Hanging by a Thread (17 page)

Betsy backed out and carefully put things back where she’d found them.

She went back upstairs, where Nancy was explaining to a new customer that the black-and-yellow canaries were a wild variety whose song was prettier and more varied than the domesticated solid yellow.

She waved at Nancy as she went by, put seven dollars and change on the counter for the cat food, and hurried out. She went next door, to the bookstore.

“Hi, Ellie-Ann, I’m in a hurry, but I need you to do me a really large favor.”

“Certainly, if I can.”

“Let me go down in your basement and poke around a bit. I’ll try not to move anything, and if I do, I’ll put it back.”

Ellie-Ann looked doubtful, but Betsy said, “It’s about Angela Schmitt’s murder.”

“Oh, my God, really? Then go ahead, go ahead. Here, let me show you where the light switch is.”

The entrance to the basement was through the far end of a storage closet behind the checkout counter, which was near the center of the north wall of the store. The stairs were concrete, and the basement was clean but cluttered, like a storage place not open to the public tends to get. There was a wooden plank table with a microwave and small office refrigerator on it, and in boxes all around were surprisingly few books, some bright book posters, a supply of stuffed animals and puppets (a feature of the Excelsior Bay Bookstore), props for their display window—Betsy recognized four slender, white-barked birch trees from last spring—and the teapots and coffee urns brought out for author appearances.

There was a clear space along the boards that divided the bookstore’s basement from the pet shop’s. Betsy found the gate to the pet shop near one end of the clear space. It didn’t open to a push from this side, either, though there were no screws in evidence here. She looked across the pet shop space—Betsy had neglected to turn the lights off—and wondered if, in the gate on the opposite wall, there were screws on the gift shop side or the pet store side.

A voice behind her said, “What are you looking for?”

Betsy jumped and came down facing Ellie-Ann. “Mercy, you scared me!”

“Sorry. Is that what you were looking for? Yes, it’s a door; no, you can’t open it, it’s been nailed shut since before I took over the store; yes, there’s another one on the other side of the pet shop; no, it hasn’t been tampered with, either.” Ellie-Ann was obviously repeating replies to questions she’d been asked before. She smiled and explained, “Mike Malloy looked at it after Angela was killed upstairs.”

“Ellie-Ann, what did you think of the investigation? Were they really thorough? Could they have missed something?”

“I’m no judge, of course. But actually, they did miss something. They had to come back and do a better search before they found it.”

“Was it something to do with the gate?”

“How could it be something about the gate? It’s there, it doesn’t open. No, it was a shell casing. When Mike didn’t find one the first time, he said the gun was a revolver. But they found shell casings at Paul’s house after he was shot, so they came back and they searched some more, and they found one.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Is it? It made me wonder if they didn’t miss something else. I was pretty sure Paul shot Angela, y’see. That is, until I saw in the paper that Paul was murdered; and with the same gun, which they couldn’t find. So I guess it wasn’t another of those dreadful murder-suicide things.”

“Did you know Angela was having an affair?”

“No. I suspected she and Foster Johns were attracted to each other. He developed an interest in books he hadn’t shown before Angela started to work here, and she always seemed especially pleased to see him. But I had no idea it was a real affair. I don’t know how they managed it. Paul kept such careful track of her, it was ridiculous.” She added, almost irrelevantly, “Paul did some good things in that gift shop, but he was rude to browsers. Once he insulted a man dressed in dirty jeans, who turned out to be the mayor’s brother, visiting from Arizona, and a very wealthy man. He’d been helping Odell paint his boat when he suddenly remembered it was his wife’s birthday.” She chuckled. “He came in here instead and bought a copy of every book about Minnesota I had in stock and asked if there was a jewelry store and a flower shop in town, and left at a fast trot.”

Betsy tugged at the wooden handle of the gate, which still refused to move. “Why were there gates here in the first place?”

“I don’t know,” said Ellie-Ann. “Maybe in case of fire?” She shrugged. “The man I bought the bookstore from said the doors were nailed shut when he moved in, and that was eleven years before I took over, and that was six years ago. So it’s at least seventeen years since you could go from one basement to the next.”

