by Crewel World
What was more, the sun was slanting brightly through the window, it looked to be another pretty day. On those two happy notes, she began her morning stretches. Pennsylvania stretch, stretch, stretch!
The song ended. Dale and Jim Ed began one of their faux commercials—this being public radio, and they apparently felt a need to make up for the lack of real ones. They touted a company that, for a price, thought up weird excuses for why you could not come to work. Their current offering involved a rare mildew infection, and included a scientist who would call your boss to confirm the infection and give the recipe for the powerful cleaning solution needed to wipe down anything you had touched. “This way,” concluded Dale, “when you go to work the next day, not only have you convinced everyone you had a legitimate excuse for being off work, you will find your work area spick-and-span!”
And Betsy had thought California had a lock on weird!
Stretches completed, she relaxed for a bit. She felt the mattress jiggle, then lean into big-cat-size footfalls as Sophie came up alongside her. The cat fell weightily against her hip with a combination sigh and purr. The cat enjoyed these slothful morning minutes as much as Betsy did. Betsy closed her eyes and let her fingers wander through the animal’s fur until she came to the special itchy place under Sophie’s chin, where she paused to scratch lazily. Sophie put a gentle paw around Betsy’s hand in case Betsy had any notion of moving it away. The purr became richer, deeper, deeper, deeper….
Betsy was brought back from a doze by a gentle but insistent tugging at her hand. She resumed scratching.
But when Betsy tired of scratching and tucked her hand back under the covers to try for another nap, Sophie turned the movement into a game of Mouse Under the Blanket, which finished that notion.
Then, thumping along on her cast, Sophie led the way into the kitchen, where she sat pointedly beside her empty food dish. But Betsy started the coffee first. It was her sole victory in the mornings nowadays and she was determined to hang on to it.
When it was a little before ten Betsy went downstairs to open up, eager for customers.
But by noon she had added another four inches to the knitted scarf (including errors unraveled and reknit properly) and nothing to the till. Only two people had come in. One wanted something the shop didn’t carry. “Try Needle Nest in Wayzata,” Godwin said, adding to Betsy, “They send people to us.” The other person was merely curious about Betsy’s sleuthing, and she firmly put him off. As she told Godwin, perhaps he was on Detective Malloy’s list of informants.
At last Betsy announced she was going to call the part-time help and tell them not to come in for the afternoon shift.
Godwin, taking down some outdated announcements on the mirror by the front door said, “Don’t do that. Take a half day yourself. Margot always took Wednesdays off.”
“I don’t have anywhere I need to go,” she objected, thinking perhaps she should give Godwin the half day and save his salary, too.
“Yes, you do.”
“Like where?”
“First, you should go back upstairs, have a little lunch, and find Margot’s sketchbook, the one with the red cover. I can do the needlepoint, if Margot did a graphed drawing of it. I’ll work it like counted cross-stitch, only in needlepoint. It’s a thousand dollars for the shop.”
“Less what I’d have to pay you to do it.”
“I’ll do it for nothing. For the sake of the shop. For Margot.”
“Oh, Goddy …” Betsy felt guilty for even thinking of shorting Godwin’s paycheck.
“Now don’t get mushy. Besides, here’s where you really need to go this afternoon,” he added, bringing a new flyer back to her. “Look, there’s a Kaffe Fasset exhibit just opened.”
“Who’s Kaffe Fasset?”
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Only one of the best needlework designers in the world. Needlepoint to cry for, knitting to die for. People who see the exhibit or read about it will be coming in to buy his patterns and it will help if you can talk intelligently about him.”
He put the flyer in her hands. The front flap had a color photo of a magnificent sweater, knit in a pattern of subtle, earth-toned stripes under an Oriental-looking pattern of flowers.
“Hmmm,” she said. “This is at the Minneapolis art museum. Yes, you’re right, I think I need to go see this.”
“Upstairs first. Go on, go right now.”
Because it had been Shelly who found the slash jacket and Irene who had noticed the T‘ang needlepoint horse missing, Betsy considered she, perhaps, was not the one to be looking for the sketchbook.
