Hanging by a Thread (22 page)

“I know,” she sighed, sitting back in her padded seat. “But Foster Johns was so careful and, and
scrupulous
over putting that new roof on my building. I talked with the city inspector about him, and he said Foster Johns has a reputation all over the state for honest dealings. He follows the rules, he said, he insists on an independent inspector, and he only hires sub-contractors who agree to do things over if they aren’t perfect. How could someone as honest as that be a murderer?”

“Well,” said Morrie, leaning back in his own seat, “if I did something horribly against the law and wanted to get away with it, I’d obey the laws and follow the rules and mind even Miss Manners forever after.”

“Hmmmm,” conceded Betsy, turning her beer bottle around by the neck to draw a wavy line through her circles. “A middle school teacher, now retired, came to the shop the other day and told me about Paul, Jory, and Foster, all of whom she taught English. She kept diaries of her classroom days and recalled Foster as an impatient, aggressive seventh grader. He certainly is none of those things today.”

Her expression was troubled, and he said, “Look, dear heart, your interest in crime is not so much to discover the culprit as to see justice done, right?”

Betsy nodded.

“Well, perhaps it already has. If Paul Schmitt murdered Angela and tried to frame Foster Johns for it, and Foster killed him, then the scales are in balance. Perhaps you should withdraw from this one. If justice is your game, then Mum should be your name. Go home and tell no one what you’ve found out.” He made a little motion in front of his mouth, as if turning a key. “Tick-a-lock!” he said. “Look, here comes our dinner.”

T
hanh Do’s Vietnamese basil chicken was so fabulously delicious that Betsy couldn’t do anything but make delighted little humming noises for a while. There were big pieces of fresh Asian basil strewn among the chicken tenders, and pineapple chunks and streamers of sweet onions in a delectable brown teriyaki sauce.

Morrie had to stop and blow his nose after every three bites of his fiery curry, which was making Betsy’s eyes water clear across the table.

“Where did you learn to like food that hot?” Betsy asked when she was able to form a thought that didn’t have the word “basil” in it. “Certainly not here in Minnesota, which thinks a dash of fresh-ground pepper is going wild.”

Morrie nodded. “My first wife and I used to vacation in Texas every winter for about ten years. Their Tex-Mex food is wonderful, but hot enough to melt horseshoes. I actually tried to wrangle a job down there, with Houston PD, but didn’t succeed.”

“I’m glad,” said Betsy.

“Me, too, now.” He smiled at her in a way that made her heart turn over.

“Do you always fall in love this easy?” she asked.

“No. You?”

“Oh, gosh, yes.”

He stopped eating to stare at her, and very slowly his face began to change, from surprise to disappointment, to sorrow, to deep, deep sorrow.

At first embarrassed, she soon began to giggle. He heaved a despairing sigh, incandescent with curry, and she became helpless with laughter.

When he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to touch his eyes, she lay down sideways on the seat, and there, unable to see his brokenhearted face, she regained control. “Are you finished?” she asked from that position.

“Yes,” he replied in a voice with a sad catch in it. “Sit up, people are staring.”

She came up to see him eating his dinner with a satisfied smirk. “Idiot,” she said.

“Tell me a ghost story,” he said.

She told the one about Cecil’s ghost haunting the house his granddaughter owns. “When the house was being remodeled to accommodate a wheelchair, Cecil would steal tools, slam doors, and wreak some kind of breakdown on the man’s pickup ...” She stopped suddenly to think.

“What?”

“I wonder how long ago it was that that happened.”

“Why, is that important?”

“Probably not, but wouldn’t it be strange if the carpenter was Foster Johns? He started out as a carpenter, then got into construction, and is now a general contractor.”

“Are you thinking that these women played a trick on Foster?”

“No, no, nothing like that. This is a small town, and so there are lots of connections among people. Carol and Sue have been living together for sixteen years. Carol didn’t say the carpenter’s name. That’s kind of sad, isn’t it? She has this wonderful story, but she can’t say it involves Foster Johns without spoiling it.”

“Tell me another ghost story.”