Discouraged, Betsy went upstairs to retrieve her bag of lams Less Active. As she went out the door, Ellie-Ann called, “Betsy?”

“Yes?”

“Please, solve this one, will you? Angela was a sweet person, and she didn’t deserve to die.”

T
he next morning Betsy, feeling much fresher after a good night’s sleep, came down to find another new customer waiting in the doorway. She was an elderly woman in a long, dark blue coat, a red knit hat pulled down over her ears. She huddled close to the door because, while the sun was shining painfully bright, there was a cutting wind blowing and the temperature was in the mid-twenties.

Betsy hastily unlocked the door and let her in. “Good morning,” she said. “Come on, sit down. If you can be patient a few minutes, I’ll finish getting open for business. There will be hot coffee or tea soon, too.”

“Thank you,” said the woman, easing herself gratefully into a chair at the library table and pulling off her red mittens. Sophie jumped up onto “her” chair, the one with a powder-blue cushion, and looked the customer up and down briefly before deciding this was not a Person With Goodies. The cat settled down for a nap.

Betsy busied herself with lights and cash register, then went into the back, and soon the warm smell of coffee brewing wafted into the shop.

“Now,” said Betsy, coming back to the library table, “what can I do for you?”

The woman said, “My name is Florence Huddleston, and I am a retired school teacher. Alice Skoglund said I should come and talk to you, because Paul Schmitt was a student in my seventh-grade English class many years ago.”

Betsy pulled out the chair next to Ms. Huddleston, turning it so it angled toward the woman, and sat. “What can you tell me about Paul?”

“Nothing as an adult. But I remember him quite well as a seventh grader. He was a bright boy but an average to poor student, because he was lazy. I once told him he should grow up to run a charm school, because he could be very charming when it suited him, and he was forgiven too often. But his real talent was in laying the blame for his misdeeds onto others, and for getting others to behave badly while maintaining his own—what is the modern word? Deniability. I’m certain these traits continued into adulthood, as many do. Certainly they seemed innate in Paul. And another thing: He wasn’t really brave, of course; people like him never are. But he had a curious ability to ignore pain that made him seem brave. He once broke his left wrist in a lunch-time wrestling match, but on his way to the nurse’s office he stopped in my classroom to say why he wasn’t coming back this afternoon. He pulled that horrible arm out of the front of his shirt and displayed it like a trophy to the two girls I was tutoring. There was no doubt it was broken, it was swollen and the fingers were purple. But he so enjoyed shocking and frightening me and the girls, he couldn’t resist the opportunity.”

“He doesn’t sound like a very charming boy to me, if he could do things like that.”

“Surprisingly, even I sometimes found him charming. He was very popular among many of the students and even some teachers. He was generally helpful, taking half of a load, opening doors, picking up after people, and he was always smiling and polite. That charm was as real as his deviousness. But I remember he used to fascinate a certain set of boys and even some girls with a gruesome collection of true crime stories.”

Betsy, blushing faintly because of her own helpless fascination with crime, sat back to absorb this for a moment, then asked, “You didn’t by chance know Angela Schmitt—well, she wasn’t a Schmitt back then—the girl who married Paul?”

“Angela Larson. I know she was in my class, but I can’t remember her at all. She came into the classroom on time, did her homework, scored well on tests, but never volunteered anything in class. Teachers love students like her, the invisible ones, because they make the larger classrooms bearable. I only know about her because I looked her name up in my class records after she was murdered. According to my diary, she was a B-plus student who wrote a rather good paper on
The Mill on the Floss.”

“How about Foster Johns? Was he also a student of yours?”

“Yes, he was.” The old woman touched her mouth with slender fingers, picking her words carefully. “He was a very bright young man, but aggressive, impatient, and hotheaded, a dangerous combination. He was a very competent artist, but he wasted that talent drawing cartoons of, er, scantily-clad women with extraordinary physical endowments. He was funny and popular, but with that streak of wildness, I often wondered how he would turn out. I was pleased to learn he’d tamed his creative talent by going into architecture, but sadly disappointed to discover his impetuous affair with a married woman, and worse, that his temper led him to murder both his mistress and her husband.”