But she told herself sternly that since she obsessed about Margot’s murder, and was therefore the sleuth, however amateur, she had a responsibility to prove herself capable of sleuthing.
Unlike Betsy, Margot had been a neat and organized person. (Already the apartment shows that, Betsy thought, and sighed.) Presumably there was a place she kept such things as the notebook she used when designing pieces. Betsy had been living in the apartment long enough to know that if the notebook were kept outside Margot’s bedroom, she would have come across it by now. And she hadn’t.
Therefore (Betsy smiled to herself, this was rather like a syllogism, and she’d been rather good at syllogisms), the notebook was in Margot’s bedroom.
She stood a quiet moment inside the door, feeling suddenly that her sister was quite close, that this was an important moment. She stopped the shallow breaths she’d been taking and instead took a deep one, letting it out slowly.
If I were Margot, she thought, where would I keep a sketchpad on which I was designing a copy of the blue horse?
Filed away under T‘ang, came the prompt answer.
She went to the wooden file cabinet and slid open the bottom drawer, labeled M-Z. Under T, she found T‘ANG HORSE. The file folder was slender, containing only the handwritten note about the order for the copy Mrs. Lundgren had placed. No, wait; in the bottom of the folder were two sets of three slim packets of Madeira blue silk embroidery floss, each held together with a rubber band. They were numbers 1005, 1007, 1008, 1712, 1711, and 1710. One packet was dark, medium, and light shades of midnight blue; the other, silver blues.
By now Betsy had seen enough of needlepointers to know that a needlepointed rose was often four or more shades of red. So why not a horse six shades of blue? She started to put the folder back, but changed her mind and kept it out.
There was no sketchbook in the file cabinet, of course; she had realized as soon as she opened it that the sketchbook was too big to fit in the drawer—Betsy had seen the sketchbook, it had a thick red cover with spiral binding across the top. Any other notes Margot had made on the original horse she’d either thrown away or taken with her to the museum, where she’d probably added a few new ones. And she’d never gotten a chance to put them back into the folder.
They were probably with the sketchpad.
Which wasn’t in the closet. It wasn’t tucked behind the file cabinet or the dresser, either. Or under the bed. Or under the comforter pulled across the bed.
Betsy searched the other closets, cabinets, bookshelves in the apartment with equal lack of success. She went out to the kitchen to spread a dab of peanut butter on a slice of the Excelo Bakery’s excellent whole-wheat bread and do some thinking.
Betsy had overheard some conversation between Margot and a customer about using a computer to design patterns. Margot had sounded knowledgeable on the topic; maybe she did that herself.
Betsy put down her bread half-eaten and went back to the bedroom. She booted up and looked for a publishing or artwork program. The first one she found didn’t have anything connected to needlework in it. The second one was for designing needlework, but there were no files in it. She searched around for a while, found no other design program, and finally summoned the word-processing program.
The computer burped and gurgled at her, and instead of a screen ready to accept text, offered something called What Are You Supposed to Do Today? I
t had a list under it, beginning with some general notes: Betsy’s birthday, October 15, for example. Under that were specific dates. Wed, Aug. 19, 11 am—See Hud at museum, read the first of those entries. Under it, indented: 2 pm, Penberthy, sign papers; and under that: 7 pm, City Hall, bring report on art fair.
Betsy smiled. She had not been able to find a physical date book because Margot kept her appointments on her computer.
Thursday, Margot was supposed to see if Eloise was back in town and ask her if she would run the food shelf this winter. Friday asked, Told Betsy yet?
Betsy sat frowning at that. Tell Betsy what? She thumped the screen with a knuckle. Tell me, she thought at the screen, as if it had ESP and would respond. But it didn’t.
Betsy scrolled down the screen. Margot had a date with Mayor Jamison for the Last Dance of Summer at the Lafayette Club on Friday. The date of the fund-raiser, also at Lafayette Club, was noted, and there continued a steady stream of things to be done, running right through the end of this year and into the next, including that spring art fair she’d gone to talk about at City Hall.
