Hanging by a Thread (18 page)

Toward noon she went into the back to get down a new package of foam cups from a high shelf—only special customers got the fancy porcelain ones—when the step stool wobbled and she grabbed at a lower shelf to steady herself. The shelf, which held the aforesaid porcelain cups, as well as containers of imitation and real sugar, cans of coffee and tea, stir sticks, and creamer, broke loose. Down came Betsy, the shelf, and its contents—and the three-gallon coffee maker, which was half full of very hot coffee.

Betsy yelled in fright and pain, and the tiny back room was immediately jammed with all five customers present, who got in one another’s way and shouted contradictory orders at her and one another.

Betsy managed to get her feet under her and with a faint cry of, “Hot! Hot! Water!” pushed through the little mob into the rest room where, sobbing, she turned on the cold water and tried to cool her burning arm.

Once that was taken care of, she looked down at her red knit dress, bought new barely a week ago. Coffee and wet grounds had made huge dark patches all over it. Unless it went into cold water immediately, it was ruined. She’d have to go upstairs and change.

But how, with a shop full of customers?

Wait a minute, hadn’t one of the customers been Bershada? Bershada, the retired librarian, who therefore knew how to deal with the public.

She opened the door a few inches to peer out, looking for a dark face wearing glasses. And found it.

“Bershada, could you do me a big favor?”

“I hope so,” said Bershada. “What is it?”

“I have to go change clothes. Could you possibly watch the shop for just five minutes? You don’t have to collect any money, just answer questions until I come back down. And maybe keep anyone from leaving with merchandise they haven’t paid for yet.”

“Sure, I can do that.”

Betsy slipped out the back door and down a short corridor to another door that let into the entrance hall of the apartment stairs. She hurried up.

Her keys were in her pocket, and in two minutes she was in her bedroom, stripped to her underwear. Which also had to be changed. She put her dress into the bathtub and turned on the cold water while she went to get dressed.

But there was no time to rinse out her hair, which was damp on the back and right side. “There must be no coffee on the floor down there, I think I soaked it
all
up!” muttered Betsy.

Four minutes later, resplendent in jeans, chambray shirt, and head scarf, she went through the back door into her shop.

Where she was met with applause and laughter.

“Well, I know I’ve got a heavy clean-up job ahead of me,” she announced. “I might as well dress for it.”

The rest of the day was as if every customer present at her accident went home and phoned her friends, who all decided they had to come and laugh at Betsy looking awful and stinking of coffee. Bershada, apparently lonesome, hung around and answered needleworkers’ questions.

But of course, having come in, the curious had to buy something. Business was brisk, which almost made it worthwhile.

It got to be quarter to three. Betsy still hadn’t had a chance to clean the mess in back, and she was getting really hungry. She was about to phone the deli next door to ask Jack to bring her a sandwich, when Jill came in with an aromatic paper bag. “Tomato rice soup from the Waterfront Café, which is rocking with stories of your fall from grace,” she announced.

With it came half a grilled cheese sandwich, which Betsy ate first, for an immediate dose of fat and carbs. The soup came in a large round carton. Betsy declined a spoon, electing to drink it straight.

“Ah,” she sighed after three big gulps. “That’s better. Jill, have you met Bershada Reynolds? She’s going to be coming to Monday Bunch gatherings now she’s retired. Bershada, this is Jill Cross.”

“Officer Cross,” said Bershada in greeting, adding to Betsy, “She’s given me a traffic ticket or two.”

“Around the station house we call her Miss Lead-foot,” said Jill gravely.

“Well, it’s hard for me to decide which of you is my brightest star,” said Betsy. “One kept customers from walking off with my shop and the other kept me from dying of hunger. Thank you both.”

Bershada was still laughing when she left the shop with her purchases. Jill said, “How bad was it?”

“Was? Still is. Take a look, I can’t find a minute to even start picking up. It’s all the fault of that one stupid shelf. It broke as soon as I took hold of it.”

Betsy drank more soup while adding up the purchases of another customer. Jill came to report, “That shelf can go back up. And the urn doesn’t appear to be broken. You’ll need to buy more supplies, though.”

