The Drowning Spool

by Monica Ferris

  “No, it was just luck. A coincidence. I just touched the door of the armoire and it opened, and I saw the pillowcases on a shelf. Frey told me they were Teddi’s great-great-grandmother’s, too fragile to be used. I recognized the Hardanger pattern—a really gorgeous one, very elaborate—as the same one on Mrs. Ball’s sheet.”

  “But suppose Mrs. Ball is mixed up in this somehow?”

  “If she were,” Betsy said, reasonably, “then under no circumstances would she be carrying it around asking how to save the embroidery.”

  “Good point,” Goddy agreed. “Like I said: You’re so clever!”

  • • •

  THE phone rang after lunch, and Betsy answered it. “Crewel World, Betsy speaking, how may I help you?”

  There was a brief pause. Then a man said, “I think I may have the wrong number.”

  “Are you Noah Levesque?”

  “Uh, yeah? Who is this?”

  “My name is Betsy Devonshire, and I’d like to talk to you about the murder of Teddi Wahlberger.”

  “Oh, shit! I beg your pardon, but dammit, I think I’ve done all I can with regard to that mess. I’m sorry as hell she’s dead, but I’m not the father of her baby and I don’t want to talk any more about it.”

  “Did you ever go skinny-dipping with her at Watered Silk?” asked Betsy.

  The pause this time was longer. “Who are you again?”

  “My name is Betsy Devonshire and I want to know if you ever went skinny-dipping in the therapy pool at the Watered Silk Senior Complex. Before you answer that, I will say we may have an eyewitness.” Of course, Betsy thought to herself, if there had been an eyewitness, she was now dead. But she wasn’t going to mention that to Mr. Levesque.

  The pause this time was so long that Betsy began to think he had quietly hung up. But she bit her tongue and waited, and at last he spoke. “What do you want?” His voice was quiet.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Why not? You know you’re suspected by the police. If you didn’t murder Teddi, you should want the real murderer to be caught.”

  “The real murderer is the person who got her pregnant.”

  “But you didn’t know until just recently that you weren’t the person who got her pregnant.”

  Another pause, this one not so long. “I can tell you right now, I don’t know a damn thing that could help you.”

  “Neither of us knows that until we talk.”

  “Lady, you got an answer for everything, don’t you?”

  “Hardly. If I did, I wouldn’t need to talk with you. Please, why don’t you suggest a time and we’ll find a public place to meet.”

  • • •

  NOAH Levesque was even handsomer than his picture on Teddi’s Facebook page. He was perhaps thirty-five years old, about five eight or five nine, but so lanky he looked taller. His workman’s tan had not entirely faded even this late into winter. He wore old skinny jeans and a fleece-lined denim jacket over a heavy flannel shirt, which did not disguise his broad shoulders and narrow waist. There were faint laugh lines around his eyes and on his forehead, and he had a dimple in one cheek that deepened dramatically when he smiled, which he did as he sat down.

  Noah’s brown hair was thick and just a little unruly, his dark brown eyes were densely lashed, and his teeth were white and even. His hands were large and blunt-fingered, without rings. And, though it was only noon, he had a beard shadow. “Hi,” he said, in a rich voice with just a hint of sand in it.

  Betsy, drinking in the delicious details, wished she were twenty years younger, thirty pounds lighter, and inclined to whisk handsome strangers off to Cancun for a winter week’s romp in the sun.

  They were at the Barleywine. Leona gave Betsy an approving smile when she saw the two of them in the same booth that Betsy had shared with Tommy. That Leona had picked up on Betsy’s sudden fantasy—and approved!—recalled her to her mission, and made her get a grip.

  Noah and Betsy greeted each other politely—he seemed a little wary. He ordered a turkey wrap and chips and, in a show of confidence, a big mug of Don’t-Be-Afraid-of-the-Dark ale. Betsy had her favorite multilettuces salad—this time with a scatter of shrimp—and a Diet Coke. They chatted about the weather—cold and snowy—until their food arrived.

