The Drowning Spool

by Monica Ferris

  Lia said, “But then there’s our favorite carpenter, Noah Levesque—it’s spelled L-E-V-E-S-Q-U-E, but pronounced Le-VECK. He was hired by our landlord to build the deck out back, and he came over to get started on Teddi’s day off, and caught her out back getting a suntan. He was hot for her from that minute; I think he took about a week longer finishing the job than he had to, just so he could hang out with her. Not that Teddi was fighting him off. I mean, she was so gorgeous, and he’s so handsome, it was like they belonged together. Poor Tommy was feeling tossed aside—don’t you think, Frey?”

  “Definitely. He was more sad than jealous, but feeling cast off, for sure.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Well . . .” Frey looked at Lia, then at Betsy’s notebook.

  Lia said, “There was this other guy, older, strange looking—no, that’s not what I mean. That is, he looked like the guy in a movie who turns out to be a vampire.” She touched her hairline. “What’s it called when your hair comes to a point on your forehead?”

  “A widow’s peak,” said Betsy, amused.

  “Okay, widow’s peak. Dark hair slicked back and cheekbones that kind of stick out and he likes to wear leather. Dark eyes, intense and just a little slanted. Teddi loved the way he looked. But I think he’s married.”

  Frey said, surprised, “You do?”

  “Yeah, I do. He never told her where he worked, for example, or what he did for a living, or where he lived. Teddi loved how he was so mysterious, but I think he had a wife and kids. And he’s old, like thirty-seven or even older.”

  “No, he wasn’t!” Frey was scandalized.

  “Yes, he was. He had lines on his face. And he talked kind of creepy.”

  “I like the way he talked, so cool. And I never saw any lines.”

  “You hardly ever saw him. And you won’t, either. Look on Teddi’s Facebook page—you won’t see a single picture of him.”

  Frey grew thoughtful. “Yeah, now that I think about it . . .”

  “Yes, think about it,” said Lia. “I was looking at Facebook today, getting ready for Ms. Devonshire’s visit, and I couldn’t find a single picture of him.”

  “What’s his name?” asked Betsy.

  “Preston something, or something Preston,” said Frey.

  Lia said, “I think it’s Preston something—I can’t remember if I ever knew his last name. Teddi called him Pres.”

  “What about the other two? Any sign they were married?”

  Frey said, “Sweetie-face Tommy is definitely single. He couldn’t afford to be married.”

  “And Noah was just getting over a divorce. No kids. It was one of those quick-to-get-married, quick-to-be-sorry-about-it things, but he and his ex are still friends.”

  “God, what a hottie he is!” said Frey. “I mean, fan my brow, as my grandmother used to say.” She giggled, then sobered. “Sorry.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “No, not really, but . . .” said Lia, and she exchanged a look with Frey.

  Frey said, “Now don’t get the wrong idea. Teddi was just friendly and . . . impulsive. She dated a lot of men just once or twice. No harm in that, not at all.” Betsy thought Frey was trying to explain away a lifestyle she thought Betsy might disapprove of.

  Lia drew herself up tall and said boldly, “Okay, let’s be honest. All three of us were up for a booty call once in a while.”

  Frey tilted her head to one side. “Well . . . once in a while.”

  Lia said, “The three we’re telling you about were more like her regulars. Men she would invite over, to parties.”

  “Except the vampire,” said Frey. “He’d come by to pick her up, take her someplace.”

  “Now,” said Lia, “twice I came into the kitchen late at night and saw him sneaking down the stairs, dressed like he put his clothes on in the dark.” She looked at Betsy. “I was up stirring the marinade for a roast I was preparing. I love to marinate. But you have to pay attention to what you’re doing.”

  “You should get a job as a chef,” said Frey.

  Lia shrugged, smiling. “I’ve thought about it, but if I did, I wouldn’t want to cook at home anymore.”

  Frey retorted in mock horror, “In that case, please forget I mentioned it!”

  Betsy had a feeling this was an old, familiar exchange, a way of explaining their domestic arrangements to outsiders. She needed to steer them back to the subject at hand. “Lia,” she said, “you’re sure, then, that Preston had been in the house, upstairs.”