“I’m glad about the urn, but I think I’ll replace the shelf with something sturdier.”

“No need to, really. Just use heavier nails—or better, wood screws. You can even use the same holes if you use wood screws thicker than the original nails. That way you won’t have to get in there with that imitation-wood paste.”

Betsy stared at her.

Jill smiled. “What? You don’t know about wood paste? Or wood screws?”

“Sure I do. But Jill, you are a genius, you showed me the way!” Betsy was so excited, she lost the thin veneer of Minnesota restraint she’d grown the past year and gave Jill a big hug.

Jill politely allowed it for a short while, then disentangled herself. “I don’t understand,” she said.

Betsy caught the eye of a customer over Jill’s shoulder and said, “That’s a DMC skein of floss you’re holding, Mrs. McLean, please don’t put it in with the Anchor colors.” Then she leaned forward and said quietly, “Both Nancy and Ellie-Ann used the word ‘nailed’ when talking about the gates leading from her basement to the pet shop basement—the bookstore and pet store and gift shop are all in one building, did you know that?”

Jill nodded.

“And that there are gates between the barriers set up between the basements?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“The gates were nailed shut years and years ago, so while Paul Schmitt could have gotten into the basement of the gift shop, everybody decided he couldn’t get through the pet shop basement into the bookstore basement.”

“Okay.”

Betsy continued, “But when I looked at the door to Ellie-Ann’s basement, it’s not nailed shut, it’s screwed shut. And when you just now said you could put bigger screws into the nail holes, it struck me.” A customer came up with a cross-stitch pattern and a fistful of DMC floss, so there was a pause while Betsy wrote up the sales slip and collected the money. Then she said, “Don’t you see? That’s why Paul was ‘bone dry’ when Mike went to talk to him about Angela. He didn’t have to go out in the rain to get to the bookstore, he went through the basement. Back then Ace Hardware was selling wood screws right across the street.”

“But surely even Mike would have noticed that the screws were new.”

“Oh,” said Betsy, frowning. “Well, the screws I saw were rusty, but of course this happened five years ago, so they would be.”

“Unless ...” said Jill.

“Unless what?”

“If Paul was a handyman, one of those people with a shop in his basement or garage, he probably had a tin can full of old screws and nails. Lars does, and my dad did, anyone who does work around his house does.”

“Paul did carpentry work well enough to get paid for it,” said Betsy. “So, see? That could explain it, couldn’t it? Of course it would have taken time to put those screws in. Did Mike go down in the bookstore basement right away?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t think so.”

“How soon after he got to the crime scene did they go looking for Paul?”

“Not right away, I wouldn’t think. In fact, I know they didn’t. They still hadn’t when I got there. I was called in to guard the back door, as I told you, and arrived about fifteen minutes after I was called, which was probably half an hour after Mike got there, which was probably twenty minutes after the patrol officer arrived.”

Betsy nodded. “Plenty of time for him to screw those doors shut before they came looking for him.”

Jill said, “But he wouldn’t know he had that much time.”

“He wouldn’t need that much time. I’ll bet he didn’t do both doors, you know, just the one between the bookstore and the pet shop.”

“You’re right, that’s the one Mike would go to, and if it wouldn’t open, he wouldn’t try the other—why should he?”

“Especially if the screws holding it shut were old and rusty. I’ll bet he did the one door and hurried back upstairs. He wouldn’t want to be found missing at the gift shop when they came looking for him. There was plenty of time later to go down and screw the second gate, between the pet store and the gift shop, shut. Is this enough to take to Mike, Jill?”

“He likes corroborative evidence, not just theory.”

“Like what, after five years? If only there was a way to find out if he had a can of rusty screws around the place!”

Jill smiled and said, “I used to know the couple who bought his house. The man is Jack Searles and I went to college with his sister. Even better, the wife is Paul’s cousin, or second cousin. She may be able to tell you something useful.”

“So the house is still standing?”

“Oh, heck, yes. Or at least it was a couple of years ago.”