  “So what do you want to talk to me about?” he asked after taking a bite of his wrap.

  Betsy speared a shrimp and got right to the point. “Were you in love with Teddi?”

  Her directness obviously surprised him. He hesitated, then replied with a little nod, “I think I was falling in love with her.”

  “Was she in love with you?”

  “Not . . . yet.”

  She pressed. “Were you surprised to learn you weren’t the father of her baby?”

  He put his wrap down, his face troubled. “I don’t think I like the way this conversation is going.”

  Betsy ate her shrimp, speared a tomato. She asked, “Where do you think it’s going?”

  “I think you’re going to try to make me admit I was angry with her because she was playing around.”

  “Were you?”

  “First of all, we were both free to date other people; second, I didn’t know she was playing to that extent.” He picked up his wrap.

  “But you knew she was seeing other men.”

  He shrugged as he took a bite, then said around it, “Sure. She was young and beautiful and taking advantage of her youth and beauty, living life full on, right up to the hilt. She was enjoying herself. I couldn’t blame her for that.”

  “Were you dating other people, too?”

  He looked over the little heap of potato chips on his plate as if it held the answer to her question. “No,” he said at last.

  She made a swift mental note: He doesn’t know what I might know.

  “How did you meet?” she asked, changing tack.

  He took another big bite of his wrap, chewed and swallowed. “Through my job. Dick Richards—he’s the owner of the house she lived in with those two other girls—hired Maurice and Company to build a deck, and they hired me.”

  “Did they supply the crew, or did you?”

  He offered a friendly smile at her ignorance. “What crew? It was just a ground-level deck, they only needed one person.”

  “So they hired you? You aren’t an employee?”

  “I’m a freelancer, I work for whichever contractor is looking to hire me for a job. I do demo—demolition—and drywall, roofing, framing—” Relieved to be wandering into familiar territory, he put down his wrap to count his skills off on his fingers. “Flooring, plastering, painting, even a little plumbing. I work twelve, fourteen hours a day spring, summer, fall. In the winter I do hardly any work so I can collect unemployment.” He lifted one eyebrow and smiled a charming, crooked smile, again deepening that dimple. “Anyway, one of them, Richards or Maurice, I’m not sure which, consulted with Teddi, Frey, and Lia to come up with a date for me to come by to start the build. Teddi happened to be the one at home the day I showed up. She’d taken the day off from work, I learned later. But nobody answered the door. I went around back to at least start measuring, and there she was, out in the yard, getting a tan.” He smiled, remembering. “She was just about the prettiest woman I ever saw, just a little bit of a thing, but hot. And she was friendly and nice, we hit it off right from the start.”

  Betsy ignored the urge to question the intelligence of an adult woman who considered lying in the sun in her backyard the equivalent of being at home waiting for the doorbell to ring. “When was this?” she asked.

  “Last year, second week in May.” He ate a potato chip. “A real pretty day, warm and sunny, I remember that—that and Teddi’s yellow bikini.”

  “And you asked her out to dinner that same evening,” Betsy guessed.

  “No, she made me wait about a week. One day while I was cleaning up, getting ready to go home, she invited me in to supper.
Her roommate Lia cooked a great curry that just about melted my back teeth—they all three like spicy food, and fortunately, so do I. We dated pretty steady from then on.”

  “How did she let you know she was pregnant?”

  He stiffened. Now they were coming to it. “She sent me a text saying we needed to talk. Urgent, she said it was. I called her as soon as I got home, but she had company and said she’d call me back later, which made me think maybe it wasn’t so urgent. And she didn’t call until the next morning. And she was kind of flip about it, she says, ‘Hi, baby daddy,’ and I said, ‘Whoa, what does that mean?’ and she says, ‘What do you think it means?’ and I said, ‘Don’t tell me you’re pregnant?’ and she says, ‘Yes, and guess who the father is?’ and I said, ‘It’s not me.’”