“Just let me finish this little bit here first,” said Betsy, and ate some more. She was disobeying the rule slender women follow: Eat only until you’re not hungry anymore. But she wasn’t slender—and obviously the maker of that rule had never eaten Thanh Do’s Vietnamese basil chicken. “Is everything here as good as this?”

“I haven’t been disappointed yet.”

“Your turn, tell me a ghost story now,” she said.

“I don’t know any ghost stories. But you said you’ve actually seen a ghost, so tell me about that.”

“The bright and good one, or the scary one?”

He considered. “The scary one.”

“We were camping, my parents and my sister and I. I think I was eight or nine years old. I don’t know where we went, it wasn’t a campground with a building that sold ice and soft drinks and charcoal starter, but a forest with no road into it, or even trails. We drove for hours, it seemed like, and arrived near sundown, and had to walk back in for a long time, carrying things. We came to a clearing in the woods and put up the tents by lamplight. I remember there were owls, two owls, hooting back and forth. Dad dug a shallow hole and we built a wood fire in it and we roasted weenies and marsh-mallows. He and Mama talked about themselves as children, and what school was like and what they did for fun. Mama said a favorite thing was to take an old wallet and put green paper in it so it looked nice and fat with money, and put a rubber band around it and tie a length of button thread to it and put it on the sidewalk, and when someone would reach for it, yank it back, then laugh like anything. She laughed again when she told us about it.” Betsy shrugged.

“Every generation has its own sense of humor. Have you noticed that cartoons aren’t funny anymore?”

Betsy said, “Boy, are you right! If I want to enjoy a cartoon, I have to wait for the Bugs and Daffy Hour.”

“That wasn’t much of a ghost story,” said Morrie.

“I hadn’t gotten to the ghost part yet. Let’s see, oh, yes, parents’ stories about their childhood. Well, Dad told about a brown-and-white pinto pony his father had as a boy that would rear up and strike at anyone who came near with a saddle. Only Granddad could ride it, and he had to ride bareback. It was a menace in the barn, sneaking a bite if someone got within reach of it. Except it loved Granddad and never bit him. That night I went to bed simply wild to have a pony of my own that no one but me could ride.”

“Still no ghost,” noted Morrie.

“Be patient, my dear. We had two tents, one for our parents, one for Margot and me. I woke up very early the next morning, convinced I’d heard a pony neighing not far away. I was absolutely positive that pony was white with big brown patches and that it would let me ride it. So I got out of my sleeping bag, put on jeans, T-shirt, and sandals, and went out looking for it. I listened and heard it neigh again, and started for it. Every time I’d get discouraged, I’d hear it again, and pretty soon I was a long way from the camp. I kept thinking about how much fun it would be to come back to the camp riding my spotted pony, which I felt I pretty much had to do, because I remembered my parents had warned me not to leave the camp alone, so I needed a spectacular excuse.

“At last I came to a meadow, but it wasn’t the one we’d parked the car in the night before. And there wasn’t a beautiful brown-and-white pony grazing in it, either.

“It was about then it stopped neighing, so I decided it had been a ghost pony, haunting the meadow and crying for its old owner to come play with it again.

“But I’d been wandering the woods for so long, I didn’t know where I was or which way back to the camp. I started walking aimlessly, got into some brambles, and fell a few times. Some mosquitoes found me, and invited all their friends and relations to come and feast. The woods seemed dark after the sunny meadow, and I started to feel afraid. I couldn’t find the tents. I just kept walking and crying and even praying. Then I saw a big box turtle. I loved turtles, so I knelt down and stroked it and cried some more, because I was really scared and getting very hungry. And so long as I was down there, I prayed really hard, and when I stood up, there was the camp on the other side of some bushes, not twenty yards away.

“I came running into camp bawling and woke everyone up. It was only about seven-thirty, I must have gotten up before six. My mother wanted to know why on earth I went off into the woods like that, and I told them about the pony, and Dad said there wasn’t a horse or a pony for miles.”

“How did he know?”

“He didn’t say, but I’m sure we didn’t just pull off the road and go camping in some stranger’s woods,” said Betsy. “He must have known the area.”

