what Judy said she’d seen that morning.
“Sounds like the sort of clue that not even Miss Marple would get,” he said. “Do you know what it means?”
“No.”
“Well, maybe it’s nothing; maybe it’s not important.”
“No, no, I think it is important,” said Betsy. “This is the first eyewitness account that someone might’ve really been up there. And . . .”
“And?”
“Something . . . I don’t know. It’s like someone at the very back of a big crowd, waving his hand to get my attention. Hard to tell.”
Jill looked at her askance. “You’re a strange one.”
“Look who’s talking, Miss Let’s-Throw-Goddy-Over-A-RAIL.”
“I never let go of him, never.”
“True,” said Godwin. “Even when I wriggled and said, ‘O my dear!’ ” He hurried out ahead of them and did a little waggle as he walked on, looking over his shoulder with eyebrows lifted and his mouth in a shocked O.
“Are you hiding a sugar glider in there, or do you need a dose of that itch cream you carry in your suitcase?” asked Jill.
“Ooo-ooo, made you mad, made you mad.”
“Stop it, both of you,” said Betsy, laughing.
Back in their suite, Jill asked, “Do you want me to call Eve Suttle or Lenore King to see if they’ll talk to you this evening?”
Betsy checked her watch. It was barely nine-thirty, but she was tired. It had been a late night last nigh
t, and a long day today. “I don’t think I could ask an intelligent question, or understand the answer if I could,” she said. “Let’s do it tomorrow. I want to go to bed.”
But lying in bed soon after, she couldn’t fall asleep. She thought about getting up and doing some needlework, but that might disturb Jill. And Godwin was asleep in the sitting room, so she couldn’t go there, either. She slipped out of bed, found her copy of the Management and Hiring booklet—her choices were that or the Gideon Bible, and somehow she didn’t feel up to King James’s English—and went into the bathroom. The regular light switch, she knew, also turned on a roaring exhaust fan, so she twisted the timer on an overhead heating light and sat down to read.
She found a list of “red lights” to look for while interviewing a prospective employee—she’d had two bad experiences this year with employees who’d left after a few weeks—and decided that the red lights both employees had shown was lack of enthusiasm and lack of chemistry. She was about to turn the page and explore the positive signs to look for, when her eye was caught by the notes she’d made while interviewing Cherry Pye.
It had been a long interview. Betsy’s notes covered three pages. She noted with a wry smile her first note: volatile. Too true. On the other hand, Cherry had seemed convincingly reluctant to put others in a bad light. And her story about Lenore’s model jibed with Lenore’s own account of Belle’s misbehavior. Interesting that both Lenore and Eve ran into the same strange jealousy problem with Belle.
Had Cherry?
Betsy ran her eyes back over the notes. The money to buy the store was Cherry’s. Belle supplied “the expertise,” according to Cherry. Cherry said the shop was owned fifty-fifty, but it if was losing money, it was losing Cherry’s money.
Could Cherry afford that?
The light went out. Betsy stood and groped for the dial, found and twisted it, and sat down again to read some more.
Cherry said Belle had explained the reasons for the losses to her: cash flow problems, an increase in inventory, having to split the profits. And if Cherry had asked for an audit, that meant she suspected Belle was lying.
So there was a motive—no. Betsy was starting to get sleepy now, so had to think it out slowly. If Belle was stealing money from Samplers and More, and Cherry was threatening an audit that would reveal it, then the person who should have gone over the railing was Cherry, not Belle. Right?
Betsy sighed, closed the booklet, turned out the light, and went to bed.
Twenty
Sunday, December 16, 7:56 A.M.
Betsy was wakened the next morning by the sound of voices whispering. She understood at once the whisperers were benign because she came awake hearing, “. . . going to wear my lavender shirt, but maybe that’s a little frivolous, and anyway I think this tan looks just as good with the black sport coat, don’t you think?”
Godwin. In her bedroom? No, this was not her bed, so not her bedroom. Where—?
Oh, Nashville. Market. Blizzard. Murder—oh, have mercy! Murder! She sighed.
The owner of the other voice spoke aloud, “Betsy, are you awake?”
Jill.
Betsy was sure there was an implied “at last” in there somewhere. “Uh-huh,” she murmured. “Wha’ timesit?”
“Nearly eight.”
“Uff.”
“We’re thinking we need to get down to breakfast pretty soon because who knows what they’ll have to eat, and the best of it will soon be gone.”
Remembering the Fritos scattered on her tomato soup last night, Betsy sighed again and began to struggle out of bed.
But once up, she was washed and dressed in a very efficient hurry. She came out into the sitting room in her brand new cranberry sweater and navy skirt, and Godwin said admiringly, “How do you do that?”
“I pretend I’m back in boot camp,” said Betsy. “It might’ve been a long time ago, but something you learn in an advanced state of terror never quite leaves you.”
“Terror?” Godwin was leading the way to the door. “I thought you were in the Navy, not the Marine Corps.”