  He leaned across the table toward Betsy, his triumphant, angry smile not reaching his eyes. “And I was right!”

  “But you didn’t know that when she told you.”

  He sat back, took a deep drink of his ale, and looked at her over the top of his mug. “No, I didn’t, that’s true. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I am pretty damn careful about that sort of thing. Women like Teddi sometimes aren’t, you know. She was having a wonderful life, dancing every dance, drinking every drink, going to every party. I wanted to laugh and have fun with her—and also take care of her, okay? But that isn’t what she wanted—until this happened. Then she was scared, then she did want someone to take care of her, tell her what to do. But I don’t think she knew for sure who the father was. I think she was trying it on with different men.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  He shrugged and ate a potato chip. “I just did. I heard the cops took DNA samples from another guy plus me. And that they were looking for more candidates.” He offered, umprompted, “I did ask her what she planned to do about it—you know, like get an abortion, keep the baby, give it away, plan an open adoption—”

  “You seem to be familiar with the available choices,” Betsy said. “Have you been through this scenario before?”

  He looked surprised, then nodded. “Yes, a few years back. My sister got pregnant, and she wasn’t married. She went round and round for weeks about what to do. Her boyfriend left town, the worthless piece of— Anyhow, she had all those choices. She finally chose open adoption. She had a girl, Jillian, a cute little kid who looks a lot like her daddy. When the boyfriend came back to town still not ready to step up to the plate, I went and had a talk with him, and this time he moved to Atlanta, which in my opinion is just barely far enough away.”

  “But your sister knew who the father was. Why did you think Teddi didn’t?”

  He ate another potato chip in two crisp bites before answering. “Because she didn’t call back right away. Because when she did call back she didn’t say, ‘I’m pregnant and it’s your fault.’ She was, like, trying it on, to see what I’d say. When I said it wasn’t mine, she didn’t blow up at me. She said, ‘Well, I think it is,’ and I said, you ever hear of a DNA test, and she started to cry, so I hung up. I never heard from her again.”

  “Did you kill her, Mr. Levesque?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Is it true you’re divorced?”

  He blinked at the swerve in topic, then nodded. “Yes.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Not quite three years. It ended two years ago. No kids—her choice.”

  “Do you have any contact with your former wife?”

  “Not lately. She’s engaged to someone else now.”

  “Talk to me about skinny-dipping.”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise, then took a long pull at his ale without looking at her. “Some people enjoy naked swimming.” He put down the sweating mug and wiped his wet fingers on his napkin.

  “I’m sure they do. Did you tell the police that you and Teddi used the therapy pool at Watered Silk to go nude bathing?”

  “No, of course not.” He picked up his wrap.

  “Even though you did?”

  He said cunningly, “Why do you have to ask? You said something about an eyewitness.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you willing to produce her?”

  “How do you know it’s a woman?”

  “You said it was. Didn’t you?” When she merely looked slantwise at him, he tossed down his wrap. “Okay,” he dared her, “what did this alleged witness tell you?”

  Betsy said, “She showed me the way you gained entrance: through a wooden door off the alley into the machine room, up the metal stairs, and through the men’s locker room to the pool.”

  Noah was clearly rattled. He quickly said, “But she’s crazy, right? A crazy old lady who’s liable to say anything.”

  So he didn’t know Wilma was dead. “Was she wrong?”

  He looked away for a long while. Betsy bit her tongue and waited. “No,” he said at last.

  “Who rigged the door?”

  “Dunno.”

  “It wasn’t you?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “But you’re a carpenter.”

  “I’m the only carpenter in the county?”

  “Who else used the pool?”

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “Even to save yourself from a charge of murder?”

  “I didn’t kill her, and they can’t prove I did!”

  “I have been involved in a number of cases in which an innocent party was nevertheless arrested for murder.”

  After another pause for thought, Noah said reluctantly, “That dorky guy, Tommy. He came once.”