She pressed the exit button and the computer wanted to know if it should save the calendar, noting that no changes had been made. Betsy punched N for no, and on getting a blank screen asked to see a list of files.
The contents were mostly letters, including one to Mrs. Lundgren about the T‘ang-horse needlepoint, saying that it would be ready Tuesday of Thanksgiving week and reminding her that the one-thousand-dollar price was due on delivery.
But there was nothing else about the T‘ang project in the files.
Betsy shut down the computer and finished her sandwich before going back down to the shop, frowning with discontent.
Godwin was no help; he had no idea what might have happened to the sketches or any other notes Margot might have taken about the needlepoint project. Or what papers Margot was to sign at Penberthy’s office.
“You could call and ask,” he suggested.
Feeling a little foolish, she went behind the desk and phoned Mr. Penberthy. He was out, but his secretary remembered Margot coming in. “She was here to sign the incorporation papers.”
Well sure; Penberthy had told Betsy that! And of course that was what Margot had meant to tell her, that she was an officer of the new corporation.
Betsy said, “Margot had this big sketchbook, a kind of tablet with a red cover. She didn’t by chance leave it behind when she was there, did she?”
“Now, funny you should ask,” said the secretary. “Because she did leave it behind. I had to run out of the office to catch her and give it back to her. We had a nice laugh about it, like she was getting real absentminded lately. Which of course she wasn’t.”
“Do you know where she went from your office?” asked Betsy.
“No. Home, I guess. She sort of waved that big pad at me and said, ‘Thanks for this, I’ve got some work to do now,’ or something kind of like that.”
“She didn’t say she was going straight home?”
“She said something I didn’t quite catch. I said, ‘Are you going home now?’ and she said—well, you know how you hear something all wrong? I heard her say, ‘I mean to putter around the mix,’ which I know is wrong. I heard it wrong. I remember that I tried for an hour to figure out what she really said, because it kind of bothered me. Then when she was killed, I thought about it some more, because it might be important. But the police never came around asking, thank God. I’m thinking maybe I missed the last word, so it’s the mixed something.”
Betsy thanked her and hung up.
“ ‘I mean to putter around the mix’?” echoed Godwin, when she repeated it to him. “What does that mean?”
“Irene Potter is next,” said Betsy. She had opened her mouth to say she had no idea what Margot meant, and instead that came out.
Godwin stared at her.
“Margot was my sister, Godwin,” she said. “I can understand her better than some secretary, even if she’s not speaking to me.”
“You are good! So, are you going to go see Irene instead of going to the museum?”
Betsy hesitated. “Both,” she said. “The museum first, because it may be hard to get away from Irene.” She picked up the file folder. “Is there anything odd about this?” she said, spilling the silk onto the desk.
Godwin came for a look. “I don’t know. I’d think they were the colors for the horse, except these two families are so different.”
“Would they be like samples?” asked Betsy. “I mean, there isn’t enough here to do the entire horse, is there?”
“Probably not, although you get more loft from silk and so don’t need as much of it as you’d need of cotton. These are more likely samples, to see which family came closer to the actual horse—Margot liked to match colors as closely as she could. But then why not a selection of yellows for the mane, or whites for the saddle? The ground was a light tan, I remember, but that wouldn’t matter as much, since she wasn’t matching a real wall or drapery.” He checked his watch. “If you’re gonna visit the museum, arid flirt with Mr. Earlie, you’d better get a wiggle on.”
“Goddy!”
“I know, I’m incorrigible.”
Betsy got directions from Godwin and set off. She was halfway there before it occurred to her that she wasn’t exactly dressed to kill. Oh, well, she thought, better he learns now that I’m not the clotheshorse Margot was.
The museum was perhaps a dozen blocks south and west of the Guthrie, in what had once been a neighborhood of wealthy families, and was still a long way from crumbling. Some of the fine old mansions had been converted to offices, but others held the line, stubbornly insisting that the 1880s would be right back.
