Blackwork (16 page)

Today she was showing the apartment to a young man who looked for all the world like Ichabod Crane. He brought his clingy girlfriend along to see Doris’s one-bedroom place. What on earth did she, an exceedingly attractive young woman, see in him? Betsy wondered. As they finished touring the little apartment, Betsy’s other tenants came to stand in the open door.

Ichabod and Miss Cling said they weren’t sure about the place. “It’s kind of small,” Ichabod noted after his girl whispered in his ear while casting sly looks at Betsy over his shoulder. Did she think Betsy might become a rival for his affections?

As they went out, Betsy’s other tenants said, almost in chorus, “Can we talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure,” Betsy replied. She gave Miss Cling her card and told them she had more people interested in seeing the place, so they shouldn’t wait too long to make up their minds.

After they vanished down the stairs, Betsy turned to the couple and said, “Okay, Joy and Frank, what can I do for you?”

“We want to give notice, too.”

“Oh, no! Is something wrong?”

Joy smiled shyly and bumped gently against her husband. “Not at all. We’re pregnant, and it’s with twins, so we’ll need a bigger place. Isn’t that exciting?”

“Yes, it is, how wonderful for you!”

“We want a yard, too,” said Frank, beaming and putting an arm around Joy. “We’re having two boys, and they’ll need some space to be boys in.”

“I’m so pleased for you, congratulations! All right, today’s the twenty-fifth, your last day will be November twenty-fourth, all right?”

She went back to her apartment to make a note of their date of departure on her calendar and sat down to write a new ad. “For Rent: Newly renovated second-floor walkup, quiet, less than a block from Lake Minnetonka. On-site laundry room. Small, well-behaved pets welcome. Available November 25.” She raised the rent thirty dollars a month—she hadn’t raised it on Joy and Frank after the renovation—and gave a phone number and the Crewel World web site. She updated the web site to repeat the ad—there was already one for Doris’s apartment—and uploaded an “after” picture she had taken when the renovation was finished.

Then she went down to the laundry room in a corner of the basement and started a load. She caught up on her bookkeeping and her newsgroups, updated her grocery shopping list, went down to move the clothes into the dryer and start a new load, stopped in the shop to see how the part-timers were doing, and went out to continue her investigation.

One reason she had taken the day off was that the elementary schools in the district were out for the day for a teachers’ conference, so Shelly—who almost never attended the conferences—was home.

“Who is it?” she called in response to Betsy’s knock.

“Me, Betsy.”

“Come in!”

As Betsy entered, she found Shelly tossing a lightweight blue Saint Paul Saints blanket over her needlework. “Mike Malloy has a crew down in my sewing room again. This time they’re doing a more thorough job of treating it like a crime scene. And they’re drinking coffee as fast as I can make it,” she added with a little sniff. “I knew I should’ve bought that big coffeemaker when it was on sale at Target. But usually Harv and I just have two cups apiece in the morning. I think I’ve made fresh for these guys about five times already. They’re running me ragged.”

She was talking too fast, and her eyes were too shiny. “Are you all right?” Betsy asked.

Shelly sat like a statue for a few seconds then melted into tears. “No,” she said. “I’m not handling this well at all! I’m trying so hard, so hard to be b-brave.” She broke down completely.

Betsy led her to the couch and made her sit down. She sat beside her, holding her hands. “Take it easy, Shelly,” she soothed. “It’s all right, this is a terrible situation.”

“My beautiful sewing room! I can’t go down there anymore! It’s ruined for me! Ruined, ruined!”

“Now, now, that’s how you’re feeling right now—and it’s no wonder. But in a little while you’ll change your mind, you’ll see.” She chafed the backs of Shelly’s hands. “Now, pull yourself together. You don’t want Harvey to see you like this.”

“Oh, Harv’s been so wonderful!” sighed Shelly. “He’s been my rock, so patient with me. Oh, Betsy, I wish I’d given him a chance back when I knew him in high school! All those wasted years! He is so kind to me, so thoughtful and understanding! I could just cry!” In fact, she did start to cry again, then saw the humor in that and turned it into a strange laugh.

Her dog, a short, blocky black-and-tan type who, judging by her long ears and big feet, had basset hound in her ancestry, came to sniff at her legs and whine softly.

“Oh, Portia, it’s all right,” said Shelly, and the dog wagged her tail and collapsed at her feet.

“She’s so sensitive to my feelings,” sighed Shelly fondly. “And she hardly ever barks, except at strangers.” She leaned forward to confide, “By his second visit, she was greeting Harv like an old friend, but she’d still like to take a bite out of Mike and company.”

“Why don’t you let Mike and his crew make their own coffee?” asked Betsy.

“Because I don’t want them poking around in my kitchen, the nosy snots.”

Betsy smiled, then sobered. “Shelly, you know, I’m sure, that I’m looking into this myself.”

Shelly nodded, and then grew serious. “What do you want to ask me?”

“Have you been down in your sewing room since you found Ryan?”

She lifted her shoulders and shuddered. “It’s too awful down there. That business with the mice was just too grotesque. They are supposed to be all cleared out, and the walls are repaired, but it still gives me shivers. I store my projects in there, but I bring things up here to work on. It’s difficult, and it’s making Harv crazy, but I can’t bear to be down there.”

“That may be a good thing. I want you to go down there in your mind, the day you found Ryan. Picture it in all the detail you can recall, exactly as it was. This might be important. What did you see down there that was wrong? Besides Ryan’s body, of course.”

Shelly bowed her head and closed her eyes. Betsy was struck by how handsome she was, her oval face surrounded by all that light brown hair, the thick eyelashes underlining her large eyes, her straight nose and sensitive mouth. Normally mobile, her features became still as she drew into herself, thinking. Betsy could see her eyes moving behind the closed lids as she explored the room in her memory.

