Crewel World

by Monica Ferris

  She nodded. “The paper trail of owners tracing a piece of art back to the artist.”

  “Or the place where it was dug up,” he agreed. “So what we get sometimes is an authentic piece of ancient art with a fake provenance. It’s my job to authenticate pieces that we acquire, and I’ve learned to look beyond the paper to the piece itself.”

  “Hud, where’s the T‘ang horse?”

  If she hoped to startle him with that question, she didn’t succeed. “In storage. Most of our collection is in storage, because we’re renovating the Asian art exhibits, giving separate galleries to India, Korea, Islamic countries, Himalayan kingdoms”—he was counting on his fingers—“Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. Plus new lighting and better alarms. It’s going to be spectacular. I take it you went looking for the horse?”

  “Yes. Margot was going to redo her needlepoint picture for a customer, who offered a thousand dollars for it—a sum the shop can use, badly. I’ve got an employee who thinks he can do the needlepoint, so maybe we can still get the money. I was curious to see what it looks like—I don’t remember more than glancing at Margot’s original.”

  “You want me to show it to you?”

  “Can you?”

  Hud glanced toward his desk, where papers waited. Then he smiled at her like a schoolboy plotting to play hooky. “This will have to be quick, okay?”

  “Thanks.”

  But as they turned toward the door, Betsy saw the one non-Asian note in the room, an umbrella stand made from an elephant’s lower leg, standing by the door.

  “Let me explain,” Hud said with upraised hands, when her questioning gaze came back to him. “I needed something to hold my walking sticks, and they were going to de-accession that. Somehow, it ending up in a Minnesota landfill seemed worse than keeping it, though of course we can’t display it. So don’t look at me like I killed the elephant myself; that happened a hundred and thirty-odd years ago.”

  Betsy approached the object gingerly. She had heard about such things, but to actually see one was horrible—it even had the toenails—so she changed focus to the seven or eight walking sticks and the one umbrella it held. Most had brass heads, including the umbrella, which was tightly furled. “Is this your collection?” she asked.

  “Part of it. I’m always taking one or another home and then coming in with a different one. I don’t even know what’s in there right now.”

  The flat-faced owl was, and another shaped like a snail. “Which one’s the sword cane?”

  He pulled out an ebony cane with a standard curved handle. Apart from some copper-wire inlay, it was undecorated. Hud had to pull fairly hard to get the handle to separate, which he did with an overhead flourish, and suddenly there was a length of gleaming steel waving under Betsy’s nose.

  “Cute,” said Betsy, taking a step back. “I’m glad it was the sword or I’d be covered with whiskey.”

  Hud laughed and put the cane back together, and they went out of his office. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, Dana,” he said to his secretary as they swept by.

  They took the freight elevator, a big, padded box so old-fashioned it had a human operator—a retarded man from a local group home, who loved this vehicle like Hud loved his Rolls. As it slowly clanked its way down, Hud said to Betsy, “How do you like our Guthrie Theatre?”

  “Very impressive. How did you know I went?”

  “You’re a new face in a small town. Everyone’s paying attention.”

  “I didn’t know you lived in Excelsior.”

  “I don’t, I live next door in Greenwood. But I eat breakfast every so often at the Waterfront Café.”

  Betsy chuckled.

  They went up a broad hall lined with huge eighteenth-century religious paintings to an unmarked wooden door that opened with a key.

  The door let into a long narrow hall, at the end of which was another door, which opened into an enormous room full of stacked wooden crates, a big stone statue of Shiva, and glass cases containing golden Buddhas, Chinese watercolors, Japanese robes, and enigmatic stone heads. “Wow,” breathed Betsy, “it’s like Christmas at Neiman Marcus.”

  Hud laughed. “Here, this way.” He led her through a labyrinth formed by the rough wooden cases. At last he led her around an immense crate and pointed. “There it is.”