  “Was he the one who showed you the way in?”

  “No, he just turned up one night. Brought another guy I never saw before. I don’t know who told him. Maybe the guy who came with him.”

  “Come on, who showed you this back way in?”

  “Teddi did. I don’t know how she found out—or maybe she told me who told her, and I don’t remember the name. Seriously, I can’t remember. It didn’t seem important at the time, you know? It was like a prank, going to the pool. And it wasn’t all that wonderful, anyway. The pool isn’t very big, there’s no diving board, and the water’s too hot, like being in a bathtub.” He shrugged.

  “Who else was there when you and Teddi went?”

  “There was a man and another girl.”

  “Lia? Or Frey?”

  “I never saw either of them there. Look, it was only maybe three or four times, okay?

  “When was the last time you were there?”

  “Some weeks before Christmas, maybe the middle of December. It was snowing like a son of a gun, and we had a hard time getting out of that alley, and I could just see trouble all around if I got stuck, or damaged my truck sliding around back there. It’d be embarrassing explaining how I came to be in that alley. Plus, I need my truck, can’t afford to bang it up.”

  “But Teddi kept going back.”

  “I don’t know that.” He drank the last of his ale and pushed away his plate, with the remnant of his wrap still sitting on it. “Are we about done?” he asked.

  “Where were you the night she was drowned?”

  Noah tried for a dismissive tone. “As it happened, I was home alone. I caught some kind of bug and was sick for two and half days.”

  “Did you see a doctor about it?”

  “No, it wasn’t that serious. But I shut off my phone, just laid on my couch and watched some old movies. Slept a lot between visits to the bathroom.” He shrugged. “Threw it off with no aftereffects.” He wrinkled his brow. “But that’s not much of an alibi, is it?”

  “It’s not an alibi at all. When did you last see Teddi?”

  “About a week before she called to say she was pregnant. Maybe longer.”

  “Did she hint about it then?”

  He frowned, then shook his head. “No, not really. We went out to dinner and were going to go dancing at our usual place, Bar Abilene, bu
t she was in some kind of bad mood, so I brought her home early.” He frowned over that for a few moments. “I guess that was a sign, but it went right past me.” He sighed. “I thought we were a couple, y’know? I knew she sometimes went out with other guys, but I was putting up with that, thinking fine, let her play, get it all out of her system, right? But when she got pregnant, that meant she wasn’t just dating these other men. I was . . . disappointed.”

  “And maybe a little angry?” asked Betsy.

  “No, that wasn’t the way it was. I was upset, yes, but once I calmed down I was concerned about her. But she didn’t call again—and then I heard she was dead.”

  “That must’ve upset you.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, it did. I was really depressed over it. I liked her, she was more fun than anyone I ever knew—in a nice way, and not . . . mean, I guess is the word, she didn’t tease in a mean way, she didn’t ever hurt anyone. When she got mad, she didn’t yell or call anyone names, she’d just start bawling. Made you want to hug her. She was a good kid, she just wanted to have fun.”

  Betsy felt a twist of sympathy for Teddi. “Did she cry when she told you she was pregnant?”

  “Only when I mentioned getting a DNA test. ‘You don’t believe me!’ she said and started to cry, but I wasn’t ready to hear that, so I hung up.”

  Fifteen

  ON her return from lunch, Betsy found Godwin winding up a consultation with a customer who was jazzing up a relatively simple needlepoint canvas. He was just closing The Needlepoint Book, with its three hundred illustrated stitches. Beside it was a heap of wools, silks, metallics, beads, and charms. The total for the materials would add up to over two hundred dollars, including the needles, new scissors, and laying tool. The hand-painted canvas had been purchased at a sale price, further discounted because it was the customer’s birthday, so she was paying more for the materials than the canvas—not an uncommon event.

  The customer, a prosperous-looking matron in her middle forties, was wreathed in smiles as she left. Godwin turned to Betsy and said, “So?”