But all she said after nearly a minute was, “Nothing.”

“Nothing was out of place, no chair pulled away, no window open?”

“The window doesn’t open. It’s made of glass blocks cemented together.”

“What did Ryan have in the room? Where did he keep his clothes, for example?”

“In a suitcase, he had this big suitcase. And a couple of grocery bags for his laundry. That stuff was right where he always left it.”

“Did you do his laundry?”

“No, of course not.”

“Did he eat with you?”

“Yes, except when he was drunk. Once he started getting drunk, I told him he had to eat out.”

“He didn’t ever eat in his room?”

“I don’t allow food in there! Or any drink besides water. He could eat his supper on the porch or in his car if he brought something home. But he did eat breakfast with us, because he was sober in the mornings.”

“Did he ever talk at breakfast about someone who was angry with him?”

“Not that I recall.”

“What did you talk about?”

“The usual things. The awful weather we’re having. What his girls were doing in school. Harv is designing that new park over in the development in Chanhassen, so we talked about that. Once Ryan showed us a new amulet he’d ordered from a town called Raipur in India—can you imagine? From
India
! I said, ‘I don’t think it works on pink elephants, Ryan!’”

“What did he say?”

“He said it brought peace. He said he could use some peace. And I will admit, he looked hag-ridden. Oh.” She pressed her fingers against her lips. Then she sighed. “Was that politically incorrect?”

“I don’t know. I think the term for a senior witch is
crone
, not
hag
—it’s one they use themselves. And anyway, I should think he was riding Leona rather than the other way around.”

“He was afraid of her.”

“Apparently he was afraid of a lot of things.”

“Including the dark—oh!”

“What?”

“Every night when he got in, he’d light a candle. The lights in the sewing room are very bright, too bright to sleep with them on, but he was afraid of the dark. I told him he could have a candle so he borrowed my big pottery bread bowl—he was afraid of fire, too, poor fellow—and he had this box of white emergency candles he bought at the grocery store. I had a little candle holder I loaned him, and he’d put it in the bowl and put one of those candles in it. He’d light it and let it burn all night, down to nothing. But his last night on earth he must’ve gotten over his fear of the dark, or let his fear of fire overcome it, because when we looked around the room, we found the bowl beside the futon and the candle was only halfway burned down.”

“Or his murderer blew it out.”

“Oh, Betsy! Don’t say that! The thought of a stranger in my house . . .” She shuddered.

“You think it wasn’t murder? Then what was it?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” She rocked back and forth in anxiety.

Betsy pulled a little red spiral notebook from her purse. “Who hated Ryan McMurphy?”

Shelly drew her shoulders up. “No one.”

“Shelly, we both know that isn’t true.”

She sat back on the couch, one of those squashy ones, upholstered in putty-colored corduroy. Her royal blue slacks and top made a pretty contrast with it and with her light hair. But she drew her shoulders in as she wrapped her arms around her upper body in distaste. “An ugly question.”

“An ugly crime. And you’ve heard the talk.”

“Leona?”

“I now know she has a good, solid alibi. How about Joey Mitchell?”

“How about him?”

“What do you know about him?”

“Not a whole lot. He had wanted to be a full-time fireman since he was a little kid—our Excelsior firefighters are just part-time volunteers, everyone knows that. There are firefighters all over his family, uncles and cousins and grand-fathers.”

“Does Harv know him?”

“Not very well. He’s never said anything to me about him other than he feels sorry for him because of his arm.”

“Did Joey ever visit Ryan here at your house?”

“No.”

“Who else hated Ryan? Come on, help me out here, Shelly.”

“I’m trying! But all right, let me think.” She did, for a long while. Finally, as if she was coming to a decision rather than recalling something, she said, “Well, much as I hate to say this, Ryan’s wife, LuLu, has to go on your list.”

“LuLu? I thought her name was Luella.”

“It is. But her baby sister couldn’t say Luella and called her LuLu, and it stuck. Anyway, LuLu was sick to death of Ryan’s drunken antics, frightened to death he was going to lose his job, and furious with the chaos he was bringing into the lives of the children. They—Claire and Winnie,” she said, playing to the notebook in Betsy’s hand—“loved him when he was sober and were scared of him drunk; and they never knew which he’d be when he walked in the door at night. Also . . .” Here Shelly paused to think, and to gather her nerves. “All right, there was a really enormous life insurance policy on him. LuLu shouted at him once when he was on a bender, saying what was she to do if he killed himself while he was drinking? How would they pay for the house, educate the kids? So, still half drunk, mind you, he went out and got this policy for two million dollars.”

“Good Lord!” said Betsy. “When was this?”

“Just about six months ago. Maybe a little longer, but I don’t think it’s been a year. He kept the premiums up on it, too, because he seemed to think it gave him permission to drink.”

“Two million dollars,” said Betsy. For a woman scared of what might happen, two million dollars could buy a lot of relief.

B
ETSY, still desperate to “get a clue” as she left Shelly’s house, reflected that a viable suspect would have had to know where Ryan was staying. Not just at Shelly’s house, but specifically in her sewing room in the basement.

She sat in her car and thought about it. LuLu knew, of course. Then Betsy had a sudden recollection. Ryan had announced at The Barleywine, on that awful night of the committee meeting, that he was staying with Shelly. Rats, that meant that first the committee members knew, and soon after, the whole town knew. Wait, most of the Monday Bunch already knew his body was found in Shelly’s sewing room, so that little item was probably already circulating.

So much for that clue.

Still . . . Betsy wrote down the names of the committee members present. Plus Joey Mitchell, he of the maimed left arm, who wanted to drive the fire engine Ryan had restored.