  Lia nodded. “Up in her bedroom, yes.”

  “How about Tommy? Or Noah?”

  “Yes, both of them have been in her bedroom,” said Lia, nodding.

  “Yes,” said Frey, also nodding.

  “Do you each have your own bedroom?”

  “Yes, I’m downstairs, with my own little bath; and Frey and Teddi each have—had—a bedroom upstairs with another bigger bath they shared.”

  Frey said, “There used to be just one bathroom, downstairs, but when our landlord remodeled this place, he turned the smallest bedroom upstairs into a really nice bathroom.” She drew her shoulders up and rubbed her upper arms. “The police now think maybe Teddi was drowned in that tub. I’ve been using the downstairs bathroom ever since they told us that.”

  Lia said, “Do you want to see it? Scene of the crime, right?”

  “Yes, thank you, if you’re willing.”

  Frey led the way. Unlike downstairs, the upstairs was carpeted, or at least the hallway was—as was the one bedroom Betsy got a glimpse of as she walked past it.

  The bathroom was really nice. It might once have been a small bedroom, but for a bathroom it was quite large. The floor and walls had been tiled in a pinky lavender, and its window was set with imitation stained glass in a semiabstract pattern of purple irises. The fixtures were ivory and brushed nickel, with a two-sink travertine vanity, and an enormous bathtub standing alone on claw feet. Betsy stood beside it and found it easy to imagine a strong man pushing a small woman down into its depths.

  A large armoire in antique green served as a linen closet.

  Frey said sadly, “This used to be my favorite room. I’ve always wanted to live in a house with a bathroom like this. Our landlord wants to put the house on the market in a few years, that’s why he redecorated, but at least he let us help design the upgrades.”

  “That’s why our kitchen has a gas stove with a double oven and amazing counter space,” said Lia. “I can really cook in there.”

  “Teddi’s favorite space was the deck out back,” said Frey. “She invited the carpenter to our first barbecue. She was still cooking out there after the first snowfall this winter. And Noah came to that last one, too.”

  Lia said, “And why not? She was so beautiful, and fun, why shouldn’t they have made a great couple?” She frowned. “The only problem was, Teddi wasn’t ready to settle down, even a little bit, and he was, I think. She was a player, and she was playing him. I mean, she was still seeing Tommy, and there was Pres, too. I tried to warn her about Pres, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  “I bet she heard you, loud and clear,” said Frey. “She just didn’t care. She wasn’t really serious about any of them, so she would think it didn’t matter that Pres might be married. And anyhow, maybe he wasn’t.”

  Lia raised one finger and said thoughtfully, “Mrs. Pres might have taken it seriously, if there was a Mrs. Pres and she found out about Teddi.”

  Frey gaped at her, then looked at Betsy. “Wow,” she said. “Is that like a clue?”

  “Do you know if this possible wife of Pres’s might have known about the therapy pool at Watered Silk?” Betsy asked Lia.

  “There’s too many ifs in that question,” said Lia.

  Betsy nodded. “You’re right. But so long as the subject has come up, did either of you know about the pool?”

  Big-eyed with alarm, the two were quick to declare ignorance.

  “Did Teddi?”

  Lia and Frey consulte
d each other silently; the look between them showed uncertainty and raveling loyalty. “No,” Lia decided, and Frey nodded agreement. But Betsy could tell they weren’t sure.

  Betsy sighed significantly to encourage them to rethink their reply, and went for a closer look at the armoire. It was a beautiful thing, possibly a real antique, though the paint job was obviously recent.

  Betsy touched its shining surface and the door opened itself under her hand.

  “The latch doesn’t always catch,” said Frey.

  Curious, Betsy pulled the door the rest of the way open. It was shelved top to bottom and there were stacks of thick towels and washcloths, numerous perfumed soaps and shampoos, half scented in strawberry and half in lavender, and a shelf devoted to feminine products and cosmetics, carefully divided in half with a space between them. The bottom shelf held bed linens: a few sheets and pillowcases edged in lace.