The museum was built in the classical style, with lots of steps leading up to a row of massive pillars, flanking bronze doors. The new main entrance, around the comer, was a modem addition, and wheelchair-accessible.
The inside had been thoroughly renovated, too, though here and there was a room that still showed signs of having been built the same time as the beautiful old houses in the neighborhood.
The Fasset exhibit was in two rooms, one very small and the other not really large. Betsy was disappointed to discover that Kaffe Fasset was a man. She had never considered herself much of a feminist, but needlework is so traditionally female that while it was nice to see a woman’s homely craft at last recognized as art, it would have been equally nice to have the artist be female.
On the other hand, Mr. Fasset was indeed an artist. There were gorgeous sweaters, some so enormous only an NBA star gone to fat could have worn them. Is that what makes these art? wondered Betsy. They are clothing no one can wear? Mr. Fasset favored rich earth tones of gray, mahogany, green, and gold.
The artist also did needlepoint; Betsy was intrigued by a red lobster on a checkerboard ground. His work was perfectly smooth, unmarred by errors, fancy stitches, or beadwork.
Signs everywhere warned patrons not to touch, but this was a weekday morning, and the exhibit had few visitors. Betsy took a quick peek and discovered that Mr. Fasset was not fastidious about the backs of his works. Betsy hadn’t been either, when she was doing embroidery. Would it be worth her while to work really hard and gain artistic status so she might escape the criticism the Monday Bunch leveled against messy backs?
Betsy studied a knitted shawl inspired by the arum lily, row upon row of perfect curved shapes, each marked with a narrow tongue, in a harmony of colors that made her sigh with envy and covetousness. No, she would never be this good. Better to learn to be more careful with the backside of her work.
She left the exhibit and went looking for the Asian art section. One wide hallway was lined with European sculpture from the last century, which Betsy only glanced at—until she saw a small white bust of a young woman wearing a veil held in place by a circlet of flowers. She slowed, stopped. She could see a hint of eyes, nose, and mouth behind the veil, and almost instinctively reached to touch it. But her eye was caugh
t by a hand-lettered sign asking her not to. Smudges on the veil showed not everyone pulled their fingers back as she did. Not that one could move the veil, of course; the entire thing was of marble, a three-dimensional trompe l‘oeil. She looked for and found the brass tag naming the genius who had done this: Raffaelo Monti. When I am rich, she thought, and went on.
Her feet were tired before she found the Asian art section, up on the third floor. It was cramped between two areas being noisily renovated, and was disappointingly small. The centerpiece was a massive jade mountain carved into paths, brooks, bridges, trees, houses, animals, and people. But in the few surrounding glass cases there was no pottery horse of any color from any dynasty.
Betsy went down to the information desk on the main floor, which was manned by two middle-aged women whose manners were so open and informal that they had to be volunteers. One of them called Hudson Earlie’s office, and permission given, a guard was summoned to bring Betsy up four flights to him.
She was shown into a small anteroom where a secretary said Mr. Earlie was on the phone. Hud stayed on the phone a long time—but Betsy didn’t mind. Chat was better than “music on hold,” and Hud’s secretary was personable, as well as young, trim, and pretty. Doubtless Hud had taken her out to dinner any number of times, though Betsy was careful not to ask.
Hud’s inner office was quite grand, with tall windows on two walls and an Oriental carpet on the floor. He came out from behind his desk to take her hand in both of his, pleased she had come calling.
“Nice of you to come into town especially to see me,” he said.
“Actually, I came to see the Kaffe Fasset exhibit.”
He smacked himself on the forehead. “Oh hell, where is my head? I should have realized that you’d be interested in that and seen to it that you got a ticket.”
“It was only five dollars, Hud.”
“Yes, but you’re not on Easy Street yet.”
“True, true.” She looked around. The shelves flanking the windows held small, exquisite examples from Hud’s specialty, Asian Art, and the books were also on that topic, except one called Art Crime.