“Still ...” Morrie looked skeptical.

Betsy sniffed loftily. “I told the story of that ghost pony at camp, and it was very well received.”

Morrie laughed. “You made that up! Well done!”

“The getting lost part wasn’t made up,” said Betsy. “Once when we went camping, I went out for an early-morning walk and got lost and stooped to play with a box turtle, and when I stood up, there were the tents. When I told that story in camp, I added the ghost pony and said I went out later looking for proof of the pony and guess what I found?”

Morrie said solemnly, “Horsefeathers!”

That set Betsy off into another peal of laughter. “I wish I’d thought of that when I told that story!” she said when she was able to speak again. “The best I could do was to say I found an old, rusty horseshoe just the right size for a pony’s hoof.”

The waiter came by. “Do you want to take that home in a box?” he asked, looking at the platter, which was still nearly half full.

“All right, thank you,” said Betsy.

She was quiet on the ride home.

“A penny for that thought,” Morrie said at last.

“Something ... I said something, or you said something that triggered something, only I can’t think what it is.”

“Sleep on it. If you’re like me, it’ll come to you in a dream.”

 

 

Betsy didn’t know who the grinning bad man was, but he had a gun and he was going to shoot her if she didn’t give him forty thousand dollars. She didn’t have any money and went out on the street to look for some. And there on the sidewalk was a fat billfold full of money, but every time she stooped to reach for it, it leaped away. She finally threw herself down and grabbed it with both hands, but it resisted and finally worked itself loose from her fingers, as if it were attached to something by a rubber band.

She woke up to find herself sleeping on her belly, crosswise on the bed, one arm reaching out. “Maybe I should have tried the curry instead of eating all that basil,” she muttered, straightening herself around, pulling the sheet and blanket back into place. She pushed the little button on her watch, whose face obediently lit up. Four o’clock. She had another hour and a half to sleep—today was early-bird water aerobics day. She rubbed her forehead and composed herself for sleep.

No good. She got up, grumbling.

The stupid dream had her wide awake.

Sophie, wondering what she was doing awake at such an hour, came to ask if, so long as they were up, perhaps Betsy could give her loyal, loving cat a little snack? “Not a chance,” Betsy told the cat. “If I feed you now at”—she checked her watch—“four ten A.M., my God, then when I do get up at five-thirty because it’s Friday and I have early-bird water aerobics, you’ll have very conveniently forgotten all about this, and want your breakfast. Again. It may also cause you to decide this is customary, rising at four to feed the cat. But it isn’t, so I won’t. Now, go to your basket and take a nap. Shoo.”

Having after countless lessons learned that Betsy could not be cajoled away from
no
when it came to food, the animal did as she was told; except she didn’t take a nap, but leaned on one elbow to stare at Betsy with her yellow eyes at half mast, thinking resentful, self-pitying thoughts.

Betsy ignored her and sat down in an easy chair, turned on the standard lamp that stood behind it, and reached for her knitting, which lived in a big, bowl-shaped basket beside the chair. She had three projects under way and, considering the tired state of her mind, picked the easiest one, a thin blanket meant to be sent to Africa, part of a program her church was sponsoring. She was using an inexpensive acrylic yarn, not because she was cheap but because it could stand repeated washing, even in very hot water. There was no complexity to the stitchery, just knit and knit and knit—though she was changing colors every eight inches. But that was more to keep herself from being totally bored than to provide something a little less plain for the unfortunate individual who would sleep under it.

It took a great many stitches to get a width sufficient for even a narrow blanket, and even the promise of a change from mint green to tangerine in another three inches didn’t help all that much. Betsy could knit much faster now than she could a year ago, but she was not yet up to a speed that would impress anyone but a beginner. The blanket was growing very slowly.

But after a few minutes she stopped noticing how slowly the work was progressing and fell into a state that was almost like meditation. Giving her hands something to do stopped that little voice that recited a list of things she should be doing: cleaning the bathroom, dusting, updating the books, reviewing her investments—she had an appointment with Mr. Penberthy next week, and he could always tell when she had merely glanced at them. That little voice was silent now because she was doing something.