  “Those are Teddi’s,” said Frey. “Aren’t they beautiful? They’re antiques, they belonged to her great-great-grandmother. We don’t use them, we keep the ones we use on our beds in our rooms. These are here to be ornamental. Like, decor.” She used the word self-consciously.

  Two pillowcases sat on top of the stack. Betsy could see that their fabric was worn thin, and as she looked closely, she noticed that they were edged not with lace but with Hardanger embroidery. Frowning, she bent and reached in to pull one out.

  “Um,” began Lia, but Frey gestured at her to be silent.

  Betsy unfolded the pillowcase. The patterns, skillfully done, looked familiar. The edging was Spider Web Flowers, and here was the lovely, complex pattern called Edelweiss.

  A penny dropped. “Is there a sheet that goes with this pillowcase?” Betsy asked.

  “Yes,” said Frey, and she stooped to reach to the bottom shelf. “Now where—?” She lifted the two other sets of bed linen. “Why, that’s funny.” She straightened and looked at Betsy with a puzzled expression. “It’s gone.”

  Thirteen

  “OH, that’s impossible!” cried Lia, crowding Frey out of the way as she reached into the armoire. She lifted the other sheets, then pulled them all out, tumbling them onto the tiled floor.

  “Careful, careful!” warned Frey.

  “But of course it’s here. Oh my God, Teddi will have a cow—” She cut herself off and, pressing both hands to her face, turned away. “Sorry, sorry!” she said in a strange, high voice. “Oh, Teddi!”

  Frey immediately pulled her away from the wardrobe and embraced her. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she said.

  “I can’t believe she’s gone!” wept Lia. “She was so alive!”

  “I know, I know,” said Frey, who was looking apologetically at Betsy over Lia’s shoulder.

  Betsy said, “I’m sorry this has upset you. Maybe this was a bad idea. Do you want me to leave?”

  “Maybe that’s best,” moaned Lia.

  “No!” said Frey, releasing Lia and holding her at arm’s length. “Now you listen to me, Lia Perrin. You agreed with me that we should take every opportunity to help find out who did this terrible thing to Teddi. Ms. Devonshire just now found something that the police missed. It may be important. So pull yourself together and stop being messy. Okay? Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Lia, sniffing and nodding. “Yes, okay.”

  “Good girl.” Frey turned to Betsy. “Is the missing bedsheet important?”

  “I don’t know how important it is, but it’s definitely a clue. Someone brought the missing sheet to my shop, torn and dirty. She found it in her garbage bin, with no idea how it got there.”

  Lia whirled to face Betsy. “How did that happen? Who put it there?”

  “I don’t know. But it will be helpful to try to find out who took it away from here. Did either of you take it, perhaps to show it to someone, or even to wrap around something?”

  “No, no, the only person who ever handled those bedclothes was Teddi,” said Frey. “Even when we were cleaning in here, she insisted on being the only one to take them out and put them back, and we mostly just dusted around them. They were too fragile to survive much handling, she said.”

  “That’s right,” seconded Lia. “One thing that made us good roommates was that we never touched anything that wasn’t ours. And it helped that we each had our own bedroom.”

  “May I see Teddi’s?” asked Betsy.

  “You show her,” Lia said to Frey. “I can’t go in there.”

  Teddi’s bedroom wasn’t large, but it was tastefully decorated in deep pink and silver with pale pink accents. The bed was thickly draped with a rose-pink duvet over a pale pink dust ruffle, and the border of the tufted headboard had been painted silver. The wall behind it had been hand- painted with a gnarled tree covered with pale pink flowers visited by silver butterflies. The carpet was silver-gray.

  One pink wall was covered with pen-and-ink and watercolor portraits and landscapes, some framed and others held on by painter’s tape. Betsy recognized Lia and Frey in two of the drawings. The paintings were well done, though not quite professional. A lowercase wooden initial t, painted silver, was centered over a deep pink Ikea desk and chair. A silver laptop computer sat on the desk, its lid closed, and beside it stood a plain glass vase holding a single branch of silk cherry blossoms.

  “Teddi bought a capital T for this wall, but decided it looked too much like a cross and replaced it with the lowercase t,” said Frey.

  “Was she anti-Christian?” asked Betsy.