“So you think Foster Johns murdered Paul Schmitt?”

“Yes, of course, and Angela as well. Isn’t that what you have set out to do, prove it once and for all?”

“I’m trying to discover the truth, and I’m not convinced Mr. Johns is guilty.”

“Whom else do you suspect?”

“Well, did you have the Miller brothers, Jory and Alex, in your class?”

“Not Jory. He heard I was very demanding about grammar and he signed up with Mrs. Jurgens, who allowed vernacular and even ungrammatical language and phonetic spelling. Alex was forced to take my English class because Mrs. Jurgens’s class conflicted with a shop class he wanted.”

“What an extraordinary memory you have!” Betsy said.

Ms. Huddleston laughed gently. “I do have a good memory, but most of what I’m telling you came from the diaries I spoke of. I went back through the years pertinent to your investigation before coming to talk with you.”

“I’m pleased you kept them, then,” said Betsy.

“Oh, they are often useful to me. Whenever I hear about a person’s success, it is a special joy to me to look in my diaries and find I not only gave him high marks in my class, I predicted his future success. And when someone does something shocking, I will look to see if I predicted that, as well. I’m not always right, but more often than mere chance would have it. I think character is formed early.”

“So what did you write about Alex Miller?”

“That he was not nearly as interested in the mechanics of good writing as he was in auto mechanics. That he was touchingly loyal to his friends and family, and would probably go into some kind of partnership with his brother when he came to adulthood.”

“Yes, too bad about that,” said Betsy.

“Well, as I said, these predictions of mine don’t always come true.”

“It nearly did; he wanted to join Jory with his father in his auto service company, but someone instigated a quarrel between him and them.”

“Do you know who the instigator was?”

“Alex says it was Paul Schmitt.”

“But Paul and Alex were close friends when they were my students! I remember that because I thought no good would come of it.”

“And that’s probably what happened. There was a breach when they were in their twenties, and Alex now blames Paul for setting his brother against him, and causing his plans to go into the family business to fall apart. The quarrel was very serious.”

“So you think it’s Alex rather than Foster who might have murdered Paul?”

“He was still murderously angry at Paul when I spoke to him two days ago, and Paul has been dead for five years.”

“Oh, dear. That’s so dreadful. Do you think it possible that Paul was in fact responsible for the breach?”

“I’m afraid I do.”

“Oh, my. Oh, if you are right, that is truly dreadful.” She stared at the surface of the library table. “I knew Paul was a troubled child, and I was afraid he’d have an unhappy life. But I didn’t know it was to be so short. It was bad enough to think that two flawed youngsters such as Foster and Paul crossed paths to the deadly injury of one of them, but to think that Paul is responsible for an essentially decent fellow to go so terribly wrong, that is indeed a tragedy.”

She stood. “I had intended to buy a kit of Christmas ornaments from you,” she said. “But I no longer have the heart to work on them. I’ m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” said Betsy. “Perhaps at a later date. Christmas is still nearly two months off. Meanwhile, won’t you have a cup of coffee or tea before you go? It’s so cold outside.”

“No, thank you. I think I’ll just go on home now.”

Betsy watched her going up the street seemingly unaware of both the cheerful sunlight and the cold wind that whipped around her.

 

Godwin had the day off and the part-timer scheduled to come in had the flu, so Betsy had to work alone that day. Her customers seemed more impatient than usual, and more inclined to take things off the racks or shelves and put them down anywhere (even into their pockets and purses). They didn’t like her herbal tea, the coffee was too weak (never mind that it was free), and why didn’t she have the Mirabilia pattern the customer had driven all the way from Anoka to buy?

The talk with retired teacher Ms. Huddleston colored her morning. On the one hand, it saddened her, because it reminded her the people she was investigating had once been children full of promise, who were hotheaded and impetuous, malicious and manipulative, loyal and unscholarly, rambunctious and impatient. Character forms early, Mrs. Huddleston had said. So on the other hand, trying to see the hopeful child that still lived behind the eyes of her demanding customers helped Betsy stay friendly.