  The blue horse was inside a glass case with a brown horse and two human figures. Hud said, “As you can see, it’s part of a set. They are funerary figures from a tomb in China built early in the eighth century.”

  He watched as Betsy slowly approached the case. The figures were on a stepped base, the male figure on the highest point in the center. But Betsy only glanced at him and focused in on the blue horse. This was so typical, thought Hud, that he was going to suggest at the next board meeting that they discontinue the postcard showing all the figures and make one of just the horse.

  High but directly above the case was an air vent; it blew a chill draft down on them. He saw Betsy shiver and stuff her hands into the pockets of her blue cardigan as she moved around the case. Suddenly she stooped as if to see it from a child’s angle. He could see only the top of her head, and was surprised at the amount of gray in her hair. Her face was young; she could get away with a dye job. Doubtless when she came into that money, her hairdresser would suggest it. What was it, three million? He would himself suggest some improvements to her wardrobe—that cardigan was positively shabby.

  He waited, but she showed no signs of being finished. At last he cleared his throat, and when Betsy straightened he was looking pointedly at his watch.

  “Sorry,” she said, and they retraced the labyrinth out of the storage room.

  Back in his office, she asked, “May I ask why Margot came to see you the day she died?”

  “She had some idea about a proposed fund-raising campaign. She felt it was too ambitious, that we wouldn’t meet our goal. She wanted me to support her at the next meeting when she voted against it.”

  “Did you agree to?”

  “No, I told her I thought the goal was achievable. We agreed to disagree and she went off to see the T‘ang horse.”

  “But the door was locked. Or did she have her own key?”

  “No, she borrowed mine. There was talk among the board members about getting their own keys, but the staff argued successfully that the hand of authority is not the same as the hand that knows how to handle fragile artifacts.”

  “Yes, of course. So why, when she brought the key back, was she all upset?”

  He looked at her slantwise. “Have you been talking to my secretary?”

  “That’s what you get for making me wait while you chat on the phone,” she said archly. “But why was she angry?”

  “She wasn’t all that angry. Every time she went into that storage room, she snagged a stocking or her good wool skirt. She wanted to know when we’d get the renovations finished; most of our artifacts have been in storage for over a year. I told her it might be another six months; we’re short of money to complete the renovations.” Hud grinned at her. “I think that might have changed her mind about voting against the fund-raiser.”

  Betsy smiled back. “Do you remember about what time she left here that Wednesday?”

  He had to think. “I’m not sure. Wait; I had an appointment at two and I made it, so it must have been fifteen or twenty minutes before that.”

  “Did she tell you her plans for the rest of the day?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I know she had an appointment with her attorney to sign the incorporation papers, but that only took half an hour. Yet she didn’t get home until after I’d closed the shop. We hardly had a chance to talk, I was getting ready to go out when she came in, and I left her changing to go to the meeting at City Hall.”

  “Maybe she went to a movie,” Hud suggested. “It was her day off, after all.” He took her by the upper arms and gave a gentle shake. “I wish you’d let this alone,” he said.

  “I can’t, Hud. It’s on my mi
nd all the time, like one of those dumb songs that start in and won’t go away. I can get busy in the shop or figuring out Margot’s computer, but if I stop for just a minute, it starts in: Who murdered Margot? Who murdered Margot?”

  He embraced her, and this time she let him. “Poor kid,” he said. He felt her lean into him and tightened his embrace just a little.

  But that only made her pull back. She said, “Hud, I understand you and Margot were not exactly friends.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Is it true?”

  He grimaced. “Well, she was kind of mad at me, but that was a long while ago.”

  “Because you dumped your second wife for your third.”

  “I see my secretary has really been dishing the dirt.” He didn’t bother to sound amused this time.

  “It wasn’t her, someone else told me.”

  “You don’t think I hated Margot, do you?”

  “No, it seems to have been the other way around. What happened?”