“I was in the Navy, but when you’re eighteen years old and people are shouting and blowing whistles at five A.M. and insisting you hit the line, now, at attention, bare feet at a forty-five degree angle, middle finger lined up with the side seams of your nightgown—and you do—you realize that when you’re really scared you can do anything required of you. Even take a shower and get dressed in eight minutes. It was a surreal experience, one I’m glad I signed up for, but never, ever want to try again.”
Jill snickered.
“What?” asked Betsy, falling behind Godwin, who was practically cantering down the gallery toward the elevators. Breakfast smells of meat and biscuits were wafting all the way to them from down on the atrium floor.
“I had a great-aunt who was a Navy WAVE, and you sound just like her. She wouldn’t have missed it for anything, but never wanted to go back.”
The elevator came half full of people from the ninth floor, and stopped to pick up a few more from seven. Most were in that early-morning daze that wants neither to talk nor listen. Someone did murmur something about the hotel extending breakfast hours to ease crowding, but no one replied.
As the car smoothly descended, Betsy turned and looked out at the rising view. “Hey,” she said, “is that Cherry?”
Jill managed to turn around in the small, crowded space and look out in time to see someone moving down the gallery right across from them. She was in a wheelchair, moving swiftly toward the elevators on that side.
“Where?” asked Godwin, wriggling around to peer out.
“Up there,” said Jill, pointing. “But it’s not Cherry, her hair’s the wrong color.” The person she was looking at had very pale, perhaps white, hair.
The balusters of the metal railing, and the ivy dripping from the flower boxes, broke her image up so that for Godwin she was more a flicker than an image going by. Jill and Betsy exchanged significant looks. “What good eyes you two have,” Godwin said. He was a bit nearsighted, but this was as close as he could come to admitting it.
Breakfast wasn’t so awful as Betsy expected. No fresh melon or strawberries, no croissants or sweet rolls, no bread or English muffins to toast—but there were plenty of biscuits and enough butter or jam for them. There were bacon and sausages, and pancakes with syrup. The kitchen was out of eggs, except for the few stirred into a mix of fried potatoes with add-ons of onion and sweet bell peppers. More biscuits waited to have sausage gravy or a ham and cheese sauce spooned over them. There was coffee and tea, but no milk. The little bin that had held tiny half-and-half containers was empty. There was cranberry juice, but no orange or grapefruit juice. Betsy got the last orange. She peeled it and shared the sections with Godwin and Jill. Before long, they were lingering over the last of the coffee—the place wasn’t nearly as jammed as last night, so they were in no hurry to leave the table—and talking about plans for the day.
“I don’t see Eve Suttle or Lenore King here,” said Jill, craning her neck.
“May I join you?” asked a slim woman with white hair combed into a smooth helmet. She was in a wheelchair, and Betsy suddenly recognized her as the INRG Committee member behind the table in the lobby from yesterday. She had a tray in her lap bearing a cup of coffee and a single biscuit.
“Yes, please,” said Betsy, and Godwin hastily pulled an empty chair away to make room for her.
“We’re about finished,” said Jill. “Do you have someone else who will sit with you?”
“No, but I cherish a few minutes alone at breakfast,” said the woman, transferring the tray to the table. “I’m Emily Watson, co-chair of this event.”
Betsy introduced herself, Jill, and Godwin.
“You’re the one who brought her to this event,” said Emily to Betsy, nodding at Jill. “We issued your friend a special name tag so she could buy something to keep her occupied. But you found something else to do,” she said to Jill. “Trying to find out
what really happened to Belle Hammermill. I am sure you will find it was sad accident or, at worst, a suicide. And that’s why I came to your table—to beg you not to do anything more to disrupt this event than you absolutely have to. Ms. Harrison, who is normally just the night manager, is de facto day manager as well; and she is, quite naturally, upset about what happened yesterday morning. She is anxious that whatever needs to be done, be done quietly and without disturbing the guests. She spoke rather sharply to me this morning about your, er, methods.”
“Yes, she has spoken to us, as well,” Jill said. “I am going to tell you something in strict confidence.”
Jill paused while Emily studied her face and then nodded. “All right,” she said.
“We are trying to solve what we are now convinced is a murder.”
Emily gasped and stared at the three of them, who returned the look solemnly.
“I see,” she said. “Then why—? I mean, I’m sorry, but it seems from the descriptions I’ve heard of your antics around the upper-floor railings that you are amusing yourselves, rather than conducting a serious investigation.”
“We are taking it very seriously,” said Jill. “Those two experiments at the railings were important, and they served the purpose of convincing us that Ms. Hammermill did not go over by accident or by her own will. And having served that purpose, they won’t be repeated.”
“I am glad to hear that,” Emily said. “But I am terribly shocked to think you actually believe someone might have pushed Ms. Hammermill to her death. I trust the reason was such that we need have no fear of it happening again?”
“I doubt that very much,” said Betsy.
“Good.” Emily looked relieved, broke her biscuit and said, “So this was a terrible thing, but an isolated thing. I don’t want people’s noses ground into it, or they might begin to feel they can’t come to the Market in the future without being sickened or terrified.”
“I understand,” said Betsy quietly.
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