“Do you know them well enough to visit them and bring me along?”

“I think so. When do you want to go?”

“How about tonight, after I close up at five? When do you have to be at work?”

Jill moved out of the way so Mrs. McLean could buy her mix of DMC and Anchor floss, saying, “I’m doing the graveyard, so not until midnight. All right, I’ll phone them as soon as I think up a reason.”

After Mrs. McLean was out of earshot, Jill said, “So you’re thinking Paul murdered Angela.”

“Yes.”

“So who murdered Paul?”

“I’m not sure yet,” said Betsy.

Jill said, “If Foster Johns thought Paul murdered the woman he loved, he had a powerful motive to kill Paul.”

“Yes, but you weren’t here when we were telling ghost stories on Halloween. Comfort Leckie said she saw Paul Schmitt’s ghost in the bookstore the night he was killed. She said it bent down, straightened, then disappeared. I don’t think it was a ghost, I think it was Paul planting the shell casing Mike found only after a second search—after Paul was shot.”

“Why would Paul go back two days later to plant a shell casing?”

“To frame someone else for the murder.”

“Who?”

“Foster Johns. He made sure Foster was out of sight while he planted the casing and then set the other part of his plan in motion. I think he planned to shoot this other person and blame Foster. But after Paul lured him to his house, the person took his gun away from him and killed him instead.”

“And you think you know who that person was?”

“I think it was Alex Miller.”

“Why on earth would Paul want to kill Alex Miller?”

“Because he caught him kissing Angela. It was perfectly innocent, but Paul didn’t think so. He went to an enormous amount of trouble destroying Alex’s relationships with his father and brother, and was working on breaking up Alex and his wife when this happened. I think he hated Alex—and Alex didn’t even know it until long after. I think when Paul needed another victim to complete his frame-up of Foster, he naturally thought of Alex Miller.”

J
ust before closing, Morrie called. “What’s this I hear?”

“Did Jill call you?” Betsy asked indignantly.

“Call me about what?”

Betsy hesitated. “Why did you call?”

“Because I heard you tried a crash landing in the back of Crewel World—which is a very appropriate name, I think—and ruined your nice red dress.”

“It’s not ruined. Or at least I hope not. It’s soaking in cold water and Orvus. I’ll wring it out later and see.”

“That’s good. Now, what would Jill have told me if she’d called?”

“How should I know?”

“If I may be so bold as to quote Ricky Ricardo, ‘Looooo-see, what are you up to?’ ” Morrie did a pretty good Cuban accent.

“All right, I’m going out to visit the people who live in what was once Paul and Angela Schmitt’s house. Jill’s taking me.”

“What do you think you’ll find out there after a lapse of five years?”

“I’m not sure. Why did you call?”

“I wanted to take you out to dinner.”

“Not tonight.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes, all right. About six-thirty?”

“See you then, sweetcakes.”

“God, he’s nice,” said Betsy, climbing into Jill’s big old Buick Roadmaster an hour later.

“Who?”

“Morrie. He’s taking me out to dinner tomorrow.”

“Where to?”

“I didn’t ask. We did Italian last time, so probably to a steakhouse.”

“Has he ever cooked for you?”

“Once.” Betsy chuckled. “That’s when I learned why he’s so thin.”

They went up Water Street, away from the Excelsior Bay of Lake Minnetonka, turned right at the top onto County 19 and followed it back around until the lake came into view again.

Lake Minnetonka isn’t exactly one lake. It’s more an awkward sprawl of seven lakes all run together, and the little towns that once dotted its border have nowadays pretty much run together to form a single town four hundred miles long and a quarter of a mile wide.

Navarre begins a little before County Road 19 joins County Road 15. Coming up 19, a big gray board sign reads “Navarre” and under it “City of Orono.” Spring Lake is around the corner on 15, with its own smaller sign (though it’s actually a bigger town) announcing that it, too, is both Spring Lake and City of Orono, and at the other end of Spring Lake is Mound, City of Orono. Orono is a small city that has done on a small scale what many of its big sisters have done: grown until it engulfed its neighbors.