  He sighed. “I got to know Margot through my wife Eleanor. We used to go out as a foursome, Eleanor and me, her and Aaron, and we all got along swell. Then I hired Sally as an assistant and thought I’d found true love. It was like Fourth of July fireworks.” He made an upward spiral with his hand. “Whoosh, whee, bang!” He dropped the hand. “Darkness.” He sighed. “I was the world’s greatest jerk, but by the time I found that out, Eleanor was dating a banker in Kansas City and not inclined to listen to anything I had to say. And Margot had been named to the board of directors of the art museum, which I thought for a while she maneuvered herself into as a way of getting at me. But while she never really forgave me for what I did, she was too interested in what was good for the museum to damage it in order to hurt me.”

  “Was she alarmed about you flirting with me?”

  He felt a little alarmed himself. “Did she say something to you?”

  “Kind of. Hinting that you weren’t altogether one of the good guys.”

  He nodded. “That’s fair. Because I’m not, you know.”

  She smiled up at him. “Yes, I suspected that from the start.” He wanted to go back to that embrace, but she moved out of range, saying, “I’m keeping you from your work. Thank you for being patient with me.”

  “Don’t forget Friday. I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty, if that’s not too early. I want to show you the lake at sunset.”

  “I look forward to that,” she said, and continued toward the door. Then, just like Columbo, she turned with one last question. “Oh, how long was Margot in the storage area looking at the horse? We can’t find her sketchbook, but I’ll stop looking for it if I know she didn’t have time to make a graph of the pattern.”

  He shrugged. “An hour, maybe? I’m afraid I don’t know how long it takes to make a graph.”

  He frowned worriedly at the closed door for a moment after she left, but as he dug into the paperwork he had to work on he began to whistle. Someone was going to get kissed very thoroughly on Friday.

  17

  Betsy retraced the route back to Lyndale and went up it, toward the towers of downtown. In a couple of stoplights she was driving past the Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church, with its circular nave and crown-like steeple, then past the Gothic St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, and saw ahead the entrance to 394, next to St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Basilica, built in the Baroque style. If I’m going to live in this part of the world, maybe I need to start going to church, she told herself.

  In another minute she was on 394, which curved around sharply and headed west.

  What did it all mean? What was Joe Mickels doing in an Excelsior parking lot when he was supposed to be an hour away at a business meeting? Had he come back in time to murder Margot?

  Irene Potter said she saw him, which meant she’d contradicted her own alibi of being at home doing needlework at the time of the murder. Was she so innocent she didn’t realize that? Or was she astute enough to realize that someone might have seen her, and so was getting in ahead of that witness?

  Hud drove a car that at first glance or in the dark looked like an American model from back in the sixties. Why hadn’t she thought to ask his secretary if in fact he had taken her to dinner that fatal night? Not that there wasn’t time to have gone from dinner to Excelsior and parking his convertible in a parking lot only a couple of blocks from Crewel World.

  And Hud was the Asian art curator, responsible for the T‘ang horse, the needlepoint representation of which was mysteriously missing.

  The question was, why? Hud had no motive.

  Still, it was interesting he was keeping abreast of her comings and goings. Or should she be flattered by his interest, rather than concerned?

  She continued west to 100, south to 7, west to Excelsior. There, she drove around looking for Irene Potter’s house, whose address she had gotten from employee records.

  Irene lived in a brown clapboard house that had not enjoyed the meticulous care of the houses around it. When Betsy reached the door, she saw a clumsily crayoned sign in the window indicating that this was a rooming house with a room for rent. She knocked on the door and an elderly, sad-faced man answered it and she asked for Irene Potter.

  “She ain’t here,” he said.

  “Is this her house?” asked Betsy.

  “No, it’s mine. She just rents from us.”

  “Who is it, Father?” called an old woman’s voice from the back.

  “Someone wanting Miss Potter!” His voice, when he raised it, quavered.

  “Let me talk to him.”

  A plump woman with a face like one of those dried-apple carvings came to stand beside him. She wore a faded blue dress under a clean white apron, and her dark eyes were bright with intelligence.