  “Oh, no, not at all! She went to church twice a year, even after her parents retired to Florida. She just didn’t want a cross . . . in her bedroom.” Frey shrugged and looked uncomfortable.

  “I understand. Is all this artwork hers?” asked Betsy.

  “Yes, all of it. She even painted the wall.”

  “That tree is amazing,” said Betsy, turning to look at it again.

  Frey said, “She loved to paint and draw. She did what-do-you-call-them, like cartoons—caricatures, that’s it, and landscapes and people. There are whole albums of her work, not just the things on this wall.”

  “Would there by any chance be a drawing of this fellow Pres?”

  Frey stared at her as if suddenly realizing she was sporting a halo. “My God, I never thought about that! Yes, yes, she did! You are incredible, even the police never thought of that!” Frey ran to the bedroom door and pulled it open. “Lia! Lia!” she called. “Get Teddi’s albums out!”

  “What for?” Lia called from downstairs.

  “To look for a drawing of Pres!”

  “Who?”

  “Drawing! Sketch! Of Pres!”

  “Holy cow, I never thought of that!”

  Frey, pleased and excited, turned back to Betsy. “Is there anything else I can show you up here before we go back downstairs?”

  Betsy shook her head, then thought of another question. “Was Teddi using birth control?”

  “Yes, of course. She was on Enovid.” She offered a sideways smile. “We’re all on Enovid, actually.”

  “Apparently Teddi told someone she sometimes forgot to take her daily pill. Could that be true?”

  “I don’t know. She was kind of a space cadet, it’s true, so it would be just like her, but I don’t know if that’s what happened. I mean, I never looked at her meds or in her jewelry box. We all kept our meds and anything pricey in our own bedrooms so we could lock them up during parties. Because you never know, right?”

  “Right,” Betsy agreed. “Do you know where in her bedroom she kept her birth control pills?”

  “No—and anyway, why do you want to know that?”

  “Because the autopsy showed she was pregnant. And I—”

  “Oh my God! Oh my God! Are you sure?”

  “The medical examiner’s report said she was ten weeks along.”

  “But then—Could that be why . . . ?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Oh my God!” Frey turned to lean against the door and gasped brokenly, trying not to weep.
“I can’t believe it, this is so awful!” She thumped on the door with her fist, twice, hard. “This is so sad!”

  Betsy put her hands on Frey’s shoulders. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew. Didn’t the police say anything?”

  “No, they never said anything about that!” Frey turned, shrugging off Betsy’s hands. Her own hands pressed against her cheeks. Tears poured out of her eyes, wetting her fingers. “This is so wrong! I can’t believe it!” she shouted angrily.

  Suddenly the door pushed against her. “What’s going on in there?” demanded a voice. Lia’s.

  Frey hastily stepped aside and opened the door. “Lia, did you know Teddi was pregnant?”

  “Really?” She looked at Betsy, who nodded. “So that’s what it was.”

  “What what was?” asked Frey.

  Lia came into the room, walked to the window, and pulled aside a very pale pink sheer curtain to look out briefly before turning back. “I kind of wondered what was going on with her,” she said to Betsy, her face full of grief. “She’d gotten odd, kind of moody. She wasn’t eating junk food—which she loved—and wasn’t partying so much.”

  Frey said, “Yes, I noticed it, too. But I never guessed that. I thought maybe it was something at work.”

  Lia nodded, “Me, too. So I finally asked her about a week before she”—Lia choked over the word—“died, if something was going on. She said everything was going to be fine. You see what I mean about odd? Not that everything was fine, but was going to be fine. I didn’t remember that till later.”

  “So usually she was good about taking her daily Enovid?” asked Betsy. She was trying to get a straight answer from them.

  Both girls shrugged. “I never asked her about it,” said Frey.

  “So that’s how it happened,” said Lia. “She was kind of a bubble-brain.”

  Frey said to Betsy, “Go ahead and look. They shouldn’t be hard to find. Only . . . will you look on your own? I don’t think I could stand going through her things just yet.” Frey went to stand by Lia at the window, folding her arms tightly, her eyes cast down. Lia put an arm around Frey’s shoulders.