  “You’re not a policeman!” she said indignantly.

  “No, I’m Margot Berglund’s sister. I’ve taken over her shop, Crewel World. Irene sometimes worked for my sister, and I wanted to talk to her.”

  “She’s gone out.”

  “So your husband was telling me. Do you know when she’ll be back?”

  “Not much longer, I don’t think. She’s at church, one of the volunteers who helps cook Meals on Wheels.”

  “How nice of her to do that. Do you know her very well? I take it you’re her landlady.”

  “Yes, that’s right. But I don’t know her that well, though she’s been with us for years. She’s not one of the friendly ones.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid that’s true. But she is very talented at needlework.”

  The woman smiled. “She tried to show me how, but I just didn’t get it.”

  Betsy smiled back in kind. “Me, too. Irene isn’t a very good teacher.”

  “Won’t you come in?”

  “Now, Mother—” said the old man.

  “Shut up, Father.” The old woman led the way, saying, “It was terrible what happened to your sister. We don’t have murders in Excelsior, so this was a terrible shock. And of course it was even more terrible for you, being her sister.”

  “Yes, it’s been a sad time.” The living room had too many couches and chairs, all well used. The woman gestured Betsy to an easy chair.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “No, thank you,” said Betsy. “Irene told me that she was out walking in the rain the night my sister was killed. In fact, she was near the shop about the time it happened.”

  “I know. That’s why I thought it was a policeman at the door.”

  Betsy said, “From here to the lake is quite a walk in bad weather. Does she do that sort of thing often?”

  The old man cleared his throat, clearly disapproving of the direction this talk was going. His wife shot him a look that made him decide he’d be more comfortable elsewhere. He tottered out without saying a word, but she waited until she heard a door close before turning back to Betsy.

  “Miss Potter is a great one for walking. Part of it is necessity, of course; she never learned to drive. But part of it is plai
n contrariness. The worse the weather, the more she likes to be out in it. But I must say it agrees with her, she never gets so much as a sore throat.”

  “So you saw her go out that night? Do you know what time she left?”

  “No, I was out myself, at my granddaughter’s house. They just bought this place out in Shorewood, and it’s a wreck. Needs everything, from paint to plumbing. So I was out there scrubbing and painting and watching the greatgrandkids.” She drew herself up a little. “Got three of ‘em now.”

  “Congratulations,” said Betsy.

  “You’re the one who thinks the police are barking up the wrong tree with their burglar theory, aren’t you? Do you really think Miss Potter might have done it?”

  “Right now I suspect everyone.”

  “Yes, that’s probably smart, though I don’t think your sister had many enemies. What were you going to ask Miss Potter?”

  “If I could see some of her needlework. I’ve seen one or two pieces, but I keep hearing how wonderfully talented she is.”

  The old woman frowned in puzzlement.

  “You see, I’m not trying to prove Irene murdered my sister, I’m trying to find out the truth. If Irene is innocent, I want to make use of her expertise. She’s already given me some intelligent suggestions about running the shop. And my sister kept some of her work on display as an inspiration to her customers.”

  “I could loan you something of hers. Wait here a minute.” She left the room and soon Betsy could hear heated conversation, cut off by a closing door. Then the woman was back with a square pillow. “Is this the kind of thing you want to display?” she asked, and handed it to Betsy.

  The face of the pillow was divided into quarters, each containing a picture of the same house in a yard with a tree. Each quarter represented a season. In spring, a robin sang in a tree branch and tulips glowed in the yard. In summer, a child skipped rope in the yard. In fall, the leaves on the tree were a gorgeous mix of red, yellow, and orange, and a jack-o‘-lantern sat on the porch. In winter, a Christmas tree decorated with tiny beads glowed in a window. The snow was done in white yarn, which had been brushed to make it fluffy. In each, the sky had been done in fancy stitches that Betsy knew had names like gobelin and Victorian step, though she did not know what names to call these skies.